Mules Rush In
“They’re taking our jobs.” It’s a phrase you hear associated with immigration, especially during election years. But these days, some of the people complaining about jobs being taken are Mexican drug mules. The cartels have figured out a more effective way to get often-deadly fentanyl across the border: hire someone with an American passport to do it. “The teenager practiced driving from his apartment in San Diego down to Tijuana and back, on the orders of the criminals he was working for in Mexico. He rehearsed how he would respond to questions from U.S. border officers. He tracked when the drug-sniffing dogs took a break. The men who were paying him had cut a secret compartment into his car big enough to fit several bricks of fentanyl. When they loaded it up for the first time and sent him toward the border, Gustavo, who was only 19 at the time, began to tremble. At the checkpoint, he steadied himself like he had practiced, and calmly told the border officers that he was just heading home.” NYT (Gift Article): The American Drug Mules Smuggling Fentanyl Into the U.S. “In reality, the largest known group of fentanyl smugglers is not made up of immigrants traversing the desert or moving through secret tunnels — they are Americans coming through legal ports of entry. More than 80 percent of the people sentenced for fentanyl trafficking at the southern border are U.S. citizens, federal data shows.” That’s a statistic you won’t hear during an immigrant-demonizing political rally. But the truth is stubborn as a mule.
+ The governor was initially reluctant to let me see that story close up, to let me embed with him in Springfield. He didn’t want to expose or exacerbate tensions in the community. Yet as Senator JD Vance continued to insist that his lie about eating pets was true and to falsely call the Haitians ‘illegal aliens,’ DeWine grew ‘just more infuriated,’ as he put it to me over dinner. ‘Yeah, after a while, because it got cumulative, and then you keep thinking, ‘Well, they’re going to stop this,’ he said. ‘Well, they didn’t stop this, they just keep going.'” Politico Magazine on Mike DeWine in Ohio. ‘Just Not Right’: A GOP Governor Confronts Trump’s Lies. (However, it’s not wrong enough for DeWine to pull his support of Trump. And there’s the rub.)
+ “A flood of threats was directed not only at him, but his family and his business. They came by the hundreds — phone calls, emails and letters from white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other people they had never met.” Why is a lifelong Republican taking classes on using a gun to defend himself and his family? Because he dared to say something positive about his Haitian employees in Springfield. NYT (Gift Article): An Ohio Businessman Faces Death Threats for Praising His Haitian Workers.
