Border Battle Nightmare

The current immigration horror show along the Rio Grande has put the lives of both Americans and illegal aliens at risk.

Who benefits? Mexican smuggling cartels and corrupt American politicians.

TheBlaze's Sara Carter exposes what's really going on at out southern border in an exclusive story for TheBlaze Magazine. Using interviews, first-hand accounts, photography and a multitude of sources, Sara details the truth that our government is trying to hide from the American people.

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Below is an excerpt from Sara's piece, "Border Battle Nightmare." The full story is available ONLY in the newest issue of TheBlaze Magazine.

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The sun weighed heavy on the dusty, rocky earth, and the shrubs hid jagged thorns among its bushy green leaves. The twisting and turning of branches also camouflaged the faces of the women, children and men attempting to find a new life far from their native lands.

In June and July, media outlets began to report that something different was happening along the 2,000-mile U.S. border with Mexico: It was being overrun by thousands of children daily—not including the thousands of families and the regular male migrants that have been commonplace along the border.

By Oct. 1, the number of children entering the United States without guardians was more than double the previous year, with nearly 70,000 unaccompanied immigrant children having entered illegally, according to figures released by the Department of Homeland Security.

U.S. Border Patrol agents are seen processing illegal aliens caught just after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. (Sara Carter/TheBlaze)

They didn’t get here on their own.

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“Smuggling these children is easy for [traffickers] because, for one, they bring them across and then they leave them right at the river’s bank—the edge—on the United States side,” said Border Patrol Agent Omar Zamora, who is also a spokesman for the Rio Grande Valley sector. “[The traffickers] don’t ever have to step foot inside the country, they just tell the children and some of the mothers to walk up and turn themselves in.”

Zamora, who noted that the Border Patrol had to tap more than 300 agents from other stations to handle the crisis in his sector in July, said the situation became more complex when these smugglers found that they were “never in any danger of being arrested for smuggling” and that it’s “really easy money and the risk is zero for them when they bring in unaccompanied children.”

Border Patrol stations were overwhelmed with women and children turning themselves in to federal authorities and asking specifically for “order to appear in court” papers and protection from criminal elements—requests that would allow them access into the States. Whether it was children traveling alone or mothers traveling with children, the seemingly coordinated stories of drug-cartel violence and abuse would ring like a symphony from holding cells already stretched thin and lacking resources.

After being processed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the majority of illegal immigrants would be loaded onto buses and sent to churches for supplies or to overcrowded government facilities across the country before disappearing into the multicultural fabric of cities already overwhelmed by illegal alien populations.

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Illegal alien children are extremely vulnerable in the current border mess. Many of them travel without parents or guardians and must rely on dangerous cartels to get them across the U.S. border. (Sara Carter/TheBlaze)

This was not the historic Ellis Island scenario, which had its own problems, where millions of immigrants flooded New York City seeking legal citizenship under the watchful eyes of the Statue of Liberty and her call to “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

This new surge of visibly tired, poor and hungry families—especially children traveling alone—were extorted by drug cartels and human traffickers. Many of the young girls and boys traveling confronted the horror of rape, slavery, abuse and death along their journey. Many of these children—those who made it—had already been abandoned by their parents long before making their journey to find those same parents again in America after entering the country, according to dozens of children and parents who spoke to TheBlaze.

Those interviews revealed consistently similar stories: Guardians living illegally in the United States requested that their children make the dangerous journey because they had been told that under President Obama those kids would not get sent home and neither would their guardians.

[…]

HARASSING CITIZENS AND AGENTS TO HIDE THE TRUTH

... Lorenzo Anzaldua Jr., a rancher whose Texas family has lived in the border area for generations and who often visits the family land to remember his deceased father, nodded toward a watching Border Patol agent and shook his head, saying to TheBlaze, “I’m consistently harassed by federal officials when I bring guests to my property.”

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Spratte agreed, admitting that he initially thought Anzaldua was exaggerating. It wasn’t until he began to visit Anzaldua on his property that Spratte saw the harassment from other Border Patrol agents working along the river.

Texas National Guard soldiers monitor the U.S.-Mexico border. The troops, deployed along the Rio Grande, are part of a 1,000-strong force called up by Texas Gov. Rick Perry to guard the border. The soldiers were sent to help state and federal law enforcement stem a surge of illegal immigrants, many of them families and unaccompanied minors. (John Moore/Getty Images)

“When the crisis first started and we had all these unaccompanied [juveniles] and family units just showing up, the [local Border Patrol] union started bringing the reporters down because we felt it was important for the American public to know what was going on,” said Spratte. “And when we started bringing them down, we started seeing the harassment.”

A directive not to speak to reporters was delivered from supervisors and other senior DHS officials in memos and meetings. “They didn’t want agents speaking with or being a part of any reporter’s story unless it was authorized by Washington D.C.,” said Chris Cabrera, vice president of the sector’s union, in an interview. Like Spratte, he works with the Local 3077 in the Rio Grande Valley sector.

“They didn’t want agents telling anyone what was going on, and they don’t want agents saying anything now,” Cabrera added. “It was no wonder that agents who are afraid of losing their jobs or worried they won’t get promoted don’t want to cooperate with reporters. That’s why so many of them talk on background.”

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“We believe it’s an attempt [by the administration] to control the information that gets out,” said Spratte. “You know, we swore to defend the Constitution and defend our republic. It’s important for the freedom of the press and for the First Amendment—it’s important to have the information so that the American people can base their judgment on actual facts, instead of what they are being told, which is mainly lies.”

Anzaldua reminded me that this type of harassment is an everyday occurrence. “You see how they are harassing us,” said Anzalduas, pointing at the Border Patrol vehicle parking on his property. “You are a guest on my property, on my family’s property, and yet they’re coming here to find out who you are and that is what’s disturbing. This whole month it’s been like this. They purposely come, and they find out who we are—who you guys are—because they don’t want the American people to know the truth.”

WHAT'S REALLY GOING ON?

A month earlier TheBlaze had visited Anzalduas County Park.

It was June, just as word had begun to spread about the flood of illegal alien children. Spratte had taken us to the park with the hope that we’d witness the drug cartel runners who were delivering illegal aliens across the Rio Grande via Jet Ski.

Not only were there at least a dozen Jet Skis on the Mexican side of the river at the border town of Reynosa, Mexico, moving back and forth across U.S. waters but also drug cartel “spotters” were sitting along the banks just across the river.

The spotters, including one man with binoculars in a white truck semi-hidden in the bushes who watched our every move, were keeping an eye on ...

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Want more than excerpts?

Want answers to what's really going on? Do you really know the danger tens of thousands of children are in? What is the president's true agenda?

All of that and much more is exposed in the full cover story on the nightmare on our border in the December 2014 issue of TheBlaze Magazine.

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