YUMA, AZ — Along the Yuma border, there's a spot where the wall abruptly ends as it meets the Cocopah Reservation. Smugglers and migrants used this gap for years to illegally cross the southern border.
On a regular day, hundreds of people would be standing at the wall waiting to be arrested by Border Patrol to try and make an asylum claim in the U.S. During the peak of the crisis, as many as 1,000 people a day were illegally crossing into the Yuma Sector.
Now, Border Patrol reported just 243 apprehensions locally for the month of February. It's a 99% decrease compared to December 2022 when nearly 31,000 people were arrested in Yuma.
“It feels like a sigh of relief at this point," Yuma Mayor Doug Nicholls said at City Hall.
Mayor Nicholls declared a local emergency due to the situation at the border in December of 2021 citing an "unprecedented surge" in crossings, and expressing concern for how it could impact the local community. The emergency is still in place but Nicholls said he is looking at removing it soon.
Ultimately one of the local agencies most impacted wasn’t in the City of Yuma, but just a bit further south in the City of Somerton.
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"The gap in the border, it happens to be in our response area," Somerton Cocopah Fire Department Chief Javier Hernandez said. “We were responding to multiple 911 calls from migrants at the border a day."
Chief Hernandez said the calls started out as legitimate emergencies, but then word spread that if you called 911, you did not have to wait for Border Patrol.
“It seemed like they were abusing the system, they were calling 911, saying they had injuries, and we can’t refuse service to anyone,” Hernandez said. “So when they called us we would have to transport them. As firefighters, we like to help people, but it was challenging.”
Those calls took their limited resources far out to the border, leaving the community vulnerable if they called 911 if their two ambulances were out transporting migrants.
“Citizens in the City of Somerton had to wait an additional 20 minutes for an ambulance from the City of Yuma or San Luis to arrive," Chief Hernandez said.
The emergency calls also were hurting the department financially, as they struggled to find ways to get reimbursed for the responses.
“Who do we send the bill to? There’s no way of us tracking the migrants, so it was services we were providing but not getting any revenue back,” Hernandez said.
Now that crossing numbers have significantly declined, Chief Hernandez says there are no longer any concerns about being able to respond quickly to local emergencies. Since the beginning of the year, he says there have been no 911 calls coming from migrants out at the border.
As for what changed, Mayor Nicholls says the current quiet at the border is a direct result of actions by the Trump Administration.
“A president who says, 'we’re closing the border - the border is not a place you can cross,' it reverberates through the whole world,” Nicholls said.
Apprehensions at the border did begin to go down when President Biden signed an executive order limiting asylum access this past June. The numbers have further decreased since President Trump took office.
Mayor Nicholls says the actions go beyond just words. Since January, he says there have been increased patrols on the Mexican side of the border by the Mexican National Guard. He also believes deportation efforts have already had an impact on people thinking of making the journey to the U.S.
“When you have migrants that come across and they pay their way and experience they what they experience and then they get returned home, other people in the country will say well my friend, he tried it and he is back, I am not going to try it,” Nicholls said. “That’s one of the best ways to deter economic migrants.”
Nicholls says the difference between economic migrants and people truly seeking asylum is one many people who don’t live along the border always recognize.
“If people truly need asylum, our country needs to be there for that,” Nicholls said.
Current U.S. immigration law does not consider economic reasons as grounds to get asylum. To get asylum, migrants must prove they face persecution in their home countries based on their race, religion, nationality, social group, or political opinion.
Still, there are concerns those migrants are not having their cases heard now that the Trump Administration has also ended CBP One asylum appointments at ports of entry.
Mayor Nicholls says he believes changes to the system will come in time.
“We have to establish border security before you can start fixing things,” he said.
Hoping that during this time when it’s quiet, the federal government will take steps to prepare itself for whatever challenges arrive next at the border.
“These things are real, that impact our community,” Nicholls said. “If we wait for them to be an issue again, we will be light years behind, no matter who is in office. So that’s what I will continue to push for.”
