Nothing Less Than Our Nation’s Security Hangs in the Balance

While many newspapers and other sources of news and information are reluctant to publish accurate reports on the many aspects of the immigration crisis that threatens the sovereignty and indeed the survival of our nation and our citizens, the Washington Times has served as a steadfast source of solid information.

A couple of day ago the Washington Times ran an important news report authored by Jerry Seper, that newspapers investigative editor. Before he became a newspaper report Jerry was a police officer and his understanding of crime is evident in his writings. The article that Jerry wrote that has served as the predication for my commentary today focuses on an issue I have been greatly concerned about for many years- the fact that the Mexican cartels are spreading their cancerous tendrils across our nation and bringing with them the violence that is threatening to turn Mexico into a failed state.

In order for these extremely violent thugs to gain access to communities across our nation they needed to cross our nation’s borders. Contrary to the claims of the current administration and the previous administration, our borders are not secure! This is not a revelation for most thinking Americans but it is a point that must be made!

Immigration is not simply a “border issue!”

The borders of our country can not only be found along the lines that are supposed to represent where one country’s domain ends and another begins. Certainly those are borders- but borders also exist at every international airport. The border can be found along the nearly 95 thousand miles of coastal regions of the United States.

Finally, when an alien manages to run our nation’s borders or gain access to our country at a port of entry or by entering by sea along our coastal region- whether by embarking from an vessel which requires he is formally admitted into the United States or by stowing away on a vessel or by entering surreptitiously at a marina, aliens are coming to our country every single day.

The issue is not simply a matter of securing our land borders- a mission that has never been more important for a host of reasons- the issue is to make certain that no matter how an alien enters our country- if a violation of law has been committed by that alien either by running the border or via some other unlawful means that efforts be made from within the United States by ICE to identify that alien and take him into custody. Similarly, when aliens are lawfully admitted and then violate their terms of admission that efforts are made to identify, locate and apprehend such aliens and seek their removal from our country.

Today an alien who runs our borders has little to fear from ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). As I have noted on ever so many occasions, there are roughly 6,000 special agents employed by ICE for the entire United States of America and they have many important jobs to do and not all of those jobs even relate to the enforcement of our nation’s immigration laws. The great majority of the managers at ICE at headquarters and at field offices came from Legacy Customs and have no real background in immigration law enforcement. They are focused on enforcing customs laws. At least half of the ICE personnel are engaged in enforcing customs laws. This leaves about 3,000 special agents to enforce the immigration laws for our entire country!

Further exacerbating this insane situation is the fact that many communities are reluctant to cooperate with ICE and have declared themselves to be “Sanctuary Cities” which means that they will not even notify ICE when illegal aliens are arrested for committing felonies. Other cities will notify ICE about aliens who have been convicted of felonies but will not make any other efforts to work with ICE.

Even when local law enforcement agrees to work with ICE two more stand in the way.

First of all, ICE is strapped for resources. This is an ongoing problem for that agency. Even when I was assigned to the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force in the 1990’s we often had no money to spend on vital expenses. In fact, there were times when I had to borrow credit cards from my colleagues at the DEA, ATF or FBI just to fill up the gas tank in my government vehicle! I recall getting chewed out for purchasing wiper blades for my government vehicle by one supervisor when there were no funds!

The lack of resources also includes agents and jail space.

What message is sent when you have to chase an illegal alien for blocks and wind up having a fight with him and he lies about his identity- and then you have to release him after your bring him into your office for processing? This was a common occurrence when I was an INS special agent and suspect that today things are no better.

Additionally, I can tell you that I have been told that often when police do call for ICE to come and pick up an illegal alien that they encountered that ICE lacks to resources to take the illegal alien into custody. Remember that the administration has made a point of making it clear that aliens who have no convictions will not be dealt with by ICE! Under the law an alien is only a “criminal alien” if he has convictions for felonies. An alien who may have been arrested and prosecuted numerous times but has been acquitted is not considered to be a “criminal alien!”

Furthermore, when a neighborhood becomes the home to thousands of illegal aliens various businesses are established that are important to illegal aliens who seek to alter their identities, move money to their families back home and otherwise enable them to do what they need to do without calling attention to themselves. The enterprises that are important to illegal aliens are absolutely essential to criminals and terrorists.

I can also tell you from my personal experiences from having spent nearly half of my career working on narcotics investigations that the criminal aliens almost always set up shop within the immigrant communities that reflect their own backgrounds. Russian mobsters live in the Russian communities, Jamaican drug traffickers live in the Jamaican communities while the Mexican gang members live within the Mexican communities. This fundamental fact makes life miserable and extremely perilous for illegal aliens and lawful immigrants alike who are living inside the United States.

The politicians who claim that members of the immigrant communities will not report crimes to the police if the police work with immigration are either liars or are fools- or perhaps both!

One of my areas of responsibility when I was assigned to the Unified Intelligence Division at the DEA and then when I was promoted to the position of Senior Special Agent and was assigned to the Organized Crime, Drug Enforcement Task Force was to use my authorities as an INS agent to help those other agencies as well as various police departments, including the NYPD to cultivate informants and cooperators!

