As Chairman of the Otero County Board of Commissioners my heart is heavily burdened for my constituents as they struggle with the crisis on our nearby southern border. It is no accident that New Mexico is now the most dangerous state in the country for both property and violent crimes. Our border crisis has two related elements: narcotics and human impacts. They are two sharp edges of the same sword.
The human impact edge
New Mexico ranks last, or nearly last, in every measurement of life quality and we lead in every negative statistical category, including child hunger. Both drive home the cold hard fact that New Mexico’s government is not taking care of its own people. Our politicians will sacrifice our citizens to “virtue signal” their concern for (undocumented) aliens.
Recently in New Mexico, city and county governments have made outrageous commitments of our tax dollars to support illegal border crossers. Examples include: Las Cruces at $500k, Albuquerque at $250k and most recently Deming at $1 million! Deming made its contribution out of its meager $11 million general fund. Deming would be well-advised to take care of its own destitute people and desperately inadequate infrastructure.
Bernalillo County has also allocated taxpayer money to support (undocumented) border crossers. The hypocrisy of Bernalillo County’s decision is that the money was allocated out of their behavioral health fund while Albuquerque has the nation’s fifth highest suicide rate and the small town of Espanola is No. 7 in the nation in cities with the worst drug problem.
Recently I received some nasty pushback for a comment I made that allocating these monies is like “feeding pigeons in a parking lot.” I obviously do not compare “migrants to pigeons.” My comment was more in relevance to what the outcome is. If you begin feeding pigeons in a parking lot pretty soon you have every pigeon in town showing up at feeding time. The difference between pigeons and people is when you run out of pigeon feed the pigeons will eventually go away. When it comes to people, history tells us that desperate times bring about desperate measures. When New Mexico’s handouts stop, these people, who don’t know the language nor our laws, will be in our streets. They will be desperate and they will be demanding.
The narcotics edge
The narcotics edge of this two-edged blade is a sharper and more dangerous edge. The migrant crisis is a “smokescreen” that the cartel craftily navigates behind, using these poor people to exhaust our border patrol resources. Recent data collected by the Otero County Sheriff’s Department shows a huge uptick in drug seizures. For the month of February $3,500, March $23,000 and April $61,790!
Our secondary Border Patrol Security Checkpoints were closed on March 25 of this year due to a political assault led by U.S. Reps.(Xochitl Torres) Small, (Joaquin) Castro, (Jerry) Nadler and others. It was only a few days after a visit by this entourage to New Mexico that our Border Patrol checkpoints were shut down and their resources were reassigned from monitoring drug trafficking to processing border crossers.
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