As The Daily Wire has reported at length, the nation is currently experiencing an unprecedented crisis of bogus asylum-centric migrant influxes at our southern border that, as Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, recently told Conservative Review’s Daniel Horowitz in an interview, makes for “uncharted waters” for our border and homeland security apparatus. U.S. Customs and Border Protection tried to put the border numbers in context, as part of its press release accompanying its report for the month of March:
In Fiscal Year 2019 to date, the U.S. Border Patrol has seen a more than 370% increase in the number of family units apprehended compared to the same time period in FY2018. Today, 60% of apprehensions along the Southwest border are family units and unaccompanied children, made up predominantly of individuals from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
Additionally, through the first six months of FY19, CBP has encountered 104 large groups composed of 100 or more individuals totaling 17,242 apprehensions. In comparison, U.S. Border Patrol encountered 13 large groups in FY2018 and two in FY2017.
One under-appreciated aspect of our border influx is not the more frequently covered direct humanitarian crisis, but the myriad more indirect, downstream effects of mass illegal immigration on the sundry denizens of the nation’s border states. One obvious such downstream effect is the metastasis of drug/gang/trafficking ring-induced violence all along the border. Earlier this week, the mayor of besieged Yuma, Arizona saw fit to symbolically declare a “state of emergency” for the town. And on Wednesday, the Phoenix, Arizona local ABC affiliate reported on a harrowing shootout between AK-47-wielding human smugglers and federal Department of Homeland Security agents:
Investigators continued to follow [U.S. citizen Warren] Jose for more than two weeks. Agents going to arrest him followed another vehicle connected to him on I-10 south of the Valley and as it exited the freeway began trying to get away from authorities.
The vehicle took off once the Homeland Security agents tried to get the SUV to pull over, hitting several other cars on the road and causing one agent’s vehicle to crash into a wall, according to court paperwork.
Once the SUV spun out, agents say Jose started firing at agents from the front passenger seat with an AK-47-style assault rifle. Agents returned fire, and in the exchange the SUV’s driver was hit and killed.
ABC further reports that Jose and one other U.S. citizen in the vehicle have been arrested and charged with violating federal human smuggling law. Additionally, Homeland Security agents have determined that two others present in the SUV were in the country illegally. The outlet also notes that “Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the four [federal] agents treated for injuries as a result of the shooting had been released from the hospital and were recovering.”
As The Daily Wire reported earlier this week, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is planning to introduce legislation to tighten the nation’s asylum laws, which could potentially have an ameliorating effect on the border surge.