Aliens who have information are likely to be far more intimidated by criminal organizations than ICE agents when you consider that ICE has the statutory authority to provide illegal aliens with the authority to live and work in the United States. There are even visas that can be given to illegal alien victims of crimes and to aliens who cooperate in major criminal investigations! The immigration laws can provide a very juicy carrot as well as a big “stick” to encourage aliens to come forward. This is not conjecture on my part; this is something I did for most of my 30 year career with the former INS!

If you want to talk about intimidation I suggest you consider this excerpt from Jerry Seper’s excellent news report:

Trained as an elite band of Mexican anti-drug commandos, the Zetas evolved into mercenaries for the infamous Gulf Cartel, bringing a new wave of brutality to Mexico’s escalating drug wars. Bolstered by an influx of assassins, bandits, thieves, thugs and corrupt federal, state and local police officers, the Zetas have since evolved into a well-financed and heavily armed drug smuggling force of their own.

Known for mounting the severed heads of their rivals on poles or hanging their dismembered bodies from bridges in cities throughout Mexico, the Zetas have easily become the most feared criminal gang in Mexico – where 35,000 people have been killed in a continuing drug war. Everyone is a potential victim: men, women and children.

“The Zetas are determined to gain the reputation of being the most sadistic, cruel and beastly organization that ever existed,” said George W. Grayson, professor of government at the College of William & Mary and an expert on Mexican drug gangs. “Many of Mexico’s existing drug cartels will kill their enemies, but not go out of their way to do it. The Zetas look forward to inflicting fear on their targets.

“They won’t just cut off your ear; they’ll cut off your head and think nothing of it.” Grisly example: What the Zetas are capable of doing was never more clear than the carnage they left behind in December 2009 on a squalid back street in the border town of Reynosa, Mexico, across the Rio Grande from McAllen, Texas. The bodies were no longer human, their torsos scarred by deep lacerations and punctures; the severed heads were badly beaten. Crudely butchered limbs lay scattered across a blood-stained tarmac.

“See. Hear. Shut up, if you want to stay alive,” read a note written like so many others in block letters on blood-splattered poster board.

The simple truth, Mr. Grayson said, is that the Zetas “enjoy killing – they want to terrorize communities.”

*Over the past few months, Mexican authorities have unearthed more than 140 bodies from mass graves in the state of Tamaulipas. Many of the victims were kidnapped off buses and killed when they refused to work for the Zetas. Tamaulipas, in northeastern Mexico, is across the border from Brownsville, Texas.*

Mexican police arrested 22 suspected Zetas in the killings. The victims were Mexicans and Central and South American migrants, who authorities think were targeted to work for the Zetas as gunmen or drug mules. Others were thought to have been killed when they refused ransom demands.

Companies often put up billboards to advertise products and services. To the Mexican cartels, bodies hanging from bridges an heads stuck on the top of poles serve as their version of a publicity campaign to convince those who would talk to the police or federal agencies that this would be a big mistake!

What is even more upsetting is the fact that the Zetas were trained by our own government! The idea was to have Mexico’s elite police and military officers learn how to more effectively combat the cartels and, in so doing, our government created the Zetas!

Furthermore because these gangs span several countries, they are able to threaten to do harm to family members back in the immigrants’ home countries if they speak with law enforcement authorities. They also use this threat of violence against family members back home if immigrants refuse to cooperate with the gangs in committing crimes!

Yet the ACLU, La Raza, and politicians will make the accusation that when people, such as myself, call for enforcing immigration laws and securing our nation’s borders that we are being “Anti-Immigrant!”

I ask you- who is more “anti-immigrant” those of us who are doing everything we can to prevent the continuing infiltration of our nation by members of these extremely violent criminal organizations from all over the world including the incredibly violent Mexican cartels, or those who would exploit vulnerable illegal aliens for their own political and/or profit-driven objectives?

Even without passing an amnesty bill, every time the president and such political “leaders” as Schumer, Pelosi, Reid and McCain talk about the need to put illegal aliens on a pathway to United States citizenship encourage hundreds of thousands of more illegal aliens to run our nation’s borders. There is a hotel chain that promises to “leave the light on for you” while the politicians offer to provide citizenship to those who violate our borders and our laws!

Here is something else for you to consider-

If there was no market for narcotics in our country then there would be no point to the cartels attempting to set up shop in America.

When was the last time you saw a truly concerted effort to educate our people, especially our young people about the dangers of drugs? It seems as though one third of the commercials on television these days is for a pharmaceutical product- often some drug that has an unpronounceable name that requires a prescription and offers a laundry list of potential side effects that may end with the death of the person who takes this “wonder drug!”

The next one third of commercials seem to be advertisements of law firms offering to sue drug companies if their magic “elixirs” have caused you harm!

With more and more young kids watching television without adult supervision, it is not surprising that they may well get the idea that no matter what your problem is, there is a chemical that can take care of the problem!

The time has long since come for a meaningful effort to be mounted to educate about the extreme dangers to be found in the use of narcotics. The term “recreational drugs” needs to be replaced with the term- “POISON!”

It seems that there are more efforts underway to dissuade kids from smoking cigarettes than with using hard drugs!

