Border Patrol agents have arrested 353 illegal immigrants so far this fiscal year on charges of sex-related crimes, many with a history of prior convictions involving minors. During the same period in fiscal year 2020, Border Patrol had only apprehended 55 such criminals. In other words, arrests have increased by 542 percent. For all of fiscal year 2019, only 58 criminal sex offenders were arrested.
“There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t read a paper or a report from my agents that talks about criminal aliens, sexual offenders that they’ve apprehended out there… Those folks aren’t getting released in these communities. Guess what happens to them? They go to jail. When they get out of jail, they go back to their country of origin,” Acting Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz said at an event in Del Rio, Texas, according to The Epoch Times.
Ortiz, who was appointed to his post on June 24, revealed that the Border Patrol has detected over 250,000 illegal immigrants crossing into the United States so far this year who have evaded capture.
Some of the arrested sex offenders were deported previously. For example, a child rapist from Peru was arrested on June 14 by Border Patrol from Roma, Texas. The man was deported last year after serving five years in prison for another child rape incident. On June 20, a Mexican national was arrested while attempting to enter the United States. The man had been convicted in 2018 for indecent acts involving a child in Dallas.
According to Del Rio sector chief Austin Skero, the sector has seen a 1,400 percent surge in the number of sex offenders apprehended by border agents. The chief said that he has never seen such a large surge in the past three or four decades, and that the situation has “never been this bad.”
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“I have four daughters—does it concern me when you say there’s a 1,400 percent increase in sex offenders? Yes, it concerns me,” a resident from Del Rio said to The Epoch Times.
In an interview with Breitbart in early June, Texas Governor Greg Abbott stated that he would start building barriers at the Rio Grande border in areas where migrants could easily cross over into Texas. He hopes to not only stem the flow of illegals, but also empower state law enforcement to arrest migrants who violate the state law by crossing the barriers.
“They’re (residents) seeing a lot of very bad dangerous people come across the border… People that they are afraid of encountering, people who are causing damage to their fences, their livestock, their crops, their neighborhoods, and their homes… Bad things are happening around here, and so they need help from the state to help them address this exploding crisis,” Abbott said in the interview.
According to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the agency encountered 180,034 people attempting to enter America along the Southwest border in May 2021. Compared to the 23,237 encounters in the same month last year, there was a 674 percent increase.
Operation Talon
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), under President Joe Biden’s administration, canceled Operation Talon, a nationwide operation by ICE focused on removing illegally present convicted sex offenders from the country.
In February, a coalition of attorneys general from 18 states wrote a letter to Biden, expressing outrage at the cancelation of Operation Talon. The document cited several statistics on sex offenses committed by illegal aliens:
- Between October 2014 and May 2018, ICE arrested 119,752 illegal immigrants with criminal convictions, many of whom had prior convictions for sex-related offenses. 5,565 had been convicted for sexual assault, 4,910 had been convicted for child molestation, and 675 had been convicted for exploiting children through child pornography or sexual performances.
- In 2017, one percent of illegal immigrants arrested by Border Patrol had prior sexual offense convictions. In 2020, the number rose to six percent.
“The cancellation of this program effectively broadcasts to the world that the United States is now a sanctuary jurisdiction for sexual predators. This message creates a perverse incentive for foreign sexual predators to seek to enter the United States illegally and assault more victims, both in the process of unlawful migration and after they arrive,” the letter stated.
