https://twitter.com/Virginia_Allen5/status/1858965579992072433

Carrell served in the Border Patrol for 24 years, retiring as a deputy patrol agent in charge of the San Diego Sector before going on to author a book on the border crisis and film two documentaries on the topic.

“I state with complete certainty that [President Joe] Biden, [Vice President Kamala] Harris, and [Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro] Mayorkas intentionally, strategically and purposely weaponized illegal immigration and use it as a tool to fundamentally transform America,” Carrell said during the joint hearing by the Subcommittee on Border Security and Enforcement and Subcommittee on Oversight and Accountability, both subcommittees of the House Homeland Security Committee.

“Inside this invasion, the unspoken evil of child trafficking and more specifically, child sex trafficking has flourished,” he said.

Where Are the Missing Migrant Children?

In August, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement reported that it does not know the location or status of more than 300,000 migrant children. Between fiscal year 2019 and 2023, 32,000 illegal alien minors did not appear for their immigration court hearing, and an additional 291,000 were never given an immigration court date.

According to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, 81% of unaccompanied alien children are between the ages of 13 and 18. The average age of a trafficking victim in the U.S. is between 12 and 15, according to Anti-Trafficking International.

Under current U.S. law, after being apprehended by Border Patrol or Customs and Border Protection, unaccompanied migrant children are released into the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, which in turn releases the child to a sponsor in the U.S.

For a decade, HHS has demonstrated a “record of losing children to sponsors who abuse, exploit, traffic, and harm children in unthinkable ways,” Tara Rodas told members of Congress during her testimony at Tuesday’s hearing, which was titled “Trafficked, Exploited, and Missing: Migrant Children Victims of the Biden-Harris Administration.”

As a government employee, Rodas was recruited in 2021 to help HHS with the growing number of unaccompanied migrant children arriving at the southern border. She soon discovered that the department’s unaccompanied migrant child program was allowing for the exploitation of children.

The names of the sponsors who take the children from the Office of Refugee Resettlement are run through the National Crime Information Center before a child is released. A sponsor can be a distant relative or have no blood relation to the child at all, opening the door for human traffickers to prey on minors, which, according to Rodas, has and continues to happen regularly.

“Migrant children are working overnight shifts in slaughterhouses and factories, and some may die today because they don’t have the knowledge or skills to do the job that their supposed to be doing, but their doing it because they need to repay debts to their smugglers and traffickers,” she said.

https://twitter.com/Virginia_Allen5/status/1858971219867078980

Rodas accused the U.S. of operating a “white glove delivery system” that is responsible for handing migrant children over to “MS-13, 18th Street Gang, Russian Balkans crime syndicates, and other unsavory characters.”

https://twitter.com/Virginia_Allen5/status/1858985085120508345

In defense of HHS, Rodas pointed out that the department is “not an investigative or law enforcement agency. HHS simply does not have the knowledge, skills, ability, or the tradecraft to protect children from traffickers.”

Furthermore, child trafficking has become a highly sophisticated operation, according to Rodas, mirroring the “tactics and operations of terrorist organization.”

https://twitter.com/Virginia_Allen5/status/1858977083806150869

Solutions

Solutions to end the exploitation of migrant children, according to Rodas, include DNA testing for sponsors who claim to be a relative of the child, and prison time for sponsors who cannot produce the child that was given into their care.

“Let’s mobilize the full power of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to dismantle these criminal networks,” Rodas said, recommending that child trafficking activity should be elevated on the National Intelligence Priorities Framework and be designated a terrorist activity.

“We cannot be a nation that looks the other way,” Rodas said. “We have a moral imperative to care for children that the government takes into custody, and the time to act is now.”

Generative AI, in its most basic form, is “trained on vast amounts of data,” according to Ryan Bangert, senior vice president of strategic initiatives at Alliance Defending Freedom. “It ingests petabytes of information in order to learn how human language works, in order to understand how it is that human syntax grammar is structured, and then it predicts what comes next.”

Generative AI is “not a mind, it’s not a consciousness, it’s not a human being,” Bangert says. “It’s a piece of software, a very complex piece of software, that’s fulfilling an algorithmic function.”

Therefore, he adds, generative AI is “not a First Amendment rights-bearing entity.”

In their new paper, “The Ghost in the Machine: How Generative AI Will Test the Bounds of the First Amendment,” Bangert and Jeremy Tedesco, senior vice president of corporate engagement at Alliance Defending Freedom, parse the relationship between AI and the First Amendment.

Bangert and Tedesco join “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the fight to protect free speech amid rapidly changing AI technology use.

Listen to the podcast below:

About 1,200 Israelis were killed Oct. 7 during Hamas’ terrorist attack exactly one year ago, a rampage of rape, torture, and murder in southern Israel. The terrorists took another 240 as hostages.

Hostage negotiations remain stalled, with little progress in recent weeks.

An Israeli-American hostage, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, was murdered in the Gaza Strip about a month ago after enduring 11 months in captivity. His body was recovered in Gaza.

