In one of my favorite movies of all time, Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon A Time in the West”, Henry Fonda’s bad guy character says in regards to trying to get information out of someone, “People talk better when they’re dying.” I remember talking with an ICE Special Agent years ago. He was telling about interviewing some criminal involved in narcotics who I think was Dominican. The Special Agent told me he threatened the Dominican with doing something like five years in prison unless he rolled over on his higher ups in the drug network. The Dominican essentially laughed at him. Then, the Special Agent added that the Dominican would be deported after that. At that point, the Dominican decided he would cooperate after all. Maybe, Hollywood can make a movie with the anti-hero saying, “People talk better when they’re being deported.”
Deportation is a highly effective tool. I remember somebody writing in to Marilyn vos Savant’s column saying that he speculated you could fill all of America’s prisons by advertising what the living conditions were like. Marilyn said that the loss of freedom is so important to most people that she doubted that was true. Unfortunately, my experience has been that many people would prefer to stay in an American prison rather than be repatriated in a place like Haiti.
For some reason I was thinking of that when a liberal alerted me to an article about the Trump administration letting into the United States 17 members of a Mexican Cartel member’s family. Why? What good is this to us? Trump has already said that Cartels take advantage of birthright citizenship, yet, here we are letting in Cartel family members who weren’t even born here.
Ovidio Guzman-Lopez, “The Mouse”, is the son of Sinaloa Cartel boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. It appears that good Ol’ Ovidio has managed to finagle himself a deal to testify against other Cartel members in exchange for letting his family members into the United States.
Of course, this is good for his family, but bad for the United States. At a time when we should be kicking out every last illegal alien we can, we are letting in Mexicans associated to one of the most dangerous criminal gangs. What for? I bet he would be willing to talk if we threatened to deport him into an area of Mexico controlled by a rival Cartel.
Stephen Miller, Tom Homan and Kristi “ICE Barbie” Noem have been doing a great job of shutting down the border while increasing deportations from the interior. (BTW Don’t believe that stuff about Obama having high deportation numbers. Obama’s numbers were all a lie. He was the “Deceiver-in-Chief”).
The important thing is that the narcotics trade is shut down. The reasons why fentanyl is no longer flowing across the southern border might confuse the Washington Post, but no one else.
With drugs no longer flowing across so freely, I do not believe it is necessary to go after the Cartels in Mexico as hard as we used to. After all, they are almost becoming irrelevant unless you are a Mexican living in Mexico, and being oppressed by them. Now, the Cartels are expanding into Canada. Canada is starting to have fentanyl drug labs there. Instead of worrying about what has been, we should be focusing resources more on the northern border.
Plus, we won’t have to worry about letting in Mexican cartel family members who hate the United States and are only here because their lives are threatened by their fellow countrymen in Mexico.
20 year veteran of the U.S. Border Patrol. Author of "What Bridge Do You Work At? Or, Kids Are Cute; Therefore, Open Borders" & "East into the Sunset: Memories of patrolling in the Rio Grande Valley at the turn of the century". Books are available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, as well as Thrift Books.
Master's Degree in Justice, Law and Society from American University.
Grew up partly in Europe.
