Monday, March 11, 2019

OFF THE RICHTER SCALE EARTHQUAKE IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST


CITY JOURNAL

https://www.city-journal.org/pacific-earthquakes?utm_source=City+Journal+Update&utm_campaign=51c4c80672-



Off the Richter Scale

Can the Pacific Northwest prepare for the cataclysmic quake that’s coming?
Winter 2019
Public safety

Americans have long dreaded the “Big One,” a magnitude 8.0 earthquake along California’s San Andreas Fault that could one day kill thousands of people and cause billions of dollars in damage. The Big One, though, is a mere mini-me compared with the cataclysm forming beneath the Pacific Northwest.
Roughly 100 miles off the West Coast, running from Mendocino, California, to Canada’s Vancouver Island, lurks the Cascadia Subduction Zone, where the Juan de Fuca Plate is sliding beneath the North American Plate, creating the conditions for a megathrust quake 30 times stronger than the worst-case scenario along the notorious San Andreas, and 1,000 times stronger than the earthquake that killed 100,000 Haitians in 2010. Shockwaves will unleash more destructive force against the United States and Canada than anything short of nuclear war, a giant asteroid strike, or a civilization-threatening super-volcano.
We didn’t even know a megaquake was coming until recently. When I was a kid, growing up in the mid-Willamette Valley in Oregon, earthquakes were California’s problem. Everyone, including scientists, thought us immune. Seismic hazard maps shaded California red and Oregon green. Geologists knew about the Cascadia Subduction Zone, but they thought that the Pacific and Juan de Fuca Plates weren’t locked—that the subduction was smooth, as if the continent were greased with lubricant. University of Washington geologist Brian Atwater proved them wrong in the late 1980s. Oregon had recorded no earthquakes since American pioneers colonized the territory in the nineteenth century, and the native population had no written records, but the earth itself keeps copious records of geologic events, once one knows where to look. Atwater’s first clue was the “ghost forests” along the Oregon and Washington coasts, drowned by seawater, covered by sand and landslide debris, and then exposed by beach erosion. According to tree-ring dating, every one of those forests was buried in 1700. Something extraordinary happened that year. Sea levels can’t rise six or more feet in a year. The coastline itself must have plunged into the ocean. Later, beach erosion exposed yet another ghost forest, in the small town of Neskowin; this one was 2,000 years old.
Atwater then collaborated with Japanese seismologist Kenji Satake, who dug up long-forgotten reports in his own country of an “orphan tsunami”—a violent tidal inundation not preceded by a local earthquake—that also occurred in 1700. Scientists scrambled for core samples of the ocean floor just off the American coast and found turbidites—layers of tsunami debris—that date back millennia and, most recently, again, to 1700, revealing a cycle that repeats itself every 300 to 600 years. The Cascadia Subduction Zone is not quiet, after all: it triggers catastrophic megathrust quakes, on schedule. “A fault that ruptures with this big of an earthquake every few hundred years is ragingly active,” says Yumei Wang, a geotechnical engineer at the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries (DOGAMI).
A 9.0 megathrust quake is too powerful even to be measured on the now-dated Richter scale. Megathrust quakes are measured instead on the Moment scale. Like its predecessor, the scale is logarithmic. Every whole-number increase represents an energy release 32 times greater than the whole number before it. An 8.0 earthquake is therefore 32 times more powerful than a 7.0, and a 9.0 roughly 1,000 times more powerful.
Of the three West Coast states, Oregon is the most vulnerable. “We’re less prepared here,” says geologic-hazard analyst John Bauer, also at DOGAMI. “Washington has had more earthquakes recently, so they’re better prepared, and California, too, of course. We didn’t adopt a culture of preparation until the mid-1990s.” Portland is also closer to the subduction zone than Seattle or Vancouver, so it will experience more violent ground shaking. And the Oregon coast is considerably more populated than anywhere else in the tsunami’s path. “We’re not overdue,” Bauer says. “But we’re due.”
The megathrust quake could strike at any time. Not even the most hardcore adrenaline junkies will want to be anywhere near when it does. “It will be,” says Andrew Phelps, director of the Oregon Office of Emergency Management, “the worst natural disaster in American history.”
When it happens, the earth will slip by roughly 60 feet along a rupture zone more than 600 miles long, unzipping the sea floor at roughly two miles per second and convulsing the West Coast for as long as five minutes. Bridges will fall. Wet soil will liquefy. Brick and masonry buildings will shatter. Skyscrapers built before modern earthquake codes may topple. City centers in Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver will be buried beneath glass shards and rubble. Everything underground—water mains, natural gas pipes—will be crushed. Land that has bulged upward from tectonic pressure for the past 300 or so years will collapse to baseline, permanently altering the topography and plunging low-lying coastal areas into the ocean. The inland Cascade Mountains will knock the knees out from under the earthquake, but numerous landslides will occur, especially on roads built with a “cut and fill” method, where flat slabs get cut out of rock walls and smoothed over with soft fill. Just a few minutes after the quake finally stops, the second hammer blow will strike. Tsunami waves up to 50 feet high will rip the face of the coastal region clean off the map, pulverizing everything and killing everyone in their path.
It’s hard to say in advance how many will die. It depends on the time of year and the time of day. The Pacific Northwest as far north as British Columbia has a Mediterranean precipitation pattern, with warm, dry summers and cool, wet winters. An earthquake during the rainy season will result in a lot more liquefaction and landslides. Better for disaster to strike during the summer, then—except that thousands more tourists will be at the beach and get swept away by tsunamis. The ideal time would therefore be after Labor Day, when the beach is less crowded but before the autumn rains come, and better by far at 4 AM, when schools and downtown high-rises are empty and there’s little or no traffic on bridges. “Best case,” says geologic-hazard coordinator Althea Rizzo at the Oregon Office of Emergency Management, “is between 2,000 and 6,000 fatalities.” If the quake happens during the school year, she adds, fatalities could tally in the tens of thousands. “That’s just for Oregon. And that’s not factoring in the tsunami, which will kill even more people.” The United States could conceivably lose more people in an hour, in a single part of the country, than we lost over an entire decade in the Vietnam War.

