A One-two Punch Upon America

America’s southern border is out of control.

It is a metastasizing emergency on a scale never experienced in our nation’s past. Ever.

The collapse of our security on La Frontera is not a “challenge,” as Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has meekly asserted. It is an unmitigated disaster. It is more than just a humanitarian crisis associated with the escalating tsunami of Third World migrants who may or may not be infected with any number of diseases, including COVID-19.

Nor is it merely about how the poor, unaccompanied minors are “kids put in cages,” the horrific practice supposedly wrought by Trump, but completely ignored under the tactic’s originator, Obama. Yet now, administered fervently by President Biden, the procedure is suddenly just a “distraction,” according to the Washington Post.

Of course, the unfolding catastrophe we watch grow more swollen and dangerous by the day is unmistakably a human tragedy of historic, even biblical, proportions.

More than all this, however, is the lasting and perhaps irreversible damage to our very civilization brought about by a devastating one-two punch perpetrated against the American people by corrupt and feckless leaders on both sides of the Mexican border. Two very specific policy decrees—one by Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador and then, seemingly by design, a second, amplifying one delivered by our own current president—have empowered and incentivized organized crime to prey upon and endanger our nation, even the hemisphere.

The first cataclysmic event began as a well-planned, sophisticated Mexican military operation in Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state in northern Mexico to capture Ovidio Guzman-Lopez, the son of the former head of the Sinaloa Cartel, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. The October 17, 2019 raid resulted in eight killed, including one member of Mexico’s security forces, following an utterly violent and overwhelming military-style response by better-equipped and more lethally-prepared cartel members that culminated in a, forgive the pun, Mexican standoff.

When it was finally declared over, President Lopez himself would end up disgracefully surrendering his armed forces, along with his very authority, to the cartel gunmen, stating that, “the capture of one criminal cannot be worth more lives.” Chapo’s son, along with all of his henchmen and all of their weapons, were simply allowed to walk away. Long criticized for his strategy of dealing with the organized crime threat in his country by promising “hugs, not bullets,” the president’s decision sent shock waves throughout Mexico and the world. It humiliated the weakened President Lopez and his discredited policies of protecting his citizens through a naïve belief in a kind of hyperempathy toward even the most savage criminals.

If one were to identify a precise event that defined Mexico’s descent into a narco-state and demonstrated its abdication of all sovereign authority to the drug traffickers, this singular military, judicial and political disaster would clearly be it. From that date forward, large swaths of Mexico would be ceded to the complete domination of a patchwork of medieval fiefdoms of narcoterrorists and warlords, with the entirety of our 2,000 mile shared border under the control of one or more of the cartels.

Yet since we know that the powerful and proliferating Mexican drug cartels earn nearly as much money from other types of crime (hence being renamed as transnational criminal organizations) as they do from manufacturing and trafficking drugs, President Lopez came to understand that fighting the cartels would ultimately be the only option in regaining some semblance of peace and justice for his countrymen. Or, as some have rightly described it, a quintessential struggle between good and evil.

In addition to theft, piracy, kidnapping, extortion, sex trafficking, and nearly every other species of crime, the cartels control the highly lucrative business of smuggling humans into the United States. And at, on average, $10,000 per head for every crossing, it is estimated that just during the past month with the approximately 100,000 migrants trafficked into the U.S., the cartels earned over $1 billion—and they know that the good times are just beginning to roll.

For this principal reason, the Mexican leader had previously cut a deal with Donald Trump to enforce the immigration laws of his own country and block the flows of Central American and other immigrants from entering the U.S. in the highly successful, yet vociferously opposed, Remain in Mexico Policy. Until it was trashed by Joe Biden.

Which brings us to gut-punch number two.

By the time our newly inaugurated president was sworn in and had issued his sweeping immigration-related executive orders, caravans had already started to form based on the clear messaging delivered throughout the Biden campaign that, in the name of reversing Trump’s “inhumane” and “indecent” policies, the border would be wide open to all comers. In the name of a simplistic and irrational kind of compassion (or pandering), the Biden administration jettisoned his predecessor’s carefully crafted—and effective—array of policies, agreements and capabilities designed to protect Americans, not to mention the migrants themselves.

The result was completely predictable—and predicted. This rapidly worsening crisis demonstrates with stunning clarity that policy choices—especially those involving our national security—can rarely, if ever, be reduced to merely the good vs. the bad; but, rather, the distasteful vs. the catastrophic. Perhaps owing to this misapprehension, President Biden has been described by commentator Wayne Allen Root as nothing less than “the greatest gift ever bestowed upon the Mexican cartels.”

We already know that the various Mexican transnational criminal organizations have a command and control presence in nearly every medium and large city across the United States—more than 3,000 locations according to one recent estimate. They have sent their agents and emissaries here solely to sell drugs to Americans. Moreover, with record amounts of fentanyl, heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine, among other illegal drugs, pouring across the Mexican border on a daily basis, our already frightening levels of overdose deaths in this country are set to rise even further. Future years will make last year’s record-breaking drug overdose death rate of more than 88,000 of our fellow citizens look like the good old days.

Moreover, as every cop in every town in every state across this land can tell you, illegal drugs spawn and sustain all manner of crime. One study in the Midwest found that two-thirds of all violent and property crime can be directly tied to drug use and/or trafficking, with 40 percent of all homicides attributable to same. These numbers, unsurprisingly, mirror the same findings documented by sociologist James Q. Wilson during the 1960s and 1970s.

And, no, we are not going to police our way out of the drug epidemic in this country, but neither are we going to treat or prevent our way out. As former drug czar John Walters has noted, “The future of addiction in America rests on whether the supply [emphasis added] of addictive drugs is dramatically reduced.” We know that the Mexican cartels are actively inserting their own single-minded, highly ethnocentric and brutally violent soldiers among the huddled masses illegally entering our country to not only expand their drug trafficking activities throughout the U.S., but to transplant every facet of their transnational criminal enterprises to your community.

Bienvenidos a Culiacan!

So until such time that the White House and the Department of Homeland Security realize—or admit—that this “challenge” has already evolved into a full blown catastrophic event of their own making, we must shout, paraphrasing Ronald Reagan, “Mr. Biden, build up this wall!”

Jeff Stamm is a 34-year law enforcement veteran, having served as a Deputy Sheriff in Sacramento County, California and a Special Agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. He is also the author of “On Dope: Drug Enforcement and The First Policeman.”