Massive caravan on 'illegal immigration superhighway'

For most people, the pain of mass illegal immigration has been abstract.

That’s about to change.

Anyone crossing the U.S.-Mexico border could end up stuck in longer lines as officers are pulled from the land ports of entry and deployed to help the Border Patrol transport, feed and see to the medical needs of the tens of thousands of people streaming illegally into the U.S. each week.

Mexican officials warn of another caravan of 20,000 migrants preparing to shoot north, hoping to take advantage of the lax enforcement in both Mexico and lenient policies in the U.S. About 100,000 immigrants responding to those incentives have been nabbed at the border in March alone.

“The result is an illegal immigration superhighway that’s flowing through Mexico,” one senior Homeland Security Department official told The Washington Times.

By now, the nature of the border problem is clear: Families and children, assisted by drug smuggling cartels, have figured out how to exploit loopholes in federal law to gain a foothold in the U.S. They are coming in larger numbers and poorer health, and Homeland Security says it has reached the breaking point.

Plans call for as many as 750 officers to be re-deployed, and one Homeland Security official told The Washington Times that as many as 2,500 Homeland Security staffers could eventually be pulled from across the department to help out.

The re-deployed staff will be put to work transporting, processing and watching the migrants who need medical care. Border Patrol agents already are spending as much as 40 percent of their duty time performing those tasks.

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