In 2014, the feds attempted to [...]]]>
In 2014, the feds attempted to relocate more than 100 unlawful foreigners from south Texas to Murrieta, and the people noticed:
Below, Americans in Murrieta protested the dumping of aliens five years ago.
Now Murrieta has been targeted again for unwelcome guests, and Tucker Carlson reported by interviewing a resident who knows the drill regarding foreigner dumping:
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: Bob Kowell is a resident of Murrieta, California, where an unknown number of illegal migrants recently were brought for processing. Where are they now? Well, that’s open to question. Mr. Kowell joins us live tonight. Bob, thanks very much for coming on.
BOB KOWELL: We love you, Tucker.
CARLSON: Thanks. And we’re glad to have someone from California running the front lines of all of this, giving us an account of what is happening. So people who are in the country illegally were brought to your town. Where are they? What happened to them? What do you know?
KOWELL: They were flown in from El Paso Sunday evening, Sunday afternoon and brought up by bus from Brownsville Airport in San Diego near the border to Murrieta, which is about 60 miles north. That’s my town. And they’re for processing there. And the processing takes 24, 48, 72 hours. We don’t know exactly, but they’re there with one toilet basically.
They have, I understand, from the sources that I have that there’s tuberculosis, there is scabies and other things that are right now in our community. These people go through processing. I’m sure they’re great, some of them are great people. But then they get, I understand, a bus voucher and they go down to there — I was told that they are taken to the local Temecula Mall, which is a neighboring town and they can take a bus anywhere.
We suggest that they go to a sanctuary city like Los Angeles, like Cher’s home, or San Francisco or Portland and not Murrieta and Temecula. We are a sanctuary city for the rest of America —
CARLSON: So I am sorry, Bob, can I stop you there? Just for our viewers who are now Googling your town in Temecula, who aren’t from California, they’re discovering that you’re nowhere near the border. You’re nowhere near Mexico.
KOWELL: No, we’re not.
CARLSON: Why are people being flown and bussed to your town? Who thought of that? And what’s the point of it? Do you know?
KOWELL: Yes, well, there is a Border Patrol station in Murrieta. And so there is Border Patrol agents there. And we thank them for that. We love our station there. That station takes care of the I-15 corridor. We do — they do a lot of drug bust on that highway and a lot of these — they catch a lot of the illegal aliens on the highway. So they’re there for another purpose.
They were actually about 10 miles north of that. They had a Border checkpoint, exactly about 60 miles or 50 miles north of the border. By law, I think they could have that. We do have those in the United States. So that Border station is legally there.
CARLSON: But it’s just interesting. They’re being flown from Texas to your town. Have you or anyone else in the town being consulted on this? Has anyone asked your opinion?
KOWELL: No, actually, we found out this by inside sources that I can’t divulge. But it’s been confirmed by the Police Chief of Murrieta, they are there. And that was confirmed by a Border Patrol agent, a senior one today that I talked to that yes, they are there.
So we know that they’re there. And actually, I’ve been told that there’s 105 of them and that this is not new, that they’ve actually been coming in since 2014 when we had thousands of demonstrators out on the street in the town. So I don’t know if you know about that.
CARLSON: I do and I suspect there may be more news from your town and I hope that you’ll keep us posted on what happens. Bob Kowell, thanks very much for that update. Appreciate it.
KOWELL: Sure. Thank you.
However when the perps are foreigners in the process of invading America across the Rio Grande, they receive the assistance of Border Patrol [...]]]>
However when the perps are foreigners in the process of invading America across the Rio Grande, they receive the assistance of Border Patrol agents — in fact, the illegals are rescued and brought to the American side of the river.
On her Monday show on Fox, Laura Ingraham and her sidekick Raymond Arroyo visited the wide open border to see the action first hand.
In one segment, Arroyo rode along on a river boat with Border Patrol agents, as they performed rescues and not much that could be called enforcement. Agent Bryan Kemmett said many of the illegals jumped into the river because they didn’t want to wait to go through the official entrance.
Below, Border Patrol Agent Bryan Kemmett (left) gave the tour to Raymond Arroyo.
Arroyo suggested that the Border Patrol was incentivizing this behavior with its rescues, but Kemmett said no, they didn’t want to become a ferry service — but that is exactly what’s going on. Illegal aliens couldn’t get a friendlier, more helpful welcome from our officers who act more like social workers than cops.
Too bad the Border Patrol doesn’t work to defend the American people’s safety and our national sovereignty. Of course, they are only following orders.
Here’s a video:
]]>LAURA INGRAHAM: OK. So, you can make that out, 209 miles, OK, along the border in this sector, only four miles of fencing. And that wasn’t all. When I was surveying the border from the air, The illegal crossings and the rescues at the river exploded. Luckily Raymond Arroyo and our staff were there with the Border Patrol to capture a lot of the drama. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BORDER PATROL AGENT BRYAN KEMMETT: They’re getting ready cross.
RAYMOND ARROYO: Where will you intercept them?
KEMMETT: It’s the minute they start getting into distress.
ARROYO: This is unbelievable. You see a father and I don’t even see a flotation device.
KEMMETT: The father and a child.
ARROYO: So, he’s in the water without – the baby has got the device on.
KEMMETT: You’re going to come this side.
ARROYO: I’ll get over here. This is terrifying. I mean if a man is separated, now you have a man separated from his baby here. The baby is crying on the other boat and. Border Patrol is left to have to fish him out of the river and this happens every day.
KEMMETT: Every day all the time from sun up to sun down when the boats are in here and they’re doing this pretty much non-stop.
ARROYO: Why risk life in this way?
KEMMETT: Many of them just don’t want to wait. There’s a long wait at the bridges. They can only process so many a day. Doesn’t matter what bridge they are, but many of them just get tired and they don’t want to wait.
