Thursday, July 11, 2019

CHARLOTTE CUTHBERTSON - BORDER LIES - THE DEMOCRAT AIDS AND ABETS AN INVASION

Low-skilled immigrants also tend to vote Democrat, she said.
“They tend to back big government, big welfare programs, and higher taxes … a plus for the Democratic Party,” she said.
“I just think it’s a political war. If the Democrats take the White House in 2020 and they’re true to their word, they’re going to open the immigration system even further.”

Abolishing ICE Means Letting the Worst Criminals Imaginable Stay in the USA




The call to abolish ICE is repeated over and over again in American politics. This mantra is likely to be repeated with even greater frequency and intensity as the race for the Democrats’ presidential nomination heats up.
But what does ICE actually do?
A quick look at some of their actions from the past few weeks reveals the agency to be an unambiguous force for good.
Date: June 21, 2019
The street value of that much cocaine is north of one billion dollars. Though opioids have been getting almost all the attention whenever our country’s drug epidemic is discussed, thousands are killed by cocaine every year, too. The number is climbing as well.  The Washington Post notes that, “Overdose deaths from cocaine increased by about 18 percent each year during the five-year [2011-2016] period.”
Date: June 21, 2019
The man in question, Houcine Ghoul, was a strong supporter of ISIS, and believed in violently imposing Islam worldwide. In their press release on the matter, ICE gives this background to his case:
The investigation into Ghoul’s conduct began in April 2014 when Ghoul posted a photo online that explicitly displayed support for the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), a designated foreign terrorist organization. This photo displayed an individual holding a sign with the Arabic phrase, “The victory of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,” and then below in English, “ISIS,” and “N. Carolina, USA,” the state where Ghoul was then residing. The photo later appeared in an online propaganda video posted by others to display worldwide support for ISIS. Though he did not use his actual name or identity for the online accounts, Ghoul provided a self-description within the account, “Extremist, terrorist, tough, brain-washed, radical, I love explosions, booby trapping, beheading the enemy, and am among the supporters of establishing the religion with the sword.”
Later, when Mr. Ghoul applied to become an American citizen, he lied and claimed to have never been affiliated with a terrorist government or advocated the overthrow of a government. Now, he’s one less threat to worry about.
Date: June 24, 2019
ICE targets the worst of the worst, and notes that while all were in the country illegally, the arrest records of this bunch also included, "assault, battery, domestic violence, traffic offenses, driving under the influence, drug possession, drug trafficking, larceny, illegal re-entry after deportation, illegal entry, resisting officers, and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.”
Looking over the details of this action also reveals how porous our southern border really is. Quite of a few of these criminals had been arrested and deported years ago. For example, one 25-year-old Honduran who had a prior conviction for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon had been deported before. Now that he has been apprehended, he faces “federal prosecution for re-entry after deportation.” Another arrestee, a 32-year old Mexican had also been deported before. This guy is an active gang member with prior convictions for robbery, evading arrest, and aggravated assault.
Who wants these thugs in America?
Date: June 25, 2019
Here again, we see how ICE only targets active criminals -- often of the most despicable sort. They make this as clear as can be:
ICE deportation officers carry out targeted enforcement operations daily nationwide as part of the agency’s ongoing efforts to protect the nation, uphold public safety, and protect the integrity of our immigration laws and border controls….  During targeted enforcement operations, ICE officers frequently encounter other aliens illegally present in the United States. These aliens are evaluated on a case-by-case basis, and, when appropriate, they are arrested by ICE officers.
The rap sheet of this round-up included, “drug possession, assault, dangerous drugs, illegal entry, larceny, marijuana possession, possessing a weapon, failure to identify and identity theft.” The most monstrous of them all being a Honduran man wanted for the rape of a minor.
So when politicians say they want to abolish ICE, are they saying America should give these people citizenship and leave them alone?
Date: June 26, 2019
Another case of a horrendous human being committing crimes in the US after having been deported. This man, José Ramón Aguilar-Moreno, had been sent back to El Salvador in 2003 after he was convicted of sexually abusing a child. But he came back and started posting child pornography to Facebook. He got busted and now faces up to 80 years in prison.
When Kamala Harris says she wants to abolish ICE, is she hoping for the support of men like this?
Date: July 3, 2019
In 2016, Michael Cerdas Molina was convicted of sexual assault against a minor in his native Costa Rica. He tried to dodge prison time by hiding out in the US. But now ICE has busted him, and he will complete his sentence in his homeland.
Under what rationale should this man have been allowed to stay here?
Date: July 3, 2019
The prior convictions of this group is enough to give you goosebumps: “three counts of murder, two counts of rape, two counts of aggravated assault, five counts of aggravated assault with a weapon, two counts of assault, sexual assault,  three counts of attempted murder, burglary, child abuse, lewd act on a minor, driving under the influence, larceny, stolen property, two counts of firearm possession, two weapon offenses, traffic offence, forgery, three counts of robbery, resisting arrest, auto theft, and seven drug convictions.”
Now each and every one of them is back in Cambodia where they came from, and headed for prison, where they belong.
Supporters of terrorism, drug-peddlers, murderers, rapists, child pornographers, and violent criminals. These are just some of the terrible people ICE has rid us of in just the last three weeks.
ICE shouldn’t be abolished; it should be expanded.