“‘No community on the planet is adequately prepared for a major subduction zone earthquake.’”

Most studies predict tens of billions of dollars in damages, but “these numbers stop making sense at a certain point,” says Phelps. “They don’t mean anything to anybody. Where do we stop counting? What about the future economic earnings of those who are killed, for example?”
Even when it’s over, it won’t be over. “We’ll have aftershocks for decades afterward,” Rizzo notes, some of them producing smaller tsunamis, “and there will be constant ground rumbling for a month or two.” “We’re expecting tens of magnitude 7s, scores of magnitude 6s, and hundreds of magnitude 5s,” says Jay Wilson, resilience coordinator for Clackamas County in Oregon.
“No community on the planet is adequately prepared for a major subduction zone earthquake,” observes Dan Douthit, spokesman for the Portland Bureau of Emergency Management (PBEM). The Northwest, however, and especially Oregon, is nerve-rackingly further behind than it should be. Nothing built here before 1995—which includes the vast majority of all structures, including skyscrapers, bridges, and hospitals, as well as houses—was engineered to withstand it.
The PBEM, by contrast, was built to endure just about anything short of an air strike. Sited atop some of the firmest bedrock in the metropolitan area, it’s one of the most seismically sound structures in Oregon, designed to be up and running at once after virtually any conceivable catastrophe. The windows might not even break. Employees are equipped with satellite phones and a radio system that doesn’t rely on communication towers. They’ll be able to talk to the State of Oregon and to FEMA. Douthit gave me a brief tour. I felt a little better.
I felt better still when I visited the Oregon Office of Emergency Management in Salem, the capital. It, too, was built on seismically stable ground. And unlike the Portland office, the state building is a military installation, the agency a division of the Oregon Military Department. “We are not sitting on our heels and waiting for something to respond to,” explains Phelps, its director. “We assume we’ll experience a 9.2 earthquake on a really bad day when buildings, bridges, and the coast are packed with people. That’s what we’re preparing to respond to, and we assume it’s going to happen tomorrow.” Says Wilson: “Too many media people ask, are we there yet, are we done? There’s such a long arc of progress that we’ll never be done.”
The brick and masonry buildings are in the most danger. Portland has more than 1,600 of them. Vancouver, farthest from the subduction zone, has the fewest. City planners there, hemmed in between the Strait of Georgia and Canada’s Coast Range, razed a huge swath of the historic city center and replaced it with high-rise condominium towers, which, of course, present their own hazards.
Nearly every Main Street in every small town and urban neighborhood in the region consists mostly of brick and masonry buildings. They’re delightful to look at, and they contribute mightily to the cultural fabric, but they’re earthquake death traps. “The city is working on a plan to require all of them to be reinforced,” says PBEM’s Douthit. “We’re offering tax credits and setting up a loan fund and a 20-year requirement to finish so it can be financed with the least amount of pain possible.” Governments won’t pick up the tab; the buildings’ owners will have to do it themselves. “For every dollar we spend on mitigation,” says Phelps, “we save six dollars or more during recovery, in addition to the lives we’ll save.”
The buildings won’t survive, however, if they’re retrofitted just to the minimum standards. The codes require life safety only, not immediate post-quake occupancy. Anything built just to code will probably have to be replaced. Nobody I interviewed for this story thinks that’s acceptable. “We already expect buildings to be replaced every 50 to 60 years in the U.S.,” observes Phelps. “I think every building should be built to immediate occupancy standards because I don’t know which one I’ll be in when the earthquake hits, and I don’t trust that if a building won’t be suitable for immediate occupancy that it will really hold up after five minutes of shaking.”
The same goes for infrastructure. All three of the Northwest’s urban areas have dozens of bridges linking cities and suburbs, and Oregon and Washington are connected by several spanning the state line over the Columbia River. Some will collapse. Most of the rest will be damaged beyond repair. The few that might still work will have to be reinspected after every aftershock. “I’ve told the state legislature that there is a difference between the cost of a bridge and the value of a bridge,” says Wilson, “especially after the disaster has happened. We’ll have to replace it after it’s gone—in the middle of the crisis. A ‘we’ll fix it when it’s broken’ attitude will just set us back.”
One upside: most houses in the Pacific Northwest were built with wood frames (this is a timber-producing region, after all), and wood houses, which are flexible, fare better than brittle brick structures in an earthquake—and better during megathrust events than in typical earthquakes. “The California-style high-frequency vibration quakes are really hard on homes,” Wilson explains. “During the long frequency quake we’re expecting here, the joists and connections should be able to handle it a bit better.”

