When it comes to illegal immigration, Dennis Michael Lynch has seen it all. Coming down to the southern border for four years, partly to shoot his documentaries, he has seen the oddest and most disturbing images.
From families plagued by diseases turning themselves in to authorities, to military-grade fencing cut through by drug cartels in one of the most secured areas of the border, Lynch has seen it all.
“You can just keep on throwing it out and I say, ‘Yea, I’ve seen it,’” he said.
Lynch, 45, is a Long Island-born tech entrepreneur-turned filmmaker. Just describing his views as conservative wouldn’t do him justice. With the amount of legwork he’s done, his ideas are more rooted in reality and less aligned with wonted rhetoric. That makes him a worthy commentator, yet poses hurdles for his recent ambition to become the President of the United States.
About four years ago, Lynch started to work on documentaries about illegal immigration. “I’ve been to Texas, California, New Mexico, all of them,” he said.
For some time he volunteered with the Border Patrol in south Texas and attests that there’s no one single age or ethnic background coming to the borderline.
They stopped groups of 20–40 people that included old, young, men, women, criminals, and drug dealers. He even saw one man from the Middle East.
He saw medical reports showing kids coming in ill with everything from chicken pox to tuberculosis.
But the most shocking things happen when and where the Border Patrol is not around.
In Arizona, the border fence is lifted up to allow free flow of flood waters that come every summer. But Lynch was there last fall and saw the fence was still lifted, a month after the flood season was over.
The openings, unguarded, drew attention from the other side. “I saw footprints by the hundreds,” Lynch said. “It looked like a stampede of people came through.”
Lynch met with farmer John Ladd, who told the media that drug cartels are cutting through the border fence right at his ranch again and again. Lynch went to the border and indeed confirmed the fence has been repaired multiple times at the same spot.
