OXON HILL, Md.—Many young women and girls cross the southern border carrying “morning after” pills, also known as Plan B, because “they know they’re going to be raped,” Tom Homan says.
“Some young ladies are being raped as you and I are talking,” Homan, who was acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President Donald Trump, told The Daily Signal during a recent interview.
Homan says he has “talked to young girls, as young as 10, that were raped multiple times” by members of criminal cartels.
No migrant crosses America’s border from Mexico illegally without the cartel’s consent, according to the former acting ICE director, now a visiting fellow at the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
When migrants don’t have the money to pay what the cartels demand, they fall prey to trafficking.
If illegal migrants can’t afford to pay the fee to cross the border, cartel members “find out who your family is, what family you have,” Homan said, explaining how the cartels force illegal aliens to work off their debt.
So … they’ll put you in forced labor, they’ll put you in prostitution, but they’re going to own you. And if you don’t abide by it, and if you don’t do what they tell you to do, they’ll kill your family. They’ll tell you they’ll kill your family. As far as back in the old days, where someone could just cross the border illegally, without the approval and acceptance of the cartels, those days are over.
In fiscal year 2022, which ended Sept. 30, Customs and Border Protection reported a record 2.3 million land encounters with migrants at the southern border. Just since fiscal year 2023 began Oct. 1, more than 1 million more migrants have been encountered at the southern border. That’s a record high.
“There’s a right way and wrong way to come to this country,” Homan said. “I can’t blame anybody that wants to be a part of the greatest nation on earth, but they can’t start that out by committing a crime against this country, entering the country illegally.”
Homan classified the current situation at the southern border as a “humanitarian crisis,” placing blame at the feet of the Biden administration for creating policies that have allowed the cartels to bring a record number of illegal aliens into the country and to exploit migrants for profit.
“I wish this administration would stop talking … in circles, stop playing a shell game, and just secure the border,” Homan said. That’s a sentiment that Mark Morgan, former acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, echoes.
In February, President Joe Biden announced a new asylum policy that, according to the proposal, will “encourage migrants to avail themselves of lawful, safe, and orderly pathways into the United States, or otherwise to seek asylum or other protection in countries through which they travel.”
Migrants can use an app known as “CBP One” to apply for asylum or, after being denied asylum in a third-party county, they can claim asylum in America.
Morgan, also a visiting fellow in the Border Security and Immigration Center of The Heritage Foundation, said Biden’s asylum plan should not be celebrated because it doesn’t fix the problem of illegal immigration.
What this so-called new plan does is, it just simply makes a deal with the entire world that says if you refrain from illegally entering in between the ports of entry and filing what we know to be false and fraudulent asylum claims, we’re going to make a deal with you: Get on the CBP One app, make an appointment, come to our lawful port of entry while we will continue to look the other way as you continue to file intentionally false and fraudulent claims. We’re going to process and release you to the United States.
Nothing changes. This plan does nothing to deter those coming to our border either illegally or filing false claims. It does nothing to apply consequence to anybody that violates the law, and it does nothing to put integrity back in the system by reducing fraudulent and fake claims from being made. So, all it does is literally shift the burden to some degree from in-between the ports of entry to the ports of entry. But the crisis is still there.
Morgan and Homan joined “The Daily Signal Podcast” from the annual Conservative Political Action Conference just outside Washington, D.C., on Thursday to discuss the cartels’ control of the border and what the Biden administration should do to retake it. Listen to the podcast below:
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