Open Borders Advocates Are Using Changing Narratives With Impunity, Says Expert


July 10, 2019 Updated: July 11, 2019

NEWS ANALYSIS
WASHINGTON—The extreme flip-flops in narrative about what’s happening at the southern border, should, in theory, discredit the storytellers, says Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of “The War on Cops.”
But they’re not.
In lockstep, Democrats and many media outlets pushed a narrative at the end of last year that there is no crisis at the southern border, and that the “crisis” was a tale manufactured by President Donald Trump to play to his base and get money for his wall—a “vanity project,” according to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
In June, the narrative swung to say that not only is there a crisis on the border, but it’s so bad that there are even state-sanctioned concentration camps.
“It’s clearly opportunistic. The Democrats are swiveling to whatever position seems to put them in opposition to Trump,” said Mac Donald.
“In theory, the blatant reversals should discredit the proponents of this narrative that now has gone to the opposite extreme. I frankly don’t think it will. I think the people who are in sympathy with the knee-jerk criticism of Trump are willing to go along with whatever twists and turns the anti-Trump narrative takes. So, one could posit in theory that it would undermine their position. I think in the battle of competing ideologies, the inconsistency probably doesn’t matter.”
Since January, Border Patrol has been apprehending more and more illegal immigrants at the southern border every month. Agents warned that the system was being overwhelmed—facilities were overcapacity, medical issues were getting more complicated, and agents were unable to secure the border.



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Border Patrol EMT agent J. Birmingham shows his medical gear in the back of his truck after conducting a medical screening on 39 illegal aliens who have just crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico into the United States near McAllen, Texas, on April 18, 2019. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

Trump called it a crisis, in a national address from the Oval Office on Jan. 8, but the establishment media had already primed its audiences.
CNN host Don Lemon had even discussed delaying the president’s address. “The president will say what he has to say, people will believe it whether the facts are true or not … and then, by the time the rebuttals come on, we’ve already promoted propaganda, possibly. Unless he gets up there and tells the truth,” he said.
After Trump’s address, MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace said, “The big scam of the whole address was that there’s a crisis; there’s not a crisis.”
CNN’s Jim Acosta uploaded a video to Twitter two days later while in McAllen, Texas—the busiest sector for illegal crossings on the border. In the video, Acosta stood beside a border fence and said: “As we’re walking along here, we’re not seeing any kind of imminent danger, there are no migrants trying to rush toward this fence. … No sign of the national emergency that the president has been talking about.”





I found some steel slats down on the border. But I don’t see anything resembling a national emergency situation.. at least not in the McAllen TX area of the border where Trump will be today.



Acosta failed to mention that the vast majority of illegal crossings in the McAllen area don’t occur where he was standing. Almost all illegal aliens cross the Rio Grande in an area belonging to the Fish and Wildlife Service that is closed to the public. In January, almost 18,000 illegal aliens were apprehended in the Rio Grande Valley sector.
Trump thanked Acosta the following day for helping to further the case that border walls help deter illegal crossings.
When Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, addressed the White House press corps in January, saying Border Patrol agents “will tell you that walls work,” CNN hosts and guests called it a “stunt.”

Same Evidence, Different Conclusions

The president declared a national emergency on Feb. 15.
Many media and Democrats responded again by saying the president was manufacturing a crisis.
“The president’s unlawful declaration over a crisis that does not exist does great violence to our Constitution…”  Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a joint statement on Feb. 15.
After visiting the border near El Paso, Texas, in early February, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said, “The first, most dramatic thing we found was there is no crisis at the border.”
Mac Donald suggests people’s political commitments can be pre-rational, which allows for selective viewing of evidence.



Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of “The War on Cops.” (Courtesy of Manhattan Institute)

“This is a very complicated question—where people’s political beliefs and inclinations come from—because one can observe that liberals and conservatives are viewing similar evidence, and they come to very different explanations for that evidence, and different conclusions about it,” she said.
“I’m not willing to say that one side is more substantially deficient in reasoning capacity than the other. So it would appear that there are certain innate dispositions that people have towards the importance of order, of authority, of obedience to the law and that those psychological dispositions contribute to a political worldview and they’re not arrived at through the application of syllogisms or a set of inductive or deductive reasoning.”

Numbers Without Context

By April, Border Patrol apprehended almost 100,000 illegal border crossers and the Department of Homeland Security estimated that fiscal year 2019 would see close to 1 million illegal immigrants.
Media outlets constantly reported that the numbers were far lower than record levels, propping up the “fake crisis” narrative. But the context was omitted from the reporting.
Although 1.6 million illegal aliens were apprehended in 2000, the vast majority were single, male Mexicans who could be returned to their country almost immediately.
“We would arrest them, send them back across the border, and then they would just come back. I mean, I arrested the same group three times in one shift,” Judd said on March 20. “But now, that’s not what we’re dealing with.”
Now, upward of 70 percent of illegal border crossers are family units and unaccompanied minors from Central America—both groups that require a huge amount of extra resources while in custody, after which they’re released into the United States, where most will stay indefinitely, despite close to 90 percent having invalid asylum claims.
Then-Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan warned in March that the situation was a ticking time bomb.
“With 55,000 families, including 40,000 children, expected to enter the process this month, we are doing everything we can to simply avoid a tragedy in a CBP facility,” McAleenan said during a congressional hearing on March 27.
“But with these numbers, with the types of illnesses we’re seeing at the border, I fear that it’s just a matter of time.”
The number of Border Patrol apprehensions has since increased to an average of 4,500 per day along the southern border and Homeland Security has built several temporary tent facilities to deal with the burgeoning numbers. In May 2018, the average number of apprehensions was fewer than 700 per day.
Border Patrol has said 40 to 60 percent of their agents are unable to focus on border security due to being tied up with processing and humanitarian work.
“That means our border is less secure than it was just a couple years ago. And if people don’t think [cartels] are taking advantage of that, they’re just wrong,” said former ICE chief Tom Homan on June 27.
“When you see a group of 100, 200, 300 family members coming all at once through one sector, that’s not by accident. They’re tying up Border Patrol assets so they can move bad people and contraband through unguarded parts of the border.”



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A graph depicts the number of apprehensions and inadmissibles along the southern border. The red line is fiscal year 2019. (CBP)

Changing the Tune

On May 1, the administration asked Congress for $4.5 billion in emergency humanitarian funding to help mitigate the extreme overcrowding in Border Patrol facilities that weren’t designed for housing families and large groups of people. In some sectors, Border Patrol was forced to release families within hours.
It took two months before Congress granted the funding and, within that time, the narrative swung again.
By mid-May, Pelosi changed her stance.
“We have never not said that there was a crisis—there is a humanitarian crisis at the border, and some of it provoked by the actions taken by the administration,” she said on May 16.
Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-Ill.) went so far as to imply the administration is intentionally murdering children.
“At this point, with five kids that have died, 5,000 separated from their families, I feel like, and evidence is really clear that this is intentional,” Underwood told acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan during a congressional hearing on May 22. “It’s intentional. It’s a policy choice, being made on purpose by this administration, and it’s cruel and inhumane.”
McAleenan called the accusation “appalling,” while the ranking member, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), asked for Underwood’s comments to be struck from the record.

Separating Families

The narrative of “separating children” and “ripping babies from their mother’s arms” still runs rampant.
In May 2018, the administration said it intended to start prosecuting all illegal border crossers, under the law.
The result meant that those who crossed illegally with children were separated while prosecution took place. After  major backlash, Trump issued an executive order on June 20 that stopped the prosecution of adults with children who crossed illegally.
Since then, only three instances exist in which Border Patrol will separate children—the child and adult are not related, the adult is a criminal or threat to the child, or if there is a medical problem.
Underwood, along with other Democrats and the establishment media, have continued to focus on family separations—which Trump stopped a year ago—while largely ignoring the fact that children are being rented to adults in order to get an easy ride across the border.
In 2014, fewer than 1 percent of all men apprehended by Border Patrol in the Rio Grande Valley Sector had a child with them. That number now sits at 50 percent, according to Rodolfo Karisch, chief Border Patrol agent for that sector.
“Make no mistake about it, the word is getting out: if you are part of a family, if you bring a child, you will be released,” Karisch said at a Senate hearing on April 9.



border security
A group of illegal aliens is processed by Border Patrol agents after crossing from Mexico into Yuma, Ariz., on April 13, 2019. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

In the Yuma, Arizona, sector, an average of three fake families are discovered every day.
An initiative started in May by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), using rapid DNA testing, has revealed a 30 percent rate of fraud in the two test areas of El Paso and Rio Grande Valley, Texas.
Between mid-April and May 10, ICE Homeland Security Investigations special agents interviewed 562 family units, with a full 48 percent of them being determined as fake.