The potential quake could be 1,000 times stronger than the one that killed 100,000 Haitians in 2010. (PAOLO PELLEGRIN/MAGNUM PHOTOS)
The potential quake could be 1,000 times stronger than the one that killed 100,000 Haitians in 2010. (PAOLO PELLEGRIN/MAGNUM PHOTOS)

The extensive amount of vulnerable physical infrastructure isn’t the region’s biggest weakness. The real soft spot is the lack of individual preparedness. Only a tiny percentage of families will be able to fend for themselves for as long as they’ll need to. “I feel like Cassandra,” says Rizzo, referring to the daughter of King Priam in Greek mythology, cursed to prophesize catastrophes that no one believed. “And the thing is, Cassandra was right.”
Local governments can’t possibly stockpile enough food to feed millions during a disaster; they aren’t, in fact, stockpiling anything. People will have to feed themselves until FEMA arrives, and the agency won’t be on the scene in a day, or even a week. Not a single road will be passable. An entire region 100 miles wide and 600 miles long will be ravaged. Many Americans have bemoaned the federal government’s response to Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico, but we’ll have hundreds of de facto islands in the Pacific Northwest. Small towns will be cut off, especially in the coastal regions, battered by tsunamis and separated from major population centers by mountain ranges. So the states are partnering with the U.S. military to provide rotary-wing aid drops from Chinooks and Blackhawks onto track fields at schools and similar locations.
Local governments once told everyone to have at least three days’ worth of food on hand that can be prepared without gas or electricity. They have since raised the bar to two weeks. Is that enough? “I don’t trust the federal government to feed me on Day 15,” I say to Phelps. “I don’t either,” he replies. “I openly share your skepticism,” says Jeremy Van Keuren, community resilience manager at PBEM, “but we don’t want to scare people.” It’s hard to encourage citizens to be resilient if they find the prospect too overwhelming. “And the quality of aid we expect to receive at the end of that theoretical two weeks is questionable.” At least it takes four weeks to starve to death.
There’s only so much that state governments by themselves will be able to do, so they’re partnering with both the federal government and the private sector. “The state isn’t good at moving critical resources around the country,” says Phelps. “It’s not what we do. You know who is good at it? Amazon and Walmart. So we’re including them in our response and will do everything we can to get them back up and running again, hopefully after Amazon’s drone army is in place.”
We aren’t all unprepared. Some of us will be able to help not only ourselves but also our neighbors. Van Keuren heads up Portland NET, a network of civilian volunteers trained, among other things, to rescue people during and after disasters. As former FEMA director Craig Fugate put it after Hurricane Katrina, “you had more rescues of neighbors helping neighbors that went unreported, because in reality in most big disasters that’s who’s going to get to you first.” It’s comforting to know that we can rely on our neighbors to help us, but many who aren’t trained end up injuring or killing themselves.
Changing that reality is a big part of Van Keuren’s job. His volunteers are trained in search and rescue, small fire suppression, medical triage, medical treatment in an acute disaster, radio communication, team organization, disaster psychology, and HAZMAT awareness. They hold field exercises at Scenario Village, the same scale-model urban simulator used by police officers and firefighters. “I like to put them into situations where they’ll screw up,” he says. “It’s a great learning experience.”
Van Keuren’s program is modeled on the Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) program developed in Los Angeles after the 1985 Mexico City quake. “If you have a community in rural Oklahoma hit by a tornado,” he says, “the volunteers can render aid until the proverbial cavalry arrives. After a Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake, the cavalry won’t show up for weeks. So my volunteers need to know more than simply first aid. They need to know wilderness first aid.” Not just rural areas and small towns but three urban areas, home to millions of people across an international boundary, will be more cut off from the civilized world than even the wilderness areas. They’ll be Walking Deadlandscapes, minus the zombies.

Some Pacific Northwest residents have purchased “tsunami pods,” survival capsules that would purportedly allow their occupants to ride out the catastrophe. (CHRISTOPHER JUE/AFLO AFLO SPORTS/NEWSCOM)
Some Pacific Northwest residents have purchased “tsunami pods,” survival capsules that would purportedly allow their occupants to ride out the catastrophe. (CHRISTOPHER JUE/AFLO AFLO SPORTS/NEWSCOM)