The bodies of three other Americans—Itay Chen, Judy Weinstein, and Gad Haggai—also are believed to be in Gaza.

Some details on the four Americans believed to be alive:

Edan Alexander

Alexander, now 20, was born in Tel Aviv but grew up in Tenafly, New Jersey. He was serving in Israeli’s Golani Brigade when Hamas terrorists attacked Israel. Alexander spoke to his mother on the morning of the attack and told her he was safe; shortly thereafter, his parents were unable to reach him.

Sagui Dekel-Chen

On Oct. 7, Dekel-Chen was living in Kibbutz Nir Oz with his wife and two daughters. He was busy at work that morning when he saw Hamas terrorists entering the kibbutz.

Dekel-Chen climbed onto the roof of the Kibbutz’s communal dining room to issue a warning before running home to his family. Finding them in a bomb shelter, he went back into the kibbutz to fight off the terrorists.

He was one of about 80 residents of Kibbutz Nir Oz to be taken hostage that day.

Dekel-Chen’s third daughter was born during his captivity.

Omer Neutra

Neutra was born in New York City in 2001. After high school, Neutra took a gap year and participated in a leadership program in Israel.

After a year there, Neutra decided to join the Israel Defense Forces and became a tank commander. On Oct. 7, he was serving close to Israel’s border with Gaza.

Neutra’s tank was found empty shortly after the terrorist attack.

Keith Siegel

Siegel and his wife were taken from their home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza on Oct. 7. Aviva Siegel was released Nov. 26, but her husband remains a hostage in Gaza.

Siegel, 65, is originally from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He and his wife hid in their safe room during the Hamas attack, but terrorists found them and took them from their home.

Aviva Siegel said terrorists shoved her husband, breaking his ribs, and shot him in the hand.

As Israelis and Americans mark the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 terrorist attack, Yael Eckstein, president and CEO of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, sits down with The Daily Signal.

In the interview, Eckstein talks about how the day will be remembered in Israel and what life has been like in the Jewish state since the attack.

“No,” Unanue said, when asked whether former President Donald Trump’s border policies would cost him the Hispanic vote in the 2024 presidential election.

The CEO is a longtime supporter of Trump and was thrust into the political spotlight four years ago after stating publicly that the U.S. was “blessed” to have Trump as president. The remark triggered calls from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, D-N.Y., and others to boycott the Goya brand, which sells its products in the U.S. and many Spanish-speaking countries.

The boycott failed, and “business has been great” since then, Unanue says.

Unanue remains a vocal Trump supporter, and in his new book, “Blessed, Donald J. Trump, and the Spiritual War,” he explains why he thinks Trump is the leader America needs at this moment in history.

The chairman of the Hispanic Leadership Coalition, Unanue, whose grandfather immigrated to America from Spain, joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the biggest issues on the minds of Hispanic voters and why he is an unapologetic Trump supporter.

Listen to the podcast below:

Tren de Aragua is a “Venezuelan prison gang and … they’ve been wreaking havoc throughout South America … since their inception,” according to Chris Chmielenski, president of the Immigration Accountability Project.

That “havoc” has now come to America.

The brothers of Venezuelan illegal alien Jose Ibarra, the lead suspect in the slaying of Georgia college student Laken Riley, are thought to be connected to the Tren de Aragua gang, the New York Post reported.

Aragua is one of Venezuela’s 23 states, and Tren de Aragua translates to “Aragua Train.”

Members of Tren de Aragua are “getting through some of these cracks that the Biden-Harris administration has exploited because of certain loopholes within our immigration law,” Chmielenski says.

Under Chmielenski’s leadership, the Immigration Accountability Project is working to “hold members of Congress and members of the administration accountable for their actions, votes, and statements that they make on immigration, and to educate the American people on how these immigration issues affect them in their communities,” he says.

Chmielenski joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the recent spike in crime carried out at the hands of illegal aliens, and what a new presidential administration could do to address the crisis.

Listen to the podcast below:

Harris’ running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz joined Harris for the interview, a move which many Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, criticized.

Here’s a look at some of the statements Harris made during her interview.

1. ‘Diversity of Opinion’

The current vice president, a lifelong progressive Democrat, sought to appeal to moderate voters, even telling Bash she would appoint a Republican to her cabinet in the interest of “diversity of opinion.”

In an exclusive interview with CNN's Dana Bash, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris said she would be open to putting a Republican in her cabinet. The full interview will air at 9 p.m. ET Thursday on CNN's "The First Interview: Harris & Walz, A CNN Exclusive."… pic.twitter.com/9nRzSA7RYb

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) August 29, 2024

“I have spent my career inviting diversity of opinion,” Harris said.

Harris’ record, however, indicates her invitation for diverse options is limited.

While Harris was serving as California attorney general in 2016, California investigators searched pro-life activist David Daleiden’s home. Daleiden had recorded undercover video of Planned Parenthood.

“The fact that Ms. Harris is seizing private property of a pro-life California activist who has exposed horrific practices conducted by Planned Parenthood … is a conflict of interest and abuse of government power,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony List, said at the time.

