U.S. Border Patrol agents on the frontlines of the illegal immigrant influx worry diseases they come in contact with at work could be spread to the people they love at home.
The fears were articulated by National Border Patrol Council Local 3307 spokesman Chris Cabrera, who told KRGV News the different types of diseases encountered are taking a toll on morale.
“It’s pretty much a forgone conclusion that we are going to get sick just being in contact with the people,” says Cabrera.
With detention centers overflowing, some agents in the Rio Grande Valley are forced to work in close proximity to illegals harboring illnesses.
Cabrera says Customs and Border Protection agents risk taking home “lice, scabies, pneumonia, tuberculosis, measles, mumps, the chicken pox, and endless strains of the flu, and aggressive chest colds,” according to KRGV.
“I think one night they had 19 agents call in sick with some type of symptom or some type of illness,” said Cabrera.
One wife of a border patrol agent, Rene Perez, told KRGV her husband heads straight to the shower when he returns home from work to avoid getting their three children sick.
“In the past, I wouldn’t have thought about it. And now I’m like ‘there are all different strains of flu’,” Perez admitted to KRGV.
Meanwhile, Cabrera hopes the federal government finds a way to address the crowded detention centers facilitating exposure to disease.
“The conditions our agents are working in are getting worse on a daily basis. The conditions these people are being held in are less than ideal. So something needs to be done…”
“People say, ‘Well, this system is going to break.’ This system broke a long time ago.”
Cabrera’s latest assessment coincides with an Infowars report last month documenting how more CBP agents in El Paso were calling in sick than ever before.
“I believe this is probably the record, you know, Border Patrol-wide, since ever, of agents calling in sick,” said National Border Patrol Council Local 1929 Carlos Favela.
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