By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — The small desert town of Gila Bend, southwest of the Phoenix metropolitan area and next to the Interstate 8 route westward to San Diego, doesn’t have a monumental reputation, but it apparently was expected by the open-borders Biden administration to do monumental things in accommodating Biden’s personal and monumental failure on illegal immigration.
Gila Bend has about 2,000 people. The Space Age Lodge on Pima Street, a motel more than a half-century old and sporting a flying-saucer theme, may catch a driver’s eye momentarily, but the San Diego beaches about four hours westward probably are more on his mind. The Mexican border at Lukeville, Ariz., is just under a 90-minute drive to the south of Gila Bend.
The Gila Bend mayor, Chris Riggs, was among many officials throughout the Southwest — from Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott to U.S. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to other members of Congress — who loudly protested the crisis Democrat Joe Biden intentionally created.
Abbott told reporters that drug cartels are benefiting from Biden administration policies.
Riggs said his economically depressed town was just coming out of the pandemic lockdown’s effects when he was told that Border Patrol simply would start dropping off migrants without resources at a Gila Bend park, in order for the town to care for them.
Perhaps Gila Bend’s most prominent day in the news aside from repeated illegal-immigrant invasions was back in 1973, when an inquest was held into the death of former Time magazine entertainment writer David Whiting, who had been based at Time’s Beverly Hills bureau among the glitterati before he left that job to become the agent for English actress Sarah Miles.
Miles and Burt Reynolds were filming the movie The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing around Gila Bend when Whiting’s bloodied body was found in a motel. Five English reporters and five American writers, including me, traveled to Mulford Winsor’s justice court for a hearing that produced the questionable conclusion of a drug overdose.
Winsor pointedly had put an eight-ball in front of himself at his desk to indicate how he felt.
Whiting’s elderly mother showed up to urge us reporters not to let his death be brushed off.
If some people got the feeling of a Hollywood coverup back then, the Democrat-dominant media alliance in early 2021 did all it could to protect Biden from deserved blame starting on his very first day in office as he signed arrogant executive orders to undo Republican President Trump’s achievements, including on border security.
Joke Biden had hopes of helping Democrats electorally with his phony compassion for everyone who managed to step over the international line with the belief that he’d make them into benefits-rich U.S. citizens with free medical care. Then the Joke president dumped the burdens on everyone else.
The New York Post noted on March 15 that no less than the president of Mexico ascribed migrants’ belief in a welcome mat to Biden’s policies.
“Migrants attributing their trips to Biden’s rhetoric follows similar remarks from Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who this month said, ‘They see him as the migrant president, and so many feel they’re going to reach the United States’,” the Post said, quoting one woman, “Biden promised us!”
James T. Harris, a conservative talk host on Phoenix-based KFYI Radio (550 AM), said on March 16 that a police officer reported to him that 75 to 80 illegal aliens are being dropped off in the Phoenix metropolitan area every day.
Do the math. Eighty every day would be 29,200 new illegals every year in this area alone.
Without any good cause, Donald Trump’s foes started crying out to impeach him even before he took office in January 2017. With Biden, the master of chaos and dementia, having given the nation plenty of reasons to throw him out of the White House two months after his inauguration, can people please start saying, “Impeach Biden!”?
The administration wasn’t even consulting Democratic congressmen along the Texas border, Cong. Henry Cuellar (D., Texas) told the Inside Texas Politics program. Also, Cuellar tweeted: “Our country is currently unprepared to handle a surge in migrants in the middle of this pandemic. I urge the Biden administration to listen and work with the communities on the southern border who are dealing with this influx.”
Fox News reported on March 15 that Mayor Riggs said the Border Patrol said it would be dropping off illegal immigrants in his town, then they’d be Gila Bend’s problem. But, the mayor said, his town doesn’t have the resources for them.
“Riggs said that other than the notification his town will be a drop-off location for captured illegal immigrants and asylum seekers,” Fox News reported, “the feds are not providing any crucial information, such as coronavirus infection rates of the migrants, the number of migrants Gila Bend can expect to see, or any other basic data.”
Riggs told Fox host Charles Payne that he’s concerned about local elderly residents including Native Americans who are susceptible to COVID-19.
When Payne asked if he thought the illegal immigrants are being told that if they can make it into the U.S., “you’re more or less home free,” Riggs replied, “Exactly.”
Riggs said he saw a recent “big increase in foot traffic” through his area. “I’m seeing drug deals like I’ve never seen before go through our desert. It needs to stop.”
Payne said that instead of just Central Americans who might be expected, current crossers also include natives of Cuba, Brazil, Africa, Haiti, and Romania who believe that if they can get as far as Mexico and have enough money, “we’ll get you into the United States.”
Riggs replied that the illegal entrants are coming from the African continent, the Middle East, and Asia.
On March 16, radio host Harris on KFYI cited the “Cloward-Piven strategy,” first proposed in the 1960s by left-wing activists as a way to so overburden the system that it would collapse and be replaced with socialism.
Although Trump had opposed such tactics, Harris said, “President Trump was just a speed bump on the Cloward-Piven Expressway” rolling forward under Biden.
