...Jim and Susan Chilton own a 50,000-acre ranch south of the tiny town of Arivaca in Pima County, Arizona. Their ranch is 12 miles west of the Nogales point of entry, with rugged terrain separating the checkpoint and all its law enforcement assets from his “no man’s land,” which includes 14 miles of international border. According to Chilton, there is nothing close to a permanent Border Patrol presence at the border where his ranch is located, and his property has become a known drug and human smuggling route for the cartels, who are constantly surveilling his property. “My ranch is essentially controlled by cartel scouts,” says the fifth-generation rancher, who is wondering why the agents don’t permanently camp out right at his border. “The fact is the Sinaloa Cartel has cartel scouts on our mountains and they have telephones with satellite encryption and high-value radios,” said Chilton in a wide-ranging interview. “We’ve uncovered extremely expensive binoculars left by one of the scouts chased off by one of my cowboys. They have night vision and rolled-down solar packs on their backs, so they can keep everything charged. They are on the tops of the mountains 24/7 guiding the drug packers through the country. They can see Border Patrol 5-15 miles away and they carefully move their people through our area. It’s outrageous.” In any other country or any other era of our history, we’d consider this an invasion. An invasion would warrant, at the bare minimum, the Border Patrol and other assets holding the line right at the border and refusing to allow any entry of cartel activity on our soil. Most of those crossing in the remote areas aren’t even the bogus asylum seekers; they are the drug smugglers. Chilton was incredulous at the notion that drugs don’t cross between points of entry and invited the media to come to his ranch and see the photos of those coming over in camo with assault rifles. Chilton described a frustration I’m hearing from several parts of the border, namely that the policy of our government is to keep the Border Patrol stationed in operating bases far from the border, essentially ceding all the land south of their presence, allowing the cartels to whittle away our sovereignty and the security of our border ranchers...“The Border Patrol are in the Tucson station, which is 80 miles north of the border,” said Chilton, criticizing what is known as the “depth in defense” strategy. “It takes them several hours to go to the border after morning briefings and checking the vehicles, but they won’t stay at the international border.”...Judy Keeler, a prominent cattle rancher in New Mexico’s Hidalgo County, an area that has been flooded with illegal aliens this year, corroborated Chilton’s concern over CBP’s strategy of not holding the line at the border in her state as well. She owns two cattle ranches, parts of them further north and parts closer to the border. “Just north of Highway 9, we always have a lot of Border Patrol activity on our ranch. We’d always wondered why they waited to get after the people crossing the border, until we asked an agent, one of the Border Patrol’s finest, the boots on the ground. He told us they were not allowed to apprehend anyone until they had crossed Highway 9. Even though they have the technology to watch them crossing into the U.S., the boots on the ground cannot apprehend them until the immigrants have walked the five miles from the border.”...MORE
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