Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol agents have recently experienced vicious, hate-filled rhetoric. Leftist radicals in Congress falsely claimed that these agencies were running Nazi-like concentration camps. The Left wrongly accused them of withholding hygiene products and other necessities. The Left alarmed the country with the patently absurd allegation that agents forced detained women to drink from toilets.

None of their claims are true.

The chorus of Orwellian chants was perpetuated by the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who made the inflammatory statements that border and immigration agents were torturing children, and in some cases, murdering illegal aliens.

The Left, the base of the Democrats, took these assertions at face value. This rhetoric has produced persistent, virulent attacks on the brave men and women who protect our border, enforce our laws, and defend America’s sovereignty.

The Democrats have continued to attack our agents while providing a reticence to remove incentives for people to make the dangerous journey to enter our country illegally.

I pointed out in a hearing that the information I have received, and the evidence adduced from my multiple visits to the border, indicates that the drug and human trafficking cartels determine who is allowed to cross our border. The Democrats gasped in unison that someone would make such a claim. But they silently paint their narrative that the United States is running a regime of terror on would be, sainted, illegal border crossers.

The piso, the protection cost imposed by the cartels includes the fee for the coyotes, the fee to bribe Mexican officials, and the various cartels that control the plazas (the geographical areas controlled by each, respective cartel affiliate) along the border. Even legal cross-border commercial trucking enterprises must pay the piso.

In the meantime, Democrats are fixated on preventing the changes necessary to slow the flow of illegal aliens into our country. If we advocate for the rule of law, Democrats charge that we are racists. If we emphasize legal immigration over open borders, we are labeled xenophobic. The tolerant Left is never tolerant to those who disagree with its position.

So, we see continued inflammatory, ad hominem attacks by the radical Democrats. What does that produce? Threats to individual ICE and CBP agents, their families, and even their pets.

I have long asserted that Democrats prefer rights for illegal aliens over protections for Americans. Their outrageous attacks on any who are trying to enforce laws enacted by Congress, the body in which many of these radicals serve, undermines the law that they so quaintly claim others are failing to obey.

Democrats live in a fantasy world filled with cognitive dissonance. When I visit border facilities, I see food, water, medical care, free clothes, and other humanitarian efforts for those who willfully violated U.S. law and sovereignty. Democrats see inhumane, tortuous conduct on the part of jack-booted thugs.

I recently visited a remote port of entry in New Mexico and found an agent exposed in the last several weeks to mumps, measles, hepatitis A, B, and C, lice, scabies, and many other diseases – including a flesh-eating bacteria that experts have been unable to identify. But the agent persists because it is his job. He loves this nation and is committed to the mission of protecting our border and enforcing our laws.

If only the Democrats were also interested in protecting our border. If only they had as much respect for those who are trying to protect this nation as they have concern for those who do not care for this country or knowingly break our laws in illegally crossing the border. If only those who come illegally weren’t so insistent on waving the flags of the countries from which they fled over the American flag. If only Democrats were living in the real world.