“There is no security in my country,” said the 28-year-old Ecuadorian, who lost his job when his employer closed due to extortion by criminals. “Without security you cannot work. “You can’t live,” he stated.
A change in human smuggling routes has brought an influx of migrants here from countries as diverse as Senegal, Bangladesh and China, prompting the Border Patrol to seek help from other federal agencies and generating scrutiny on an issue critical to the next year’s presidential elections.
With hundreds of migrants crossing the area daily, the U.S. government indefinitely closed the nearby international crossing between Lukeville, Arizona, and Sonoyta, Mexico, indefinitely last Monday to free up Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers. assigned to that port of entry to assist with transportation and other support. The agency also partially closed some other border ports of entry in recent months, including a crosswalk in San Diego and a bridge in Eagle Pass, Texas.
Critics of the measure – including Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s Democratic governor, the state’s two U.S. senators, the governor of the Mexican state of Sonora and leaders of the nearby Tohono O’odham Indian Nation – said it could hurt trade and tourism. Hobbs urged President Joe Biden to reassign the 243 National Guard members already in the Tucson sector to help reopen the Lukeville crossing.
The agents cannot cope
The morning after it closed, about a dozen Border Patrol agents in olive green uniforms watched over some 400 migrants who had spent the night along the towering wall of steel bollards, wrapped in bright Mylar blankets and then left between them. saguaro cactus and blue palo verde trees.
Three to four times as many CBP field operations officers in navy blue uniforms helped migrants load into white vans for a short ride to a covered intake center. From there, agents took the migrants for processing to the Ajo Border Patrol station, a half hour north, or to other locations such as Tucson.
U.S. authorities have found themselves so short-staffed in Arizona that they have used charter flights to transport some migrants from Tucson to three Texas border cities for processing, according to Witness at the Border, an advocacy group. which analyzes flight data.
Undercover federal air marshals – who provide security on commercial flights – and even Federal Protective Service officers, charged with guarding US government buildings, are being diverted to the border, officials have said, without saying exactly where they send them to.
“We’re seeing a lot of different types of uniforms here,” said Tom Wingo, an aid worker in Lukeville.
Nonprofit groups are concerned about the well-being of immigrants.
“This is a humanitarian crisis that is happening in our own backyard,” said Dora Rodríguez, president of Compassionate Borders, a Tucson nonprofit that maintains water tanks at the border for migrants. “There are hundreds of people, including babies and children, who are stranded in remote areas of the desert for days,” she said.
Lukeville becomes popular
The popularity of the Lukeville area as a place to cross the border from Mexico to the United States has increased in recent months. It is one of the most striking examples of immigrants moving to a remote area, putting the Border Patrol in trouble. In 2019, Antelope Wells, New Mexico became a popular location. This year has also seen hundreds of migrants camp in the mountains of Jacumba Hot Springs, California, waiting to be processed by agents.
Because Lukeville is so remote, Border Patrol personnel are scarce, so smugglers in the region controlled by the Mexican Sinaloa cartel direct people there. Among those who arrived last week were Luiz Velázquez, 41, his wife and three children, from Zacatecas, a Mexican state plagued by drug cartel violence.
Heat-related illnesses were a major concern several months ago, when daytime temperatures surpassed 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit). The concern now is nighttime temperatures in the low 40s (40 degrees Fahrenheit), in a place where the nearest hospitals and nonprofit migrant shelters are nearly two hours away.
Chris Clem, a retired sector chief from Yuma, Arizona, said part of the smugglers’ strategy is to spread agents as widely as possible, forcing the closure of highway checkpoints and the diversion of other resources to processing smugglers. immigrants. The remoteness creates an “enormous strain” on the Border Patrol, he added.
Too many immigrants
Art Del Cueto, vice president of the National Border Patrol Council, based in Tucson, said the union wants stricter measures to deter the arrival of migrants. He explained that it is not so much a question of too few agents, but of too many immigrants.
Looking ahead to next year’s presidential election, the border is a priority issue for voters, especially Republicans, and immigration issues could be a problem for Democrat Biden in his re-election race.
A national poll in November found that about half of American adults say increasing security at the U.S.-Mexico border should be a “high priority” for the federal government, and three in 10 rate it as a “high priority.” moderate priority.” Republicans were more likely than Democrats to consider it a high priority.
Biden’s approach to immigration combines new legal pathways to enter the country along with more restrictions on asylum for those who cross the border illegally. Former President Donald Trump, the GOP front-runner for the 2024 nomination, has promised even tougher hardline immigration policies in a second term.
Congress withheld additional funding for border security because of a package to provide supplemental aid to Israel and Ukraine.
John Modlin, chief of the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector, said Friday that the agency made 18,900 arrests for illegal crossings the previous week in the sector that includes most of Arizona’s border with Mexico. That translates to a daily average of 2,700 arrests, well above October’s daily average of less than 1,800 and just 700 in December 2022.
Impact on the area
The 2020 census put Lukeville’s population at 35, but the trailer park where many of the residents lived now appears abandoned, with boarded-up buildings and some older manufactured homes in the area. A once-busy gas station and store that sold ice and snacks to travelers closed indefinitely Monday.
The Lukeville border crossing is also popular with U.S. residents driving from Arizona to the popular resort of Puerto Peñasco, which they call “Rocky Point,” in Mexico. Nicknamed “Arizona Beach,” it is located about 100 kilometers (62 miles) south of the border, on the northern coast of the Gulf of California (Sea of Cortez).
Americans who want to travel to Puerto Peñasco will now have to cross through Nogales, a three-hour drive to the east, or San Luis, a two-hour drive to the west.
Alfonso Durazo, governor of the Mexican state of Sonora, asked officials from both countries to “make all necessary efforts to resume as soon as possible the extraordinary commercial, tourist and social relationship that has historically distinguished Sonora and Arizona.” “The solution is not to close the border crossings,” he claimed.
Source: With information from AP
