Well, not good news to the LA Times, which supports illegal immigration
Juan Ortíz trudged through 100-degree heat along the U.S.-Mexico border, weighed down by a backpack full of water bottles that he planned to leave for migrants trying to cross this rugged terrain.
Only there hadn’t been many migrants of late.
When Ortíz started water drops in this especially dangerous stretch of desert near El Paso nearly two years ago, he sometimes encountered dozens of people trying to reach the U.S. in a single afternoon. Now he rarely sees any. Border crossings began falling during the final months of President Biden’s term, and have plunged to their lowest levels in decades under President Trump.
Oh, lord, they’re actually trying to give Biden credit. The illegals knew the Trump admin was soon going to shut it down
These borderlands surrounding El Paso were long a place of risk but also opportunity. Migrants chasing the American dream crossed by the tens of thousands annually, sometimes dodging federal agents and often seeking them out to ask for asylum.
But Trump’s immigration crackdown — a total ban on asylum, a mass deportation campaign and the unprecedented militarization of the border — has altered life here in myriad ways.
Across the Rio Grande from El Paso in the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez, shelters once hummed with life, rich with the smell of cooked stews and the chatter of people plotting their passage to the U.S.
Today those shelters are largely empty, populated by migrants stranded in Mexico when Trump took office, and others who were in the United States but decided to leave, spooked by policies designed to instill fear.
I mean, seriously, this is what happens when the Executive Branch uses the laws on the books and dissincentives people from around world to cross the border and/or declare (fake) asylum.
The Pentagon, which made the designations, has deployed some 9,000 active-duty troops to the border as part of Trump’s directive to expand the military’s role in reducing migrant crossings. Migrants who enter the new “national defense” zones while crossing the border are being detained by U.S. troops, charged with trespassing and turned over to immigration authorities.
Applause! Of course, for the LA Times it is a long, long, whiny piece about how mean it is for the Trump admin to enforce federal law.
Meanwhile
US government is building a 5,000-person immigrant detention camp in west Texas
The U.S. government is building an immense 5,000-person detention camp in west Texas, government contract announcements said, sharply increasing the Trump administration’s ability to hold detained immigrants amid its ever-growing mass deportation efforts.
A Defense Department contract announcement on Monday said Acquisition Logistics, a Virginia-based firm, had been awarded $232 million in Army funds to build the facility, which would be used for single immigrant adults.
Procurement documents called it a “soft sided facility,” a phrase often used for tent camps.
And they can all avoid being put there by self-deporting.
We don’t have to deport those who never sneak in in the first place.