By John Kass

April 10, 2022

When I think about America’s wide-open southern border with Mexico and the utter lawlessness such chaos represents–a record two million illegal immigrants streaming in last year and thousands more every day–I consider the politics.

Can a nation survive without borders? How long can political leaders rationalize their own refusal to enforce the law and protect the borders?

And how long will voters allow politicians and their media enablers to gaslight this orgy of national self-destruction?

My wife has a different perspective. Yes, Betty sees the politics. But she’s also a mother and a teacher. She loves kids. Her hands rocked the cradles in our home.

And I can still see her as she was in the boys’ bedroom years ago when I’d come home late after work, her hands rocking those twin wooden cradles as I opened the door, with Betty wordlessly warning me not to wake up the boys.

But the other evening, for the first time in the 40 years we’ve been together, she offered up a column topic and asked me to write on it.

“The border, the border, the border,” she insisted.

The free Biden phones to illegals?

 “Not just the free phones and the politics,” she said. “All those young people dead from fentanyl overdoses. All of them dead. Their families. All that pain.”

More than 100,000 Americans died from drug overdose last year, most of them young, most were victims of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids smuggled over the southern border.

Overdose deaths have doubled over the past two years. Some reports put fentanyl overdose as the leading cause of death of Americans between the ages 18-45. And the numbers of the dead are rising.  The narcotics come illegally across that wide-open southern border with Mexico, the border that President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris continue to ignore.

If you’re young and think yourself invincible you may have heard of contemporaries dying by overdose. . If you’re older, you may know parents who’ve lost their children that way. You see that eyes of the parents are empty, exhausted and broken by regret and guilt.

 Those holes in their families and lives will never be filled. If you’re blessed as we’ve been with healthy children who by God’s grace have stayed away from drugs, you can still think of those who are hurting. You can still say a prayer for them.

China makes fentanyl. Banks and the Mexican drug cartels make fortunes pushing the synthetic opioid across our wide-open Southern border.

 They use illegal border crossers as their mules. All the cartels want is their money, to use as the Outfit used prohibition cash, to buy corrupt politicians and corrupt cops to keep their supply lines open.

Most human fentanyl mules get through undetected. For every one that is caught, how many get away? And American young people die, without much reaction from the American political class or the media that protects that class.

If 100,000 young Americans started dropping dead from Covid, media would spotlight the cause and assess the blame. But fentanyl is all about the border. And the open Southern border is about politics.

And so, the dead become just numbers, statistics to be swept up and tossed, and we look away, as we look away when black and brown children are cut down in America’s big cities in the street gang wars and we forget their names, because others are always dropping into the river of violence that bears them away.

Some of the addicted have lost contact with their families. But many of the dead were loved. Their families were still in their lives. And they had mothers who rocked them in cradles and dreamed of the things they would do together.

The other day at the Del Rio Port of Entry in Texas, a human mule was arrested, trying to smuggle more than a half million dollars’ worth of fentanyl into the U.S. from Mexico. She had 30 packages weighing more than 40 pounds of the drug in her vehicle. One news story offered photos of the packages.

But the story struck a memory. Del Rio.

Remember Del Rio? It is the place where 15,000 illegals gathered every day to cross over. Del Rio was an embarrassment for the president, not because illegals were crossing. As a presidential candidate he called for all those who wanted to come to surge the border. Once he took office he rewarded Democrats and the illegal immigration lobby by stopping the building of the wall, reversing the immigration policies of former President Donald Trump.

It wasn’t much of a surprise, was it? Biden had announced what he would do. He campaigned on it. And now we live with it.

What bothered the White House  at Del Rio was Fox News sending a camera-equipped drone over the Rio Grande, so America could see the chaos, so bothersome that federal aviation regulations were ginned up to stop the TV drones. But they didn’t stop. In September 2021, Hattians had arrived from Central America and thousands began rushing across the river.

Mounted Border Patrol agents tried to turn them back, swinging their reins to control their mounts and keep the illegals off the horses. Democrats and media allies seized on the mounted agents, shrieking that the border patrol had used whips like cruel overseers on a slave plantation. They all told the lie that the Border Patrol was whipping the innocents. Biden and his crew played the race card. They got what they wanted. If you opposed the illegal rush across the border you were in league with the slave masters and their whips.

It wasn’t true. There were no whips. There was no whipping. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was the screaming to change the subject from those thousands upon thousands streaming across the Rio Grande.

“It’s horrible what you saw,” said President Biden. “To see people like they did, with horses, running them over, people being strapped. It’s outrageous. I promise you! Those people will pay. There is an investigation under way now. And there will be consequences.”

 Again, there were no whips. The illegals weren’t whipped. But careers were ruined. Horse patrols were suspended. Morale was destroyed. Border enforcement was relaxed. And the border was kept wide open, which satisfied the neo-Marxist left the Democrats have given themselves up to.

 And six months later, Joe Biden has yet to offer an apology to the Border Patrol.

“After clearly making up career-ending, false accusations about the agents to change the narrative away from shocking daily videos of 15,000 illegal aliens amassing under the International Bridge in Del Rio, the administration now seems perfectly content to let the agents twist in the wind,” writes Tom Homan, the former Acting ICE Director now a visiting fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

“Where is the report?” Homan asked, demanding an apology that will not come.

And except for a few media outlets, the porous Southern border that Biden had created faded from the news.

But the border is wide open now. And soon it will widen some more, with the Biden White House decision to abruptly end what is called Title 42 Authority.

Title 42 is a regulation through the Centers for Disease Control that allowed illegal immigrants to be expelled from U.S. soil during the pandemic. Border officials are now dealing with a flood of illegal immigration. But in the coming days, as Title 42 ends on orders of the Biden administration, they’ll be dealing with an illegal immigrant tidal wave. Some estimates suggest there could be an additional million illegal border crossings in within weeks of Title 42 ending.

This is by design.

“The southern border is about to explode, and federal authorities are making preparations — not to arrest, detain, and deport record numbers of illegal border-crossers, but to process them quickly and release them into the United States,” writes John Daniel Davidson, superb analyst and senior editor of the conservative opinion site “The Federalist.”

That means more border chaos. And more fentanyl. More mules to carry the poison to us.  More money for the drug cartels.

America will be awash in fentanyl. And more young Americans will die, and more grieving parents will stare at the world through empty eyes. Many states are already overwhelmed. And everywhere, bad as it is now, it will get much worse.

I wonder how the open border politicos of the Washington establishment would react to the following:

What if all the parents of all the fentanyl dead gathered in silence around the Biden White House holding photos of loved ones lost?

Not one or two, not a dozen, but all of them.

It won’t happen of course. But think of it. See it.

Around the White House, see all the grieving parents holding photographs of overdose victims. The photos of victims as the infants they once had been, when they had dreams, when their parents had dreams for them, before they were claimed by the narcotics pushed by Mexican drug lords across that open southern border.

In wave after wave. And more when the tidal wave begins.

The parents and siblings not screaming, not shouting. Just standing. Americans quietly reminding the Washington political establishment of the obligation they have to the nation.

An obligation to act. To focus on protecting our own border before they worry about borders of other nations a world away.

Why? Because this is our country. Because we live here.

There are real lives at stake, lives of Democrats, lives of Republicans, lives carried by women for months, by wives, by moms who weren’t thinking of talking points or partisan politics when they gritted their teeth and screamed, suffering the great pain of childbirth.

See it. Think of all border and the fentanyl dead, think of them as America’s children, the images held in the hands of the women who rocked the cradles.

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(Copyright 2022 John Kass)

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