Only a handful of insiders realize the true magnitude of the border crisis and its consequences.
Those in the know include defanged Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents, neutered Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, journalists whose truthful reporting rarely makes national headlines, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and his White House superiors. Otherwise, the dangers that open borders represent are kept tightly under wraps to avoid bad optics. The world, however, knows that accessing the U.S. interior is merely a matter of getting to the border, crossing, and beginning the journey – often White House-aided and abetted – to the final destination for those who enter illegally. In President Joe Biden’s eyes, the world is welcome.
In mid-August, for example, CBP caught ten illegal immigrant adults posing as the ubiquitous unaccompanied alien child (UAC). The phony minors, apprehended at Texas’ El Paso Sector, ranged in age from 18 to 26; by law, UACs must not have reached age 18. All were Guatemalans who claimed to be minors to avoid deportation.
Days later, at the Del Rio Valley Sector, agents stopped an 18-wheeler crammed with 150 smuggled aliens that included 17 gang members, one sex offender, and one convicted of murder. MS-13 members were among the identified gangsters. This fiscal year, an estimated 130,000 UACs, some self-defined, have entered. The CBP press release on the DRV action concluded vaguely: “All subjects were processed accordingly.”
The Coalition Against Trafficking Women, Latin American branch, estimates that 60 percent of Latin American children who embark on a U.S.-bound journey, either alone or with smugglers, are captured by cartels and then forced into pornography or drug trafficking. In addition to enduring a moral nightmare, those migrants who successfully make it to the U.S. interior will have outstanding debts owed to the coyotes and cartels that will take them a lifetime to pay off. To make sure that smuggling accounts are settled, the aliens are forced to wear GPS wristbands so that the cartel can monitor their movements. Cartels are the world’s most powerful criminal organizations and have created the largest form of modern slavery. The New York Times estimated that cartel revenues reached $13 billion this year, up from $500 million in 2018, a 26x increase in fewer than five years.
Over the years, illegal immigration has reached such extraordinarily high levels that it begat more illegal immigration. Decades of porous borders, inadequate interior enforcement, and the current welcoming environment have facilitated today’s historic and continuous wave.
In 2018, during interviews in Guatemala’s tiny 17,000 residents-strong Concepción Chiquirichapa, reporters learned that almost everyone has family or knows someone with a family in the U.S. Think about what that amazing statistic conveys: individuals thousands of miles away from Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, and with few transportation options in their remote villages, have departed for the U.S., confident that they’ll get in, and will remain indefinitely.
But neither unlawfully present parents nor their children who are joining them, trafficked or not, deserve a free pass from the Biden administration. In previous UAC waves, 60 percent of the children were handed over to illegally residing parents. U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen, in the Southern District of Texas, wrote of several instances in which parents “initiated the conspiracy to smuggle minors into the country illegally,” a reference to contracting with traffickers.
Then, Hanen continued, instead of enforcing immigration laws, “DHS completed the criminal conspiracy…by delivering the minors into the custody of the parent living illegally in the United States.” Hanen’s message: Nonenforcement encourages parents to pay coyotes to bring their minor children north. UACs will continue to flock to the border as long as their illegal alien U.S. families can criminally bring their children to the U.S. without concern for their own removal. Judge Hanen’s criminal conspiracy allegation is tough talk but accurate. And with the entire U.S. a sanctuary nation, nonenforcement’s failures, and the fallout are painfully obvious.
Joe Guzzardi is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist who writes about immigration and related social issues. Joe joined Progressives for Immigration Reform in 2018 as an analyst after a ten-year career directing media relations for Californians for Population Stabilization, where he also was a Senior Writing Fellow. A native Californian, Joe now lives in Pennsylvania. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.
