Alan Long, mayor of the San Diego suburb of Murrieta, said on Fox News that residents need answers from the federal government about the Department of Homeland Security's plan to house large numbers of illegal immigrants there.
A group of Murrieta residents on Tuesday blocked buses carrying illegal immigrants to a local U.S. Border Patrol station. Long said he has concerns about costs and solutions for those being transported to his community.
"My questions for them are, who's going to pay for it? Who's going to help for resources? When are you going to finally come up with solutions in Washington, D.C., to solve the ultimate problem?" Long told "Fox & Friends" on Wednesday.
Long said he also had concerns about the health of the immigrants entering Murrieta.
"When you start asking about the health screening that they claim they get, there's a lot of gaps. They could not answer a lot questions that we had to give us certainty that people on those buses were healthy," he said.
The local Border Patrol office had been "great" in providing information when they had it, Long said. The problem was that there had been "little to no communication at all" between the Department of Homeland Security and the local Border Patrol office.
The federal government has been struggling under the surge of illegal immigrants entering the country through the southern U.S. border. An estimated 60,000 undocumented immigrants, many of them children unaccompanied by parents, have entered the United States so far this year, according to
Watchdog.org.
Long said another concern he had was that there did not appear to be any "end point" to the approximately 140 immigrants the federal government planned to transport to Murrieta every 72 hours. The flow of illegal immigrants did not appear to be ending "any time soon," he said.
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