‘Concentration Camps’

The most extreme narrative started on June 17 when freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said during an Instagram live post that “the United States is running concentration camps on our southern border.”
Ocasio-Cortez doubled down on her comments over the following days, drawing ire from both sides of the aisle, but not outright condemnation from Democratic leadership.
“The GOP has supported building mass concentration camps on the southern border. Kids & families are dying.
Now they want money for more,” she wrote in a tweet on June 22.
Mac Donald said the accusation is “extraordinarily demoralizing” to border agents.
“These are agents that are trying to uphold the remaining shreds of immigration law that we have—duly enacted laws. And for them to be preposterously compared to concentration camp guards, is just a huge slap in the face,” she said. “And their public reputation matters to people. So it makes it harder to enforce the law. It certainly makes it harder to recruit. And it poisons the discourse as we try to establish order on the border.”
Two reports by the Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General that addressed issues of overcrowding at border facilities were seized upon by Democrats and major media outlets to blame Trump for creating such an egregious crisis, while also starting a push to decriminalize illegal border entry.



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An overcrowded room at Border Patrol’s Weslaco, Texas, station, on June 11, 2019. (Office of the Inspector General)

The latest report, issued on July 2, stated that inspectors observed “serious overcrowding and prolonged detention of unaccompanied alien children, families, and single adults that require immediate attention.”
It also showed that from 2018 to this year, the number of family unit apprehensions in the sector had increased by 269 percent, unaccompanied children by 62 percent, and single adults by 32 percent.
After several lawyers visited detention centers holding children in Texas, they reported to media that the conditions were squalid, with children not having showered for weeks and had inadequate access to food.
Parents in Central America often send their children alone with a smuggler to cross into the United States, where they are then held separately from adults and transferred from Border Patrol to Health and Human Services (HHS). Border Patrol attempts to transfer children within 72 hours, but HHS currently has its own capacity issues.
On July 7, McAleenan appeared on ABC saying the lawyers’ claims were “unsubstantiated” and that the Clint, Texas, facility is a “clean and well-managed facility” with adequate food and water.
“I know what our standards are and I know they’re being followed because we have tremendous levels of oversight. Five levels of oversight,” McAleenan said. “Of course we’re worried about it. Everyone in the entire chain of command was worried about the situation for children.”
He said extra tent facilities have been built for housing children, but the goal is still to move them to HHS as soon as possible.

Child Abuse Narrative

Aaron Hull, chief Border Patrol agent for El Paso, Texas, was grilled on CNN about medical “outbreaks” and hygiene in the facilities.
“We encounter people from all over the world. When we encounter them and when they get their medical screening, we often find that they have scabies, lice, chickenpox, the flu. We immediately treat those people, they’re quarantined and separated,” Hull said on July 8. “The term ‘outbreak’ implies that it’s something somehow occurring or being caused in our facility.”
The reporter then asked about accusations that children weren’t being bathed, sometimes for weeks.
“Every two days, these children are getting offered shower facilities. Now, we cannot make them shower. We can take them to the shower and we can put them there, but we can’t physically make them shower,” Hull said. “It’s the same thing with brushing their teeth—we encounter children who’ve never brushed their teeth. We’ve had a lot of agents had to teach them basic hygiene. This is no secret that all of these aspects—food, water, hygiene, showers, laundry—we’re monitoring all of this. These things are documented.”
But politicians and the media are milking the child abuse narrative.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow had Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) on her July 1 show, to talk about how border security officials should be prosecuted for child abuse.
“This is inhuman. Frankly, I think it’s criminal. There ought to be criminal prosecutions of some of the agency heads for child abuse. This is clearly child abuse. It violates probably half a dozen laws,” Nadler said.
The New York Times ran a front-page lead article on July 7, emphasizing razor wire and that detention centers holding children are “the stuff of nightmares.”
Pelosi issued a letter to Democratic colleagues on July 8 saying, “We must lead a Battle Cry across America to protect the children.”

