Border Security

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"open borders" Republicans got demagogued


During President Joe Biden’s term, Border Patrol arrested an unprecedented number of immigrants who crossed illegally into the United States. Many believe Biden caused this increase in migration by reducing border enforcement. However, data obtained by the Cato Institute through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) challenges this narrative. In fact, the border crisis began before Biden took office and ended before he left.


From his administration’s first day in January 2021, Biden actually increased border enforcement—arrests, detentions, and removals of border crossers all increased. The prevailing narrative that blames Biden overlooks the real causes of the crisis: America’s robust labor market and bad immigration policies that incentivized illegal entries. However, Trump, not Biden, mostly started those policies. Biden eventually phased out some of them; he increased legal migration, and as the labor market cooled, the problem dissipated.
https://www.cato.org/blog/biden-didnt-cause-border-crisis-part-1-summary

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corrupt, faithless and oppressive government


At 4:59 a.m. on Aug. 25, Verlon Jose, the chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation in Southern Arizona, received an email from the head of the U.S. Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector. Government contractors were en route to conduct soil tests for construction of a 62-mile wall along the Nation’s southern boundary, wrote acting chief patrol agent Henry N. Laxdal.

If the tribe wished to have cultural monitors observe the work, they were welcome to, but they could not interfere with the government’s operations.

The work would begin in exactly one minute.

Jose, 59, was already aware of the contractors’ arrival. An hour earlier, a tribal member had called to report a caravan heading south through the reservation, and Facebook was lighting up with similar accounts. The convoy included not only work trucks and drilling rigs, but Border Patrol vehicles as well.

Dozens of border waFor months, the O’odham had maneuvered to avoid such a scene, taking their case to federal court. Their homeland straddles the border, and thousands of tribal members live in Mexico. A wall would disrupt routine border crossings for ceremonies and family visits and destroy landscapes they consider their duty to protect, members and leaders say. Their lawsuit argued that the Trump administration’s efforts to build it despite their opposition constituted an historic attack on tribal sovereignty.

But administration attorneys gave assurances that the government was engaging with the O’odham in good faith, and a judge in Washington, D.C., denied the tribe’s request for a preliminary injunction. In his Aug. 25 email providing Jose a 60-second heads up, the Border Patrol chief said his agency’s willingness to accommodate cultural monitors underscored its “commitment to ongoing coordination” with the Nation.https://www.propublica.org/article/tohono-oodham-nation-arizona-border-wall

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A
s daylight broke, Jose learned the contractors were guarded by federal agents in masks and tactical gear, drawn from a special operations cadre that participated in citywide sweeps in Minneapolis and Chicago the previous year, which left three people dead, including two U.S. citizens. When the tribe’s chief of police tried to reach the worksite, he was stopped at a roadblock set up by the agents.
https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/D5612E06-F25D-4891-8753-A68B9ABB663C_d64c8e.jpgMerrian Felixhttps://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/20260826_091732_70f147.jpgDavy Cross
Border Patrol tactical team members amass around the Tadai Me:i prayer camp on Aug. 26.

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For a quarter-century, Tohono O’odham leaders have staved off a border wall by allowing DHS to use the reservation as a testing ground for some of the government’s most aggressive homeland security measures — from vehicle barriers (https://tolc-nsn.org/docs/Actions04/04095.pdf) on the reservation’s southern boundary, to state-of-the-art surveillance towers (https://theintercept.com/2019/08/25/border-patrol-israel-elbit-surveillance/), to law enforcement partnerships with the Border Patrol (https://tolc-nsn.org/docs/Actions16/16141.pdf) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (https://www.ice.gov/hsi/our-partners/shadow-wolves).


Despite the collaborations, and assurances from the Trump administration, ProPublica found that DHS has turned its vast apparatus on tribal members, with 24-hour surveillance directed at an ongoing border prayer ceremony and tribal members being questioned outside the reservation about their ceremonial activities.

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For Deshane Gregg, whose vehicle was forced off the road by a convoy of contractors and federal agents, the recent show of force on the reservation has felt like a government siege, not cooperation.


“You just feel helpless. You see these people, and they’re just so aggressive. They want you to react. They want you to show them that we could be ugly too,” she said. “We’re just here doing prayer. We’re just here, not trying to bother them, but it gets to you when it’s constantly being like that.”


“The drones flying over us all day,” she added, “it’s a lot.”

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The O’odham have inhabited the Sonoran Desert, from what is now Southern Arizona to Mexico’s Sea of Cortez, for thousands of years (https://naair.arizona.edu/tohono-oodham-nation). According to the tribe, roughly 14,000 of its 37,000 enrolled members live on tribal land west of Tucson. Approximately 3,000 more reside in Mexico. At 2.8 million acres, their reservation is the largest on the southern border by a long shot.

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In June, a $1.3 billion contract to build the wall, known as the “Tucson 5” project, was awarded to Sullivan Land Services Co., also known as SLS and SLSCO. The Texas firm has a long history (https://www.texasobserver.org/biden-quietly-gave-border-wall-contract-to-company-used-by-trump-abbott/) of Republican political donations and was a major recipient (https://www.texasobserver.org/colossal-waste-of-money-texas-nears-1-billion-in-border-wall-contracts/) of border wall contracts during Trump’s first term.

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On the eve of a July 22 hearing, DHS filed a notice (https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2026-07-21/pdf/2026-14604.pdf) affirming that to accelerate the project, it was waiving, in whole or in part, more than 30 laws, including several that mandate tribal consultation.

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Two days after the meeting with Mullin, the DHS secretary, a border wall contractor had “inadvertently disturbed a cultural site” west of the reservation. The crew had bulldozed (https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2026/04/30/border-wall-damage-indigenous-arizona/) a 70-foot swath through the Las Playas Intaglio, a 200-foot long earthen etching in the shape of a fish that was at least 6,500 years old (https://mydigitalpublication.com/publication/?i=870459&p=30&view=issueViewer). The site was well marked and well known to area archaeologists.

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Human rights groups documented (https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/amr51/018/2012/en/) U.S.-born tribal members being arrested and deported, and verbal and physical abuse by Border Patrol agents. CBP did not respond when asked about the report’s allegations.

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so much for only trying to stop illegal immigration

huge own goal


https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:drfb2pdjlnsqkfgsoellcahm/bafkreievqbcezr6ehkzfqgtyk4vvzsyad5aslwaq5nseendc2 o2wmq7m7i