photo credit: ABCNews.go.com
The day after President Trump’s
rally in El Paso, Ortiz-Gonzales crossed the border, along with a group of 16
other adults and children, all from Central America. They had spent the night
in a safe house in Juarez, and after paying $2,000 a head they were taken to a
spot on the edge of the Rio Grande and told to walk across. (In downtown El
Paso, the Rio Grande isn’t much more than a stream—easy to walk across, even
for children.)
All but one of the adults in the
group were men, and they all had more or less the same story: they have wives
and other children back in Central America, they are coming here to work and
send money home, they have networks of family and friends in the United States,
and they intend to return to their homes at some point after they have made
enough money. All of them are claiming asylum, but none of them, based on the
accounts they gave, will likely qualify for it.
If you spend enough time on the
southern border, where record numbers of migrant families from Central America
are turning themselves in to U.S. Border Patrol—including 1,800
on the day of Trump’s rally—you begin to see this pattern emerge. Media
outlets often repeat the now-familiar line that Central American families are fleeing
poverty and violence, which is true (Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras
are among
the most violent countries in the world). But according to federal law, suffering
poverty and violence doesn’t make you a refugee.
. . .
What goes unmentioned in most media
coverage of family migration from Central America is the role that Mexican
cartels play. Cartels control everything that happens on the south side of the
border, not only the movement of drugs but also the movement of people.
A previous CTP blog linked to opposing analyses of the
recent budget provisions for Border Security. Paul Bedard at Washington
Examiner considered the compromise a step in the right direction. Rush Limbaugh
saw it as a step backward.
Steve Salvi at the Ohio Jobs & Justice PAC considers the Border
Security bill “disastrous” – and had this to say on his FB page:
We can no longer depend on most of
our public officials to protect US citizens or our nation's sovereign right to
control our borders.
Pres. Trump and the US Congress
signed off on a disastrous bill that will result in:
1.
More American citizens killed by illegal aliens
2.
Encourage more illegal migrants to enter the US
3.
Help drug cartels/gangs expand human/child
sex/labor trafficking
This is not America First! It was
an ‘open-border illegal alien First-Americans last’ bill!
Even NumbersUSA has not issued an Action Alert that satisfactorily reconciles these disparate concerns.
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