OPINION:
White-tail deer hunting season opened in South Texas on November 7 and runs for the next two months. Since it’s the event of the year for thousands of ranchers and hunters, anticipation at high school reunions and other social gatherings during the fall runs high. Ranchers talk about stocking up the deer camps and hunting lease holders compare the latest results from their game cameras. One of my old classmates was showing an amazing picture on his iPhone: Three big bucks are gathered around the feeder but in the background is a buck with a rack so big it looks like he would have to walk sideways to get through the brush.
Nobody wants to talk about it but hanging over all the happy expectation is this question: Who else is out there in the brush? Everybody has a tale to tell — something that happened to them or a close friend. As an example, a husband and wife team of hunters was driving their Suburban down a ranch road in the pre-dawn hours last year when they made a hard left only to find four very tough-looking young men covering both sides of the road. “They were armed with Uzis,” said the wife who clearly knows her small arms. As the husband put it, “I kept my hands on the wheel, looked straight ahead and justdrove.”
A close call but that was last year and who knows about this year? The ranchers, the hunters and the drug traffickers are all armed. So far, there is an uneasy truce. Nobody wants to start a sagebrush war but a firefight back on some lonely South Texas ranch is not out of the realm of possibility, particularly as the number of drug trafficking operations explodes and the cartels come flooding across the border.”Open Borders” means more than poor migrants coming to America.
None of this is a secret in South Texas. Mr. Juan Manuel Loiza Salinas, aka “Commandante Toro,” a leader of the Gulf Cartel, has erected billboards on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande and facing the American side proclaiming that, contrary to malicious rumor, he is not a terrorist. He and his heavily armed men are merely drug traffickers. That’s comforting to know. As PBS recently reported,”The gangs own the (Rio Grande) River.”
According to the DEA’s 2015 Drug Threat Assessment, just released this month, “These Mexican poly-drug organizations traffic heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, and marijuana throughout the United States, using established transportation routes and distribution networks.” DEA concludes, “Mexican transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) remain the greatest criminal drug threat to the United States; no other group can challenge them in the near term.”
How far does all of this reach? As far north and east as Vermont where Gov. Peter Shumlin, a Democrat, has a good grasp of the problem. In January 2014 he devoted his entire “State of the State” message to the “full-blown heroin crisis” engulfing his state. In 2013, he said, twice as many people died in Vermont of heroin overdoses as the year before. Opiate addiction is up 770 percent since 2000, he told the legislators. Further, the problem has spread all over New England.
And as far north and west as Oregon where illegal aliens from Mexico, Silvestre Aguilar Rodriguez and German Tovar-Romas were just sent to the slammer for 15 years and 17 years respectively. Their crime? They sold heroin to Morgan Brittany, then 17 years old, which sent her into an immediate coma. She is now confined to a wheelchair and has permanent brain injury. According to the Portland Oregonian reporting in September, “Tavor-Ramos told authorities that he routinely delivered 40 ounces of heroin a week to De Leon. Each shipment was worth around $30,000 The group was trafficking in heroin in bulk from Mexico to the Portland-area for about a year, he said.” Two other illegal aliens from Mexico, Federico Martinez and Rolando De Leon, also received long prison sentences in this case.
Looking at the issue nationally, recently The Wall Street Journal reported that deaths from heroin overdoses have shot up on President Obama’s watch from 3,000 in 2010 to almost 9,000 in 2013. The Journal’s graph of heroin overdoses showing only modest change from 2000 to 2010 and then a sharp upwards break at 2010 is eye-opening. Thanks to open borders, heroin is plentiful and it’s cheap. For Carly Fiorina, the issue is personal — she lost a daughter to a heroin overdose. Based on the recent Fox Business Network debate, it’s clear that Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas also understand the problem. The other Republicans, maybe not so much.
Mrs. Clinton cannot address the open-borders/drug problem because to do so runs the risk of reminding voters of Carlos Anibel Vignali. As the late Barbara Olson reported in “The Final Days,” (Regnery 2001), in January of 2001 Vignali was a drug king pin with a problem. He was in the federal penitentiary facing some serious time because his network had shipped tons of narcotics from Los Angeles to the poor neighborhoods in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. But then he heard about Mrs. Clinton’s brothers, Hugh and Tony Rodham, operating out of the Bill Clinton White House. For a payment of $400,000 from the Vignali family, Carlos got a commutation of his sentence, in essence a “Get Out of Jail Free’ card, from Bill Clinton.
In short, what to do about illegal migrants is a big part of the open borders debate but, once the borders are opened, anyone and anything can come in through the South Texas brush country.
• William C. Triplett II is the former chief Republican counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
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