As Americans are finally realizing the danger of the Mexican cartels in light of the brutal murder of an American family 50 miles from our border, we should not forget that a California sheriff’s deputy was essentially killed by the cartels on our own soil. The murder of Brian Ishmael horribly shows that the cartels are not a Mexico problem, but a problem right here at home, caused by our failed border strategy, sanctuary cities, and the drug crisis. That few lawmakers have even heard of Brian Ishmael speaks volumes about the misplaced national security focus among the foreign policy elite.

El Dorado County is a beautiful, rural part of California in the heart of wine country. But thanks to a lack of border security, sanctuary state status, and recent pro-drug policies, this county is now a primary growing site for the Mexican cartels. Their contractors come in through our own border and are harbored by the pro-illegal alien policies of California.

“First I want to make something clear, and I ask that you, the media, please call this what this is … don’t soften it,” said El Dorado County Sheriff John D’Agostini at a press conference on Thursday. “This tragedy was due to an illegal alien, tending an illegal marijuana garden, who murdered my deputy. That’s what it is.”

The sheriff was referring to the October 23 murder of Deputy Brian Ishmael, who was allegedly ambushed by Juan Carlos Vasquez, who was guarding a marijuana growing site for traffickers back in Mexico. Four men were arrested in connection with the murder, and two of them are illegal aliens. One other suspect, Jorge Lamas, said he was being paid $150 a day by someone in Mexico to supervise the growing site.

Remember, we were told that legalizing marijuana would put the cartels out of business. Yet legalization, mixed with illegal immigration and sanctuary cities, is creating the worst outcome of all – not only are the cartels still in business, they are now growing their poison on our own soil and guarding it with armed men they easily get over the border and ensure are protected by California’s illegal policies.

Christopher Ross, Juan Carlos Vasquez, Ramiro Morales, and Jorge Lamas have all been indicted in connection with the marijuana growing site where Deputy Ishmael was murdered. Ross was the owner of the property, who originally called the police claiming someone was stealing from his “legal” growing site. What he didn’t say was that it was an illegal growing site being worked by Mexican nationals for the cartels. One of them, Juan Vazquez, allegedly opened fire on Ishmael when he arrived, fatally striking him in the chest.

“When Ross called into 911, he said he had a legal marijuana operation,” said U.S. attorney McGregor Scott at the press conference when announcing the indictments yesterday. “Well guess what, it wasn’t a legal marijuana operation. So, the fig leaf of legalization gives cover for those who operate in the black market to do their business.”

But how do cartels so successfully peddle their business here? It’s all through illegal immigration. “If you allow criminally minded illegal aliens to infiltrate our communities with more protections than our average citizens, they will take advantage of that and victimize our communities,” said Sheriff D’Agostini angrily.

If we admit 1.1 million legal immigrants from all corners of the world, should we then have to be on the hook for illegal immigration from all corners of the world? Evidently yes, according to open-borders politicians.

If you add up the population of every country with a lower GDP than that of Guatemala (about 88 of them), along with other countries that are experiencing a myriad of unpleasant living conditions, it would easily add up to a few billion people. Yet, unless we end our open-borders policies, those are exactly the people who will begin coming, even after Trump successfully worked out diplomatic agreements with the northern triangle countries to stem the flow of the main migration.

The cardinal mistake of our border policies of the past is that we have always played catch-up by being reactive to the previous crisis instead of anticipating the one around the corner. Thus, once we finally got a handle on illegal immigration from Mexico, the northern triangle migration was already upon us. Now that it appears the Central American migration might finally be in check, rather than diverting attention away from the border, the Trump administration must look around the corner to the next shoes to drop, from all over the globe. He must not repeat the same mistake of early 2017, thinking that the tough perception would deter everyone until all the policies are actually implemented.

According to final fiscal year 2019 data given to CR by a border agent who must remain anonymous because he is not authorized to speak to the media, the numbers have shot up from other countries around the globe, even as the numbers from Central American decline. Here is a breakdown of some of the biggest increases:

China – 98%

FY18: 1,077

FY19: 2,133

Brazil-1002%

FY18: 1,634

FY19: 18,012

Cuba-5982%

FY18: 194

FY19: 11,799

Ecuador – 718%

FY18: 1,613

FY19: 13,196

Nicaragua – 301%

FY18: 3,337

FY19: 13,373

These numbers should become public in the coming days when Customs and Border Protection (CBP) releases final tallies for FY 2019.

