Before the weekend began, Customs and Border Protection had sent out a news release about the latest effort to slow the illegal border crossing attempts.
Then on Sunday afternoon, at the news conference about the deadly human smuggling attempt that morning that ended with an overcrowded, unsafe boat, capsizing and breaking into pieces off Point Loma, he said that despite the dangers and despite the risks, the number of these smuggling attempts at sea keep happening. There are news stories about the panga boats coming ashore along the San Diego coast at least every few weeks.
The Border Patrol agent Sunday made a point to say these maritime efforts by human smuggles are the most dangerous of all, because as he put it, the smugglers don’t care about these people, to them they are only commodities used to make a profit. We also saw over the weekend the continued surge of people from Mexico and Central America being smuggled across the Rio Grande river in Texas and there have been some who have died there as well. And a few weeks ago 13 of 25 people packed into an SUV were killed in near El Centro.
The illegal immigration problem is a big one and it’s being argued that so is the legal immigration problem.
So now what? What will we do about these problems? The history over the last 40 years or more tells us, not much and certainly not enough.
Many Americans are probably hoping that our nation’s leaders in both parties will see what happened Sunday within view of the Cabrillo National Monument as a reason to stop arguing about the immigration problems and work together to solve them.
READ MORE about the smuggling boat tragedy.
(Photo Getty Images)