By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — As a southern Arizona woman spoke with The Wanderer about U.S. private citizens recently rescuing illegal aliens from likely death in two instances, this writer asked how often she hears of such events.
The woman, who lives near the international border but doesn’t want to be identified because of concerns about her safety, said this isn’t the kind of topic that people want to talk about — due to their own worries about personal security.
They don’t want to attract the attention of agents of the powerful, deadly Latino drug cartels who live in the people’s own areas in Arizona, she said in a telephone interview.
“People don’t want to be targets of the cartel” by sharing information with others about such encounters, she said. “We don’t know who’s cartel in our neighborhoods.”
The Wanderer has met with this woman personally in the past to verify her credibility, and occasionally speaks with her on the phone. We’ll call her “Mrs. Smith.”
As Mrs. Smith spoke in July, a picture emerged of Latino immigrants being used as mere pawns of the globally powerful, and Americans whose lives seem to be of no concern to a U.S. elite that’s always ready to hector them about being “bigots” — because they see life on an unsecured border crumbling around them.
And, she warned, the turbulence that has afflicted her and her neighbors for years is on the march now. “And the whole nation is going to get what we get,” Mrs. Smith said, as the Obama administration brings in more massive illegal immigration and spreads it throughout the states.
Joe Arpaio, the Republican sheriff of Phoenix’s Maricopa County, has complained repeatedly in recent months that after his office turns over illegal aliens suspected of serious crimes to Barack Obama’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), the suspects keep getting rearrested by Arpaio’s deputies on the streets.
Arpaio suggests that ICE either simply releases them to prey on the public again, or, if they actually are deported, the border is so porous that they come right back to the U.S.
Meanwhile, a July 12 Washington Post article mentioned a southern Arizona Democratic congressman, Ron Barber, who said his constituents “already live in fear for their safety,” but now they’re seeing law-enforcement agents pulled away from border duties in order to provide child care for minors illegally entering the U.S.
Neither Barber nor the Post indicated that his voters are racists or bigots for being concerned for their safety. The paper reported that up to 47 percent of cartel drug-running arrests are made in Barber’s Tucson-area district.
The chaotic way the federal government continues to allow illegal aliens to enter the U.S. means there’s no way to prevent opportunistic drug dealers, gang members, and terrorists from coming in, too.
Although one might get the mistaken impression from some media descriptions that mainly alien toddlers are arriving, a researcher’s opinion column in the July 15 Wall Street Journal corrected that image.
David Stoll, who does research in a Guatemalan town, wrote that “the average age of unaccompanied minors caught by the U.S. Border Patrol is 14 or 15, which in Central America is old enough to work. Many of these youths are aiming for the U.S. labor market, and often with financial support from their parents.”
In southern Arizona, Mrs. Smith told The Wanderer that she herself performed one of the recent rescues of an endangered alien.
She said she was out for a drive with her usual bottles of Gatorade and water handy when she saw a man “dying under the bushes. . . . His lips were like clay.”
Mrs. Smith said she gave him fluids and called the Border Patrol.
The man displayed his Nicaraguan ID and opened his wallet to show photos of his family, she said, adding that she thinks he made the gesture because “we were kind to him.”
In the other recent rescue, Mrs. Smith said, a friend of hers found two minors starving and abandoned. “Here she is, feeding and watering two illegal alien kids” and calling for the Border Patrol.
Mrs. Smith complained that unauthorized entry in another border state has been getting most of the attention recently, although Arizona continues to be pummeled. “It’s all ‘Texas, Texas, Texas’,” she said. But “they’re always coming through here,” too.
Another southern Arizona woman who asked not to be identified because of her safety concerns made a statement by email to The Wanderer about the necessity for reform guided by true religious principles.
This woman also is known personally to this newspaper; we’ll call her “Mrs. Jones.”
