On a recent trip to the southern border, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) witnessed coyotes brazenly smuggling illegal aliens across the Rio Grande in broad daylight as border patrol and local police watched on.
Bachmann shot video of the entire episode on her iPhone, the footage of which she provided exclusively to Breitbart News.
“You see the Jeep pulling up to the water of the Rio Grande on the Mexican side,” Bachmann told Breitbart News.
“You see a guy get out of the back of the Jeep, he blows up a 12-man raft and then a very pregnant woman gets inside. It’s in broad daylight–5 o’clock in the afternoon, yesterday afternoon. They get in the raft and start taking off, and there’s an island in the middle of the river in no man’s land and that’s usually the direction they head but in this case, you heard it–they went straight to the U.S. border,” Bachmann said.
The video shows men in a raft dropping off a woman on the U.S. side of the river, after which a Border Patrol truck approaches her location.
Later, while agents are addressing the first situation, a second boat – powered by individuals using their hands to paddle – crosses the river downstream. A border patrol agent overheard on the video said he suspected the second boat had narcotics on it and that the first boat and departure of a pregnant woman was a decoy to distract the law enforcement officials from the drug smuggling.
“They did it knowingly while we were standing outside at the top of the block, and while the Border Patrol were there and the local police were there,” Bachmann said. “There were people everywhere, cars everywhere from the law enforcement–up on the block where we were and down below which is an abandoned park, there’s so much drug dealing and so many illegal aliens coming through that that part of the town, Roma, has just been abandoned.”
When the pregnant woman landed in the U.S., “she said she had ‘credible fear’ which are the–that’s the golden ticket right now for a woman and her child to be able to get out. When I was standing with the border security guard watching all of this go down, he said that behind this raft there were another four and they were running drugs from Mexico into the United States,” Bachmann said.
WATCH THE VIDEOS FROM CONGRESSWOMAN MICHELE BACHMANN:
Bachmann said the drug cartel active in the area–the Gulf Cartel, which is connected with criminal gang MS-13–uses this location as a major drug smuggling hub. Law enforcement catches about 8,000 pounds of drugs–and burns them there–each week, she was told, or roughly $3-6 million in street value. “That’s just a small portion of what goes through–it’s marijuana, it’s meth, cocaine, it’s heroin. That’s what they catch going through, and burn, per week.”
This story and video is just the first part of a lengthy interview with Bachmann on her trip to the border with Rep. Steve King (R-IA) and on what they witnessed while there. Specifically, regarding the role of U.S. law enforcement under President Barack Obama’s policies, Bachmann said the Border Patrol has been reduced to “people processing” rather than protecting the United States. The effect, she added, is that the United States has open border by executive order from President Obama.
“I thought that Border Patrol actually stopped people from coming into the United States,” Bachmann said. “I thought that’s what Border Patrol was about: Stop people from coming in. But effectively 100 percent of any foreign nationals who want to come in, come in. There’s virtually no one who doesn’t come into the United States–the question is whether they’ll be allowed to stay. So, Border Patrol’s function, from my vantage point, was people processing. That’s what Border Patrol is doing: They process people. They take the people into the system.”
Bachmann said that the “amount of money that is spent” courtesy of U.S. taxpayers on this process–rather than just deporting the illegal aliens immediately–is “stunning.”
“If they’re children or women, they get a shower and clean clothes, a medical examination, they get food and something to drink,” Bachmann said. “If they have a medical issue, they’re taken to an emergency room, like for instance in McAllen it costs $1,200 a visit. If it’s Catholic charities, they call an ambulance to transfer the foreign national to the emergency room. Once the emergency room visit is done–and of course, McAllen pays the cost of that emergency room visit and for the ambulance–after they’re done, Catholic charities go around and pick up the foreign nationals and bring them back to Catholic charities.”
Bachmann said that President Obama shouldn’t be given any more money by Congress to deal with the border crisis.
“I think what people should do right is they should melt the phone lines of their members of Congress–and I’m including Republicans in this,” Bachmann said. “They should melt whoever their senators are, whoever their congressman is, and say don’t give President Obama a dime for this issue. Don’t give him a dime for this issue. Because, I’ll tell you, it’s all going to go to Health and Human Services–every bit of it. All we’ll do is make this faster and more efficient. What we’ll do [if we give Obama any money] is send the message that ‘hey, this isn’t a bad process. It’s pretty easy. Why don’t you come in?'”