Paramedics in Texas are reeling under the border wave

Throughout the long, busy fall months, the calls kept coming in: mothers losing control of their children while trying to cross the treacherous waters of the Rio Grande. Pregnant women become entangled in barbed wire. Bodies washing up on shore.

Cities like New York and Chicago have struggled in recent months to accommodate the busloads of migrants who arrived during the latest wave of migration. But here on the border, the small town of Eagle Pass, Texas, is one of many towns facing an even tougher challenge. During the height of the influx in recent weeks, up to 5,000 migrants a day crossed the border there from Mexico. They gathered along the river, ran through people’s yards and looked for help.

Many require urgent medical attention upon arrival – help that is only available through a city already scrambling to meet the needs of its own 28,000 residents. The city has had to use one of its five ambulances full-time to transport injured migrants from the riverbank.

“A lot of the attention is on the big cities and the disagreement between politicians and not on the bootstraps here in Eagle Pass,” Eagle Pass Fire Chief Manuel Mello III said this week as a delegation of 60 Republican members of Congress. , including House Speaker Mike Johnson, gathered in the city on the edge of the Rio Grande to call on the Biden administration to stem the immigration wave.

“Our communities are being overwhelmed,” Mr Johnson told reporters on Wednesday. “They opened the border wide to the whole world.”

In December, an estimated 300,000 migrants were apprehended along the southern border, a record, leading to the temporary closure of four international border crossings, including one in Eagle Pass.

Texas has long been the focus of U.S. immigration policy, with some of the largest arrivals in recent years taking place in El Paso and across the Rio Grande Valley. But the area has become a major point of contention between Republican leaders and the Biden administration this year, as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has openly defied federal authority and set up state law enforcement patrols, concertina wire and floating buoys along the border. an attempt to keep new migrants out of the state.

On Wednesday, the Justice Department filed suit challenging a new Texas law which gives state police officers the authority to arrest and return migrants, and will take effect in March.

Governor Abbott continues to send migrants to northern cities, but local officials at the border say they are the ones overwhelmed by the thousands of migrants arriving at their doors, especially emergency departments called to respond when there is trouble.

In Eagle Pass, most calls are for migrants who underestimate the river’s strong current and disappear underwater. Others are for injured people trying to cross the barbed wire that the state installed despite the objections of federal authorities, pregnant women in distress, heat exhaustion, hypothermia and various minor injuries.

The fire department responds to an average of 217 such calls per month, a significant number for a crew of about 50 paramedics and emergency medical technicians. “We saw drownings almost every day,” Chief Mello said. “We are overwhelmed.”

The department spends about $150,000 a month on ambulance costs for migrants alone, a cost normally covered by patients or health insurers but not in the case of migrants, the chief said. That figure does not include overtime, which costs more than $30,000 a month, and the cost of replacing equipment and medications.

“But what is the solution?” said Chef Mello. “Not responding to calls? That would be inhumane. Our job is to save lives.”

The fire department isn’t the only local agency feeling the pressure. Eagle Pass Police Chief Federico Garza says his small police force of 74 officers is often distracted from the daily duties of responding to calls from migrants idling on a corner or walking through a backyard. The sheer volume of calls “can be overwhelming,” he said.

Local officials are expected to turn migrants over to U.S. Border Patrol. But that dynamic could change in March when the new state law takes effect and local officials are given the authority to make broader migrant arrests, a provision the Justice Department says unconstitutionally usurps federal authority.

Chief Garza has his own concerns about the law. He said his officers were not trained in how to handle migrant encounters, and that no one from the state had been contacted to provide training and resources.

“Are we going to add border patrol? Those are the answers I’m waiting for,” he said. “My deal is to keep the city safe and prevent them from crossing the border and inconveniencing our citizens,” he added, referring to the migrants.

Leandro Gonzalez, 32, an Eagle Pass resident who lives near the Rio Grande, says he sees hundreds of people entering the city and waiting in clusters to be picked up by Border Patrol agents near his home. They leave behind piles of debris, clothing and discarded plastic, he said. “That’s been happening for a few years now. You don’t know who they are,” he said. “You feel unsafe.”

After the record figures of recent months, there are some signs of a decline. Arrests fell to about 2,500 on Jan. 1 from 10,000 on one day in December, according to government officials. Rolando Salinas Jr., the mayor of Eagle Pass, said his city had seen fewer than 500 people in recent days.

“But that’s happened before, right? If you have very few people for a few days, and then all of a sudden, you have a big surge,” Mr. Salinas said. “I hope we don’t go back to seeing 4,000 or 5,000 people. That’s what causes chaos.”

The reasons for the recent slowdown are unclear, although it appears one factor may be new steps Mexico has taken to curb migration after U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and other top U.S. officials urged Mexico to President Manuel López Obrador had urged to intervene. Since then, Mexican officials have set up checkpoints to intercept a large caravan heading north and have also begun deporting Venezuelan migrants, who have made up a large portion of the new arrivals in the United States lately.

US authorities have also stepped up deportations, with more than 460,000 migrants, including 75,000 families with children, having flown back to their home countries since May.

The elimination of the crossings has already taken a heavy burden off the city of Eagle Pass, Mr. Salinas said. The recent closure of an international border crossing known locally as Bridge 1 has crippled a local economy that benefits from a steady stream of Mexicans crossing the border legally every day to eat at restaurants, fill their gas tanks and commute to work. The holiday closure cost the city about $1 million, Mr. Salinas said.

The bridge reopened at seven o’clock on Thursday morning. Other border crossings that were temporarily closed also reopened, in San Ysidro, California, Nogales, Ariz., and Lukeville, Ariz.

Mr. Salinas said he received a personal call this week from Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas about plans to reopen the bridge.

“The last thing we want is for a bridge to close,” Mr. Salinas said. “That had consequences for the local population and our wallets.”

He also said he hoped the visit of Republicans in the House of Representatives this week would put pressure on the president and Democrats to agree to stricter immigration policies.

But crews at the Eagle Pass fire station said they didn’t have time to wait for Washington politicians to act, with lives at stake.

Harish Garcia, 27, an emergency medical technician, shared a moving story about the fall. During the most recent wave, he said, his crew responded to a call of a mother and daughter, about four or five years old, who were not breathing after trying to cross the Rio Grande. Mr. Garcia said he helped perform CPR on both victims, loaded them into an ambulance and took them to a hospital.

He said he saw it as a victory after hearing that “they made it.” But upon listening to his story, Chef Mello intervened. Both later died in hospital, he told him.

Mr. Garcia lowered his eyes. “We see it here almost every day,” he says. “It’s hard for us. But we lean on each other. It’s part of the job. We help whoever we can and then we have to get everything back up and running and ready for the next call.”

Mirjam Jordaan reporting contributed.