BISBEE, Ariz.—Around the middle of September, residents say U.S. Border Patrol vehicles started showing up without warning at the Safeway plaza in Bisbee, Arizona, about five miles from the boundary with Mexico.
Locals then watched as Border Patrol agents dropped off illegal immigrants—men, women, and children. This happened mostly during the daylight hours, but even at 3 a.m. as the city slept.
Many of the arrivals had barely enough food, water, and clothing with them. Still, in the eyes of the Biden administration, they were in the country legally.
Some needed rides to destination cities like New York and Chicago where officials say they’re overwhelmed by bus arrivals carrying illegal immigrants. Though most in Bisbee would find themselves stranded in a strange town and left to shift for themselves.
Border Patrol had taken the migrants into custody once they reached the border, processed them, given them court dates, and granted legal entry after requesting asylum, bypassing the normal visa process.
“These weren’t desperados one hears about on the news,” observed Bisbee City Manager Stephen Pauken during a recent interview with The Epoch Times.
“These were young mothers and children. We had several kids on Sunday a week ago younger than 4. Their mothers looked to be in their 20s. They were all basically young families. Most of them were migrating from Mexico.”
Mr. Pauken said he dislikes the term “dumping” of illegal migrants because “these are human beings.”
“Mostly, they’re just people crossing, looking for a better life.”
The drop-offs have occurred almost daily along the southern border in Arizona, ramping up around mid-September due to an apparent change in transportation schedule policy for illegal migrants in Washington.
Suddenly, Arizona border communities with busy ports of entry in Bisbee (pop. 4,911), Naco (pop. 1156), Douglas (pop. 16,513), and Nogales (pop. 20,837) found themselves inundated with new arrivals with little or no advance notice.
According to one Arizona law enforcement officer, Nogales continues to receive as many as 200 and sometimes 300 drop-offs daily.
Federal government officials euphemistically call them “safe street releases.”
“We just call them street releases,” Mr. Pauken said, “because we can’t ensure anybody’s safety.”
“The reality is they’ve been going on for a while”—at least since April with the end of public health order Title 42, federal restrictions placed on legal immigration during the pandemic.
Mr. Pauken said the federal government recently directed the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector to begin intercepting, processing, and releasing migrants at safe locations to help deal with an influx of border crossings.
He said the Safeway plaza was the closest safe space for the Brian A. Terry Border Patrol Station in Bisbee.
At first, he said Border Patrol was dropping off migrants at the south end of the parking lot away from public scrutiny.
Then, agents realized that a school bus arrived daily to pick up students and moved the drop-off location to the northern end of the parking lot in full view of the storefront.
Mr. Pauken said Border Patrol dropped off at least two buses loaded with 62 migrants that caught the town off guard in mid-September.
City officials moved quickly to set up temporary housing, food, rides, and a more permanent shelter for up to 35 people.
Volunteers and charitable agencies also helped with supplies, money, and transportation.
“So, [Washington policy] short-circuits the process when Border Patrol receives directives from their superiors that when they reach a certain level, they just load them up in Border Patrol vehicles and drop them off in a parking lot,” Mr. Pauken said.
“They could hold those folks for a little longer, and the bus would show up.”
Illegal immigration along the nation’s southern border with Mexico has surged in recent weeks under the Biden administration’s open borders policy.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported 232,972 migrant encounters for August—up nearly 27 percent from July’s total, including unaccompanied children.
Approximately 50,000 encounters in August were in the active Tucson sector, which includes most of the 372-mile-long southern Arizona border.
The agency conducted 3,212 rescues, bringing the year’s total to 29,365.
“They were dropping them in Cochise [County] for a while. In Pinal [County], they were dropping them in Casa Grande,” said Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb in a telephone interview with The Epoch Times.
“I made an issue of it. Sheriff [Mark] Dannels [in Cochise County] made an issue of it. Many of them are just getting pushed out of Nogales because no one else is making an issue of it.”
“This is the [Biden] administration dumping them,” he said.
In an unexpected turn of events, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Oct. 5 issued a notice of determination waiving federal laws to “ensure the expeditious construction of barriers and roads in the vicinity of the international land border in Starr County, Texas.”
“The United States Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector is an area of ‘high illegal entry,” Mr. Mayorkas wrote, citing more than 245,000 illegal entry attempts in fiscal year 2023.