ARROYO: The humane crisis and the crisis for humanity is what’s forcing these people here and the entire cartel that has created a network to feel just what we’re seeing. The risk to life and limb and to you guys. You all are risking your lives.
KEMMETT: Absolutely.
ARROYO: By going out of your way to protect and in some cases rescue these migrants, aren’t you incentivizing more of them to do this.
KEMMETT: We don’t incentivize it. We try absolutely not. We don’t want to become a ferry service.
ARROYO: Right.
KEMMETT: We know that it’s a daily struggle that these guys have. But you know you can’t leave an infant in the water struggling, you can’t leave small children living in the water.
ARROYO: Here we go again, these migrants throwing themselves into the Rio Grande. The difference here, contrary to a lot of the reportage, they know they’re going to be rescued, because otherwise this current will carry them straight down. But Border Patrol always intervenes as they will.
So, this gentleman, this lady, they’re from Honduras. Apparently, they are friends there on the Mexican mainland to help them get across Mexico and here to the Rio Grande and now they’ll go in for processing.
The man and woman we saw here. The lady claims she’s from Honduras. She showed us cuts on her arms, on her head. You believe this might be part of a script.
KEMMETT: It very well could be. And we see a lot of the same story.
ARROYO: Do you think these people paid cartels to get here? They’re from Honduras.
KEMMETT: They don’t move through here without the cartels knowing.
ARROYO: Obviously, you see the tragedy of this all around the square. A father and a daughter jumped into this river thinking they were going to get some clemency, a better life and they’re now going to be taken in, processed and then eventually released here into the country because of the laws the way they are, but they put their belongings in a bag, and they jump in the water and take their chances. This is the situation here. And it really is not only risking their own lives, but the lives of these agents who are taking us out here.
Now word has gotten out that America is back to being a soft touch, despite all Donald Trump’s tough talk that scared them off at first — [...]]]>
Now word has gotten out that America is back to being a soft touch, despite all Donald Trump’s tough talk that scared them off at first — there was a substantial drop in illegal border crossers in the first months of the Trump administration.
But as the news spreads of America’s border weakness, marauding job thieves are coming from around the world, illustrated very well by a Cameroonian man interviewed on Fox News on Tuesday.
REPORTER GRIFF JENKINS: I’m about 25 miles north of the Guatemala-Mexico border in the town of Tapachula; it’s been the stop for the caravans since they started coming. But one thing is very different and that is the word that our borders are open, that catch and release will let you stay in America, has gone global. We’ve run into migrants from Africa, from India, from Bangladesh, from Haiti, from Cuba. And we’ve only been here for about 24 hours.
We spoke to one gentleman, Saffa Sedhu (sp?) is his name, from Cameroon. Here is how he got here — this is unbelievable:
SAFFA SEDHU: I’m from Cameroon, and my journey started from Cameroon to Nigeria, from Nigeria to Turkey, from Turkey to Colombia, from Colombia to Panama, from Panama to Ecuador, from Ecuador I start coming by boats, I take by boat from Colombia to Capurgana. From Capurgana I had to walk in the jungle to Panama. When I arrived in Panama, I walk from camp to camp. I left Panama for Costa Rica. From Costa Rica to Nicaragua to Honduras, from Honduras to Guatemala, from Guatemala to Mexico now.
JENKINS: The goal is the same for all of them — to get to the US.
Now this, just to give you a quick shot, is the shelter where — remember the end of last week — 1300 migrants escaped from here because Mexico is detaining the migrants in these shelters. It’s overcrowded — if you look out here, these are the folks who couldn’t even get in, and they’re sleeping in the street. It’s obviously still late here, but the challenge now is that the makeup of these caravan flows is not just the Central Americans from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and to lesser extent, Nicaragua.
Now it’s just a mix of people from all over the planet and this is obviously why ICE, CBP and others are putting a lot of resources, more resources, on the border we’re learning to particularly combat that fake family unit. We’ve been talking to the immigration officials here to try and find out if they’re doing anything here in Mexico to try and expose fraudulent family units as well.
The Cameroonian who was interviewed (pictured below) appears to be a healthy, moderately intelligent young man — why isn’t he working at home to build his own country instead of mooching off America? Instead of being a patriot in his homeland, he spent a lot of time and money to be a thief in a foreign country where he is not wanted.
Multiply him by a million this year, and it’s not only a disaster for the US as we are increasingly seen as the world’s welfare office, but the Third World countries are being abandoned by their own people.
That’s no way to run a planet that has over 7.7 billion human residents today, with no sign of slowing down.
Below, foreigners (right) carry [...]]]>
Below, foreigners (right) carry the Honduran flag on their way to invade the United States, as Buck Sexton discusses border anarchy.
Somehow, it seems unlikely that Pelosi’s open-borders Democrats now running the House of Representatives will be amenable to fixing the many legal loopholes that allow foreigners to game the system. Not that the earlier Republican legislature was much better. We still don’t even have universal E-verify, the basic American jobs protector.
Here’s the audio version plus a transcript of the interview:
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: Well it’s well-established, at least on TV, that there is no crisis at all on the U.S.-Mexico border. The very idea of that is insane.
REP. TED LIEU, D-CA: Trump and Republicans continue to lie about basic facts. The truth is there is no crisis at the Border that justifies a government shutdown.
JOE LOCKHART, FORMER WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: There is no crisis at the Border. So you’ve got to start from the place that everything the President’s saying is fiction. So, it’s very hard to negotiate with someone who’s dealing with a made-up problem.
CARLSON: These guys would literally say anything, like there’s nothing they wouldn’t say. And now, they’re saying it’s a made-up problem. It’s all just a fever dream, a product of your deranged imagination.
But wait. There is that 12,000-person caravan coming up right now from Central America. And Mexico’s new governor is making it easier for them to get here. Or did we just dream that up too?
Buck Sexton is a former CIA analyst, now with The Hill. He’s recently been on the border, and he joins us with an update. So Buck, it’s made up, this crisis on the border. Does that comport with what you’ve seen?
