Earlier this month there was national news coverage of the announcement by federal authorities that Gila Bend residents -all 2,000 or so- should prepare for the U.S. Border Patrol and other agencies to “drop off” groups of border crossers in the rural community along Interstate 8 between Ely and Yuma.
Gila Bend Mayor Chris Riggs expressed several concerns with that plan, noting his town receives only part-time law enforcement coverage from the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office. There is also no hospital, and the only health clinic (all two rooms of it, Riggs said) is open only a few hours a week, he said.
Like Gila Bend, Willcox is located nearly one hour north of the U.S. / Mexico border. But a similar warning by a USBP official that a few dozen border crossers a day could end up dropped off in Willcox along Interstate 10 in northern Cochise County has not attracted similar attention.
USBP Agent in Charge Alex Blais recently spent nearly two hours explaining the why and the how of the situation to city officials and residents during a council meeting. Blais oversees the USBP Willcox Station, one of nine stations within the Tucson Sector which covers all of Cochise County and Tucson, as well as the Nogales area up to Casa Grande.
If the stations closer to the border get overwhelmed, then federal authorities plan to transport the immigrants to the USBP station in Willcox. From there, the border crossers would be taken as close as possible to a Greyhound bus depot to go wherever they can to await their asylum court hearing.
In Willcox, that means leaving people who may not even speak English with a bus ticket in a small area of the city with four fast food restaurants and two gas stations.
“I don’t have soup kitchens,” Mayor Mike Laws said of the feds’ plans. “I don’t have a facility to even put someone in, to put beds in.”
Willcox does have some facilities that Gila Bend does not – such as a Cochise County Sheriff’s Office jail annex and a hospital. But an administrator from Northern Cochise Community Hospital expressed concern about the economic impact of an influx, noting that medical staff are required under federal law to provide emergency treatment to anyone in need.
“The hospital is in a very precarious financial situation and it is certainly a concern if we see patients that we expend our resources on without payment,” said Carol Holden, NCCH’s chief financial officer.
City officials are planning to reach out to federal officials to discuss options for reimbursement of any medical expenses provided for immigrants.
A common concern raised by Willcox residents was the issue of COVID-19. Cochise County has taken longer than many part of the state to see its positive test rates and deaths to slow down.
Blais said USBP does not have the financial nor logistical resources to conduct COVID-19 testing. Instead, he said, all border crossers will be screened for COVID-19 symptoms, although what would happen next is not yet clear.
As recently as Tuesday, the Biden White House continued calling the situation along the nearly 2,000-mile long southwest border “a challenge” which Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas says is being managed.
“I think there is a challenge at the border that we are managing, and we have our resources dedicated to managing it,” Mayorkas said. “We are operating under a broken immigration system, and we need to fix it.”