Mrs. Jones said it’s abusive behavior by governments if they “do not stop the [illegal immigration] flow with every power they have. It is also abuse by the mistakenly compassionate Church members and other Americans who think retaining them [in the U.S.] is charitable.”
The border tidal wave also “is abusive of our own children,” she said. “America’s children and their parents just can’t keep losing wages, losing their homes, and losing the ability to educate their children. In Tucson, over one-half of people live in poverty.
“It is just as abusive to impoverish [Americans] further by accepting others who have had the ability to pay up to $10,000 to get here, a fact which belies any claim that they are escaping extreme poverty,” Mrs. Jones said, referring to Latinos’ payoffs to people-smugglers.
“Further, that payment ties their hands permanently to the gangs to which the money was paid.
“There are lots of ways to handle this crisis which are truly compassionate, truly principled, and possessing effects of long-term benefits for all concerned,” she said.
“Our political and religious classes and our good-hearted citizens seem to lack courage and true compassion. Rather than proposing ways to handle these children with a solution where justice and mercy kiss, they are proposing one where everyone gets hurt, both long-term and short-term.
“It would be more compassionate to use every political, economic, and diplomatic leverage the U.S. has to force the sending countries to stop the human-rights abuses and establish conditions in their countries which will immediately benefit the children and their families — should be of primary importance,” Mrs. Jones said.
“Unless and until the U.S. government forces the sending countries to remedy the reasons for mass emigration and poverty, the world will never see cultural interactions and an equitable economic trade which lifts the status of all,” she concluded.
“It is, as our two recent and prior Popes said, do-able and the best and most long-lasting solution. It just takes the vision and the will.”
A new note of hope emerged when a Texas Democratic congressman, Henry Cuellar, said he had just returned from a visit to Central America with the message that Guatemala wants to have its children return home.
On July 15, CNSnews.com reported that Cuellar had been on Fox News and said: “The president of Guatemala…said, we want our kids back. It’s a brain drain for those countries. But we have got to work with those countries, with Mexico to return those kids back.”
And The Los Angeles Times reported July 15, “Cuellar just returned Monday from a weekend trip to Central America with House Republicans. The message from those leaders, he said, is that ‘they want their kids back’.”
The brain drain is an issue often overlooked when U.S. open-borders enthusiasts speak of bringing high-tech employees here. However, other countries need to have their own scientists and engineers; the U.S. shouldn’t be trying to suck them all away.
Regarding another aspect of the surge in illegal immigration, a Los Angeles Times story posted July 15 noted strong opposition from coast to coast, including by political officials, to the Obama administration dispersing the aliens as it pleases in this nation, without even keeping authorities informed.
The Times story quoted a Maryland official: “‘Carroll County will not become a repository for Obama’s failed immigration policies,’ Commissioner Richard Rothschild, of Maryland, said this week after officials were told that a local facility might be used to house immigrants. The idea is ‘in no way, shape or form approved by the governing body of this county’.”
Obama isn’t solely to blame, Arizona’s Mrs. Smith told The Wanderer, explaining that a national political establishment insists on pushing its agenda. “It’s institutional, it has been institutional since the [George W.] Bush people. . . . And what did Bush do? Called us ‘vigilantes’. . . . We’re ‘the ones who are not Christian’.”
Later in the interview, Mrs. Smith suggested that certain national leaders prefer newly arrived illegal immigrants instead of American citizens because “we have not been good slaves” for their agenda, but the leaders hope the aliens will be, “at least for a generation. . . . The world has always had the slave, and the slave masters, haven’t they?”
As for certain religious spokesmen who say it’s racism and bigotry to oppose massive illegal immigration, Mrs. Smith rejected the accusation and said, “So I’ll have to ask God when I get there [to judgment], ‘Was I wrong?’”
Mrs. Smith said it’s nothing new to have groups with a number of children crossing the border illegally. She has been photographing this for 10 to 15 years to document the illegal entries, she said, but the growing size of the numbers is new.