Guesting on Harris’ program, Riggs said the Biden administration had not been in contact with his town and showed no signs of having planned for what would happen when he opened the border.
Harris also played an audio of a reporter with illegal immigrants who said there’s a lot of coughing among them, but he didn’t know if that’s the result of COVID-19 or just because of their long journey.
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, told KFYI’s “Russell & Hunter” program on March 15 that the Biden administration is “trying to put Band-Aids over the gaping wound they’ve created.”
Brnovich said that when Biden decriminalizes and then incentivizes behavior, “they’ll get more of it.”
The attorney general said he was in Yuma earlier in the day, which is in the southwest corner of Arizona, just east of California and north of Mexico. He said the Border Patrol will be so distracted by illegal immigrants that drug cartels will just be driving their trucks over the border.
More drugs are coming in, Brnovich said. “It is a recipe for disaster. It’s going to be a huge problem here.”
Some people “in Congress for decades have done nothing” on border problems, he said.
“I think we need to have more health measures in place,” and the National Guard called out to stop traffickers, Brnovich said.
A separate Fox News story, posted March 8, interviewed Mark Dannels, sheriff of Cochise County, located in the southeastern corner of Arizona, bordering Mexico and New Mexico.
Dannels was cited saying “that the Biden administration failed to consult with Arizona lawmakers before implementing the policies and left the state to ‘pick up the pieces’,” with the border “not only ‘wide open’ for cartels, but the policies are causing concerns on a number of different fronts, including public safety and the pandemic.”
An article at The Federalist website on March 16 pointed to the increased public-safety threat in Texas, not only from COVID-19 but even from vehicle chases.
“Border communities in south Texas are seeing a sharp increase in high-speed chases through their towns, as vehicles full of illegal immigrants attempt to evade Border Patrol,” the article said. “The mayor of Uvalde, Texas, which is about 60 miles from the border, said there are about a dozen high-speed chases through his town every week now. He says they run between 95 to 100 miles per hour. ‘We’ve never seen anything like this’.”
Meanwhile, NBC News posted on March 16 that even according to Biden’s own Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, “the U.S. is expected to reach the highest number of people apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border in two decades.”
The report said, “As of Sunday [March 14], Customs and Border Protection was encountering 565 unaccompanied children crossing the border on average per day, according to new data obtained by NBC News, up from an average of 313 children per day last month.”
Just in the way that Biden finally issued a mild rebuke to last summer’s rioters and arsonists after a cable television host opined that Biden’s silence on the subject was hurting him with voters, liberal Democrat and ABC News interviewer George Stephanopoulos practically fed Biden the line to say that border chaos isn’t good.
This occurs in remarks posted by ABC on March 16: “Amid a surge of migrants and unaccompanied minors on the U.S. southern border, Stephanopoulos asked the president, ‘Do you have to say quite clearly, “Don’t come”?’
“‘Yes, I can say quite clearly: Don’t come over,’ Biden said during the wide-ranging interview in Darby, Penn.”
When Biden tried to say the current surge is just one of various surges, ABC posted, “Stephanopoulos noted, ‘This one might be worse,’ and Biden acknowledged, ‘Well, it could be’.”
Hey, Mr. Stephanopoulos, here’s betting that if you feed the president the line that the sky is blue, whatcha think he’ll reply?
Meanwhile, once more Americans observed COVID-19 being used as a purely political disease that was used to half-destroy the U.S. economy during a year of government-enforced lockdowns that closed businesses, churches, and schools and led to addictions and suicides — but, ahem:
Newly arrived COVID-carrying illegal immigrants, who should not even be in the U.S., were set free by U.S. law enforcers under Biden’s policies to roam as they pleased around this nation, even being put on public buses and airplanes to travel where they wanted.
An Overnight Crisis
The Wanderer asked Virginia-based Catholic blogger Mary Ann Kreitzer for her reaction to this official hypocrisy. She replied on March 15.
“Nothing has exposed the truth about COVID being a political football than the crisis at the border,” Kreitzer said. “Democrat governors continue to double down using the pandemic as an excuse to control our citizens and destroy livelihoods, and even the lives of our children who should be back in school.
“The Democrats’ open-borders policies endanger the health and welfare of every American, especially those on the border. Not only are diseased invaders welcomed without restriction and allowed to be superspreaders of COVID, but unaccompanied children and women are in danger from sex traffickers and drug lords,” she said.
“How many illegals are ‘mules’ for the cartels? The Democrats own ‘this mess,’ as Biden called it while trying to say he inherited it from Trump,” Kreitzer said. “But the statistics don’t bear that out at all. We’ve gone from a manageable situation to a crisis overnight.
“At some point the little boy calling ‘Wolf’ faces the vicious predator staring him in the face. And he is on his own! Andrew Cuomo is learning exactly how fickle political allies are. He’s experiencing his own night of the long knives as all his former friends pile on and demand his head,” she said.
“But that same Armageddon will be coming for many other Democrats as they continue to devastate the American economy and fuel inflation,” Kreitzer said. “Let’s pray Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer are next. You can’t fool even the dumbest voters forever! Hopefully the crisis at the border will wake up a lot of liberals to what their elite leaders have in store for all of us, including them.”
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