Gila Bend Mayor Chris Riggs has expressed concern that his Arizona town is actually being turned into a waypoint for illegal immigrants captured by federal authorities near the US-Mexican border.
"We can barely afford to take care of the people that we have here and our community now, and as of this second, the Border Patrol advised us that they're going to drop people off here and do sort of like: 'They're your problem'", Riggs told Fox News on Monday.
He made it plain that authorities in Gila Bend "just do not have the ability to care" for migrants, adding that "it's going to cost us tens of thousands of dollars a year to be able to just to provide them with a bottle of water and a sandwich when they get dropped off".
The mayor also berated the federal government for failing to provide the city with crucial information related to the COVID-19 infection rates of the migrants, the number of asylum seekers the town can expect to see, or any other basic data.
Riggs insisted that quite a few illegal border crossers act as "drug mules", urging the federal government "to step up and do their job". According to him, the feds are "the ones that created this problem, [and] they need to fix it".
The remarks followed President Joe Biden asserting last week that there is no immigration crisis in America and his administration will be able to handle the influx of refugees illegally crossing the US-Mexico border.
He spoke after the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said that its agents had recently encountered large groups of migrants, mostly from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Cuba, Nicaragua, Brazil, and Mexico who tried to illegally cross the country's southern border.
According to the CBP, the total number of people detained at the US-Mexican border topped 100,000 in February — a 28 percent rise from January. Of those who made the trip, an estimated 29,000 are said to be unaccompanied minors.
He pledged to create "a fair and humane immigration system" in America, vowing help in addressing the causes of immigration that prompt people from Latin America to move to the US.
