El Paso Reels Under Migrant Wave
Shades of ‘Del Rio’, and things are just set to get worse all along the border
By Andrew R. Arthur on December 13, 2022
More than 2,600 migrants are reported to have crossed the Southwest border in Border Patrol’s El Paso sector during a 24-hour period between December 9 and 10. They were just a “small” portion of the nearly 15,000 migrants apprehended in the sector over the past week, with hundreds more following. It’s beginning to look a lot like the surge that brought thousands of migrants to Del Rio in September 2021, turning “Del Rio” into “shorthand for a border in chaos” — and it’s about to get worse.
El Paso Sector. The Border Patrol’s El Paso sector is one of nine along the Southwest border, from the Rio Grande Valley sector on the Gulf of Mexico in the east to San Diego sector on the Pacific Ocean in the west.
El Paso hasn’t traditionally been one of the busiest sectors. In FY 2022, for example, as nearly 481,000 aliens were apprehended down river in Del Rio sector’s area of responsibility, agents along the 284 border miles in El Paso sector’s area of responsibility (which includes all of New Mexico) caught “only” about 308,000 illegal entrants.
Things have been heating up in El Paso of late, however, with apprehensions increasing from fewer than 30,000 in August, to just over 49,000 in September, to more than 53,000 in October (a 280 percent increase over the same month one year before).
https://cis.org/Arthur/El-Paso-Reels-Under-Migrant-Wave
