Texas Sheriff Joe Martinez says border crossings are placing a significant strain on his town.
”On a daily basis, we’re dealing with immigrants coming across one specific location. This is just that one specific location when the river is either running low or waist deep. People are coming across, you know, 8, 10, 12, 18 at a time, and it’s putting a strain on our office, our manpower,” Martinez, the sheriff for Travis County, told Newsmax TV’s ”American Agenda” Thursday afternoon.
”Border Patrol is doing everything they can with their abilities. They’re overworked. They’re undermanned and, you know, we’re just picking up some of the slack of these individuals as they’re coming across into our community. Our goal is to keep our community safe, so we take possession of them there at the Rio Grande, call Border Patrol to take them off our hands and they go to get them processed.”
The situation at the border has gotten so dire that President Joe Biden is calling on federal employees across government to pause their normal job duties to assist in processing and caring for the increased number of unaccompanied children arriving at the border.
A top U.S. border official on Tuesday said he expects more than 1 million migrants will arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border this year, a sign of a growing humanitarian challenge for President Biden on the southwest border.
If the figures reach 1 million, it could mirror a similar increase in border crossings in 2019 during Donald Trump’s presidency, when nearly 978,000 migrants were taken into custody.
Border Patrol arrested about 100,000 migrants in February, the most in a month since mid-2019. More migrants typically cross between April and June, Raul Ortiz, deputy chief of the U.S. Border Patrol, told reporters.
”We’re already starting to see some higher days of 6,000-plus apprehensions,” Ortiz said. ”So, I fully expect our Border Patrol agents to encounter over a million people this year.”
The Biden administration has blamed its predecessor for the crisis. Martinez told Newsmax TV the situation now is more dire, and that the Biden administration needs to ”show up and have boots on the ground.”
”They need to know what it’s like to live in this area, be here on a daily basis. You can make a decision 2,000 miles away and it not be the right decision to make. But once they see what these Border Patrol agents are going through on a daily basis, I think that they will get the true picture,” he said.
”You just can’t show up here for a short period of time and think you know all the answers. You have to have a little bit of ownership of this.”
Information from Reuters was used in this report.
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Source: Newmax
