The U.S. border with Mexico is open, or as open as it can be without disbanding the U.S. agencies in charge of that border.
Pew Research Center says that the U.S. Border Patrol logged 250,000 encounters will illegal immigrants crossing “crossing into the United States from Mexico in December 2023…. That was the highest monthly total on record, easily eclipsing the previous peak of about 224,000 encounters in May 2022.”
Not all are deported or even given a court date. In early 2023, NBC News reported: “Nearly 600,000 migrants who crossed the border since March 2021 were released in the U.S. with no immigration court dates.”
In late March 2021, as the numbers of undocumented migrants arriving at the southern border began to surge, CBP began releasing migrants with what is known as a “Notice to Report,” telling them to report to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office, rather than a “Notice to Appear,” which instructs migrants when to appear in court to determine whether they will be deported or given protections to remain legally in the U.S.
But that process proved problematic, as reports emerged that many migrants were not showing up at ICE offices to receive court dates.
Despite further steps, the chaos persists. The chaos is often bad for persons legitimately seeking asylum, who may miss a deadline to apply for asylum even as they await a court date. The chaos is good for persons who want to get into the country and couldn’t care less about complying with nominal institutional requirements for remaining here.
In a Common Sense commentary, Paul Jacob asks whether the U.S. government should “let soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army enter these United States through the southern border so that they’re in place if and when the Chinese government directs them to undertake sabotage against the United States (perhaps during a Chinese invasion of Taiwan).”
Jacob refers to a Gatestone Institute piece by Gordon Chang in which the author reports that although many immigrants from China patiently wait for visas “in lines at U.S. consulates in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou,” many others are “short-circuiting the long waits.”
At the southern border, Chinese migrants are entering the United States in unprecedented numbers…. The 8,000 Chinese migrants apprehended this calendar year [2023] are more than quadruple the number apprehended in the comparable period a year ago….
Some migrants are almost certainly members of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Representative Mark Green (R-Tenn.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said at a press conference [on June 14, 2023] that a Border Patrol sector chief informed him that some of the Chinese migrants at the southern border have “known ties to the PLA.”…
These military-linked migrants, despite their affiliations, have been released into America.
There is no question that China’s PLA is inserting saboteurs through Mexico. “At the Darien Gap, I have seen countless packs of Chinese males of military age, unattached to family groups, and pretending not to understand English,” said Yon, the war correspondent. “They were all headed to the American border.”
The Department of Homeland Security declares at its website: “Securing and managing our borders have been priority mission areas for DHS since its creation.”
Now an Air Force general is telling Congress that more than a thousand undocumented drones a month are also crossing into the U.S. from Mexico. A major purpose is to monitor Border Patrol agents. According to San Diego Sector Chief Patrol Agent Aaron Heitke, “Human smugglers using drones to surveil the Border Patrol is a growing trend that we’ve observed along the border. This technology provides transnational criminal organizations with new capability that they are eager to exploit” (New York Post, March 15, 2024).
Drones can be countered, but it’s a struggle. According to Forbes reporter Laren Thompson, writing in November 2022, “The problem is that any country investing in drone systems has numerous options for making them more lethal and survivable—more options than defenders currently do.”
Drones can be used by smugglers to monitor. They can also be used by persons with different motives and affiliations to kill.
Also see:
Center for Immigration Studies: “Video: Michael Yon: Panama’s Darien Gap”
“The people that are going to come in and blow up a mall are more likely to come through here [the Darien Gap] than are through the northern triangle.”
