9,100 migrants a day flood across the border in Arizona: source

The border crisis keeps getting more shocking, with 9,100 migrants encountered in a single day this week according to Border Patrol sources — close to the record setting 10,000-a-day figures experienced in May when Title 42 ended.

Huge floodgates which had been welded open in the Arizona allowing for migrants to simply walk into the country are now closed, but the area is still being overwhelmed with asylum seekers crossing into the US.

In a 24-hour period, 7,400 immigrants who crossed from Mexico into southern Arizona illegally surrendered to Border Patrol agents and were taken into custody.

Another 1,700 migrants turned up at ports of entry seeking asylum the same day, overwhelming the available resources and leading Border Patrol agents to have to release immigrants into the streets of Arizona towns, federal law enforcement sources said.

“A lot of these issues happen because the cartels, they’re the ones who control the border,” Art Del Cueto from the National Border Patrol Council, the union that represents Border Patrol, agents told The Post Thursday.

“They’re the ones who determine where people cross, who can cross, everything.”

Del Cueto explained how other parts of the US-Mexico border have added more resources — such as Texas which has deployed its National Guard, razor wire and a floating border barrier in the Rio Grande internatinal boundary — smugglers have simply moved migrants looking to enter the country to remote stretches of Arizona.

“The cartels are not dumb — they know where the exposure is, they know where people are focused on,” he added. “A lot of traffic has moved over to Tucson sector.”

To make matters worse, Del Cueto said flooding the border with asylum seekers is largely a smokescreen fo their drug smuggling operations.

“The drug smugglers are the ones in charge of smuggling these people in. This, to them, is just moonlighting. Their main job is to bring drugs into the United States.

“They know that by using people … they distract more agents and it opens up the border to where they can continuously bring more drugs.

“That’s something affecting the entire United States where you’re seeing fentanyl, heroin and methamphetamines continuously pour into the country.”

Since July, the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector has been ground zero across the country for migrant apprehensions, eclipsing other hot spots — like El Paso and Del Rio in Texas — which had previously been the busiest over the last two years.

Spanning all of southern Arizona, except for Yuma, the Tucson sector is desolate, dotted with small towns like Nogales and Lukeville. The closest city is Tucson — some two hours away from the international boundary.

In addition, the Tohono O’odham Nation Reservation on the border makes the region difficult to surveil since there is no federal border wall at the reservation to stop migrants and smugglers — just some barbed wire, Del Cueto described.

“You’ve got to realize, when you catch a group on the reservation, you’re looking at a two hours to take migrants to an area to get processed. Here, it’s pretty much four-wheel drive. You can’t get a bus down there to get all the migrants to processing center,” he stated.

“They’re not prepared like they’re prepared in other areas; they’re a lot smaller. That’s where we’re getting a lot of the issues where the agency is having to release migrants to the streets.”

Once migrants are caught, as they are on US soil they have to be processed and can then be allowed to pursue asylum claims and stay in the country, or they are deported.

Processing centers — where migrants are taken for a background check, medical screening and so their illegal entry into the country can be recorded — in Southern Arizona are so overwhelmed, the agency has run out of rooms at detention center.

In the last few days, they started releasing people into the streets with at least 5,000 migrants set free in towns like Casa Grande and Nogales.

Del Cueto shared photos of groups of single men with so-called “notices to appear” loitering in public spaces. The paperwork gives migrants a court date in front of an immigration judge who can determine if they even have a legal basis to stay in the country. However, the court date is often years down the road as immigration courts are notoriously backlogged.