Del Rio Sector: A Case Study in the Southwest Border Disaster

The Southwest border is 1,954 miles long, and though the disaster there is plunging headlong into catastrophe, it's worse in a handful of the Border Patrol's nine sectors there than in others.

• Del Rio sector agents encountered more than three times as many illegal entrants (43,570) than they had in all of FY 2017
• In September 2021, anywhere between 15,000 and 30,000 aliens - mostly Haitian nationals - crossed the Rio Grande illegally into the city of Del Rio, where they overwhelmed not just Border Patrol but also local resources available to accommodate them.

Deaths along the Southwest border

• Some 609 migrants have already died there in FY 2022, according to a July 25 report, up from 566 deaths in all of FY 2021
• In FY 2020, 247 recorded Southwest border deaths, and 300 in FY 2019
• 200 of those deaths have been recorded in Del Rio sector
• Chernobyl-style meltdown in Ukraine in 1986 led to 30 deaths and the relocation of 200,000 people

The "design" in this case is poorly thought-out, but not "faulty"

• The Biden administration has decided that its objective is no longer to deter foreign nationals from entering illegally.
• Instead, the plan is to accommodate those migrants by foisting them off on an already overburdened immigration court system, or placing them in a novel administrative system of its own making.

It's akin to cranking the reactor up, draining the cooling system, disabling the fail-safe devices, and asserting that the resulting catastrophe was due to external factors.

• Mayorkas is now like the Vicomte de Valmont (John Malkovich) in the 1988 movie "Dangerous Liaisons" repeating over and over again to a distraught Madame de Tourvel (Michelle Pfeiffer), "It's beyond my control."

Biden administration officials stage-managing this fiasco could relieve the burden on the exhausted and abused agents, slow the flow of drugs, and prevent countless migrant deaths beginning tomorrow if they wanted to, by returning to deterrence policies that worked under Trump.

• They won't because their agenda is more important.

https://cis.org/Arthur/Del-Rio-Sector-Case-Study-Southwest-Border-Disaster