Thousands Cross US Border Into Texas Following Fire at Nearby Migrant Camp

Authorities in Brownsville, Texas, processed at least 2,000 undocumented immigrants who crossed into the US starting on Monday evening, April 24, local police said.

The immigrants were primarily from Venezuela, and included families with small children, the Brownsville Police Department said. Their crossing came days after a fire was set at a makeshift camp across the border in Matamoros. Credit: Brownsville PD via Storyful

Video transcript

- Hello. This is investigator [INAUDIBLE] with Brownsville Police Department Public Information Officer. I'm here reporting by the river levee over by the old golf course where border patrol and Brownsville PD are going through at least for right now the count is 2,000 undocumented immigrants that actually crossed the river levee. As of 6:30 they have been starting to cross. As you can see behind me, there is a couple of people there and the line keeps stretching on for quite a while.

But like I said, there's been approximately 2,000 as the count of 8:00 PM today. The count keeps going up and the people still keep coming. Now, we're going to see a small picture here momentarily of all the people that have been crossing. And there's nothing but a bunch of families, children, women, men. About 70% of them are from Venezuela. The other percentage comes from different nationalities.

This is just the back end. Several of them have already been shipped out in buses. So you can see there's a makeshift checking center that they had to do for all these people that were crossing. We can see there is a long line stemming all the way as far as I could see.

Now, the last count was 2,000 and that was at 8:00 PM. Right now they're still assessing more people, but are we trying to see where is it that they're going to be housed. Border patrol is putting them on a bus and sending them to the processing center as soon as they're done here. I will keep you up to date further on.

OK. We're back here again. It's almost 11 o'clock. As you can see, it's been dying down. There's not that many people left. They've been at-- border patrol has been at since like about 6:30 this afternoon. And we've been getting a slow stream of undocumented immigrants coming in.

As you can see, they have them in groups and then they're going to ship them out in buses. Here's some other stragglers that just came in. That is where they're processing them, separating all of them. And then from that point they're taking them on the buses that are right over there. They're going to be taking them to several different stations in the Rio Grande Valley to finish the processing system.

Like I said, there's approximately since of 8 o'clock tonight there was about 2,000 undocumented immigrants that crossed. And as we see it has actually died down, but there's still a little bit more coming in and out. There coming in from the river levee, not down from here. You can see there's a lot of families, men, women, small children. And hopefully they're going to go either to Fort Brown, McAllen, very different areas. We'll keep you informed.

As you can see, there are several people here that are waiting on the buses. They're getting ready to be shipped out. And processed in remote areas. They think the initial count here-- [INAUDIBLE] results in the initial count-- as you can see, there's a lot of people here. And the buses are starting to get loaded.

This is just the few that are here right now. Several of them have already been shipped out to a remote locations to be processed. These are the ones that are still waiting to get on the bus to be taken out of this location. It's been peaceful so far, no one's been aggressive, no one's been fighting. They've all been following the instructions from border patrol.

We're still here tonight. Like I said, it all started at about 6:30, 7 o'clock tonight. And we're into 11:00 PM. So there's still more to come.