Yuma, AZ, Fire Department Battalion Chief Alvin Luedtke witnessed first-hand the impact of the U.S. border crisis on his own small community and similar ones along the Southwest border during several years of the Biden Administration. In response, the Center for Homeland Defense and Security alum (Master’s Program cohort 2103/2104) decided to use his education to do something about it.
According to the 13-year fire service veteran who oversees his department’s special operations programs including technical rescue, Yuma and its fire department have been “at the forefront of the migrant crisis and the associated transnational criminal activities” as the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol’s (CBP) Yuma Sector recorded an increase in migrant encounters from 8,000 in FY2020 to more than 310,000 in FY2022 and a corresponding exponential increase in migrant mortality and migrant-related calls for service in Yuma County.
That included a significant increase in border fence rescues and falls with CBP relying on local fire and EMS agencies to effect rescues and render care and transport to the injured, often in remote desert areas where the use of fire trucks and aerial ladders were difficult if not impossible, Luedtke said, adding that those rescue activities result in significant time and resource commitment negatively impacting emergency response to the rest of a jurisdiction.
By the time Title 42 ended in May 2023, Luedtke said Yuma Fire was “expending significant resources responding to the various demands created by the crisis and had to actively mitigate the humanitarian challenges created by CBP ‘street releases’ into the Yuma community, and the City of Yuma had twice declared a local emergency due to the local impacts non-citizen migration on local infrastructure.
Recognizing what he called the “lack of attention and awareness of the border crisis impacts on fire and EMS agencies,” and the lack of federal policy and programs available to mitigate those impacts “despite their essential participation in response to the border crisis,” Luedtke said he decided to “set out on an effort to collect and analyze available data to demonstrate these challenges and the absence of support that compounded them,” authoring his department’s first impact report regarding “irregular migration” and leading various roundtables with elected officials and policymakers.
“I believe that this technology will revolutionize and streamline our response to rescues of this variety.”
– Alvin Luedtke
“These efforts have progressively widened as I worked with fire departments across the entire Southwest Border to understand the challenges on a macro scale,” he said, adding that they resulted in the founding of the Coalition of Border Fire Chiefs and working with Texas A&M University to research impacts on migrants and first responders in border communities.
In January, Luedtke joined Dr. Christine Blackburn of the National Association of EMS Physicians at the organization’s annual meeting to present the findings of her research, which he helped facilitate, into the impacts of irregular migration on fire and EMS agencies along the border.
Meanwhile, in 2022, the Arizona State Legislature approved significant funding for border security, most of which was designated to support construction of border fence infrastructure and associated efforts to interdict illegal entry and human/narcotics trafficking, and Luedtke was successful in securing a state emergency management agency grant funded through the legislation to fund equipment to “revolutionize our response to border fence rescues.”
Luedtke used the grant to purchase equipment used by the U.S. Special Operations community to perform maritime Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure (VBSS) activity on ships, adapting U.S. Navy technology to create a rescue platform at the border fence while noting the similarity between boarding ships and ascending a steel wall. Equipment included a line launcher with grappling hooks, modular ultralight pole ladders, a powered ascender, and a magnetic anchor/climbing system.
“I believe that this technology will revolutionize and streamline our response to rescues of this variety,” Luedtke said, adding that he believes such an adaptation might be of interest to the Department of Defense’s Domestic Preparedness Support Initiative through its partnership with CHDS. “The border fence rescue equipment is quite literally a downstream result of the DPSI interaction that occurred during (the Master’s Program) class. It inspired me to look to existent military technologies to adapt as a solution for a new/emerging homeland security problem.”
According to Luedtke, his CHDS education supported his work in a “myriad of ways,” providing him with the “skill and ability to research, collect, and analyze data before using it to craft and support his argument”; enabling him to “map the ground-level impacts of federal policies and to articulate their consequences on local communities”; providing him the capacity to “understand the various paradigms through which the border crisis is viewed,” including political, economic, security, humanitarian, etc.; teaching him “how to think” and “distill complex challenges into high-level strategic imperatives”; providing access to a network of experts and homeland security practitioners from across the enterprise “whose insights have been invaluable”; and inspiring him to “innovate in the response to an emergent challenge.”
Published in partnership with the Center for Homeland Security and Defense (https://www.chds.us/c/).