Harris has also been accused of targeting conservative organizations because under her leadership as attorney general, California required organizations receiving donations to “file copies of their federal IRS Form 990 tax forms,” according to America First Legal.

“These forms include a list of all donors who contributed at least $5,000 to the charity in a given year,” the legal group explains. But, in 2021, the Supreme Court held in the case of Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta that mandatory disclosures were a violation of the First Amendment.

America First Legal says it believes that Harris may have “sought donor information about her political enemies without complying with federal law designed to protect donor privacy.”

2. Immigration and Southern Border

President Joe Biden tasked Harris in the third month of his presidency with “leading the administration’s diplomatic efforts to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras,” according to a White House fact sheet.

But as Bash pointed out during her interview with Harris, a historic number of illegal aliens have arrived on America’s southern border under the Biden-Harris administration.

“Why did the Biden-Harris administration wait three and a half years to implement sweeping asylum restrictions?” Bash asked, referencing Biden’s executive order giving him authority to close the border when the seven-day average of daily border crossings between ports of entry exceeds 2,500.

Harris did not address Biden’s executive order but told Bash that “the number of immigrants coming from that region has actually reduced since we began that work,” referring to her work to address the root causes of immigration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

Since March 2021, U.S. Customs and Border Protection says the Border Patrol has encountered over 1.9 million illegal aliens from El Salvador, Guatemala, or Honduras along the southern border, the same number of total illegal aliens the agency said it encountered during all four fiscal years of the Trump administration.

Between the start of fiscal year 2017 on Oct. 1, 2016, and the end of fiscal year 2020 on Sept. 30, 2020, which represents most of the time Donald Trump was president, the Border Patrol encountered a total of 1,952,654 illegal aliens from nations around the world at the southern border, according to CBP data.

When combined, the number of encounters of illegal aliens from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras fell to 25,011 in June, a new low not seen since Trump’s last month in office.

3. Fracking

Bash reminded Harris Thursday night that in 2019, Harris said “there is no question I’m in favor of banning fracking,”

“Do you still want to ban fracking?”

“No, and I made that clear on the debate stage in 2020 that I would not ban fracking,” Harris said. “As vice president I did not ban fracking, as president I will not ban fracking.”

During her debate with then Vice President Mike Pence in 2020, Harris twice said, “Joe Biden will not ban fracking.”

4. ‘Opportunity Economy’ 

The economy and inflation remain the top issues for voters in the 2024 election. If elected, Harris says she will begin “implementing my plan for what I call an opportunity economy” on day one.

The Democratic candidate’s economic plan includes “what we’re going to do to bring down the cost of everyday goods, what we’re going to do to invest in America’s small businesses, what we’re going to do to invest in families, for example, extending the child tax credit to $6,000 for families for the first year of their child’s life,” Harris said. “There’s the work that we’re going to do that is about investing in the American family around affordable housing, a big issue in our country right now.”

But Harris’ economic plan has all the elements of “21st-century socialism,” according to Daniel Lacalle, economist and fund manager. In a recent column for The Daily Signal, Lacalle says Harris’ plan to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy will result in “more inflation, a hidden tax, for you.”

“Following the Harris plan, the United States public debt will likely increase by $24 trillion in a decade,” according to Lacalle.

America’s national debt has increased over $7 trillion since the start of the Biden-Harris administration.

Trump’s assailant crawled onto a nearby rooftop Saturday night while Trump was on stage at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, 33 miles north of Pittsburgh. The shooter fired multiple shots, striking Trump in the right ear.

It remains unclear how the gunman, who was killed, was not seen and neutralized by the Secret Service or other authorities prior to opening fire.

“At some point we may find out what happened on Saturday,” Carlson says.

The Daily Signal caught up with Carlson behind the scenes of the Republican National Convention at The Heritage Foundation Policy Fest to ask about the implications of the assassination attempt on the election, and Trump’s selection of Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, for vice president.

Watch the interview below or read the lightly edited transcript:

Virginia Allen: Big news today—we learned that [Sen.] JD Vance is the pick for vice president. Did Trump make the right choice?

Tucker Carlson: We absolutely made the right choice. And I think, well, I love JD Vance. I know him pretty well personally, and I think he’s an outstanding person. He’s really smart, but he puts his intelligence to good use, which is to say the pursuit of wisdom. I mean, JD Vance is one of the only politicians I’ve ever met. He hasn’t been a politician in very long, but who thinks about what’s the right choice? What’s the moral choice? What’s the best choice for the country? So yeah, I’m thrilled.

But I would also say that Trump didn’t choose a long list of truly destructive people who hate what Trump believes and who, for reasons that they would have to explain, wanted to serve them anyway. What is that? If you didn’t agree with somebody, you probably wouldn’t want to be their running mate, right? But if you want to be the running mate anyway, that would suggest what?

Well, A, that you were incredibly dishonest, and B, that you’re probably working to subvert them. And there was, I’m not privy to Trump’s mind, but I did watch the process closely. And there were an awful lot of people who I personally consider loathsome. But even if I didn’t consider [them] loathsome, I know for a fact [they] dislike what Donald Trump believes, and they wanted to serve with him. And there was a lot of pressure, a lot of pressure brought to bear on the president to choose them, and he didn’t.

