California governor-elect: State must face border crisis

California Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom said the state must do more to address what he called a "humanitarian crisis" at the border with Mexico.

Newsom said he planned to discuss the large caravans of Central American migrants when he attends Mexico's President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's inauguration tomorrow.

Newsom said a tour of an immigration detention center and a temporary shelter for asylum seekers in San Diego drove home the need for California to invest more money. He said local and federal governments will also have to do more.

Newsom said at a news conference at the San Ysidro Civic Center, "we can't do everything ourselves but I know we're capable of doing more."

Newsom's remarks hint at a more active role in border and immigration affairs than outgoing Gov. Brown, also a Democrat, who supported limits on cooperation with federal deportation agents but joined President Trump's mission to deploy the National Guard to the border on condition that troops have nothing to do with immigration enforcement.

More than 6,000 migrants are across the border from San Diego in Tijuana, Mexico, packed into a sports complex with space adequate for half that many people and where lice infestations and respiratory infections are rampant.

Dawn Kamber