By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — A man visiting from St. Louis surprised his girlfriend with a marriage proposal at northern Arizona’s Grand Canyon in January. Phoenix television station KPNX, Channel 12, had a photo of Kevin Fowler, wearing a short-sleeved shirt, kneeling in the snow beneath gray skies as he held Roni Moore’s hand and successfully popped the question.
The station quoted Fowler saying that, not being an area resident, he wasn’t aware of the local weather conditions and “wasn’t planning for the cold and snow.” However, Arizona isn’t one big, flat expanse of rocks and scraggly bushes. In addition to its famed deserts and saguaros, the Grand Canyon State has high mountains and forests.
The more heavily visited South Rim of the Grand Canyon, at about 7,000 feet elevation, is open year-round. On the other side of the chasm, the North Rim, about 1,000 feet higher, closes to visitors every winter because of its relative isolation and cold. Snow is regularly expected at both rims in the chillier seasons.
The Canyon’s rims are far higher than the city of Phoenix, elevation 1,100 feet, located in south-central Arizona, in the Sonoran Desert.
Arizona isn’t unique for being a place with surprises for unfamiliar outsiders. But the entire international line that Arizona shares with Mexico is facing a perhaps incalculably different future if recent events are allowed to become standard.
For decades the Southwest frontier has been used as an unauthorized entry point for illegal aliens whose motives can range from the economic to the overtly criminal to the ideological — the “reconquering” of the Southwest for the mythical bronze kingdom of Aztlan.
A recent change has been the repetitive large-scale arrival of entire family groups — or at least adults with someone’s children in tow — because they’ve heard the minors’ presence makes it easier to stay in the U.S., and that an “asylum” request is taken seriously legally if they can touch a toe onto U.S. land, even if “asylum” is only a stratagem they’ve been coached to say.
What already had been an overpowering tide of illegal immigration could swell into submerging the entire identity, ideation, and independence of the U.S.
Coupled with sponsorship of “caravans” of thousands of people by open-borders ideologues, poorer persons are lured northward with notions that all their problems end once the U.S. starts having to provide for them, and that they may come as they please, no matter how many legal applicants for residency they’re unjustly jumping ahead of.
And no matter how many demands they make upon another nation’s citizens instead of calling for reform from their own lands’ corrupt rulers, who are most immediately situated to address their appeals for justice.
The unauthorized entrants may save up thousands of dollars, not to begin a better life in their homelands but to pay criminals to sneak them into the U.S.
ABC-TV news reported on January 18 that people-smugglers had dug tunnels under an old barrier in a lightly patrolled area earlier that week so the largest-ever group of “asylum seekers” could enter Arizona near Yuma, in the state’s southwest corner.
The news report quoted one border official saying, “In my 30 years with the Border Patrol, I have not been part of arresting a group of 376 people. That’s really unheard of.”
It said that a man from Guatemala saved about $5,000 so smugglers could get him and his daughter to the border quickly, and he already had a plane ticket to San Diego.
The ABC report said that on January 16, “another huge group” of 247 migrants entered into New Mexico, and that Customs and Border Protection said “24 large groups — quantified as 100 or more — have crossed the border near Lordsburg, N.M., just since October 1, 2018.”
The new organized-caravan phenomenon of thousands of people caught attention in the U.S. last October as migrants moved northward to some unrevealed location, which turned out to be Tijuana, just south of San Diego. From Tijuana, some of the marchers attempted to force their way into the U.S.
Meanwhile, the San Diego Union-Tribune site posted on January 22 that with yet another caravan on its way, Tijuana officials hope it doesn’t arrive there.
At Tijuana shelters, the Union-Tribune said, “resources remain strained, volunteers are weary and conditions are crowded. Beleaguered aid workers are barely able to look up from one dire situation to the next. Meanwhile, remnants of a current caravan from Honduras crossed into Chiapas (Mexico) as recently as Saturday,” January 19.
The Wanderer contacted two of its sources in southern Arizona about the growth in organized illegal mass migration to the U.S. They both declined to be quoted by their actual names because of their security concerns.
One of them, whom we’ll call Mrs. Jones, said: “The cartels as well as the U.S. and Mexico governments will never stop finding ways to cash in on illegal immigration. The big-money cash cows in the money exchange are, of course, the children being smuggled across the U.S.-Mexico border. Cartels charge thousands to move the children, or they get paid when the children are sold into the sex-slave trade.
“Our own U.S. government has found ways to keep unaccompanied minors here by contracting them out with corporations like Southwest Key,” she said. “Former Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano knew from photo documentation and news reports that children were being smuggled. This was being reported by volunteers like ‘Desert Visions,’ getting film and photos out to the American public.”
(Desert Visions has its own Facebook page.)
The Southwest Key website (swkey.org) says its immigrant children’s shelters “are funded by contracts with the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement, under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. All other Southwest Key programming is funded by grants and contracts from federal, state, and local governments, foundations, corporations and private contributions.”
Wikipedia says Southwest Key “is a Texas-based nonprofit organization that operates shelter facilities for unaccompanied immigrant minors and immigrant youth separated from their parents. It also provides youth-justice alternative programming and educational programming.”
Mrs. Jones told The Wanderer: “Southwest Key has built an empire housing illegal-alien children, and no one will ever know how many billions the cartels have made on the smuggling and selling of human flesh.”
“Desert Visions began reporting in 2000,” Mrs. Jones said, although politicians didn’t favor “citizens reporting on our unsecured border. In 2012, after many years of voicing her displeasure of truth-tellers, then-Secretary of Homeland Security Napolitano issued a memorandum entitled ‘Exercising Prosecutorial Discretion with Respect to Individuals Who Came to the United States as Children’.”
This created “a non-congressionally authorized administrative program that permitted certain individuals who came to the United States as juveniles and met several criteria — including lacking any current lawful immigration status — to request consideration of deferred action for a period of two years, subject to renewal, and eligibility for work authorization,” she said.
“This program became known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA),” Mrs. Jones added.
It’s a bureaucratically created program that continues to roil national politics even today.
The other southern Arizona woman, whom The Wanderer will call Mrs. Smith, said regarding the organized caravans into the U.S.: “The fact is that this whole invasion is staged, implemented, and financed by those who are usefully ignorant, along with those who are intent on the destruction of America or criminal organizations with a purely profit motive.
“One notable group is Pueblo sin Fronteras (PsF), an organization with multiple tentacles of help and influence,” Mrs. Smith said. “One contributor of effort and money to PsF is CLINIC, the Catholic Legal Immigration Network” (cliniclegal.org).
“It would seem if the invaders request asylum, even if coached and lying, it can be deemed legal. CLINIC might be well advised to pull out of this effort, if they have not already done so,” she said.
Mrs. Smith made the following points to The Wanderer:
“The ‘asylum seekers’ are helped to reach the border by such groups and, according to reports by Border Patrol agents, are coached on what to say to achieve asylum.
“The fraud on the system is endemic and is destroying the Western Hemisphere.
“Why are these people who make it to the border to exploit the weaknesses in our immigration law any worse off than those they left behind?
“Where do these arrivals get the money to make the journey? It is as much as $60,000 in some cases.
“What are the costs to the American people and is there any limit to what they are morally required to give?
“What are the alternatives to letting the strongest people of other countries into America, leaving their weaker behind and weakening the sending countries?”
Mrs. Smith concluded: “If we do not stop this mass influx of people, we are destroyers, not helpers. A change in policy and approach is crucial. We need leadership from people who are prudent and knowledgeable rather than emotionally driven activists. And we need it now.”
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