Advocating for Americans First

Mary Ann Mendoza, whose son was killed by an illegal alien in 2014, said politicians should be looking after American children first.
“Why isn’t [Pelosi] cleaning up her own state and fighting for the homeless people and children living in California?” Mendoza said. “There are hundreds of thousands of homeless American children. And none of those children matter to them. They’re never brought up, they’re never talked about.”
She said the rhetoric by the media and Democrats tries to stir sympathy for illegal aliens, “who aren’t immigrants whatsoever.”
“They haven’t filled out one piece of paperwork. Honestly, we owe them nothing. Yet, our politicians are making out that we owe them everything. Nobody in America has given Congress permission to spend the kind of money they’re spending on these illegal aliens’ behalf,” she said.



Mary Ann Mendoza, whose son Sgt Brandon Mendoza was killed by an illegal alien, stands next to the Rio Grande, which is the border between the U.S. and Mexico, in Hidalgo, Texas, on Nov. 5, 2018. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

Mendoza criticized Congress for holding “hearing after hearing” about how to help illegal immigrants, but there is yet to be a hearing for “Angel families,” who have lost loved ones to illegal alien crime.
“To know that my son’s life was senselessly taken and he was a law enforcement officer trying to uphold the laws in our cities and our state and our country, it’s just so discouraging to me,” she said.
“Nothing we do will bring our loved ones back. Nothing we say will. But if they would just listen to us and understand that these people are not all good people who are coming into our country.”

Both Ways

Ocasio-Cortez said on the New Yorker Radio Hour on July 10 that “cruelty is the point” of Trump’s immigration and detention policies.
“Treatment of migrants at our border has been this low-grade static, background noise, torture that has been happening in our country, and it has been getting worse and worse and worse,” she said.
Mac Donald said the left can’t have it both ways.
“It cannot, in the morning, proclaim that the United States and the West are the fonts of all oppression in the world and are the sources of racism and sexism, and homophobia and Islamophobia. And then, in the afternoon, also take the position that every Third-World person of color should be coming into the United States,” she said.
“They’re mutually contradictory. If this is such an oppressive place, those Third-World people of color would presumably be far better off staying [put].
“But there’s some part of the left that understands that arriving in the United States is a ticket to opportunity and gives you freedom from oppression and government violence, not the opposite. So the left is completely internally contradictory on that front, as well.”

Decriminalizing Illegal Entry

Pushing for a huge amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants in the United States, as well as the dissolution of ICE, have been themes for well over a year.
The latest effort is to decriminalize border crossings.
“A violation of status is not a reason for deportation. That’s just not so,” Pelosi said recently.
At the first debate for Democrat 2020 candidates on June 26, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro said he would get rid of Section 1325 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which deems entering the United States without an inspection a crime.
“My plan also includes getting rid of Section 1325 … to go back to the way we used to treat this, when somebody comes across the border, not to criminalize desperation. To treat that as a civil violation,” Castro said.
The next night, during the second part of the Democratic presidential debate, eight of 10 candidates raised a hand when asked if they would also do the same.



Border Patrol agent Carlos Ruiz apprehends 35 illegal aliens who have just crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico near McAllen, Texas, on April 18, 2019. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

“Continuing to send the message that there are no rules and there are no limits … that is the biggest magnet one can possibly set out. It tells people you come and you’re here. There’s no consequences to your behavior,” Mac Donald said.
“That open borders philosophy leads to this flood of people that is simply beyond the capacity of a government—no matter with how much goodwill—to respond. And, at some point, there is a limit to how many resources should be diverted from other uses in the United States to serve as the first jumping-off point to this flood of migration.”
Mac Donald said the talk of decriminalizing illegal border entry is part of an agenda to “break down any impediment for mass, low-skilled immigration from south of the border. And to say that any attempts to enforce immigration laws is somehow fascist.”
She believes the left has a desire for massive demographic change in the United States, brought forth by an identity politics position that postulates that a certain demographic profile oppresses everybody else.
“I think they really think that a predominant sort of European-based civilization in America is unacceptable, that it’s the source of all oppression in the world—which is, of course, an absurdity. And they want to change that culture, and that civilization, and that demographic reality,” she said.
Low-skilled immigrants also tend to vote Democrat, she said.
“They tend to back big government, big welfare programs, and higher taxes … a plus for the Democratic Party,” she said.
“I just think it’s a political war. If the Democrats take the White House in 2020 and they’re true to their word, they’re going to open the immigration system even further.”
Follow Charlotte on Twitter: @charlottecuthbo



