1: Thank you for joining us on The Briefing,
your weekly debrief of top news by the Arizona Republic and a essential.com.
I'm Raphael Carranza. This week we're coming to you from Tucson,
the heart of Arizona's Borderlands,
where we met with a man responsible of enforcement over this large area.
Here are the top three things that you need to know to understand what is
currently happening at the Arizona border, as it once again gains prominence.
This election cycle, the Tucson sector,
which covers the Eastern two thirds of the Arizona border continu to leave the
country in the number of migrant encounters.
An official stats for March show agents here apprehended nearly 39,000
migrants or about 1200 per day weekly.
Apprehensions have begun to decrease,
but we don't know if that will hold during the summer when numbers peak.
Historically,
nonprofits and local governments are continuing to coordinate with border
officials to provide humanitarian aid to migrants released at the Arizona
border.
They faced a March 31st fiscal cliff when federal money was expected to run
out. But DHS assured that more money is coming to Arizona.
That has allowed them to continue providing services like shelter, food,
and transportation uninterrupted. As local governments respond at the border,
state leaders are at odds about how to address this issue.
After Governor Hobbes vetoed the Arizona Border Invasion Act,
house speaker Bent has championed a concurrent resolution that mandates the use
of E-Verify to receive state benefits.
The goal is to get it into voters in November, but it stalled in the Senate.
President Warren Peterson says it has unresolved issues for more coverage of
immigration and border issues across Arizona and at the southwest border.
Visit az central.com or follow us on social media. Last month,
Congress averted a government shutdown.
It passed a series of spending bills that includes 1.2 trillion for the
Department of Homeland Security to step up border an immigration enforcement.
The 2024 spending bill for the Department of Homeland Security allocates about
19.6 billion to customs and border protection and nearly
9.6 billion to immigration and customs enforcement.
Some of the funding highlights include $650 million for the shelter
and services program,
which reimburses local governments and nonprofits for providing humanitarian
assistance to migrants and asylum seekers released in the US after crossing the
border.
An increase in I detention capacity with enough funding to raise the number of
detention beds from 34,000 currently to
41,500.
The bill also funds more than 2100 new border patrol agents bringing up the
total to 22,000. It also includes overtime pay for agents
$491 million will also pay for specialized at the
border crossings to scan and seize fentanyl and other hard drugs.
2: What I'm calling down the federal government to do is to disperse these funds as
quickly as possible back into the sectors so that they can go to work
on the field here and continue to their efforts to protect our border.
1: This past week we sat down with John Maudlin.
He is the chief patrol agent for the Tucson sector.
We discussed what lessons his agents learned during a major increase in
crossings last year that culminated with the closure of the Louisville port of
entry.
3: 20 18, 20 19, 20 20. We saw about 60,000 apprehensions a year,
which is a lot for a sector this size, but it was certainly manageable.
And then in 2021 it jumped to 190,000 and then it jumped to
250,000 in 2022, and then last year,
373,000.
But when it comes to how people migrate through Mexico into the United States,
it's all controlled by the smuggling organizations.
So people don't really have a choice along the route to sort of go east or west.
It's all determined based on who they are,
but also violence in Mexico will change migration patterns as well,
and especially if there's violence against migrants,
that will move migration patterns as well. So a whole lot of things affect it,
certainly not just a single cause. To me,
the thing that affected us the most here and still is affecting us the most is
that where the smuggling organizations are moving,
these people are the most remote areas that we have.
You talked about the west desert. So the farthest west parts of our area,
way out west of Ajo, very desolate out there.
There's no infrastructure out there,
and these people are being pushed across the border into areas where it'll take
us hours to get from the nearest paved road to them.
So if you think about a group of a hundred migrants shows up at once out there,
there's no four wheel buses for us to drive out there,
we have to get out there in trucks and triage that group and then determine
who's the most vulnerable of all those vulnerable populations and get those out
maybe four or five at a time and get them again in an hour or two,
drive back to some paved street where there could be a bus waiting to move them
out.
So it's incredibly callous and inconsiderate of the life and the
safety of those people that the smuggling organizations are pushing through in
those areas. And while that's happening, probably most importantly,
we are not able to focus on our mission, which is securing the border,
which is preventing dangerous people and dangerous things from getting into the
United States. We are focusing on triaging these groups,
providing care for these groups while we're not doing our traditional mission.
How do.
4: You determine who you will release and who will be, for example,
placed in detention or removed?
3: Yeah, sure. So every day
when we make all of our apprehensions,
a certain percentage of those people have significant history in the
United States already. They've committed felonies here,
they've been removed from the United States,
or they left voluntarily and now they're coming back.
So those people are going to go into the custody of the US Marshal service.
We're going to prosecute those people.
If it's someone that's involved in a smuggling scheme,
they're going to be prosecuted as well.
There's a percentage of the people that are interdicted that are unaccompanied
children by law,
they need to go into the custody of HHS so that they go that way.
And what we're left with is this other population that we refer to
ICE ERO for custody with the population that's left over.
Some of them will go laterally,
sort of east and west to sectors that have the capacity to hear those
fear claims while they're in custody in those sectors.
And then that population that's left,
if there's nothing else for us to do to them or do with them,
they then have to be released.
I don't have any authority to continue to hold them.
So we release them in coordination with NGOs and
with the idea being to try to mitigate the impact to the city of Tucson or
Nogales or Douglas as much as we can. Thank you, chief. Appreciate you.
Absolutely. Thank you.
5: The Arizona Republic here for it.
0: Are you.
1: For this week's sunspot?
We are traveling to the White House when the elementary school district banned
from Tolleson that represented Arizona. This past weekend, los,
the Tolleson and Mariachi band from the Tolleson Elementary School District
traveled to Washington DC
They played at the White House for the annual Easter egg role.
The band is led by RA,
who was recognized as a 2024 teacher of the year while in DC the students
also visited the Capitol building and other monuments in the nation's capitol.
Thank you for joining us on The Briefing,
your weekly debrief of top news by the Arizona Republic and a central.com.
We'll see you next time.