California: Migrant Boat Accident Leaves 8 Dead in Painful Tragedy

A migrant boat incident near the shore of Black's Beach in San Diego, California, resulted in the deaths of at least eight people.

CNN reported that someone on one of the two panga boats that capsized called 911 to report victims in the water, prompting officials to respond to the scene at around 11:30 p.m. Saturday.

Lifeguard chief for the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department, James Gartland, said during Sunday's news conference that the 911 caller was a Spanish-speaking woman.

Gartland also called the incident "one of the worst maritime smuggling tragedies" in recent years.

Aside from Fire-Rescue Department, lifeguards, the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), and the U.S. Coast Guard also responded to the scene of California's capsize boat incident.

Capt. James Spitler, sector commander of the U.S. Coast Guard's San Diego, noted that they carried eight people to the shore while another panga boat, carrying 15, "overturned in the surf."

Gartland said all of the eight people killed were adults, with their nationalities still uncertain. He noted that these migrant boats are often "poorly maintained and overloaded."

Human Trafficking in California

A spokesman for CBP, Jason Givens, noted that about 600 people were caught in the first two months of 2023 from the waters of San Diego, according to The New York Times.

Givens said there were around 3,500 migrants apprehended in the prior two years. He added that a huge part of the apprehensions was part of a "criminal smuggling operation."

Spitler said at least 23 people have died in U.S. human trafficking cases in Southern California since 2021. The sector commander noted that cases like this have been happening "for quite some time" and continue.

Spitler said it was "not necessarily people trying to find a better life" but was part of a "transnational criminal organization network" smuggling people into the U.S.

Three people died in 2021, and two dozen people were rescued in the waters off San Diego after a packed boat suspected of being used to smuggle migrants capsized.

U.S. Immigration Crisis

The latest available government statistics showed that monthly encounters between U.S. Border Patrol agents and migrants attempting to cross into the U.S.-Mexico border have levels not seen in more than two decades, Pew Research reported.

In 2022, U.S. authorities made over two million immigration arrests along the southern border during the past 11 months. CBP detained 203,598 migrants in August 2022. The migrants were crossing from Mexico.

The historic migration wave has been driven by soaring numbers of people crossing from outside Mexico and Central America, the two largest sources of illegal entries.

According to Texas Tribune, more than one-third of those taken into custody were migrants from Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba.

CBP noted that it was a 175% increase over August 2021. President Joe Biden's officials blamed the government of those countries. Many of the migrants apply for humanitarian protection in the U.S. and have asylum claims.

Biden administration officials said they will continue to create a "safe, orderly, and human" immigration system.

This article is owned by Latin Post.

Written by: Mary Webber

WATCH: At Least 8 Dead After Smuggling Boat Capsizes off San Diego Coast, Authorities Say - From ABC 7 Chicago