By Mark Anderson
DONNA, Texas—With border apprehensions having reached over 100,000—and that’s just those who are caught—in February, a 14-year high for that month, and with the Department of Homeland Security allegedly sending only adult illegal aliens back to Mexico, the border is “bleeding” like never before. A rather mysterious, almost endless flow of “orphaned” children and “unaccompanied minors,” along with some real and suspected fake family units, inundates south Texas and other areas along the 1,900-mile long border.
Despite the ongoing “Covid contagion” concerns preached to the masses nonstop by the U.S. and Mexican mass media, these youths, busload upon busload—some of them no doubt infected with Covid—are routinely whisked off to far-flung facilities in San Antonio, Dallas and elsewhere. And families, real or contrived, are being released into the United States, pending their immigration and asylum court dates, reinstituting an often-risky practice that Donald Trump had largely banned when he required those seeking asylum to remain on the Mexican side of the border for their proceedings.
On March 25 alone, 6,000 people were apprehended by the Border Patrol along the southwest border, according to a senior Border Patrol official via a press call. “Of the 2,200 individuals within family units who were apprehended, 1,900 were re- leased, while 300 were processed under Title 42 to be expelled from the U.S.,” the Epoch Times reported, giving an idea of the ratio between those expelled and those released.
Here in Donna, a small but tightly populated former fruit-canning town in Hidalgo County, border authorities set up one of the main regional detention centers, which has garnered worldwide headlines, a half-mile from this writer’s house. Any passers-by who get too close, including yours truly, are waved away immediately from a facility that represents a supreme embarrassment for the rogue Joe Biden administration, which in just a few short months has turned the entire southern border area from a place of relative and reasonable control and security into a region of utter chaos. The Donna facility, infamous for cramming children and minors into tight fenced-in cells, where they’re covered with foil-like silver-colored blankets—reportedly amid the stench of urine and feces—not only drew Texas Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn to the area, as well as Gov. Greg Abbott, of course, but also James O’Keefe of the noted independent journalism outlet Project Veritas. That outlet made a name for itself doing undercover video of Planned Parenthood staffers talking about selling aborted baby tissue, among many other exposés.
O’Keefe managed to smuggle photos from in- side the Donna detention center. Among other things, he noted that specially assigned attorneys wanting to assess the inside of the Donna facility were turned away, as well. An effort by this AFP writer to reach out to Project Veritas to cooperate and explore the border issue further, however, did not receive a reply.
Notably, at the Donna facility, up to 80 individuals are crammed into each 24-by-30-foot cell. On any given day, approximately 9,000 people are in custody in the Rio Grande Valley alone, according to various accounts.
Many citizens in the Mexican-American “Tex-Mex” population that typifies the deep-south Rio Grande Valley of Texas hardly have had time to investigate the border crisis due to the persistent rigors of daily life. While Covid restrictions have hampered their ability to make a dependable living, the transnational criminal element is doing just fine, using the hordes of minors that it helps traffic to the border, sometimes for $20,000 per head, to overwhelm and distract the Border Patrol. According to Rio Grande Valley Border Patrol Sector Chief Brian Hastings, more than 861 criminals have been encountered in his sector so far this fiscal year, including 92 sex offenders and 63 gang members. But that’s just those who are caught, of course. Some of the minors, as recent history has shown, blend in as “sleeper” scouts who carry out errands for their criminal sponsors.
The family units and unaccompanied minors currently crossing are usually from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. However, the Border Patrol is currently encountering more illegal aliens from Ecuador, Brazil, and Cuba. In recent years, people from 40 or more countries—the Middle East, Eastern Europe and even Africa—are found as far north as Brooks County near where a Border Patrol checkpoint is located at Falfurrias. Ranchers and friends of ranchers recently told AFP at a breakfast meeting that the illegals some- times follow the rights-of-way routes, or easements, established for gas and oil pipelines that traverse the huge ranches, as a means of crossing those ranch lands, making it less likely to be detected by ranch owners or Border Patrol agents. Border policy wasn’t perfect under the four years of Mr. Trump’s presidency. Illegal entrants also were tightly caged, though arguably under somewhat better conditions.
But now, more acutely than ever, the real scourge, above and beyond the exploitation of illegal alien hordes, is an alien ideology that no public official, no matter how well-intended, can fully escape. That ideology centers around the idea that there’s no longer such a thing as nationhood. Mr. Biden, being an ever- obedient globalist in the thrall of world-banking and other entrenched corporate interests, won’t do anything definitive to correct the border problem because that doesn’t fit “the plan.”
Mayors of what are now called “global cities,” as well as some rogue governors, now say we’re living in a “post-national” world. That, in the final analysis, goes a long way toward explaining what appears to be a deliberate creation of border chaos, to achieve “greater” objectives under the rubric of globalism.
Mark Anderson is AFP roving editor.
