Americans along the border say Obama is threatening their lives
To protect American lives from malicious invaders from foreign nations is one of the most basic reasons a federal government was established in the United States. Unfortunately for a growing number of Americans living along the nation’s southern border, Obama administration immigration policies have stripped away any remnant of faith in that protection.
A report published in the Albuquerque Journal last week told of how Obama’s immigration policies, including actively calling on Border Patrol agents to turn a blind eye to illegal crossings, are causing many American border dwellers to live in fear.
And it isn’t the kind of fear that so often—and usually inappropriately— comes up in political debates about immigration.
No, they don’t fear that unskilled Mexican migrants are coming for their jobs. They’re in fear for their lives…
From the report:
Ranchers here have been steaming over the reported kidnapping of a ranch hand in December, when drug runners allegedly hijacked the man’s vehicle, loaded it with narcotics and drove him to Arizona. He came home “roughed up,” his employer Tricia Elbrock said, but he survived the ordeal.Concerns about border security have simmered for years for those who live among the region’s sprawling ranches and rugged mountain ranges. Sometimes, fears boil over, such as after the unsolved 2010 murder of southern Arizona rancher Robert Krentz, who was found shot dead on his property, or after the recent reported kidnapping.
The border ranchers say that decreased activity along the southern border on the part of the U.S. government is leaving the door wide open for an increase in criminal activity that puts their lives at risk.
“The increase in the number of people in the area that are smuggling people and drugs seems to be increasing,” one rancher noted. “We see a lot less of the people who are looking for a job.”
And it’s not surprising that more criminals are showing up along the border, considering how the Obama administration has tied the hands of the men and women tasked with keeping it safe.
Earlier this year, National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd told lawmakers the Obama administration has ordered immigration agents to release any suspected illegal immigrant who claims to have been in the country since January 2014 without further question.
“Simply put the new policy makes mandatory the release — without a [Notice to Appear] of any person arrested by the Border Patrol for being in the country illegally, as long as they don’t have a previous felony arrest and conviction and as long as they claim to been continuously in the United States since January of 2014,” he said.
Judd said the policy is so open to abuse that the president” might as well abolish our immigration laws altogether.”
And in response to such complaints, Obama Customs and Border Protection Commissioner R. Gil Kerlikowske said that agents who want to protect the nation should quit.
“If you really don’t want to follow the directions of your superiors, including the president of the United States and the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, then you really do need to look for another job,” he said.
And apparently many have.
One New Mexico Border Patrol station, according to the Journal report, “is budgeted for 284 agents but has been short about 50 agents for months.”