There’s only one sure way to survive a tsunami: don’t be there. Run as fast as you can to high ground. Oregon, again, is the most vulnerable. Canada’s Pacific coastline is almost entirely undeveloped, as wild and remote as Alaska’s. Much of Washington’s is likewise underpopulated, sometimes with long distances between settlements. The entire Oregon coast, by contrast, is a tourist attraction, studded with one small town and city after another for its entire length. An extraordinary number of people will be vulnerable to a tsunami, especially if it strikes on a summer weekend.
The West Coast has plenty of high ground, but not everywhere. “Seaside,” Phelps points out, “is the scariest place on the Oregon coast.” You emphatically do not want to be in that city during a megathrust quake. The city center is on a long, narrow peninsula, completely cut off from the mainland by the Necanicum River. You can’t get to high ground without crossing it, and every bridge that spans it will be destroyed. If you can manage to swim across—avoiding dangerous debris all the way—you’ll need to run a mile through rubble to reach the hills east of the city. You might have ten minutes; a fit person needs eight to run that far on a track.
Washington’s Long Beach Peninsula is even more vulnerable. It’s 28 miles long and home to several resort towns, and no high ground exists anywhere on it, aside from Cape Disappointment, at its southern tip. Communities there have faced a terrible dilemma for decades: abandon the peninsula or accept annihilation when a tsunami occurs.
Seattle-based civil engineer Rian Johnson recently came up with a much better option: armored mini-mountains. He drew up plans for vertical evacuation routes atop artificial triangular hills, taller than anything else in the area and shaped like ship prows to redirect roaring water around them. They’re just an idea, so far, but they could work. If the mini-mountains get built, they’ll be the first of their kind on this continent.
Tsunami pods, another safety possibility, are now available, manufactured by Survival Capsule, a company based in suburban Seattle. Made with aircraft-grade aluminum, they’re watertight and supposedly strong enough to withstand just about anything that nature can hurl at them. They come with flares and personal-locator beacons that go out on marine-band radio. A two-person capsule is spacious enough for weeks’ worth of supplies, weighs in at 300 pounds, and costs $13,500. A user should put on a helmet and strap himself in, because he’ll be in for the roughest ride of his life. “It makes people uncomfortable to think about dying,” Survival Capsule’s first-ever customer, Jeanne Johnson, said to Portland’s KOIN 6 News. “I don’t think about dying anymore. I think about having to get in here and lock the door.”
Meantime, many of the region’s coastal cities have installed air-raid sirens to warn of incoming orphan tsunamis, triggered by earthquakes too far away to be felt. The sirens are regularly tested. The loud sound would be dread-inducing, so when Cannon Beach, Oregon, tests the system, it uses the sound of cows mooingto keep everyone calm and to indicate that it’s only a test. Every coastal hotel and motel room includes tsunami-evacuation maps.
Neither homeowner’s insurance nor earthquake insurance covers tsunami damage. Only the federally guaranteed National Flood Insurance Program covers such damage, and that maxes out at $250,000 for a structure and $100,000 for its contents. If your house was three feet above the high-tide line and ends up joining the old “ghost forests” three feet below after the bulging North American Plate sinks into the ocean, your property will cease to exist. No one will bail you out. Yet there’s no prohibition against new construction in the inundation zone, and people still build. (Insuring your home against earthquake damage remains surprisingly cheap: just $200–$300 a year. The deductibles are high, however—tens of thousands of dollars, in most cases.)
The Pacific Northwest is going to get knocked back 100 years,” Phelps says, but things could be even worse post-quake, post-tsunami. When my own Victorian house was built, there was no indoor plumbing and no electricity, but you could traverse the roads and buy things at stores, and the railroads and seaports remained operational. No one had to depend on government aid from the sky just to survive.
We won’t need 100 years to dig out of a megathrust-caused disaster, but the extent of the crisis will be so overwhelming that other countries will swoop in to help. Australians, Canadians, and New Zealanders already come here every year to help fight wildfires, so they’ll be available. (Well, maybe not the Canadians: they’ll have their own catastrophe in British Columbia to contend with.) “The Israelis will be here, too,” Phelps says. The Israelis regularly mobilize after humanitarian disasters, though they rarely get any credit for it. They were the first aid workers to arrive in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, for example. “Our focus for the first two weeks,” says Phelps, “is delivering food, water, and medical supplies, and evacuating people who need serious medical help.” Evacuate them where? “Denver and Houston. Wherever they need to go.”
The cities will be studded with BEACONs—Basic Earthquake Communication Nodes, a primitive network that will be the start of recovery efforts. There’s one within a 25-minute walk from every location, and they should be activated within a day or two of the disaster and outfitted with tents, radios, and first-aid equipment. In theory, access to clean water should return fairly quickly, though it won’t come out of the tap for more than a year. We’ll have to walk (or, eventually, drive) to a distribution center to get it. Electricity should come back online within a few months, but indoor plumbing and sewer systems will take more than a year to get running, major highways will remain disrupted for a year and a half, and restoring health-care facilities could take up to three years. Initial repairs to the electrical grid will entail workarounds. Utility companies will patch things temporarily to get the service in. As for water, aboveground pipes will be working before the broken underground pipes are replaced. All this work will be conducted, initially, in an enormous field of rubble. “When I was in Japan three months after the T¯ohoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011,” observes Wilson, “they didn’t just have mountains of debris. They had mountain ranges. They had football fields of cars three on top of each other. Every one of those cars was a biohazard. It still gives me nightmares.”
Since then, the Japanese have taken extraordinary steps to protect themselves. Some coastal communities have been relocated to higher ground, but there isn’t enough high ground in the country to accommodate everyone, so the government is raising the height of the seawalls and the coastal plains themselves with material excavated from mountains. Americans would almost surely never do these kinds of things; we’re lucky enough, on an uncrowded, sprawling continent, not to have to.
Our own trajectory will more likely resemble that of Christchurch, New Zealand, knocked low by a catastrophic quake in 2011. All of downtown shut down for more than two years, and some of it remains closed today. Parts of the city have been abandoned forever; residential areas prone to liquefaction are returning to greenspace. Thousands of residents had to rebuild somewhere else. “After recovery, we will live in a different community,” says Douthit.
It’s hard to see it from here, and it will be nearly impossible to believe it during the immediate aftermath, but the Pacific region of the United States and Canada could even emerge, Phoenix-like, bigger and better and stronger than before—not just a repaired community more resilient to natural disasters, but in many ways a brand-new one, reforged from the ground up and more cutting-edge than it already is. “The new Pacific Northwest is going to be a showcase for what ingenuity can look like,” avers Phelps. He points to Greensburg, Kansas, a small town of 1,500, completely destroyed by an F5 tornado in 2007. Greensburg had to restart from zero, so its residents figured that they might as well do it right. Today, they have more LEED-certified (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) houses and buildings per capita than any other place in the world. And that’s a small, provincial town in “flyover country,” thousands of miles from anywhere that anyone would think of as advanced.
After annihilation, then, rebirth? Or, as Ernest Hemingway put it in A Farewell to Arms: “The world breaks everyone and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.”

INVASION OF TEXAS - BILLIONAIRE BETO "BETOMATIC" O'ROURKE'S STATE INVADED!

76 Migrants Found in Refrigerated Trailer near Texas Border


Laredo Sector Border Patrol agents rescue 76 migrants who were locked in a refrigerated trailer. (Photo: U.S. Border Patrol/Laredo Sector)
Photo: U.S. Border Patrol/Laredo Sector
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Laredo Sector Border Patrol agents assigned to an immigration checkpoint rescued 76 migrants locked inside a refrigerated trailer. Authorities arrested the driver, a U.S. citizen, on human smuggling charges.

