By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — When trying to answer whether the U.S. border with Mexico is secure, it’s useful to know that illegal aliens even continue to cross right through the land of a high-intelligence Army installation in southern Arizona, a woman in the area told The Wanderer.
The woman is one of this newspaper’s border contacts whom this writer has met with personally. They don’t want to be named because of their safety concerns living near the porous international line.
Barack Obama is continuing to make border protection the same disastrous federal failure as his Obamacare.
Although the frequent illegal penetration of this Army installation is familiar to Arizonans who follow border issues, the Washington Examiner web site posted a story about these violations on November 19 headlined, “Army intelligence headquarters is pathway for illegal immigrants.”
This is the home of the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and the U.S. Army Network Enterprise Technology Command, in southeastern Arizona’s Cochise County.
If the illegal aliens won’t be stopped here, where will they be stopped in vast stretches of open desert and mountains?
The Examiner item reported Department of Defense indifference to policing its property at Fort Huachuca (pronounced Wah-CHU-ka), just north of the line with Mexico.
Many U.S. citizens say that’s precisely the case — their own government discourages attempts to protect this nation.
Despite official claims of security, the Arizona woman said she’s quite familiar at her residence with the sounds of helicopters and ambulances responding to border turmoil.
“I don’t go out hiking in those fields anymore,” she said during a November 20 telephone interview. “. . . I don’t want to be killed. . . . I don’t want to have to draw my weapon. . . . There’s a million more [illegal entrants] behind them. . . . It’s never-ending.”
She said there have been two serious traffic accidents in the area just this year caused by alien-smuggling vehicles.
Allowing unlimited illegal entrants across the border encourages smuggling and fuels sex trafficking of women and children, the woman said, declaring that “it’s a sin” that the Church defends keeping the border wide open when there are such results.
“It’s appalling to God. I just know it,” she said.
“Rape trees” are legendary in border country. Female illegal immigrants’ undergarments are displayed on branches as trophies of alien men’s sexual conquests.
Ironically, two days after this interview, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie spoke at a November 22 Phoenix event against border-crossing sex trafficking.
The Phoenix-based Arizona Republic said Christie said this “criminal enterprise preys on victims’ financial challenges, aspirations, and ‘heartfelt desires’ to come to the United States for a better life. . . . It exploits ‘America’s greatness’ to lure immigrants into a degrading life of ‘abject slavery.’
“The traffickers are ‘playing on someone’s dreams in order to destroy them,’ Christie said,” the Republic reported.
Also ironically, the Phoenix event where Christie spoke was hosted by Arizona State University’s McCain Institute for International Leadership. Arizona’s U.S. Sen. John McCain is a leading champion of open borders.
Amid all this crime and chaos, one can easily see why Pope Benedict XVI said the best solution for illegal immigration is to improve conditions in the home countries, so there’s no need to emigrate.
In her November 20 interview, the Arizona border resident told The Wanderer, “How about if you remind [Church officials], the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom….The [drug] cartels and the smugglers are from the pit of hell.”
The Arizona Catholic Conference, the regional bishops’ lobbying arm, repeatedly has opposed border protection unless it’s tucked into “comprehensive immigration reform.”
The September 19 issue of the Phoenix diocesan newspaper, The Catholic Sun, again presented the Church’s open-borders stance in an article headlined, “Waiting on reform — Church continues to walk in solidarity with undocumented immigrants.”
The article quoted Phoenix Auxiliary Bishop Eduardo Nevares: “The Church is here for all immigrants. Our Church doesn’t ask for papers and she doesn’t ask your religion. We just keep our doors open to all.”
One searches such articles in vain for acknowledgment of the numerous serious problems of massive illegal immigration.
The southern Arizona woman who didn’t want to be named already was aware that the Washington Examiner’s Joel Gehrke posted the item about lax security at Fort Huachuca the previous day. The item was based on a report by Tucson NBC-TV affiliate KVOA, whose video was linked.
After a KVOA anchorwoman said the problem of security risks “doesn’t seem to be getting any better,” a former Border Patrol supervisor who grew up in Cochise County, Dave Stoddard, was shown out in the field saying, “I think the average American should be petrified” about the situation.
When a KVOA reporter referred to concerns about weapons being smuggled, Stoddard said that “with [illegals’] backpacks weighing 30 to 50 pounds, who knows what’s in there?”
Is the Army even concerned about this invasion at a high-intelligence command center?
“The military chooses to close its eyes and ignore it,” Stoddard said.
The reporter said the Fort Huachuca public affairs office refused to put a spokesman on camera, but it issued a statement: “Apprehending undocumented immigrants is a Department of Homeland Security mission, and not a DOD [Department of Defense] one.”
“That smuggling operation going through there is very, very sophisticated,” Stoddard said. “They’ve been getting by with it for years. They know the formula. They know the routine.”
The mantra is often heard from Catholic Church bureaucrats and liberal Democrats that the immigration system is “broken.” However, Stoddard said, “Our immigration laws work. They’re just not enforced.”
