Below is my initial bias regarding this issue before I wrote the following 5,500 words on this topic. How I felt at the end of writing this is in Section 5.
I’m very biased on this issue.
I’m a Texan and I want to secede from the United States. I do not wish to be a part of this country, nor do I wish to be subject to the whims of a federal government that is far removed from me and does not share any of my concerns. The closer the government is to me (both in size and geography) the more influence I have over it and the more likely it is to be representative of my concerns and the concerns of my community. A larger government that is further distant from you is by definition less representative than a smaller one that is closer to you. Some people have no interest in a government that represents them or that advocates on behalf of their beliefs, that is not me. I very much wish that if a government is to represent me, that it be small and as near to me as possible.
That is my bias, and that is the lens through which you should view the entirety of everything I say here. I will be objective about objective facts but understand that the opinions I state in this piece flow through this bias.
Table of Contents
The Feds Own The Southern Border
Formal vs. Informal Border Crossing
Formally Crossing The Border
Informally Crossing The Border
Rampant Child Trafficking
Modern Day Opium War
Sick Men of Asia
Synthetic Opiates and US Cities
The Texas Governor Pushes Back
How I Really Feel/Conclusion
Internal References
1. The Feds Own the Southern Border
According to US legislation as it exists today, securing the border is the responsibility of the Federal Government. The Supreme Court interprets Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution as granting the federal legislature authority over immigration, nationalization, and border security. A US Customs office was one of the first things signed into law in 1790. The Appropriations Act of 1924 officially created the Border Patrol. ICE and the DHS were created in 2001 through the Patriot Act. You can read the entire history of legislation regarding the border here if you want to. There is no debate about this fact.
The United States government possesses all the powers incident to a sovereign ruler, including unqualified power over the national border (unqualified means they do not need anyone’s permission). This power flows through the checks and balances of the separation of powers. The legislature has to pass legislation authorizing an action before the Executive Branch can perform that action and enforce the existing legislation. The Judicial Branch then can confirm any disputes to this in court.
This does not mean the government can do whatever it wants to. But it does mean that if the legislature passes a law and the president signs it, then the executive branch can do whatever the law says. Currently, ICE, CBP, and the DHS are in direct violation of existing legislation regarding human trafficking, human smuggling, and aiding and abetting other individuals who are breaking those laws. Until the legislature sits down and formally legalizes human smuggling, drug smuggling, and several other crimes, then this means that the executive branch is currently operating illegally. This is how the Separation of Powers functions at the Federal Level.
The federal government owns roughly 25% of the land bordering Mexico (40% is owned by public entities including the 25% owned by the federal government), but this federal land is almost exclusively not in Texas.
There are 167 land border crossings in the US.
Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) outright owns the land under these crossings, or they lease them from the state/city they are located in. CBP exists under the Department of Homeland Security, which is part of the executive branch of the US federal government.
When we get to Section 4, we’ll discuss Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, TX. For now, know that it is City property, and the city is leasing it to CBP to operate the border crossing facilities there.
2. Formal vs. Informal Border Crossing
The media does not depict what it’s actually like to cross the border formally in a legal manner. They make it seem as if long treks across the desert or attempted swims across the Rio Grande are the only way across. This is not true.
Formally Crossing The Border
Many people live in border towns and work/shop on either side of the border. People who live in El Paso might tell you that they prefer restaurants, bars, dentists, nail salons, etc. on the other side and will cross for a day to patronize those businesses. The same is true for citizens living in Juarez. They cross every day at formal ports of entry. You can both walk or drive across the border and often, public transportation is available within a short walk from the border. Below is a video of what it looks like to enter the US from Tijuana to San Ysidro, California.
You’ll notice it is safe, clean, orderly and has some shops/food trucks available along the short walk. So why don’t the migrants cross here? Well if you enter one of the 167 formal ports of entry, you must have identifying documents from your country of residence, and apply for a VISA (Verified International Stay Approval), or apply for asylum if you are fleeing persecution in your home country. You’ll note the modern yellow building on the right about 3:30 into the video, this is where asylum seekers would apply.
Applying for an entry VISA is fairly simple. It requires official identification documents from your country of origin. A B-VISA is a 30-day authorization approved upon entry. You can either apply for it ahead of time online, or at the border in person. Some applicants do get rejected in their VISA applications. Typically, this is either because they give no clear exit date and are applying for a temporary travel VISA, do not have identifying documents, or are on a watch list/terrorist list.
