Watch: Arizona Border Town Remains Shut Amidst Uncontrolled Flow of Migrants
LUKEVILLE, Arizona — A warning sign has been placed at the entrance of the Organ Pipe National Monument area, recommending tourists refrain from entering the area due to ongoing Customs and Border Protection (CBP) operations. Nearby, the town of Lukeville is completely shut down and void of human presence. At the same time, Breitbart Texas witnessed a constant flow of mostly African migrants crossing the border wall and walking through the Organ Pipe National Monument, hoping to secure their freedom in the United States on Tuesday evening.
This Breitbart video shows signage placed by CBP at one entrance to the monument, cautioning travelers to stay out but offering no clue as to what lies ahead. After driving past the sign, Breitbart Texas observed CBP Office of Field Operations (OFO) personnel — those normally tasked with inspecting legitimate travelers and cargo at the port of entry shut down because of the migrant crossings — performing duties once reserved for Border Patrol agents.
The Lukeville port of entry nearby is completely void of any legitimate trade and travel. As Border Patrol personnel driving vans and buses shuttled migrants to a processing facility from the Organ Pipe National Monument reserve, a stream of mostly African migrants continued to cross the border unabated. The video shows a line of migrants stretching for as far as the eye can see, walking on a self-guided quest along the border wall, searching for Border Patrol agents to surrender to.
The migrants ultimately found OFO personnel instead. The CBP OFO staff from the shuttered port of entry corralled the migrants at a staging area and began loading them into the arriving vans to leave the desert area. The available transportation resources proved insufficient to move the hundreds of migrants Breitbart Texas watched.
The port in Lukeville has been closed for more than one week, rattling the few local business operators who rely on tourist travel for their livelihood. A convenience store, restaurant, and a duty-free shop were closed on Tuesday and will likely remain shuttered until the port reopens. The reopening date remains a mystery, according to an employee at the food mart fueling station in Why, Arizona. The store, 30 miles from Lukeville, provides services to local residents but relies heavily on cross-border travelers for revenue. According to an employee who spoke to Breitbart Texas, the store reduced the hours of operation and may close on certain days if business remains slow.
Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs (D) visited Lukeville over the weekend after sending a scathing letter to the White House on Friday criticizing the closure of the port of entry. Hobbs is demanding $512 million in federal funds to offset state expenses to cope with the migrant surge into her state. Hobbs described the closure of the port, writing, “The decision to close the Lukeville Port of Entry has led to an unmitigated humanitarian crisis in the area and has put Arizona’s safety and commerce at risk.”
Hobbs added, “Our ports of entry are essential to our state and our country’s economy, and it is vital that they be properly staffed and resourced to continue to fuel economic growth in the state.” Despite the governor’s pleas, the unabated flow of migrants continues, and the town of Lukeville remains shuttered.
The constant surge of migrants crossing into the United States at the Arizona border resulted in a simultaneous increase of migrants being released into the country to pursue asylum claims as Border Patrol-operated processing facilities in the region remain over capacity. As reported by Breitbart Texas, detention capacity and transportation issues have resulted in hundreds of migrants waiting days to be transported away from the border wall in Lukeville.
Randy Clark is a 32-year veteran of the United States Border Patrol. Prior to his retirement, he served as the Division Chief for Law Enforcement Operations, directing operations for nine Border Patrol Stations within the Del Rio, Texas, Sector. Follow him on Twitter @RandyClarkBBTX.
White House Sets Border Deal: 1 Million Illegals Per Year and $61 Billion for Ukraine
President Joe Biden’s border chief has a deal for the GOP: He will carefully cap illegal migration at one million a year if the GOP approves $61 billion for war in Ukraine, according to press reports.
The offer would double pre-2021 immigration numbers, but it is a “good faith offer,” said one of the four GOP negotiators told reporters.
“We’re at 11,000” illegal migrants per day or roughly 4 million migrants in a year, Sen. Thom Tillis told CBS on December 13, adding:
We’ve seen what the White House has sent over … We’ve got to get somewhere closer to … 2,000 [migrants] a day [or 700,000 a year], and let’s figure out how we get it done. But I think I’m going take it as a good faith offer, which is why I think we have to act in good faith and stay here [in Washington] until we get it negotiated.
Tillis is a long-standing supporter of the federal migration programs that deliver cheap labor to investors and companies.
He was picked by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to help negotiate a deal that would curb Biden’s mass migration in exchange for $14 billion to help quietly move migrants into American housing and jobs — plus roughly $61 billion for the war in Ukraine.
