Washington (Reuters) - The government of Donald Trump He asked Congress for $4.5 billion in emergency funds on Wednesday.
The argument for requesting this amount is that the increase in migration at the border has exhausted fiscal resources.
The new request is added to the funding for the wall, a central commitment of his 2016 presidential campaign.
Trump's top advisers are also quietly courting members of Congress to back a bill that would toughen the treatment of young undocumented immigrants detained at the border with Mexico and impose more limits on who can seek asylum in the United States.
The request for emergency funds represents a 44 percent increase in spending for shelter, food, transportation and supervision programs for a record number of Central American families seeking asylum and filling the capacity of shelters in border cities such as El Paso and Las Cruces. .
Trump earlier this year called the influx of migrants a national emergency, allowing him to redirect more than $6 billion to build a border wall.
"Agencies are literally running out of funds," a senior US administration official told reporters on a conference call.
(Reporting by Roberta Rampton Edited in Spanish by Javier López de Lérida)
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