SAN DIEGO -- The downcast faces on computer screens are 1,500 miles away at a Border Patrol station in McAllen, Texas: a 20-year old Honduran woman arrested rafting across the Rio Grande and a 23-year-old man caught under similar circumstances.

Four agents wearing headsets reel through a list of personal questions, spending up to an hour on each adult and even longer on children. On an average day, hundreds of illegal aliens are questioned on camera by agents in San Diego and other stations on the U.S.-Mexico border.

The long-distance interviews -- introduced last year in El Paso, Texas, and extended to California -- are a response to the dramatic increase of Central Americans crossing the border in Texas that also has flooded immigration facilities with hundreds of women and children. The Border Patrol does not have the staff to process all the aliens crossing in the Rio Grande Valley, but faraway colleagues have time to spare.

President Barack Obama will ask Congress for more than $2 billion to respond to the flood of aliens illegally entering the U.S. through the Rio Grande Valley and for new powers to deal with returning unaccompanied children, a White House official said Saturday. A letter will be sent to Congress on Monday, said the official, who was not authorized to speak by name and discussed the requests on condition of anonymity. The exact amount and how it will be spent will come after Congress returns from recess July 7. Whether any funds will go toward border staffing is unknown.

In San Diego, the video processing is a welcome change of pace. Arrests are at 45-year lows and many agents go entire shifts without finding anyone. Cesar Rodriguez, who joined the Border Patrol in 2010, said eight hours fly by since he gave up his assignment watching a stretch of scrub-covered hills east of San Diego and took on a new assignment to process the immigrants via video.

"If there's nothing going on, what are you going to do? You're just staring at the fence," Rodriguez said in his new office, whose parking lot offers sweeping views of hillside homes in Tijuana, Mexico.

The McAllen station is designed to hold a few hundred people, but often teems with more than 1,000 who spill into hallways and outside. Migrants have been sent to stations in quieter parts of Texas, and they were overwhelmed. Overcrowding at the Laredo station prompted a visit from the fire marshal last month.

Some warn against bulking up agents in South Texas because smuggling routes will inevitably change along the 1,954-mile border.

Forced transfers must be negotiated with the National Border Patrol Council, the union that represents agents, and have not happened on a large scale.

The Border Patrol can move agents for 35 days -- longer by mutual agreement -- but those temporary assignments are expensive. More than 100 agents were sent to Rio Grande Valley this spring for short stays.

Voluntary transfers were an option but have not been used widely in South Texas. As agents quit or retire, the vast majority of new hires who replace them are now assigned to Rio Grande Valley.

The Border Patrol introduced video processing in El Paso in April 2013 to address the surge in Rio Grande Valley, where most border crossers are from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala and many are unaccompanied children. It expanded the processing to El Centro, Calif., in March, and to San Diego last month.

Texas Democrats say the solution for dealing with the thousands of migrant children pouring into the country is a softer, more measured policy response, while state Republicans emphasize clamping down on the U.S.-Mexico border first and tackling everything else later.

At their state convention in Dallas this weekend, Democrats approved a party platform that endorses an "attainable path to citizenship" for people living in the U.S. illegally. They say doing so will help snap the Republicans' 20-year winning streak in statewide elections.

But just two weeks earlier, the Texas GOP removed from its party platform a plan that had passed in 2012 calling for a guest-worker program for immigrants in the country illegally and added language that prioritized securing the border -- above all.

Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa, who was re-elected to his post at the convention, said his party doesn't "believe in a guest-worker program. ... Those kinds of programs have always led to exploitation.

"If their only crime is to be here in an undocumented status, give them an opportunity to obtain their legal status," Hinojosa said Saturday.

Meanwhile, top conservatives led by Tea Party-backed state Sen. Dan Patrick, the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor, say most Texans, including Hispanics, are troubled by the flood of all kinds of immigrants crossing the border illegally, and that a hard-line stance is the best way to ensure their political domination continues for another two decades.

Information for this article was contributed by Christopher Sherman and Will Weissert of The Associated Press.

A Section on 06/30/2014