But it is “not remotely possible” to get a deal done by Christmas, countered Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
“They’re using this to try to put something together — I’m not going take the bait,” Graham told PunchBowl News on December 14. Graham is another one of the four GOP negotiators and he is taking an unexpectedly pro-American stance in the talks.
The Washington Post reported on December 13:
President Joe Biden is not part of the talks, despite GOP pleading.
Instead, the Biden deputy who organized and funded the migrant flood is leading the talks, according to the Post:
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has been a lead negotiator for the administration for weeks. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Natalie Quillian and Shuwanza Goff, director of the White House office of legislative affairs, joined the talks in a more substantive way this week, lending them momentum.
GOP House legislators are not part of the talks, even though they have refused to fund the Ukraine war until the White House agrees to their H.R. 2 border stabilization bill.
Mayorkas is also offering GOP Senators to expand the reach of the fast-track “Expedited Removal” process and to detain new arrivals. But these powers are already in the law, and Mayorkas has long ignored both because he is a pro-migration zealot.
The offer to cap the daily inflow of migrants is being portrayed as a souped-up Title 42 process established during the coronavirus crash. When Mayorkas was confirmed in 2021, he immediately reduced enforcement of Title 42 at the border, so allowing many more migrants into U.S. communities.
Since then, Mayorkas worked hard to maximize the government-managed flow of migrants into the United States, despite the huge economic damage to ordinary Americans. He has repeatedly stated that he sympathizes with migrants, not the Americans who want their border laws to be enforced.
RELATED: Brownsville, TX Drone Footage Reveals LARGE Migrant Camp at U.S.-Mexico Border
NEWSNATION /TMX“I am, to a great extent, aligned with the expectations” of the immigrant community, the Cuban-born Mayorkas told an elite audience at the Aspen Institute on July 19. He has also lamented his limited ability to supply U.S. employers with cheaper foreign workers. “Regrettably, our legal immigration system is not designed to meet the needs of employers here in the United States,” he said in March 2023.
Yet establishment media outlets are portraying Mayorkas’ offer as “harsh” or a “pretty major concession” — even though they would do nothing to stop the millions of migrants who walk over Mayorkas’ loopholes in the border.
The loopholes include Mayorkas’ multiple parole pipelines, his asylum loopholes, and his tacit support for “gotaway” migrants who sneak past the unfinished border war and over the unguarded portions of the wall.
“Republicans are not so much being asked to compromise as to conspire in Biden’s lawbreaking,” responded Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor. In an article for National Review, he wrote:
Not petty lawbreaking but rather a betrayal of the core security duties of the presidency that is destroying the social welfare and law-enforcement capabilities of America’s border states and major cities. Given how boiling angry much of the country is over this issue, I don’t understand why Republicans aren’t driving a much harder bargain.
The four GOP Senators in the talks reportedly include Tillis, Graham, Tom Cotton (R-AR), and James Lankford (R-OK).
The only GOP Senator with mainstream views about migration is Cotton. The other three Senators are deemed “moderates” in D.C. because they favor the long-standing federal policy of allowing companies to hire cheap foreign migrants instead of paying market wages to American citizens.
Tillis, for example, recently told reporters that he wants to preserve Mayorkas’ quasi-legal policy of annually awarding two-year parole visas and work permits to roughly 350,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
The policy is slated to add roughly 700,000 wage-cutting, rent-boosting foreign workers to the U.S. labor market. It operates alongside the H-2A and H-2B visa programs which annually bring in more than 300,000 foreign workers for a wide variety of jobs across the nation.
RELATED: NewsNation Drone Footage Shows El Paso Border Day Before Title 42 Ends
NEWSNATION / TMXBut Graham — the founding member of the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty — is taking a surprisingly pro-American stance in 2023.
“I will not go back to South Carolina and try to explain why I helped Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel and did nothing to secure our own border,” Graham told reporters last week. “I will help all of our allies, but we’ve got to help ourselves first,” he added.
That centrist position has been adopted by many other GOP Senators.
For the moment, Graham is shutting down Mayorkas’ offer and is rejecting the vote scheduled for next week by the Democrats’ pro-migration Senate Majority Leader, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY).
“Another show vote on the supplemental —with inadequate or nonexistent border security measures — does not move the ball,” Graham told Punchbowl News. “I’m looking for outcomes, not timelines,” he said, adding, “There’s no legislative text.”
