Yuma, Arizona mayor tells 'Your World' city not equipped to handle surge of migrants

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Yuma mayor: COVID infections coming into community 'not being managed'

Republican Douglas Nicholls discusses the Biden administration's open-border policy on 'Your World'

Yuma, Arizona Mayor Douglas Nicholls told "Your World" Monday that his border city is not equipped to handle the massive influx of migrants crossing into the U.S.

"We need to make sure that the Department of Homeland Security, if they have to release, is releasing in communities that can handle that kind of load," the Republican Nicholls told host Charles Payne.

NICHOLLS: On the COVID-19 side, we don’t understand, or we don’t know, what the level of infection rate is of those coming into our community, and while we’re trying to manage regular border traffic -- which we do a lot of here, we have a very robust economy with Mexico -- but we’re trying to control that on the legal side so we limit exposure. On the illegal side, we then have this release into our community that is not really being managed. Moving forward, what we’re looking for and I believe we’ve got the ability to do [is] over the weekend, Congress passed the $400 million in the FEMA food and shelter program. I think some of those dollars will be headed here along with our boots on the ground response, potentially, from FEMA. The details are yet to come together.

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Really what needs to happen, if there’s any tent or soft-sided shelter, it needs to be on the DHS side. It’s my understanding there’s a program to get soft-sided shelter in the border patrol facility so that they can have the capacity for these surges. On the city side, what we struggle with is the ability to get people out of town. The migrants are not looking to stay in Yuma. They’re looking to go to other parts of the country. There’s just limited resources to get people where they need to go. That is really the bigger issue, making sure that there’s not a lag and people [are] getting where they’re going to go. So tents could be helpful in the interim to get people where they need to go. Long-term, we’re not looking for a tent city.