By Frank McCaffrey
2021 has been quite the year on the border, the immigration crisis has grown out of hand.
Mayra Gutierrez is running for city commissioner in McAllen, Texas, a border community heavily impacted by illegal immigration. “In the fiscal year numbers represent a 187,000 increase from the same time of last year’s fiscal year and we’re not even in the middle of the year.”
Withholding centers like this temporary facility in Donna, Texas are becoming overcrowded fast. Many immigrant families are now being released without a court date set for them. Gutierrez said this poses a great threat to safety of not only border towns, but to all of America.
“Not only are they releasing people who are now embedded that we don’t know what they’ve done in their home countries,” Gutierrez explained. “But now, we’re not giving them a court date to come back to see who they are or where they’re from.”
The migrants are being released into the United States without much tracking. It also shows that the Biden administration is doing little to support Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol.
Gutierrez said the agents have no direct order from the federal government to get these people and arrest them and send them back. “They’re just there as clerks,” she said. “They immigrants are using our border patrol to get them Uber rides. Our border patrol are not a taxi drivers, they’re not Uber. They are there to protect our borders and unfortunately that is not being done. Not because of the Border Patrol but because of the federal government.”
Gutierrez said that professionals who work in law enforcement on the border are experiencing morale issues because “everything that they accomplished in four years has basically been thrown out the window. They have nothing to show for their hard work. Right now the numbers are just going higher and higher.”
She said there have been more than 550,000 apprehensions this year alone, with 170,000 in March.
“So for them not to have the support of a strong president, and having them do the job that they signed on for is very is very hard. They love their border patrol job. It’s an issue that will only grow.”
Frank McCaffrey is news director for Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
