Migrants Cross Border as Arizona Governor Gives Press Conference on Immigration Crisis

Migrants could be seen walking through a gap in the U.S.–Mexico border fence as Arizona governor Doug Ducey held a press conference on Tuesday to call out the Biden administration’s failure to control the flow of illegal immigrants.

Ducey held the press conference at a gap in the fence in the Yuma border sector with local officials to address efforts to stem illegal immigration at the southern border. A reporter for a local NBC affiliate filmed the group of “almost a dozen” migrants entering while Yuma mayor Douglas Nicholls spoke to reporters.

Nicholls, who appeared not to see that specific group of migrants arriving, drew attention to human-trafficking of migrants and drug flows through Yuma County.

“We have a lot more drug trafficking through the communities, and that hits our schools, it hits all throughout our community,” Nicholls said. “We really appreciate the governor’s support, the National Guard . . . and the men and women in Border Patrol.”

Ducey described what he called the “Biden border crisis” as “out of control” at the beginning of the press conference.

“We’ve been seeing thousands of migrants every day for several days here at our border in Yuma,” Ducey said. The Biden administration “upended sensible, effective policies like the Migrant Protection Protocols, just to reinstate them months later only because a court ordered them to.”

Ducey spoke several days after the administration announced it would reimplement the Trump-era MPP, known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy, which requires asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico before immigration court hearings in the U.S. The administration had attempted to rescind the policy but was forced to restart the program by order of a federal judge.

Border Patrol agents encountered 164,303 migrants at the southern border in October, after a total of 1,734,686 encounters for the entire 2020–21 fiscal year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.