Agents assigned to the Interstate 35 immigration checkpoint between Laredo, Texas, and San Antonio observed a refrigerated tractor-trailer rig approaching the primary inspection lane last week. During an initial interview, the driver consented to a search of his vehicle, according to information obtained from Laredo Sector Border Patrol officials.
The driver moved the rig to a secondary inspection station where agents conducted a search for contraband or smuggled humans. The agents discovered 76 illegal immigrants locked in the cold trailer. The agents carried out a medical screening and found all of the migrants to be in good condition.
An immigration interview identified 62 of the migrants to be Mexican nationals. The others came from Guatemala (11), Honduras (2), and El Salvador (1).
Agents apprehended all 76 and transported them to the station for processing. They also arrested the driver and seized the tractor-trailer.
Homeland Security Investigation special agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement assisted in the investigation, officials stated.
In February, Laredo Sector Border Patrol agents apprehended 3,118 migrants who illegally crossed the border from Mexico. Only 311 of those were family units and unaccompanied minors, according to the February Southwest Border Migration report released last week by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. One year ago, agents in this sector apprehended 2,671 migrants — an increase this year of 16 percent.
These numbers stand in sharp contrast to other sectors like El Paso where agents reported a 1,689 percent increase in the apprehension of family unit migrants.
The El Paso and Rio Grande Valley Sectors combined apprehended 24,957 migrant family units in just 28 days. This amounts to an average of 891 migrants per day in these two sectors of the U.S.-Mexico Border.
Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for the Breitbart Border team. He is an original member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX and Facebook.


900 Migrant Families Apprehended Per Day in Feb. in Two Border Sectors



El Paso Sector Border Patrol agents apprehend a group of 180 Central American migrants families and unaccompanied minors on February 26 near Sunland Park, New Mexico. (Photo: U.S. Border Patrol/El Paso Sector)
Photo: U.S. Border Patrol/El Paso Sector
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Border Patrol agents in the nation’s two busiest sectors of the U.S.-Mexico boundary apprehended an average of nearly 900 migrant families per day in February.

U.S. Border Patrol agents assigned to the El Paso and Rio Grande Valley Sectors apprehended an average of 891 Family Unit Aliens (FMUA) per day in February. This represents an increase of more than 570 percent over last February’s 132 daily average, according to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Southwest Border Migration Report released last week.
“Smugglers and traffickers have caught on that the outdated laws, lack of resources, and bad court decisions effectively give them a ‘free ticket’ into America,” U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Neilsen told the House Homeland Security Committee last week. “Make no mistake: the problem is getting worse.”
Neilsen said that a disturbing trend in the overwhelming number of migrant families crossing the border is the increasing number of fraudulent family claims. She testified that her agency witnessed a 620 percent increase in families, or those posing as families, who are apprehended at the U.S. border with Mexico.
She said her agents have observed “recycling rings, where innocent young people are used multiple times to help aliens gain illegal entry. As a nation, we simply cannot stand for this.”
During an interview last month on Breitbart News Sunday, Breitbart News Border/Cartel Chronicles Director Brandon Darby said this is a direct consequence of U.S. laws that allow migrants arriving at the U.S. border with a child to remain in the country.
“If you come with a child you cannot be deported — by child we mean anybody under the age of 18,” Darby explained. This is basically telling human traffickers to attach a child to your migrant caravan and say that everybody that’s with that child is a family member, and you get in.”
“All they have to do is kidnap a baby and they get to live in the United States now,” he stated. “That’s all they have to do, is show up with a kidnapped baby. We have no way to prove it — we’re not DNA testing, we have no way to prove it.”
The El Paso and Rio Grande Valley Sectors apprehended nearly 25,000 of the more than 36,000 migrant families apprehended in the nine southwest Border Patrol sectors in February. This represents nearly 70 percent of all migrant family apprehensions along the U.S.-Mexico border last month.
During a press conference last week, Border Patrol Chief of Operations Brian Hastings told reporters current U.S. laws prevent any consequence for the migrant families crossing our border. “Today, 70 percent of all of those we are arresting are from the (Central American) northern triangle — Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras,” Hastings stated.
“Without being able to deliver a consequence to these individuals for crossing our border, the Border Patrol has no reason to expect that this trend will decrease — in fact, we believe it will increase,” he predicted. “It’s well known at this time that immigrants with children will not be detained during the immigration proceedings. The word of mouth and social media quickly gets back to those in the northern triangle countries that ‘If you bring a child, you’ll be successful.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin K. McAleenan told reporters that his agency is putting additional resources and processing centers in place to help “manage” the increased flow of family migrants.
“The fact is that these solutions are temporary and this situation is not sustainable,” the commissioner stated.
Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for the Breitbart Border team. He is an original member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX and Facebook.

every single one of these clowns are for amnesty, wider open borders, more welfare for invaders and bring up the rest of your heavy breeding family for generations of "cheap" labor!

