The city is located directly across from one of the “safest” areas of northern Mexico, one that migrants consider a “smoother path” into the United States, the chief said.

Located about 140 miles southwest of San Antonio, Eagle Pass is also home to one of the United States’ busiest rail-crossing areas. Illegal immigrants “hop into the rail cars coming from Mexico,” the chief said. “It’s like having a free ride.”

And then there’s the 30-mile stretch of the Rio Grande that Eagle Pass shares with its Mexican sister city, Piedras Negras.

The Rio Grande’s name translates to “big river;” and Chief Mello calls it a “precious” one because of its significance as a natural resource.

As the third-longest river in the contiguous United States, flowing nearly 1,900 miles from Colorado to the Gulf of Mexico, it supplies life-sustaining water for animals, people, and more than 2 million acres of cropland.

But it also churns out tragedies that have smacked Chief Mello and his medics in the face with shocking regularity lately, “almost daily.”

Twelve of the department’s 52 members are cross-trained in swift-water rescue. Sometimes, they’re called to drownings-in-progress.

However, these specially trained rescuers were able to save only about four or five near-drownings in the past year.

“By the time we get there, they’ve been underwater for a while,” the chief said. “I doubt any fire department right now is going through what we’re going through.”

“As a witness to many incidents, I am here to tell you that we are being overwhelmed with EMS [emergency medical services] calls and body recoveries,” he testified.

In the Border Patrol’s Del Rio Sector, which includes Eagle Pass, agents apprehended nearly 53,000 illegal immigrants in August 2022—the same month that Chief Mello’s crews dealt with a pair of heart-wrenching deaths, back-to-back.

He shared details of that tragedy with the congressional committee, to give its members “an idea of what my men and women are going through.”

On Aug. 22, 2022, dispatchers sent the department’s swift-water rescue crew and an ambulance to one of the two international bridges that span the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass.

There, they found Border Patrol agents performing CPR on a 3-month-old boy who had been pulled from the river. Their efforts restored a faint pulse, and crews whisked the infant to a hospital.

Moments later, a second call for help originated from the same area, reporting a 3-year-old male victim. At first, medics thought this was a duplicate call for the same incident. They wondered: Were callers mistakenly talking about a 3-year-old when they meant to describe a 3-month-old?

But there was no mistake; a second child was indeed needing help. Others had already tried to revive the boy, who had been submerged for quite some time. “He died right there in the back of that pickup truck,” the chief recounted to The Epoch Times.

Both boys died. And these weren’t two random little boys. They were brothers—a realization that made a sad situation even sadder, the chief said.

He found out that the brothers had come from Nicaragua, but the chief has no idea how they made the journey of some 1,600 miles from their home. He also doesn’t know the fate of their mother, who was apparently traveling with them.

But he did learn that the boys most likely died because their mother lost her grip on the children, as many river-crossers do.

He explained that migrants often meet their demise when the Rio Grande lulls them into complacency. But most people are unaware of the river’s quirks.

“There are areas where you’re walking, the water is maybe knee-deep,” the chief said. People mistakenly believe that “because they’re walking on a sandbar, that the whole river’s going to be shallow, and it’s not,” he said.

Suddenly, the riverbed drops, plunging a person up to 15 feet underwater, the chief said. If that person is weighted down with a backpack, other belongings, or a child, there’s little chance of emerging alive.

Ms. Jackson Lee’s office didn’t respond to The Epoch Times’ request for an update on her efforts since that Jan. 11 hearing.

During the hearing, Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) said: “This unprecedented illegal migration is exactly what the Democrats promised to do. It’s exactly what they have done. And it’s exactly what they have defended for the last three years in this Congress; if you voted for them, this is exactly what you voted for.”

He suggested that Democrats are welcoming illegal immigrants, yet most of those supporters have no idea as to the perils that those immigrants will face en route to the United States.

“When we pick them up, they regret making that trek,” Chief Mello said.

The chief wrapped up his remarks by telling the congress members that he sees an enormous cost “of not being a normal community.”

Chief Mello’s crews also treat illegal immigrants for all types of other medical complaints. He rattled off some examples: hypothermia, weakness, shortness of breath, fainting, headaches, fever, flu-like symptoms, allergic reactions, abdominal pains, pregnancy.

“We transport patients almost every day” from the river’s edge or from nearby areas, he said.

In the five months between September 2023 and February, the department transported 486 illegal immigrants for medical treatment. Each of those ambulance runs costs at least $900, excluding medications and additional treatments.

The ambulance bill is normally sent to health insurance companies or patients. “But since these are undocumented people, who do you send the invoice to?” the chief asked.

As a result, just for that short span, Chief Mello’s department absorbed a loss of $437,400. That stings in a department that has a total annual budget of $6 million.

From its three fire stations, the Eagle Pass Fire Department handles emergency calls for all of Maverick County, where Eagle Pass is the county seat. On any given day, including “visitors,” the population is about 70,000.

Last year, the department handled 9,500 calls for emergency medical help; 10 percent of them were illegal immigrant-related. Chief Mello had to add a fifth ambulance and crew, dedicated solely to assisting illegal immigrants.

To defray some of the costs, the state of Texas gave the department $400,000 for overtime. But the department spent almost all of that in just three months.

All of the patients—illegal immigrants and citizens alike—go to the region’s only hospital, Fort Duncan Regional Medical Center. Only 18 emergency beds are available.

“That can be overwhelmed very quickly,” the chief said, particularly because Eagle Pass is a low-income community with many residents who use the hospital as a de facto doctor’s office.

At peak times, some people who transported themselves to the hospital have waited three or four hours for treatment, Chief Mello said.

Sometimes, ambulances loaded with patients have waited anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours “just to get a bed,” he said.

These statistics and stories only hint at the suffering that illegal immigration causes, the chief said.

He suspects that some of the groups that claim to be families “aren’t really families,” and that the children don’t really belong to those adults; he worries that those kids could be victims of sex trafficking.

Chief Mello wonders about the motives of the many military-age males who traveled here solo.

He is haunted by dozens of deaths that he cannot forget, in addition to the drownings.

“What about the people that have died in the brush?  What about the people that died in the deer blind, because they froze to death? We found them hugging each other because they were cold, but they were dead,” the chief said.

“What about the people that we pulled out of the rail cars that suffocated because of the heat, the people that got run over by vehicles out on the highway?”

And one time, a smuggler’s pickup truck overturned, leaving 11 people hurt and one killed.

Some of the images are so grisly, “you just can’t imagine,” Chief Mello said, shuddering.

He noted, with gallows humor, that public safety trainers have jokingly likened Eagle Pass to a “paramedic heaven,” because rescuers’ skills are put to the test in so many ways, with such frequency.

“But,” the chief said, grimly, “it’s more like hell than heaven right now.”