Thursday, June 30, 2022

Run For The Border

Alright, let's talk about this a second:
In April, Gov. Greg Abbott ordered state police to inspect every commercial vehicle entering Texas through a port of entry, saying the painful step was needed because the Biden administration was not doing its job to secure the border.

Drug cartels, Abbott said, were using “dangerous commercial trucks” to smuggle “immigrants, deadly fentanyl and other illegal cargo” into the state. The “enhanced commercial vehicle inspections” at the border caused hourslong delays at the inland ports, essentially grinding trade with Mexico to a halt and costing Texas businesses millions in losses.

After a week and a half, Abbott ended the inspections, announcing what he called historic security agreements with governors from border states in northern Mexico that he said would slow the flow of drugs and immigrants across the border.

But three months later, in a harrowing reminder of the risks migrants are taking to enter the country, authorities on Monday night discovered an abandoned tractor-trailer in San Antonio that contained the bodies of 46 dead migrants — another five died after being transported to local hospitals.

To immigration experts, the astounding loss of life inside the same kind of commercial vehicle Abbott had targeted in his inspections illustrates just how difficult it is to stem migration into the country, even as he has spent the last year pouring billions of state dollars into securing the border.

“Every data point we’ve seen about migration into Texas from Mexico shows that migrants are getting to the border in the same numbers as before,” said Adam Isacson, a regional security expert at the Washington Office on Latin America. “There’s no numerical evidence that it’s had any numerical impact on migrant flows.”

U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents had more encounters with migrants on the southwestern border of the country in the month that followed Abbott’s mandated vehicle inspections and agreements with Mexican governors. The agency reported 239,416 encounters in May compared to 235,478 encounters in April, when Abbott announced his new border security efforts. In March, the agency had 222,339 encounters.

You'll recall Abbott stopped that practice because it was costly, ineffective, and was slowing commercial cross-border traffic to a standstill, threatening both the Texas economy and the U.S. economy.  He did "close the border."  For 10 days.  And his officers found exactly: nothing.  The effect was nil.  Border Patrol encounters reflect either caution for a brief period, or seasonal movements.  Migrants coming from south of Mexico tend not to read the news on the way, and take months to get here, so it's not unlikely encounters with Border Patrol come in waves unrelated to a state policy rescinded 10 days after it was announced.  Or they just bided their time for two weeks.

Turns out smugglers aren't that stupid.

In case you forgot about Operation Lone Star: It's a human issue, too: All too human:
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