Shortly after Donald Trump’s upset election victory in 2016, official State of Texas business brought me to two ICE immigration detention centers in South Texas. I ran an intelligence group for the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division. What I learned there has informed my beliefs about illegal immigration ever since.
Back then, part of my routine was to help the feds interview apprehended aliens from Pakistan, Syria, Somalia, and Afghanistan and collect intelligence about potential Islamic terrorism. The South Texas Processing Center in Pearsall, Texas, some one hundred miles from the Mexican border, was always filled to the brim with detainees.
But to my surprise, for the first time, it was as empty as a football stadium in baseball season. The same was true of ICE’s larger, ever-packed-to-capacity Port Isabel Service Processing Center near Brownsville, Texas.
“Where is everyone?” I asked the ICE intelligence officers, separately, at both facilities.
The same surprising answer went something like this: People throughout Latin America heard Trump on the campaign stump vowing illegal immigration crackdowns, and they decided to stay home rather than risk smuggling money for nothing. If the perceived odds of successfully getting in and staying a long time to earn money is high enough, they’ll come. If the perceived odds are higher that they’ll be blocked and deported, they’re sheltering in place.
It was the first time I’d heard such a thing, although it seemed so obvious.
The number of Border Patrol apprehensions, however, proved it. In November of 2016 there were 63,361 border apprehensions but by March of 2017 that number dropped to 12,193, the lowest count in decades.
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