The Open Invitation!

 

The Open Invitation!

HELP!

Biosecurity Now!

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

  

            Has anybody heard if an Executive Order has been hand stamped dispensing with the State of the Union Address?

            The Open Invitation

            Driving west on I-10 since January 6 should remind the world that the open invitation extended to the neighbors to our south is being accepted and is unfolding.

The Border Patrol check point at mile marker 120 has been closed or traffic is simply waved through since the day the new fellow was led into the White House. This facility is the important physical presence north from the Potrillo Mountain drug corridor. It serves both as a highway check point and a visible reminder to cross border wanderers that unlawful entry remains illegal.

What few patrol agents that have been present have little expression on their faces and that has only become more noticeable since the agency was told last weekend to cease talking about border issues to the public. The problem, however, is these men and women, now on conditional field furlough (not yet assigned to filing paper on the increasing parade of invited guests), live within the community and interact with the locals. 

They talk, and they are alarmed at what is taking place.

They have been ordered to disengage from the process of keeping the border as safe as possible with the tools that have cost the American taxpayers fortunes to assemble. Boots on the ground, high tech infrastructure, speed of access, and real time intelligence is now out of favor. They have been ordered to go back to the nonsensical political chicanery of catch and release, but not all is yet lost. They are resourceful and give them credit for trying. They are unofficially adopting an entirely new and novel way of discouraging the north bound invited guests from circling back upon release. The technique is making it more attractive to return the few miles to Mexico rather than walking the 35+ miles to their rendezvous points.

            They are taking their shoelaces away!

            HELP!

            It is not lost among our citizenry in these hinterlands that security fences intended for some nebulous paranoid concern around the center of government in Washington has suddenly taken highest precedence while the cross-border invasion here on the American Frontera is being sanctioned and encouraged. How is that explained?

            The Mexican people seem to know more about it than we do. While we are shaking our heads, the gente are calling the U.S. president, the president migrante (migrant president).

Even AMLO (Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador), the Presidente de Mexico, is worried about the chaos it is already causing. His concern is the accelerated underworld and cartel activity which plays "wailly" not just in the United States but in Mexico as well. His intelligence service has found the cartels are already “diversifying methods of smuggling and winning clients as they eye U.S. measures that will incentivize migration”.

So, if Americans on the border are simply incredulous and AMLO is worried, who wants this?  Is this just immense naivete or is it sinister?

It isn’t a stretch to assume cross border campaign favors deserve paybacks. Remember, cartels must have reliable farm to market trails and portals for entry. It is not out of the question, either, to think that the level of remittances of Mexicans working legally and illegally in the United States back to Mexico can be explained away as politically good will to our favorite little neighbor to the south. January cash transfers were up another 26% to US $3.3 billion and the string of month over month remittance increases is only growing more robust. The combinations are dangerous.

            There is another problem looming as well.

            The COVID casualties and the endemic energy debacle in Mexico are running headlong into the increasing drought that now impacts 86% of that nation’s territory. A full-blown catastrophe is imminent unless weather patterns change in the next six months. The familiar advertising hook of Run for the Border will take on a whole new meaning if relief is not at hand.

            Washington, HELP!

Get your act together or perhaps we must look to the border states that will consider the wellbeing of their citizenry. That would only be Texas and Arizona. Those states should read the Constitution and realize they have the power to protect themselves and engage in war because the United States is not protecting them as set forth in foundational law and they are being invaded and such imminent Danger … will not admit of delay (Article I, Section 10, [3]).

            Biosecurity Now!

            Then, there is the matter of biosecurity and its dangers. It has, for too long, been a forbidden issue.

            Whereas there are protocols in place in ports of entry where most products bound for American markets are crossed, the vast stretches of the rural lands are problematic. That is where the Trump era border wall has not been completed. As that hot potato continues to be debated and cast with dispersions and catcalls from the fans in the progressive and open borders bleachers, the great stretches of frontier where completions are now in jeopardy remain supremely dangerous. It is there no primary barrier protection against neither livestock nor human disease intrusion is installed much less layered security in the likely event planned and or accidental entry eventually occurs.

            America’s soft underbelly is exposed!

            At a minimum, effective livestock fencing must be installed in a prescribed buffer stretching from the Pacific to the Gulf. That should encompass administrative boundaries of ranches and allotments within that buffer that would preclude livestock movement to the extent practical. The redundancy of the approach within the buffer would support the isolation of issues in the event of fencing breaches.

            BORDER COMMUNITIES TO WASHINGTON, COME IN PLEASE … IS ANYBODY BACK THERE?

 

Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “No control of the family, no control of the children, no control of the dogs, and … no control of the border!”