On Wednesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” Monroe County, FL Sheriff Rick Ramsay (R) said that dealing with migrants in the county is hurting his agency’s ability to protect its citizens and that the federal government failed to come up with the plan despite being warned that a problem was coming.
Ramsay stated that dealing with the surge is “very manpower intensive. I’m having to pull resources all day long to respond to landings where we’re diverting police, fire, rescue and we’re dealing with just a mass migration for us, for a rural county, we consider a mass migration. And we are worried about the humanitarian crisis about this going on. Border Patrol is overwhelmed at our level that we’re having groups of migrants having to sit on the side of the road for long periods of time waiting to be picked up, processed, or taken care of. We actually had the other day, we called for a pickup for a group of migrants, they were so busy they told us they may not be able to arrive until the following day. So, we’re like, what are we supposed to do, leave a group of women and children and kids on the side of the road for a day, day and a half? No bathrooms, no food, no shelter. So, it’s a little concerning. I’m overall worried about the public safety of my citizens in Monroe. This does affect my ability to do my job to protect, serve, patrol, and take care of my citizens.”
He added, “We just want the government to have an actual working plan that works for this geographic area. Every area’s different. But this is nothing that wasn’t foreseeable. We’ve spoken to the government in the past, we said, this is increasing. This is going to be a problem, you need to work on an action plan now so we can mitigate this when it does occur. Now, it’s occurring to what we thought, and there’s not much of a plan.”
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