Dozens more immigrants were shipped quietly to California for processing by immigration officials on Wednesday, a day after protesters blocked buses full of migrant families bound for a Border Patrol station north of San Diego, according to Reuters.
The move came as some 1,000 residents of suburban Murrietta, California confronted local officials on Wednesday evening at a town hall meeting over the hundreds of illegal immigrants that the federal government means to process and house in their San Diego-area community, Reuters reported.
Protesters on Tuesday blocked three buses carrying the first group of some 140 migrants who were headed for Murrieta, forcing the caravan to turn around and head to another Border Patrol station in San Diego for processing there instead, according to Reuters.
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, in an interview with MSNBC, said he found television images of that demonstration "very disturbing" to watch, Reuters reported.
"Because of the recent influx of kids and families crossing the border in the Rio Grande sector, our processing capability in that immediate area is full and we've had to go to other places in the Southwest simply to process these people," Johnson said, according to Reuters.
"So when someone interrupts the ability of the border patrol to process a migrant, you're preventing us from conducting basic health screening and the basic background checks on who these people are," he added.
The immigrants are part of a wave of families and unaccompanied minors fleeing strife-torn Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras and streaming by the thousands over the U.S.-Mexico border via human smuggling rings, according to Reuters.
Most have shown up in Texas, overwhelming detention and processing facilities there and leading U.S. immigration authorities to set up overflow sites in California and other states in the Southwest to help screen and manage the influx, Reuters reported.
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