Chairman of Retired Border Patrol Officers’ Group: Those Supporting Driver’s Licenses, Sanctuary for Illegal Aliens Facilitate Drug Smuggling

EDUCATING THE ELECTORATE ON THE EFFECTS OF ILLEGALS:  “IT HAS TO BE VISUAL”

by Sharon Rondeau

(Jun. 19, 2014) — In response to the entry of thousands of unaccompanied minors and other illegal aliens at the southern border in recent weeks and months, George (Zack) Taylor of the National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers (NAFBPO) issued a public letter on June 10 which began:

America is undergoing the most intensive campaign of Political Deception ever launched against Americans by her political leaders. The Administration, the members of the U.S. Senate that voted for S-744, and every other member of Congress that supports a path to citizenship, regularization or any other form of amnesty for illegal aliens before providing for full protections for National Security (jobs & economy) and Public Safety (the right of the people to be secure in their property and person) are fully responsible for the wave of illegal aliens flooding into the United States today.

Taylor’s reference to “S744” was to a bill passed by the U.S. Senate last year entitled the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act which has not been deliberated by the House.

Following the publication of the letter, The Post & Email contacted the NAFBPO, after which Taylor spoke with us for an hour on the problem which he and his organization believe illegal aliens present to the national security of the United States and how that might be changed.

Parts 1 and 2 of our interview with Taylor can be found here and here, respectively.

On Monday, Maricopa County, AZ Sheriff Joe Arpaio told Fox News that because of the overwhelming number of aliens entering the country, “Border Patrol agents are “too busy babysitting to actually do their jobs.”  Arpaio stated that Obama “knew this was going to happen, so it’s going to help him on his executive orders if Congress doesn’t take this mission up,” adding that “It might backfire because of the inhumane situations.”

The aliens are being held in “warehouses” where their “basic human needs” of food, water, shower facilities and a place to sleep are being supplied.  Reporters have been allowed very little access to the facilities, although the representative of an immigrant rights organization stated after being granted unprecedented access that “violations against unaccompanied minors in detention” are occurring.

Fox’s Sean Hannity described the conditions as “horrible” and reported that Border Patrol agents have been threatened with criminal charges if they speak to the media about them.

Earlier this week, a Tea Party group reported that a solicitation was published in January on a website for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) seeking “Escort Services for Unaccompanied Alien Children RFI.”  The solicitation begins:

Procurement Type:  Request for Information (RFI)/Sources Sought

Title:  Escort Services for Unaccompanied Alien Children

Classification Code:  V- Transportation/Travel/Relocation

NAICS code:  561612

Primary POC:  Rachel Ali, Contract Specialist/ Rachel.Ali@ice.dhs.gov

Secondary POC:  Tony Ross, Contracting Officer/ Tony.Ross@ice.dhs.gov

A.  Introduction

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a component of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has a continuing and mission critical responsibility for accepting custody of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) from U.S. Border Patrol and other Federal agencies and transporting these juveniles to Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) shelters located throughout the continental United States. ICE is seeking the services of a responsible vendor that shares the philosophy of treating all UAC with dignity and respect, while adhering to standard operating procedures and policies that allow for an effective, efficient, and incident free transport. The Contractor shall provide unarmed escort staff, including management, supervision, manpower, training, certifications, licenses, drug testing, equipment, and supplies necessary to provide on-demand escort services for non-criminal/non-delinquent unaccompanied alien children ages infant to 17 years of age, seven (7) days a week, 365 days a year. Transport will be required for either category of UAC or individual juveniles, to include both male and female juveniles. There will be approximately 65,000 UAC in total: 25% local ground transport, 25% via ICE charter and 50% via commercial air. Escort services include, but are not limited to, assisting with: transferring physical custody of UAC from DHS to Health and Human Services (HHS) care via ground or air methods of transportation (charter or commercial carrier), property inventory, providing juveniles with meals, drafting reports, generating transport documents, maintaining/stocking daily supplies, providing and issuing clothing as needed, coordinating with DHS and HHS staff, travel coordination, limited stationary guard services to accommodate for trip disruptions due to inclement weather, faulty equipment, or other exigent circumstances. In emergency situations, the Contractor shall be called on to provide temporary shelter locations (such as trailers) with shower facilities for juveniles who are pending placement with HHS when bed space is unavailable nationwide for extended periods of time. The Contractor shall provide temporary guard services and other support as necessary during these emergencies.

In addition, the Contractor shall have personnel who are able to communicate with juveniles in their own designated language(s).  While this may not require each employee to be fluent in all of the encountered languages, personnel should have access to and knowledge of translation services.

