Who Will Tell Her Story?
Shea Bradley-Farrell /
No one wants to talk about it.
Not about how illegal immigration on the U.S. southern border, facilitated by brutal Mexican cartels, “dehumanizes” people. Not about the “broken young women,” who—hopeful for a new life and having paid thousands of dollars to the cartels—must comply “with anything” to be trafficked across the border. Not about the raped, the shot, the exploited women and children in “drop houses” on the U.S. side of the border. Not about the bar-coded bands on women’s wrists—labeled like livestock—so that they and the money they owe can be tracked by the cartels.
No one wants to talk about any of it—not President Joe Biden’s administration, nor a complicit Congress. But you can see it in her eyes.
This was described to me by two veteran emergency services professionals, one working in Del Rio, Texas, and the other working in the Firefly Border Patrol Processing Center at the Texas-Mexico border. The center is a soft-sided tent “city” (described as “about the size of four Super Walmart stores”) set up as a Border Patrol processing camp just off Firefly Road in Maverick County, Texas, between Del Rio and Eagle Pass, Texas.
The EMS professional working at Firefly says that in addition to the obvious physical signs of rape and beatings, he recognizes the trauma in the eyes of these “broken young women,” some of whom are just teenagers, and wonders—with tears in his own eyes—what will become of them.
He speculates they will be absorbed into immigrant communities all over the U.S.—ignored, lost, and forgotten by the Biden administration, the other politicians, and the self-absorbed government opportunists who, for their own political agendas, open U.S. borders and allow cartel businesses to thrive.
“Their design is to get to the U.S., and it’s the price they pay for going through,” he says. “They’re either going to pay upfront (with money), or pay afterward with indentured servitude or sex service, but someone’s got to pay. What’s strange is that our government facilitates [trafficking]. Once they cross the border, they get them where they need to go.”
He continued, “You can see the trauma on their faces, and they’re broken young women … . They are ‘product,’ labeled and tracked by the cartels. They’re broken people, and now they’re ours—going to school with our grandkids, in our systems and our communities.”
So, who will tell her story? She will be forgotten. The long-term effects of the emotional trauma of these women—and of the U.S. medical professionals and Border Patrol agents tasked with helping them—are already being forgotten.
A senior Border Patrol official in McAllen, Texas, reported to me that suicide rates, domestic violence, and alcoholism are significantly higher now among Border Patrol agents than before Biden took office. Agents have been “greatly impacted” by observing on a daily basis the abuse of illegal aliens by the Mexican cartels—rapes, killings, and assaults in “drop houses” located on the U.S. side of the border, where illegals await trafficking into the interior of the United States.
Biden declared his immigration policies to be “humane, orderly, and safe.” What deception. What disregard for human dignity.
No one wants to talk about it, but this is illegal immigration: Potential immigrants, wanting a new and improved life, are emboldened by Biden’s executive orders that opened—no, make that destroyed—U.S. sovereign borders to collaborate with the Mexican cartels.
No one gets across the border illegally without paying the cartels and receiving their authorization. Those who try to “freelance” across are killed. Many illegal immigrants are ignorant of the emotional cost and the potential life-changing trauma. But Biden and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas are not.
Senior government officials—Democrats and Republicans—visit border communities, giving hope that officials would finally “see and understand” the trauma, the warlike zone at the border, the daily car chases, the chaos and inhumane conditions so they will finally “do something” about it. But, according to angry and disheartened border residents, when the same officials return to Washington, D.C., all is forgotten. The casual dismissal of Mayorkas’ impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate was, in their words, like “a gut punch.”
For the U.S. government, “it’s not about stopping it,” the emergency services professional says. “It’s about processing [illegal immigrants] faster … and we will all have to deal with the consequences of this. Beyond the economic impact, it’s going to have tremendous psychological and health impacts—for years and years.”
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