By Jason Hopkins
A group of congressmen touring the Arizona-Mexico border completely missed the four illegal migrants nearby who were able to cross the border undetected.
Arizona Republican Rep. Andy Biggs led a border tour on Tuesday alongside four other GOP congressmen, according to a Washington Examiner reporter who was on the scene. The five lawmakers were there to inspect smuggling activity taking place in the area.
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However, they did not catch the three women and one child who passed by, remaining covered as they walked through brush and overgrown water plants on the border near Yuma, Ariz.
The group of migrants, however, were not necessarily hiding from anyone. After crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, they approached a nearby house and asked for water. After giving them something to drink, the homeowner, Dennis, pointed them in the direction of the Border Patrol.
“I didn’t call anybody. I was sitting in there watching TV — knocking on the door. There’s four of them here. They wanted agua so I went and got ’em a bottle of water,” Dennis said to the Washington Examiner. “I walked ’em out here — said they need to go up there.”
Footage of the event showed the group of migrants appearing happy and voluntarily getting into a Border Patrol truck.
“In the past several months, it’s getting to be more and more,” Barbara, Dennis’s wife, stated. “It’s pretty much like a sieve right here because all we have are vehicle barriers and the river is very shallow right here. You can just wade across.” Dennis guessed that around “50 to 500” migrants cross the area a day, and Barbara said almost all them are families.
The women and child apprehended that day closely mirror what immigration officials are currently dealing with at the border.
Border Patrol turned back or apprehended a total of 103,492 migrants at the southern border in March, marking the highest month in 12 years. A large number of these migrants are family units and children from Central America, burdening a system designed primarily to handle single males from Mexico.
On the very same day Biggs and the other congressmen toured the border, the mayor of Yuma, Arizona, declared an emergency over the migrant situation.
“I am calling upon the federal government to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Yuma, as our NGO’s are over capacity and cannot sustain providing this aid,” Yuma Mayor Douglas Nicholls said on Tuesday. “… I believe we need to do [something] to make sure that our community is maintained and that the human rights of all the migrants are also maintained and that we have a path forward that respects both.”
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