The flood of illegal immigrants coming across the U.S. border with Mexico is also driving up criminal activity, which is posing a serious problem for border agents tied up with care taking and processing.
Border Patrol Rio Grande Valley Sector Chief Patrol Agent Rodolfo Karisch held a press event with Sen. Ted Cruz on Monday to highlight the perilous conditions migrants face crossing the border in south Texas, and to discuss how the recent spike in illegal crossings provides opportunities for drug smugglers and other criminals.
#BORDERNEWS RGV Sector Chief says 258 MS13 Gang members have been apprehended this fiscal year, + 96 18th Street Gang members as well. “Not a day goes by that I don’t see a report for someone that we’ve taken into custody that has an active warrant for murder, sexual assault…” pic.twitter.com/WYsknEekjI
— Sydney Hernandez (@SydneyKGBT) July 1, 2019
KGBT’s Sydney Hernandez asked the important question: “Chief, right now ya’ll are dealing with the humanitarian mission. Does this mean that more narcotics and people with criminal histories are entering more easily?”
Karisch confirmed that’s the case, and said it’s a matter of managing the agency’s meager resources.
“Absolutely,” he told Hernandez, “because when you have 60 percent of your workforce dedicated to humanitarian – and I haven’t even really addressed rescue part, because now we’re getting into the rescue months where we’ll actually be sending out more agents just to do that – so out of that 60-40 split, that means I only have 40 percent of the workforce to dedicate to the border security.
“With that, you’ve got hard drugs, you’ve got marijuana that sill continue to flow,” he continued. “You have criminal aliens – year to date, 258 MS13 Gang members, 96 18th Street Gang members. Not a day goes by that I don’t see a report for someone that we’ve taken into custody that has an active arrest warrant for murder, sexual assault or some other crime here in the United States.
“So that’s the reality of what we face, and why I have not collapsed those checkpoints, because there are still a lot of bad people and bad things that are coming into this country,” Karisch said.
Cruz chimed in with some perspective.
“Cocaine is up, heroin is up, meth is up, fentanyl is up, and if we don’t get serious about solving it those problems are only going to get worse,” the senator said.
Karisch said agents in the Rio Grande Valley seized over 91,000 pounds of marijuana, though he acknowledged that the total for the drug is down from previous years. Hernandez questioned whether the stat is a reflection of more marijuana making it through undetected.
“It could be any number of things. If you look at a lot of states who have legalized recreational and medical. There are number of given reasons as to why that’s down, but it could also be that factor, as well,” he said. “We don’t intercept everything that we detect …”
The press conference came on the same day congressional Democrats toured immigration holding facilities in Texas, where Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez alleged Border Patrol agents are forcing illegal immigrants to drink from the toilet.
The outlandish claim, which was quickly debunked by Border Patrol officials and others who attended the tour, garnered far more media attention than the press conference in the scorching Texas heat.
The media tour took reporters through the desert on the same trails followed by more than 130,000 illegal immigrants that crossed through the sector in May alone. In total, well over 1 million will make their way in to the U.S. in fiscal year 2019, though plenty will also perish along the way – deaths perpetuated by Democrats in Congress who have refused to fix the legal loopholes at the heart of the border crisis, Cruz said.
Unlike the migrants crossing into the U.S., reporters in Texas received a cold glass of water at the end of the two hour-tour, which left reporters soaked in sweat, the Brownsville Herald reports.
“Today,” Karisch said, “you’re blessed with a little cloud coverage.”
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