The sensational media dispute over Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and the nitpicking over individual anecdotes from that town is obscuring a far more important reality. Whatever else we know, it is a documented fact that the Biden-Harris Administration is complicit in a multinational effort, aided by major NGOs and U.N. organizations in collusion with drug smugglers and human traffickers, to funnel migrants into the U.S. at completely disruptive and unsustainable levels.
This became clear on my recent reporting trip to Acandi, Colombia, where a powerful paramilitary force controls all human and drug smuggling into Panama. The “Gaitanist Self-Defense Forces of Colombia”—a 6,000-man armed force also known as the “Gulf Cartel”—rules its vast domain in northwestern Colombia with a brutal iron fist, killing and kidnapping perceived wrongdoers on a dime.
The leaders of the Gaitanistas take enormous pride in having built such a massive and fine-tuned smuggling machine. They were so childishly eager to vaunt their accomplishment that I recently found myself FaceTiming with a high-ranking Gulf Cartel chieftain willing to show it all off.
Through the mobile phone screen, the bearded criminal bureaucrat eyed me and my interpreter with suspicion at first. We had just come off a speed boat from across the Gulf of Urabá and asked a motorcycle cabbie to take us to the immigrants. He spat that we couldn’t just show up unannounced, without pre-approvals arranged by trusted interlocutors somewhere very far away.
“You just can’t just come in here and do what you want,” he said.
He softened a bit when, under interrogation, I said I was there as a research analyst from the Center for Immigration Studies to evaluate a plan by Panama’s new president, José Raúl Mulino, to close the notorious Darien Gap migrant passageway. This is the route through which nearly two million foreign nationals were funneled over the course of three years en route to enter the U.S. illegally at the Southwest border.
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