Neither a phone call nor email to Ross by The Post & Email over Wednesday and Thursday received a response.

On Wednesday, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, his Lt. Governor, David Dewhurst, and Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives Joe Straus issued a letter to Texas Director of Public Safety Col. Steven C. McCraw directing him to “plan and execute a surge operation of increased law enforcement in Texas border counties.”  Breitbart News, which has reported extensively on the recent incursion of illegals in to the country by its southern border, issued a story which it apparently removed entitled “BREAKING:  Texas-Led Border Security Surge ‘Imminent’.  A caption below the title indicates that there were 1695 comments made to the story before it was disabled.

In Part 2, Taylor described how the presence of illegal aliens in the U.S. has permitted the illegal narcotics industry to flourish and for heroin to enter public schools, referring to a kindergartener in Hartford, CT who in 2012 brought 50 “packets” of heroin to show to his classmates as part of a “Show-and-Tell” discussion.

Hartford became a “Sanctuary City” in 2010.  Sanctuary cities defy federal laws which define legal and illegal entry into the country.

Taylor told us that on the same day he learned of the Hartford five-hear-old having brought heroin to school, he learned of “another five-year-old in Philadelphia, PA doing exactly the same thing.”

Taylor contended that “illegal immigration is the casue of the failed war on drugs and why we have drugs throughout the United States.”

Cocaine and heroin are produced outside of the United States and are smuggled into the U.S.  The people who smuggle them into the U.S. don’t necessarily belong to a cartel or have any ownership of the drug.  The reason is that that’s the high-risk part of getting the drugs into the U.S., and the people who own the drugs go only with the people who are the most successful at that point in time in getting them in.

Once they get them into the United States, they have to be delivered to a trusted member of the organization from a foreign country so they can go to the next step to distribution in the United States. So that means these transnational criminals in the foreign country have to have their people inside the U.S. to receive the drugs and distribute them.  The only way they’re going to allow that kind of money – because we’re talking about not millions of dollars, but trillions of dollars in drugs.  These people they have absolute control over, and that usually that they know that the family members of that person are still in the foreign country, and they can put pressure on that person in the United States through their family members.

Each one of these distribution pipelines feeds a part of the United States.  For instance, Tempe, AZ is the smallest political subdivision in the Phoenix area.  Phoenix is the sixth-largest city in the United States.  On one day in Tempe, AZ, they arrested 204 cartel members from several distribution networks belonging to the same transnational criminal organization.  None of those people in the various distribution networks knew the other was operating in the city.  So if DEA and the local police had only picked up people out of one distribution network, they would not have disrupted the other six at all.   But because their investigation started at the street level with the illegal aliens that they caught incidentally by the application of Senate Bill 1070 – which everybody demonized in Arizona – and worked it backwards, they got to people who were distribution players in the pipeline.  They did not shut down the distribution; they interrupted different pipelines.  So even though that sounds like a large number, it did not disrupt the distribution, because they were independent groups.

When something like that happens, the drugs back up in the foreign country.  In the case of the Mexican border area, when that happens, they have to pay the local police or the people in power, whoever that happens to be, to protect the drugs so that one of the other cartels doesn’t steal them.  It’s called “protection.”  They figure that there’s no sense in crossing the border if they don’t have someplace to take it.  So once they get that place established, they have all these drugs amassed on the south side.  Think about 40 metric tons of cocaine in one warehouse.  A metric ton is 2,200 pounds.  Now the pressure is on them because they’re having to pay so much to protect it that they can afford to lose some bringing it across the border.  Because the supply line in the U.S. has been disrupted, it has now been re-established, so they have to get the drugs out of Mexico or lose them all.  So they make mistakes in bringing them across the border and they get caught.

The Mexicans have a term for this; it is called “the second rat gets the cheese.”  The first rat that takes the drugs across the border without a whole lot of forethought gets caught, then the second rat looks at what happened to him, and he’s able to formulate a strategy to get the drugs past the Border Patrol and into the United States.  That is what “the second rat gets the cheese” means.

The other side of that is that the drug smugglers in the border area, and especially in Mexico, have a term for operating their illicit business right before your eyes:  it is called “poking you in the eye.”  In other words, they’re rendering you blind to what they’re doing, and the better they are at doing that, the better they are at masters of the trade of moving the drugs into the United States.