When AIDS was identified as being a massive problem for our nation and, indeed, for people throughout the world there was an effort mounted by epidemiologists to find “patient zero,” the first person in the United States to have contracted and then spread AIDS.

The epidemic of drugs and the violence associated with the drug trade have been a factor in our country for decades- however, the level of violence associated with the Mexican cartels is unprecedented. Left unchecked it is only a matter of time- and I fear not much more time, before we start to see the same sort of violence that has become commonplace in Mexico playing out in every American city!

How secure is the homeland with these thugs moving into communities across our nation?

When the person who is supposedly charged with securing the homeland- if indeed that is what the Department of Homeland Security is supposed to be doing, can blithely stand in front of the cameras and declare that the borders are safer now than ever before you have to know that we are in deep trouble!

When I was a boy, my mom always used to tell me that “Actions speak louder than words!”

The words of our “leaders” are hollow and without meaning! The time has long since passed when our nation that claims to be waging a “War on Terror” and a “War on Drugs” actually secured our nation’s borders and enforced the immigration laws throughout our nation in order to deprive transnational criminals and terrorists with opportunities to set up shop inside our nation.

The blue smoke and mirrors approach of lying and smiling before the cameras will not protect our nation or our citizens. Our leaders were elected to uphold the Constitution.

I would remind you that the Preamble of the Constitution contains the following:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

How on earth can our government insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense and promote general welfare when we know that there are international terrorists and members of transnational gang members including the Mexican cartels crossing our nation’s borders each and every day with the intention of setting up their pernicious cells in cities and towns across our nation?

What will Napolitano have to say when the people in a community in our country awaken to find bodies hanging from a bridge in their community?

Will she even admit that they were killed by the cartels or will she claim that they simply were people who committed suicide- even if the bodies have no heads and multiple bullet wounds in their backs?!

I would remind you that the day after “Captain Underpants” attempted to destroy an airliner over Detroit on Christmas day, 2009 Napolitano had the chutzpah to claim that, “The system worked!” I wrote a commentary in response to her absurd statement in which I said, “If hope is not a strategy, then dumb luck is not a success!”

Napolitano and our other “leaders” are clearly grammatically challenged. They are only able to conjugate verbs in the first person singular. The three most important people in their world are “Me, myself and I” Therefore they need to realize that even if they are being selfish- the cartels usually seek to kill high ranking government officials. No one is safe from the violence of the cartels.

The securing of our nation’s borders and the effective enforcement and administration of our nation’s immigration laws are, arguably, among the most important of all missions that are supposed to be carried out by our federal government. Nothing less than the security of our nation and safety of our citizens hang in the balance!

A country without secure borders can no more stand than can a house without walls!

If our country is to survive and if our children and their children are to get their share of the “American Dream” the citizens of this nation must take their citizenship seriously!

We the People must be the best citizens we can be, citizens who are worthy of the gallantry demonstrated by our valiant men and women in the military, law enforcement and firefighters, who routinely go in harm’s way in defense of this nation and our citizens.

My goal in writing this and other commentaries is to point out our nations many failings before more victims pay the ultimate price for the incompetence and ineptitude of our government.

The first step in problem-solving is to first identify the problems and vulnerabilities and then devise strategies to overcome them.

If you find yourself to be in agreement with this commentary, I ask that you forward it to as many of your friends and family members as possible and encourage them to do the same. We need to create a “Bucket Brigade of Truth!”

The practice of good citizenship does not end in the voting booth, it only begins there.

The large scale apathy demonstrated by citizens of this nation has emboldened elected representatives to all but ignore the needs of the average American citizen in a quest for massive campaign funds and the promises of votes to be ostensibly delivered by special interest groups. There is much that we cannot do but there is one thing that We the People absolutely must do- we must stop sitting on the sidelines!

The collective failure of We the People to get involved in make our concerns known to our politicians have nearly made the concerns of the great majority of the citizens of this nation all but irrelevant to the politicians. I implore you to resolve this year to get involved!

I believe our nation’s is greatly benefited by the rich diversity of our people which is why I could never imagine living anywhere except New York City, arguably the most diverse city in our nation if not, in fact, the world. However, my idea of diversity most certainly does not include members of MS-13, the Mexican drug cartels or members of other transnational gangs or members of al-Qaeda!

If this situation concerns you or especially if it angers you, I ask you to call your Senators and Congressional “Representative. This is not only your right- it is your obligation!

All I ask is that you make it clear to our politicians that we are not as dumb as they hope we are!

We live in a perilous world and in a perilous era. The survival of our nation and the lives of our citizens hang in the balance.

This is neither a Conservative issue, nor is it a Liberal issue- simply stated; this is most certainly an AMERICAN issue!

You are either part of the solution or you are a part of the problem!

Democracy is not a spectator sport!

Lead, follow or get out of the way!

Brutal Mexican drug gang crosses into U.S. Zetas butcher victims to spread message of fear

Michael Cutler, a former Senior INS Investigator, an expert witness in more than a dozen Congressional Hearings is a Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies and an advisor to the ‘911 Families for a Secure America.’ He writes about the nexus between immigration and national security.