And so I consider his choice an act of courage. I’m grateful for it. I think it says something really good about where this administration will go. I’m saying confidently that he’ll be the president he deserves to be. I think he will be. And so I find it thrilling.

Allen: Tucker, the past 24 hours has been wild, the amount of news that has come out. How did the attempted assassination on former President Donald Trump change this election?

Carlson: Well, Trump won when that happened because he displayed physical courage. And if you live in a society where people are literally dating by remote virtually and working virtually, you can kind of lose touch with the physical reality of life.

But the unchanging truth is that leadership requires courage. And not just abstract courage, moral courage, but physical courage. Someone starts shooting a rifle like are you going to wet yourself and start crying and run away, or are you going to stand up and look at your people and raise your fist and say, fight?

And very few people are capable of doing that, and he is. And therefore he wins because that supersedes all this nonsense that we talk ourselves into. Believing is important. No, the guy got shot in the face. He stood up with blood streaming down the side of his head, blood on his hands, and said, fight. Totally defiant. That’s an act of undeniable courage that was not staged. You couldn’t stage that. And that man is the leader, and he wins.

And by the way, notice what happens to everyone in the crowd when a leader is strong, his people are calm, his courage gives them heart. That’s true for a father, and it’s true for a president. So yeah, he just won, and he deserves to win. That was the ultimate test

Allen: You had predicted about a year ago, that an assassination attempt on Trump was likely. How did we get here?

Carlson: Well, we got here. Disaster has many authors. So we got here for a bunch of different reasons. I think there’s been, I say this [as] someone who’s been in the media my whole life, 33 years, an extraordinary amount of recklessness and dishonesty in the American news media, which is loathesome.

The legacy media, the big companies that I spent my life working for have really dedicated themselves to lying in a very cruel and vicious way. People like Joe Scarborough did a lot, I think, to make assassination attempts like that possible. They’re comfortable with violence— Scarborough especially is comfortable with violence, but a lot of them are, I think, and so they should be ashamed they’re not, but they should be.

But I think more broadly, there’s a lot going on that is unseen. There’s a lot of evil all of a sudden in this country. I never noticed it before. I’m not saying it wasn’t here, but in the 55 years I’ve been here, I never— I haven’t seen it like I’ve seen it in the last year, people really being vicious, people espousing cruelty and killing, people telling you that abortion for its own sake or war for its own sake is a good thing. What is that? That’s evil. So there’s a lot of that. And this is, I would say, a manifestation of it.

Allen: You are seen as very controversial by the leftist media.

Carlson: Oh, you’re so controversial. Oh, you’re so controversial.

Allen: Did the assassination attempt on Trump make you regret anything that you’ve said?

Carlson: Well, I regret all kinds of things. I endorsed the Iraq war. I mean, talk about living in shame. Yeah, I regret a lot of things I’ve said, and all I want to do is apologize for those things and to say I was wrong, which I don’t enjoy saying I was wrong or apologizing, but it’s the only way forward. So yeah, I regret all kinds of things I’ve said, but I’m not controversial. That’s one of those words. When I was an editor, I banned that from my newsroom. It doesn’t mean anything. What it means is I don’t like you.

In point of fact, I think I’m the most moderate person I know. My parents got divorced—I hate change. I want everything to stay exactly the same. That’s the opposite of radical. I’m the opposite of radical. I like the status quo. I go to bed at 10 o’clock with my wife and three dogs. I’m not into anything radical at all. I’m the least radical person I’ve ever met. In fact, I’m not radical enough.

So no, if I’m a radical, I’m not the one getting rid of Easter and replacing with tranny day. You know what I mean? The person replacing Easter with tranny day is calling me radical. OK.

Allen: You’re conservative for a reason. In other words, you want to conserve things.

Carlson: Well, I’m just temperamentally that way. I mean, I like the country I grew up in a lot. I loved it. I love it still, but I’m very worried about it now. But no, I loved it.

If I could press a button and make it 1985 again with no internet, no threat of AI and all the rest, I mean, I would do that. I can’t do that. Of course, that’s a middle-aged man’s dream. But I’m only saying that—it’s kind of pathetic even to say that, but it’s true. But just to show that, if you think I’m radical, you don’t know what the word means.

Allen: Going back about five days, most of the conversation in the news was of course about President Joe Biden and his cognitive ability to serve another four years. Would a Harris administration be any different than a Biden administration?

Carlson: Well, I don’t know. I have fewer friends [in] the Democratic party that I once had. Not surprisingly so I’m not privy to much insight information, some, but my strong sense is they, no, they’ve given up. Trump is going to be president. They know that at this point.

It would just be too messy to stop that, stealing the election once again, like they did in 2020. It was just too hard. Everyone’s expecting it. I think it would not be worth it actually.

