Migrants are happily reporting they can just walk right in.
The border between Arizona and Mexico has more holes than Swiss cheese. 100+ floodgates have been welded open by the federal government to account for flooding from monsoon season and the migration pattern of an endangered antelope species.
And now, 1,400 illegal migrants a day are pouring through unimpeded.
“We thought the agents were going to tell us something,” one Ecuadorian migrant told The New York Post. “But we just walked in.”
“It was so easy to get into the US,” a migrant from Cuba added.
“Nothing like our journey through Mexico. That part was hard,” she added. “I thought there was going to be more security.”
Let that sink in: Mexico was the hard part.
Smugglers have started to capitalize on the open gates, as well, bringing through hundreds of illegal migrants a day. U.S. Customs and Border Protection can’t do anything about the gates — they’re welded open. Migrants arrive and surrender — CBP calls them “give-ups.”
According to The Post, “Last month, 42,561 migrants were encountered at the Tuscon border post, a huge jump over the June number of 27,294. Tuscon now tops traditionally busier border spots at El Paso and Laredo in Texas, where 24,352 and 26,627 border crossings, respectively, were reported in July.”
“We haven’t seen this many migrants since about 2008,” said Adam Isacson, director for defense oversight at the advocacy group Washington Office on Latin America. “With the end of Title 42, in a way that nobody oversaw, it seems to come back to Tucson.
“What you’re seeing is a lot of large groups who want to turn themselves in,” Isacson said. “Tucson has also traditionally been where smugglers concentrate Mexicans and Central Americans who don’t want to be detected. Now they’re seeing 100 people at a time who are not running away.”
“It’s really becoming an epicenter,” he said. “This is big.”
It’s bigger than big — it’s a full-blown crisis.
