OPED: We Must Secure Our Border And End This Crisis

Last week, I visited parts of our southern border in McAllen and El Paso, Texas. The best word to describe what I saw is horrifying – massively overcrowded processing centers, young children exploited by drug cartels and traffickers, and the U.S. Border Patrol doing their best to hold it all together. I knew there was a crisis at our southern border, but the severity of the situation does not fully set in until you see it in person.

What is taking place at our southern border is a humanitarian, public health, and national security crisis, with no sign of slowing down. In the month of March alone, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encountered the highest number of migrants recorded in more than two decades – more than 172,000. That figure represents a 71 percent increase from the month prior and a 400 percent increase from March 2020.

We have thousands of migrant children being held in processing centers in a country entirely foreign to them. One young boy I met, around 8 or 9 years old, named Miguel had just recently crossed the border with his older sister near El Paso. As I approached Miguel, he had just gotten off the phone with his Mom and Dad, both located in Kansas. Miguel’s parents had come illegally to our country years prior and were eagerly awaiting reunification with their children. The border patrol will soon release Miguel to HHS, and the American taxpayer will pay for the two minors to be sent to Kansas.

As a father of four children around his age, my heart breaks for Miguel’s family situation, and I empathize with his parents’ desire to create a better life with more opportunity for their children. However, what I cannot support is disregarding American law and the extremely dangerous situation these two young children were put in. According to border patrol agents I spoke to at both facilities, no one can cross the southern border without paying thousands of dollars to the drug cartels in Mexico. These cartels are some of the most heinous criminals in the world. Examples of trafficking, kidnapping, and rape are disgustingly standard operating procedures for these drug cartels. We cannot allow the endangerment of these children, and the enrichment of the drug cartels to continue any longer.

Though, make no mistake about it – while these drug cartels make money trafficking migrants across the border, migrants are often deployed as distractions for the cartel’s greater interest – flooding deadly drugs into American communities. Vicious cartel members will not hesitate to beat, torture, or murder migrants, including women and children, if they get in the way of their illicit drug trade. Cartels will often abandon children in the middle of the desert to divert Border Patrol resources away from stopping drug traffickers. Once agents rush to care for abandoned migrant children, cartels will exploit holes in points of entry to move deadly narcotics across.

It is critical we acknowledge how we arrived at this awful point. President Biden’s rhetoric and policies, which have significantly limited immigration enforcement and weakened border security, signaled to the world that our immigration laws can be violated with little, if any, consequence. Unfortunately, desperate migrants are paying the price for the Biden administration’s failure to understand that their words and actions have consequences.

President Biden has fueled this crisis at the border from his first day in office. Here are just a few examples: on the day of his inauguration, President Biden issued a proclamation terminating the national emergency declaration at the southern border declared by President Trump and halted the construction of the border wall, including projects already funded through bipartisan Congressional appropriation. The Biden Department of Homeland Security then issued a memo freezing all immigration deportations for 100 days on most illegal migrants. Weeks later, President Biden rolled out immigration legislation that would grant amnesty to more than 11 million illegal migrants. After just a few short weeks in office, President Biden lied to the American people and claimed there was no emergency at the southern border and no need for a border wall, ordered a halt to most deportations of individuals illegally entering our country, and promised amnesty to people currently residing in our country who circumvented the legal immigration system to get here.

The truth is that we will not have a country if we do not have strong borders. I care about the individuals who are so desperate to escape their situation that they will risk everything to come to the United States – but I care about them too much to lie to them. We are a nation of laws; we cannot choose to selectively ignore our laws, or we will fundamentally erode our system of government.

There is no way to fix the root problems of mass migration when there is an active crisis at the border. We must eliminate the perverse incentive structure enabled by the Biden Administration, whereby, drug cartels use unwitting migrants as pawns in their effort to move massive quantities of drugs into our country. That means we need to restore the rule of law, secure our border, and implement solutions to end this crisis.

The first step we should take is also the easiest to implement, restarting and finishing construction of the border wall with the more than $1 billion in funding available. President Biden’s unliteral decision to halt construction thwarted congressional authority, put his campaign promises ahead of the public good, and undermined border security. Nearly every agent I spoke with on the ground said the wall is a critical tool in deterring illegal crossings. The next solution is to appropriate additional funding to the extraordinary men and women of Border Patrol in their mission to protect the American people. Our Border Patrol needs more resources, which translates to increasing the number of agents, enhanced facilities to hold migrants, technology, and the authority to implement best practices. The last solution is to increase the number of immigration judges and ICE attorneys to help expedite the backlog of cases. We desperately need immigration court reform to expedite decisions, prevent fraud, and hold individuals accountable who do not show up for their court appearances.

I implore President Biden and his administration to immediately implement a course correction and fulfill their most sacred duty – to protect and defend our country.