2020 Democrats Flock to Star Studded South By Southwest Festival





AUSTIN, TEXAS - MARCH 09: Beto O'Rourke attends the 'Running with Beto' Premiere 2019 SXSW Conference and Festivals at Paramount Theatre on March 09, 2019 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for SXSW)
Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for SXSW
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AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A big chunk of the 2020 Democratic field began making Texas an unlikely early-state stop Saturday and pushed back on big tech in front of young, social-media savvy crowds in a city where companies including Google and Apple have big footprints.
Texas is an early primary state, but the real draw of the South by Southwest Festival in Austin for Democrats is face time with the party’s ascendant young and liberal wing. The festival has grown from obscure roots into a weeklong juggernaut of tech, politics and entertainment.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts defended her new call to break up tech giants to an audience dotted with employees of some of those very companies. Her appearance began with her interviewer asking tech employees in the crowd to stand up. Warren scanned the room as several people got on the feet.
“There are parts about big tech that are frankly just like railroads of the Teddy Roosevelt era,” she said. “What’s new is old. When someone gets market dominance, how then they start to destroy competition.”
Warren was also asked whether Sen. Bernie Sanders discouraged from her entering the race. She wouldn’t divulge details, calling it a private dinner.
Other highlights of Saturday campaigning:
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AMY KLOBUCHAR
The Minnesota senator kicked off SXSW with promises to reign in tech companies and saying that she has spoken to former President Barack Obama about her own presidential ambitions.
Klobuchar wouldn’t go as far as Warren when asked whether Google or Facebook should be broken up.
“I would want to have it investigated. That is how I do things,” she said. If anti-competitive problems are discovered, Klobuchar said, “then you come up with a plan to break up or to move something out if there is a piece of it that is anti-competitive.”
Klobuchar criticized the tech industry for not protecting privacy and floated the idea of taxing social media companies when they sell personal data, but she did not give specifics.
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KAMALA HARRIS
The California senator said she’s committed to shoring up rural communities, a message the Democratic presidential hopeful shared with voters in some of the most sparsely populated parts of the early voting state of South Carolina.
Harris told a crowd of several hundred gathered in tiny St. George that a national infrastructure of crumbling roads and bridges makes it difficult for people in communities like this one to get to their jobs, which may be miles and miles away.
Harris also said she wants to make changes to rural hospital funding, tweaks that she hopes will lead fewer health care facilities in such areas to close.
In remarks to a small-business summit in North Charleston, Harris pledged to help build back America’s image abroad, which she said has been damaged by President Donald Trump.
“What we have seen recently is a president who is conducting foreign affairs by tweet. On Day One, I would make it very clear that I value the importance of diplomacy. I value relationships. And that doesn’t take any strength from us, any power from us — it gives us power,” she said.
Speaking with reporters, Harris said that she wanted more information about the investigation into former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort to be made available to the public.
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BERNIE SANDERS
Sanders told a packed house in Des Moines that as president his power to reform industries and institutions would be limited, but he’d still fulfill his campaign promises with their support.
The Vermont senator said “no president, not the best-intentioned in the world, can take on those extraordinarily powerful forces.” He went on to say: “But we have something they don’t have — we have the people.”
The crowd packed into the Animal Learning Center on the Iowa State Fairgrounds roared their approval of Sanders, who is making another run for the Democratic nomination. Many were decked out in his 2016 campaign gear or waved “IA loves Bernie” signs.
About 50 volunteers showed up to support Sanders at the final stop of his three-day swing through the state, part of an Iowa volunteer force that he said already totals 7,000.
“We need you to add to that number,” he said, to roars from the crowd.
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JOHN HICKENLOOPER
Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper said during his first trip to Iowa as a candidate that it would be “crazy” to drive out everyone who’s in the U.S. illegally.
Hickenlooper launched his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination this week and is positioning himself as a uniter who can get things done. On immigration, Hickenlooper said both sides need to sit down and that hardliners must accept some realities.
“To think we’re ever in this country, that was founded and defined by immigrants, to expel 10 million to 11 million people is crazy,” Hickenlooper said.
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BETO O’ROURKE
O’Rourke swung by the trendy and techie SXSW, too, but still didn’t announce whether he will embark on a White House run.
Officially, O’Rourke wasn’t part of the lineup at SXSW. The former Texas congressman attended a documentary about his longshot U.S. Senate campaign that may or may not become the springboard to a White House run.

BILLONAIRE BETO “BETOMATIC” O’ROURKE PROCLAIMS AMNESTY FOR 40 MILLION INVADING “UNREGISTERED” DEMOCRAT VOTING ILLEGALS.
No word on America’s homeless, housing or jobs crisis for Legals!

UPDATE ON BILLIONAIRE BETOMATIC’S ASSAULT ON AMERICA’S BORDERS AND CULTURE

 

Beto’s solution to the wall issue: let the rest of Mexico jump our open borders and vote democrat for more and no wall will be needed!

 

IS BETOMATIC A CLONE OF BANKSTER-OWNED BARACK OBAMA, THE LA RAZA SUPREMACIST WHO SURRENDERED OUR BORDERS FOR 8 YEARS AS HE AND HOLDER SERVICED THEIR CRONY CRIMINAL BANKSTERS.

https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/02/is-beto-betomatic-orourke-nothing-more.html

 “Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes.  This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” – Karen McQuillan  AMERICAN THINKER.com
OBAMANOMICIS:

Further, nearly 60% think that the next generation will be worse off than they are. And few have any faith that the economic outlook for the country will improve in the near or distant future.
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There are many parallels between “Betomania” and “Obamamania,” and O’Rourke has been called the “white Obama.”


He is married to the daughter of a billionaire, so if nominated, Democrats would have a hard time attacking Republicans for supporting a billionaire president without being accused of hypocrisy. 

“Beto also questioned whether the Constitution was still relevant, which makes one wonder how seriously he would take the oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” should he be sworn in as president.”

WORDS OF A PSYCHOPATH BARACK OBAMA:

"In his 2006 autobiography The Audacity of Hope, then-Senator Obama wrote, “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”  That is why Obama won the presidency, and should O’Rourke win too, that is why he will have won" 

Rio Grande Valley Border Chief: We Have Intercepted Migrants from Bangladesh, Turkey, Romania and China





