President Obama continues to bypass Congress on immigration via Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Memoranda. By way of these de facto executive orders, Obama offers undocumented aliens entry into the United States and subsequent legalization.
By facilitating an influx of undocumented foreign nationals to the country, the President is running up a bill to be paid by U.S. taxpayers, who should prepare for price-tag shock. In addition, the environmental impact is substantial at the border and beyond.
Somehow the DHS continues to report that illegal-entry numbers are down, in an Obama version of Three-Card Monte. A complacent newsmedia allows immigration miscounts to support an imperial presidency.
On May 20, 2014, the President opened another pathway for Mexican Drug Cartels (MDC) by granting smugglers of human beings and drugs unimpeded access to the United States. He did this by declaring the 500,000-acre Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks region of southern New Mexico a new National Monument bordering with Mexico. You see, U.S. Border Patrol agents are not allowed to make arrests on National Monuments.
The President ignores the implicit security problems related to his new designation, declaring, “One of the great blessings of being an American is that we are blessed with some of the most beautiful landscapes and real estate on Earth.” In describing the new National Monument’s mountains, Obama stated, “They are a spectacular sight. You’ve got massive rocks that jut up to 9,000 feet in the air and stretch for 90 miles, like organ pipes of a giant.”
He failed to mention that, for the past 12 years, neighboring Arizona’s Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and its contiguous National Monuments, Wildlife Refuges, and National Forests have served as pathways into the United States for illegal alien smugglers, drug smugglers, and foreign criminal gang members. Since 2000, these lands have been the sites of attacks on federal officials, such as the murders of U.S. Park Ranger Kris Eggle, and U.S. Border Patrol agents Brian Terry and Nicholas Ivie.
Drug and alien smugglers also leave behind habitat destruction, creating hundreds of tons of trash per week that endangers plant and animal species and contaminates the beauty of these public lands. Despite calls by environmentalists to preserve the fragile beauty of the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks region, President Obama created another protected “pathway” for criminal activity.
Undocumented immigrants, drug smugglers, and criminal gang members care not one iota for wilderness ecosystems. Those on foot trample endangered plant life, and those in all-terrain vehicles tear-up vegetation and kill native wildlife.
Where are demonstrations by Green Peace? Little is heard from environmental groups, including the Sierra Club. When did open borders outrank wilderness? Since national monuments are now off-limits to the U.S. Border Patrol, they are wide open to smugglers and their mules — customers, often teenage and younger, carrying drugs. U.S. national monuments now account for 30 percent of annual crossings by undocumented foreign nationals.
The head of the National Border Patrol Council states that areas well north of the U.S.-Mexican border are now so overrun by armed criminals that U.S. citizens are being warned to keep out of many federal parks, forests, and wildlife refuges. The New Year promises more of the same, as the MDCs and other foreign terrorists use these lands as pathways to citizenship for undocumented foreign nationals, among them jihadists.
The U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy estimates that along the 1,952 miles of Mexican-U.S. border, some 700 miles is unsecured, and of the $65 billion worth of illegal drugs being carried across the border, less than 10 percent are intercepted.
In addition to illegal drugs crossing the border are those being grown on public lands in the United States. As early as 2009, the Obama administration was informed by Gil Kerlikowske, Chief of the President’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, that “Mexican drug trafficking organizations have been operating on public lands to cultivate marijuana, with serious consequences for the environment and public safety.”
In 2013, the U.S. Border Patrol made 420,789 apprehensions of illegal border crossers, including Islamic terrorists, at the southern border. If three times as many entered undetected, then some 1.2 million new environmental and national security concerns entered in 2013. Yet the national security aspects of undocumented immigrants tend to be ignored, as do related environmental damages such as air pollution, waste production, water use, and soil degeneration.
The Obama administration responded with a DHS Memoranda for “deferred deportations,” which will cost at least $50 million a year for additional government employees to process applicants for legalization. Look for skyrocketing costs to taxpayers to cover educational, environmental restoration, health care, housing, social, and welfare entitlement costs.
Over the next five years, to support at least 5 million legalized individuals and their family members, look for increased costs to taxpayers to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Also expect increased environmental damage to fragile public lands and price-tag shock for national security.
James H. Walsh was associate general counsel with the U.S. Department of Justice Immigration and Naturalization Service from 1983 to 1994. Read more reports from James Walsh — Click Here Now.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.