Obama’s Border Patrol Chief: Border Crisis ‘Worst in Our History’

April 27, 2019 Updated: May 1, 2019

WASHINGTON—Former U.S. Border Patrol Chief Mark Morgan sat down with The Epoch Times on April 24 to discuss border security. Morgan, who led the agency during the final months of the Obama administration, is also a 20-year veteran of the FBI.
The Epoch Times: We’ve got record numbers already, seven months into the fiscal year—we’ve already surpassed last year’s numbers, and there’s a new caravan on the way. I’ve heard 10,000 to 20,000 people. What are the likely scenarios here?
Mark Morgan: Well, so it really depends. I think it illustrates a couple of things: one it’s just another example, another fact, that this is a crisis. We’re talking about a caravan now, 10,000 to 20,000.
I think the other thing that’s important that it illustrates is the failure of the government of Mexico to be a proactive partner in resolving this problem. Their southern border is completely unsecure, and the border between Mexico and the United States, the cartels own it. So it really does show the government of Mexico’s inept ability to handle this issue.
But now, with President Trump making the threats that he’s making, to close down the border, we see the government of Mexico finally starting to step up [and] we’re seeing reports that the caravan is being broken up.
But, mark my words, they’re still going to get here. Congress has still failed to do its job to protect the American people, so the same laws apply. So there’s a good chance that the majority of these individuals are still going to be allowed into the interior of the United States.
With one exception, if the president is able to continue with the new approach—the Migrant Protection Protocol—to make the individuals seeking asylum remain in Mexico, there is a chance that those numbers could be reduced. But, right now, that’s only being done at the ports of entry.
The Epoch Times: There’s no incentive for them to go to the ports of entry, because the smuggling networks don’t want them to. They want to use them to tie up Border Patrol, then bring drugs around them. So, although the Migrant Protection Protocol sounds good in practice, it’s not really having a big impact, is it?
Mr. Morgan: No. Right now, I think only about 2,000 have remained in Mexico. And so you’re absolutely right. For the protection protocols to really work, they’re going to have to apply that along the whole southwest border, at the ports and in between the ports. Because like you said, that’ll actually just incentivize even more for them to come illegally and for the cartels to continue to exploit, not only the migrants, but also our resources along the border.
The Epoch Times: Rio Grande Valley, Texas, Border Patrol chief Rudy Karisch said recently that, in 2014, of all the men that Border Patrol apprehended in his sector, fewer than 1 percent had brought a child with them. That number is now at 50 percent. What’s going on there?
Mr. Morgan: So they know now, you grab a kid, you’re in. They know, they understand that with the Flores Settlement Agreement and TVPRA [Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act]—I think those two things are what really creates catch-and-release, they know it and it’s working. Grab a kid and you’re in. And so now you’ve seen a complete change in the demographics because of that. And now you’re seeing adult males coming along. And it goes even further, the children are being exploited, right? So an adult male who wants to get across, will pay the cartels to basically rent the kid. It’s horrendous.
The Epoch Times: And so this number, from fewer than 1 percent to 50 percent, that can’t in any way be attributed to some kind of catastrophic events in their home country that happened between 2014 and now?
Mr. Morgan: No. That’s another false narrative. So if you’ll look at the Northern Triangle countries [Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador]. Whether you look at their violence, whatever element you look at it, it ebbs and flows. But yet the numbers from the Northern Triangle countries have continued to skyrocket. Why?
It’s not what’s happening in the Northern Triangle countries. It’s what’s happening in the United States. It’s the Congress’s failure to address this problem again and again. And the Northern Triangle countries getting more educated … they know once they get here, they’re in. The Border Patrol and ICE are so overwhelmed right now that a lot of these migrants coming, they’re not even asserting credible fear for asylum, and they’re still being allowed in because the agencies are overwhelmed.
The Epoch Times: I was in Yuma a couple of weeks ago, and the Border Patrol chief there said 90 percent of the people that are crossing illegally don’t even claim credible fear. I’ve also heard that there are websites and WhatsApp groups that are educating the migrants on what to say, what to do. Even coordinates on where to cross the border. What do you know about that?
Mr. Morgan: All of that is correct. I’ll give you a step further. The cartels aren’t starting those caravans—they don’t need to, because there are nongovernmental agencies and other nonprofit organizations that are actually starting the caravans.
But make no mistake, the cartels own that border. And so as they start coming through, they’re going to tax them. And they’ll take the caravans, no matter how big or small, and they’ll direct them to certain areas, so the Border Patrol can be engaged, and they’ll sneak criminal aliens in and bad things in. And so it’s absolutely being done every day.
