Saturday, May 18, 2019

Cartels "Kicking Our Butts" In New Mexico As State Left Without Checkpoints

In an interview with CR, Couy Griffin, the chairman of the Otero County, New Mexico, county commission, explained how our government has exposed his county, and by extension, the rest of the nation, to unprecedented criminal activity from the Mexican cartels.

"We get so tied up and focused on the asylum seekers or the illegal immigrant aspect of what's going on at our southern border, but the reality of it is that it's nothing but a mere smoke screen for the cartel. They're using these large groups of migrants as nothing more than a smoke screen to smuggle their drugs across the southern border. Meanwhile, as soon as those agents are exhausted, those critical spots, they're sending boatloads of drugs across the border in unsecured areas. The shutting down of the checkpoints on the major drug smuggling corridors is a recipe for disaster. Now they have a green light to shuttle drugs through our counties and through our rural areas, with no security in place."

Otero County Sheriff David Black told me that his tiny three-man narcotics team and other deputies now have to deal with the cartels all on their own without any help from Border Patrol: "We have rerouted all of our overtime money to interdictions on the highway." Black noted that his informants tell him the large stash houses in El Paso and even in source cities in Mexico like Juarez are now empty because the cartels "Are taking advantage of the unprecedented open borders because nothing is stopping them."

In total, there are six checkpoints in the El Paso Border Patrol sector: one in El Paso County, Texas, two in Otero County, N.M., and three in Doña Ana County, N.M. Customs and Border Protection has confirmed with CR that all six remain shut down.

While the politics of Doña Ana County and the central state government in the urban areas of Albuquerque and Santa Fe have rolled out the welcome mat to illegal immigration and cartel activity, officials in the more conservative and rural counties, such as Otero and its neighboring county to the north, Lincoln, resent the secondary effects and fear that more is coming.

"I've never seen all these checkpoints closed in my life, and I've been in Lincoln and Otero Counties for 30 years," said Lincoln County Sheriff Robert Shepperd in an interview with CR. "I have friends who are out on ranches who now have to lock their doors and do things they shouldn't have to do. It's eerie watching these checkpoints look like ghost towns."

On top of the diverted federal resources, the more conservative rural counties in New Mexico must deal with the open-border policies of the governor, who doesn't seem concerned about the empowerment of the cartels or the drugs coming into her state.


https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-17/cartels-kicking-our-butts-new-mexico-state-left-without-checkpoints

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