Our Southern Border is Trashed, Dangerous

By Robert Park
Volume 16, Number 1 (Fall 2005)
Issue theme: "Numbers, population and energy: Professor Albert Bartlett's public education campaign"

The governors of Arizona and New Mexico have made a gesture toward dealing with our crisis on the border, all the while continuing to hold hands with their counterparts in Mexico.

In 1980, President Jimmy Carter declared an emergency in Florida over a paltry 125,000 Cubans and sent troops to deal with it. Among that group were some serious bad guys and some mental cases.

Twenty plus years later, by some estimates, three million illegals cross our nation's southern

border annually, laying waste to thousands of acres of private, state, federal and Indian lands. Fires are set in national forests; the fragile Sonoran Desert is being trampled to dust; tons and tons of clothing, trash and human waste are discarded randomly in such places as the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area, Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, and Cabeza Prieta Refuge where the Sonoran Pronghorn is being driven to extinction -- extinction, as in forever damage only a tank armada can surpass. No one living today will see much, if any, of it restored. Not even tax dollars can help.

Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument has been designated America's most dangerous park a site where Park Ranger Kris Eggle was murdered by a drug smuggler. That's to say nothing of the carnage on our roadways by drug and people smugglers including the murder of six people in a horrific traffic collision in Sierra Vista last October.

Much of the area is a no-man's land where nearly each and every death that occurs is classifiable as murder.

Even our military's training missions are disrupted when invaders make intrusions.

After years of mis- or malfeasance in Washington, the Border Patrol was finally given a most important tool direct access to the FBI criminal fingerprint data base known as IAFIS. Get this in its first nine months of operation, it identified 102,024 lookouts involving major crimes to include 391 homicide suspects, 136 kidnapping suspects, 525 sexual assault suspects, 849 robbery suspects, 5,154 suspects for assaults of other types, and 10,394 suspects involved with dangerous narcotics. All this as a direct result of IAFIS technology.

Go back just 5 years. That's approximately 650,000 criminals who made it, lurking in neighborhoods across America awaiting amnesty.

Article IV Section 4 of our Constitution states in part "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against invasion" (emphasis added). The Founders had invasion on their minds. It is mentioned in four places without it having been defined.

Ten years have passed since six states charged the federal government with having failed to meet its obligation under the Invasion Clause. As mentioned above, matters have grown exponentially worse.

American patience has grown thin a fact made highly visible by the recent heroic Minuteman Project.

Let's go back to court!

About the author

Robert Park is founder of the Article IV, Section 4 Foundation, the name of which refers to the wording in the U.S. Constitution regarding invasion. He lives in Prescott, Arizona. This is the text of a letter recently submitted to the Arizona Tribune.