The Kammy Harris joke continues.
She is rightly scorned for using her southern trip to visit El Paso instead of the real hotbed of illegal immigration.
But the media misses the real point of why she is an idiot.
Under the deportation policies of the early 1990s, Border Patrol agents apprehended as many aliens as they could, but even those deported generally found ways to make it back across the border in the following days and weeks. Observing the ineffectiveness of this approach, Silvestre Reyes, then-Chief of the El Paso Sector of Border Patrol, decided that deterring illegal entry into the country altogether was a more efficient strategy than focusing solely on apprehensions.
Under Reyes’s leadership, Border Patrol’s Operation Hold the Line increased the volume of border agents and dramatically improved the physical barriers already in place in El Paso starting in 1993. The Operation began as a 20-mile blockade of 400 agents and vehicles every 100 yards along the border on each side of El Paso. It established the border control strategy that influences our nation’s immigration policies to this day.
As a result of Reyes’s groundbreaking initiative, border apprehensions dropped from nearly 300,000 to under 80,000 per year—culminating in over a 70 percent reduction. With the implementation of Operation Hold the Line, Reyes not only proved to his city, his state, and his country that borders can in fact be secured, but also provided the model for border security and immigration policies for years and decades to come. Following the success of the Operation, Congress allocated funds to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service so that Reyes’s “extremely effective border patrol model” could be replicated in other parts of the country.
Reyes was later elected to Congress, where he served eight consecutive terms as a democrat and as the first Latino to represent El Paso.
FBI statistics show during the Trump Administration El Paso rose to become one of America’s safest cities—even in spite of its nearness to the border and close proximity to Juarez, Mexico, one of the most dangerous cities in the world.
When President Trump left office, El Paso had 131 miles of fully constructed border wall and experienced an overwhelming cutback in drug and smuggling activities in places where new border wall had been constructed. In two of U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s El Paso zones, apprehensions decreased by as much as 80 percent from the first half of fiscal year 2020 to its second half.
So thanks, Kammy, for visiting El Paso.
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