A small-town fire department is increasingly responding to calls to rescue migrants who have been abandoned or injured while crossing remote spots on the border in southeastern New Mexico and is only anticipating more calls as triple-digit temperatures set in for the summer.
Sunland Park, New Mexico, is a suburb right outside El Paso, Texas, with a population of roughly 20,000 people. Its fire department comprises two stations. While federal agents from the Border Patrol are responsible for encountering people who have illegally crossed from Mexico into the United States, it is the local fire department that gets called in to render medical aid to migrants. Lately, the calls have been every day, sometimes multiple times a day, as migrants get stranded or abandoned in the mountains or trapped while trying to climb over the border fence.
“The call volume is going up,” Sunland Park Fire Department Chief Daniel Medrano told the Washington Examiner. “We’ve received more and more and more than what we have seen in the past.”
Border Patrol agents who work in New Mexico and West Texas have encountered 113,000 people in fiscal year 2021 compared to 30,000 at the same point last year, according to federal data. Sunland Park is at the center of the region and a popular spot for apprehensions, but it is more difficult to get through because of the 30-foot-tall border wall that went up in the area during the Trump administration.
Sunland Park has an elevation of 3,700 feet, and its Mount Cristo Rey is just shy of a mile above sea level, where it is harder for hikers to breathe than at ground level. The heat is dry compared to Central America, where most migrants travel from. The migrants Medrano’s staff see are poorly nourished, dehydrated, and, in some cases, have been walking 20 to 35 days, he said. When smugglers lead them through the mountains to get around the border wall, many cannot make the journey and are left behind. Desperate, they may call 911 or be spotted by agents patrolling on the ground or in the sky. That is when the fire department may be called in.
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“We’re having to drive our fire trucks as close to the scene as possible,” Medrano said. “It’s so rugged, and during this time of the year, it’s just super hot right now. I think we were 110 [degrees] or something yesterday, and it wears on my firemen. So we want to try to carry as much equipment as possible and then try to carry a body back out to a waiting ambulance, sometimes half a mile, a mile in the distance, is very taxing on my firemen.”
The fire department opted to transform its Polaris Ranger utility vehicle to carry a patient transport skid so firefighters do not have to carry people through the rocky terrain back to their truck. A military-style Humvee that the department uses to access brush fires is also being repurposed so that the vehicle can serve as a larger transport vehicle since ambulances cannot access these areas. The department is using existing funds to cover the costs.
“To ask for funding, grants, or what have you — it takes too long. And I need to address this issue yesterday,” Medrano said. “So I’m using my own funding.”
191771039_3961620717247558_3978490170154960616_n.jpgLast week, his team was called to the top of nearby Mount Cristo Rey, which sits between Sunland Park and El Paso on the border. This part of the region has gaps in the border wall that smugglers see as a vulnerable place where they can push people through. The body of a 35-year-old woman abandoned on the mountain was discovered by Border Patrol agents, and the fire department responded. Within 24 hours of that discovery, another deceased migrant was found in a desert area of Sunland Park, close to the Riverside Elementary School.
Medrano’s team is increasingly getting called to the border wall to help people who have gotten stuck atop it, fallen off it, or even are pinned.
“Most of the calls we’re getting are for falls from the wall,” Medrano said. “In our response area, the wall will be anywhere from about 12-14 feet tall to anywhere as high as about 30 feet tall. So what will happen is a migrant will get to the top of the wall, not have a way down or lose a grip as they’re trying to shimmy down, and falling from that kind of height will cause pretty severe injuries.”
On June 12, his team was called to respond to a woman stuck in the fence posts. In another incident, a man who climbed the fence fell off, resulting in a Level 1 trauma. He was flown to a hospital from the scene. A woman who fell while attempting to climb over the fence days earlier was also flown to the hospital after sustaining serious injuries. One of the fence climbers later died.
Over the past two weeks, Medrano’s team has begun seeing heat-related injuries, adding to the regular injuries sustained by people crossing rocky mountains. In the past week, his team responded to six heat-related incidents, including one that resulted in death.
Medrano does not know why more people are coming across lately or why, of those, more are in need of emergency assistance. The city relies on mutual aid agreements with outlying volunteer departments in the county if other calls come in while its staff is occupied. Despite the influx in border-related emergencies, the chief said his staff will continue to respond to them on top of calls from within the community.
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“When we get a call for service, we don’t ask for immigration papers. We don’t ask for nationality. We don’t ask what your favorite football team is,” he said. “We treat each patient equally as we would anybody else.”