BUCK SEXTON: No. Members of Congress that say that either haven’t been to the border or haven’t even taken the time to speak to members of Border Patrol or Immigrations and Customs Enforcement about the many layers of crisis that are occurring right now at the border.
On one front, you just have now the increase in very serious medical cases, and this is problematic at a number of levels. You have people who are showing up, as we know. There are already two children who died in custody. They were ill when they entered custody.
But there are many people that are now coming into Border Patrol custody. And in most cases or many cases, they’re surrendering, so they’re actually actively seeking out Border Patrol knowing that they’re going to get medical services.
They’re actually having to set up now screening facilities, frontline screening facilities, for Border Patrol to deal with people showing up who have H1N1 Flu, scabies, a whole list, a litany of different communicable, very serious diseases that they have to be treated for, by the way, courtesy of the taxpayer, that often requires taking them to the nearest hospital, which takes one or two depending on the sector Border Patrol agents to accompany them to the hospital, all this, of course, paid for by Uncle Sam.
And then, you also have to deal with the drain on resources. Border Patrol guys are saying, “Look, we’ve got enough problems as it is.” They had about 30,000, close to 30,000 family units alone.
That doesn’t include unaccompanied minors. It doesn’t include people that are just trying to cross illegally, the old-fashioned way, by themselves that are showing up, turning themselves in.
And now, what’s happening is, Border Patrol’s being turned into a de facto Red Cross on our border for people who are coming up with serious illnesses, diseases, people who were eight or nine months pregnant, this is happening in increasing numbers every month.
So the problem, Tucker, is actually getting worse while people are going on TV saying there is no problem.
CARLSON: Well it’s not happening in their neighborhoods. And we need to bring all of this awesomeness, you describe, into the neighborhoods of the people making these policies, and maybe they’ll have a different view of them.
So let me ask you, since you’ve spoken recently to a lot of people who work down there, enforcing our immigration law, do they think there’s a crisis? I mean is there any doubt in their minds?
SEXTON: No. No doubt at all. I mean they’re certain that there is a crisis that’s also getting worse when you look at the strain and the drain on overall border resources. That includes the enormous, and now even bigger, because of the shutdown, backlog in the courts. It includes the way that the asylum system has not been addressed so that Congress really has to actually pass laws, because right now, if you understand the system, there are many different ways to game it.
You can come into the country effectively and skip the entire line and stay in the United States. And even though you won’t get asylum in the end, you’ll be in the interior of the U.S. That has to be addressed by Congress. There’s also a crisis of lawlessness.
One thing, I think, is interesting is when you see all these people who are going on TV and saying, “You can’t lie to the FBI, you can’t lie to the federal government,” when it has to do with the Mueller probe, well the same laws apply, same laws about lying to federal officers, to Border Patrol and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
And people who are showing up renting or borrowing children of other people pretending that they’re the — that’s fraud, Tucker. That’s actually illegal. You can’t do that.
CARLSON: How many of those felonies do we prosecute?
SEXTON: They’ve – I think they’ve gotten about under a 100 for the last 12 months of the estimated thousands that are probably occurring. They don’t really know. They don’t have the time. They don’t do DNA checks at the border. They don’t have the ability to process.
It’s essentially they have overwhelmed the system not just with medical requests, but they’ve overwhelmed the system with lawlessness because U.S. attorneys won’t even take up the cases now of, as I was told, 30-something-year-olds saying that they’re teenagers, so they can skip to the front of line, that’s illegal too. The same law that sends people like Stone possibly to jail for allegedly lying to Federal Agents can send people to jail for giving wrong age.
CARLSON: But here’s the difference if I can just say, none of those people volunteered for the Trump campaign. And if they had, they’d be in jail right now.
SEXTON: That is probably true.
CARLSON: So, probably smart enough not to do that. Buck Sexton, great to see you, as always.
A memorable aspect of the article was the photo, showing Hondurans flying their flag, speeding along on top of a bus toward their goal of invading America with [...]]]>
A memorable aspect of the article was the photo, showing Hondurans flying their flag, speeding along on top of a bus toward their goal of invading America with its abundant free stuff and jobs to steal.
The young men pictured certainly don’t look hungry or miserable. The one nearest the Honduran flag is flashing a “V” for victory sign.
Young men used to be idealistic and available for revolutionary activity to fight against injustice and totalitarian governments, but today they must think it’s just easier to flee the needy homeland and mooch off Uncle Sucker.
Unsurprisingly, the Director of the Casa del Migrante in Guatemala City Father Mauro Verzelleti remarked, “Migration is a fundamental right, and states must respect this right. . . If countries do not implement politics that permit people to remain in their countries, then they must respect the right to migrate.”
It must be reassuring to get approval from the Catholic church to invade somebody else’s country!
The church has never been strong on borders and sovereignty.
]]>Trump threatens to send troops to the border and cancel trade deal to stop migrant caravan, Los Angeles Times, October 18, 2018
President Trump threatened Thursday to scrap a crucial trade deal and send troops to the U.S. southern border in response to a large caravan of Central American immigrants heading toward the United States.
In a series of tweets, Trump said that if Mexico is incapable of stopping the immigrants, he will “call up the U.S. Military and CLOSE OUR SOUTHERN BORDER!”
….In addition to stopping all payments to these countries, which seem to have almost no control over their population, I must, in the strongest of terms, ask Mexico to stop this onslaught – and if unable to do so I will call up the U.S. Military and CLOSE OUR SOUTHERN BORDER!..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 18, 2018
Trump also threatened to cancel a pending trade deal with Mexico that took more than a year to negotiate and is designed to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement.
“The assault on our country at our Southern Border, including the Criminal elements and DRUGS pouring in, is far more important to me, as President, than Trade or the USMCA,” Trump said, referring to the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.
