NBC News correspondent Guad Venegas was shocked during his reporting at the Eagle Pass, Texas, border crossing Thursday as he saw firsthand a huge number of migrants illegally entering the U.S.
This week, Customs and Border Protection have apprehended a record number of illegal immigrants, with more than 12,000 people illegally crossing the border in one day as the Biden administration faces continued calls to address the crisis. During Venegas’ report which aired on MSNBC, the correspondent stood by the Eagle Pass border crossing, showing a massive crowd of migrants waiting to be processed as more migrants continued to flow across the border, according to Mediaite.
“These crowds here in Eagle Pass have never been this large during my reporting. This is the most people I’ve ever seen in Eagle Pass, and other reporters, colleagues working other parts of the border in Arizona, [and] in Jacumba near San Diego tell me the same thing,” said Venegas, who grew up in a Mexican American household near the U.S.-Mexico border in Southern California.
“We have these conversations and the conversation is always, ‘Wow, I’ve never seen this number of migrants arriving,’ and we know from the reports coming from the government with these numbers,” the NBC News correspondent added. “We have the number of apprehensions, the numbers of encounters, everything spiking, so we don’t know what this will mean moving forward, we just know that the numbers are much larger as the resources are spread thin.”
Venegas said he was told by Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) that the federal government’s processing centers and area hospitals are overwhelmed by the number of illegal immigrants.
“When the U.S. congressman visited this area, Tony Gonzales said that the hospitals are also overwhelmed. So if someone calls 911 and needs to go to the hospital, that hospital might be overwhelmed because they’re helping a lot of these migrants, so you have that humanitarian crisis happening as well,” Venegas reported.
The spike in illegal border crossings has caused both Republican and Democratic leaders to urge the Biden administration to take action on the crisis. On Thursday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) pressed President Joe Biden to use executive orders to secure the border while last weekend, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) demanded that the border “must be shut down,” telling CNN’s Jake Tapper that the Biden administration must “stop this dangerous immigration.”
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Earlier this week, Governor Greg Abbott (R-TX) signed a bill giving state authorities power to arrest illegal immigrants to help stop the crisis. Abbott’s action was criticized by leftist groups and the White House as the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit claiming the law is discriminatory and will target minorities.