Officials in the border town of Yuma, Arizona said this week that the ongoing illegal immigration crisis has led the area “to the brink of collapse.”
Yuma County Supervisor Jonathan Lines told Fox News that the town has fewer than 100,000 residents. But, the town sees around 6,000 migrants cross the border illegally every week. Of those 6,000, there are reportedly 1,000 to 2,000 “got aways.”
This amount of illegal immigrants puts a strain on the town’s resources and threatens its food production.
“The problem that we’re foreseeing right now is there’s a couple of big waves coming,” Yuma resident Hank Auza told Fox. “Yuma can’t support that. It will overwhelm the system here.”
Last month, Border Patrol began erecting a massive tent near El Paso to help process migrants. This occurred around the time that Title 42 was expected to end, which Townhall covered.
According to the New York Post, churches and the medical system in Yuma struggle to keep up with the amount of migrants making their way into the United States.
“Let’s talk about the financial impact and the strain that it’s placed on our hospital,” Lines said. “Yuma Medical Center has had over $22 million of unreimbursed expenses specifically for people who are illegally crossing our border.”
Lines said he has received calls from residents saying that they took their family members to other cities for medical attention because the Yuma hospital was full.
Many illegal immigrants destroy agriculture when they trek through fields.
“Our fields are monitored and audited and tested for different pathogens,” Yuma farmer Alex Muller told the outlet. “You can’t have people walking through the field.”
"Policies need to be changed when you see an unprecedented amount of people coming across the border that even supersedes what we saw under any of the other presidents for the past 30 years," Lines told Fox News. "And they're coming because they said that Biden told them to come, that we have an open border."
In November, Townhall reported how some residents in Yuma hired armed security guards due to the influx of illegal immigrants.
"Two of these families down here actually had to hire private security guards — armed security guards — to keep people out of their yards," Lines, told Fox News in an interview in November. "They were constantly having people come into their homes, into their yards, and they were not very respectful."