A mayor in Arizona declared a state of emergency Tuesday as the Biden administration’s immigration policy wreaks havoc on the Gila Bend community.
FOX 10 Phoenix reports that U.S. Customs and Border Protection on Monday dropped off 16 illegal immigrants, including young children, at a park in Gila Bend, which has a population of 2,000.
Additionally, Mayor Chris Riggs, who has repeatedly warned that his town does not have the resources to house the illegals, noted earlier this month that he was seeing some 20 unknown illegals a day walk into the town.
As the town battles an uptick in violence, Riggs says he’s not even being informed on the illegal immigrants’ identities, potential criminal background, or COVID-19 infection status.
“I’ve got nothing here, I’ve got no shelter, nowhere to put them,” Riggs said, according to FOX 10. “Literally, they’d be sleeping at the park and I’m not going to do that to little children.”
“I want to get Maricopa County to provide me, from the department of health services, with personnel and testing resources so that I can test these people,” the mayor added.
The Biden administration has refused to address Riggs’ concerns, which has resulted in the mayor declaring a state of emergence, a report from The Blaze highlighted.
“We can barely afford to take care of the people that we have here in our community now, and as of the second [of March], the Border Patrol advised us that they’re going to drop people off here and [say], ‘They’re your problem,'” the mayor said.
“We just do not have the ability to care for these people. Quite frankly, it’s going to cost us tens of thousands of dollars a year to be able just to provide them with a bottle of water and a sandwich when they get dropped off.”
During a Fox Business appearance on Tuesday night, Riggs reiterated the dire circumstances triggered by the Biden administration’s policies.
“Border Patrol let us know that they were going to be dropping migrants that had been detained for 72 hours in our town, which we really didn’t understand because we have nothing here,” he said, according to The Blaze. “We have no charity organizations that can help, no non-governmental organizations that a lot of the larger cities and towns do have to assist these people.”
As noted by The Daily Wire, soon after Biden took office, the president did away with Trump-era Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), which hold foreigners who tried to enter the U.S. illegally in camps in Mexico while they await hearings. Instead, the Democrat returned to the so-called “catch-and-release” policy in which illegal migrants are allowed to enter the United States.
“Suddenly, the flow of foreigners to the border exploded,” The Daily Wire detailed. “Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents apprehended nearly 100,000 people at the border in February. Last April, just more than 16,000 were captured at the border, according to Pew data.”
There are an estimated 7,700 children in the care of the Department of Health and Human Services at the U.S.-Mexico border, according to Newsweek.
The Daily Wire reported Monday that an internal leaked document from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) revealed that nearly 1,000 child migrants have been kept in border detention facilities for longer than 10 days, which is far longer than the 72-hour maximum amount of time children are supposed to be housed in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody.
The crisis, however, has gone largely under the radar in the mainstream press until this weekend via leaked images. The Biden administration has reportedly put what’s effectively a “gag order” on Border Patrol agents with the media, according to sources. The Biden administration has denied the “gag order” reports.