Officials in Kinney County, Texas, had hoped to fund a splash pad park for its residents to enjoy. Instead, the county has been forced to reappropriate the funds for emergency shelters for migrants coming across the U.S.-Mexico border and to add security to schools amid a rise in criminal high speed chases, the county attorney told a Congressional committee on Friday.

Kinney County Attorney Brent Smith's comments came during testimony before the House Committee on Economic Disparity and Fairness in Growth on Friday. Members of the committee traveled to South Texas to hold a field hearing titled, "Infrastructure Investment: Building Economic Resilience in South Texas."

However, while Democratic members of the committee took the trip to discuss infrastructure in South Texas, Republican members turned their focus to the impact of the border crisis on the region.

Representative Jodey Arrington, a Republican whose district covers parts of West Texas, blasted Democrats' focus on infrastructure during the hearing.

"The infrastructure that matters most right now is the infrastructure that protects the American people and we are at ground zero of the worst humanitarian public safety and security crisis in the history of our country and we're talking about roads and bridges," Arrington said. "I'd love to have this conversation but that would be like us going to Ukraine and having a hearing about fixing the potholes in the street while the Russians are waging war on the citizens. So, no. We have to talk about this border crisis."

Smith said before the current border crisis began, Kinney County saw maybe two or three high speed police chases per year. Just last weekend, the county saw ten high speed chases, he said.

The danger has grown so high that the school campus is "now militarized with boulders that surround the campus to prevent cars from high speed car chases from actually entering campus and injuring children," he said.

"That’s money that should be better spent preparing our children for the jobs of the future," Ranking member Brian Steil (R., Wis.) told National Review in an interview.

Communities in the area are contending with massive flooding and little-to-no internet access. In the local colonias, there are people living without adequate access to sanitation and fresh water, committee chair Jim Himes said during the hearing.

Steil said that the committee should explore how the federal government can partner with local areas to meet the community’s need for flood infrastructure that will cost millions of dollars.

“But instead what’s so frustrating when I heard from folks here is that the federal government and local resources are being used to address a different crisis and that’s the porous border costing the state of Texas and cities across the Rio Grande Valley millions of dollars each year,” he said during the hearing.

“It’s impacting the ability of towns to afford longterm infrastructure projects and the inaction by the Biden administration is pushing Texans to pay for a federal issue,” he added.

In August, Texas state lawmakers approved nearly $2 billion in additional funding for border security operations, months after lawmakers had already approved $1.05 billion for border security in the spring.

Representative Kat Cammack (R., Fla.) noted that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has spent $260 million dollars in South Texas in recent yeaes “not for our citizens, not for our veterans, not for our underserved mothers and fathers, not for our underserved communities but because of the border crisis.”

The spending comes as South Texas communities have struggled to secure FEMA funds in the wake of six FEMA disaster declarations in the last six years due to flooding in Hidalgo County.

Steil said there is a "myriad of ways" the Biden administration has failed on the border, including the passage of Biden’s $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan” that provided $0 in border security, as well as the administration's attempts to end the Title 42 public health order, which has allowed border agents to immediately expel illegal border crossers.

There have been 2.8 million illegal border encounters since President Biden took office — more than three times the population of the entire state of Delaware — Steil noted, with the end of Title 42 expected to increase the total number of people coming across the border to 18,000 per day.

“And so not only is the Biden administration failing to secure the borders, they’re actively working to make the border less secure,” Steil said, adding that the border crisis plays out nationwide, including in his native Wisconsin, where 68 people died in the city of Racine of a fentanyl overdose last year.

The Department of Homeland Security has seized 13,000 pounds of fentanyl since Biden took office, he said.

Steil said members of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection and other law enforcement agents have told him that the illicit fentanyl is coming from Mexico and that while some of it is being captured at legal ports of entry “other forms of that illegal fentanyl is coming through through drug trade with with a porous border.”

While the border crisis has a ripple effect throughout the nation, perhaps no communities feel it more acutely than those near the border.

Susan Kibbe, executive director of South Texans’ Property Rights Association, testified before the committee on Friday and explained that local emergency services are being diverted from local public safety needs to deal with “smuggling pursuits, bail outs and the lost, injured, dehydrated or dead immigrants.”

“The normal daily emergency needs don’t just put themselves on hold until illegal immigration slows down. They just become needs that are unmet,” she added.

She said cameras used on private properties have shown an increased number of smugglers carrying firearms and other weapons as they are guiding illegal immigrants and drugs through private property.

Illegal immigrants who are left behind by their guide approach landowners and their employees for direction or a ride to Houston or beyond, she said.

“More and more of them are becoming more desperate and more threatening,” Kibbe added. “What used to be an occasional event has now become commonplace; migrants are breaking into homes, barns and sheds for shelter food and other resources.”

Kibbe echoed Smith’s testimony, saying “every day there are high speed pursuits,” adding that smugglers and migrants often leave behind damaged or destroyed gates, cut locks, damaged and destroyed fences and other types of property damage.

Cartels often set grass and brush fires as a diversion, as do lost immigrants hoping to be found, she said. Migrants walking through the region have also hurt the area’s status as a hunting destination as they have a tendency to scare off the game.

The situation is also harming agriculture in the area, she said.

The migrants have stomped on, driven through and destroyed farm crops and allowed livestock to roam free.

“The agriculture community, the ranchers and farmers and those that make a living on the land feel totally abandoned by this federal government,” Kibbe said. “We've reached out. There have been multiple Republican Congressional and Senatorial delegations that have come down but no Democratic delegations that have come down and even asked to speak to a landowner.”

Representative Stephanie Bice (R., Okla.) told National Review the situation is an “economic crisis on the border.”

“These communities that immigrants are coming into, they’re flooding the communities and the NGOs and other organizations are overwhelmed and can’t handle it,” she said.

She noted it is also a “national security crisis” given that individuals from 90 different countries are coming into the U.S. from the southern border and that known or suspected terrorists have crossed into the U.S.

She accused the Biden administration of “dereliction of duty and neglecting what’s happening on the border.”

Steil, meanwhile, urged President Biden and Vice President Harris to visit the Rio Grande Valley to “see the real world impacts that their decisions are having on the communities here in south Texas.”

“It has to stop,” he said.