His threats came as an estimated 1,500 members of the loosely organized caravan reached the Mexico-Guatemala border, with thousands more expected to arrive in the coming days. Mexican authorities have closed a border crossing near the town of Tapachula, and have ordered hundreds of federal forces to the area to help immigration agents guard popular illegal crossing points along the murky Suchiate River, which forms the international boundary between the two countries.
Dozens of federal police officers stood guard on the Mexican side of the river on Thursday. It was unclear whether the immigrants would try to rush the border, as they did at the Honduras-Guatemala border several days ago, or whether they plan to turn themselves in to border authorities with the hope that they will be granted entry. The immigrants appeared ready to wait for the rest of the caravan to arrive in order to proceed together.
Mexican authorities have said that members of the caravan will be treated like anybody else seeking to enter Mexican territory: Those with proper documentation will be allowed to pass while anybody entering the country “in an irregular manner” will be apprehended and returned to their home country. (Continues)
Below, the little raft is hardly needed by the illegal alien.
Any time you’re ready, President Trump, America awaits its border wall to protect it from the thieving Third World.
]]>Video shows man on raft attempting to smuggle people into U.S. via the Rio Grande river, CBS News, July 12, 2018
ROMA, Texas — As the Trump administration intensifies efforts to curb illegal immigration, attempts to cross the U.S.-Mexico border are continuing. A CBS News crew witnessed one of those attempts on Wednesday as a man in a raft tried to smuggle two people into the U.S. Their crossing, near Roma, Texas, was less than 100 yards from a port of entry where dozens of armed agents are stationed.
CBS News’ David Begnaud said he and his crew had gone to the border to work on a story about people receiving letters regarding the border wall that President Trump wants to build in the area. After stopping at a lookout point at the border, Begnaud and his producer drove over an international bridge that goes from Texas to Mexico, crossing over the Rio Grande river. They then parked on the Mexico side, along the water.
While there, Begnaud saw a man on a raft and began filming using his phone. Two other people in the boat appeared to be wearing life jackets.
As Begnaud recorded, a man speaking in Spanish — called a scout — told him and his producer that it wasn’t safe, and told them to leave. The scout, who was using a walkie-talkie to communicate with the smuggler in the boat, followed Begnaud and his producer to their rental vehicle, leaned on the window, and told them it wasn’t safe for them there.
Within about ten minutes, Begnaud and Hooper were back on the U.S. side of the river and the border. They then saw the man who was paddling in the raft walk across the river back to Mexico.
The incident highlights an ongoing issue that U.S. Border Patrol has been talking about: people swim or walk from Mexico to the U.S. across the Rio Grande river. What was surprising, however, was that it happened in broad daylight about 100 yards from the international bridge where dozens of Customs and Border Protection officers were stationed.
(Continues)
In contrast, real immigrants want to contribute to their new country and to assimilate to the culture they have chosen to join.
Below, the front page of the Washington Post on April 30 featured a photo of invasive illegal aliens waving their Honduran flag as they demanded to be admitted to the U.S.
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: Over the past month a caravan of Central American migrants has gradually made its way up from Honduras through Mexico all the way to Tijuana opposite San Diego. At one point, Mexican authorities claimed they broke up the group, and American media of course dutifully reported that they did, but they didn’t; that was just a PR gesture and a temporary one.
In fact, during parts of the trip, Mexican police escorted the migrants northward. In other words, the Mexican government abetted illegal immigration into this country, as it has done for many years. Well tonight the caravan is on our southern border. Rather than wait for the crossing station in San Ysidro to open, many of them just jumped the fence.
Some waved Honduran flags when they got to the top. And that tells you everything. When you arrive in a country to contribute to it and to assimilate into its culture, you don’t wave the flag of a foreign nation. That’s when you do in triumph when you invade a country. According to border control, at least one member of the caravan has already admitted to being a member of MS-13.
All of this should worry us. There are only a few hundred people in this caravan, but there are billions more around the world who live amid violence and poverty, and virtually every single one of them would like to relocate to San Diego. The Left argues we have no moral right to stop any of them from doing that.
Here’s attorney Nichole Ramos of Tijuana denouncing the US government as criminal for trying to enforce our own federal law. Watch.
NICHOLE RAMOS: The message for Customs and Border Protection: Stop rejecting asylum seekers at the port of entry, you know what you’re doing, you know you turn people away; you complain that they are breaking the law by entering illegally. You are breaking the law, and you are forcing them to break the law that’s why we have Caravan.
CARLSON: Yeah it’s definitely someone you want in control over public policy, screaming into a bullhorn. This is not immigration: immigration happens with the consent of the host country. This is happening by force without our consent. A government that cared about its own citizens wouldn’t allow it to happen.
Bad things happen when you leave the door open. Every homeowner knows that. The Left is demanding that we leave our door open. Any attempt at self defense is immoral, they tell us from the safety of their segregated neighborhoods where they all live. Illegal immigrants are amazing people, they say — far better than you are, Mister Entitled American. . .
Sunday’s front page featured a photo of Venezuelans headed south to Brazil, where officials “have begun questioning the wisdom of open borders.”
The interior article reported on the turmoil created by thousands [...]]]>
Sunday’s front page featured a photo of Venezuelans headed south to Brazil, where officials “have begun questioning the wisdom of open borders.”
The interior article reported on the turmoil created by thousands of Venezuelans fleeing socialism (without the word being mentioned) on nearby Brazil. Violent crime and drug dealing are up. Homeless, hungry foreigners crowd Brazilian streets, where they line up for free food distributed by the military. (Reuters reported in February that the average weight lost by Venezuelans last year was 24 pounds.) Communicable disease is a growing problem, along with lowered wages for all because of an excess of workers.
The symptoms may sound familiar to Americans.
It’s curious how the Times never considers that borders and sovereignty might be advantageous for the United States, particularly when millions of poor people south of the Rio Grande are determined to move here.