At some point, we may find out what happened on Saturday. A guy with a rifle wound up on a building that close with a ladder, and all these people saw it. And the Secret Service, what is that? It’s not crazy to think that there was something there. It was an effort to kill Trump, and it wasn’t just a lone gunman who was killed, that it was something else.

But I don’t think going forward, look, I think everyone has kind of accepted the fact that Trump’s going to win and it’ll be too hard to stop him from winning. That’s just my gut as of today.

And Kamala Harris, that’s not going to work. What they really want to do is subvert Trump with a running mate who agrees with the Democrats on the big issues, on the economy and foreign policy. And there are a whole bunch of those. And donors tried to force them in in the last 48 hours. They tried really, really hard. You can’t beat Trump clearly. You shoot ’em in the face and he gets more popular. I mean, really. S

o what we need to do is just rot it from within with some running mate who, let’s make Nikki Haley the running mate, or something like that, and they failed. So I’m pretty hopeful.

Allen: What’s your message going to be here at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee when you speak on the main stage?

Carlson: Oh, gosh. Well, I’ve never written a speech. I’ve given a lot of speeches over a thousand, and I’ve never written one. And so I won’t start. I’m not going to start this week. But my feeling about speeches is always the same, which is, it’s just like reporting a story. … You pay super close attention. You talk to as many people as you can. You listen carefully. You try to figure out what’s going on, and then you say a prayer and start talking. So that’s my plan.

Allen: You have a speaking tour coming up this fall, starting in September. Tell us a little bit about that. 

Carlson: We’re going across the country. I can’t—I live in a beautiful place, and I hate to leave, so I make myself, but we’re doing 15 or 16, 16 I think, dates across the country for a month, coast to coast. And the inspiration for that was frustration with Facebook and other media monopolies that were censoring me. And I thought, well, the one thing you can’t censor is a live event. And so let’s just get big venues, big venues, and tell the truth. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do. And I’m psyched.

“The simple fact is that every crime committed by an illegal alien is one committed by an individual who should not have been at large in the country in the first place,” House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rep. Mark Green told The Daily Signal.

“While the Left likes to hide behind flawed studies and incomplete data on illegal alien crime, families across our country are suffering from the tragic realities of President [Joe] Biden and Secretary [Alejandro] Mayorkas’ open borders,” said Green, R-Tenn.

The growing number of American lives lost at the hands of illegal immigrants coincides with an increase in the number of criminal illegal immigrants crossing America’s borders annually.

According to Customs and Border Protection, 13,130 criminal noncitizens were encountered between ports of entry since the start of fiscal year 2024 on Oct. 1, setting up fiscal 2024 to outpace last year’s 15,267 such encounters.

“Instead of enforcing the laws they swore to uphold, Biden and Mayorkas have devoted themselves to a policy of mass catch-and-release,” Green said. “This radical agenda may excite their far-left base, but the rest of us are left wondering if one of our loved ones will be the next to fall victim to these violent crimes.”

The following are 13 Americans who have lost their lives at the hands of illegal aliens in the past 12 months.

Jocelyn Nungaray, 12

Franklin Jose Peña Ramos, 26, and Johan Jose Martinez-Rangel, 22, have been charged with capital murder in the death of Jocelyn Nungaray in Houston. Nungaray’s body was found in a creek on June 17.

In court documents obtained by Fox News, Harris County Assistant District Attorney Michael Abner wrote that “the defendant lured a 12-year-old under a bridge, where he and his co-defendant remained with her for over 2 hours, took her pants off, tied her up, and killed her, then threw her body into the bayou.”

Peña Ramos crossed the border in May; Martinez-Rangel in March. Both men are from Venezuela.

“Let me be very clear,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, recently said in an appearance on Fox News, “These bastards should be executed, and they should burn in the pits of hell. But we shouldn’t have to be talking about this, because Jocelyn should still be with us. And every day this administration is releasing more and more and more illegal aliens who are going on to kill people day after day after day.”

Gloria Cascio, 53

On April 26, Maine state troopers responded to reports of a car crash on Interstate 95 in Wells, about 30 miles south of Portland.

Driving a Toyota Prius, Oguzhan Cildir—an illegal immigrant who crossed the U.S. border from Mexico in January—hit a minivan and a pickup truck, according to The Maine Wire. The pickup truck, carrying Gloria Cascio and her husband, rolled over a number of times. Cascio was pronounced dead at the scene, and her husband suffered serious injuries.

The Maine Wire reported Thursday: “More than 62 days after the fatal accident, no charges have been filed against Cildir, and a police source tells the Maine Wire that State Police are still waiting for a toxicology report.”

Ruby Garcia, 25

Brandon Ortiz-Vite, an illegal alien from Mexico, is accused of killing a Michigan woman, Ruby Garcia, during a carjacking attempt in March.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement says Ortiz-Vite was deported to Mexico in the fall of 2020, but returned to the U.S. without permission, according to the local Michigan news outlet MLive.

Garcia was found dead on a road in Grand Rapids on March 22 with a gunshot wound to the head.

