Editorial - Obama's Land Grab Opens Path For Cartels, Illegals

    The Bureau of Land Management plans a Bundy-like seizure of New Mexico land for a national monument that will restrict Border Patrol access and provide an open corridor for drug and human traffickers.
    In August 2002, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument Ranger Kris Eggle was killed in the line of duty. Allegedly the killers were drug smugglers crossing through the Arizona park, which shares a border with Mexico. Since Eggle's death, Organ Pipe has been called the most dangerous park in America.
    According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, about 65% of the cocaine and most of the marijuana entering America come from Mexico, and much of those drugs through Organ Pipe. In 2002, the year Eggle was murdered, some 200,000 illegal aliens were caught sneaking into the U.S. through Organ Pipe.
    The Border Patrol estimates that 700,000 pounds of illegal drugs enter America through the park each year. Federal lands and national parks along our southern border are favorite points of entry for illegal aliens and drug runners. Those areas often resemble a war zone.
    These border parks, created to protect the environment, often more closely resemble a landfill from the debris and damage caused by endless streams of drug runners and illegal aliens.
    Yet to protect the "pristine" nature of existing monuments like Organ Pipe, the Obama administration has barred the Border Patrol from using their vehicles to hunt for illegals and drug traffickers.
    President Obama on Wednesday announced that he would bypass the Senate and Congress to create another 600,000-acre off-limits "monument" near the U.S.-Mexico border in New Mexico, to be called the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument.
    The city of Juarez, Mexico — a city riddled with drug-cartel activity — is right across the border from the new national monument.
     "Without law enforcement having access to federal lands, drug traffickers, human smugglers and potentially terrorists are able to exploit yet another loophole created by the Obama administration's lax immigration enforcement," said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., in a May 2 statement.
    Zack Taylor, the chairman of the National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers, told Breitbart Texas that the creation of the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument "is the biggest breach of border security I have seen in the last 20 years. The people don't want it, and the sheriff doesn't want it. It is an open invitation for the foreign drug cartels and transnational criminals to bring their illegal drugs and aliens into the U.S."
    According to a 2012 report by the Congressional Research Service, "The federal government owns and manages roughly 635-640 million acres of land in the United States — about 28% of the total land base of 2.27 billion."
    That percentage has increased since then, and agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which recently engaged in an armed confrontation with Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, want more.
    The government's agenda in this and many other land-confiscation activities is motivated by a desire to comply with a U.N. "rewilding" program that advocates pushing humans out of rural areas and into densely packed urban zones to promote what the U.N. called "sustainable development."
    "Land ... cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market," said a U.N. action plan. "Private land ownership is also a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice."
    It's not surprising that the Obama administration is again putting the social-justice agenda once advocated by far-left "green jobs" czar Van Jones ahead of border security and enforcement of the nation's immigration laws. It's all part of the promised "fundamental transformation" of America.

IBD