To Stop The Border Invasion, Get Tough On Mexico

[Geee]

The Federalist

The key thing to understand about the crisis is that it’s being managed by Mexican cartels, along with their partners inside the Mexican government, as a for-profit enterprise. Under Biden, the cartels have turned illegal immigration into big business, a massive black market in which every illegal immigrant who crosses the border represents a source of income for the cartels. They are all being trafficked, in other words. It is not too much to say the cartels are running slave markets, as my friend Joshua Treviño did in these pages recently, “in which children are bought and sold to increase the chances that the norteamericanos will admit a supposed family unit, and also to provide supply to the vile and ravenous market in sex.”

 

The Mexican government is complicit in all this. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, popularly known as AMLO, has not tried to hide his longstanding connections to the country’s most powerful cartel, Sinaloa, nor has he done anything to rein them in during his presidency, consistently pursuing the drug war policy he outlined when running for president in 2018: “hugs, not bullets.”

In recent years, he has become testy and aggressive on matters related to immigration and the border. AMLO is especially incensed at efforts by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to crack down on illegal immigration. Asked about the new Texas law that would allow state law enforcement officers to arrest and deport illegal border-crossers, which a federal appeals court temporarily blocked this week, AMLO strongly implied the Mexican military would help illegals cross the border. His foreign secretary, Alicia Bárcena, said the government would put “increased vigilance and controls” at border crossings to prevent Texas from carrying out deportations if the law goes into effect. While AMLO would not say clearly what steps he would take, he did suggest some kind of retaliation: “We will not just sit around with our arms crossed.”