Christopher Gadd, 27

Raul Benitez Santana, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, crashed into Washington State Trooper Christopher Gadd’s cruiser at more than 100 mph in March.

Santana, driving an SUV, reportedly swerved and hit the back of Gadd’s parked patrol car on the shoulder of Interstate 5 in Marysville, Washington, about 34 miles north of Seattle.

The New York Post reports that it’s unclear when Santana first arrived in the U.S., but he has had multiple run-ins with U.S. law enforcement dating back to 2013.

Gadd was a husband and father of a daughter.

Travis Wolfe, 12

On Dec. 20, Endrina Bracho crashed her vehicle into a car carrying 12-year-old Travis Wolfe and his parents. The Missouri family was rushed to a hospital, and Travis was put on life-support. He passed away on March 6.

Bracho, an illegal immigrant from Venezuela, was reportedly driving 75 mph in the wrong lane when she collided headfirst with the car carrying Travis.

Bracho faces multiple charges, including involuntary manslaughter and operating a vehicle without a valid license.

Alex Wise Jr., 10

Rogelio Ortiz-Olivas, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, is accused of hitting and killing Alex Wise Jr. while the young boy walked home from school in Midland County, Texas, in February.

CBS reported that Ortiz-Olivas was previously sent back to Mexico on a voluntary removal, and was then deported five times after that.

He faces charges of hit-and-run and of an accident causing death.

Lizbeth Medina, 16

Rafael Govea Romero was indicted in February on capital murder charges in the death of Lizbeth Medina last December.

Romero, an illegal immigrant, had reportedly been stalking Medina leading up to her killing, according to KTRK-TV.

The teen’s mother, Jacqueline Medina, found her daughter dead in the bathtub of their apartment in Edna, Texas, about 140 southeast of San Antonio.

Jeremy Poou-Caceres, 2

Nilson Granados-Trejo, an illegal alien and Salvadoran national, has been charged with first- and second-degree murder in the fatal shooting of 2-year-old Jeremy Poou-Caceres in Maryland in February.

The little boy and his mom were out for a walk when they were caught up in the crossfire of an illegal immigrant who was in a car and firing, reportedly at another group of people.

Laken Riley, 22

Laken Riley, a nursing student at Augusta University, was slain while jogging on the University of Georgia campus in Athens, Ga., on Feb. 22. Authorities concluded that she died of blunt force trauma to the head.

Jose Antonio Ibarra, an illegal immigrant from Venezuela who crossed the border in 2022, has been arrested and charged with 10 counts in Riley’s death, including malice murder.

Melissa Powell, 47, and Riordan Powell, 16

An illegal alien who had been deported four times faces charges in connection with the accident that killed mother and son Melissa and Riordan Powell in December 2023 in Colorado. He was reportedly driving under the influence.

Jose Guadalupe Menjivar-Alas, an El Salvadoran, was said to be going about 100 mph when his vehicle struck the vehicle carrying Powell and her son.

Menjivar-Alas faces multiple charges, including vehicular homicide.

Aiden Clark, 11

Hermanio Joseph, a Haitian migrant, illegally crossed the border in 2022, according to the Daily Mail.

On Aug. 22, Joseph was driving with an invalid license in Lawrenceville, Ohio, when he swerved over the centerline and struck a school bus full of children. Aiden Clark, 11, was ejected from the bus and pronounced dead at the scene. About two dozen other children were injured.

Joseph was found guilty May 1 of involuntary manslaughter and vehicular homicide and was sentenced to nine to 13 years in prison, WDTN-TV reported.

Rachel Morin, 37 

Victor Antonio Martinez-Hernandez, 23, crossed the U.S. southern border illegally in February 2023, according to Harford County, Maryland, Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler. Six months later, in August 2023, Hernandez is suspected of attacking, raping, and killing Rachel Morin, a mother of five, while she exercised on the MA & PA Heritage Trail in Bel Air, Maryland, about 30 miles northeast of Baltimore.

After a lengthy investigation, authorities arrested Hernandez in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on June 14 on charges of rape and murder.

But the illegal entry of Chinese nationals into America through the Border Patrol’s San Diego sector isn’t new. Chinese individuals long have worked with criminal cartels to get into the U.S., former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott says, but the numbers have shot up.

In January, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported over 3,700 encounters with Chinese nationals on the southern border, nearly all in the San Diego sector.

But back up to January 2021, when Joe Biden became president, and CBP encountered only 17 Chinese nationals at the southern border. So what changed?

To find out why so many Chinese nationals are crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in the San Diego sector, The Daily Signal spoke to Scott as well as to Derek Maltz, a 28-year veteran of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, and to Michael Cunningham, a research fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center. (Heritage founded The Daily Signal in 2014.)

They point to six main reasons.

1. San Diego Infrastructure

“It’s easy,” Scott said of why San Diego is a favorite crossing point for illegal immigrants from China.

Before serving as the 24th chief of the Border Patrol from January 2020 to August 2021, Scott was chief patrol agent for the San Diego sector from 2017 to 2019.

San Diego, population 1.4 million, long has been a popular illegal crossing point for illegal aliens because it’s easy to disappear on busy city streets, Scott explains.

