‘Gotaways’ Surge Across Border; Expect More Crimes to Follow
More than 1.5 million illegal aliens have slipped into the U.S. since Joe Biden took office — more than three times the number seen during the last three years of the Trump presidency.
Beyond the record-breaking numbers, experts say these “gotaways” pose heightened risks to this country’s public safety and security.
Although the Biden administration says it is establishing tough new rules and sending more people back across the border – we’ll believe it when we see it — Texas law enforcement sources say more migrants are resorting to illegal entry and smugglers to enter America. Motivated criminals and terrorists pay traffickers a bonus to get them through.
Late last year Texas launched a “gotaway” task force to track down migrants who make it past a thinning green line of Border Patrol agents. This month, Idaho and Florida sent reinforcements to aid the Lone Star State.
But the rugged 1,250-mile-long Texas-Mexico border is a sprawling security nightmare for a force of any size. Recent reports indicate that neighboring New Mexico is effectively open to illegal border crossers.
Amid what it calls an “epidemic of runners and gotaways,” a new border video from the Center for Immigration Studies states that those who brazenly dodge authorities “are potentially the most dangerous kind of migrant because they have criminal records, or are wanted on warrants, or on U.S. gang databases. This immigrant category is ballooning now.”
The downstream effects can be horrendous, as the case of one gotaway shows. Last year, Jose Pascual-Reyes was charged with multiple counts of capital murder in Alabama. The 37-year-old illegal alien was also charged with kidnapping a 12-year-old girl who was “tied to bed posts for at least a week, assaulted, and kept in a drug-like state by being plied with alcohol.”
“Who do you think are the ones getting away?” asks Mark Morgan, former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and a senior fellow at FAIR. “It’s not your upstanding citizens. That’s where the criminal element is coming in. That’s where the gang members are getting through.”
The Department of Homeland Security, attempting to downplay the extent of the gotaway problem, is engaging in a statistical shell game to hide these illegal entries. By excluding gotaway data from official border-crossing statistics, Biden & Co. have been shuffling numbers like “Enron at the border,” FAIR noted last February.
Even with the administration’s promiscuous (and legally suspect) parole program pushing migrants through designated ports of entry, criminal aliens with sketchy backgrounds and an itch to run are taking their chances elsewhere – and succeeding.