By Terence P. Jeffrey | March 8, 2019 | 4:41 PM EST






U.S. Border Patrol Rio Grande Valley Sector Chief Rodolfo Karisch (Screen Capture)
(CNSNews.com) - Rodolfo Karisch, chief of the U.S. Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector, told the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight, Management and Accountability on Thursday, that the Border Patrol in his sector has intercepted illegal aliens trying to enter the United States “from 40 different countries, including Bangladesh, Turkey, Romania and China.”
“I want to provide some perspective on the challenges facing our men and women at the Southwest border,” Karisch told the committee in his opening statement. “Though I cannot speak for all of the components of Customs and Border Protection, I can provide a first-hand account of the complex border-security environment and ask for your assistance in helping our frontline men and women.
“In our line of work, Border Patrol agents rarely know exactly who or what they will encounter,” he said.
“In a single day,” he said, “and agent may arrest a violent felon, encounter a large group of families and children, or rescue a drowning migrant sent into the river by smugglers.”
Karisch told the committee that in his sector, the Border Patrol apprehends “nearly a thousand people between the ports of entry each day.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has divided the U.S.-Mexico border into nine Border Patrol Sectors. Running from the Pacific Coast to the Gulf of Mexico, these include: the San Diego Sector, the El Centro Sector, the Yuma Sector, the Tucson Sector, the El Paso Sector, the Big Bend Sector, the Del Rio Sector, the Laredo Sector, and the Rio Grande Valley Sector.
[Government Accountablity Office map of U.S. Border Patrol Sectors]
Although most of the illegal aliens the Border Patrol intercepts in the Rio Grande Sector come from Central America, Karisch explained that agents in his sector have apprehended illegal aliens from “all over the world.”
“The majority of the apprehensions are family units and unaccompanied children from Central America, and many travel in large groups of a hundred or more,” the Rio Grande Valley Sector chief said.
“In addition to the high volume of Central Americans, we encounter people from all over the world, many of whom don’t want to be caught,” he said.
“In my sector alone, we have encountered aliens from 40 different countries, including Bangladesh, Turkey, Romania and China,” he said. “People are travelling thousands of miles across hemispheres to attempt to illegally enter the United States, using the same pathways as Central Americans.
“Contrast this incoming tide of migrants,” Karisch told the committee, “with our limited resources and infrastructure at the Southwest border, particularly in the Rio Grande Valley and Tucson Sector.”
Of the 303,916 who were apprehended that year along the U.S.-Mexico border, only 127,938—or approximately 42.1 percent—were from Mexico.
1,364 of the deportable aliens intercepted on the U.S.-Mexico border in 2017 were from the People’s Republic of China. Of these, 702 were intercepted in the Rio Grande Valley Sector.
564 deportable aliens from Bangladesh were intercepted on the U.S.-Mexico border in 2017. Of these, 304 were intercepted in the Rio Grande Valley Sector.
433 deportable aliens from Romania were intercepted on the U.S.-Mexico border in 2017. Of these, 94 were intercepted in the Rio Grande Valley Sector.
35 deportable aliens from Turkey were intercepted on the U.S.-Mexico border in 2017. Of these, 21 were intercepted in the Rio Grande Valley Sector.
FOR EIGHT YEARS AND AFTERWARDS, OBAMA, HOLDER AND PELOSI HAVE BUSTED THEIR CORRUPT ASSES TO GET MORE ILLEGALS INTO OUR VOTING BOOTHS.

 We’ve got an even more ominous enemy within our borders that promotes “Reconquista of Aztlan” or the reconquest of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas into the country of Mexico….. AND THE ENEMY IS THE LA RAZA SUPREMACIST GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY!

DYING AMERICA: Poverty, Open Borders, Widespread Homelessness, Housing Crisis, Opioids, Corrupt Politicians and Then Suicide!

"In a state like Florida, where immigrants make up about 25.4 percent of the labor force, American workers have their weekly wages reduced by perhaps more than 12.5 percent. In California, where immigrants make up 34 percent of the labor force, American workers’ weekly wages are reduced by potentially 17 percent." JOHN BINDER
*
*
"In the last decade alone, the U.S. admitted ten million legal immigrants, forcing American workers to compete against a growing population of low-wage foreign workers. Meanwhile, if legal immigration continues, there will be 69 million foreign-born residents living in the U.S. by 2060. This would represent an unprecedented electoral gain for the Left, as Democrats win about 90 percent of congressional districts where the foreign-born population exceeds the national average."




Democrats Block Motion Condemning Illegal Aliens Voting in American Elections

Democrats blocked a motion Friday to affirm that illegal aliens voting in elections “devalues” the fundamental tenets of American democracy.




The House passed H.R. 1, known as the For the People Act, which was approved along staunch party lines on Friday. Conservatives and Republicans alike derided the bill at a “voter fraud and election theft” wish list.
Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) sponsored a motion to recommit before the final passage of H.R. 1, to express the sense that illegal aliens’ voting in elections violates fundamental tenets of American democracy. The motion to recommit failed, with 197 votes in favor of the motion and 228 against. One-hundred-and-ninety-one Republicans voted for Crenshaw’s motion, and six Democrats voted for the amendment.
In contrast, 227 Democrats voted against the measure and one Republican, Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI), also voted against.
Motions to recommit typically allow for the minority party to offer one more chance to kill or amend the bill before final passage. In Crenshaw’s motion, the House would send the bill back to the Judiciary Committee, which would come back to the House with an amendment condemning illegal immigrants’ voting in American elections.
Crenshaw’s motion mentions that “Voting is fundamental to a functioning democracy.”
“It is of paramount importance that the United States maintains the legitimacy of its elections and protects them from interference, including interference from foreign threats and illegal voting,” the amendment continues.
The Texas Republican’s motion also notes that the city of San Francisco, California, allowed non-citizens, including illegal aliens, to register to vote in school board elections and that federal law prohibits non-citizens from voting in national elections.
Further, Crenshaw’s motion would express the sense of Congress that “allowing illegal immigrants the right to vote devalues the franchise and diminishes the voting power of United States citizens.”




Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.



BILLONAIRE BETO “BETOMATIC” O’ROURKE PROCLAIMS AMNESTY FOR 40 MILLION INVADING “UNREGISTERED” DEMOCRAT VOTING ILLEGALS.
No word on America’s homeless, housing or jobs crisis for Legals!

UPDATE ON BILLIONAIRE BETOMATIC’S ASSAULT ON AMERICA’S BORDERS AND CULTURE

 

Beto’s solution to the wall issue: let the rest of Mexico jump our open borders and vote democrat for more and no wall will be needed!

