Have you ever fallen asleep only to wake up and discover there was a dramatic change that took place somewhere in your vicinity while you were zonked out? Imagine closing your eyes, dosing off and waking up to realize you're suddenly surrounded by people who weren't there when you fell asleep? When you went to bed you were alone, but now you're in a room filled with strange faces who don't speak your language. Surprise! They may not have been here before, but now that they've arrived they have needs and they're pushy. Maybe they're even armed - because, after all, they're gunmen for the Los Zetas Mexican drug cartel.

That would be pretty nuts, right? Well, the equivalent of that just happened here in the United States, and the people who just woke up from that long drooling nap are the Liberals and Democrats in our national news media.

Earlier this week CBS News sent a reporter to the border of Texas & Mexico named David Begnaud. As David stood at the border preparing his report for CBS News viewers on the state of our nation's immigration system, a very predictable thing happened: a coyote smuggled two illegal immigrants in a raft over the Rio Grande River.

Not only was David surprised to see them, but he admitted he even felt a bit unsafe as the human traffickers signaled to him that he wasn't supposed to be there and he'd better get movin' before something bad happens.

The team at CBS News witnessed the same thing Tom Llamas of ABC News encountered last month during a similar trip to our border.

To most major network TV news viewers, this was probably the first time they'd ever seen anything like this happening with their own two eyes, but independent conservative news outlets like Breitbart Texas or KPRC News Radio in Houston, Tx cover these stories every day.

If you travel to the most volatile places along our border, which I definitely wouldn't recommend doing, it's not hard to stumble across human smugglers and illegal immigrants. You've been told that they're all refugees seeking asylum - but that's not always the case.

In fact, many of them are being sent with coyotes who work for the cartels. The undocumented immigrants coming here are often blackmailed and held against their will or forced to share money from their meager off-the-books jobs with the cartels that brought them here because they fear that their family members back home will be murdered by armed thugs. It's not uncommon for the smugglers who accompany these people to sexually assault the young girls, which is part of the reason why the parents of these children often send them with a Plan B pill in their pocket. If you get raped, take the pill.

Kidnappings, murders and extortion are common place at our nation's border, particularly on the Mexico side. Part of the reason why so many of these major news stations were surprised to learn about the crisis at the border stems from the fact that cartel gunmen will murder small town border journalists who report on their behavior. If you're a small town news reporter and you don't want your family to be murdered, don't write or publish stories about the organized criminal groups in your community. And since mainstream news outlets like ABC, CBS, CNN, the Washington Post and MSNBC get most of their content by regurgitating the news stories of smaller local outlets around the country, in the past it's been pretty uncommon for any of the big media companies to acknowledge how common these violent occurrences have become at our border.

Earlier this year reporters from news outlets like the NYTimes and Buzzfeed started posting photos of migrant children being held at border facilities to social media. People were shocked at what they saw - little kids being held in what looked like cages. They were all quick to blame President Donald Trump, only to later realize they were posting old photos from 2013 (when Obama was still President). Not coincidentally, the photos originated from reporters at Breitbart Texas.

But this immigration crisis has been happening since way before Trump, or Obama. In fact, it was President Jimmy Carter who signed the Refugee Act of 1980 that first opened the flood gates to all of this migration from Central America (and it was Democrat Bill Clinton who signed a law in 1996 to detain families at the border).

During the 2016 Presidential election President Trump made headlines for suggesting the people crossing over the border were rapists and murderers. While not all of the people migrating to the US from Central America are as violent as those who work for the cartels, many of them are being accompanied by coyotes who do in fact work for criminal organizations, and those people very often really are rapists and murders. This relationship between the migrants and criminal organizations is so deeply ingrained that it's impossible to ignore.

Earlier this week a report from the Border Patrol detailed how a car crash in South Texas led to the arrest of 96 illegal immigrants. How do you fit 96 people in a vehicle? Probably at gunpoint, if what we've heard about the cartels is true.

Another report out this week highlights how Border Patrol agents in Arizona recently arrested 26 illegal immigrants and a human smuggler in yet another sting. It was just another day in the life of Immigration Customs Enforcement.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the border, ten members of a family of migrants from Honduras came under fire when a team of gunmen believed to be connected to the cartel burst into a home in the border state of Tamaulipas and opened fire. One person died and two children were severely injured, adding to the endless number of cartel war casualties.

These incidents all took place in just a couple of days and we've barely even scratched the surface of what's going on at the border.

So while reporters from CBS and ABC News are suddenly waking up to the fact that this violent and dangerous crisis is something we can no longer ignore, one has to wonder how long we'll be able to keep their attention focused on the issue.

With every news story about investigations into Russian election meddling, Melania's clothing choices and Stormy Daniels strip club appearances, one can only assume we're just moments away from the mainstream TV News talking heads losing interest in this human rights crisis and turning their eyes towards something more salacious.

But for the time being, our immigration crisis is sitting in front of us like a turd on a dinner plate. And, interestingly enough, it's also part of the reason why Donald Trump won the last Presidential election.

I wonder if Democrats know that?