The Epoch Times: And just to go back to, you know, sneaking bad people in. In the first six months of fiscal year 2019, 25,000 people in the Rio Grande Valley have evaded Border Patrol. Give us a little insight. Who are they? Where are they going? What are they doing here?
Mr. Morgan: We focus so much on the humanitarian crisis—those families, unaccompanied minors come from the Northern Triangle—that we’ve forgotten about the other part of this national emergency: the national threat that we face because of the southwest border.
So although 65 percent are family units and unaccompanied minors, that still leaves 35 percent of people coming across that they’re not all good. And this is the false narrative. Some of them are rapists, some of them are murderers, some of them are pedophiles. Some of them are gang members. This year already, Border Patrol has apprehended as many gang members so far in the first six months than they did all of last year. That’s a fact. It’s not hyperbole. And we need to make sure we’re being intellectually honest.
And that’s just who we’re apprehending. Again, the border is still 60 percent wide open, meaning it doesn’t have enough infrastructure, technology, and personnel. And because anywhere from 25 to 40 percent of Border Patrol resources are being pulled away and dedicated to the humanitarian side, the border is even more wide-open for the cartels to do what? Exploit. To bring drugs, contraband, and bad people in.
The Epoch Times: The Yuma Border Patrol chief said 50 percent to 60 percent of his manpower is on this humanitarian effort, not controlling the border. All three of his highway checkpoints are closed right now. And those checkpoints last year seized 1,800 pounds of methamphetamine. That’s now just flowing straight into America everywhere.
Mr. Morgan: Absolutely. And so to put it in perspective, when I was there in 2016 as the chief, I estimated about 15 percent of the Border Patrol agent resources were pulled off the line to do humanitarian tasks—that was a complete crisis in my opinion.
And now, in some sectors, it’s up to 40 percent of the Border Patrol resources are being pulled off the line. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see what that does to the border. It’s wide-open and the cartels are exploiting this every single day.
The Epoch Times: Is it that Congress doesn’t understand the magnitude of the problem or is it playing politics?
Mr. Morgan: So this is a tough question for me to answer because I’m not a political guy. I’m a law enforcement guy. So I’ve been really trying hard to just look at this from facts and historical data and not put myself in the political arena. But after serving this country for 30 years and knowing this border—both from an FBI perspective and a border patrol perspective—you can only draw one conclusion, because the facts are there.
What we need to do is very clear. Congress needs to fix the Flores Settlement Agreement and TVPRA, and catch-and-release ends. This problem, Congress could fix in 15 minutes by doing those two things, and they know that.
So I can only draw one conclusion: that they’re not doing this [is] based on their political agenda and their ideology. For me, I can draw no other conclusion from a law enforcement perspective because they know. The experts have been telling them for a very long time what they need.
We’re going to expect a million [people] this year. That’s not hyperbole, that’s fact. You know, former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson said a bad day—and I was a Border Patrol chief under Jeh Johnson—for him was 1,000 apprehensions. We’re getting 4,000 a day now. And he says, in anybody’s definition, it’s a crisis.
The Epoch Times: What is the real reason anyone in American politics would want the border to be open?
Mr. Morgan: I don’t want to get into the minds of the politicians. All I want to do is make sure the American people know that this is absolutely a crisis. And that it’s not just for the border cities or the border towns. Every city in this country is a border city. These individuals coming across are entering every major metropolitan city in this country. And there. So there’s a taxpayer burden that goes along with that.
But we have to remember, a lot of times, again, we get sidetracked with the individuals coming over here, either legally or those that are claiming asylum. We forget to talk about the ones that are entering illegally that are bad people. There are. What about the thousands and thousands of angel families, the thousands and thousands of American citizens that had been killed by illegal aliens that had ICE detainers, multiple ICE detainers that should not have been here. Those are [deaths] that could have been prevented.
The Epoch Times: Let’s say Congress does nothing, which is a high potential. How can this be fixed without the Flores and the TVPRA being tweaked?
Mr. Morgan: We have to change our complete mindset. We need to stop thinking that the Northern Triangle countries are going to fix this in the short term, that Mexico is going to be a partner in the short-term fix, or the Congress is going to be a partner in the short term. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that we still don’t work with the Northern Triangle, Mexico, and Congress. We have to. But those are long term, if at all, is going to happen.
We’ve given hundreds of millions of dollars in the Northern Triangle countries forever. And what has happened? The numbers continue to skyrocket. We’ve been working with Mexico for decades to try to get them to be part of the solution here and they’ve failed. They’re still on the sidelines. We’ve been working with Congress for decades to fix this, and they failed.
