One truth is clear about the migrant caravan sitting in Tijuana: They don’t care about U.S. immigration law, and have no intention of letting a small obstacle such as a border fence block them from entering the United States.
Last week, for instance, a pregnant Honduran hopped the fence just in time to drop an anchor baby that will be a U.S. citizen.
But now, the Associated Press has reported, migrants are digging under the fence like gophers.
Will a Trickle Become a Flood?
“A steady trickle of Central American migrants have been finding ways to climb over, tunnel under or slip through the U.S. border wall to plant their feet on U.S. soil and ask for asylum,” AP reported today.
The news agency’s most recent sob story came in a photo. “In recent weeks,” AP reported, “Honduran migrant Joel Mendez fed his 8-month-old son, Daniel, before handing him over to his partner, Yesenia Martinez, who had crawled through a hole in the rain-softened soil under the wall.”
AP divulged nothing more about Mendez, mother, and child, but it did say “a group of young people hoisted themselves over the wall to San Ysidro, California, hoping that their ticket to a better life was finally within reach.” And “one migrant offered a hand to help the others jumping down onto U.S. territory.”
Why are they jumping the fence? Because they know that entering the country legally will take a while. U.S. personnel at the border are processing only about 100 asylum applications a day, most of them likely fraudulent.
But the illegal border-crossers, AP reported, know they don’t have to wait, for two reasons. First, they can cross just about any time they want. Once the first few made it across, others got the same idea.
“By word of mouth,” AP reported “some have realized they can simply cross into U.S. territory, largely uninhibited by Mexican authorities. In twos or threes — occasionally by the dozen — they arrive at the border wall and manage to get over. Often within minutes, border officers quickly arrive to escort them to detention centers and begin ‘credible fear’ interviews.”
More than a dozen of the illegals tried crossing during two nights last week. “‘A woman wearing a blue-beaded rosary waited with her children to see where they could cross,” AP reported, while a “Salvadoran migrant hid as he dug a hole in the sand under the wall. In the dark of night, migrants could be seen walking up a hill inside U.S. territory toward agents waiting to detain them.”
Second, the migrants likely know border authorities can’t kick them out, even though the president had declared that anyone crossing illegally, meaning between legal ports of entry, would be denied asylum. A leftist federal judge blocked that order at the request of anti-American subversives who seek open borders. He claimed that U.S. law permits anyone to apply for asylum. Undoubtedly, word that the radical Left had secured this free pass to cross the border trickled into the migrant camp.
Marching for Money
The migrant caravan did not head north, as TNA has repeatedly reported, to claim asylum. It is mostly on the make for jobs and welfare, and perhaps the starkest example yet was the pregnant women who hopped the border fence near San Ysidro last week.
The woman flatly admitted that she and her husband left Honduras to deliver her child here. They knew that meant he would become a citizen. Her child’s arrival on American soil was a “big reward,” she said. “With the faith in God, I always said my son will be born [in America].”
But now, of course, she’ll apply for asylum. Will U.S. officials believe any claim that she “fled violence” or left her country out of “fear?” Or will they believe what she said when the child was born?
Last week, more than two dozen migrants breached the border during a nighttime incursion. Some squeezed through a gap in the border fence, while others went over the top, using blankets as ropes.
In Arizona, the Border Patrol’s cameras caught six Guatelamans, including two children, clambering over an 18-foot border wall. A smuggler dropped the kids from the top of the fence before he disappeared into the darkness in Mexico.
Photo: AP Images