The record number of migrants flowing into the Florida Keys in recent days have been overwhelming authorities and straining resources, the local sheriff said Wednesday.
"I'm sympathetic for the migrants trying to come over, I want them to have a good life. But we have to have a plan, we have to have secure borders," Monroe County Sheriff Rick Ramsay said Wednesday. "I'm experiencing about 10 migrant loads come in a day in my small county which for me, resource-wise, is very challenging."
Ramsay made his remarks at an appearance with Sen. Rick Scott in Doral. The sheriff said he almost didn't make it to the event.
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"I left my house at 4:45 to come up here. Between 4:45 and 5:55 I had three landings. I actually did a traffic stop on the way up on a car, 114 mph, crazy. I get out of the car, I'm in the middle of nowhere by myself, intoxicated driver, I call for a zone car to back me up, I couldn't even get a backup because all my zone cars were tied up on three other migrant landings," Ramsay said. So I was almost late coming up here. But then, while I'm actually out with this person on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, 150 yards away, no kidding, a migrant landing just occurred, 20-something migrants come out behind someone's house to the highway."
U.S. Border Patrol and Coast Guard crews patrolling South Florida and the Keys have been experiencing the largest escalation of migrations by boat in nearly a decade, with hundreds of interceptions in recent months, mostly of people from Cuba and Haiti.
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Border Patrol officials said they've seen a more than 400% increase in migrant encounters since the beginning of October in their Miami sector.
Ramsay said his deputies had called Border Patrol to respond to a landing the other day but were told they were so busy they might not be able to arrive until the next day.
"We're like, what am I supposed to do, keep 35, 40 migrants who've been at sea for days sitting on the side of the road, no shelter, no bathrooms, no food no water?" Ramsay said, adding that there's only so much the Border Patrol and U.S. Coast Guard can do. "They're doing the best they can but they are so overwhelmed."
Separately, 160 migrants arrived by boats in other parts of the Florida Keys over New Year’s weekend, and on Monday, around 30 people in two new groups of migrants were found in the Middle Keys.
On Tuesday, more than 130 Haitian migrants arrived in Key Largo on an overloaded sailing vessel that became grounded just offshore.
Over the weekend, 300 migrants arrived at the sparsely populated Dry Tortugas National Park, about 70 miles west of Key West. The park was closed so that law enforcement and medical personnel could evaluate the group before moving them to Key West.
The migrants were removed from the island Wednesday and were to be transferred to Key West Thursday, officials reported.
And on Monday, two separate cruise ships rescued migrants who were found drifting on makeshift boats in waters between Cuba and South Florida.
Ramsay and Scott blamed the lack of a plan from the federal government to deal with immigration.
"I've been to the border quite a bit, it's not that hard to figure out what you have to do. What you have to do is you have to enforce our asylum laws, you have to say and actually have a secure border, you have to make sure to fund our border patrol," Scott said. "The Biden administration has made the decision to have these open borders and it's killing Americans, it's dangerous for Americans."
