An island is a very tough thing to defend.  Just ask King Harold.  Your enemies can land virtually wherever they want around the island, and you have to scramble to be able to defend from unexpected attack from one side or another.  It’s one of the reasons that Great Britain developed such a powerful navy.  The logical thing is to confront the enemy before he can get on shore, anticipate the enemy’s line of attack, and even take the fight back to the opponent’s homeland.  A peninsula is very similar to an island in that regard.  The Romans, the Greeks all had powerful navies at their height. 

Florida is a peninsula and for a long time has been invaded by Cubans during the Mariel Boat Lift, drug smugglers throughout the 70s and 80s, and Cubans along with Haitians ever since. 

Back in 1982, the Border Patrol tried to stop some of the invasion inland.  They set up a roadblock to inspect vehicles along US 1.  Something the Border Patrol had legal justification for doing.  The Border Patrol won in court, but lost in the public’s eye and in the eyes of politicians.  The Conch Republic was formed when local residents protested and claimed they must be a separate nation since the U.S. government was treating them as such.  It looked like a wonderful excuse for a party, something Key West is no stranger to (ask Jimmy Buffett).  It proved that it is difficult to balance the legitimate rights of citizens and the ability to arrest illegal aliens.  Which is why interior enforcement against employers and those who harbor illegal aliens is so important.

For a long time, the policy toward Cuba was called the "wet foot, dry foot" policy informally.  If a Cuban was caught by the U.S. Coast Guard out at sea, they were then sent back to Cuba.  How that worked was they were actually sent to Guantanamo Bay and housed there for a time. I had a buddy in the Army who was there despite Guantanamo being run by the U.S. Navy and Marines.  He said that the Cubans were given all sorts of free stuff courtesy of charity groups.  The Cubans were supposed to wait in camp till they were formally sent back to Cuban authorities.  The wait could last weeks, and some of the failed migrant Cubans would get tired of waiting and try to walk back into Cuba.  Unfortunately for them, the area outside the camp gate was heavily mined and they would often set one off.  Then the Army had to get out the map of where the mines were buried and carefully tip-toe through the minefield to retrieve the corpse. 

In one of the few things that Obama did to increase enforcement, he stopped the wet foot, dry foot policy.  Obama wasn’t really trying to increase enforcement; he was trying to normalize relations with Cuba. 

All that made Cubans do was to start going to Mexico and up through our southern border there.  Even before Obama ended the program, I can remember encountering Cubans coming in from Mexico.  They didn’t run, but just surrendered to us knowing they would get asylum, a harbinger of things to come.

I was talking to some friends recently who said that the area of El Paso is starting to die down a bit.  The huge numbers are not as great.  I speculate that the invasion caused too big a stink in Democratic circles and was making the Democratic mayor of El Paso look bad, and open-borders Democrat representative Veronica Escobar (F-rating from NumbersUSA) didn’t need more bad publicity.  Plus, illegal aliens phone home to let their relatives know how things are going.  If those invaders are sleeping on the street and miserable, their relatives hear about it quickly.

However, Florida has a Republican governor—let the floodgates open back up!  Now, the Border Patrol is starting to detail agents over to Florida to help with all the illegal aliens coming through there. 

At first, they just wanted BP agents to help process, but now, they even want the Border Patrol’s boat patrols to help out. 

#BREAKING: Miami Sector #BorderPatrol agents & LE partners responded to a maritime smuggling event that made landfall at Lantana in #PalmBeach County. 8 migrants of mixed nationalities were taken into custody (Haitian, Jamaican, Colombian, Guyanese). Event is under investigation. pic.twitter.com/Ne2STqDHpR

— Chief Patrol Agent Walter N. Slosar (@USBPChiefMIP) August 31, 2022

Like I said, the invasion continues.