Child Flight - Cartel controlled border

The Hypocrisy of Federal Enforcement

Child Flight

Cartel controlled border

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

            If the plight of children on the Mexican Border is new news, you are living a make believe world.

            There are numbers of ‘most impressionable incidents’, but the winter morning on the Pipeline Road in our Goodsight Pasture has to be one of the most memorable. It was there I encountered a group of 20 illegals made up largely of women and children.

            It was freezing cold, and the light rain that had fallen intermittently all night lay in sheets of ice on the ground. Held to its mother’s breast, the most critically affected baby of the group was wrapped in a drenched blanket. It didn’t make a sound the entire time. It just stared, and … shook.

            All I could do was to offer directions and instructions. If I had been caught giving aid and transporting those Mexicans, I would have been prosecuted. Very likely, those illegals would have been released.

            For too long, my government does not recognize my importance on the border. It also fails to carry out the mandates that protect me, other Americans, and babies like the one I witnessed freezing in that immense stretch of American border frontier.

            The numbers

            The claimed number of juveniles making headlines in Texas is miniscule compared to the infants that have made the long walk across the southern border over time. The real news remains what triggered the revealing exodus and why this administration wants to make issue of it now.

            The idea these children are crossing Mexico from war torn countries is fiction. The only war torn battle fields are the cartel controlled border smuggling corridors, and notice thereof should be taken. The arrival of the children is concentrated in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas not through the most lucrative trade portals of western New Mexico and the Tucson Sector of Arizona. The cartels are disallowing the entry of publicity generating infants in those corridors. Those portals are reserved for drugs and higher value illicit trade.

            Nearly exclusively, the Valley arriving children have parents in the United States. They make up the 15-20 million illegals living in our midst and crushing our social services.

We know that because the kids being processed must provide an address where their parents are living as a condition of their release. Customs and ICE personnel are being given those addresses in the United States where those illegals are residing, but … they cannot use that intelligence to apprehend and deport those illegals.

The State Department contribution

A shadow operation has also been underway in American Consulate offices across Mexico. Consulate officials are being required to issue visas under increasing quota demands.

Word leaking out of the ranks of those officials is that they are being inundated with visa requests. As a consequence, mandatory and essential checks of due diligence have become impossible to complete. The result of such reckless action by the State Department is setting the stage for catastrophe.

This madness has a corresponding and reciprocal impact on administration of ports of entry. The processing protocols including those for arriving kids are hugely time consuming. It takes a minimum of 4-8 hours to process each request. The regulatory burden is increased by an eight hour limit imposed on the detained people. If held beyond that time limit, authorization from administrative hierarchy must be obtained for further detention. The rights being extended to these foreigners are being given priority over the agency’s ability to process the established safeguards deemed necessary to protect the American public from harm.

Word filtering out of Customs is that desks are being “swept” of documents in order to expedite the number demands. Befuddled Customs agents are as confused as all Americans should be.

The plea for more man power and money by this President is predicated, in part, on the assertion these problems can be solved by expanding the bureaucracy associated with these induced processing bottlenecks. Based on the interacting events, though, any expansion of personnel would only accelerate the numbers of applicants as long as the State Department and the Administration continue the quest to expand the distribution of entry documents.

The Administration’s mandated instructions are overwhelming the system.

Addresses and loopholes

The matter of addresses held by illegals in this country is nightmarish. The more it is studied the more it emerges as a ‘pull’ mechanism for the expansion of numbers. The addresses of the illegals not only now invite more dependent children they are securing the beachhead for the illegal parents. Heretofore, those people have sought anonymity.

Implicit in the whole affair is the mounting impasse of complexity and the inevitable expansion of welfare distributions.

An example is a recent case in El Paso where an 18 year old boy appeared at the border and asked to be admitted as a legal resident. He had never lived in the United States, couldn’t speak English, certainly wasn’t assimilated in the culture, but, upon investigation, he had the legal right to enter. When he was born in El Paso to a Mexican national, a social worker walking the halls of the hospital sought the mother and suggested helping her to secure various benefits. All that was needed was an American address.

The mother provided her sister’s address in El Paso and began receiving American benefits while continuing to live in Mexico. Upon investigation 18 years later, the Customs official determined the Mexican national couldn’t be held liable for false information … it was the welfare worker who filled out the paperwork!

The next chapter

Meanwhile, the southern border remains a sieve.

None other than SouthCom’s commander, Marine Corps General John Kelly, describes the border with its smuggling corridors as “wide open for business”.     

“Many argue these (border) threats are not existential and do not challenge our national security,” the general began in congressional testimony. “I disagree.”

The official estimate that only 26% of actionable border illicit trafficking events even surface is a poor record for a border this president declares to be safer than any time in our history. As witnessed by his recent spontaneous reactions in Texas, his assessment of the mess remains embroiled in the shortage of immigration attorneys and administrators, and the obstruction of Republican law makers.

His willingness to actually elevate the effectiveness of border protection, however, must be revealed in his administration’s Border Patrol border flight directives. Helicopter time out of Arizona’s Sierra Vista is being limited to seven hours per pilot month down from 70 hours and more in the Bush administration.

Although Texas is getting the press, the hot (drug smuggling) corridors remain those in Arizona and the nearby Bootheel of New Mexico. That is the domain of the billion dollar dealer to market trafficking lanes. That is where specific geographic and land management factors have combined to allow the cartel wealth to grow and exceed the gross national product of most nations of the world. It is also there that the greatest threat yet to the soft underbelly of the nation slumbers and awaits its grand opening.

On May 21, this president, by executive order, signed into law the Organ Mountain Desert Peaks National Monument. Up to that time, the Potrillo Mountains component of that designation displayed every characteristic of the Arizona corridors except … unrestricted access by the Border Patrol and the presence of sovereign Americans with investments at risk … ranchers. Unless the pending management plan for that border monument clearly and extensively promotes the presence of those two critical border protection components, that new corridor will have every physical characteristic of the Arizona portals and has the earmarks to exceed the dangers of all of them.

The added danger comes from the new and largest inland port in the world now open and doing business east from the Potrillo Mountain complex. Part of the ultramodern rail lines emanating from that port east-west and north-south actually serve as the boundary of the northeast thrust of the Potrillo component. There are, at any given time, multiple unit trains parked along that boundary awaiting routing clearance. With any restriction for patrolling access in the massive national monument land to the south toward the border, those stationary trains and the security void around them pose an immense national security risk. The entire complex becomes a tailor made staging area to move drugs, weapons of mass destruction, and agents of American destruction into the country to be dispersed into the populous.

The implications are astounding, and, yet, this government, led by the president and New Mexico senators, Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich, has ignored every warning plea offered by Americans fully at risk with duties, responsibilities, and or investments in the monument footprint.

Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “The cash fee for successfully delivering each child across the border is averaging $6,000.  The children are then held for weeks and even months before they are reunited with their parents.”