Arizona border city Yuma on brink of collapse after migrant crisis toll

Posted By TheNewsCommenter: From Nypost.com: “Arizona border city Yuma on brink of collapse after migrant crisis toll”. Below is an excerpt from the article.

Officials in an Arizona border town say they get a weekly flood of migrants totaling 6 percent of their population — and the dire scenario has driven the area to the brink of collapse.

Yuma has fewer than 100,000 residents, yet the town sees 6,000 migrants illegally crossing its border with Mexico every week, for a total of more than half a million people in the past few years, exasperated Yuma County Supervisor Jonathan Lines told Fox News.

“The average for Yuma on a weekly basis is 6,000 people coming across. Of those 6,000, we have 1,000 to 2,000 ‘gotaways’ — people we have not been able to catch,” Lines said.

The Arizona community has been an immigration flashpoint for years, but the burden on the area often gets overlooked, with it currently ranking third in migrant apprehensions — behind El Paso and Del Rio, Texas. El Paso is considered Ground Zero for the border crisis.

“The problem that we’re foreseeing right now is there’s a couple of big waves coming,” Yuma resident and farmer Hank Auza explained of the town’s current situation. “Yuma can’t support that. It will overwhelm the system here.”

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