“Sanctuary” policies attract foreign drug traffickers, fugitives and terrorists.

The mission of the immigration elements of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is, in part, to protect America and Americans from aliens who pose a threat to national security and the safety and well-being of those who are in the United States. DHS is also charged with securing our nation’s borders, America’s first and last line of defense, to prevent contraband such as narcotics and illegal weapons from entering the United States.

Today, my commentary is predicated on news reports that in August 2017 the DEA and other law enforcement agencies, including the NYPD, conducted a field operation that resulted in the arrest of two Mexican citizens, Rogelio Alvarado-Robles and Blanca Flores-Solis, a middle-aged husband and wife from Mexico, and the seizure, pursuant to the execution of a search warrant, of 213 pounds of narcotics in their apartment in the fashionable Kew Gardens neighborhood of Queens New York.

On November 13, 2017 The Washington Post reported on this investigation (“Mexican traffickers making New York a hub for lucrative — and deadly — fentanyl”), appropriately filing the report under “National Security.”

We will delve into this case, but first I want to ask a simple question and then provide some background information to put things into proper perspective.

The NYPD consists of over 35,000 officers and has garnered the reputation, around the world, for being the most sophisticated, well-equipped and effective police department in America, if not the entire world.

Why then would a foreign drug trafficking organization move its operation into New York City?

I would suggest that the fact that the city is a self-declared “sanctuary” for illegal aliens plays a significant role in that decision.

I spent half of my career with the INS assigned to elements of the “War on Drugs.” Back in 1989, as a member of the Unified Intelligence Division of the DEA, I began tracking the arrest statistics for the DEA in New York and was startled to find that at least 60% of those arrested by the DEA Task Force in NYC for drug-related crimes were identified as “foreign born.”

Nevertheless many members of the United States Congress are adamantly opposed to the construction of a wall or other fortifications along the U.S./Mexican border, declaring that it would somehow stop commerce and that such a wall would be an affront to Mexico.

In point of fact, the wall President Trump is determined to construct would not block ports of entry into the United States, only make certain to funnel all traffic through ports of entry to stop the flow of illegal aliens and the criminals and potential terrorists among them from evading the vetting process conducted at ports of entry.

Furthermore, such fortifications would also go a long way to stopping the flood of contraband, particularly narcotics currently inundating the United States.

The proponents of open borders and immigration anarchy claim that sanctuary policies protect “immigrants” from immigration law enforcement authorities. Their position on border security and immigration law enforcement run in diametric opposition to the mission of the DHS.

In reality, lawful immigrants and temporary foreign visitors who abide by our laws need no protection from the the components agencies of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) who are charged with enforcing and administering our nation’s immigration laws.

Indeed, aliens who are lawfully admitted into the United States are admitted by CBP (Customs and Border Protection) inspectors and aliens who are granted immigration benefits such as political asylum, lawful immigrant status and even United States citizenship are granted those benefits by Adjudications Officers of USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) a division of the DHS.

Title 8, United States Code, Section 1182 is the section of law that enumerates the categories of aliens who are to be excluded from the United States and includes aliens who who suffer from dangerous communicable, diseases or extreme mental illness as are criminals, human rights violators, terrorists and spies. That law is utterly blind as to race, religion and/or ethnicity.

The media fosters the false narrative about immigration law enforcement by describing advocates for secure borders and effective immigration law enforcement as “Anti-Immigrant” while using the term “Pro-Immigrant” to describe immigration anarchists.

The use of misleading language is a tactic that undermines public understanding of critical issues and ultimately undermines our very democracy. In point of fact, The Road to Tyranny Is Paved with Language Censorship.

Having provided this background information, let’s go back to the seizure of that massive quantity of narcotics that included 141 pounds of pure fentanyl, making this the largest seizure of fentanyl in U.S. history.

Fentanyl is 50 times more potent than heroin.

In fact, according to the DEA, the fentanyl that was seized during this field operation could provide lethal doses to 32 million people.

In other words, according to the DEA, the quantity of fentanyl seized in that one apartment could kill roughly 10% of the entire population of the United States!

According that that Washington Post report Rogelio Alvarado-Robles and his wife Blanca Flores-Solis, had flown to New York City about a month before their arrest and that the couple had no criminal histories and carried no weapons but were described by law enforcement sources as one of the many Mexican “drug cartel emissaries” have turned New York City into their Northeast distributions hub that employs aliens from the Dominican Republic as their “sales teams” that move incredible quantities of drugs through the “Big Apple” to cities located in neighboring states.

The article also noted that this year more than 350 pounds of pure fentanyl has been seized in New York City, a ten-fold increase in the quantity of this deadly drug that was seized in 2016 and that last year more than 60,000 people died from drug overdoses in the United States, with a fivefold increase in deaths attributed to synthetic opioids as fentanyl as reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Washington Post report includes this excerpt:

According to DEA intelligence gleaned from wiretaps, about 80 percent of the fentanyl seized in the New York area appears to be linked to Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel. The organization remains North America’s dominant trafficking group, even as its leader, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, awaits trial in a maximum-security jail in Lower Manhattan.

Sinaloa’s smuggling machine has carried on without Guzman, meaning his legal defense may be funded in part with profits from fentanyl sales made just a few miles from his cell.

The Sinaloa group does not bother with retail-level commerce, according to the DEA. It uses New York to deliver large wholesale shipments to middlemen, typically local Dominican traffickers. Those groups distribute to markets in New England, Pennsylvania, Baltimore and other places where the opioid crisis is raging.

On September 18, 2017 the NYPD issued a press release about the investigation seizure of the record quantities of fentanyl that includes this excerpt about a terrifying trend:

These cases highlight the enormous amount of fentanyl surging through New York City, hitting the streets and escalating overdose deaths. According to the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, fentanyl is driving a spike in fatal overdoses, which reached an all-time high of 1,374 deaths in New York City in 2016 – 46% more than in 2015. A dangerously strong synthetic opioid, fentanyl is approximately 50 times stronger than heroin and is increasingly found mixed into the city’s illicit narcotics supply.

Dead is dead. While the number of people dying of gunshots wounds in NYC is decreasing, the number of deaths attributable to drug overdoses is skyrocketing but, incredibly, there is no mention of the fact that the couple arrested were citizens of Mexico, that the narcotics were smuggled into the United States from Mexico or that aliens from the Dominican Republic were used as “salesmen” to market these drugs on street corners of New York City and other cities across the Northeast.

This should not, perhaps come as a surprise because New York City is a “Sanctuary City” that not only shields illegal aliens from detection by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) but also provides “municipal ID” to hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens further enabling them to embed themselves in New York City.

Nearly five years ago the NY Times published an important and illuminating article, Roosevelt Avenue, a Corridor of Vice that reported on the nexus between illegal immigration, false identity documents and a variety of crimes including human trafficking, prostitution and narcotics.

Drug money bankrolls gangs and terror organizations. Drugs have a direct and indirect nexus to violent crime. Considering that most of the narcotics peddled in the United States is smuggled into the United States by aliens, it is beyond belief that any mayor of any city would turn his town or city into a magnet for aliens whose presence in the United States may undermine national security and public safety.

A few weeks ago I asked, Who Deserves The Drug Cartel’s MVP Award?

Mayors of “Sanctuary Cities” and governors of “Sanctuary States” must certainly be prime candidates for this “award.”