INTRODUCTION to TERRORISTS ON THE BORDER AND IN OUR COUNTRY by Charles A. Marino“We are not saying, ‘Don’t come.’ We are saying, ‘Don’t come now ….’”
With these calculated words from DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas during an official White House Press Corps address on March 1, 2021, the message was sent to the world that America’s Southwest border would soon be wide open to anyone wishing to enter.
Fifteen-year-old Maria and her tight knit family heard the news from small-town gossip and on social media: Incoming U.S. President Joe Biden promised to stop construction of Trump’s border wall immediately upon taking office and offer refuge to anyone who could reach American soil under a simple verbal claim of asylum. For millions of desperate folks from impoverished areas all over the world, this new messaging was an invitation—a welcome mat—compared to Trump’s policies that required immigrants to stay in Mexico while their individual cases were investigated.
Word on the streets of Chihuahua suggested that if Maria could just make it across the border, she’d be free to make a life in America. Her cousins who legally immigrated to California in 2005 urged her to come, insisting there’s be plenty of jobs available when she arrived. Getting there, however, would be on her.
As an “unaccompanied child” she was told she had little to worry about. She’d also heard that even if she was apprehended by Biden Administration authorities, her journey might simply be delayed for a few days as she was processed and released for a court hearing sometime in the years to come. And if for any reason she was expelled back to Mexico, under America’s new Covid rules there would be no penalties for trying again. For Maria, the odds were worth the risk. But like always, there was the money issue.
She’d lost her father to a motorcycle accident when she was 13 and had to drop out of school to help her mother feed her brother and sisters. They figured if she could make it to California where the poor are given housing, food, and healthcare, she could send money home and eventually bring the whole family to live with her.
So finally, with the help of small donations from extended family and some street wisdom garnered from two tough years of fending for herself, Maria felt she was ready. So, she Snapchatted an acquaintance who made a few calls. A week later she hopped a ride to a tiny town outside of Ciudad Juarez where she met up with a coyote who promised to usher her across the border.
Maria knew she’d made a mistake as soon as she saw him.
His body was laden with wicked tattoos, and when he turned, she saw the flash of a handgun partially hidden in his waistband. He looked her up and down like a meat inspector before sneering in approval. For young Maria, her natural beauty was both a blessing and a curse. The coyote’s wicked smile vanished as he demanded the money.
Maria was already in too deep; she had no choice but to reach into her backpack to fish out her life savings—$2,000 U.S.—knowing that she must pay the remaining balance of her bill within three months after reaching the states and that she would likely be forced to work for the Cartels even longer once in the country. What that “job” would entail was unknown and feared.
From the moment she handed him the cash and was shoved into a Ford pickup, she was not treated like a client paying for a service, but rather like a stock animal headed to auction. She was pleasantly surprised though when her trip across the Rio Grande somewhere near Guadalupe, Mex, was much less treacherous than the drowning nightmare she had anticipated; minutes later when she felt American soil under her feet, she started to relax a bit.
But her easiness was short lived; Maria would not taste the American freedom that she’d dreamt for another five tortuous months. Rather, her nightmare was just beginning.
As soon as she changed into dry clothes pulled from the only luggage she carried—a plastic bag—she was ushered up a steep riverbank, led across a few hundred yards of crop fields and finally onto a culvert beside a dirt road where they hid. An hour later or so another pickup appeared, into which she was ordered to lay down in its covered bed and not move. Lying beside her were several plastic containers filled with packaged cocaine–and as she would later learn—enough fentanyl to kill most of Dallas.
Maria was driven for several suffocating hours West on U.S. HWY 10 before the truck made its first and only stop. She thanked God that it was a relatively cool morning in March, or she surely would have baked to death. But before she could discern any of her new surroundings, she was blindfolded and whisked into a seedy windowless bedroom in a stash house somewhere in Tucson. She was pushed to a bed, given a sack of fast food, some Xanax pills and told she needed to rest awhile before continuing her journey to California and her new life.
But there would be no journey; For the next five months the young girl’s life was a haze of violence, drugs, sleep, and rape.
Maria was sold into prostitution—and used by cartel members—day after day, night after night. Like every kidnapping story you’ve ever heard, she was told that if she tried to run, therefore defaulting on her debt, she would be tortured and her mother and little brother back in Chihuahua would be killed. And she had every reason to believe them, as she’d witnessed their savagery on numerous occasions and overheard many of the vile deeds they’d done while they partied in the next room and bragged about their gangbanging exploits, including intentionally killing “stupid American teenagers” by selling them fentanyl-laced cocaine. And so, Maria entered survival mode, doing what she had to do to live, trying to block out all the rest, all while praying for an opportunity to escape her living hell—whenever she was lucid enough to do so.
