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.
"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's 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, 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.
