Border Patrol Costs Exploding As More Migrant Families Reach The US

One Border Patrol sector expects to spend around four times as much on basic necessities as more illegal family units descend on the U.S.-Mexico border.

$300,000 was spent on food, formula, diapers and basic medical care by Border Patrol’s Yuma Sector in fiscal year 2018, according to a report by the Washington Examiner. In an indication of how much more agents are forced to spend to care for illegal migrants in its custody, agents in the Yuma Sector have already spent $600,000 on those very same services and items for the current fiscal year — and it’s only halfway over.

Yuma Sector expects to dole out $1.2 million, four times as much as last year, by the end of the 2019 fiscal year. The precipitous rise in costs comes after agents caught 25,000 illegal migrants traveling in family units through southwestern Arizona in the past six months.

“We only have one hospital, and that’s to serve the whole community, which is the whole Yuma County,” Yuma Border Patrol agent Justin Kallinger told the Washington Examiner. “We have snowbird season — our population goes from 100,000 to 200,000. It doubles. Most of that age group still needs medical attention quite a bit. Our ERs [emergency rooms] are stacked already before we start with the illegal aliens we have to take to the hospital.”

Law enforcement agents working across the entire U.S.-Mexico border have seen a monumental uptick in illegal migrants in the past year.

Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) announced that their agents have made 418,000 apprehensions this fiscal year to date, a number that already surpasses the 404,142 nationwide apprehensions seen in the entire 2018 fiscal year. A vast majority of the captures are taking place on the southwestern border.

Yuma, one of nine Border Patrol sectors on the southern border, has been hit especially hard.

The mayor of Yuma, Arizona declared an emergency on April 16, begging the federal government to assist his border town with the migrant situation. The very next day, New Mexico’s Otero County declared an emergency and asked the governor to deploy the National Guard and re-open CBP checkpoints.

Unlike years prior, many of the migrants currently reaching the U.S. southern border belong to family units. However, there are rising numbers of “fraudulent families” being detected by immigration enforcement officers. Over 3,000 fraudulent family cases have been identified by Border Patrol within the past six months alone.