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The fire department in Eagle Pass, Texas, has been burning an eye-popping $21,000 a day — more than $2.2 million since mid-September — as it deals with emergencies stemming from the influx of migrants crossing the southern border, according to an official in the beleaguered border city.
Almost every hour, first responders from the town’s fire department are being dispatched to the Rio Grande or US Customs and Border Protection holding facilities to address migrant-related emergencies, according to Eagle Pass Fire Chief Manuel Mello.
“There’s not a day where we don’t go to the river’s edge to transport patients, and the city swallows the cost,” Mello told Fox News.
Since mid-September, the Eagle Pass Fire Department has been averaging roughly 45 emergency medical service calls a day — usually 30 of them migrant-related — with each call running the department $700, according to the fire chief.
“We have all kinds of calls from minor cuts and bruises to hypothermia to heart attacks to broken bones to even childbirth,” he told the outlet. “So we’re transporting all kinds of patients, and they’re all migrants.”
Eagle Pass’s fire department budget was just under $6.3 million in fiscal year 2023, which ended Sept. 30, city records show.
Republican US Rep. Tony Gonzalez, whose district covers Eagle Pass — which is less than a mile from the Mexican border — previously said the federal government has yet to reimburse the town for the staggering costs linked to the migrant crisis.
“The City of Eagle Pass has received zero federal dollars in reimbursement,” Gonzalez told San Antonio-based station KENS5.
The United States’ southern border has been besieged by migrants, with CBP agents encountering a record-breaking 276,000 individuals attempting to illegally cross over from Mexico in December, according to preliminary data obtained by Fox News — which didn’t even include the final three days of the month.
Earlier this month, more than 12,000 migrants crossed the border in a single day, with illegal crossings exceeding 10,000 on several days.
December’s migrant crush got so out of hand that CBP ordered international railroad crossings from Eagle Pass and El Paso with Mexico to close temporarily “in order to redirect personnel to assist the U.S. Border Patrol with taking migrants into custody,” the agency said.
Earlier this week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to address the ongoing torrent of migrants at the border.
Neither side announced any specific solution to the issue, but claimed they were committed to addressing the influx.
“As we made clear in Mexico City today, we are committed to partnering with Mexico to address our shared challenges, including managing unprecedented irregular migration in the region, reopening key ports of entry, and combating illicit fentanyl and other synthetic drugs,” Blinken said after the meeting.
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