The Times article was reprinted by WRAL.com, so click away for the whole story:
]]>Venezuela’s Turmoil Is Testing Brazil’s Limits, WRAL.com, By Ernesto Londono, New York Times, April 28, 2018
PACARAIMA, Brazil — Hundreds turn up each day, many arriving penniless and gaunt as they pass a tattered flag that signals they have reached the border.
Once they cross, many cram into public parks and plazas teeming with makeshift homeless shelters, raising concerns about drugs and crime. The lucky ones sleep in tents and line up for meals provided by soldiers — pregnant women, disabled people and families with young children are often given priority. The less fortunate huddle under tarps that crumple during rainstorms.
The scenes are reminiscent of the waves of desperate migrants who have escaped the wars in Syria and Afghanistan, spurring a backlash in Europe. Yet this is happening in Brazil, where a relentless tide of people fleeing the deepening economic crisis in Venezuela has begun to test the region’s tolerance for immigrants.
This month, the governor of the northern Brazilian state of Roraima sued the federal government, demanding it close the border with Venezuela and provide additional money for her overburdened education and health systems.
“We’re very fearful this may lead to an economic and social destabilization in our state,” said the governor, Suely Campos. “I’m looking after the needs of Venezuelans to the detriment of Brazilians.”
The tens of thousands of Venezuelans who have found refuge in Brazil in recent years are walking proof of a worsening humanitarian crisis that their government claims does not exist.
They also constitute an exodus that is straining the region’s largely generous and permissive immigration policies. Earlier this month, Trinidad deported more than 80 Venezuelan asylum-seekers. In Colombian and Brazilian border communities, local residents have attacked Venezuelans in camps.
During the early months of this year, 5,000 Venezuelans were leaving their homeland each day, according to the United Nations. At that rate, more Venezuelans are leaving home each month than the 125,000 Cuban exiles who fled their homes during the 1980 Mariel boat crisis and transformed South Florida.
If the current rate remains steady, more than 1.8 million Venezuelans could leave by the end of this year, joining the estimated 1.5 million who have fled the economic crisis to rebuild their lives abroad.
As Venezuelans began resettling across Latin America in large numbers in 2015, for the most part they found open borders and paths to legal residency in neighboring countries.
But as their numbers have swelled — and as a larger share of recent migrants arrive without savings and in need of medical care — some officials in the region have begun to question the wisdom of open borders.
Campos said she took the “extreme measure” of suing the federal government because the influx of Venezuelans led to a spike in crime, drove down wages for menial jobs and set off an outbreak of measles, which had been eradicated in Brazil.
At least 93 people were killed during the first four months of this year, already exceeding the 83 violent deaths recorded last year, Campos said. And law enforcement officials say drug trafficking in the region has increased as destitute Venezuelans have been drafted into Brazilian smuggling networks.
The population of Boa Vista, the state capital, ballooned over the past few years as some 50,000 Venezuelans resettled here. They now make up roughly 10 percent of the population. At first, residents responded with generosity, establishing soup kitchens and organizing clothes drives.
By last year however, local residents in Pacaraima, the border town, and Boa Vista, the state capital, which is 130 miles from the border, felt overwhelmed.
[. . .]
The U.N. recently asked international donors to donate $46 million to address the crisis during the remainder of this year, but so far it has secured only 6 percent of that goal. Mercedes Acuña, 50, said she felt blessed to have been among the first admitted into a shelter. She arrived in Brazil two months ago, rail thin, after an anguishing period during which she joined an ever-growing mob in the capital, Caracas, picking apart garbage for bits and pieces of discarded food.
Acuña said she had nothing but gratitude for the Brazilians who have helped her, but she has come to agree with those who say it’s time to shut the border.
“I realize we’re all in need,” she said. “But their country is being invaded.”
(Continues)
The series, with its own special title — “The Desperate Trek” — is a guilt trip from top to bottom comparing the feckless Third World with the First. And it’s likely that the sob story genre will experience even more of a boost after the Trump administration takes power.
The most striking element in the current border surge is the worldwide nature of the illegals, indicated by the December 22 story titled, ”Haitians, Africans, Asians: Tracking the sharp rise in non-Latin American migrants trying to cross into the U.S. from Mexico”. Apparently the whole planet knows that the Obama open borders will end on January 20, and the rush is on to get inside in time to disappear. Some of those foreigners bunching up in Mexican border towns have already tried Europe with no luck, and they hope for a better outcome in Obama’s lawless America.
Traveling from Nepal to Tijuana is 8,000 miles, so there’s no question that these are desperate people. But why don’t they pool that considerable energy in organizing to demand their dirt-bag governments be more accountable? Nobody wants to do the hard work of nation-building: they just want to roll in to a place where the government and economy already function.
Note that in the headline below, while thousands are making the long treks from abroad, only “dozens” are sent home. Hmm. Apparently there is no trend toward more enforcement, just a handful of sob stories to be exploited.
]]>THE DESPERATE TREK – They gambled, and lost, Los Angeles Times, December 24, 2016
Dozens of migrants braved thousands of miles of jungles, seas and bandits to reach the U.S. Then they were sent home.
On a chilly April night in the desert outside Phoenix, Rasel Ahmed, his wrists and ankles bound in cuffs, shuffled onto a bus at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement airfield with a pit in his stomach.
From his home village in the rice fields of eastern Bangladesh, the 30-year-old restaurant worker had traveled through a dozen countries to reach the United States, nearly collapsing in relief when he saw the American flag flying over the border crossing at San Ysidro.
For 18 months he bounced among detention centers in San Diego, Louisiana and Alabama, praying for an immigration judge to let him remain in the country, get a job and support his family 8,000 miles away.
Now it appeared his time had run out.
Rasel sat near the front as the bus approached a plane looming beside an empty airstrip. Two dozen shackled Bangladeshis and Indians twisted in their seats, some shouting in protest, when the bus stopped.
