Before the Trump administration began construction on the Border Wall, almost two-thirds of criminal activity in Texas was gang related and Mexican cartels were escalating their recruitment of U.S. school-age children.
“Texas Border Security: A Strategic Military Assessment,” an independent study by former military generals Barry McCaffrey and Major-General Robert Scales noted, “They want these kids to do the dirty work.”
“They are sacrificial,” Carlos, a 28-year old man who had escaped cartel torture and death and was working at a downtown San Antonio restaurant, explained. “They pay them $500 or $1000 to cross the border into Texas because they know the patrol doesn’t think American kids are going to smuggle that much drugs in, but with that kind of money, and excitement, they can find students willing to do it.”
“When the other kids see someone driving a car and spending money and buying their girlfriends jewelry and clothes, it’s not hard to recruit others,” Carlos said.
In just 18 months, six of seven cartels established headquarters in Texas cities during Obama’s last year’s in office, according to testimony form the Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McGraw.
At least 22 murders, 24 assaults, 15 shootings and five kidnappings were traced to cartel activities on the Texas side of the border during that period.
Carlos says “these cartels are very sophisticated and are run like a military or a business.”
“They provide ‘insurance’ to the farmers,” Carlos outlined. “If the farmers continue to harvest and provide marijuana for a very cheap price, then their wives and children will continue to live. That is Mexican cartel ‘insurance.’”
“They pay a few dollars for a pound of marijuana,” said Carlos. “They have up to six levels of people on their payroll who make sure it gets into the U.S. cities because they can sell it in San Antonio or Houston for like $250 or $300 a pound, but in New York or Chicago, it might be $1500 or $1600, and that’s a big profit that no one is going to stop as long as the U.S. allows them to keep on going.”
The generals’ report stated the cartels objectives “are relying increasingly on organized gangs to provide expendable and unaccountable manpower to do their dirty work.”
“These gangs are recruited on the streets of Texas cities and inside Texas prisons by top-tier gangs who work in conjunction with the cartels,” the report continued.
During the Obama presidency, Department of Public Safety reports showed that in 2010, the Texas prison gangs associated with the Mexican cartels increased from four to 12.
When Texas Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples released the report, it revealed these cartels were building a “sanitary zone” about one county deep within the U.S. along the Texas border. The plan was use this zone to escape Mexican law enforcement and provide an area of safe movement for drug smugglers and human traffickers.
Texas was the “tactical close combat zone and frontline in this conflict. Texans have been assaulted by cross-border gangs and narco-terrorist activities.”
“Washington keeps telling us our border is more secure than ever, but this detailed military assessment, by two of America’s top generals, offers proof to the contrary,” Commissioner Staples said about the Obama administration. “It’s time to shed the cloak of denial and protect our citizens and national security.”
“It’s time for Washington to uphold its constitutional duty to protect Americans on their home soil,” Staples added.
The report offered a military perspective on how to best use “strategic, operational and tactical measures to secure the increasingly hostile border regions” on the border.
Big Improvements With Trump
Before the Trump presidency, Texas landowners and officials had been witnessing and pleading with the Obama Administration for increased federal support to defend the U.S. border. They are doing the same with the Biden White House.
“The southwestern United States had become increasingly threatened by the spread of Latin American and Mexican cartel organized crime,” said Gen. Barry McCaffrey (Ret.)
“The violence and ongoing threat to our security reflected a change in the strategic intent of the cartels to move their operations into the United States,” said Maj. Gen. Robert Scales (Ret.) observed back then. “American cities and rural areas now have Latin American drug, gun and human smuggling cartels operating inside our borders.”
Under Obama-Biden it is a War Zone
Their findings indicate citizens living and working in a Texas border county is equivalent to living in a warzone. Law enforcement agencies, civil authorities, journalists and citizens are in continuous and growing danger of attack.
There is disparity between reported and actual cartel activity because the 17,000 local and state law enforcement agencies that provide data to the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), under the both the Obama and Biden Administrations, are not required to categorize these crimes as “drug related.”
Trump had fixed all of that.
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Get Your Natural Vitamins A & D from the Sea!
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Clever Journeys 
[…] Under Obama & Now Biden, Living in Texas Border Counties is Like ‚Living in a War Zone‘ — … […]
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The picture of the human scum behind bars tells the real story. If any country deserves sanctions, it should be Mexico. Without the cash sent from Western Union every week, their economy would collapse in 30 days.
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The entire country has gone mad. I admit that the violence in the border must be greater than what we see in Pittsburgh, yet the violence here is incredible.
My old neighborhood, Mt. Oliver, living in the house my wife grew up in (we inherited it), a borough that is independent from Pittsburgh, but inside the city limits. They have their own police, but use the Same Radio to Dispatch Calls in the City or Mt. Oliver, and they get assistance from the Pittsburgh Police freely, and Mt. Oliver relies on the City Paramedics for all the medical calls, yet they have their own Fire Department.
