When Biden took office, one of his first acts was the elimination of our border security. Like a power-hungry dictator, Biden simply decided to ignore our immigration laws. His catastrophic border policy resulted in untold millions of unidentified foreign citizens from around the world pouring into our country. Its impact is now being felt in cities across the country. The worst is yet to come. PETER LEMISKA - AND WE'RE ALREADY THERE!!!
Thursday, May 23, 2019
STASH HOUSES ON AMERICA'S UNDEFENDED BORDERS WITH NARCOMEX - A HIDDEN AND HORRIFIC PHENOMENON
A stash house is discovered in El Paso, Texas. (ICE)
Stash Houses: A Hidden and Horrific Phenomenon on Border
EL PASO, Texas—Stash houses have been used for decades to hold humans and contraband on both sides of the southwest border, ready for transportation.
Now, along with the dramatic surge in human smuggling, there is an increase in the number of people who smugglers squeeze into stash houses, “especially since the family migration has been coming up,” said Jack Staton, special agent-in-charge of El Paso’s ICE Homeland Security Investigations.
“I’m just going to throw a random number out. Let’s say we would usually see 10 or 12. We’re now seeing houses that camp 54 people, 67 people,” he said.
In February, Staton’s team dismantled a stash house in Dexter, New Mexico, that housed 67 illegal aliens from Guatemala and Ecuador—six of whom were unaccompanied teenagers. The structure was an unfurnished, 20-foot by 20-foot wooden addition to a travel trailer.
“So there’s no room for them to even move. They did have a bathroom in there, but the bathroom didn’t work. In order to even use the restroom, they had to go outside,” Staton said on May 7. “The organization had taken their shoes off of them, so if they went outside, they wouldn’t run away because they’re just running across the desert now with no shoes on. It was pretty bad.
“That was one of the most horrific structures I’ve seen since I’ve been doing this job—and I’ve been doing border security and enforcement for over 24 years.”
Staton said the case is ongoing as investigators continue to go after the smuggling networks involved.
The majority of those being housed in stash houses are single males, who would be prosecuted and deported if caught by Border Patrol, and those with criminal records, who try to avoid law enforcement altogether.
“When you look at alien smuggling in general … it’s an illicit travel agency, is what it is,” Staton said.
‘They Don’t Treat Them as Humans’
In Hidalgo County, Texas, Sheriff Eddie Guerra is at the frontline of the border crossing surge. His county shares 78 miles of international border with Mexico.
Border Patrol in the Rio Grande Valley, in which Hidalgo sits, has already apprehended more than 173,000 illegal immigrants crossing from Mexico in the past seven months; more than 101,000 of whom are individuals within a family unit.
Border Patrol is so busy dealing with the humanitarian side of the illegal crossings, “they’re being taken away from intelligence gathering where these stash houses are,” Guerra said on April 30. He said, in the past, his deputies, along with Border Patrol, have dismantled up to three stash houses a day.
“A lot of these stash houses that we’re seeing now are the results of our community calling law enforcement. And we’re having to go out there and pick up the slack because our federal partners are tied up doing what they’re doing on the border,” Guerra said.
Often, those who are smuggled across the border need to then be smuggled around the highway checkpoint about 70 miles north, in Brooks County, especially as many are heading to Houston, San Antonio, or Dallas.
“So they’ll take them from those stash houses and they’ll run them up, as close as they can get to the checkpoint. And then they take them across in the ranch lands or they’ll put them in tractor trailers to try to smuggle them through the checkpoint,” Guerra said.
“These organizations … they don’t treat them as humans. They don’t see them as humans, they see them as a commodity. And they don’t have any respect for human life. They put them in the back of these 18 wheelers and of course with our weather down here, we’ve had some instances where they don’t make it to their final destination.”
On May 15, Border Patrol agents at a checkpoint near Laredo, Texas, discovered a semi-trailer with 120 illegal aliens locked in the back, according to Customs and Border Protection. The aliens included 11 juveniles from Honduras and Guatemala and 109 adults from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Ecuador, and Mexico.
But it doesn’t stop at the checkpoint. The smuggling networks are vast and the opportunities to extort more money are always on the table.
“In one intelligence briefing that I read, even some of the family units that were given papers to come into the United States, they’re finding them in stash houses in Houston. And they’re being held against their will to continue to force the family to pay the smuggling debt,” Guerra said. “These females … it turns from human smuggling into human trafficking. They’re forced into either labor or they’re forced into the sex trade to help pay their smuggling debt.”
Guerra suggested that the criminal enterprises in Mexico are now making more money from smuggling humans than they are from smuggling drugs.