An immigration officer who looked to be from Pakistan barked at the group in Urdu: “You’re all going home, either alive or dead,” he said.
The ICE-chartered flight that took off from Mesa, Ariz., on April 3 carried 85 Bangladeshis, Indians and Nepalis. They had reached the end of a long, unlikely journey to the United States.
They were among thousands of international migrants whose numbers are now surging across Latin America, taking advantage of travel routes and smuggling networks forged over decades by Latino immigrants destined for the U.S.
Nearly all had started in Brazil and snaked north for months, braving dense forests, roiling waters, bandits and gang-infested towns before arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. Some attempted to sneak in illegally and were caught; others surrendered to authorities, requesting asylum.
South Asians have become some of the biggest users of this expanding immigration pipeline. In the 11 months ending in August 2016, at least 4,060 Bangladeshis, Indians, Nepalis and Pakistanis traveled to the U.S. along this route, compared with just 225 seven years earlier, according to Customs and Border Protection statistics. Of those, 3,604 were arrested while crossing illegally, nearly a fourfold increase from 2012.
The passengers on the charter flight from Arizona to Dhaka had each paid tens of thousands of dollars to traffickers who promised them a chance at a new life. But the money was gone, months had been spent attempting the treacherous journeys and languishing in detention, and courts in the U.S. had rejected their asylum claims.
They had gambled, and lost.
As an officer began reading off names of the detainees, a few men resisted and lunged toward the door. Rasel stood up too. He thought of his ailing father who had liquidated the family savings to get him to this point, the hellish journey he had survived and the shame of returning to Bangladesh.
Rasel saw an officer point a small weapon, about the size of a handgun. Then he crumpled to the floor and fell unconscious.
He awoke in an airplane seat, his body encased in a navy blue blanket unzipped to the middle of his chest. His face was bruised; his eyelids felt like they had weights attached.
Seated in the row behind him, Dalim Ahmed, a 29-year-old Bangladeshi, saw Rasel slumped in his seat, barely moving.
“He looked dead,” Dalim said.
In a tidy village in the eastern district of Sylhet, below azure hills that mark the Bangladeshi-Indian border, skull-capped schoolboys toss cricket balls in the dirt and brightly colored clothes dry under palm trees. Rasel, curly-haired and slightly pudgy, lived with his family in a two-room mud house on a plot shared with his uncles and cousins.
One uncle owned a restaurant where Rasel worked in the kitchen, earning about $40 a month. But with an eighth-grade education, there was little more he could aspire to in Sylhet. The sleepy tea-growing region’s main export is its people — fortune-seekers who have migrated to Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, taken blue-collar jobs and sent money back home.
The most desperate set off in ramshackle fishing boats for Thailand and Malaysia, many perishing in the Bay of Bengal. Those better off look to the West. In the 2000s, tens of thousands of Bangladeshis entered the United States on diversity visas, intended for semi-skilled immigrants from countries underrepresented in the U.S. population.
By 2013 so many had come that Bangladesh was dropped from the program.
“If I had applied for a U.S. visa, I would never have gotten one,” Rasel said.
Among the young dreamers of Sylhet, word spread of another option. Ecuador was allowing migrants from all over the world to fly in with little more than tourist visas. Smuggling networks offered passage up through Colombia and Panama to Guatemala and Mexico. From there, it was a bus or plane ride to the U.S. border.
The migrant trail through the Americas, Rasel decided, “was my only pathway.”
With his soft voice and delicate manner, Rasel did not seem cut out for the journey. He spoke no English; he had barely been outside Sylhet.
Then he reconnected with a childhood friend.
Mostafa Kamal had left Sylhet in 2004, flying into New York holding an immigrant visa. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen and bought a row house in northeast Philadelphia. When Kamal returned to his family’s village in November 2013, Rasel came to see him.
“He talked about the U.S. so casually. It sounded good,” Rasel said. “I knew living standards in the U.S. were better than in Bangladesh. If he said life wasn’t good there, I wouldn’t have believed him.”
Rasel’s father, Abdul Manik, was skeptical.
His second son had always been a bit starry-eyed. Rasel’s older brother was managing their one-acre farm and supporting the family; his younger brother was college-bound. His two sisters had been married, which had cost small fortunes.
A stomach operation two decades earlier had scarred Abdul Manik’s torso with grape-sized pits and weakened him so much that he could no longer work. He wondered how he could find the $30,000 smugglers in Dhaka were demanding to arrange passports, visas and plane tickets for the journey to the U.S.
“But Rasel was crazy about going,” said Abdul Manik, 65, whose short gray hair frames a round, creased face. “For three months he pressured me.”
Abdul Manik relented, selling their house and farmland to his brothers and putting his cattle up for auction. Even that wasn’t enough; he had to ask his brothers for an additional $12,000, which they only would loan him with interest.
In Bangladesh, where the average family lives on $150 a month, paying for a relative’s journey abroad is widely considered not a gift but an investment. At least 8% of the country’s economy comes from remittances sent home by workers overseas.
“I hoped he would find work in the U.S. and we would repay it,” Abdul Manik said. “He said he would support us and make me happy.”
Rasel’s older brother contacted a smuggler in Dhaka, who sent a folder with plane tickets and instructions. Rasel stuffed a couple of shirts, pants and shorts into a small suitcase and a backpack. In his pocket he carried a new Samsung phone, a gift from his aunt.
“Stay in touch with us on Facebook,” she said.
He rode a six-hour bus to Dhaka, where he boarded a flight to Dubai. It was his first time on a plane.
He hopscotched across airports in Brazil, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador, then took buses and taxis to the Colombian border. Security guards there confiscated his new phone and hundreds of dollars, leaving him with only about $150 he had stashed in various pockets.
He traded in his hard suitcase for a soft bag and boots, and ditched some of his clothes for the arduous walk ahead.
