Today, the Texas Public Policy Foundation released a new video titled “Border Crisis: Cartels and Drug Trafficking,” highlighting the unprecedented increase in drug trafficking at the U.S.-Mexico border. This video is the latest effort by the TPPF-led Border Security Coalition to shine a spotlight on the border crisis, which through a combination of failed federal policy and a surge of new migrants has grown significantly worse in recent months.
“Since this new administration has come in, drug apprehensions have gone down,” said Manuel Rodriguez, Jr., Retired Border Patrol Agent. “Because they are dealing so much with family units. That doesn’t mean that drugs aren’t coming across, that just means that apprehensions have gone down because they have avoided detection. In my opinion, I think we are losing a lot more than we were in the past.”
Sophisticated drug schemes at the border are one of the reasons why the Border Security Coalition, along with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, have urged the federal government to label cartels as terrorist organizations.
As the video describes, “Cartels in Mexico are something to be reckoned with. These organizations are highly sophisticated, highly organized, and intelligent, and of course unlimited budget in the multi-millions and billions of dollars that they are making. The estimate in Del Rio is that the cartel on the other side is making $25 million a week. Down in the Rio Grande valley, they are making $14 million a day.”
The border policies pursued by the Biden administration have done nothing to solve this growing crisis at the border, instead incentivizing traffickers to use migrant families as a distraction to increase their drug trafficking operations.
“The open borders policy only aids and abets these cartels to continue to take advantage of that crime surge,” said Victor Avila, retired ICE agent. “We need to see what we can solve to make America better and protect our sovereignty.”