Prediction: On one of the most pressing homeland security issues facing the nation, President Bush will have nothing - nada - to say during his State of the Union address.
I am talking, of course, about the state of our borders.
The Bush White House remains shamefully silent about the brutal murder of U.S. Park Ranger Kris Eggle. This 28-year-old American was gunned down last summer by an AK-47-toting illegal alien drug smuggler who waltzed across the southern border into Arizona's Organ Pipe National Monument.
According to the Park Service, as many as 1,000 illegal aliens a day trample across the park-trashing our fences, ruining the environment, breaking our laws, and endangering lives. It's a smugglers' paradise and a national security nightmare. "We have caught people from China, Pakistan and Yemen coming through," Bo Stone, an Organ Pipe ranger and close friend of Eggle's, told the Los Angeles Times this week. [The Law Loses Out at U.S. Parks, January 23, 2003, by Ralph Vartabedian]
"If 1,000 illegal immigrants can walk through the desert here, so can 1,000 terrorists."
Kris's father, Bob, a Vietnam veteran told me last fall on a trip to Washington, D.C.: "I gave an eye for one war. Now, I've given my son for another. What is our president going to do about the war on our borders?"
Despite recent press coverage from the L.A. Times, Wall Street Journal, National Geographic magazine, and Outside magazine, the Eggle family still has received no phone call, no acknowledgement, from the Bush White House in response to their call for border reform and serious enforcement of our laws.
Bob Eggle noted at a press conference in October:
"The Mexico-American border is in chaos and is virtually a non-border. I have been involved there as a volunteer for the National Park Service and attempted to repair the border fence, only to have it knocked down again a couple of hours later. That non-border contributed to Kris' death."
The story is the same on the northern border, where just last week two reporters for the Toronto Star illegally crossed a dozen easy entry points between the land boundaries that separate Quebec from Vermont and New York state.
Mangled fences and battered stop signs spraypainted with "U.S.A." are all that stand in the way.
"After September 11th, we all need to be concerned about border security and how easy it is to get in this country," Bob Eggle says. "Kris's death needs to bring about reform. We have to make his sacrifice meaningful."
Peter Gadiel, a lifelong Republican from Connecticut, [and a board member of Coalition for a Secure Driver's License] is on a similar crusade to get his president to address illegal immigration as a national security issue. He, too, lost a son because of the government's lax border and entrance enforcement policies. James Gadiel, 23, died in the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. He was an assistant trader at Cantor Fitzgerald.
"When you have 8 to 11 million illegal immigrants living here in the U.S, it's hard to notice 18 or 20 terrorists," Peter Gadiel argues. It is that ocean of illegals that "allowed the hijackers to plan, rehearse, finance and carry out their mass murders over a long period of time, almost completely free of fear that they would be discovered."
Some 300,000 illegal alien fugitives remain on the loose despite deportation orders. There is still no systematic tracking of criminal alien felons across the country. Sanctuary for illegal aliens remains the policy in almost every major metropolis. Banks and local governments continue to accept sham Mexican ID cards to "regularize" the existence of alien lawbreakers. And "catch and release" remains standard operating procedure for untold thousands of illegal aliens who pass through the fingers of federal immigration authorities every day.
Nevertheless, the Republican Party elites in Washington continue to turn a blind eye. As grass-roots conservative stalwart Phyllis Schlafly has noted, the Republican National Committee's mail-order surveys on important national issues omit immigration and border security.
Meanwhile, the White House refuses to meet with the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus, led by Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado.
"The simple truth is that we've lost control of our own borders," Ronald Reagan warned nearly two decades ago, "and no nation can do that and survive."
We ignore America's lost sovereignty at our peril.
Michelle Malkin is author of Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores. Click here for Peter Brimelow's review. Click here for Michelle Malkin's website.
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