As we’ve tried to keep up with all of the ups and downs (well… mostly downs) of the Biden border crisis, the lion’s share of the attention has been paid to Texas. That’s for good reason because it’s a huge border with many places to potentially cross and illegal migrants know this very well, as Karen has reported many times. Del Rio has been a particularly troubling spot, but large sections of the Rio Grande have sparse coverage and the nearly unprecedented flow of illegal migrants continues.

But Texas isn’t the only state facing a crisis over this problem. Further to the west, Arizona is dealing with the same sort of problems without receiving nearly as much media attention or federal assistance. Governor Doug Ducey made that point during an interview with the Washington Examiner this weekend. He’s dealing with particularly alarming challenges in the Yuma region, where the Governor describes the situation as being “just as out of control” as the crisis currently unfolding in the Lone Star State. The Yuma sector is currently seeing an average of 1,000 illegal migrant encounters with border enforcement officials every day, and their resources are being just as overwhelmed as those of Del Rio last month.

Texas has been the center of the border crisis, but Arizona is also in peril and bearing the brunt of Mexican cartels’ smuggling of people into the United States at record-high levels, its governor said.

“What’s already happening in Yuma is reflective of what’s happening on the Texas border,” Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey said in an interview with the Washington Examiner in Mission, Texas. “Arizona is a border state. We faced this before, but we’ve never faced a crisis this large in 21 years.”

Ducey said the state’s border is “just as out of control” as that of Texas. Border Patrol agents in western Arizona’s Yuma region have encountered 1,038% more suspected illegal immigrants year-over-year.

Yuma is not a big city by any stretch of the imagination. the population of (legal) residents is a bit over 90,000. They’ve seen 91,841 people illegally cross the border between October of last year and August of this year. Stop and think about that for a moment. This locale has faced an incursion of illegal migrants that adds up to the entire population of the city in less than a year. You don’t need to be a math major to figure out what sort of pressure that puts on their resources.

Of all the migrants crossing in 2020, barely 8,000 wound up being apprehended and processed. And those numbers do not take into account the number of illegal aliens who evaded capture or were never spotted in the first place. Ducey reports that the available agents spend so much time processing the illegal aliens they do manage to catch that they have little time to keep up with the rest of the flow or attend to their other responsibilities.

Ducey wanted to be clear that it’s not just the Yuma region near the California border having trouble. The eastern half of the state, primarily under the jurisdiction of the Tuscon offices, is similarly beleaguered. That stretch of the border has registered an increase in illegal crossings from 57,703 in 2020 to 173,476 so far this year. That’s more than triple the number more in a single season with no corresponding increase in border enforcement personnel and resources to deal with the surge.

On top of all of this, Ducey is concerned about the more than 60,000 Haitian migrants that we know are currently heading for the American border. With word getting out among immigration activists that Arizona might be an easy place to cross now that Texas is cracking down, his problems may only grow worse before the end of the year. Ducey has already mobilized the National Guard to support local law enforcement along the border as they struggle to assist the CBP. The state legislature has approved $55 million in new appropriations for the effort. But there’s only so much they can do, and a lot more help is needed.

Joe Biden and his “border czar” Kamala Harris have continued to mostly ignore this crisis, preferring to stay in Washington and dance around the flailing efforts to pass their massive spending packages. And sadly, much of the media have adopted this “turn the page” strategy, so the Biden border crisis gets only pitiful amounts of coverage when you hear of it at all. But the dam is nearing the breaking point and something will have to be done sooner rather than later. Polling this week showed that only 23% of Americans approve of Biden’s handling of the border crisis, while more than two-thirds disapprove. If he doesn’t do something about this soon, the voters may have to remove the option from his hands.