Op-ed: Got-Away Traffic Drops Like A Rock At This Notorious Stretch Of The Border

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico – “Hit the gas!” I barked at my translator behind the wheel of our rental car. “Let’s get the f*** out of here!” We tore off, leaving the reflections of two cartel gunmen, a shiny handgun in the waistband on one, shrinking in our rearview mirror.

The confrontation happened one year ago on the Juarez, Mexico side of the U.S. border along a locally notorious, miles-long stretch of steel mesh border wall that closely paralleled Mexican Highway 174 and made it a natural human smuggling corridor tightly controlled by the ultra-violent La Linea Cartel.

It was April 2024, and I’d gone to this dangerous stretch of the border opposite Santa Teresa, New Mexico, to observe a phenomenon that few Americans ever saw during the worst, four-year mass migration event in U.S. history — hundreds of immigrants the U.S. Border Patrol calls “runners” who become “got-aways” were crossing every day here by cutting holes in an old border wall along Mexico Highway 174.

. . .

A year later, just this month, I went back to the Highway 174 wall to contrast what has happened on that stretch since President Trump put policies in place that reduced illegal immigration border-length to historic lows.

Apparently, quite a lot.

After scouting both the U.S. and Mexican sides of this wall and highway over four days, I found only trackless emptiness. I found no open cuts in the wall, and no halcones with binoculars standing along out in the desert. The sand was windblown rather than churned with the footprints of immigrant runners. A government-contracted welder I encountered slow-cruising the American side of the fence line told me the repairs had fallen from 10-12 every day during the Biden years to just three or four, and sometimes none.

The got-away traffic has dropped like a rock on this infamous stretch of border.

. . .

[Read the whole thing at The Daily Wire.]