U.S. Border Patrol agents along the Del Rio Sector have seen a dramatic increase in the number of African migrants seeking asylum.
In a statement by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, agents have arrested more than 500 people from African countries in the six days since May 30.
Of those detained, CBP said the majority of the groups’ members had been families coming from the Republic of the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Angola.
In addition to being the battlefield for one of the world’s bloodiest civil wars, the DRC has also been hit by one of the biggest Ebola outbreaks in history, with more than 2,000 cases reported in the last 10 months, as reported in Newsweek.
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In Angola, much of the country is still struggling to recover from the impacts of the civil war that raged across the country for more than 20 years after independence, which left hundreds of thousands dead.
As of now, it’s unclear what route migrants are taking from African countries.
But reports done by NPR revealed that African migrants said they traveled from their home countries to Brazil before heading north towards the U.S.-Mexico border.
In May, a record 144,278 migrants arrived at the southern border, with more than 100,000 being families and children.
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Meanwhile, agents with Del Rio’s Border Patrol reportedly apprehended more than 33,000 people at the border so far this year, already more than double the total number of arrests made during the previous fiscal year, according to CBP.