We need to look at the regulations that handle credible fear. And we need to improve the burden of proof, because we know that 85 percent of the claims are found to be unsubstantiated. So we know that there’s an issue with the credible fear. It’s too loose. We need to tighten that up.
I think we need to pass a regulation that will actually give ICE the ability to detain family units while they’re going through the immigration process. At the same time, let’s reinstitute what they used to do called “port courts.” That means we shut all the assets, a whole government approach down to the border, everything that you need, soup-to-nuts, to be able to have the immigration hearing and do that quickly. And then, if those claims are found to be substantiated, then they’ll be allowed in. If not, we remove them immediately.
And the last thing that I would do that closes that incentive package that’s out there—because again, they’re not coming here because of what’s going on in the Northern Triangle countries. They’re coming here for economic equality. That’s it. And to some degree, family unit reunification. So we need to remove that incentive. And so the last part of that is we need to ramp up our interior enforcement. There are over a million illegal immigrants who entered the country illegally, filed a false claim, have received due justice through the immigration proceedings, and they’ve found to be false, and they’ve received a deportation order removal. A million, and they still remain here illegally.
We can’t wait for Congress. We need to act ourselves.
The Epoch Times: Are all of those things possible for the administration to do without judicial interference?
Mr. Morgan: So that’s the other thing. Every single time that Congress fails to do what they do, and this White House tries to do something, what happens? Congress—the very entity that’s not doing their job—puts roadblocks up every time the White House tries to do their job.
And then, judicial activism. I’ve never seen judicial activism at the height it is now, especially on this issue. It’s just incredulous to me.
I always say if I had five minutes, I would tell [Trump]: “Mr. President, sir, stay the course, fight it. Take that to the Supreme Court.”
Because if he could win in the Supreme Court about making the asylum seekers remain in Mexico, that’s huge. I mean, right there is a game-changer to be able to do that. If we can apply the Migrant Protection Protocols along the whole southwest border, and make individuals wait in Mexico, you’re going to see those numbers go drastically down, because you’ve removed the incentive. You now will be telling them, no, you don’t get to grab a kid and get a free pass into the United States.
The Epoch Times: But what incentive does Mexico have to support the Migrant Protection Protocol. Wouldn’t they have to be a willing partner in it?
Mr. Morgan: So that’s an issue. And in Mexico, it’s very complicated. As long as the cartels are profiting from this immigration, Mexico is going to be stymied to some degree what they’re going to be able to do about it. Because the cartels own that country.
As soon as it stops becoming profitable, and starts becoming an issue for the cartels, then you’ll see them go back to their old ways of just doing drugs again. So that’s an issue that’s got to be addressed. For Mexico to be a really valuable player in this, we have to address the cartels. But here’s another thing. Let’s force Mexico to deal with the cartels a little bit more. And I think the president’s threat of shutting down the border is having an impact.
The Epoch Times: Is there anything that we didn’t cover that’s important?
Mr. Morgan: The demographic issue, because there’s a really huge false narrative out there that the numbers are not anywhere near what they used to be, so it’s not a crisis.
So back in the ’90s and early 2000s, I think we reached a height of about 1.5 million. There are two distinct differences that really drives these false narratives.
First, is that the individuals coming across were being caught and sent back two or three times on the same day. So really if you look at it at 1.5 [million], it’s really probably around a million or even less.
The second part of that false narrative is that 99 percent of them were Mexican adults, and within a couple of hours through expedited removal, we were removing 90 percent of them.
Now, this year, we’re anticipating a million, but 65 percent of them are family units and unaccompanied minors. And because of our broken laws, they get to come in, which means 650,000 to 700,000 this year are going to be allowed into the interior United States. So that’s why it’s no comparison from back in the ’90s to now. And that’s why I’ve been actually saying the crisis that we’re facing right now is the worst in our history along the southwest border.
And what the American people need to understand, too, is that of that 650,000 that we’re going to let in, 85 percent of their claims are going to be found to be false and they’re going to be given an order of deportation—which they’re not going to comply with. And so each year, each month, we’re adding tens of thousands of people that now have been ordered removed and are here illegally, and we’re not doing anything about it.
And the taxpayers are footing the bill.
The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Follow Charlotte on Twitter: @charlottecuthbo

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