The border crisis is jeopardizing the nation’s food security as migrants trespass through farmland, contaminating crops, according to Arizona farmers with fields near the southern border.Â
“There’s obviously a food safety concern because our fields are monitored and audited and tested for different pathogens,” Pasquinelli Produce Company President Alex Muller told Fox News. “If there’s somebody that walks into our field and then we don’t know about why we put up flags and kind of mark it out and we don’t harvest that.”Â
In 2022, then-Gov. Doug Ducey ordered construction of a container wall to plug those holes. But the state agreed to remove the shipping containers as a result of a federal lawsuit.
“Where the gaps are opens up to more farm ground for them to walk across,” a fifth-generation farmer, Hank Auza, told Fox News. “We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars just on our farm for food safety.”
Yuma migrant crossings increased 171%Â between 2021 and 2022, according to Customs and Border Protection. About 1 million migrants have crossed Arizona’s southern border during the Biden presidency.Â
Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr went to visit the farmers.
I met with local farmers Cory Mellon, Alex Mueller, Hank Auza, and Robert Barkley in Yuma, Arizona. Yuma County provides 90% of the green leafy vegetables, like iceberg lettuce, arugula, spinach, and broccoli, to American tables between November and April. The tsunami of migrants… pic.twitter.com/OKUsEw9I0C
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) June 7, 2023