This article was originally posted at Foxnews.com
The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is fueling concerns that the porous U.S.-Mexico border poses a growing health risk, with statistics showing dozens of people from the epicenter of the Ebola scare illegally entered the U.S. — or tried to — this year alone.
Breitbart.com on Monday published a Customs and Border Protection document breaking down where illegal immigrants who turn themselves in or are caught by immigration authorities are coming from. The statistics reportedly showed they are traveling from more than 75 different countries.
Among them, between January and July of this year, at least 71 reportedly arrived from the three West African nations hit with the current Ebola outbreak.
The numbers come after Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-Ga., wrote to the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month raising concerns about illegal immigrants carrying “swine flu, dengue fever, Ebola virus and tuberculosis.”
“As the unaccompanied children continue to be transported to shelters around the country on commercial airlines and other forms of transportation, I have serious concerns that the diseases carried by these children may begin to spread too rapidly to control,” he wrote.
Gingrey was ridiculed in the media for his letter and accused of unnecessarily spreading fears about the disease and about the children crossing the border.
The nonpartisan PolitiFact.com panned his Ebola warning, noting that the CDC at the time had no reports of Ebola infection “anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, much less the U.S.-Mexico border,” and that anyone with Ebola and traveling by foot would likely die before reaching the U.S. border. (Since that report, two Americans with Ebola have been brought to the U.S. for treatment, though extreme medical precautions are being taken.)
But Indiana Republican Rep. Todd Rokita once again raised the Ebola issue while discussing the border crisis Monday on WIBC’s The Garrison Show.
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