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Despite Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas claim that the southern border “is secure,” a video released by Senator Ted Cruz debunks those claims.
“Look, the border is secure,” he said. “We are working to make the border more secure. That has been a historic challenge,” Mayorkas said.
His comments come after Customs and Border Protection (CBP) announced last week that there were 207,000 migrant apprehensions at the border in June, up from just over 189,000 in June of last year.
With June figures, there are so far 1,746,119 total apprehensions at the southern border in FY 2022, surpassing the 1,734,686 encounters in FY 2021.
But this Tuesday, June 26, Republican Senator Ted Cruz released a video revealing the seriousness of what is happening at the southern border over what he called the “narco slave trade.”
“Biden is responsible for slavery at the border”
“President Biden doesn’t want Americans to know that he has been ignoring the narco slave trade taking place along our southern border,” the senator said after releasing the video.
President Biden doesn’t want Americans to know that he has been ignoring the narco slave trade taking place along our southern border. pic.twitter.com/OXtOYADamj
— Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) July 26, 2022
“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are responsible for the worst plague of slavery in America since the Civil War,” he added.
Cruz traveled to the border and recounted how the vast majority of migrants are being economically exploited by drug cartels.
“These children come in in debt to vicious cartels thousands and thousands of dollars. The teenage boys work for the gangs in every city in America, and the teenage girls experience a hell worse than that, with far too many of them human trafficked into sex slavery,” Cruz says in the video.
95% of illegal migrants don’t qualify for asylum
Tony Gonzales, R-Texas, also contradicted Secretary Mayorkas by stating that “the southern border is the furthest thing from secure.” Gonzales also revealed that almost 95% of illegal migrants do not qualify for asylum.
After witnessing the situation at our border, I fear the United States will be subject to another large scale terrorist attack if the Administration continues to refuse to take action.
Biden must acknowledge this catastrophe & repeal his open-border policies endangering lives. https://t.co/4nftVLRM7S
— David Rouzer (@RepDavidRouzer) July 25, 2022
Republican lawmakers hold the Biden administration responsible for the worsening crisis because since taking office the situation has worsened following the reversal of policies that somehow contained illegal migrants outside of U.S. territory.
Biden eliminated the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), which required migrants to be returned to Mexico for the duration of their immigration hearings. The president also reduced Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) priorities, reducing the number of detentions, halted construction of the border wall, and implemented an asylum rule to speed up the length of hearings.
The situation at the southern border is so serious that smuggling has become a multi-million dollar business that is very difficult to stop.
Migrant smuggling: from entrepreneurial venture to billion-dollar business
A New York Times report revealed that illegal migrants are not only forced to pay a high amount of money for coyotes to help them reach the United States, but once there, smugglers repeatedly charge them another sum to stay in the country.
“Migrant smuggling along the southern border of the United States has evolved over the past 10 years from a scattered network of independent coyotes into a multibillion-dollar international business controlled by organized crime, including some of Mexico’s most violent drug cartels,” the story notes.
According to the Times, the fees smugglers demand from migrants can range from $4,000 to $20,000 depending on where they come from.
The fees usually range from $4,000 for migrants coming from Hispanic America to $20,000 for those who must be transported from Africa, Eastern Europe or Asia, according to Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a smuggling expert at George Mason University.
According to Homeland Security Investigations the sheer number of people seeking to cross made migrant smuggling an irresistible source of money for some cartels to the point of becoming a kind of entrepreneurial venture.
They have “teams that specialize in logistics, transportation, surveillance, safe houses and accounting, all in support of an industry whose dividends have risen from $500 million in 2018 to $13 billion today,” the report notes.
While this is happening, Texas counties declare “invasion” in order to take additional measures to help contain illegal migration, or failing that, increase security in this state that so far is the most affected by the migration crisis.
Sabrina Martín Rondon is a Venezuelan journalist. Her source is politics and economics. She is a specialist in corporate communications and is committed to the task of dismantling the supposed benefits of socialism // Sabrina Martín Rondon es periodista venezolana. Su fuente es la política y economía. Es especialista en comunicaciones corporativas y se ha comprometido con la tarea de desmontar las supuestas bondades del socialismo