The Missing Blimp and the Open Gates: Two Scenes from Biden’s Border Crisis
The administration’s message to cartels and coyotes: ‘Come on in — but don’t tell anybody.’
By Andrew R. Arthur on August 14, 2023
I’ve just returned from southeastern Arizona where I testified at a joint congressional hearing captioned “Biden’s Border Crisis and Its Effect on American Communities”. Apart from the hearing, two scenes from the area stood out in particular: one a series of open gates along fencing tens of miles long in Coronado National Monument; and the other, a grounded tethered blimp (known as an “aerostat”) that had previously kept watch over the border high above the U.S. side of the Sonoran Desert. Combined, the message they sent to smugglers and the cartels was, “Come on in — but don’t tell anybody.”
Cochise County and Tucson Sector. That hearing was held in Sierra Vista, the most populous city in Cochise County, which in turn is the southeasternmost county in Arizona. Cochise County is huge — at 6,219 square miles, it’s as large as Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. Still, with just fewer than 126,000 residents, it’s sparsely populated, and most of it (60 percent) is either state or federal land.
It also occupies the southeastern corner of the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector, which has jurisdiction over 262 miles of the 1,954-mile Southwest border. Tucson sector has seen the lion’s share of the border’s post-Title 42 illegal entrants — who were likely pushed westward by the state of Texas’s successful (and much derided) border-security effort, known as “Operation Lone Star”.
There’s no similar state border-control effort in Arizona. In fact, when I was down there, I was told that the state’s governor, Katie Hobbs (D), is actively attempting to remove the Arizona National Guard troops sent to the border by her predecessor, Gov. Doug Ducey (R), to provide federal and local authorities with logistical and humanitarian assistance — even though boosting the number of troops had reportedly been a potential part of her post-Title 42 plans.
https://cis.org/Arthur/Missing-Blimp-and-Open-Gates-Two-Scenes-Bidens-Border-Crisis
