The United States border crisis does not seem to have any intention of stopping. To try to counteract it, Texas enacted a law that allows local authorities to arrest illegal immigrants who are crossing the southern border in large numbers, making the job of the Border Patrol increasingly difficult. This difficult situation was confirmed by the agency's acting commissioner.
Troy A. Miller, who is in charge of the United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP), assured that "the encounter levels we are currently seeing across the southwest border are presenting a serious challenge to the men and women of [Customs and Border Protection]," which makes the agency's resources increasingly less sufficient.
In addition to asking Congress for more funds to address the new methodologies of human smuggling, he noted that smugglers are “recklessly putting migrants into harm’s way: in remote locations across the border, onto the tops of trains, or into the waters of the Rio Grande River."
Currently, the number of migrants at the border is such that CBP is recruiting personnel from other ports of entry to patrol the territory.
For example, as reported by Voz Media, the 3,600 Border Patrol agents in Tucson (Arizona) had to deal with more than 58,000 encounters during the month of November alone.
Indeed, according to official data, Tucson was the sector of the southern border that detained the most illegal immigrants during fiscal year 2024. In this sector alone, October witnessed 55,224 encounters, 17,000 more than in Del Río, the second most affected sector, and almost 23,000 more than in Rio Grande, the third. What's more, arrests in this territory accounted for 30% of the total on the southern border.
