Smugglers are bringing migrants to a remote Arizona border crossing, overwhelming US agents

LUKEVILLE, Ariz. (AP) — Gerston Miranda and his wife were among thousands of migrants recently arriving at this remote area on Arizona’s southern border with Mexico, squeezing into the United States through a gap in the wall and walking overnight about 14 miles (23 kilometers) with two school-aged daughters to surrender to Border Patrol agents.

“There is no security in my country,” said the 28-year-old from Ecuador, who lost work when his employer closed due to extortion by criminals. “Without security you cannot work. You cannot live.”

A shift in smuggling routes has brought an influx of migrants here from countries as diverse as Senegal, Bangladesh and China, prompting the Border Patrol to seek help from other federal agencies and drawing scrutiny to an issue critical in next year’s presidential elections.

With hundreds of migrants crossing daily in the area, the U.S. government on Monday indefinitely shut down the nearby international crossing between Lukeville, Arizona, and Sonoyta, Mexico, to free Customs and Border Protection officers assigned to the port of entry to help with transportation and other support. The agency also has partially closed a few other border ports of entry in recent months, including a pedestrian crossing in San Diego and a bridge in Eagle Pass, Texas.

Critics of the move, including Arizona Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs; the state’s two U.S. senators, the governor of Mexico’s Sonora state and the leadership of the nearby Tohono O’odham Nation, said it could harm trade and tourism. Hobbs urged President Joe Biden to reassign the 243 National Guard members already in the Tucson sector to help reopen the Lukeville crossing.

The morning after it was closed, about a dozen Border Patrol agents in olive green uniforms watched over some 400 migrants who had spent the night by the towering wall of steel bollards, wrapped in shiny Mylar blankets they later discarded among saguaro cactus and Palo Verde trees.

Three or four times as many CBP field operations officers in navy blue uniforms helped the migrants into white vans for a short drive to a canopied field intake center. From there, agents took migrants for processing to the Border Patrol’s Ajo station, a half-hour north, or to other locations such as Tucson.

U.S. authorities have been so short-handed in Arizona that they have used charter flights to transfer some migrants from Tucson to three Texas border cities for processing, according Witness at the Border, an advocacy group that analyzes flight data.

Federal air marshals who provide security on commercial flights, and even Federal Protective Service officers who guard U.S. government buildings, are being diverted to the border, officials have said, without saying exactly where they are going.

“We are seeing a lot of different kinds of uniforms down here,” humanitarian aid worker Tom Wingo said in Lukeville.

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