(Image source from: apnews.com)
The Associated Press has illustrated how families are still entering the United States even in the face of daily global headlines over the Trump administration's zero-tolerance immigration policies. From Central America, the families flow is particularly marked in this overlooked stretch Arizona and California borders.
According to Border Patrol's Yuma Sector, over 120 percent rise in the figures households and isolated children caught at the border over the last year, amazing area's citizenry that had been mostly quiet and tranquil for the past decade.
Nearly 10,000 families and 4,500 unaccompanied children have been apprehended by agents in Yuma sector thus far this fiscal year, which is an immense increase since seven years.
The Trump administration's policy of separating families did not seem to be slowing the flow. Per day, in June the Border Patrol here apprehended an average of 30 families when the uproar over the policy was at its peak, an increase from May.
For family border crossings, Yuma is present the second-busiest sector following the Rio Grande Valley in Texas.
He further said while drug smugglers and other criminals use the vast desert to cross illegally, most families and children simply walk or swim across into the U.S. and wait to be arrested, according to Border Patrol spokesman Jose Garibay. Many travels in large groups.
Garibay says he was once on assignment when he encountered a group of over 60 families and children.
It was challenging for the agency to deal with sizable numbers of families and children. There are only so many vans for the conveyance of immigrants to the sector's processing facility in Yuma.
Umpteen don't understand why so many families and children from Central America are coming to the U.S. through this stretch of Arizona and braving its extreme summer heat, when the more direct path takes them to the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, more than 1,000 miles away.
Garibay said migration patterns are largely controlled by the cartels that smuggle people across.
Yuma is a cultivation center that relies to a great extent on immigrant labor to harvest crops, chiefly lettuce and dates. Scores of Mexican workers cross the border with special visas to work the fields. Their employers have to pay to house and feed them, and they earn around $10 an hour.
By Sowmya Sangam