Latino Democrats Tout Migrants as Their Constituents
Democratic Latino politicians are demanding President Joe Biden protect the interests of foreign migrants, regardless of the huge civic and pocketbook damage to unhyphenated Americans, Latino-Americans, and legal immigrants.
“We are here to protect immigration as it is,” Rep. Nanette Barragan (D-CA), told an audience of legislators, activists, and media at a December 13 rally beside the Capitol.
The rally called on President Joe Biden to deny any significant concessions to GOP negotiators in the debate over his demand for $14 billion in emergency funds to accelerate and hide his migration flood, and funds for wartime aid for Israel and Ukraine.
Barragan said:
Let me put it a little differently. We’re here to call on President Biden and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to reject the immigration and border bills at the hands of Republicans in the ongoing negotiations around the supplemental [emergency funding bill]
The event included multiple Democratic legislators who championed illegal migrants and future migrants — and rhetorically divorced their American constituents.
Almost none of the legislators mentioned the cost of migration to their many constituents — Latino and other — who lose wages, jobs, homes, status, and investments because desperate migrants must work for less.'
Since 2021, Biden’s deputies have admitted more than six million migrants, most of whom are Latino. This huge inflow is in addition to the annual inflow of legal immigrants and temporary visa workers. Overall, Biden is admitting roughly one migrant for every newborn American.
The Latino Democrats demanded an ethnic-politics seat at the negotiations as the quasi-official representatives of the migrants, most of whom are Latino.
“Not a single member of the CHC [Congressional Hispanic Caucus] was given a heads up that the administration would be proposing or considering these right-wing nonstarters,” said Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ). “That is a hard slap in the face to all the Latino and immigrant communities we represent.”
“These negotiations are taking place without a single CHC member at the table,” said Barragan. “That is completely unacceptable … We need to continue to push to have our seats.”
The Democrats obscured the difference between illegal and legal migrants, and many described the illegal migrants as members of their constituency.
“We’re here to make things better for our constituents,” said Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX). “That’s why we are telling President Biden and the Senate Democrats to hold strong … We can pass support for allies in Ukraine without throwing immigrant families under the bus.
The event was supported by Spanish-speaking migrants from Casa de Maryland, whose leader has faced severe criticism from Democrats for apparently backing Hamas’s war against Israel.
“We can make sure that this [migration] system works … that after they cross the border, they come to us for jobs and housing, and some transportation to get to their relatives in other parts of the country,” said Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-TX).
“This is a movement to consult the most affected communities — immigrant and Latino communities and other communities across the country,” said Rep. Chuy Garcia (D-IL). “We have been excluded.”
Republicans want to “gut our immigration system at the expense of immigrants,” said Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL). “We believe that this country has a duty to help innocent migrants … We believe that all people, regardless of their status, should be treated with dignity and respect by virtue of being a human.”
“We’re not collateral damage, we’re not expendable,” said Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Az).
On December 14, the New York Times profiled some of the migrants being welcomed by the Latino politicians:
Nearly 400,000 children have come to the United States since 2021 without their parents, and a majority have ended up working ….
A 16-year-old fell off a roof in Arkansas and shattered his back. A 15-year-old in Florida was burned all over after he slipped from a roof and onto a vat of hot tar. A child in Illinois stepped through a skylight and fractured his spine.
Some of the Latino politicians promised their support for Americans — but ignored the pocketbook impact caused by their flood of migrant workers and renters.
Republicans “view this as an issue that they can win on the political front … at the expense of people who are sacrificing so much to have their shot at their American dream,” said Rep. Robert Menendez (D-NJ). “We will win the future of this country that looks like us, that’s diverse like us. and it will be better for every single American.”
The Latino politicians also used the event to promote migrant workers as a benefit to employers and the nation’s economy, even as they ignored the impact of migration on Americans’ wages, jobs, housing, schools, and careers.
“Our country thrives because of immigrants,” said Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX). “I bet every one of my colleagues can tell you stories about CEOs and business owners and leaders of industry who come to us saying, ‘We need workers, we need a workforce.'”
Biden’s economic policy of Extraction Migration has pulled at least four million extra foreign workers, renters, and consumers into the nation’s communities.
That flood is urged and welcomed by business groups because it cuts Americans’ blue-collar wages and white-collar salaries. It also boosts profits by reducing marketplace pressure to invest in productivity-boosting technology, heartland states, and overseas markets.
The inflow also reduces economic pressure on the federal government to deal with Americans’ problems — homelessness, low wages, a shrinking middle class, slowing innovation, declining blue-collar life expectancy, spreading poverty, the rising death toll from drugs, and the spreading alienation among young people.
