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Behind The Border ‘Crisis’: More Migrant Families Risk Dangerous Remote Crossings

Author: Joel Rose / Source: NPR.org

In a desolate stretch of desert outside Yuma, Ariz., there’s a spot where more than 350 migrants, including children, burrowed under the steel border fence a few weeks ago.

“This only goes down just about probably another foot, this steel,” said Anthony Porvaznik, chief patrol agent for the Yuma sector of the Border Patrol.

He says smugglers tried digging in more than a dozen spots, looking for places where the ground was soft enough.

“This is very sandy,” Porvaznik said. “It’s like that all the way down, and so it was easy to dig.”

About once a week, Border Patrol agents come across migrant groups of 100 people or more in some of the most isolated parts of the Southwest border. In Arizona, the number of migrant families and children crossing the border more than doubled last year, straining resources in the U.S. and Mexico.

The White House says the situation is evidence of a broader crisis at the Southern border. On Friday, President Trump declared a national emergency to free up billions of dollars to expand the border wall. The administration wants a total of about $8 billion, including the $1.4 billion in the funding bill passed by Congress, for border wall construction.

But immigrant advocates say U.S. officials have exacerbated the situation at the border by limiting the number of migrants who can seek asylum at legal ports of entry. They say that’s pushing a growing number of migrant families to cross illegally in more remote areas of Arizona and New Mexico, miles from the nearest food, water and medical care.

“We hesitate to use the word ‘crisis,’ because we don’t think that this is a threat to the country,” said Joanna Williams of the Kino Border Initiative, a humanitarian group that operates a migrant shelter in Nogales, Mexico.

The vast majority of these migrants are fleeing violence and poverty in Central America. And Williams says U.S. immigration officials have underestimated their desperation to reach U.S. soil.

“They’re trying to find a route to safety,” Williams said. “For them, the risks are worth it.”

No longer the ‘wild, wild west’

Despite the recent influx of migrant families, the Yuma sector is widely considered a border enforcement success story.

The number of illegal border crossings in Yuma today is just a fraction of what it used to be in the early 2000s. Former acting Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke touted the sector’s turnaround in a 2017 op-ed in USA Today titled “Border Walls Work. Yuma Sector Proves It.

The border wall between San Luis Río Colorado, Mexico, and Arizona’s Yuma County.

Even as Border Patrol agents “were arresting on average 800 illegal aliens a day,” Duke wrote, “we were still unable to stop the thousands of trucks filled with drugs and humans that quickly crossed a vanishing point and dispersed into communities all across the country.”

“It was just to me like the wild, wild west. It was just out of control,” said Barbie Moorhouse, a helicopter pilot in the Border Patrol.

Before she was a pilot, Moorhouse worked on the ground as a Border Patrol agent in the mid-2000s. Back then, she says, agents ran themselves ragged chasing migrants who were trying to cross illegally.

“We did the best we could with what we had at the time,” Moorhouse said. “But it is definitely a better situation today than it was 10 years ago. The change was pretty dramatic.”

Since then, the Border Patrol’s ranks have swelled. More miles of wall and fence have been built. And the number of illegal border crossings is far below what they used to be.

But today, the face of those migrants has changed. Instead of farmworkers and laborers trying to dodge agents, nearly 90 percent of the border-crossers are families and children. Instead of trying to get away, they’re trying to get caught.

And once again, the U.S. is not prepared.

“It is a crisis for us because this is a situation that the Border Patrol is not resourced or geared to deal with,” said chief patrol agent Anthony Porvaznik.

Border Patrol agents are spending hours caring for the migrants in their custody, Porvaznik said. They pick up hundreds of hamburgers at a time from McDonald’s and wait with migrants at the hospital if they need medical attention.

“We need additional manpower to deal with the population that we have to essentially babysit,” Porvaznik said. “And that takes Border Patrol agents away from a national security border security mission to deal with a humanitarian mission.”

Porvaznik says big groups of migrants have been especially frustrating, because they take his agents away from the law enforcement tasks they signed up for when the joined…

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