DOUGLAS – On Friday, Governor Doug Ducey was joined by several Arizona lawmakers, and Florida Sen. Rick Scott, who is rumored to have national aspirations, in Douglas to discuss the security and humanitarian crisis along the southern border.
Along with the photo op for the aspirational politicos, they met with law enforcement experts and community leaders who are dealing with the situation and the resulting hardships.
The demands for the governor come to the border have been growing for weeks. Border area resident have urged him and their State-level representatives to see first-hand the consequences of the Biden administration’s border and immigration executive orders.
The governor’s visit comes after Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced this week that the U.S. is on pace to reach the highest number of apprehensions at the border in the last 20 years. In addition, U.S. Customs and Border Protection currently has the highest number of migrant children in custody in the history of the agency.
After the tour, Ducey and Scott held a press conference at the border wall before holding border security roundtable with Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels, Arizona Department of Public Safety Director Col. Heston Silbert and other officials.
Dannels is also president of the Arizona Border Sheriff’s Association. The Association on Friday released an open letter entitled Crisis at the Border:
Arizona’s Border Sheriffs are on the frontline of public safety issues involving our border with the Republic of Mexico. While semantical gamesmanship about what to call the current conditions on the border and endless theatrical politics of who is at fault may be of great interest in Washington, DC and in the media, they are of complete disinterest to Sheriffs.
The current conditions on the border are impacting public safety in our communities and by any reasonable measure constitute a humanitarian crisis. We are not far removed from these conditions. They are directly impacting our homes, our communities, our citizens, and our very way of life.
Nowhere else in the civilized world would we tolerate literally thousands of children (emphasis children) unaccompanied by a parent coming to an international border for refuge. This would be correctly viewed as an international humanitarian crisis. Our federal partners, at no fault of theirs, are completely ill-equipped to care for these children. Anywhere else in the world massive resources would be summoned to the border and relevant policies/politics would be under scrutiny. Yet, here today we have a posture that appears to tacitly encourage this, and we remain immersed in politics rather than solutions. We urgently need solutions, not politics.
Undocumented migration to this country is not a harmless activity. No matter how compassionate policy and posture on the northside of the border, we can do nothing to ameliorate the realities on the southside of the border. Migrants must interact with transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) to be shepherded to the border. They fully control the southside of the border. Some seek to enter the country undetected, which requires interaction with “coyotes.” Migrants are being victimized criminally, sexually, and financially. TCO’s profiteer nearly as much from trafficking humans as they do from drugs. Estimates are this may be a multi-billion-dollar enterprise for them (source: Human Smuggling and the Associated Revenues. Rand Corporation. 2019). There are vast desert/mountain areas to be traversed in a harsh environment.
Every year, Sheriffs find hundreds of bodies in the remote areas of border counties. Many will never be identified and what befell them will never be known. Tragically, a family somewhere will never know what happened to a loved one.
To encourage this activity through policies and political rhetoric is not compassionate public policy. In fact, it is exactly the opposite. We are learning about a record number of undocumented persons swarming the border and being taken into custody by federal law enforcement. This is potentially a small fraction of those coming into the country. In Cochise County, Arizona they have a sophisticated camera system along migrant routes across the border. These cameras detect significantly more traffic than our federal partners report capturing. In fact, our estimates are that only about 28% of the people crossing illegally are taken into custody. While the scope of the known crisis is enormous, we believe it may be underreported by close to 300%. While some will argue these are good people simply coming here for a better life, to not acknowledge that among them are dangerous criminals and persons who potentially pose national security concerns is either ignorant or willfully disingenuous. How is this not to be considered a crisis?
Due to what we believe is misdirected policy from Washington, DC undocumented persons are being released into our communities. This is overloading our NGOs and nonprofits. Once released we have an affirmative responsibility to provide some standard of care for these people. Our local community resources are no longer able to provide social services to our own citizens. We have no meaningful assistance from the federal government. The appearance is of washing their hands of a mess they alone created and leaving it to border communities to struggle through. This is completely unacceptable.
TCOs are exploiting the migrant crisis to ensure the redirection of law enforcement resources away from the interdiction of illegal drugs into this country. They know that increased migrant traffic, especially children, overwhelms resources and essentially gives them the unfettered ability to traffic drugs into the U.S. Make no mistake, this is a deliberate tactic. We are seeing record amounts of drugs being seized along the border and we know that we only succeed in interdicting a small fraction of the drugs intended to flood our communities. In 2019, 70,980 people died from drug overdoses in the United States (source: Centers for Disease Control).
The drugs we cannot stop at the border cause overdoses, addiction and criminal trafficking across the country. This situation has become entirely intolerable. We are currently still in the grip of a global pandemic. Estimates vary wildly regarding the percentage of migrants who are COVID positive. We believe the number is between 5% and 50%. Even at the low end of potential infection percentage this should be very concerning. Adequate testing, social distancing and other public health precautions are not being followed.
Let’s be clear, nothing about the handling of the current flood of migrants to our border is consistent with “following the science” or CDC guidance. The release of potentially infected undocumented, and most certainly uninsured, migrants into border communities strains our already stressed public health system.
Therefore, on top of a public safety and humanitarian crisis we may now add a public health crisis. There should be an outcry from those persons who have expressed concern about the COVID pandemic. It is those very same persons who have gladly placed onerous restrictions on U.S. citizens’ movement and activities, and even the educational environment of our children.
However, now from these very people, we hear deafening silence. Sheriffs, as is the case with other elected officials and law enforcement officers, take an Oath of Office. That oath states, “and we affirm, that we will support and defend the Constitution of the United States and enforce the law”. Sheriffs take our oath very seriously. We are troubled that the current direction from other elected officials and the resultant posture of some in federal law enforcement appears to violate that oath. This should trouble all Americans. Arizona’s Border Sheriffs are not interested in the politics of the current crisis or perceived political/ideological victories. We need policies from Washington, DC that discourage rather than incentivize undocumented immigration. We need current laws enforced, not ignored. We need resources to address the public safety, humanitarian, and public health crisis we face. We take this stance not because we hold animus toward anyone. Quite the contrary. We stand firm in our commitment to the rule of law, care for all human beings and love for the communities we serve and call home. Urgent action from our elected officials is absolutely required. The time for politics and partisanship has passed.
Respectfully,
Mark Dannels
Cochise County Sheriff
President – Arizona Border Sheriff’s Association
At his press conference, the governor parroted the sheriffs and called out the Biden administration for ending the ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy and weakening border security.
“This isn’t just a border security problem — it’s a humanitarian problem,” Ducey said referring to the surge in illegal entrants. “Here in Arizona, we’re doing our part to keep our border safe and secure.”
“But we need more leadership from the federal government to keep our borders safe,” said Ducey. “The Biden administration’s immigration policy decisions directly impact our state, and we’re left to pick up the pieces. Our number one priority is keeping Arizonans safe, and we want to keep these migrants safe too.”