Along with other migrants and a rotating cast of coyotes, Rasel crossed mountains and rivers to get to Panama, where he spent several nights in the malarial, snake-ridden Darién jungle sleeping on his raincoat, his head resting on his bag. The sight of dead bodies lying in ditches along the trail nearly made him sick.
He drank from streams and rationed dates from his pocket, sneaking bites when others weren’t looking so he wouldn’t have to share.
At the edge of Nicaragua, he piled with a dozen migrants into a rickety fishing boat to cross the 20-mile-wide Gulf of Fonseca, bound for El Salvador. The rolling waves caused him to vomit; the salt water stung his eyes.
He and his companions were held by a Salvadoran gang for four days in a forest before being allowed to proceed to Guatemala and on to the southern Mexican border at Tapachula, a bustling migrant way station thick with Asians, Africans and Haitians aiming for America. Using the few words of English he had practiced, Rasel told the Mexican authorities that he was seeking political asylum in the United States.
They let him enter, but only on condition that he leave Mexico within 20 days. He flew to Tijuana and got a taxi to drop him near the border crossing on Oct. 14, 2014. He walked the last few hundred yards, until he could see the American flag.
Like many Bangladeshi asylum seekers, Rasel planned to argue that he needed protection because he supported the Bangladeshi Nationalist Party, or BNP, the country’s largest opposition group, which Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government has hounded with growing ferocity since 2014.
He was allowed into the United States but confined to a two-man cell at the Otay Detention Facility outside San Diego, until a date could be scheduled for him to plead his case before an immigration judge.
The vast U.S. immigration court system has not been particularly kind to Bangladeshis. Only 13% of applicants from Bangladesh were granted asylum in the U.S. in the five-year period ending in September 2015, according to statistics from the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review.
Rasel had other things working against him. His case was assigned to Judge Jesus Clemente, a former military prosecutor who has denied 93% of the asylum claims he has decided since 2011, one of the lowest rates among immigration judges, according to data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
The first test of an asylum claim is whether the defendant can demonstrate a “credible fear” that he will be persecuted if he returns to his home country. Apart from attending a couple of BNP rallies, Rasel had not been politically active. Testifying via a video link from Otay — beamed into Clemente’s courtroom 20 miles away — Rasel could offer no evidence he had been threatened or harmed for his views.
“He had kind of a wishy-washy story,” said Taryn Jelovich, an attorney who represented Rasel and other Bangladeshi detainees. “The judge came to the same conclusion.” Clemente ruled that Rasel didn’t meet the “credible fear” threshold. He wouldn’t get an asylum hearing and would be set for deportation.
But there was a delay. With his passport missing — Rasel said his was stolen in Colombia — he couldn’t be sent home immediately, and Bangladesh appeared to be in no hurry to issue a new one.
Rasel called his mother every two to three weeks and told her not to worry. But he was breaking down and losing weight.
“He’s a very gentle soul, a very slight, soft boy,” his attorney said. “It always surprised me that someone like that could endure such a harrowing trip.”
After a year, he was transferred to a detention center in Louisiana and then to a notorious facility in Etowah County, Alabama, where he was placed in a dark cell inside a six-story tower.
In October 2015, 54 South Asian asylum seekers detained in El Paso, Texas, stopped eating in protest of their prolonged detention. The hunger strike made national news and spread to more than 100 detainees at 10 facilities, including Etowah, where Rasel went without food for 12 days.
Medical staff administered saline injections every morning and evening, but after a few days he had to be taken to a hospital. As he lay on a bed in handcuffs, a doctor inserted a catheter to draw a urine sample, a procedure that Rasel recalled as “merciless torture.”
An ICE officer who was monitoring him said, “Whether you eat or not, we’re never going to let you go free.”
Rasel broke his fast. Four months later, on a morning in March, a guard marched him down to the main floor. He was driven 450 miles to a detention center in Louisiana, then flown to a facility in another state, then to Arizona, where, although he didn’t know it, the charter plane would be waiting.
But the ordeal wasn’t over.
At the airfield in Mesa, as several of the detainees struggled to avoid being loaded onto the plane, ICE officers fired Tasers and wrapped them in full-body restraint blankets, according to accounts from Rasel and others.
Officers took cellphone videos of the prisoners as they lay on the ground, they said, then grabbed the bags by the handles and heaved them onto the plane, some landing with a thud.
“Like they were sacks of vegetables,” said Ahmed, the fellow Bangladeshi who had seen Rasel slumped in his seat.
The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general is investigating the incident.
ICE denies using Tasers to subdue the detainees, saying “deportation officers are not issued such devices.” The agency’s guidelines, however, allow for the use of weapons that deliver electric shocks.
Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for the agency, said officers did employ restraint blankets — tight cocoons that leave only the head and feet exposed— after “approximately a dozen of the detainees refused to comply with officers’ instructions and became combative, endangering themselves and ICE officers.”
Rasel was shackled and kept in the blanket throughout the flight to Bangladesh, more than 30 hours with stops. ICE officers removed the restraints shortly before he and 26 other Bangladeshis stepped off the plane early April 6 at the airport in Dhaka.
“I came to the U.S. because I thought they stood for human rights,” Rasel said. “But look what happened to us.”
The cellphone rang in the middle of the night in Sylhet. It was Rasel, who hadn’t called in weeks.
“Where are you?” asked his mother, Pinjira Begum.
“Mom, I’ve been deported,” Rasel answered.
That didn’t sink in immediately. “Can you call someone?” she said.
“Mom, I’m in Dhaka.”
She let out a soft gasp. His father took the phone and told him to come home. Rasel at first refused, but finally he got on a bus back to Sylhet. When he got home, he collapsed in his father’s arms.
Seven months later, in mid-November, the family was living an hour’s drive from their former home at the clean, spacious house of a distant relative, who had offered the place rent-free.
“The money is gone, but at least I got my son home,” Abdul Manik said, his voice cracking.
Rasel was too depressed to work. His brother-in-law, a supplier of stones for construction, tried to bring him on as an assistant but Rasel showed little interest.