“If you’re coming across [the border] in between the ports of entry through traditional smuggling, we used to talk about a vanishing point,” Scott said. “How fast can you get across the border and then blend into society? That’s one of the reasons you look for [urban] infrastructure.”

San Diego is even more popular now for illegal aliens, given the situation at the border, because “it’s a lower risk,” he said.

To cross into Texas from Mexico, “you’ve got to come across the river,” the former Border Patrol chief explained, adding that globally, smugglers and others seeking to enter the U.S. illegally have seen Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s response to illegal immigration.

In an initiative called Operation Lone Star, the Republican governor placed Texas National Guard troops along sections of the border with Mexico and installed concertina and razor wire, creating a greater challenge for migrants seeking to cross the border illegally.

And in Arizona, the harsh realities of the desert are a turnoff for illegal aliens trying to cross into the U.S., Scott said. Although such conditions don’t prevent illegal crossings, he said, Arizona is “hot” and “desolate.”

Mexico’s border with California in the San Diego sector offers a safer, more comfortable crossing option, he said.

A migrant can go to Tijuana, Mexico, “be in a hotel drinking coffee, watching TV, get the ‘go,’ and in 15 minutes [he] can be in the United States,” Scott said.

In 20 more minutes, he said, that same migrant can be getting processed inside a Border Patrol station with “air conditioning, food, and water.”

When illegal aliens are released in San Diego, the city offers “this massive nongovernmental organizational network system that’s going to provide free bus tickets [and] shelter,” he said.

California also is a sanctuary state, meaning it doesn’t cooperate with federal authorities to enforce immigration law.

“From a marketing standpoint, it’s the easiest place to convince people to cross illegally,” Scott said of San Diego. “And then from a cartel perspective … that smuggling infrastructure has been well-established for years.”

2. Money Motivates Cartels

Chinese migrants are “lucrative” to the drug and smuggling cartels in Mexico, Scott told The Daily Signal.

“It’s pretty hard to get out of China,” the former Border Patrol chief said. “Nobody just goes to an airport and flies to the United States without specific permission from the government, so you have to be smuggled out of China and then into the United States.”

Chinese nationals buy “travel packages” from the cartels that are similar to commercial vacation travel packages, Scott said, and they pay based on what is included.

For example, he said, one package for Chinese nationals requires them to travel to Ecuador and then on to Mexico.

“And when they came into Mexico, they got legit legal travel documents so that they could fly on domestic airlines in Mexico. But for a lower fee, you didn’t get that.”

3. Because They Can

Established smuggling routes, urban or suburban infrastructure, and the cartels’ financial motivation long have driven illegal Chinese migration to the U.S. So again, why the spike now?

“The difference now,” Scott said, “is there’s no real response from the federal government of the United States to slow it down. There hasn’t been since 2021.”

Biden, a Democrat, was inaugurated Jan. 20, 2021, and quickly dismantled the border security policies of his defeated Republican predecessor, Donald Trump.

Now, with a Biden-Trump rematch looming in November, Scott speculated, migrants and smugglers are concerned that U.S. border security will return if Trump or another Republican wins. That may help explain the rapid rise in crossings in recent months.

Illegal crossings in the San Diego sector by Chinese nationals were relatively few at the beginning of the Biden administration.

CBP records only 75 encounters with Chinese migrants in the San Diego sector during fiscal year 2021, which ended that Sept. 30. The number climbed to 942 in fiscal 2022, then exploded to 10,520 in fiscal 2023.

So far in fiscal 2024, which ends in five months, CBP has encountered 23,890 Chinese nationals in the San Diego sector.

Cunningham, the research fellow in Heritage’s Asian Studies Center, told The Daily Signal that Chinese nationals “see all over the news that the border is wide open, that Biden is not protecting the border.”

So the question, he says, is “why wouldn’t they” attempt to cross into the U.S.?

4. ‘A Better Life’

“A lot of people are desperate to get out of China now,” Cunningham said.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese citizens endured about three years of lockdowns and restrictions that dwarfed those in the U.S. These “draconian lockdowns” led many Chinese to lose faith in their communist government, he said.

China’s older population lived through the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, if not previous repressive political campaigns, Cunningham said, before the regime implemented a strict “zero-COVID” policy.

“They saw zero-COVID as what it was—a political campaign. And they’re worried about China’s future,” he said of ordinary Chinese citizens.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping gained an opportunity to rule the nation indefinitely when the communist regime ended formal presidential terms in 2018.

China’s economy is struggling as young people try to find jobs, the nation’s real estate market is in trouble after the failure of two major property development companies this year, and its stock market saw a $7 trillion decline in just a few years.

“People for years have wanted to get their money out of China, and it’s very difficult because of capital controls,” Cunningham said. “Now more of them are just wanting to get out of China altogether for a better life.”

5. Chinese Influence on America

Through its Belt and Road Initiative, China plans to develop trade routes with other nations, expand infrastructure, and invest in foreign economic development initiatives.