Everybody says, “Well, it’s because of the violence in the foreign countries, and they’re having to move their people into the U.S.,” that’s not so.  The more people they have in the United States, the less control they have over them. The problem is there are more people growing and supplying the drugs because the demand inside the U.S. has gone up, and they need to get more in to satisfy the demand.

When we get to this point where we say, let’s say, that there are 4,000 cities in the U.S. which have a significant cartel presence, of those 4,000 cities, 50 of them have multiple cartel groups working inside of them:  Atlanta; Miami; Dallas/Ft. Worth; Omaha, NE, New York City; Hartford, CT; St. Cloud, MN.  These are what are called “hub cities.”  The purpose is to get drugs there for distribution.  These people could teach Wal-Mart about distribution.  They are really good at it.  But here’s the problem:  They can’t operate unless they’re able to operate with impunity in these cities, and the way they do that is through the Sanctuary City concept of ignoring the immigration law.  Otherwise, because of the fact that these people come and go on a daily basis, there would be attrition because they don’t have driver’s licenses; they don’t have insurance, they don’t speak the language, etc.

So the push by this administration to get these people driver’s licenses is to help them meld in to the communities more easily.

THE POST & EMAIL:  The Connecticut legislature passed a law last year which took effect on January 1 of this year allowing illegals to obtain driver’s licenses.  Are you saying that Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy, the legislature, and local mayors are aiding and abetting illegal drug smuggling by allowing illegal aliens to have driver’s licenses?

MR. TAYLOR:  When you get to this level of criminal activity, it’s called “organized crime,” RICO.  That’s why the RICO law was written, to combat this type of activity.  So when the state allows these people to get a driver’s license or, as in California, they allow them to be lawyers, as in California, they are extending political protection to the transnational criminal.  Organized crime cannot exist without political protection.  Americans get all emotional about a situation, and they go from “A” to “Z” without connecting the dots.  The American public reads that, and it doesn’t register because they’re reading it at sub-eighth-grade level, more than three points are being made in the article, and it’s not being reinforced.  The last part of that is that it doesn’t apply to them.

THE POST & EMAIL:  Or so they think.

MR. TAYLOR:  Or so they think.  So what you have to do is make people like Gov. Malloy vote it.  Then it applies to them.  If you will go back and read my article that you called to verify, it talks about the failure to enforce the immigration law, and everybody who fails to do that is aiding and abetting the transnational crime of alien smuggling and illegal aliens.  So Gov. Malloy, by allowing these people here, facilitates the drug smuggling.  He is the principal person inviting the transnational criminals into the state of Connecticut.

THE POST & EMAIL:  Then, of course, he says he needs more policemen to fight crime.

MR. TAYLOR:  Exactly.  In other words, he is feeding the problem to expand his sphere of power by hiring more people.  The idea of all bureaucrats is to grow their organizations.

THE POST & EMAIL:  Government expansion seems to hand-in-hand with corruption.

MR. TAYLOR:  Oh, it is the worst kind of corruption.  When the governor put the pen to paper and signed that law, he became the primary drug and alien smuggler in the state of Connecticut.  The governor sealed the state’s fate when he signed that law.

How did he get where he is?  Who needs to be educated?

THE POST & EMAIL:  The people.

MR. TAYLOR:  You got it.  If all of the electorate were educated before the bill was introduced to the legislature, it would have been dead on arrival in the legislature.  People who are like-minded need to get organized and educate the people at the grassroots level.  You need to go to the political parties, the Tea Parties, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Rotary Club, the citizens who are engaged in citizens’ activities.  These are the people who need to see the document you called me about.  These are the people who need to understand that the reason we are where we are today is because of the illegal alien, not because of the legal immigrant.

The reason the War on Drugs failed is that they enabled the people who were smuggling the drugs selling them.  If you’re going to go to war over ideas, you have to go to the people; otherwise, it’s not even a skirmish.

You start with the political parties:  the governor and the people in the majority in the legislature.  You find the constituents in the legislative districts and educate them, because those constituents are very likely fairly high-profile in the community.  When you do it, you have to show individual elements of how this crime is affecting your community in the state of Connecticut.  People look at the border and think that it’s very far removed – it’s 3,100 miles away from Hartford.  They don’t understand that once it gets across that border, it’s in Hartford.  Once you locate it in Hartford, you’ve got their attention.  Once you show them the news article about the five-year-old bringing heroin to class who was supplied by the illegal alien who lives in Hartford, then you’re connecting the transnational criminal, the illegal alien, and the governor who gave them the driver’s license.

THE POST & EMAIL:  And the child is in the community with their children who are in the community going to public schools.

