“The fence worked here,” Yuma County Sheriff Leon Wilmot told FOX News. “I can only talk about my area. But [politicians should] defer to the Border Patrol experts. They know the situation.”
Blue Lives Matter reports:
There are more square miles in Yuma County than in the entire state of Connecticut, The Epoch Times reported.
The county’s border with Mexico stretches a staggering 126 miles, and was once considered to be the most prevalent place for illegal crossings into the United States.
In 2005 alone, over 2,700 vehicles loaded with drugs and illegal immigrants entered the U.S. across the border in Yuma County, according to the U.S. Border Patrol.
Agents working in the Yuma County Sector arrested more than 138,000 illegal immigrants that year.
“Yuma battled entrenched smuggling groups for control of the border,” the agency said, according to The Epoch Times. “Mass incursions often left agents outnumbered 50 to 1. Agents were assaulted with rocks and weapons daily.”
That was no longer the case after the Secure Fence Act passed. After the 20 foot steel fence was erected, by 2009, there were only 7,000 arrests.
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“We were able to reduce [ancillary crimes] by 91 percent,” Sheriff Wilmot said. “The deaths in the desert, the rapes, the robberies, the homicides, the burglaries, the thefts.”
“When they were no longer able to take advantage of our border as a smuggler’s paradise, the crimes against those being smuggled virtually stopped,” he told FOX News.
PROSECUTION IS ALSO KEY
The Sheriff said in addition, the illegal entrants were INDISPUTABLY prosecuted.
“If you did try to cross and you got caught, you were held accountable. There were consequences,” Capt. Bratcher told The Epoch Times. “The fence slowed them down… But the real issue was, when you got caught, you went to jail. It stopped.”
The 100 percent prosecution policy was halted under Obama, and crime has steadily crept back up since then, he said. Drug smuggling jumped back up.
“The individuals would come across, the U.S. attorney’s office would not charge them, the dope was seized, they would cut them loose, and it was a revolving door,” Sheriff Wilmot explained. “They just kept coming back, coming back, coming back.”
POLITICIANS ARE THE PROBLEM
Local officials couldn’t afford to keep housing these people without the help of the federal government.
“It ended up costing sheriffs in Arizona about $30 million to house these individuals that had committed crimes [and] were here illegally in this country, smuggling in heroin, dope, marijuana, cocaine,” Sheriff Wilmot said. “So local taxpayers still had to pick up the rest of that burden.”
“We all too often see interviews in Washington [with] mayors and governors but, no offense, they are not the ones that are down here on the border,” he told The Epoch Times in May of 2018.
“They are not the ones that are investigating the crimes. They are not the ones out here when it’s 120 degrees, processing a crime scene where 14 people were left to die in the desert,” the sheriff said.
All President Trump wants to do is follow the law, not Obama’s reinvented law, the rule of law.
