The Largest Border Surge in Border Patrol History

Written by Daniel Horowitz

The Department of Homeland Security has announced that the March border apprehension numbers will likely reach 100,000. A record 4,117 migrants were apprehended or “encountered” on Tuesday. If the numbers for March wind up smashing the February numbers, it would show an annual pace of 1.2 million.

.@CBP_McAleenan: We are now on pace for over 100,000 apprehensions and encounters with migrants—with 90% (90,000) crossing the border illegally between ports of entry. March will be the highest month in over a decade. pic.twitter.com/Nmuq00asZY

— CBP (@CBP) March 27, 2019

Just how bad is it? Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, told me emphatically that this is the “absolute worst” he’s seen it in 21 years of his work on the border. “We have never seen what we are dealing with today. It’s unprecedented and we’re in uncharted waters.”

Judd stressed the fact that while there were years where we had up to 1.5 million apprehensions during the 1990s and early 2000s, those were total arrests, not total number of people arrested. That is because almost all of those crossing were single adults from Mexico who were repatriated back to Mexico almost immediately. As such, many tried to come back again, and Border Patrol counted news arrests of the same individual multiple times. “Last decade, we arrested the same people multiple times in one year. For example, I caught the same group of seven people three times in the same shift, so although I made 21 arrests, it was still only seven people.”

Contrast that to today’s dynamic of Central American families, who, under orders from radical forum-shopped lower courts, can now obtain release into our country simply by surrendering themselves. Almost all of them are unique individuals without multiple apprehensions. As such, according to Judd, “We are on pace to arrest more people than we’ve ever arrested before in the history of the entire Border Patrol.” That will be somewhere upwards of 700,000 if the pace doesn’t intensify, and that includes the earlier months with fewer apprehensions. He estimates that in past high migration years, there likely weren’t more than 600,000.

These are just the ones we catch and those who surrender. What about the ones we don’t catch while Border Patrol is completely shut down as a national security defense and is serving as transportation for Central America? Raul Ortiz, deputy chief Border Patrol agent for the Rio Grande Valley sector, told the Epoch Times that there are 25,000 illegal aliens that they are certain successfully evaded Border Patrol just in one sector. “We actually don’t know who they are. So far, here in south Texas, we’ve apprehended folks from 44 different countries. These are from the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, Iran, you name it.”

The reality many in Congress and among Trump’s base are missing is that the border wall cannot help for this, certainly not 57 miles of new fencing announced this week. The wall is good for keeping out those who don’t want to surrender to agents and will combat some of the cartel activities, but it will not stop this massive flow, unless we construct the fence right on the border line. However, in most places, particularly along the Rio Grande River in Texas, the wall is recessed north into our border. If agents are given legal advice, erroneous in my view, that they must go behind the fence and pick up any Central American family even when we know this is one massive fraud being perpetrated against America, then no wall will help.

The concern is that too many on the Right have been lulled into a false sense of hope by Trump’s reprogramming of a few billion in defense funding for partial border fencing. It’s certainly a good idea to construct more fencing, but the policies must be changed. It’s truly astonishing that the Senate has failed to vote a single time to change a policy and make Democrats take a tough stand against it. Congress has no plans to pass anything, and the president is left with the simple option of asserting his inherent executive authority to protect sovereignty as well as existing case law on delegated power to turn back bogus asylum requests.

Even without this power, which surprisingly is not being forcefully asserted by the Justice Department, at some point an invasion is an invasion. Eddie Guerra, sheriff of Hidalgo County, Texas, one of the hardest-hit border counties, noted how there are fliers being passed around in Guatemala telling people ‘Just Come to America! You will be processed and released, given an opportunity!”

It won’t end just with those three countries from Central America. Word has gone out to the entire world that we have open borders. Families are now coming from Nicaragua in increased numbers. A new caravan of Cubans is coming through Guatemala to our border because they now realized it is easier and safer to come through Mexico by land than by boat to the Florida coast. In other words, even if we hit rock bottom and empty out all of Guatemala and Honduras, there are endless numbers of people from other impoverished countries who would love to benefit from de facto amnesty, welfare, and birthright citizenship. It’s a suicide pact to treat what we know is not asylum and will destroy our country as a typical asylum adjudication.

In 1889, the U.S. Supreme Court said, “Jurisdiction over its own territory to that extent is an incident of every independent nation. It is a part of its independence. If it could not exclude aliens it would be to that extent subject to the control of another power. (The Chinese Exclusion Case, 130 U.S. 603 (1889)).

Indeed, we no longer even have amnesty for illegal aliens. We no longer have illegal aliens because we no longer have a border and are no longer a sovereign nation. Webster’s defines a sovereign country as “free from external control.” Our destiny is now totally in the hands of external forces.

This article was originally published at ConservativeReview.com