The July 12 Washington Post story recalled that Texas Republican Gov. Rick Perry had warned Obama more than two years ago, in May 2012, that the alien-minor problem would continue to grow. Obama ignored Perry. Perry had written: “Every day of delay risks more lives. Every child allowed to remain encourages hundreds more to attempt the journey.”
Despondent Youngsters
During the interview with Mrs. Smith, The Wanderer mentioned recent reporting by Fox News Radio’s Todd Starnes that the federal government denied requests by clergymen in Arizona and Texas to visit U.S. centers where the minors are being detained in order to pray with and comfort them.
On July 9, Starnes told syndicated radio host Laura Ingraham that youngsters are “despondent” and want to go back home. Ingraham replied that it’s the minors’ parents or smugglers who want them here, perhaps as a precursor to bringing in the rest of the family.
Mrs. Smith commented to The Wanderer that the minors are “being used, and their families are being used. It’s all trickery….How dare separate them from their villages and their families” to go on a journey where they’re raped, beaten, and abused.
She said an Arizona doctor told her in 2005 that “a secure border is a humane border.”
The federal government’s lax attitude to immigration — such as simply dropping illegal aliens at Greyhound bus stations, to go their own way — has drawn attention during the Republican primary-election campaign for Arizona governor.
On June 23, The Washington Times quoted GOP candidate Doug Ducey: “I’ve got a 10-year-old son, and if I took him to Tucson and dropped him off at a bus stop, they would lock me up.”
Some Catholic bureaucrats among other establishment figures have renewed their strong criticisms of Americans who dare question having innumerable thousands of alien minors and other unauthorized crossers continuing to flood into the U.S. with the expectation of remaining.
These bureaucrats seem to be in a defensive minority. Even various high-profile liberal Democratic politicians said the minors must be sent back home, including Hillary Clinton and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D., Md.), as well as famously open-borders Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain.
Whether the liberal Democrats actually meant this is a point for debate, but they apparently were under enough public pressure to make them speak up.
Hoyer said the invasion is “not sustainable.” Breitbart News quoted Hoyer: “The United States cannot be expected to give sanctuary to every single child in the world that is exposed to danger in their country because of the failure of the country’s government or local municipality’s government to assist in keeping their own children safe.”
McCain said if the minors are sent back, this will be a lesson to their parents, who paid smugglers thousands of dollars to bring them here, but will see their money has been wasted.
Moreover, some blacks — usually expected to be Obama supporters — started speaking out strongly from coast to coast against his lax border policies.
From southern California to Houston to Chicago to Baltimore, blacks spoke of the continuing challenges they face in their own U.S. neighborhoods, including unemployment, poverty, and violence, but they noted Obama instead was showering tax money on hordes of illegal aliens.
Backfiring On Obama
The July 12 Washington Post article said a Texas Democratic congressman, from a heavily Hispanic district, was surprised at the anger against illegal immigrants by his constituents, who believe “these children and their families are gaming the system.”
Although the liberal Post story pulled its punches, it still noted that illegal entry is backfiring on the Obama administration, which seemed to think that playing immigration politics would benefit Democrats.
A July 9 Washington Post story said Rick Perry’s 2012 letter warning Obama “appears prescient. The number of unaccompanied children at the border, which was 5,200 in 2012, has shot up to more than 52,000 this year — and it could reach 90,000 by the end of September, according to internal Border Patrol estimates.”
Speculative reports have begun to emerge of multiple alien minors drowning as they try to cross the Rio Grande River into Texas. If minors actually are dying or beginning to die in significant numbers with U.S. soil in sight, the Obama administration could be forced to abandon its open-borders agenda.
Because if the border isn’t shut down as much as possible and quickly, such appalling deaths would continue as long as there’s an expectation of being able to slip into the U.S.
Encouraging minors to enter the U.S. illegally may have been thought a winning White House strategy because youngsters often look so cute and innocent. But using them as Obama’s sacrificial lambs is monstrous.
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