Internal DHS Memo: Border Walls Are Most Effective Way to Stop Illegal Immigration
Border walls are the most effective tool for stopping illegal immigration at the United States-Mexico border, an internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) memo concludes.
The memo, conducted in June 2017 for then-Acting Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Kevin McAleenan, was obtained and reviewed by the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) following a public records request.
According to IRLI officials, the internal memo examined 25 areas at the border and ultimately recommended the construction of a border wall in every area. Further, a border wall was found to be the most cost-effective tool for DHS to deter illegal immigration.
IRLI’s report states:
For every area of the Southwest border examined, the audit determined that a physical barrier was not only the best option for disrupting irregular migration, but also the most cost-effective, as compared to alternatives such as electronic sensors. [Emphasis added]
The memo directly contradicts President Joe Biden’s claims that border walls are a “waste of money” and “not a serious policy solution.”
“This is vindication to those who were disparaged by this administration for their support of physical barriers at the border,” IRLI Executive Director Dale Wilcox said in a statement.
While Biden canceled all border wall construction immediately after taking office in January 2021, his administration has planned to build an additional wall in Starr County, Texas, due to waves of illegal immigration in the region.
“A border wall system makes practical and financial sense,” Wilcox said:
Cancelling wall construction on day one of this administration was just the first in a series of catastrophic mistakes on immigration that have jeopardized the long-term health of this country. We need immigration policies that serve America, not the radical anti-borders activists that have far too much influence over this White House. [Emphasis added]
During former President Donald Trump’s tenure, his administration built about 370 miles of border wall — 80 miles of which were built in places along the border where no prior barrier existed. The remaining 290 miles of border wall were built to replace old barriers.
The overwhelming majority of the nearly 2,000-mile-long southern border — more than 60 percent — has no physical barrier separating the U.S. from Mexico.
Amidst record-setting illegal immigration levels under Biden, Americans now more than ever support a border wall. In October, a Fox News poll revealed that four out of seven registered voters supported the DHS building additional border wall.
“Americans, who are justifiably concerned about border security, should be asking themselves why Joe Biden and [Secretary of Homeland Security] Alejandro Mayorkas are so eager to prevent the construction of physical barriers on the southern border,” IRLI’s Director of Investigations Matt O’Brien said.
“… [W]alls have repeatedly been shown to be the cheapest and most effectual way to protect both national security and public safety,” he said.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
GRAPHIC: Messages Indicate Sinaloa Cartel, CJNG Helping Gulf Cartel in Turf War
A message scrawled on a posterboard and left next to the bodies of eight murdered cartel gunmen points to a dangerous new alliance. The message reveals that a faction of the Sinaloa Cartel and the Cartel Jalisco New Generation (CJNG) are helping one side of the Gulf Cartel in an ongoing turf war.
This week, a group of gunmen dumped the bodies of their rivals and posterboards with threats in the city of San Fernando, Tamaulipas. Other gunmen took the bodies away before police could arrive leaving only blood on the floor where the bodies had been dumped.
A series of photographs and videos that were shared through Whatsapp messages and on social media are the only evidence left of the mass killing attributed to the Escorpiones faction of the Gulf Cartel. A narco-message left next to the bodies mentions MZ ( the Sinaloa Cartel faction led by Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada) and CJNG, claiming that they are not welcome in Tamaulipas and that their allies would not back them up.
The eight victims are believed to be gunmen siding with the Old School Zetas or with a group known as Sierra Fox that is based in San Fernando. That group is led by a man known as “Chuy 7.” It remains unclear if they were locals or if they were gunmen from other cartels and had been helping the San Fernando groups.
As Breitbart Texas has reported, the Old School Zetas and the Metros faction of the Gulf Cartel began fighting with the Escorpiones faction earlier this year over key territories. Since the fighting began, the Metros have been claiming to have the support of CJNG. Rumors began circulating in recent weeks that gunmen from Mayo Zambada’s group had also been wanting to enter Tamaulipas.
Despite the mass killing, on Wednesday morning, the Tamaulipas government posted on social media that the state had gone through 24 hours without a single murder. The outlandish claims come at a time when government officials have been working to minimize the appearance of violence while locals live in constant fear.
Editor’s Note: Breitbart Texas traveled to Mexico City and the 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 their original Spanish. This article was written by “Francisco Morales” and “J.C. Sanchez” from Tamaulipas.
No comments:
Post a Comment