Thousands of illegals overran the Rio Grande sector of the border last Saturday, which continued a trend the sector’s chief, Ronaldo Karisch, described for the U.S. Senate’s Homeland Security Committee a month ago.
“RGV [Rio Grande Valley] Sector Border Patrol agents continue to process unprecedented volumes of mostly family units and unaccompanied alien children arriving illegally between the ports,” CBP reported in showing photographs of the illegal-alien deluge.
Meanwhile, agents in Nogales, Arizona, hauled more than $2 million in drugs at the Port of Nogales since Friday.
One-Day Deluge
On Saturday, CBP reported, “agents from Brownsville to Roma apprehended over 2,400 illegal aliens, the majority of which consist of family units and unaccompanied children who readily turn themselves in to agents.”
They turn themselves over because they know the CBP will release them, but in any event the Rio Grande Sector seems to be the target for the illegal-alien invaders.
“Over the past week,” the agency reported. “more than 10,000 illegal aliens were apprehended, making it one of the highest weekly totals ever perienced in this sector. Currently, stations and processing centers are holding more than 7,000 illegal aliens in custody. At the current rate, the RGV Sector is expected to surpass the mass migration influx experienced in 2014.”
“We’ve exceeded our capacity and we’re doing all we can to house migrants in a humane place and transfer them in and out in a timely fashion as none of the Border Patrol facilities, including the one in Donna, are meant to be long term detention centers,” Karisch said.
In early April, Karisch told the Senate committee a similar story.
“To put things in perspective,” he told the committee, “last year agents in RGV made 162,000 apprehensions. We’re already at 147,000.” Karisch told the committee he expects 260,000 in his sector by the close of the fiscal year.
At more than 1,000 people per day, Karisch said his agents were dealing with the “capacity of 17 commercial buses.” One day in the week before he testified, his agents caught 1,766 illegals.
CBP recently opened two new facilities to house the illegal-alien colonists.
At the beginning of March, CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan said the crisis at the border is “unsustainable,” which was something of an understatement.
Drugs, Too
The fight against drugs seems almost as hopeless as the effort to control the border.
Since Friday, the agency reported, border agents at the Nogales entry station confiscated almost 300 pounds of cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, and methamphetamine in six drug seizures. They arrested four Americans and two Mexicans.
At the Dennis Deconcini crossing, they caught a 20-year-old man from Tucson with more than 90 packages of drugs in the doors and quarter panels of his Infiniti sedan. He was hauling a pound of fentanyl worth $16,000, 86 pounds of meth worth $259,000, 29 pounds of heroin worth more than $781,000, and 17 pounds of cocaine exceeding $419,000.
Total haul: Nearly $1.5 million.
Agents at the same spot caught a 66-year-old man from Tucson with 70 packages of cocaine stored in the rear cabin wall and spare tire of his Ford truck. He had 19 pounds of fentanyl worth nearly $260,000, 68 pounds of meth valued at nearly $205,000, and 9 pounds of heroin worth $253,000.
That bust was worth nearly $725,000.
Officer busted a third smuggler at the crossing on Monday, CBP reported, but the 44-year-old Mexican smuggler wasn’t, apparently, as ambitious as the other two. When agents inspected his Pontiac they found 15 pounds of meth worth $45,000 packed into the rear tires.
At the Mariposa Crossing in Nogales, border agents caught a 15-year-old from Tucson with a pound of Fentanyl pills worth $11,000 in her underwear.
Later the same day, they nailed a 33-year-old Mexican with 30 packages of meth, weighing about 55 pounds and worth nearly $167,000, packed into the gas tank of his vehicle.
At the Morley Pedestrian gate, a 39-year-old woman from Rio Rico surrendered a half-pound of Fentanyl pills worth $7,200. She pulled the package “from an internal cavity” voluntarily after agents began to search her.
Photo: vichinterlang/iStock Unreleased/Getty Images
