For the past few weeks, I have been key board warrioring on a few different platforms, but mainly Facebook. I follow the ICE and Border Patrol pages, as well as, my Republican congressman. The left seems to bring race into everything. Far from ignoring it, they pretend like ICE and Border Patrol are just going after brown people because they are full of racists and the successor to the Ku Klux Klan. A ludicrous idea from the beginning, but a narrative with which they are running. (Officially, the Border Patrol is 51% Hispanic, but that statistic comes from self reports. The real number is closer to 80%).
It had me thinking to a time I was down on the southern border in May of 2019. We were being detailed down there after Trump stabbed Sessions in the back and over turned the Zero Tolerance policy. (I’ve written about that before elsewhere). I was fortunate enough to be placed with the Migrant Protection Plan (MPP). This was the Orwellian named plan to send illegal aliens back to wait in Mexico for their court dates. There was a lot of navigating to get the bodies moved back and forth. The illegals would have initial court appearances (not trials) then go back to Mexico, but then needed to come back in two days for their next hearing (again not a trial). All the illegals were making asylum claims. The entire Third World could probably make an asylum claim to remain in the United States with the way the law is written and the right deceiving lawyer.
Anyway, we were working a lot with the CBP Officers since the aliens in the program were being let in through the Port of Entry (POE), the bridge coming across from Mexico. All the CBP Officers were Hispanic without exception. When we first got there, one of the CBP Officers (I’ll call him Zamora) was telling us that he had possibly done as many as 1,000 interviews by himself alone and that of that thousand, he estimated “ten maybe eleven” had valid asylum claims. Now, the CBP Officers had more time to do longer interviews than the Border Patrol Agents did. They (CBP) were doing interviews of the aliens that lasted almost three hours long. They were getting details on the alien themselves (of course), the alien’s family, their village, their income, their religion, their political party etc… Virtually everything there was to know about them.
Towards the end of our month down there, the aliens’ lawyers were trying to figure out a way to game the system. They tried having the aliens make two asylum claims. For instance, “I’m afraid to go back to Honduras, but I’m also afraid to go back to Mexico.” If they claimed fear of being returned to Mexico, since they were about to go back there again, this boosted them to the front of the line for an asylum hearing with an Asylum Officer which were done over the phone. Most of the time, the Asylum Officers were denying their claims. I can recall the CBP Officers joking about one of the aliens who wanted to claim asylum because the other illegal aliens at the immigration camp in Mexico were making fun of him. Why were they making fun of him? Because they said he had a fat tongue. To be clear, this wasn’t the guards or the local Mexicans. He was being made fun of by the other Central Americans he was with.
So, Zamora came out of one of the interview rooms and into the supervisor’s office where I was hanging out and Zamora was livid. An Asylum Officer had approved one of the female illegal alien’s asylum request. Now, she would still have to show up for an asylum hearing before an Immigration Judge, but she would be released into the United States in the meantime and the court date would probably be two years away. Plenty of time to drop an anchor baby, or, simply not show up for the court date. Zamora had worked long and hard on her file and this was personal to him. He was trying to read through the Asylum Officer’s reasoning because now we could be certain many more illegal aliens would try the same ruse.
Here’s the alien’s story: She had been staying at the immigration camp, but she and a friend had gone to a little corner bodega to pick up a soda or something. Two local Mexican thugs encountered them and insulted them. According to her, the two Mexicans snatched her friend and took off with her. The alien telling the story then ran to a Catholic priest for help. The priest saw her coming and jumped into his office closing the door behind him and refusing to open it. I guess he was scared too. Now, regular street crime is not supposed to count towards asylum, BUT, you can get asylum with a well founded fear of persecution based on the following factors, 1) race, 2) religion, 3) nationality, 4) political opinion, 5) membership in a particular social group. Because during the kidnapping the thugs had used a derogatory word for immigrants, according to this one Asylum Officer, that qualified as persecution based on nationality. If the thugs hadn’t used that one word, she would have been sent back.
Zamora was livid with the ruling. Not only did he think it was ludicrous, like I said a moment ago, now all the fake asylees were going to try the same scam. As he was venting to his supervisor (in a rage with the file shaking in his hands), some of my old Spanish came back to me and I blurted out, “Cálmate, güey” (calm down, dude). It was something I overheard at the morning musters while stationed in McAllen. The supervisor heard me. She probably didn’t realize that I spoke a little Spanish at all, let alone Mexican slang, and she burst out laughing. Initially, Zamora never even heard me he was so wrapped up in the case. I later helped him with some of the aliens, but he was mad at me after that. He probably didn’t realize that I was exactly on the same page as he was. I too was livid about this stupid ruling, but after 19 years of getting beat up trying to enforce immigration law, I was somewhat (not completely) resolved to the situation.
So, when I get into these online battles with open borders liberals who vilify ICE and Border Patrol it pisses me off. I think back to the guys like Zamora who I view as patriots and that the left ludicrously would have you believe are members of the Gestapo. (ICE has a lot of former Border Patrol Agents and CBP Officers in it. Officially, ICE is 30% Hispanic). They use race to try to get the open border and destroy America. They have this weird contradiction where white people are evil bad racists, but they also want to live in the country white people built and is still majority white. (Don’t get me started about slaves building Minnesota, or, anywhere else for that matter). The problem during World War II was not all the Jews trying to break into Nazi Germany.
Search.brave.com uses AI and tells me, “The quote underscores Goebbels’ belief that political dominance begins with influence over the populace in public spaces, a principle he applied extensively through Nazi propaganda.”
I understand why there’s an army of liberal trolls on ICE, Border Patrol’s and my Republican congressman’s Facebook pages. Social media is the new public space that the liberals wish to control. They do not take heed of Nietzsche’s warning about not becoming a monster while trying to fight monsters. Their blinders are on and they are right and that’s it. They are adopting Goebbels’ techniques towards their own ends. Before it was “Jews bad”, now, it’s “Whites bad”.
In the wake of Hillary’s loss to Trump, the Democrats found that shaming people by calling them “racist” worked in cowering people to go along with their agenda.
This cheap sloganeering works on the feeble minded, and since, the average intelligence in America is average, this stupidity works on millions of the gullible, the sheeple who still believe the mainstream media is honest.
Perhaps, the Republicans will wisen up and fight fire with fire, but for the moment, there doesn’t seem to be a concerted effort to fight it. Incidentally, the Democrats aren’t just doing this on social media, they are trying to harass Republican congressmen at town halls too. Their Antifa goons try to control the actual street while blue cities like Washington, D.C. imprison Republican protesters.
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.
