Organ Pipe National Monument is a remote, dusty strip of nothing located in nowhere Arizona. But lately, it's become a go-to destination for illegal aliens as smugglers are playing the border patrol like a fiddle.
All it takes is for smugglers to dump off a couple of hundred illegals and sooner rather than later, border officials will show up to "process" the illegals.
"Process" is an exaggeration. A vetting procedure that takes a few minutes and then handing the illegal a slip of paper with a court date on it is not "processing" immigrants and it's an insult to suggest it.
Soon, there are thousands of illegals waiting to get their little slip of paper with a court date on it before making their way to the interior of the country. There are no facilities. People relieve themselves behind cacti that grow in the desert. There's no food or water, although enterprising Mexicans cross the border every day bringing fresh water and tamales for those waiting to be processed.
"I've been working in this sector of the border for almost 20 years, and we've never seen anything like this," said Dan Abbott, a local volunteer with the group Humane Borders, which distributes water and food inside the Organ Pipe National Monument,
Another factor that makes this particular migration to America unique is that many new arrivals are from countries other than Mexico and Central America. CBS News reports that "men hailed from African countries, including Guinea, Mauritania, Morocco and Senegal, as well as some nations in Asia like Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Syria."
The chaotic and striking scenes at the outdoor staging area in the middle of the Arizona desert illustrate the dire humanitarian implications of the crisis along the southern border, where migrants have been arriving in greater numbers and from more countries than ever before in U.S. history.
For only the second time ever, Border Patrol apprehended more than 2 million migrants who entered the U.S. illegally in fiscal year 2023. Defying historical seasonal trends, illegal border crossings have spiked this month. Over the past several days, Border Patrol has processed near-record levels of migrants, making roughly 10,000 apprehensions every 24 hours, up from the 6,000 daily average in October, according to internal government data obtained by CBS News.
With 10,000 people streaming into the United States every day, that pencils out to around 3.3 million illegal aliens coming to the United States for the year.
Biden would prefer the problem just go away. He may favor illegal immigration in the abstract but no politician in their right mind wants 3 million newcomers in one year. That's national suicide and Biden knows if he doesn't find a way to get a handle on the crisis at the border, he will be a one-term president and his party will suffer catastrophic losses in 2024.
He didn't want to tie Ukraine funding with a border security bill. But he has no choice given the stakes of continuing to allow the border to boil over.
Economic misfortune and a desire to reunite with relatives are not grounds for U.S. asylum, which can only be granted to migrants fleeing persecution based on certain factors, such as their race, religion or political views.
Over the past few years, however, the U.S. asylum system has become a proxy process for migrants to stay and work in America, irrespective of whether they have valid claims or not. A mounting backlog of roughly 3 million pending cases has crippled the federal immigration court system's ability to adjudicate claims in a timely fashion.
Most migrants are not screened for asylum at the southern border anyway, federal statistics show, since the government does not have sufficient asylum officers, holding facilities and other resources to interview asylum-seekers under a process known as expedited removal. Consequently, most of those who are not deported are generally released with court cases that typically take years to complete.
A recent NBC News poll found Democrats getting clobbered on the issues of border security and immigration. Even if Biden wanted to let the issue fester, congressional Democrats wouldn't let him get away with it. They need something to stop the political bleeding on the border and Biden is the only one with a tourniquet.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member