With parched migrants trudging into New Mexico’s perilous desert and the region’s residents clamoring for more robust border barriers, what is Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham doing?
Pulling back National Guard troops and reposting a comic video of her breaking through a thin wall of sheet rock. The freshman governor’s unserious response would be laughable if the stakes weren’t so deadly.
In recent weeks, large numbers of Guatemalan families and unaccompanied children have surrendered to federal agents along a remote new smuggling route into the Land of Enchantment.
It is where 7-year-old Jakelin Caal and her father were found Dec. 6 with 161 other illegal aliens near Antelope Wells. Young Jakelin died at an El Paso hospital after she had been transported to the nearest Border Patrol station 94 miles away.
Subsequently, a separate group of 247 men, women and children was apprehended in the same desolate area.
The Albuquerque Journal appropriately describes New Mexico’s border corridor as a “desert death trap … rugged, remote and ruthless.”
Up in Santa Fe, Gov. Lujan Grisham seems blissfully unconcerned. The Democrat dismisses President Trump’s border protection efforts as a “charade” and tweeted a video that went viral.
“Here’s what I think of Trump’s wall,” she announced, before crashing into a partition staged for her antic breakthrough.
Her constituents deserve better. New Mexico border residents cite four specific reasons why their state needs a wall: Law-enforcement officers are too far away; barbed-wire fencing isn’t working; the Border Patrol is spread too thin; and technology can only do so much.
Such concerns have been festering since Lujan Grisham sat in Congress (three terms). In 2016, FAIR reported on a citizens’ rally that drew 700 to Animas, N.M., population 237.
Speakers stood at a podium emblazoned with the phrase “A Stolen Life” and a photo of Robert Krentz, killed by an illegal alien on his nearby ranch in 2010.
“As their region transforms into a war zone, ranchers along the New Mexico border are fed up with the indifference that Washington has shown to their plight. The recent carjacking and kidnapping of a ranch hand by drug-smuggling thugs served as the latest event to rattle this group of Americans,” the FAIR blog stated.
The Trump administration is striving, at last, to secure the U.S.-Mexico border as predatory and profiteering human traffickers, now aided by a foolish governor, remain determined to make life more perilous for everyone.