The “migrant caravan” that began in Honduras 10 days ago continues its relentless push north to the U.S. border with Mexico.
Migrants are going over — and under — border barriers, and Mexico is handing out “humanitarian” visas as fast as they can print them.
The latest “caravan” could become just the excuse President Trump needs to declare a national emergency and build the wall, which would also provide the chance for Democrats to pass a funding bill that he would sign and end the partial government shutdown.
He’d better do something quickly.
10,000 Visas From Mexico?
The last illegal-alien horde reached a peak of 14,000, according to news reports, and all but about 2,000-2,500 — the remnant that is consuming the meager resources of benighted Tijuana — are left.
They still hope to cross the border to file phony asylum claims, then disappear into the interior where they’ll take jobs from Americans, enroll kids in public schools, get free healthcare, and otherwise drain the state and local treasuries.
As do the 10,000 illegal aliens, the Washington Post reported, that have requested visas from Mexico to cross its border and head for the United States. That number, the newspapers reported, includes 8,446 adults and 1,897 minors.
“If the migrants travel together, the convoy could exceed the size of the last such caravan, the Post reported, “which became a flash point in U.S.-Mexican relations as President Trump seized on it to argue for building a giant border wall.”
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But here’s the problem: With visas, the latest horde won’t have to stick together in a mass. “The current group of migrants,” the Post noted, “will have legal papers and may disperse.”
And that in turn will provide an incentive for even more “migrants” to head for Mexico in the hope of crossing the U.S. border, an analyst told the Post.
On that note, the president observed the obvious in a tweet on Saturday: “Mexico is doing NOTHING to stop the Caravan which is now fully formed and heading to the United States.”
Desperate Measures
For their part, the “migrants” who march north under the guidance of radical open-borders activists are resorting to more desperate measures.
And those measures, including outright attacks on U.S. border agents, buttress the president’s case that a very high border wall, topped with razor wire, is required to stop the their tenacious attack on the border.
Customs and Border Patrol reported that 110 illegal aliens hopped a border barrier in the Yuma, Arizona, sector of the border on Monday. The agency provided a grainy film of the nighttime breach. The band of illegals appear to be staging a highly-organized operation, such was the ease with which they scaled and surmounted the barrier. A smuggler, the agency reported, provided the border-crashing bunch with a ladder.
And as The New American reported last week, when illegals can’t go up and over, they go down and under.
Nearly 400 illegal Guatemalans tunnelled under the border in the same sector. They were “largest single group of migrant families and minors ever recorded” in the area, the Arizona Republic reported.
Undoubtedly, the group will file asylum claims that will, of course, likely turn out to be bogus.
Such claims have increased 2,000 percent in the last five years, the White House reported just before Trump’s national address on January 8, and 72 percent of illegals “report making the journey for economic reasons and therefore would not typically qualify for asylum.”
Those data are consistent with what “migrants” tell reporters and researchers.
Hard Numbers
CBP’s numbers for the first two months of fiscal 2019 demonstrate that CBP’s efforts are akin to sweeping back the tide at the beach, or bailing out a sinking boat without plugging the hole in the bottom.
In the first two months of fiscal 2019, border agents collared 48,287 illegal-alien families and 10,625 unaccompanied minors. Another 9,160 inadmissible families and 859 inadmissible unaccompanied minors showed up at ports of entry.
Numbers for December and January are not available because of the government shutdown.
In fiscal 2018, 107,212 families and 50,036 unaccompanied minors were caught, while 53,901 inadmissible families and 8,624 inadmissible unaccompanied minors presented themselves at legal ports of entry.
Image: screenshot of CBP footage of migrants scaling border wall