The numbers from China are particularly concerning. As I reported last week, China is our number one espionage threat and has already used immigration to spy on us. Chinese migrants are increasingly coming to our border in larger numbers almost every week, even as the overall border numbers drop. In fact, just in the first two days of October, there were 31 Chinese migrants caught, compared to 10 last year. That is a pace of over 5,650 per year, which means that the trajectory is getting worse.

Last week, I reported from agents in the field that the Chinese come under the most suspicious circumstances and are not even interviewed by the FBI. They are mainly males and always run from agents, but if they are caught, they manipulate our anti-communist sympathies to game out asylum.

How much mass migration is enough for Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., and liberal Republicans who hail from solid red states? Well, they won’t say exactly how much, but they always want more.

Last week, the Trump administration announced a commonsense policy to lower the refugee cap for fiscal year 2020 to 18,000, given the record border flow this year and the historic backlog of one million people in immigration court, many of whom are claiming asylum. One would think that Republicans can at least unite behind that proposition, yet nine Republicans, led by Sen. James Lankford, joined with a group of Democrats in rebuking the administration for not electing to bring in more refugees this year.

“While I appreciate the administration’s focus on curbing illegal immigration and caring for asylum seekers, that doesn’t mean we should continue to reduce the admittance of refugees who are fleeing from persecution in their home countries to support these policies,” wrote Lankford in a statement last week.

Well, actually it does, Senator Lankford. You can’t triple- and quadruple-dip on the dime of American taxpayers who shoulder the burdens of the financial cost and social transformation of your open-borders policies. Let’s review the score:

• We’ve had almost a million people come to our border, several hundred thousand of whom have been settled into our communities at a huge cost to local governments.
• There is now a backlog of one million persons in immigration courts, quadruple the level from a decade ago. Asylum, if anything, is even more burdensome on the nation than refugees, because we don’t select or vet them; they simply show up on our doorstep.
• This past year, we’ve had 76,000 unaccompanied alien children (UACs) come to our border, an all-time record. They are settled just like refugees by the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Historically, 70,000 was the typical number of refugees we’ve taken in per year. As such, whereas this year they’re not the traditional refugees from the Eastern Hemisphere, they have already come in the form of Central American teens, and that immigration has already chewed up the agency’s entire budget. Lankford should know, because Texas County, Oklahoma, a tiny rural county in the panhandle of his state, has been forced to take in one of the highest per-capita concentrations of UACs.
• Several hundred thousand people are here on Temporary Protected Status (TPS), even though their status should have expired years ago and Trump reneged on the promise to terminate it.
• There are also record number of applicants for U visas (victims of crime who are often perpetrators of crime or gang members themselves) and many other forms of humanitarian relief, from T Visas and Special Immigrant Juvenile status to VAWA and parole. Currently, there are 244,000 pending U visa applications, a 20-fold increase since the beginning of the Obama administration!
• Plus, we have record numbers of green cards handed out every year. Between green cards and long-term visas, there are 8 million new immigrants coming every year, unparalleled in our history. We have now reached a 100-year peak in the foreign-born population. Most of the immigration is not merit-based to benefit America but is ad hoc “humanitarian” migration to allow families to bring in other people from very impoverished countries.
• Then, of course, there are the estimated 3 million illegal aliens who are the ultimate refugees, costing taxpayers $130 billion a year.

So, Sen. Lankford, are you offering to cut a single one of these statuses before demanding we bring in more refugees? It is simply dishonest to isolate one category of our immigration system and ignore the many others. Why is the political class never looking out for the interests of American taxpayers or understanding the effects of mass migration on local communities?

Lankford’s statement links to a letter he sent the Trump administration in August signed by Republican Sens. Thune, Rounds, Murkowski, Collins, Blunt, Rubio, Gardner, and Portman, along with Democrat senators, demanding that we accept more refugees. But not surprisingly, they never asked for a specific number. That would raise the obvious question about our immigration system: How much is too much?

