SAN DIEGO (Border Report) — When a storm hit the San Diego-Tijuana region last week, Nina Douglass found herself trying to help migrants outrun the rising waters between two border barriers in San Ysidro.
Douglass, who volunteers her time handing out bottles of water and food to the migrants, said the water came fast and rose quickly from a culvert that drains water from the south side of the border barrier to the north.
“The rain was heavy and heavier, people were soaked and shaking and anxious,” Douglass said.
Douglass said she took out her cellphone to record the raging waters as the rain kept coming, and that’s when she spotted a man carrying his daughter through the rain.
She can be heard on the video encouraging the man to keep going: “Hurry, hurry you’re almost there.”
“I went to the people sitting there, the migrants, and kept telling them to get up the hill to higher ground.”
Douglass admitted this was harder than it sounds considering most of the migrants don’t understand any English.
“It was very frightening and even though the group was very small — 20 or so — I was frantically looking for flotation devices to try to put through the wall because I was terrified I could miss somebody,” she said.
Douglass is now worried about Thursday as a new storm is set to arrive in the region.
The forecast calls for heavy downpours and several inches of water into Friday.
As more and more migrants arrive in the area, Douglass hopes to avoid major problems and possible loss of life.
“Yesterday morning I arrived here at 7 a.m. and there were 175 people, and they were very anxious for food and for basic things, but it was dry,” she said. “If that group yesterday, one week later, had been the group that was here last Monday, I’m sure we would’ve had people in the water and without a way including Border Patrol to reach them.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection says that during the first two weeks of January, migrant encounters fell 50% from December when illegal border crossings from Mexico reached an all-time high. In the San Diego Sector, border agents encountered 34,272 migrants crossing illegally between ports of entry in December, coming third behind the Tucson and Del Rio sectors.
CBP says the drop in arrests this month is “consistent with historical trends and enhanced enforcement, adding that a crackdown by Mexican authorities contributed to the January decline.