I Visited the Southern Border – It’s Worse Than I Imagined

As a candidate for Congress in a Southern California, I just went down to the San Diego Sector border with my team to learn about the crisis and how it’s impacting our community firsthand. We spoke with Border Patrol agents. We travelled miles of border wall. We checked out a port of entry. 

We watched as over a dozen migrants illegally crossed over. We also missed 75 people who climbed and slid down the border wall just hours earlier.

Our conclusion was unavoidable: the border crisis is far worse than we had imagined. The system is more broken than the media and President Biden make it seem. The solution is not only more walls, infrastructure and agents. The hard reality is that the border crisis is being caused by smugglers and cartels taking advantage of our country’s broken asylum laws. This crisis won’t end until we overhaul them. 

I went to the border to learn more about the crisis on the front lines. It's worse than I imagined.

We put together a video to share what we saw and learned. People need to know what's really going on.

Bottom line: this crisis won't end until we overhaul our broken asylum laws. pic.twitter.com/OGEeaBKJBH

— Max Ukropina (@MaxUkropina) December 13, 2023

The first thing we saw on our trip were glaring 50-yard gaps in the border walls at Otay Mesa, just a few miles from the Pacific Ocean. We were told that construction crews had raced to close the gap before receiving the order from the Biden Administration to stop. Biden’s decision was a major policy failure: anyone in Border Patrol will tell you that physical barriers have greatly improved their ability to do their jobs. 

Border Patrol uses the gap in the wall as a “choke point” to focus their efforts. They deploy scope trucks, censors, cameras, and other technology to monitor the gap for any migrants crossing over. In the span of just twenty minutes, our team personally witnessed migrants illegally cross through to enter the U.S. in broad daylight.

This is where it gets even worse. Thanks to our country’s lax asylum laws, anyone who crosses over illegally can claim asylum and be safely transported to get their claim processed. If the processing center is full, border patrol may simply tell them to wait until tomorrow. Due to the massive backlog of asylum claims, they may wait years for a court date, during which time they are permitted to legally live and work in the United States. 

Word has gotten out that an asylum claim has become a de facto ticket into the United States. You can cross anywhere. Even if your claim is ultimately denied, you could legally remain in the country for years. It presents a low-risk opportunity for a migrant, or for a trafficker willing to charge a hefty fee to smuggle them in.  

The result is a border disaster of historical proportions. As traffickers have wised up to the rules, illegal border crossings and asylum claims have skyrocketed. The courts are a mess. Migrants from every corner constantly show up at the border claiming asylum after crossing through a handful of other safe countries. Many claims are legitimate and should be protected. Others are clearly bunk. Moreover, this open invitation is causing a humanitarian crisis. Border crossers are risking life and limb to illegally enter instead of going through a port of entry. Women and children are subjected to routine sexual abuse.

This shouldn’t be happening. Asylum laws were designed to provide safe harbor to anyone fleeing legitimate violence or persecution at the next country they step into. Instead, our liberal asylum laws have become a pathway for a free ticket into the United States, taking advantage of the generosity of the American people, bleeding our resources dry, and distorting the public’s perception of asylum in the process.

This has serious implications for our national security. Many migrants are apprehended. Many get away, leaving us with no idea of who they were or where they came from. Hundreds of terror watchlist members have been caught at the border. Those are who we know about! While Border Patrol is forced to spend more of their time apprehending and transporting asylum seekers, drug cartels are taking advantage of the chaos, finding opportunities to send fentanyl smugglers over the border where and when they know there’s a slim chance of getting caught. One agent told us that they are out-funded by the cartels 3-1. Smuggling is highly profitable. Administering false asylum claims is not.

Our visit to the border was eye-opening. We need to finish the wall and invest in border security. But it’s obvious this will not end until we remove the magnet that is bringing an unprecedented surge of migrants to our border. 

Congress needs to act immediately to tighten our asylum laws: prohibit migrants claiming asylum unless they do so through a port of entry, tighten screening to ensure illegitimate claims don’t get through to begin with, and improve the courts to decrease wait times to days, not years. 

Until we change our laws, the border will always be overwhelmed with people trying to get in. Our policymakers aren’t willing to change the laws. It’s time to change our policymakers.