Also, why is it that there are so many solid red-state Republicans who are for open borders? Lankford is from Oklahoma; Thune and Rounds are from South Dakota; Blunt is from Missouri; and Portman is from Ohio. These are states Trump carried by a significant margin. Imagine Democrats from states Hillary carried by 20-30 points demanding a moratorium on immigration. But Democrats never dissent from the party’s platform, even when they are elected from Republican-leaning states.

Just last week, a number of the same Republicans voted against Trump’s emergency declaration and reprogramming of defense funding for the ultimate national defense at our border. They included members from Utah, Tennessee, and Mississippi.

The latest shooting involving a border agent demonstrates that even with decreased numbers crossing the border, the danger and chaos on the border are just as big a threat as before the crisis began to lessen slightly. The shooting from over the weekend demonstrates that cartel and smuggling activities still need to be countered, even as the number of Central American family units crossing the border decreases. Trump would be wise to push a funding fight for building the wall and defunding sanctuary cities before he loses this last chance of his first term.

On Saturday, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) announced in a press release that two agents were involved in a shooting in Brackettville, Texas. After the agents stopped a vehicle in an area “frequently used by smugglers to move narcotics and people from the border to San Antonio and other destinations,” a passenger fired at the two agents, wounding one of them. The other agent returned fire and killed the passenger of the vehicle and apprehended the driver.

Thankfully, the agent’s injuries are non-life-threatening, but this is what Border Patrol faces every day. There are so many parts of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona that are confidently controlled by smuggling operations. Not even the record illegal immigration forced policymakers to finally turn their attention to the broader cartel problem.

With the number of Central Americans declining, it would be a mistake for Trump to divert his focus away from the border. Now is the time to double down. The massive numbers seeking quasi-legal or humanitarian status is only half the problem. The other problem is all those we don’t see coming in to do us harm or those with criminal records who don’t want to meet a border agent but would be deterred if we built a wall in more areas along the Rio Grande River and more aggressively deploy the military.

Every day, CR and other outlets report on the endless illegal alien murderers and sex offenders arrested for crimes in our communities. Many of them were previously deported but came in again at an unknown time. Every day, border agents catch some of these people. This year, according to Border Patrol chief Carla Provost, agents caught 4,010 criminal aliens who had prior criminal convictions and 3,842 criminal aliens with outstanding wants or warrants. Just last week, an illegal alien with multiple warrants for murder and rape was arrested in Nogales, Arizona.

But how many are not caught? Remember, the cartels could not make money off human smuggling for those who don’t want to be apprehended if they only had a five percent success rate of evading detection. The reality is that for every criminal alien agents catch, there are likely many others not caught. One estimate from Princeton Policy Advisors, which was published by Breitbart last week, projects that 600,000 illegal aliens will successfully enter the country undetected this year.

In a better world, we’d all suffer from heartburn reading the headline, “Supreme Court allows Trump asylum restrictions to take effect.” We don’t need a Supreme Court to “allow” us to have a sovereign nation or to “allow” a president to use his authority to deny entry to any foreign national. However, in our prevailing political system, I’ll take “allowing” over disallowing any day of the week. Now the Trump administration has an opportunity to go on offense and kick these district judges while they’re down and drive a stake through the heart of the border crisis, ending it once and for all.

Late yesterday, the Supreme Court reversed the partial injunction of the Ninth Circuit and the nationwide injunction by California Judge Jon Tigar against the administration’s policy of rejecting asylum requests of those who could have claimed asylum in another country. Only two justices – Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg – went on record as dissenting from the unsigned SCOTUS decision to reverse the unprecedented lower-court power-grab, at least pending the disposition of the case on the merits.

Now is the time for the administration to strike while the iron is hot and put an end to this entire concept of carefully selected district judges in California controlling international relations and border policies. Rather than tepidly ease into the border policies pending the outcome of the case on the merits, the administration should begin immediately rejecting every non-Mexican asylum applicant at the border. No half-measures and no more deference to the same judges who have been repudiated over and over again.

Trump should call on Sen. McConnell to bring to the floor the bill introduced yesterday by Sen. Tom Cotton, which officially clarifies existing constitutional law that judges cannot issue rulings outside the cases of legitimate plaintiffs and that district judges cannot apply rulings outside their geographical jurisdictions. He should also have a conservative member of the House introduce articles of impeachment against Jon Tigar, who has now blatantly violated the core of judicial power by giving standing to third-party organizations to sue as aggrieved parties just so he can veto border policies.