“Therefore, I must use my authority ... to install additional physical barriers and roads in the Rio Grande Valley Sector. Therefore, DHS will take immediate action to construct barriers and roads.”
Critics argue that the move isn’t enough and comes after the Biden administration had already begun dismantling sections of the southern border wall constructed by the administration of Donald Trump. The parts were then sold on a government surplus website.
To illustrate the magnitude of the drop-offs in southern Arizona, Mr. Lamb read off the daily tally beginning in mid-September, with 275 occurring in one day, 180 another—114, 71, 157, 118, 196, 123, 172, 48—with the majority of these in Nogales.”
“It’s every day,” he said. “Sometimes, there are multiple releases in a day.”
“The reason we in Arizona aren’t necessarily feeling the pinch as much—yes, they’re getting placed in our communities—but immediately, they’re making their way to other parts of the country.”
He says the more border crossings that occur, the less vetting that takes place by law enforcement.
“The responsibility lies on the shoulders of Joe Biden and this administration, and Alejandro Mayorkas—turning a blind eye to the situation,” Mr. Lamb said.
“Instead of this administration sending them back, like they should, they’re releasing them into our communities.”
CBP has yet to respond to emails from The Epoch Times requesting comment for this story.
So Close and Yet So Far
On Sept. 26, the border crisis seemed a world away in historic downtown Bisbee, a former copper mining city and tourist attraction known for its liberal enclave of Bohemians and artists.As dusk arrived over the Mule Mountains, the tourist tempo simmered to a low boil as the retail shops on Main Street shut for the night.
Strings of red, green, and blue decorative lamps flickered on as if by magic, dazzling the narrow, emptying street with cheery calm.
The small nighttime crowd arrived slowly, drawn like moths to neon lights, electric guitars, and voices jamming at a nearby hotel restaurant offering live entertainment.
Elle Peltola, who runs a clothing and upholstery business about 150 yards away from the border fence in Naco, told The Epoch Times she sees nothing humane about safe drop-offs.
“I don’t think there’s a change in the numbers coming over. That’s been pretty steady over the past couple of years,” Ms. Peltola said.
But, “there are new policies in place—dropping them at 3:30 in the morning in our Safeway parking lot in large numbers.”
“It doesn’t seem to be very humane. The political side is not something I’m willing to get into,” Ms. Peltola said. “But from a humanitarian standpoint, I want to see people treated more kindly.
“As a country, we could be doing a lot better. It’s a very difficult thing to see—a mother with children in front of Safeway at three in the morning with nothing.”
Kathy, a downtown shop owner who asked not to use her last name, said she was happy the city stepped up with a solution to aid the drop-offs.
That way, “they didn’t have to sit out in the parking lot and get screamed at by a bunch of maniacs.”
“We’ve got to start treating human beings like human beings and stop calling them things like ‘illegal.’ They’re not illegal. They’re here legally,” says Kathy, who votes Democrat and acknowledges two local factions, one for, the other against current border policy.
“One thinks we should treat them like humans; the other is to chase them like animals. Like Jews during the Holocaust, they’re loading them on buses, dumping them off in parking lots, and letting the locals verbally assault them.”
“People are mean,” Kathy said.
Pinal County Sheriff Lamb, however, views lenient border policy as a failure of leadership and political will in Washington that ignores a very real national threat.
“This is not Border Patrol’s fault. It doesn’t have anything to do with the agents,” he said. “This administration is sending people back into our communities.”
“There is nothing humanitarian about throwing people onto the streets of America with no food, no water, no shelter.
“There’s nothing humanitarian about eight out of 10 women raped as they’re coming across [the border].
“There’s nothing humanitarian about 130,000 unaccompanied minors.
“There’s nothing humanitarian about American lives lost to fentanyl [crossing the border] to the tune of over 100,000 a year.
“Just letting 15,000 criminals back into our communities is barbaric. I mean, tell me, what is humanitarian about that? These folks won’t get it until they have a trigger event.”
Mr. Pauken said the drop-offs have become fewer in Bisbee lately.
He agrees that the situation is not the fault of Border Patrol, but a systemic problem with political roots in Washington.
“We deal with it. But we also make our voices heard to the extent that we can,” he said.
“If I get one busload, I can accommodate them. After that, I’m out of space.”
