Lack of border security enables exploitation

There is a crisis at the United States-Mexico border. Our broken immigration system enables it. Our ignorance of meaningful solutions fuels it. And until our federal leaders have the political will to fix it, illegal crossings will continue at a pace that overwhelms our ability to accommodate them. Bad people will profit from the illicit market it creates, and those who risk the journey will suffer the worst of all.

The stories of their experiences are heartbreaking. In March, a video was shared on social media by the United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP, colloquially called “Border Patrol,”) taken from a surveillance camera trained on a bridge on the border in southwest Arizona, beneath which the Colorado River flowed. In the video, a shadowy figure emerges from underneath the bridge, presumably a man. The man walks onto the deck of the bridge and drops something. As quickly as he emerges, he scurries away and disappears, leaving what he dropped.

It’s a child. A little boy, we would soon learn, around one year of age.

Left by himself, the child begins to toddle around the deck of the bridge. His tiny little body can easily slip through the rails at the edge or around the concrete barriers that separate the end of the bridge from the river. If it does, he will fall in the water and surely drown. But within seconds of the child being dropped, a white truck pulls onto the bridge. A Border Patrol agent gets out of the truck, scoops up the child, and puts him in the back seat of the truck to bring him to safety. Tragedy is averted. Thank God.

I first saw that video in late May, when I was part of a group visiting the Yuma, Arizona CBP headquarters to receive a briefing on the day-to-day realities faced by Border Patrol agents. Despite the danger posed by the river, the child was certainly dropped on the bridge intentionally. Mexican cartels, to whom migrant smuggling is a massively profitable venture, employ sophisticated technology including drones to surveil the U.S. side of the border and surely knew of the camera trained on the bridge. Like the UPS guy leaving a package on your doorstep, the smuggler was leaving his delivery where its intended recipient would know to collect it.

It’s a common occurrence. As my group was told that day in Yuma, children often come through wearing a white T-shirt with a phone number written on it that belongs to an intended sponsor already living in the U.S., and are dumped on the U.S. side as soon as they’re successfully smuggled across the border. One could say the toddler left on the monitored bridge was lucky — in another instance described to my group, a smuggling network left four children between the ages of one and eight in a remote area of the desert. It took Border Patrol agents three hours to reach the area and rescue them. At other times, agents have arrived at the scene of distress to find migrants — both children and adults — already dead.

Why would a person entrust themselves and/or their children to the custody of the notorious criminals that make up the cartels? Because it is the easiest way to attempt to migrate into the United States.

The problem is twofold. First, our immigration system — the process by which a citizen of another country can legally become a permanent resident or naturalized citizen — is a convoluted mess of massive backlogs and arcane rules that institute quotas for each country and categorize applicants based on family and employment preference. Adding the time it takes just for the initial application to be approved, the applicant must then wait their turn based on those quotas, with wait times for applicants from certain countries extending to over eight years, according to a 2018 study from The Cato Institute. COVID-19 makes it even worse: A 2022 report from the Department of Homeland Security found that U.S. Customs and Immigration Services “experienced a decline of approximately 33 percent in the pace of case processing in 2020, even after offices reopened [after pandemic-related shutdowns].” The slowdown amounted to an average of 55,000 fewer cases per month for the first eight months after reopening.

Second, unlike emigrating through our legal system, entering the country without authorization by crossing the southern border is in fact quite easy due to its lack of physical security. Even in spots where the Border Patrol is waiting to arrest an unauthorized entrant to the country, that person will get a medical screening, their clothes washed; they’ll be fed, and given transportation, including airfare if necessary, to get to their “destination city,’ where they will wait for their hearing. Those services are made possible by places such as the Regional Center for Border Health in Yuma, which can serve hundreds of migrants on any given day, with a turnaround time usually less than one day before the migrant is put on a bus or a plane and headed to their destination city in any one of the lower forty-eight states.

“If that was the system ahead of you, why wouldn’t you use it?” said Chris Clem, who served as Chief Border Patrol Agent in the CBP’s Yuma sector before his recent retirement. Clem visited Cedar Rapids last Tuesday in partnership with the Americans for Prosperity Foundation (the same group with whom I traveled to Yuma in May) to share his insight on the current state of the southern border.

However convenient things might seem for the unauthorized migrant after they cross into the U.S. and surrender to the Border Patrol, we must remember that the journey leading up to that usually involves trekking with smuggling organizations, a harrowing ordeal. While specific statistics can be hard to capture due to reluctance in reporting, it is widely understood that many women and girls experience some form of sexual violence at the doing of their smugglers, colloquially called “coyotes,” which ranges from being extorted for sexual favors by the coyotes and their friends in stash houses to being brutally raped and abandoned in unforgiving climate.

As long as our system makes it easy to cross the border without authorization, a lucrative market will exist for the nefarious groups who profit richly from trafficking migrants. Although they rose to power through the production and sale of illegal narcotics, much of their product is now people. When speaking to the group in Cedar Rapids, Clem emphatically agreed with what my group in Yuma was told at the local Border Patrol annex: Cartels are now making as much money trafficking migrants as they are running dope (and quite possibly even more,) charging anywhere from $6,500 to $25,000 per person to act as the tour guide from hell. Smuggling migrants is a $2.4 billion per year business for cartels.

Clem also emphasized, both to my group in Yuma and the gathering in Cedar Rapids last week, that a physical barrier, while not required on every mile of the 1954-mile stretch that is our southern border, still is a vital piece of the puzzle to securing the southern border. “We didn’t need a complete wall. There were environments where it didn’t make sense, but technology could bridge the gaps where a wall wasn’t necessary,” said Clem.

Leave the border exposed, and we incentivize the sick schemes of the cruel and immoral. Make it difficult for an unauthorized person to penetrate, though, and that incentive erodes. Enable a robust system, where cases are processed efficiently and laws are enforced, and the anxious traveler might not be inclined to take a journey if they think they’re going to be turned away at the end.

Yet so many, particularly from the progressive left, resist any idea of physical barriers or effective enforcement of our existing laws. Rooted in racism, they say. Xenophobia. Hatred of Black and brown people. America is a compassionate nation, and we cannot be compassionate if the door is locked.

But that compassion is being hijacked, as fear of being perceived as being an unkind or unwelcoming nation dulls us to a devastating reality: As long as our border remains weak, bad people will take advantage. Still, we stand by idly under our obtuse leadership while the truly depraved line their pockets selling tickets to a better life in an arena that cannot accomodate the influx. And the price of admission will be horrendous.

Comments: 319-398-8266; althea.cole@thegazette.com