Immigrants in, guns out: how the GOP fuels the immigration crisis | Opinion

Since the end of the Biden administration’s shutdown of the Trump-era Title 42 order, the debate around immigration reignited. The immigration crisis is one of the hot-button topics in the leadup to a 2024 where the front runners, elder statesmen Joe Biden, 81, and Donald Trump, 77, are neck-and-neck with the latest poll numbers. The GOP has been particularly critical of the Biden White House’s response to the border crisis, despite evidence showing that the GOP may be at least equally to blame for fueling the growing influx of immigrants For example: Lax gun laws touted by the GOP have led to an “iron river,” flowing backward across the border. A 2021 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found some 70% of firearms seized from Mexico between 2014-2018 were obtained from the U.S., most of them legally ICE was unable to obtain full data from over 50,000 such firearms seized in Mexico, but ATF data suggests at least most of those guns were purchased legally in border states - with some of the most lax gun laws in the country. Because of the firearms problem in Mexico, the State Department provided some $54 million to the Mexican government, in order to disrupt the illegal arms trade originating from the U.S. side of the border. The GAO noted that none of the organizations at the time of the study adopted performance metrics for the iron River problem, and the GAO at the time recommended the agencies work on that. The problem, the GAO found, was tied into a relative lack of data, analysis, interagency cooperation (on a state and federal level), and a lack of clear goals and timeframes for addressing the problem. CBS news reported Saturday that cartels down south are using both Americans and those illegally crossing the border to run guns, with the Americans engaging in straw purchases. The guns are then shopped through a network of brokers in the southwest. The guns flowing back across the border are an insurance policy for cartels, who look to outgun their competition, according to CBS News. Criminal courts reporter Kevin Krause spoke with the Texas Standard on Texas Public Radio last month, saying the gun running is tied into the growing problem of fentanyl here in the Lone Star State. “Fentanyl dealers have a parallel operation we found, which is arms smuggling. And so they’ll transport fentanyl across the border north into Texas. Then they have operatives purchase these guns, and then they’ll take the proceeds of the drug sales, along with the weapons, south in vehicles,” said Krause. “The argument is that if we want to stop the flow of drugs into the U.S. – and fentanyl in particular – we have to stop the flow of weapons to the cartels. Krause went to to say that the Biden administration has met with Mexican officials about the problem, because “for years, Mexico has complained to the U.S. about the guns that are just flooding into the country.” Lax gun laws pushed by conservative lawmakers in Texas are a big part of the problem. If guns are harder for citizens to get - then they’ll also be harder to obtain through straw purchases. Fewer purchases by people skirting the law would stand to have a direct impact on the cross-border arms trade, and cut into the cartels’ half a billion dollar a year business model. The GOP has traditionally preferred interventionalist policies in Central and South America. Republicans have this year pitched the idea to outright invade Mexico over the fentanyl crisis, for example. The Trump administration cut aid to an already-destabilized Central America (due to, at its heart, U.S. policies), exacerbating an already existing problem - and increasing the number of those fleeing countries in Central America. They’ve also pushed to end systems for streamlined immigration policies (like the recently shut down DACA), making it harder for people wanting to immigrate illegally - and become Americans themselves - to do so. That leads to a backlog of immigrants stuck in a years-long process, even besides bottlenecking at the border while GOP-preferred stricter screening processes are completed. Vanity Fair’s Caleb Ecarma broke a story earlier this year about how conservative media may also be fueling the issue, particularly around spreading the “open border,” myth. Ecarma notes that Fox News continually depicts the border as an “unmonitored wasteland,” and parrots the myth of open borders. Consider being a citizen of a far-off country seeking to flee for whatever reason, and only having access to that kind of depiction of the border: a place without a border, and where it’s easy for someone like you to cross illegally. That’s the narrative sold by conservative media around “open borders,” viewed from the other side of the border. As Ecarma put it: “From November 1, 2020, through March 16, 2023, Fox News pundits used the phrase a whopping 3,282 times, according to data compiled by America’s Voice and Media Matters, while Newsmax clocked 2,727 mentions over the same period. This coverage, according to America’s Voice, aired during time slots collectively valued at nearly $27 million for advertisers.” New York Democrat Adriano Espaillat spoke on record with Ecarma, saying “The perception from [migrants in New York] was that the border is open and they could just walk through.” High ranking Border Patrol agent John Modlin has reported a similar story this year. Testifying before the House Oversight Committee, he spoke about detainees who, according to Modlin, often said they were led to believe the border “was open.” The prevailing idea, according to Vanity Fair, is that conservative social media plays a heavy role in the perception, as do narratives spread by smugglers of humans, drugs, and guns, going into and out of the U.S. Vanessa Cardenas, the executive director of America’s Voice, echoed these ideas, saying in an interview“The best ‘open border’ propaganda machine is, in fact, the GOP.” “We know the impact this disinformation has on migrants, who largely get information through online platforms,” Cardenas said. “And we know that smugglers take this information and use it for their own purposes––to recruit and encourage irregular migration.” While it’s not the root of the problem - instability and want in their home countries is - the GOP, in embracing hyperbolic statements about “open borders,” in particular, does appear to be fueling the problem. Even outside immigration - it paints a picture of a border that’s easy to cross with, for example, fentanyl in tow. And that’s not getting into the ongoing conservative media talking points about the administration’s laxity on immigration as a whole, either. Texans are facing a very real crisis at the border. We have been beset with a tide of migrants we, no matter your political leanings, simply don’t have the resources to help enough - if truly, at all. We face an influx of drugs from cartels down south, regardless of where the cartels came from. We do have an administration that’s failed Texas - and our fellow border states - in border policies. The best idea the Biden administration has at the moment is a failed Reagan-era idea to keep migrants at the border. And we have state leaders, like our own Governor, Greg Abbott, engaging in (generously) potential executive overreach and simply moving the problem somewhere else - or claiming his bright ideas came from the Border Patrol, of all places, after his pet project along the Rio Grande was held up in court. We are, all of us, facing a very real immigration crisis. And, at the end of the day, it’s those most vulnerable - poor Texans along the border, displaced refugees from half a world away, and those simply wanting to find their own American dream as many of our own ancestors did - who are hurt the most by making those at the border political pawns. For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.