Arizona's Wide-open Border

Few people believe the Obama administration’s assurances that our border with Mexico is secure, but actually seeing it is striking. A new video (below) prepared by my colleague Janice Kephart, based on hidden-camera footage from southern Arizona, is shocking. The cameras – placed by concerned citizens, mind you, not the government – show scores of illegal aliens walking unimpeded across the border and north to waiting vehicles.

Kephart reports that this spring, 735 illegal aliens passed by just one hidden camera north of the border over a period of slightly more than a month – and “not one Border Patrol agent is seen on this trail in 39 days.

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A major reason for this is that the Border Patrol is severely hampered in its efforts to enter federally protected land owned by the Fish and Wildlife Service or the Forest Service or the Park Service, which makes up a large part of the Arizona border. At Thursday’s press event to release the video, Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT), ranking Republican on the House Natural Resources Committee’s Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands, pointed out that the Border Patrol has the right to enter any private property within 25 miles of the border, except for private homes, but has to negotiate access before it can step foot on federal lands! Often the federal agencies that own the land force the Border Patrol to make changes that harm their mission; Rep. Bishop mentioned one instance where a surveillance tower had to be moved for the benefit of wildlife, leaving a three-mile section of the border completely unwatched and wide open.

Intended to protect these wild places, the restrictions on the Border Patrol actually cause more harm, because illegal aliens and drug smugglers flock to these protected smuggling corridors (protected by environmental regulations) and trash the environment. As my colleague Jerry Kammer has written (http://cis.org/sierraclub ) regarding Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, right on the border with Mexico:

In his 20-mile, cross-country drive from the border to the spot where the vehicle bogged down in the sand, the smuggler slashed a new road littered by hundreds of destroyed creosote and sage brush plants, dozens of battered mesquite and palo verde trees, and several badly damaged saguaros, the magnificent cactus symbol of the Sonoran Desert. “With the kind of rain we get — or don’t get — it will take 100 or 200 years to repair this damage,” Young said.

Of course, as tragic as the harm caused to our wild lands by alien and drug smuggling, the security weakness is the greatest threat. Terrorists have used the Mexican border to enter the United States in the past and will continue to do so. Mahmoud Youssef Kourani, a “member, fighter, recruiter and fund-raiser for Hezbollah” according to his federal indictment, was smuggled through the Mexican border on his way to Michigan. And just last week, as Frank Gaffney has reported, Mexican authorities arrested the leader of a Hezbollah network in Tijuana, Mexico, right next to the U.S. border, which “employed Mexicans nationals with family ties to Lebanon.”

It would be folly to imagine the instances of terrorist penetration that we know about are the only ones. And it’s a greater folly to continue to leave our border poorly guarded in the hopes that Mexico, with its inefficient and corrupt institutions, will be able to screen out security threats before they reach our southern border.