“Probably within the last six years, we noticed a change from drugs to humans,” he said. “There’s a lot of money in smuggling humans. It could cost anywhere, per head, on a per alien basis, as low as $1,500 to as high as $15,000.”
A Chinese man who Border Patrol apprehended on April 18, told The Epoch Times that he paid $15,000 to fly from China to Mexico and cross the border illegally. He said he had planned to go to New York and a friend in Beijing had put him in contact with a smuggler.
A group of five Mexicans, who Border Patrol apprehended on the same day, said they had paid a smuggler $1,500 up front and planned to pay the rest, $5,500, after they successfully crossed the border.
A Honduran man with a 13-year-old girl handed themselves over to Border Patrol after crossing illegally. The man said the girl was his daughter and that he had paid $1,800 for the both of them to cross. They planned to go to Houston.
A back-of-the-envelope estimation for the anticipated 1 million illegal alien apprehensions in fiscal year 2019 comes out at $1.8 billion paid to smugglers, if applying the cheaper amount of $1,500 per head and accounting for a low estimate of those who evade capture.
Criminal Records
In July 2018, HSI and Border Patrol arrested 18 alien smugglers and 117 illegal aliens from three stash houses in a month-long investigation in the El Paso area, according to an ICE press release.
The illegal aliens were from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Brazil, El Salvador, and Peru. Agents also seized cash, nine vehicles, three tractor-trailers, and more than 1,000 lbs. of marijuana.
Several of the illegal aliens had prior criminal records, including a 34-year-old Guatemalan with an outstanding warrant out of Florida for driving under the influence; a 30-year-old Mexican with ties to a Mexican drug cartel; and a 32-year-old Mexican with convictions for child endangerment and driving while intoxicated.
All Neighborhoods
Stash houses—such as houses, trailers, and even motels—can be found in all types of neighborhoods, including gated communities.
“It can be a nice neighborhood to a dilapidated house, mobile home,” Guerra said. “Sometimes they’ll even stash these individuals out in wooded areas.”
“The majority of them are being rented,” Guerra said. “So these landlords, either for one they don’t know or they just don’t ask any questions because they’re getting paid. They might be getting paid $1,000 a month for something that might regularly go for $400 or $500 a month.”
In Hidalgo County, Guerra said his department has a “pretty aggressive” public awareness campaign about stash houses, including letting people know what to look for.
“A lot of vehicles coming in and out, especially at night. Most of the time the windows will be covered—they don’t want people to know,” Guerra said. “A lot of trash being collected or discarded from a house that normally houses a family of three or four people … a lot of trash being dumped on a daily basis. So, we get a lot of those calls from our community.”
Staton said, in some cases, calls have come in from individuals who are complaining because bathrooms are stopped up and raw sewage is coming out onto the streets.
Democrat presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke says employers should be able to hire foreign workers instead of Americans whenever there are “labor demands.”
The labor policy announced by the Texas Democrat would allow U.S. employers to replace millions of Americans with cheap foreigners whenever Americans ask for more pay, better working conditions, or family leave.
The replace-Americans policy was buried in O’Rourke’s repetition of the progressive claim that the United States is a nation of immigrants and his call for two amnesties. “Let us rewrite our immigration laws in our own image,” O’Rourke declared in a May 21 CNN town hall in Des Moines, Iowa. Ge continued:
Let us reflect our values, our reality, the best interests and traditions of this country that is compromised of immigrants, and asylum seekers and refugees. Free every one of the more than one million dreamers [illegal migrants] from any fear of deportation by making them U.S. citizens here in their homeland and then give others who are laboring in the shadows right now, working some of the toughest jobs that we can imagine. Let’s bring them out of the shadows, allow them to contribute to their full potential, put them on a path to citizenship, and ensure that our visa quotas match the labor demands we have here, our desire to have families be able to reunite, and have everyone contribute to the share greatness and success of this country.
The progressive audience applauded O’Rourke’s plan to allow coast-to-coast outsourcing of their jobs and their children’s’ jobs.
Let’s not only honor our asylum laws and never again take another child from another parent at their most desperate and vulnerable moment, but let's guarantee that all separated families are reunited. Then we will rewrite our immigration laws in our own image. #CNNTownHallpic.twitter.com/sKoQ0nrEgL
Beto’s replace-American, hire-foreigner policy matches the recommendations of the staff working for former President George W. Bush, also from Texas.
Employers should be allowed to freely hire foreign graduates for middle-class jobs, according to the Bush Center’s November 2018 recommendations. “Congress and the Administration should eliminate, or at least increase, the visa cap” for foreign college graduates, because “Industries like agriculture, construction, landscaping, and hospitality rely on low-skilled foreign workers to fill vacant jobs … A higher cap [on the inflow of workers] tied to labor market demand would better serve the needs of American businesses.”
