US border agents in Eagle Pass, Texas, are outnumbered by migrants 200 to 1 even as Customs and Border Protection (CBP) staff have been dispatched from stations across the country to aid the overwhelmed port of entry, The Post has learned.
The Texas border station was processing over 4,500 migrants into the facility on Tuesday while a further 5,300 people were already being held inside, bringing it to 260% capacity, according to figures from Fox News.
CBP checkpoints across the state have been forced to close and divert manpower to Eagle Pass, Texas Congressman Tony Gonzales told The Post, which he says leaves those communities unpatrolled, allowing drug and people smugglers to operate unimpeded in more rural areas.
“Every single checkpoint is closed — Uvalde, Carizzo — every single checkpoint is closed and every single border patrol agent is here,” Gonzalez said.
“Guess where they’re not? In the field stopping bad actors and nefarious goods coming over.”
“It’s dangerous,” he added. “Everybody is overwhelmed.”
The diversion of manpower has extended beyond Texas, with CBP personnel flying in from areas around the US to help.
“I met a guy from Buffalo and another one from New Jersey — I mean they’re coming to help out from all over the country,” said Gonzalez, who gave the figure for how outnumbered agents are.
Despite the migrant crush, Gonzalez said CBP staff remain “very resilient.”
Eagle Pass already closed one of its two international bridges into Mexico to consolidate resources earlier this month, and this week halted freight train access across the border, too.
Other ports of entry across Arizona and California have also been closed to divert manpower.
The desperation of the situation was exemplified yet again on Monday, when a new daily record for migrant encounters was set after 12,600 were intercepted by CBP officers in 24 hours.
“It is not sustainable. Just when you think you’ve hit the bottom, you haven’t,” Gonzalez told reporters, accusing President Biden of failing to take aggressive measures to address the crisis and allowing Texas to flounder.
“The state is doing everything it possibly can to keep its head above water, but this is a federal issue and this only stops when the federal government responds,” he said.
Biden, 81, last year responded to the crisis by advising migrants to “stay where you are and apply legally” by seeking asylum through the CBP One app. The president’s pleas appear to have been ignored.
“I visited the port of entry, where there were [just] 60 people who did it through the CBP One app. 60,” Gonzalez said. “There are ten thousand people coming over. That process is completely broken.”
Local emergency services in Maverick County, which Eagle Pass is a part of, are also being sucked into the border crisis. In recent days, paramedics have routinely been caught up dealing with migrants, leaving the fire department alone to serve residents until ambulances become available.
“We have five ambulances for the entire county of Maverick, which is just over 1,200 square miles, and there comes a time where we’re so stretched we resort to sending fire trucks to emergency medical calls to provide basic life support and wait for ambulances,” Assistant Fire Chief and Emergency Management Coordinator for Eagle Pass and Maverick County, Rodolfo Cardona, told The Post.
“We’re dealing with everything from drownings to heat exhaustion,” Cardona said. “It’s been hectic and tragic.”
Three weeks ago, local firefighters pulled the bodies of 16 migrants from the Rio Grande who had drowned over 10 days trying to cross into the US.
“It takes a toll having to be out here in the river continuously recovering the bodies of women and children. It’s extremely tragic and it’s something our federal government needs to do something about,” the fire chief said.
The border crisis is showing no signs of slowing. Between August and October, CBP reported over 300,000 migrants encounters each month. Preliminary numbers from November and December suggest the trend will continue.
As of November, the backlog for migrant immigration hearings topped 3 million pending cases, according to according to Transactional Records Access Clearing House (TRAC) — up from 2 million just 12 months ago.
That backlog equates to about 4,500 cases per judge in the court system, with cases being scheduled years in advance. Many of the migrants behind those 3 million cases are free to remain in the US until their court date.
Attempting to take measures into his own hands, on Monday Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill into law allowing police to arrest people caught illegally entering the country.
“Until President Biden steps up and does his job to secure the border, Texas will continue taking historic action to help our local partners respond to this Biden-made crisis,” a spokesperson for Abbott said in a statement.