Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
A wall along the Mexican border is the best solution to stem the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States, according to state Rep. Jeff Kropf.
Kropf joined the Minutemen patrolling the border from April 8 to April 16 on the border southwest of Tucson, Ariz. Kropf worked out of a private 50,000-acre ranch about 30 miles north of the border crossing at Susabe.
Kropf represents House District 17, including Sweet Home. He went to Arizona “to see how bad it really is and try to understand how it might impact Oregon.”
He came away with “two very strong impressions,” Kropf said – “the incredible amount of garbage and environmental degradation on the desert close to the border” and the human trafficking network that victimizes illegal immigrants.
Kropf volunteered to fly an airplane to spot illegal immigrants from the air.
Flying along the border, Kropf saw “hundreds of trails that look almost like a highway.”
Clothes are strewn along these trails, especially as they reach U.S. highways, Kropf said. As they near the end of their 50-mile journey, they discard their traveling clothes and get ready to be picked up by the human trafficking network.
“They discard everything into the desert,” Kropf said.
The desert is littered with one-gallon plastic milk jugs for carrying water, Kropf said.
Flying during the day, Kropf said he rarely saw groups of illegal immigrants. During the day, they would hide under the mesquite trees to avoid being spotted by aircraft. They bed down during the day in dark clothing to blend in with the mesquite. They also hide in washes. At a lower elevation than surrounding terrain, they are more difficult to spot from the ground.
“It’s tragic that we’re allowing people to literally just walk across the border,” Kropf said. “I followed the trails all the way down to the border.”
He flew along the border, which was nothing more than barbed cattle wire, Kropf said. Hundreds of trails cross this fence.
“It took me a while to learn how to spot the illegals,” Kropf said. At 500 feet, he couldn’t see anyone through the thick brush, but he learned to fly at 20 feet, just above a stall, “looking sideways through the trees.”
“What we would do then is we would call our headquarters, give the GPS coordinates,” Kropf said. “They would call the Border Patrol, which would sometimes come out and sometimes not because they are so busy.”
“The Border Patrol is dealing with “an increasing influx of people into the area,” Kropf said. In just February, the Border Patrol arrested 4,200 illegal immigrants in Tucson, and for every one arrested, three or four get through.
The Minutemen cannot touch or detain illegal immigrants, Kropf said, so they always call the Border Patrol. The American Civil Liberties Union is on the scene interviewing anyone reported to the Border Patrol by the Minutemen.
“The ACLU will sue any Minuteman that touches an illegal,” Kropf said. “The ACLU aids and abets these people. At least down there that organization was very vile.”
Across from the Minutemen headquarters, the ACLU had a banner attached to a balloon, he said. On the banner was a Spanish expletive.
Kropf hosted his radio show while in Arizona, and he interviewed local ranch owners, people who had lived in the area for more than 30 years. They told him illegals had always come across the border, but it absolutely picked up during the 1990s. Since Congress has started talking about amnesty, it has continued to get increasingly worse, Kropf said. The ranch owners were happy to have the Minutemen operating in the area. It made them feel safer.
One ranch owner would not allow his 21-year-old daughter to ride her horse around the ranch because of the danger presented by a large criminal element among the illegal immigrants, which include Guatemalans, Hondurans, Iraqis, Chinese and other Middle Eastern nationalities, along with the human traffickers.
“Many of these people have criminal records,” Kropf said. They choose to enter the States over the Mexican border because they can’t get in legally.
Many coming across the border are paying $1,500 to $2,000 to guides, called coyotes, Kropf said. Those guides and other parts of the trafficking network and other illegals rape women trying to cross the border.
Two days before Kropf arrived, the Minutemen he worked with found an 18-year-old girl wandering the desert. She had been raped three days earlier.
“This is part of the second impression I’ll share with you,” Kropf said. “I did not understand how sophisticated the network is, and how they exploit illegal immigrants.”
Kropf and his colleagues found a “rape tree,” Kropf said. They went and shot film of it. The branches of the tree had bras and panties hanging like trophies. The coyotes often feel entitled to rape the women.
“The coyotes will leave people behind,” Kropf said. “If you get hurt, they’ll leave you behind.”
After illegal immigrants cross the desert, they are picked up and taken to safe houses and jobs already waiting for them courtesy of the network, Kropf said. All along the way, every part of the network is paid.
Local ranchers take pay to hide illegal immigrants, Kropf said. Drug runners pay local ranchers to look the other way.
From the safe houses, they are transferred to locations across America, including Oregon, Kropf said. By this point, the illegal immigrant owes thousands of dollars to the network, and they must pay the network off before sending money back to Mexico, which is Mexico’s second largest flow of revenue at more than $60 billion per year.
“It’s human trafficking,” Kropf said. “It’s immoral, and it’s illegal. I think what these people are doing is inhumane.”
Many die in the desert, and many are left behind, Kropf said. The network must be held accountable, including anyone who provides jobs or safe houses. “All of them are criminals and ought to be put in jail.”
Kropf wants to introduce a bill next session to do what Georgia did and require 20- to 25-year sentences for anyone convicted of human trafficking, he said.
Opening the border “is absolutely the wrong thing to do,” Kropf said. “It’ll just make it worse.”
If immigrants do not come to the United States legally, they cannot be tracked and they overburden social service systems, Kropf said. They use medical care, food stamps, subsidized housing and more, but they never pay for any of it.
“How many of these kids does it take to fill up our schools?” Kropf asked. Some 59 percent of illegal immigrants do not pay income taxes to help pay for the schools.
Oregon does not verify citizenship for these services, Kropf said, and he wants to introduce comprehensive reform at the state level to deny state services to illegal immigrants.
“The best thing we can do is make sure Mexico’s economy is strong, and they won’t come here,” Kropf said, but Mexico is corrupt. Hardly anything is accomplished without a bribe, and the nation has no social services.
American companies are investing in Mexico, something about which Kropf has mixed feelings, but the North American Free Trade Agreement hasn’t really created the prosperity in Mexico promised by its supporters.
“We have to build a wall that will stop these people from coming across the border,” Kropf said. “It won’t stop it all, but you can easily stop what I witnessed. The way we deal with this is simply lock down the southern border.”
The United States could patrol the wall with the same number of agents it has today, Kropf said. “Of all the crazy ideas out there, this is the one that makes the most sense. If a common-sense rancher has to do that to protect himself, why can’t we as a nation? I’ve grudgingly come to the conclusion that building a wall is the only way to stop the flood of people coming across the border.”
It will stop 90 percent of the illegal immigration, Kropf said, something that is costing the United States $100 billion per year. About half of the inmates in California’s prison system are illegal immigrants, Kropf said.
For those who want to come here to work, the guest worker mess needs fixed to make it simpler for Mexicans to get green cards to work here legally, Kropf said.