'Crazy amount of people': Emergency responses at southern border
Fire Chief Abraham Garcia showed where Sunland Park Fire, the southernmost fire agency in New Mexico, received the most calls at the border.
He explained that some areas are unreachable from the dirt roadway. Those obstacles can come in many shapes and sizes, including the border itself.
"The wall in this part of the country or this part of the southwest, it's about 20 feet tall, maybe 25 feet, given the location," Garcia said. "So a migrant will get either stuck on the top and we have to rescue them from the top or they'll actually fall when they're trying to come on to the United States side."
Those rescues differ from body recoveries, where first responders are looking to locate and retrieve a body or bodies of those presumed dead.
"Last year, aside from rescues, we had quite a bit of body recoveries where we assisted other agencies with actually picking up bodies in the desert," Garcia said.
The Sunland Park Fire Department responded to a water rescue in June 2024 involving five people. One person was rescued and .
Two weeks later, from the Rio Grande in southern New Mexico. There were no reported injuries in that response, which was assisted by El Paso first responders.
"The summer of 2024, it was just crazy the amount of people that were up here, you can just see them lined up against the wall looking down," Garcia said.
Garcia said he has lived on the border his entire life, including his playing days prior to the wall being put up in his area.
Those experiences led him to lead a fire agency assisting directly in migrant responses.
"When the wall was being built and after the wall was built, there's constantly been illegal migration into the United States," Garcia said.