Not everyone who makes the dangerous trek from Central or South America to the US border will make it. We don't see all of the people who die in the Darien Gap or at other spots along the way. But, unfortunately, some Americans do see more than their fair share of the bad outcomes that happen along our border. Eagle Pass, Texas is a fairly small place which has become synonymous with people streaming across the border in the past few years. People who work as first responders in Eagle Pass get dozens of calls a day to rescue migrants or sometimes just to collect their bodies.
First responders in Eagle Pass say they are overwhelmed and increasingly traumatized by what they see: parents drowned or dying, their children barely holding onto life after attempting to cross the Rio Grande.
The emotional strain on firefighters and EMTs has grown so great that city officials have applied for a state grant that would bring in additional mental health resources for front-line workers...
On some shifts, firefighters with the Eagle Pass Fire Department can spend three to five hours in the water, helping rescue migrants crossing the river or recovering their drowned bodies.
It used to be normal for the Eagle Pass fire department to get 30 calls a day. But since the end of Title 42 that number has almost doubled. In a single shift, first responders can be picking up as many as seven bodies of migrants who drowned crossing the river. Often those numbers include children.
Harish Garcia, who has worked as a firefighter EMT in Eagle Pass for three years, still cannot shake the memory of a drowning mother and her young daughter. Garcia’s crew, including a firefighter with a daughter around the same age as the little girl, loaded the two into an ambulance, he said, but it was too late...
Garcia and Kypuros say they’ve lost count of how many bodies they’ve recovered in recent months. The majority are found after failed attempts to cross the river, but other calls have led fire crews into the rough brush of South Texas, where dehydration and exposure can prove just as deadly.
There was a story in January about three migrants who drowned in Eagle Pass, a mother and her two children. Initially the claim made was that the border patrol had been prevented from rescuing them because Texas officials had refused to let them access the river. That later turned out to be false.
A top Border Patrol official said three migrants who died crossing the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass on Friday had already drowned when agents received a distress call from Mexico, countering initial claims that the woman and two children had drowned after state soldiers blocked federal agents from reaching them.
Still, Robert Danley, the chief patrol agent in the Del Rio sector, said in a sworn statement that Texas soldiers blocked Border Patrol officers from getting to two other migrants who were struggling in the river Friday night. Those migrants were rescued by a Mexican airboat and were suffering from hypothermia.
Democrats seem to think this problem would go away if Gov. Abbott would remove all of the razor wire and let the Border Patrol handle things. But that's not true. Drownings happen no matter who is in charge because people with children try to swim across the river. The only way to stop the drownings is to discourage more people from swimming the river and to enter the country legally rather than coming here to game the asylum system as most of these people are doing.
In any case, I do feel bad for the first responders. It's not their fault this is happening but they are stuck often seeing the worst of it.