MR. TAYLOR:  You get it.  People get too emotionally involved and try to go from “A” to “Z.”  You have to go “A, B, C…”  And that’s all you need to know.

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Taylor said he has spoken with organizations such as Kiwanis, VFW, and groups of retired citizens about the problem of illegal aliens.  He told us:

I talked to a retired group in Saddle Brook, AZ.  The president of that club went to school with a very prominent U.S. senator.  He told the senator about me.  The senator’s chief of staff called me, and we’ve been in touch ever since.  That’s an example.  If I had gone to the senator’s office and knocked on the door and said, “I want to talk to you,” I would have gotten nowhere.  But I reached a constituent who just happened to be a personal friend and family member of that U.S. senator.  And that just sort-of happens across the board in talking to a rather large group of people who are current elected officials.  The other thing you find out is there are people who do not want to even let people know that you exist with their elected official, and they’re the ones whose constituents I really go after.

Back when I was a Border Patrol agent in Texas, I was, let’s just put it, “well-known,” because I worked the ranch country there.  One of the ranchers there, who was actually younger than me – he was the son of a major rancher – I was invited to go to Texas to talk to a group of ranchers, and he just happened to be in the group.  He heard what I had to say, and after a while, he remembered who I was.  This person, that year, had 110 oil and gas wells come into production on his property.  Let’s just say he was well-connected, and that put me in contact with other people in the Senate and House who do not want to hear the message.  But now, that guy, who largely contributes to their campaigns, is telling them the same story that I would tell them if they would listen to me.  It is a process; it is not an end result.

You are the spark, but you need to get your spark onto the tinder before you can start the fire.  If you’re writing the governor, you’re sparking wet wood (laughs).

The seed of patriotism…Connecticut is where this all began!  If I were you, that’s what I would say.  Where did the seed of patriotism go?

The language of politics is emotion.  Once you figure out what language you need to use and how you have to form it to reach beyond the eyes and the ears of the listener and take a hold of their heart – and just sit there and very gently hold it while you’re communicating with them, and then remove your hand and have that message stay, then you’ll be successful.  The more you scream and holler, the less people are going to listen to you.

This is exactly the way the smugglers during prohibition operated.  They could not survive without political protection.

I’m going to take it to the last step for you:  The corruption at the political level would not be happening as it is in Washington, DC if there was not a lot of money involved.  The whole idea of “immigration reform” has been stretched out so that more and more money flows to the politicians in Washington.  So they’re not looking for a solution; they’re looking to bilk more money out of it.

The people of Virginia figured that out.  They had a little help figuring that out.  Let’s just say I know it works.

Educating an unwilling electorate is difficult, because everybody else is trying to influence them. I’ll tell you the secret: you have to make it visual – when you talk to people, roughly half of them will understand what you said.  About half of them are going to retain it for about five minutes.  Less than 2% of that is going to remember it two days from now.  It has to be visual. You can show people a photograph that they will never forget.  There is something about how the human psyche is made up.  A lot of the photographs that I show people are very, very horrible.

Visual media works.  YouTube works.  You have to go visual.  If you give them more than three points, it starts canceling out randomly.

Watch the video and circulate it.  It’s not a border problem anymore.  Every single state in the union has an illegal alien problem. If you don’t call it “illegal,” you’re making a big mistake.

I’ve watched the politicians cringe when I’ve used that term. They used to try to correct me…boy, did that not work! (laughs)

THE POST & EMAIL:  It seems money is driving everything.

MR. TAYLOR:  No; it is money and power.  When I told you that the Senate and House are stretching this out so that more money will flow, they don’t have the money; they have the power.  But by people trying to influence their position of power, money is flowing to them, and the people who flow more money to it are buying more power.  It’s always been about the dollar.

The Framers of the Constitution were only trying to provide a free people with the means to pursue happiness because they knew that if self-interest entered into it and people were working to provide for themselves and to expand their communities to be a better place to live, they would work harder in it.  It’s just that people don’t look at the Constitution that way; they don’t look at the Bill of Rights; they don’t look at the people and what they sacrificed to give us what we have.  It all comes down to the ability to be free and make money.  The parasites are sucking us dry.

There’s always a beginning point in education:  you first have to make people aware that there’s a problem.  Then your next step is going to make that problem apply to them and their home and their children.  Once you get past the front door and make them see that this is an attack on the American family unit, you got ’em.

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Editor’s Note:  In 2010, the NAFBPO wrote its own proposal for “Comprehensive Immigration Enforcement and Reform.”