El Paso residents overwhelmed by migrant surge

(NewsNation) — There has been an overwhelming influx of migrants crossing over the border into El Paso, and just over 5,700 migrants remain in Border Patrol custody Wednesday morning, according to the city of El Paso’s dashboard.

However, El Paso residents told NewsNation’s Ali Bradley that they aren’t too worried about self-surrendering migrants, but rather they are losing sleep over the migrants who try to evade the law.

The U.S. Border Patrol’s acting El Paso Sector Chief Peter Jaquez said there has been on average about 2,400 daily migrant encounters involving people crossing into the area over the past weekend.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas visited El Paso Tuesday to assess the situation.

During his visit, Mayorkas said the administration is talking with the Mexican government, but declined to go into detail, the El Paso Times reported.

El Paso residents living in the area told NewsNation that they’re overwhelmed as some migrants are coming onto their properties.

“This has never happened before. Never. I feel very unsafe and not secure at all here,” El Paso resident Carmen Wilburn told NewsNation.

Wilburn cares for her 86-year-old father out of their El Paso home. She said she sees undocumented migrants jumping the fence and running through her and her neighbors’ yards often.

“They can hide in the bushes, by the bushes on the side of our house and so I don’t even want my granddaughter to stay here, it’s scary,” Wilburn said.

Josie Martinez, another El Paso resident who lives down the street, said two men who were running through the neighborhood stopped and pleaded with her for a ride.

“They came and they passed, they stopped me, I was getting in my car and they asked me if I could please give them a ride to a motel or somewhere and I told them I’m sorry I can’t,” Martinez said.

There are hundreds of migrants camping in the streets of El Paso after being released from Border Patrol. These migrants are not trying to evade, but rather they are trying to continue their journey.

Akalena Salyah, a migrant from Nicaragua, said she is trying to get to Wisconsin to be with her daughter.

“We don’t have a house in Nicaragua. We lost our house. So my daughter came to this country looking for work and to buy a house,” Salyah said.

While there hasn’t been an uptick in crime in El Paso, there was a robbery targeting four migrants at a bus station on Sunday, NewsNation affiliate KTSM reported.

DHS sources confirmed more than 73,000 migrants successfully evaded law enforcement along the border last month, Bradley reported.

And as migrants continue to cross into the El Paso Sector from Juarez, Border Patrol sources told Bradley contingency plans are in finally in place to start processing migrants at ports of entry when Title 42 ends December 21.