While families across the U.S. celebrated Christmas Eve, Tucson Sector Border Patrol agents responded to an emergency beacon in the Arizona desert and rescued a migrant family. The three family members included an infant.

Agents in the Tucson Sector responded to the activation of an emergency beacon in the desert near Lukeville, Arizona. When the agents arrived at the location of the rescue beacon, they found a migrant family in distress, according to information obtained from Tucson Sector Border Patrol officials.

Agents conducted a medical screening on the man, woman, and infant child and found they did not require medical attention. The agents transported them to the Border Patrol station for processing.

So far this fiscal year, which began on October 1, Tucson Sector Border Patrol agents rescued 243 migrants from life-threatening situations.

“Tucson Sector has 34 rescue beacons deployed throughout its more desolate areas, improving migrants’ chances of requesting help and being saved,” Tucson Sector officials wrote in a statement obtained by Breitbart Texas. “Unfortunately, smugglers abandon many individuals who enter the United States illegally, leaving it to U.S. Border Patrol agents to save them.”

During all of Fiscal Year 2019, Border Patrol agents rescued nearly 4,911 migrants after they illegally entered the U.S. from Mexico, Breitbart Texas reported. Officials said this represented a 15 percent increase over the previous year.

“They didn’t ask these individuals what their nationality was,” Acting CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan stated in an October press conference in El Paso. “They didn’t ask these individuals if they were entering this country illegally. That never happened and it never does in these circumstances.”

“What these men and women saw was a human being in need of help and in distress and they immediately went into action 4,900 times and they risked their own lives to save these individuals,” Morgan concluded.