An Arizona sheriff who has worked on the U.S.-Mexico border for more than three decades said Tuesday the region has been in a “crisis” that entire time but was nowhere as serious as the current situation has become.
“I have been in Pima County for 32 years. We have had a border crisis for all 32 years that I have been in Pima County. The nuances and the elements of that crisis have evolved over time, but nonetheless, we have had a crisis all this while,” Sheriff Mark Napier told the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border Security, Facilitation, and Operations Tuesday.
Napier said claims the Trump administration’s policies created the crisis are bogus. House Homeland Security Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., has blamed President Trump on multiple occasions.
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“To promulgate the idea that this is a crisis created or manufactured by the current administration is simply false. No reasonable, thinking person could assume the current administration has sought to entice families with children and unaccompanied minors to come in caravans to our border, or in some manner, sought an escalation of the trafficking of hard narcotics into our country,” he said.
Former President Barack Obama declared a “actual humanitarian crisis on the border” in mid-2014 after tens of thousands of unaccompanied children began arriving from Central America.
The biggest change between apprehensions at the southern border 30 years ago and the present is in the amount of people coming and the type of person coming. In the 1990s and 2000s, more than 1 million people (primarily single Mexican men) were arrested for illegally crossing. They were processed and often able to be deported within hours.
In March, 60% of all apprehensions were of families from Central America. Members of this group require hours each to be processed by a Border Patrol agent and because nearly all claim a credible fear of returning home but cannot be held the duration of their immigration cases, they are released into the U.S.
“To suggest that there does not exist a crisis on our southern border is intellectually dishonest. To be steadfast to that assertion despite clear evidence to the contrary is to be intellectually dishonest with malice,” said Napier.
Napier’s county is the largest of 31 counties that sit on the southern border with 125 miles of land that runs parallel to it.
He said since late 2018, his deputies have made an “unprecedented” amount of hard narcotics seizures in the county because drug smugglers are taking advantage of human smuggling activity to sweep their loads in.
“Large seizures are almost a daily occurrence. For every interdiction we make, we know that we miss far more,” Napier said.
A single seizure of up to 50 pounds of methamphetamine has become common, he said. Massive opioid seizures, including that of fentanyl, are also becoming standard. In one single bust in November, his deputies uncovered 13,000 fentanyl pills during a traffic stop.
“Drug trafficking across the southern border facilitated by a lack of border security is a public safety and a public health crisis the scale of which we have never experienced in my more than 30 years here,” his opening statement said.
In addition, he said southern border deputies recovered more than 100 bodies in the remote areas of the counties.
