Video shows migrant families using ladder to scale Arizona border fence
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A video released by Customs and Border Protection shows a group of migrants scaling the border fence near Yuma with the help of smugglers using a ladder.
Border Patrol
TUCSON — Another group of mostly Guatemalan asylum seekers breached the U.S.-Mexico border south of Yuma on Monday night, this time with the help of a smuggler using a ladder to scale the border fence and get the migrants to the U.S. side.Â
Customs and Border Protection on Wednesday released security-camera footage of the incident on Wednesday involving 118 migrants. About 86 percent of them were families traveling together, the agency said.
The video shows several migrants dropping to the ground, after scaling the 18-foot-tall, bollard-style fence, in an area about three miles east of the San Luis commercial border crossing.Â
As the group drops one by one to the ground, they huddle into a group, as a Border Patrol agent watches on from inside his vehicle.Â
At the end of the 55-second clip, after the last migrant is on the ground on the U.S. side, the camera zooms in to a figure running away from the border fence on the Mexican side. The figure has what appears to be a ladder on his back.Â
“It shows how brazen these smugglers are and the fact that they’re unafraid,” said Jose Garibay, the Border Patrol’s Yuma Sector spokesman.
“They know that we’re not gonna go into Mexico to apprehend them,” Garibay said. “So once he puts up that ladder, gets his commodity — in which he looks at these humans — in the United States, then he takes down his ladder, and as you saw in the video, just walks back to wherever he hid the ladder and continues on with his day.
“It’s presumable that this individual has done it more than once.”
CBP said Border Patrol agents responded immediately to the breach. Once across the border, migrants turned themselves in for processing.
Monday’s breach happened about a mile from where 376 asylum seekers dug holes to tunnel under the bollard fence last week. That group was the single, largest group that agents had encountered in the area, according to CBP.
On Wednesday, Sen. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., visited the area where the migrants burrowed under the fence during her first visit to the Yuma area as an appointed member of the U.S. Senate.
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