U.S. losing control of its border in New Mexico ... and cartels are happy

Monica Showalter

We often describe the specter of tens of thousands of unvetted migrants rolling into our country in terms of  'losing control of the border,' but a new piece by Daniel Horowitz describing what's going on at the New Mexico border near El Paso as something just a bit more literal. 
Writing for Conservative Review, Horowitz found:

In an interview with CR, Couy Griffin, the chairman of the Otero County, New Mexico, county commission, explained how our government has exposed his county, and by extension, the rest of the nation, to unprecedented criminal activity from the Mexican cartels. In his view, by taking down the two secondary Border Patrol checkpoints in his county in order to focus on more processing of illegal immigrants, the federal government is missing the point.
“The cartel is winning and winning big; they are kicking our butts,” complained the commissioner of this sparsely populated but large county bordering Texas, near El Paso. “We get so tied up and focused on the asylum seekers or the illegal immigrant aspect of what’s going on at our southern border, but the reality of it is that it’s nothing but a mere smoke screen for the cartel. They’re using these large groups of migrants as nothing more than a smoke screen to smuggle their drugs across the southern border. Meanwhile, as soon as those agents are exhausted, those critical spots, they’re sending boatloads of drugs across the border in unsecured areas. The shutting down of the checkpoints on the major drug smuggling corridors is a recipe for disaster. Now they have a green light to shuttle drugs through our counties and through our rural areas, with no security in place.”

Otero County isn't on the border itself but at an internal border checkpoint, same as is found near San Onofre in Southern California as trucks and cars head northward from San Diego to Los Angeles.
These highway checkpoints are being abandoned as tens of thousands of migrants pour over the border and Border Patrol agents are diverted to process them...MORE