For years, State Representative Bob Thorpe has tried to bring the country’s attention to the problem of our open borders and the dangers to those who are trafficked by cartels. Last week, Thorpe came face to face with the true nature of their terror when he and a group from Judicial Watch discovered a stranded and traumatized Guatemalan man left for dead in Arizona’s 103 degree blazing desert.
That afternoon, southern Arizona had been experiencing temperatures well-above 100 degrees and few – but the hardiest – would dare to travel the dangerous border terrain. While inspecting a region of the border within the boundaries of the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation, Thorpe and his party came across a man who identified himself as part of a human smuggling party of 9.
“We were actually driving down the main road on our way to the U.S. – Mexico Border when one of the people in our group noticed a person under a tree just off the road,” Thorpe told the listening audience of the James T. Harris show on Friday. “So we turned around and went back and sure enough it wasn’t someone who lives on the reservation, it turned out to be a person from Guatemala. He had been with a group of eight other immigrants. They had been on a 3-day walk through the desert. They were being managed by coyotes and they had been given cellphones,” said Thorpe, nothing that the phones “looked just like Obama cellphones.”
“The phones were so they could meet at the rendezvous point or the safe house,” explained Thorpe. “We also found pills on the gentleman, which we found out is fairly common. These pills are like uppers, and they give the illegals a burst of energy, but they also tend to dehydrate them. Can you imagine walking across the desert in over a hundred degree temperature for over three days getting even more dehydrated than you normally would? That is almost like a death penalty when crossing the desert.”
“He was in bad shape and obviously was unable to keep up with the group, so what we did is we gave him a bottle of Gatorade which he downed very quickly,” stated Thorpe. “Then we contacted border patrol, which eventually came and picked him up. Once he was put into their air conditioned vehicle, he was their responsibility and I have no idea what happened from there.” Thorpe was told that the rest of the group would probably be in Phoenix by the end of the day.
Harris asked Thorpe if the federal government is somewhat responsible for the death of illegal aliens in the desert. “Absolutely,” responded Thorpe, “no matter if you are on the left side or right side [of the political debate] you have to ask yourself: are we a compassionate nation by having an unsecured border and basically inviting people to make this dangerous trek over a hostile desert? I would say we are not being compassionate, and if we had a controlled border, if we had a controlled situation and people coming through a Port of Entry avoiding those harsh environments, I think their welfare would be much better served. I talked a moment ago about undocumented children, these children are coming up from South America. They are by themselves, and we have heard repeatedly of stories of these kids being raped molested and you name it, being taken into sexual slavery or cheap slave labor working in hotels. So you have to ask yourself: are we really being compassionate by having a porous border and allowing these children to risk their lives to come here in a totally unregulated manner?”
Thorpe’s effort to enlist other Arizona officials in looking into the problems, associated with the trafficking victims now in shelters across Arizona, has been met with resistance. This year, Thorpe tried in vain to pass a bill to audit for-profit organizations that make millions of dollars in Arizona off of the undocumented children. However, with the State and private organizations taking in massive amounts of federal dollars annually on these programs, which in turn creates fairly low-wage jobs caring for the trafficked youth, that bill eventually failed.