 

IS BETOMATIC A CLONE OF BANKSTER-OWNED BARACK OBAMA, THE LA RAZA SUPREMACIST WHO SURRENDERED OUR BORDERS FOR 8 YEARS AS HE AND HOLDER SERVICED THEIR CRONY CRIMINAL BANKSTERS.

*





*

 “Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes.  This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” – Karen McQuillan  AMERICAN THINKER.com

VIVA LA RAZA SUPREMACY LIKE TEXAS’ NARCOMEX BORDER COUNTIES THAT VOTED VIVA BETOMATIC?
BETO O’ROURKE HAS BEEN ENDORSED BY MEXICO. HOW IMPORTANT WILL THE ILLEGALS’ VOTES BE?
*
“In 2018, a volunteer for the Beto campaign urged followers to transport undocumented aliens (ILLEGALS) to the polls.”
*
“Many liberals believe that anyone in the United States – citizen or non-citizen – should be able to vote.  If they want to make that argument and change the law to make it happen, they are more than welcome to try.  Of course, if they run on that issue, they will get slaughtered at the polls.  So instead of going to the American people and working to change the law, they try an underhanded dirty trick to achieve the same goal.” APOLO VILLALOBOS

"American elites continue focusing on a global order while ignoring the decline of the United States. A broken America will be unable to meet any geopolitical threats abroad. Any national security strategy that does not begin with securing our own national security at home will be doomed to fail." DANIEL GREENFIELD




Knowing that the wall will become a reality if the President gets the cash brings out the cheap-labor-express, wealthy power brokers like the Billionaires for Open Borders: Michael Bloomberg; Rupert Murdoch; other distinguished members of the Forbes 500; and, as Lou Dobbs often reminds us, the "globalists, the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, Koch brothers and Wall Street." 

LA RAZA SUPREMACIST BETO “BETOMATIC” O’ROURKE… openly endorsed by Mexico!
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/12/rep-beto-orourke-celebrates-his.html
O’Rourke tweeted his support for hundreds of undocumented people into American communities.
*
“Many thanks to volunteers & donors who ensure that we take care of families being released by ICE in El Paso. 200 to be released today. Over 500 tomorrow.” BETO O’ROURKE
*
 We’ve got an even more ominous enemy within our borders that promotes “Reconquista of Aztlan” or the reconquest of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas into the country of Mexico….. AND THE ENEMY IS THE LA RAZA SUPREMACIST GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY!
 THE PELOSI DOCTRINE:
SERVE BILLIONAIRES WITH EVEN CHEAPER LABOR AND EVEN WIDER OPEN BORDERS.
MORE MONEY LOST FROM FOOD STAMP FRAUD THAN IS SPENT ON A WALL TO DEFEND AMERICAN AGAINST THE LA RAZA HEROIN CARTELS OPERATING OVER, UNDER AND IN OUR OPEN BORDERS!
LA RAZA SUPREMACIST BETO O’ROURKE… openly endorsed by Mexico!
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/12/rep-beto-orourke-celebrates-his.html
O’Rourke tweeted his support for hundreds of undocumented people into American communities.
*
“Many thanks to volunteers & donors who ensure that we take care of families being released by ICE in El Paso. 200 to be released today. Over 500 tomorrow.” BETO O’ROURKE
*
 We’ve got an even more ominous enemy within our borders that promotes “Reconquista of Aztlan” or the reconquest of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas into the country of Mexico….. AND THE ENEMY IS THE LA RAZA SUPREMACIST GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY!

Six Cartel Gunmen Killed in Fight with Mexican Military near Texas Border

NUEVO LAREDO, Tamaulipas – Military troops assigned to this border city killed six gunmen from a faction of Los Zetas during fierce gun battles. After the shootout with the gunmen from the Cartel Del Noreste faction of Los Zetas, the military seized.50 caliber rifles, machine guns, tactical equipment, and several allegedly stolen trucks.



The clashes took place over the weekend along one of the highways that connect the border city of Nuevo Laredo with Monterrey. This highway is considered of great importance for international cargo trade between the United States and Mexico. In the first shootout, a patrolling convoy of soldiers came under attack by vehicles filled with cartel hitmen. This encounter set off a fierce gun battle where one cartel gunman died. According to information revealed by Tamaulipas authorities, military officers seized several SUVs left behind by the gunmen after they crashed or rolled over during the battle. Authorities also seized two .50 caliber rifles, several Ak-47 rifles, and other pieces of tactical equipment.
In a second shootout along the same road, another group of cartel gunmen attacked a military convoy. This set off another fierce gun battle where five cartel hitmen died. After that shootout, authorities seized several vehicles, rifles, and pieces of tactical equipment.
The gunmen behind the attack were members of Cartel Del Noreste, a faction of Los Zetas led by the narco-terrorist Héctor Raúl “El Tory” Luna Luna. The drug lord is the same person who, as Breitbart News reported, carried out a grenade attack on the US consulate in Monterrey in 2008. Authorities arrested him in 2010 and after spending several years in prison, he was suspiciously released last year by a federal judge in Mexico. After being released, Luna took control of the CDN and has since unleashed a campaign of terror. His gunmen directly attacked police and military authorities in Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, and Coahuila. Under the orders of El Tory, the CDN also left numerous dismembered bodies with threatening messages against their rivals.
Editor’s Note: Breitbart Texas traveled to the Mexican States of Tamaulipas, Coahuila, and Nuevo León to recruit citizen journalists willing to risk their lives and expose the cartels silencing their communities.  The writers would face certain death at the hands of the various cartels that operate in those areas including the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas if a pseudonym were not used. Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles are published in both English and in their original Spanish. This article was written by “J.M. Martinez” from Tamaulipas and Tony Aranda from Nuevo Leon.