The Immigration Crisis and Security at the Border
by John Lawrence, April 8, 2019
Since Trump was elected President, Central American smugglers have handed him a victory in the sense that they have confirmed recently his main issue. While illegal immigration wasn't a crisis when Trump was running on that issue, it has since become one. Smugglers are organizing bus loads of people in Guatemala who are paying up to $7000. per person for a rapid and safe bus ride to the American border. It's called "The Conveyor Belt." Democrats had better take this issue seriously and not just hand it to Trump as a campaign issue. Their attitude has been "this is Trump's issue and it's a phony one." I've got news for Democrats. It's a real issue and one that deserves to be taken seriously.
Illegal immigration is taking place all over the world and not just at the southern US border. They are immigrating from Africa by way of Libya into Europe. Some of therm dump their passports in the Mediterranean before they are taken into custody so that it will take longer to process them, and there's nowhere they can be deported to. Immigration from poverty stricken and violent countries to prosperous ones will continue to take place as desperate people figure they have nothing to lose by risking their lives to get to a better place.
In the case of the US, some of the caravans from Honduras and El Salvador are organized by Pueblo Sin Fronteras, a church group out of humanitarian concerns. The immigrants from Guatemala are usually trafficked by human smugglers by rapid buses taking only about 4 days to reach the American border in relatively safe and comfortable conditions. The money is often paid to the smugglers by relatives in the US.
Democrats have pooh-poohed Trump's efforts to make a big deal out of the illegal immigration situation and border security. But, it turns out, it has become a verifiable big deal. Human traffickers are making more money now smuggling humans than they did smuggling drugs, and the penalties are nowhere near as harsh if they get caught. Democrats ignore this issue at their own peril. The Washington Post reported:
Paying up to $7,000 per adult with child, families are transported to staging areas at ranches and hotels in southern Mexico, where they are organized into bus groups and rushed north along Mexican highways, “stopping only for food, fuel and bathroom breaks,” according to the U.S. law enforcement documents....
Within 72 hours of leaving the staging areas, the buses arrive at predetermined drop-off points within walking distance of the U.S. border. Migrant families are clustered into groups that have at times exceeded 300 adults and children, and they walk directly across the border, in some cases stepping over barriers in long, orderly lines. They then surrender to U.S. Border Patrol agents and initiate asylum claims.
The asylum system is overwhelmed; it was never meant to handle hundreds if not thousands of immigrants at a time. The US does not have enough facilities to hold these people at detention centers so they are often given a court date many months in the future and let go. Most of them never show up for the court date, thereby achieving success at gaining entry into the US. This is a sophisticated and highly profitable entrepreneurial operation that is designed to exploit dysfunction in the American immigration system and U.S. court rulings that mandate families be released from custody while their asylum claims are processed. Who would have thunk it? Trump turns out to have been right! Democrats better stop being wishy-washy and do their best to co-opt this issue from Trump. They continue their present stance at their peril in 2020.
The Washington Post continues:
By using the direct-bus method, smugglers can eliminate the need for stash houses along the border where they would normally keep migrants under the watch of armed guards before sneaking them across the border. The express routes “minimize overhead and maximize capacity,” according to the U.S. documents, allowing smugglers to reduce “operational costs to a minimum.”
Since October, U.S. border agents have encountered at least 70 large groups of 100 or more migrants, up from 13 such groups during fiscal 2018. Approximately 12,000 parents and children have arrived in the groups, generating tens of millions of dollars in smuggling fees.
U.S. officials call the system “The Conveyor Belt” and have asked Mexican authorities to help stop it. But the conveyor pattern has continued for months, part of a record-breaking surge in crossings by families that the White House has declared a “humanitarian and border security crisis.” Last month, 40,325 arrived in family groups, up 67 percent from January.
Border arrests peaked at 1.6 million in 2000 and began to decline, falling to 303,000 in 2017, the lowest point in half a century. But Homeland Security officials say they are on pace to encounter nearly 1 million unauthorized border crossers during the current fiscal year, as arrests reach their highest level in more than a decade.
The influx has left U.S. border security “at a breaking point,” U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin K. McAleenan told reporters this month...
Recruiters are selling clients in Guatemala on the journey with presentations akin to the benign pitch of a travel agency. They offer a range of price points at different levels of passenger comfort, according to U.S. and Guatemalan officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive details about smuggling networks’ operations.
Where the migrants enter the US is not decided by the migrants themselves but by the highly professional smugglers who look for the best places to quickly deliver large numbers of their clients to U.S. agents. "The mass “give-ups” let migrants skip lines at official points of entry, and they can await processing on the U.S. side of the border, where it’s safer. The pattern has become so routine that U.S. officials say some large groups form their own queues as they present their documents to agents, as if they were waiting in the arrival hall of an international airport."
“They line up as if it’s some kind of regular immigration process, in single file, like they’re checking in,” according to one U.S. official, “It’s unbelievable.”
With the swelling arrest numbers, calls for a border wall have intensified. But in recent weeks, large groups have crossed in areas near central El Paso, where tall, modern steel barriers are already in place. Wading through shallow stretches of the Rio Grande, the migrants reach U.S. soil and wait to be taken into custody on the narrow strip of no man’s land between the river and the border fence.
The point is that 1) this is a real problem that needs to be dealt with. 2) Trump is not always wrong; in fact he's more right than wrong on this issue, and 3) Democrats better change their tune and not let Trump exploit this issue for his own political advantage.
