The President of theUnited States had a very bad month in the month of May. The United States Border Patrol had a very bad month in the month of May. People who want immigration reform are having a bad month because the Border Patrol is a bloated unionized federal force that is incompetent, ignorant and useless. It works for President Barack Obama.
The useless unionized Border Patrol made sure the country was flooded with visuals of undocumented women and children being dumped in cities outside Texas because it can’t handle its job of stopping people from crossing the border illegally in one sector of the nine border sectors along the Mexican border that the Border Patrol mans.
The Patrol tells us that thousands of children, many unaccompanied, are crossing the border into Texas in the Rio Grande Valley. They don’t know what to do with them. Few people know that federal law states that any child five or under that is found on the U.S. side without papers or accompanied by any relative is not only taken into custody but the law mandates that if filial relationship cannot be established that the child shall be formally granted citizenship and placed into state hands for foster care.
Most of these women and children that they Patrol has fobbed off on other cities and districts are from Central America, not Mexico. At these other cities, these detained people are being processed by Border Patrol sectors that aren’t as busy. In fact in the past two years according to the Patrol, illegal crossings are down from previous years. Only the lower Rio Grande Valley has shown any increase.
To hear the whiny union representatives of the National Border Patrol Council, the country is being flooded by these invaders. That is not true. Of the nine Border Patrol Sectors only the lower Rio Grande Valley has shown any real increase in illegal border crossings in the past few years.
Remember, it was a handful of immigration officers of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) that filed a law suit charging that President Obama was preventing them from doing their jobs when he loosened deportations for certain people brought here as children. Their lawyer, Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State and a failure as an anti-immigration lawyer (he works for John Tanton’s racist organizations of FAIR and its legal arm). He loses almost every single case he brings costing local taxpayers in Texas, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Alabama and Georgia millions of dollars.
In this case, the frothing-at-the-mouth ICE officers he convinced to sue were certainly disappointed when a federal judge threw out their suit.
The Border Patrol isn’t even recognizable from that George W. Bush found in January of 2001. It has tripled in size to almost 20,000 officers. Border enforcement with ICE costs us more than all the costs of the FBI, the Secret Service, and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) combined.
It appears the ICE officers including the Border Patrol also happen to provide us with the wonderful statistics that they lead the entire federal government in convictions for crimes committed usually while they are on duty and usually involve smuggling people or drugs across the Mexican border. That is not new.
25 years or so ago, the New York Times ran a multi-page article about the old INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) having the largest number of criminal charges and convictions of its personnel than of any other federal agency even the larger ones.
Little has changed.
If one doesn’t live on the border one isn’t aware of problems with the Border Patrol and its union unless they themselves turn on the union propaganda machine to excite reporters with little knowledge of the border with such efforts Arizona and California for more processing by idle Border Patrol officers because they have little to do.
Violence by Border Patrol officers made the news not long ago and the entire force of 20,000 had to be reeducated as to how to handle twelve year old kids in Mexico throwing rocks at Border Patrol agents on the U.S. side.
Seems that the Border Patrol administration decided that shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars to kids who were shot or shot at by trigger-happy agents was not desirable. Agents were simply 0rdered to step back a few feet to avoid rocks being thrown over a twelve-foot high fence or to wear helmets. That is far cheaper than tax-payer dollars being awarded to Mexican families for kids doing what kids do.
The border is relatively quiet now; now is the time to conjure up immigration reform that provides for seasonal work permits, legalization of qualified people here who might have come illegally and to make sure the legal immigration system takes no longer than 5 years rather than the 10 to 40 years it can take now if you are Mexican or Central American.
Contreras formerly wrote for the New America News Service of the New York Times Syndicate
Raoul Lowery Contreras (1941) was born in Mexico, raised in the USA. Former U.S. Marine, athlete, Deans List at San Diego State. Professional political consultant and California Republican Party official(1963-65)…Television news commentator, radio talk show host…published Op-Ed writer (1988 to present)…author of various books
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