● Moving in as adults, my wife heard a series of what seemed like shots. We turned on the police scanner, she, in fact, had heard a man being shot to death.
● We have heard Shots being Fired from cars driving down the street, and shots from Gun Fights.
● A man was shot, near a local cemetery, my wife told me, and I turned on the Police Radio (I carried a HAM Radio that also received Police, and I am licensed for the HAM Radio). I heard a cop saying he was in the Cemetery, but the victim outside the fence. Just as I arrived at the Entrance Road to the cemetery, the cop popped out, and I hard stopped because I knew what he was doing, he even waved thanks as he drove to the outside road by the cemetery.
● The young man that cut our grass, said he was walking home one Saturday afternoon (from some undisclosed location), and he walked past the Pizza Shop at the top of my street. Within minutes, early in the afternoon, a man was shot to death in front of that shop.
● My wife, son, and I were driving home one evening, and within 5 minutes of us passing, a man was shot to death at the intersection we just passed.
● 3 black men were shot in the legs, and the police received a call for a man firing a gun from his car window. This location was away from the shooting of the 3 black men, but the police found the car where the shooting was coming from, stopped against the curb, and the man behind the wheel dead from a head shot. They believe he was the one that shot the 3 men, and someone shot him, and wounded with a head shot, either delirious or trying to gain attention, was firing the gun from the window.
● A man, waiting in his car, he was a Garbage Man, and he was waiting for the truck, was shot to death because he was about to testify in a trial about a shooting he witnessed.
● Two young boys were shot by a man that broke into their home, killing one boy.
● A man on my street was shot in his home. This was within 100 yards of the previous listed shooting, many months later.
● A woman was shot in the leg at an intersection where a man was shot and killed a few weeks before. While investigating the shooting, the police found several cars shot up, and wanted to know if they were part of the shooting. The officer replied that they occurred earlier that day.
● A woman that worked at McDonalds was walking home, she’s older, not old. She was shot in the back but survived. She’s afraid to leave the house now. The shooter, when caught, said he shot her because he just liked to shoot people.
● Early in the evening, the Police Scanner was on, and a black man was going door to door in the neighborhood, looking for someone. At 11:00 PM, just after my wife and I went to bed, we heard up to 15 Shots without pause. Then silent, then another 15 shots. Someone VERY CLOSE to our home, a 15 year old black man, was shot 10 + times through the door, and one shot hit someone in the house in the leg. The man shot 10 + times lived, but is in bad shape. The 2nd 15 Shots we heard were someone from the house firing at the attempted killer, apparently missing.
The above is by no means a complete list, just the ones that come to mind.
We moved. But now, on the other end of our New Town, shootings continue. A couple, with child (probably a teen), were head and body shot, and the teen shot in the stomach, a block or so from the police station. One adult dead, the other critical. Not sure of updates. But this is happening all the time again, shootings are becoming frequent near here. Grrrr!
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May be time to move again.When I hear stories like this, it helps understand why people are moving to other locations, including to rural areas and different states.
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Rural, God Bless those people, I hope they appreciate what they have. Mt. Oliver was on a List of Cities (It’s a Tiny Town, Population 3500 or so) to avoid for French People when in the U.S. and published, I think, by their embassy, the list was in the Washington Post. Some of the Mt. Oliver Shootings are actually wrongfully attributed to Mt. Oliver, being on the City Side of the Street, so they were in Pittsburgh, no solace though, they were just feet from being in Mt. Oliver.
We kept a Firearm on the Floor of the House we were on (i.e. It was in the Bed Room at night, then, in the morning, it was in the Living Room). The Firearm was Loaded, but not Chambered. If any family visited (especially if children were present), it was locked-up. We never had a situation where it was needed, though at the night of the shooting near my home, I waited at the top of the stairs with it, listening, and listening to the Police Radio, until we felt things were stable and the Police had a grasp on what occurred. Stairs with a Right Angle are a God Send, people coming up them have no idea what to expect.
And we had a great dog, he was territorial, no one was allowed on the property without one of us ushering them in, he was 95 lbs, half Labrador Retriever and Half Pit Bull, he looked like a Lab, but was very assertive. He developed Diabetes (Insulin twice a day), and went blind, but that didn’t stop his assertiveness. My wife and I were out on a Pier Type structure on a lake, and 2 couples came out halfway, and they were talking. As we were leaving, I asked if they could stand back, that he can be aggressive. They agreed. As we came along side of them, his Pit Bull side showed, and the couples thanked us for warning them. Blind, he still walked around the house and the yard, though we limited his use of stairs.
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Interesting memories.
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As long as the border is open for gangs and criminals to freely enter, expect more of the same. America is not safe, and anyone who thinks it is, is blinded. Biden continues to make it more lawless by the day, all for future votes from illegals when the Democrats can figure out a way to make it happen. Once that becomes the norm, there will never in many lifetimes be a conservative elected in this corrupt country. We will eventually become a shithole like Mexico. Just saying.
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