With Chinese leaders’ end goal of expanding “their power and control dramatically,” Scott said, it is “not a hidden secret that they have long allowed and or even facilitated and helped getting people out of China into the U.S. through whatever means possible.”

The former Border Patrol chief pointed to reports that Chinese nationals are “systematically coming into the United States and buying property, buying foreign property, buying property near military bases,” as evidence that they are crossing the border intentionally.

China owns 384,000 acres in the U.S., about 1% of foreign-held acres, according to a Department of Agriculture report in 2021, the latest data available.

Although illegal immigrants could achieve some cultural and economic influence on America, Cunningham said, it’s unlikely that significant numbers of Chinese nationals cross the southern border with the intent of spying on the U.S.

Legal ways to enter the U.S., he said, provide greater opportunity for Chinese spies to access sensitive U.S. data than an illegal alien could get at.

“The idea that China is desperate to get their spies in the U.S. and so they’re sending them across the border illegally where they’re going to have no identity, they’re not going to be capable of getting the high-access jobs that they want their spies to get—it’s just not reasonable,” Cunningham said.

But, he added, it’s reasonable to believe that Chinese spies are infiltrated within criminal cartels and are “keeping tabs on some of the Chinese who are coming to America.”

6. Marijuana Farms 

The Chinese are heavily involved in the domestic growth of marijuana in America, both legal and illegal, federal officials say.

In February, 50 members of the House and Senate sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland expressing concern about and asking for answers to “reports from across the country regarding Chinese nationals and organized crime cultivating marijuana on United States farmland.”

“There’s a new term that’s been used a lot lately in local law enforcement—especially [in] Northern California [and] the inland parts of California—called narco slavery,” Scott told The Daily Signal. “And they’re seeing more and more Chinese that are being brought across and they’re being forced to work these domestic marijuana grows; they’re being forced to shovel money around the United States to pay back the smuggling fee that they couldn’t afford up front.”

Chinese-run marijuana grow operations “are all over the country,” Maltz, the former DEA official, told The Daily Signal.

This isn’t a coincidence, he said.

“The marijuana today has high content of THC, much higher than we’ve ever seen,” Maltz said.

THC, formally known as tetrahydrocannabinol, is a psychoactive compound found in cannabinoids. Large amounts increase the effects of marijuana on the user.

“Marijuana use directly affects brain function—specifically the parts of the brain responsible for memory, learning, attention, decision-making, coordination, emotions, and reaction time,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Cannabis products have been legalized for medical use in 38 states and legalized for nonmedical use in 24 states.

The increased levels of THC in marijuana are “causing issues with the brain more than we’ve ever seen,” said Maltz, who also was in charge of the Justice Department’s Special Operations Division for nearly 10 years.

“Very smart Chinese Communist Party leaders understand this is another way we could take advantage of America’s addiction to marijuana, and dumb Americans will never figure it out,” he said.

At 57, after 31 years of serving at the Campo Border Patrol Station in San Diego County, Syzdek retired in 2007. He loved his job during those three decades, but today, he says he wonders what all his hard work was for.

It was common for him to work an 11-hour day because his team was small, the former agent says, adding that he does not know how many graduations and family functions he missed, but those “sacrifices” were “all for nothing,” he told The Daily Signal during a recent ride-along through the area he used to patrol.

“I think of all the agents, myself included, who were injured on the job and agents who were killed … only to find out that everything was for nothing,” Syzdek said.

“Over the course of my 31 years in Border Patrol, I caught, you know, tens of thousands of aliens,” he said.

“I caught 20,000, let’s say, I kept them out of here. But they’ve let 10 million in … so, everything that I worked for my entire career was for nothing,” he added. “And the only thing I feel good about is the many, many drug loads I busted and people I sent to prison and got the drugs off the streets.”

When he looks at the current situation at the southern border, Syzdek says, “it’s just heartbreaking that we have laws on the books and an agency to enforce the laws, and nobody’s doing it.”

Illegal crossings into the U.S. along California’s border with Mexico are not new. Established smuggling routes, more desirable terrain, and Tijuana’s proximity to San Diego, one of nine sectors along the southern border, have long made the sector a desirable crossing location. Border walls and border security policies worked to drive illegal immigration numbers down significantly in the sector from 2010 to 2020.

The Border Patrol encountered 53,282 illegal aliens between ports of entry in the San Diego Sector in fiscal year 2020, the last full year of President Donald Trump’s presidency. In fiscal year 2021, encounters in the San Diego Sector nearly tripled, rising to 142,459.

Since Joe Biden became president, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has encountered more than 9 million illegal aliens on America’s borders and at ports of entry. That doesn’t include 1.7 million “known gotaways.”

Syzdek says he and the men he served alongside “never imagined in our wildest imagination that our country, that we all worked so hard to defend for those many years that we were in, would have open borders.”

On today’s edition of “The Daily Signal Podcast,” Virginia Allen and Simon Hankinson, senior research fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, discuss their recent trip to the southern border in San Diego County and what they learned from their ride-along with Syzdek. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

Listen to the podcast below: