Last week four people have sunk when crossing the Rio Grande intending to reach Texas. Usually, the stream near El Paso is not so fast, but due to the heavy rains and stream, people were caught by the stream, though the idea itself have been already risky.
The first victim found was a woman at the age of 37, who passed shortly in the hospital.
Later, few more victims were found: two teenagers, a boy and a girl around 15 years old, and an adult woman. El Paso Fire Department were lucky to save the life of seven more people. Still, some people were not found yet.
This is how migrants are trying to enter the U.S. illegally, though Rio Grande is too deep to walk across from Mexico to Texas. El Paso is usually considered like an easy to cross part, but it is not, because people can get suddenly overwhelmed by the fast-streaming current.
“It doesn’t matter which avenue smugglers are trying to use — crossing the desert or the canals or checkpoints; the danger is still there,” Jose Romero, a spokesman for Customs and Border Protection’s office in El Paso, said “Our concern is about the danger for migrants.”
“People don’t understand that the way the water works in that it pushes you and sucks you,” Mr. Briano said in an interview. “It is going to be an extremely dangerous attempt for someone trying to walk or swim across.”
Mr. Briano says, that the El Paso Fire Department is regularly called twice per month to retrieve a body out of river. “When I got paged to the second incident, I called dispatch to confirm if this was a mistake,” he said. This year, 2017, 10 bodies were retrieved out of the Rio Grande near El Paso by the Fire Department.