Despite Maria’s life-altering physical and mental scars, she’s among the lucky; a raid on the stash house thanks to an informant tip landed her in DEA custody who promptly turned her over to ICE. Her whereabouts to this day are confidential.
As Americans, we all hope Maria is safe and somehow prospering, wherever she is. But the problem of illegal immigration on a mass scale is only getting worse … and will continue to do so until America’s immigration policies are enforced, and its messaging serves as a deterrent. What we do know for sure is that despite what President Biden’s incompetent and absentee “border czar” Vice President Kamala Harris attempts to spin; the border is most definitely NOT secure. It’s an insult to the American people’s intelligence to even suggest otherwise.
The most sickening part is Maria’s story isn’t unique. Hundreds of thousands like hers have occurred since this crisis started. And human trafficking is just one horrific byproduct of America’s leaders losing operational control of our border: Other people sneak into America not for a better life or a more lucrative one selling illegal drugs and guns to its vast and wealthy markets; Rather, professionally trained, Middle East-bred terrorists come specifically to destroy it via bombs. At the time of this writing, news of hundreds of Chinese, Iranian and Russian nationals being caught at the southern border—some of them suspected of being foreign agents—is commonplace. Meanwhile, Central American-style gangs like the notorious MS-13 continue to fuel their ruthless criminal enterprises in American cities via drugs, theft, kidnapping and murder. On a less violent note, even well-intended illegal immigrants take jobs that could be filled by legal immigrants and U.S. citizens alike, all while not paying back into the system via taxes but rather fleecing it by sending their earnings home.
America's resources and infrastructure such as its welfare systems, housing, hospitals, schools, and police departments are all stretched like pawnshop guitar strings, while once-great American cities from coast to coast are morphing into virtual border towns before our very eyes. Still, elite, progressive leftists say America is incorrigibly racist and should be ashamed of itself for not letting everyone in.
President Biden and his administration claim its open-border politics are molded out of empathy for the world’s impoverished peoples. But where is that same empathy for low- and middle-class Americans who bear the brunt of unfettered illegal immigration? Biden’s reluctance to enforce the border and immigration laws of the United States demonstrates that abandoning their federal responsibilities has done nothing but endanger the lives of migrants and Americans and make the country a more dangerous place.
At the same time illegal immigrants are receiving free plane tickets, swank hotel stays, meals, smartphones, and healthcare, you might be surprised how many poor white kids in rural Oklahoma trailer parks don’t have toothpaste or access to medicine, much less a decent education or a half-ass chance at success. Yet we seldom if ever hear this Administration talk about helping them. Sioux Tribal members on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota have one of the highest poverty rates this country has witnessed since the Great Depression; the substance abuse and suicide rates are off the charts … but you seldom hear about it because it’s a progressive embarrassment—and because the Rosebud Sioux is a sovereign nation, so its statistics needn’t be reported as U.S. statistics. So, the media and lawmakers conveniently sweep them under the rug, all to continue the narrative they want to push.
As of late 2023, parts of Detroit look like the scene of a horror movie; Chicago averages 60 murders per month, and LA’s homeless situation is untenable. San Francisco is a real-life Gotham City with its “defund the police” movement installed that allows criminals to steal, loot, pillage, defecate and get high at will as business owners flee. Yet each day the news shows more immigrants spilling into the country from our southern border, unvetted, as tax-paying Americans can only watch and wonder how many more resources and opportunities their country can hand out.
These days many sympathetic Americans tend to forget that “asylum,” as the U.S. immigration law defines it, doesn’t mean “an escape from poverty.” Sadly, there are billions of innocent people around the globe suffering from abject poverty, and we can’t save them all. Rather, “asylum” means to provide special safe haven for those people who are fleeing dire government persecution due to race, religion, or other political reasons. We must remember this as we move forward.
Here’s another fact we must remember: A country cannot be considered sovereign or safe without secure borders. The leaders of every prosperous nation in the history of the world have known this, perhaps with the strange exception of the Biden Administration and the radical leftists in Congress and in universities. By 2023 America’s political divide has created a perfect storm, if we don’t circle the wagons now—specifically at the polling booths in 2024—our nation’s days of prosperity—the very reason people by the millions risk their lives to come here—will come to an end because its current trajectory simply cannot be sustained.
But before we can fully delve into border security, immigration policy and how to fix it, we should first take a truncated and unbiased look at the U.S. and Mexico’s relatively brief history as neighbors and the policy that resulted. After all, to ignore history is to invite ignorance into future planning.
