China Is Using Secretary Mayorkas’s Cartel-Controlled Border to Infiltrate Our Country

It’s no secret that the CCP is using President Biden and Mr. Mayorkas’s border crisis to exploit our nation.

A Border Patrol agent gestures as illegal immigrants prepare to board a bus to a U.S. Border Patrol processing center after crossing into Arizona from Mexico in Yuma, Ariz., on May 11, 2023. Mario Tama/Getty Images

Commentary

President Joe Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s ongoing border crisis has escalated into a national security nightmare. It’s no secret that the Biden administration has ceded control of our southwest border to the Mexican cartels.

Malign actors across the globe, most notably the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), are watching the ongoing dysfunction at our southwest border and are wasting no time in trying to exploit our increasingly porous borders.

With two months remaining in this fiscal year (FY), the U.S. Border Patrol had recorded 17,678 apprehensions of Chinese nationals at the southwest border. The total number was 1,236 in FY 2020, just 323 in FY 2021, and 1,970 in FY 2022.

This unprecedented surge has taken a significant toll on Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials. Gloria Chavez, chief patrol agent for the Rio Grande Valley Sector, said in March that apprehensions of Chinese nationals in FY 2023 in the sector had increased by more than 900 percent from FY 2022. She wrote on X that the surge was “creating a strain on our workforce.”

One chief Border Patrol agent recently told the House Committee on Homeland Security that the “typical reason” that Chinese nationals are giving for illegally entering the United States is “the same as most of the migrants—for work or a better life.”

We can’t ignore the fact that some of these individuals pose a significant threat to our national security.

In a recent hearing before the committee, one witness informed members that another sinister power, Venezuela, had been known to embed agents in the flow of Venezuelan migrants to neighboring Colombia to “harass and persecute” critics of the Venezuelan government.

“Thus, a U.S. adversary has taken advantage of this human wave to conceal the entry of spies into a traditional U.S. ally,“ the witness said. ”This begs the question of what more sophisticated U.S. adversaries like China and Russia might be doing to take advantage of the historic migration flows across the U.S. southern border.”

The CCP isn’t only taking advantage of our open border but is also lining the pockets of the cartels in the process.

One report found that three Chinese nationals each paid $35,000 to cartels to smuggle them across the border in February. Some Texas officials have said that this is just a baseline and that some Chinese nationals may pay cartels as much as $50,000. One chief patrol agent told the committee that he had seen reports of $60,000 payments.

To put these numbers in perspective, if every one of the 17,678 Chinese nationals who were apprehended for illegally crossing the southwest border so far in FY 2023 paid the cartels $35,000 each, the total revenue from smuggling these individuals into the country would equate to about $618 million. If each individual paid $50,000 to be smuggled in, then the revenue by the cartels would increase to approximately $883 million.

This revenue stream goes on to inflict further damage to our national and regional security by enabling the various cartels to continue expanding their influence in Latin America and striking fear into the hearts of government officials and innocent citizens.

In addition to overwhelming our southwest border, CCP officials and companies linked to the CBP are also responsible for the fentanyl epidemic ravaging our country and killing Americans.

A majority of the precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl are manufactured in China and are sent to Mexico through the networks of various transnational criminal organizations. Under the Trump administration, our nation held the CCP accountable for its lack of law enforcement measures to tackle this illicit trade. We must go back to that policy if we hope to end this scourge in our society.

It’s no secret that the CCP is using President Biden and Mr. Mayorkas’s border crisis to exploit our nation, undermine our sovereignty, and jeopardize the lives of Americans across the country. This is a national security threat that mustn’t be underestimated. The sovereignty of our country depends on it.

It’s time for Mr. Mayorkas and President Biden to admit that their policies have failed and to get serious about securing our border from the CCP threat.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.