If Americans’ wages and salaries begin to rise, the imported labor will be rushed in to end the labor shortage, the Bush recommendations suggest. Imported labor would spread through the economy where rising “wage levels signal where the most pressing labor needs exist,” the recommendations say.
The center’s open border for business plan echoes the repeated efforts by President George W. Bush to enact a pro-investor “any willing worker” law which would allow employers to hire anyone from around the world whenever Americans declined to take jobs offering low wages. Bush’s “any willing worker” plan was blocked in 2001, so he backed amnesties in Congress in 2006 and 2007 which created the open-ended “Probationary Z Visa.”
The Z visa plan offered work permits to all migrants who reached the United States within one year — and gave border officials just 24 hours to prove the migrants’ documents were fakes. The ambitious proposal quickly failed.
Dem. Sen. & Pres. hopeful Amy Klobuchar mimics Jeb Bush on immigration, says migrants spur economy. Well, yeah, extra labor does help investors & CEOs & real-estate owners. But it hurts people who pay rent w/ lower salaries. Did Jeb win any state in 2016? http://bit.ly/2Sbw9DX
In 1990, Bush’s father, President George H.W. Bush, signed an immigration deal that roughly tripled the legal immigration rate, shifted wealth from wage earners to investors, and spiked stock market values.
O’Rourke’s American-replacement speech echoed the progressives claim that the United State is a “Nation of Immigrants,” not a nation of Americans and their children. In an October 2018 article for Time magazine, Democratic Rep. Joe Kennedy explained the government-boosting Cold War origin of the “Nation of Immigrants” claim:
Few felt it as deeply as President John F. Kennedy. In his 1964 book A Nation of Immigrants, recently re-released, my great-uncle outlines the compelling case for immigration, in economic, moral, and global terms. “The abundant resources of this land provided the foundation for a great nation,” he writes. “But only people could make the opportunity a reality. Immigration provided the human resources.”
The book was published one year before Congress junked the low-immigration rules which the public had won in the 1920s. In place of those 1920 rules, which helped to boost wages and salaries until the early 1970s, Congress in 1965 opened up the immigration gates, so flooding the labor market with roughly 45 million legal and illegal migrants.
Since 2016, Donald Trump’s low-immigration “Hire American” policy has helped to push voters’ wages up by three percent nationwide during 2018. Wages rose by 4.6 percent for people who switched jobs, and by 5.2 percent in Minnesota where migrants have increased the labor force by only ten percent. Wages barely climbed during 2018 in states that have a large percentage of imported labor.
Nancy Pelosi is promising to raise wages via gov't socialism, but Trump's "Hire American" immigration/labor-supply policy is nudging wages up by 3-4 percent a year. Yes, politicians competing over rival wage-raising policies would be a great thing. http://bit.ly/2Vgymzk
Trump’s wage gain for American families is dismissed by many upper-income progressives who are welcoming the flood of Central American illegal migrants into the blue-collar economy.
The wage gain is being dismissed because many progressives now argue that racism is the root cause of the United State’s economic and racial disparities, and is the primary motivator in the nation’s immigration policies. This moral fervor began around 2012, and is dubbed “The Great Awokening.” Politically, the claim allows wealthy progressives and post-graduate professionals to elevate their perceived social status by smearing many Americans as deplorable racists. In part, Trump was elected in 2016 by the popular rejection of the snobbery.
Ironically, salary gains for white-collar professionals have lagged behind blue-collar gains in Trump’s economy. One cause of this disparity is that a wide variety of employers employ a population of at least 1.5 million white-collar, non-immigrant visa-workers, hired via the H-1B, OPT, L-1, and other visa programs.
Background numbers to know:
Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or university.
But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including roughly one million H-1B workers — and approximately 500,000 blue-collar visa workers.
The government also prints out more than one million work permits for foreigners, tolerates about eight million illegal workers, and does not punish companies for employing the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants who sneak across the border or overstay their legal visas each year.
This policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth for investors because it ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.
This policy of flooding the market with cheap foreign white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor shifts also enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors even as it also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, and hurts children’s schools and college educations. It also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions. The labor policy also movesbusiness investment and wealth from the heartland to the coastal cities, explodes rents and housing costs, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest and rewards investors for creating low tech, labor-intensive workplaces.
George W. Bush's Bush Center posts pro-migration, pro-business video which writes Americans out of American history: 'America’s story is an immigrant story,' says the video, which even describes some Americans as immigrants. http://bit.ly/2TTxfsF
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