Fort Report: The Border is Broken
I just returned from our southern border. The situation is dire. As we were nearing a small Texas town early Tuesday morning, the sheriff called and said, “We’re in a fight with Honduran nationals on the train track by the silos. Meet us there.”
I made the trip at the invitation of a new, exceptional young leader in Congress, Tony Gonzalez, whose Congressional district covers roughly 800 miles of the Texas-Mexico border. With illegal immigration at the highest level in twenty-one years, sheriffs and Border Patrol are crying out for help. “We’ve lost control,” one agent lamented to us.
We often think of border control in simplistic terms. But sector by sector, area by area, dynamics differ. Standing on that railroad track littered with fleeing migrant debris, the sheriff, who must cover a county the size of Delaware, described his challenge of keeping his community safe. It’s not glamorous work. We followed behind Border Patrol in weeds, mud, and heat as they searched a nearby field. A citizen emerged with a gun and binoculars. She said, “we saw him go that way.”
This is a tough, dangerous business. As the sheriff explained, the people who enter his area of the sector are mostly criminals. Still, one wonders why a person would jump off a train and flee into the harsh South Texas scrub country. The reality is that their illegal transport, escape into America, and path to safety are all coordinated by criminal cartels.
The other area we visited was right on the Rio Grande. At about a foot deep, the river here is easy to wade. No surprise there’s been a 500% increase in crossings in what is normally the slow time of year due to extreme, often deadly, summer heat. Here, most people are not running from the law. They are casually coming across, trying to turn themselves in by claiming asylum or another reason to be in the U.S. It was surreal to watch.
The detention center was way over capacity. Border Patrol have to be extraordinarily creative to take people in, protect them, and process them.
In this tough, sometimes violent, human catastrophe, Border Patrol is doing what they can with limited resources. They are exceptionally dedicated persons trying to do two things at once: treat people with dignity while trying to restore order to our immigration system. But, as several Border Patrol agents told me, “We are overrun.”
While many single adult migrants are sent back to country of origin, other immigrants are allowed to stay. Because Border Patrol lacks authority to hold, let alone adjudicate, persons at the border, many persons are released into America and asked to show up for a court hearing, often two years after entry.
All of this points to several areas of trauma: desperate persons journeying through horrid conditions; local law enforcement who should be solving local crimes and traffic violations; besieged Border Patrol; frightened townspeople afraid to send their kids to school; traumatized farmers and ranchers who routinely find dead persons on their land and criminals in their kitchens. The day I was there a rancher discovered the body of a decomposing MS-13 gang member. It’s the Wild West all over again.
The sick undercurrent is that these are salad days for the cartels. It’s so lucrative that cartels actively recruit from around the world. Seventy-six nationalities have appeared of late at this border crossing, including some with ties to terrorism. Agents are seeing people from Iran, Yemen, Nigeria, The Congo, Ecuador, Brazil, Venezuela, and increasingly from Haiti and Cuba. It was beyond belief to witness the deconstruction of a new high border fence put up to provide better protection for the town. The sad, frustrating, politics of Washington at play.
Here’s what should happen immediately:
1. A dramatic increase in Border Patrol resources.
2. To relieve the backlog, a return to the previous policy of processing asylum claims on the Mexican side of the border.
3. Send American judges to the border area, so claims can be adjudicated promptly and fairly and so persons are not dispersed throughout the country.
4. Accept that effective border barriers are an important security tool.
Chaos and disorder at the border hurts all of America and undermines our ability to have a vibrant, just, and charitable immigration system. As my colleague Tony Gonzalez said to me, “Every town in America is now a border town.”
Sincerely,
Congressman Jeff Fortenberry