He has stayed in touch with other ex-migrants he met on the deportation flight, trading Facebook messages. Occasionally, they run into each other in the clogged, dust-blown streets of Sylhet, sometimes exchanging a few words of Spanish.
Rasel has not told his mother the worst of what he endured. Relatives have been harassing his father, demanding their money back.
“I never thought they would put such pressure on me,” Abdul Manik said. “I feel like I have nothing to stand on.”
He was quiet for a moment, a tear rolling down one cheek. “I think it would be better if I died.”
The debt has saddled Rasel and his brothers perhaps for life. Sinking into a plastic chair in his bedroom, he seemed to vanish in plain sight, staring into the distance or holding his head in his hands.
“I don’t feel any strength to do anything,” he said. “Mentally and physically, I am broken. I just feel it was the biggest mistake I ever made.”
A few years ago, the scammers were [...]]]>
A few years ago, the scammers were mostly from Mexico, as I noted in 2013: Mexicans: Now They Are Claiming Asylum in Droves. But the Central Americans have been coming on strong and are now a major moocher group.
Speaking of Centrals, the Los Angeles Times reported in mid-November that some of them were ending up in wealthy Mexico: “As the U.S. gets harder to reach, more Central Americans look to a Mexican dream”. The paper judged that “growing numbers of other Central Americans who have concluded that if they can’t reach the United States, the next best thing is Mexico.”
That solution sounds likes a win all around. Hondurans and Salvadorans et al won’t have to live in the culture of the hated yankees, and we Americans might imagine a return to a nation of laws.
In 2014, Obama set up a refugee plan for “unaccompanied” kiddie Centrals, thereby adding to his growing illegal immigration magnet.
Washington Times reporter Stephen Dinan recently wrote about the current uptick in illegal asylum claimers and appeared on Fox Business Tuesday to explain the details, noting:
STEPHEN DINAN: This has been going on for a while. What really happened is an exponential increase in the number of people who are showing up at the border, either being arrested by the Border Patrol or showing up at an official port of entry. These are illegal immigrants: they arrive and when they get here, they’ve been coached to use as you said “magic words” that entitle them to at least beginning the asylum process and under Obama administration policy from 2009 once they begin that process they’re usually let free into the US while they await their proceedings and their hearings, giving them a chance to disappear along with the rest of the illegal immigrants already in the country.
]]>Illegal immigrants claim fear of home country as ‘magic words’ to gain asylum, By Stephen Dinan, Washington Times, December 4, 2016
Nearly one out of every 10 illegal immigrants crossing the southwest border is now demanding asylum, using “magic words” to claim they fear their home country, and turning a program intended to be a humanitarian lifeline into a new path for unauthorized migrants to gain a foothold in the U.S.
It’s a major change over just the last five years as lax Obama administration policies entice ever-more migrants to try to exploit the loophole, which the Border Patrol’s chief calls a “fail in policy.”
In 2010, less than 1 percent of those at the border were requesting asylum from the agents or officers who nabbed them. Now it’s 9 percent, according to statistics the Immigration Reform Law Institute pried loose from the government through an open-records request and provided to The Washington Times.
The migrants are being coached by friends and family or smugglers, who collect thousands of dollars per person for their efforts, on the “magic words” to say to get put on the asylum track, border officials say.
“We know that they’re coaching individuals on specifically what to say when they come here, that they just rattle off and they memorize the magic words that they need to say so that they’ll fall within the statute of credible fear,” Border Patrol Chief Mark Morgan told the Senate Homeland Security Committee in a hearing last week.
Most recently thousands of Haitians who have been living in South America since a 2010 earthquake in their home country have swarmed northward, claiming asylum when they reach California. They were arriving at a rate of more than 100 a day.
Central Americans have also caught on, helping feed the surge of children and families straining border operations in Texas.
But the Obama administration, while aware of the loophole, has not suggested any changes.
“U.S. Customs & Border Protection has not sought legislative or policy changes in regard to credible fear claims,” agency spokesman Daniel Hetlage told The Times.
Asylum is the political protection granted to foreigners who are already in the U.S., or who arrive at its borders. It is distinct from the refugee process, which is for those still living outside the country but who ask for its political protection.
Those showing up at the border who don’t have permission to enter, whether caught by Border Patrol agents or encountered by a CBP officer at an official port of entry, are supposed to be asked a series of questions to figure out if they were being persecuted back home.
If they say they fear being returned, they are put on the asylum track, which involves interviews and hearings to evaluate their claim.
Most of those who are claiming asylum will eventually be rejected, and are supposed to be deported. But because of a 2009 Obama administration policy change, Homeland Security no longer holds them while their cases are proceeding, making it easy for them to disappear into the shadows with other illegal immigrants.
“Since that policy change, as we can see now, the number of these aliens has skyrocketed and the wonderful job our border patrol agents do has been all for naught,” said Dale Wilcox, executive director and general counsel of the IRLI, which pursued the open-records request on behalf of the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
Congressional Republicans say the 2009 policy change runs contrary to the intent of the law. A Trump administration could quickly reverse the policy, which analysts said could go a long way toward stemming the flow.
Mexico’s major drug trafficking cartels, which also control most of the human smuggling routes along the border, have learned how to game the U.S. system, boosting the smugglers’ success rate and enticing new business — and along the way earning more cash for themselves, Mr. Wilcox said.
“This is money and support that they would not be receiving if the Obama administration actually enforced our immigration laws,” he said.
The numbers show just how quickly the cartels have figured things out.
In 2012, border officials recorded just 8,147 illegal immigrants asking for asylum. That grew to 28,793 in 2014, and through the first 10 months of 2016 it had reached a staggering 46,628, according to the statistics provided to IRLI.
“That’s being exploited,” Chief Morgan told Congress. “It’s been going well beyond the original intent of the purpose of credible fear.”