The Arizona woman who didn’t want to be named said she has faced the invasion problem at her residence since the first week she moved in, in 1999, when three illegal aliens showed up at her door at 4:30 a.m., but officials didn’t respond to her call for help.
“We have illegals coming through every day,” she told The Wanderer, adding that only ten percent of those are caught. “. . . We’ve tried everything out here. I’ve called 911 for backpacks by the side of the road” that she fears could be left by terrorists.
Having mentioned the estimate that only ten percent are caught, the woman noted that the KVOA reporter said the numbers apprehended at the military base have increased in recent years — from 96 people in fiscal year 2011, to 112 in fiscal year 2012, to 331 in fiscal year 2013.
An Educator On The Issue
As for this sort of increase, another activist against overwhelming illegal immigration told The Wanderer that when politicians raise hopes for legalization, they encourage still more to jump the border.
“One thing is certain about human smuggling. Whenever a high-level politician mentions the possibility of an amnesty, there will be a dramatic upswing in those crossing our border,” said Gary Meinert, a Wisconsin native who retired to Green Valley in southern Arizona, 36 miles from Mexico, planning to play golf.
However, the facts Meinert soon was to learn converted him into an educator on illegal immigration, traveling, photographing and documenting the effects of cartels’ drug and human smuggling for nearly a decade. He also serves on the Citizens Advisory Board of the Nogales, Ariz., Border Patrol station and on the Green Valley Liaison Committee with the Border Patrol.
Meinert said he first became aware of “the border crisis” when he and a friend “stumbled upon a ‘layup site’ with 1,500 to 2,000 abandoned backpacks of illegal aliens who entered our country.”
“In January of 2006 President [George W.] Bush casually mentioned the idea of a guest-worker program,” Meinert recalled in an e-mail to The Wanderer on November 20. “Across the border, those words translated into ‘amnesty,’ and within three months we apprehended over 250,000 illegal aliens, 60 percent of whom said they came for President Bush’s amnesty.
“Without securing the border before any other decisions are made, we will surely face an invasion such as we did in 2006,” Meinert said. “Those who ‘demand’ amnesty have no idea of the problems it would bring.”
Although “11 million” illegal aliens in the U.S. is a figure often used by champions of amnesty, Meinert noted that the figure could be much higher, perhaps 30 million in the view of some. Moreover, he said, one must take into account what people are caught violating the borders.
“Those apprehended last year represented 73 different countries including every country . . . considered sponsors of terror. Raising the specter of concern is the distinct possibility of terrorists crossing our borders,” Meinert said.
“When high-target illegal aliens or those from countries supporting terror are apprehended, they are immediately turned over to the FBI for handling,” and the outcome of the investigation isn’t revealed.
“We are also seeing a much more dangerous and ruthless group of illegal aliens,” Meinert continued. “The threat to our agents seems to elevate every year, as those being pursued are much more brazen and therefore dangerous. This is also exceptionally true when human smugglers are apprehended in some cases.
“Several years ago it was common for one ‘scout’ or lead man with a group of 10 or 20 illegal aliens to be armed. Today it is quite common for many of them to have some kind of weapon, and the willingness to use it,” he said.
“It is a falsehood to even consider that those coming across are just fine citizens wanting to come here to work,” Meinert said. “Many who are apprehended far into our country are indeed hard at work at their job. Unfortunately, their job is working for the drug-smuggling TCOs [transnational criminal organizations] as marijuana growers, dealers or even assassins, as we found in Madison, Wis.”
The two major TCOs as related to the U.S.’s southwestern border, Meinert said, “are the Sinaloa cartel and the Zetas. The reference to them as TCOs is due to their expansion in everything from drug and human-smuggling to extortion, kidnapping, prostitution, gambling, and any other criminal activity which provides them revenue. They are no longer just drug cartels.
“These two major TCOs virtually control all drug distribution in the U.S., northern Europe, and north Africa,” he said. “The battles we hear about continuously are between them and five or six other TCOs trying to maintain or control their corridors or entry points into our country.”
With all this immorality and lawbreaking simmering every day, one can easily understand why Barack Obama, the most law-breaking, doubly devious, and brazenly lying president this nation has ever had, is eager to exploit chaos for his benefit and his Democratic Party’s.
However, a person can only gasp in wonder that big-business Republicans and their spokesmen like The Wall Street Journal continue to insist that the GOP capitulate as fast as possible to help Obama legalize massive illegal immigration, by any avenue available.
If the Republican Party dares do that, it should know full well that massive amnesty would dispirit and deflate Republican voters for the 2014 elections.
The Rule Of Law
Another southern Arizona woman who doesn’t wish to be named because of safety concerns told The Wanderer that amnesty is “the great destroyer of respect for the rule of law — a fact I believe the bishops will regret someday when an Obama takes over hospitals, etc.”
This Arizonan said conservative commentator Pat Buchanan had remarked on amnesty destroying the rule of law.
She added that “the rule of law is what has distinguished this country from all others since its inception and it has contributed to the fact that the Church has been able to flourish here and is the basis upon which [bishops] can fight the [Obamacare] contraceptive mandate. They should avoid supporting amnesty, in fact should object to it.”
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