So, not only is there a rejection rate for certain people, but there is also a limit on how long they can stay in the country before they violate their VISA. All countries operate in this manner, and if you have traveled internationally, you’ve probably joined a similar line in the airport and were either traveling to a VISA-exempt country where you get a 30-90 day instant approval or had to apply for a limited stay VISA and gain approval.
For those seeking longer stays, they would either need to go through a lengthy and costly application process for permanent residency while renewing work or student VISA’s, or they would need approval for asylum, which takes time.
For people who wish to enter and reside in the United States, the process is admittedly time-consuming and expensive and locks certain people out entirely.
I’m okay with that.
The formal ports of entry are safe, clean, and regulated, but they do not offer a quick/easy path to a long-term stay in the US unless you can get your ducks in a row for a longer-term entry VISA.
Informally Crossing The Border
Compare that now to what you see in media coverage of the US-Mexico border. Officially, the US-Mexico border is the most dangerous border in the world with ~1,500 recorded deaths/disappearances in 2022.
In fiscal year 2022, there were 7,113 rescue incidents with 22,076 migrants being rescued.
"The terrain along the border is extreme. … People who made the dangerous journey into this territory have died of dehydration, starvation, and heat stroke despite CBP's best efforts to locate them," the spokesperson said. "No one should believe smugglers or others claiming the borders are open. The borders are not open."
Local reports for 2023 estimated that fatalities have doubled over the 2022 number (over 3,000 dead in 2023), but authorities are hesitant to confirm this especially since we are not even 1 month into 2024 yet.
Drowning deaths in the Rio Grande are estimated at 1.5/day. Many migrants crossing the desert are not given enough food/water by the coyotes who smuggle them in and end up arriving in CBP care in varying states of organ failure. People die in falls while climbing the wall. The desert and the southern border are unrelenting, and migrants die of heat exhaustion that occurs while walking dozens of miles through the desert. Many are kept in squalid conditions with little access to hygiene by smugglers before arriving and develop significant infections that can be fatal. They are illicitly smuggled in cargo trucks with no safety equipment provided by the human smugglers and crashes are deadly when they happen.
To top it all off, the migrants typically are scraping together the entirety of their life savings to pay Coyotes, smugglers, and human traffickers anywhere from $4,000-$20,000 to be smuggled in.
Why are they attempting to cross like this, when they can simply walk over in Tijuana, or use the official bridge at any number of crossings, like in Eagle Pass, Texas? There have been times when the bodies of drowned migrants are filmed from the bridge at Eagle Pass. There is a perfectly safe bridge they could use to approach the port of entry, but they are instead opting to attempt to swim across a 264-foot-wide river in sight of the bridge.
What is the draw of using an informal means of entry?
The draw is a unique set of incentives that the Federal government has created for migrants. If you enter at a formal port of entry, you only have 30-90 days in the country before you have to leave and are considered in violation of your VISA, you also can get denied access entirely.
But if you enter informally and are apprehended by CBP or ICE, you may spend a couple of days/weeks in a detention center or processing center and then you are given a court date upon which you must appear before an immigration court for your crime, you are then released into the United States. But these courts are backed up. As of December 2023, there were 3 million cases in the backlog for immigration courts nationwide. Until your court date, you are free to do whatever you wish in the United States, and whatever you can do with minimal identification. This 3 million case backlog means that if you were to be apprehended today, you likely would not see trial until 2028 or later.
An informal entry essentially provides you with a 4-5 year period during which you can’t be deported (unless you are arrested for committing other crimes) since you are awaiting a court date. While a formal entry costs money, requires some level of effort and documentation, and typically results in a shorter stay.
The US has created a unique set of incentives that has not only created the most deadly land border in the entire world (yes, worse than active war zones) but also allows for just about anybody to cross the border informally if they can make it. And we see exactly that whenever Border Patrol does apprehend groups of migrants. They are often from Africa, Asia, Venezuela, Haiti, Guatemala, Honduras, and the Middle East.
Many Americans have the faulty belief that Mexicans are the ones crossing the border. They’re not. Net Migration between Mexico and the US has been negative for over 40 years, with only the years 2011, 2015, and 2021 showing a positive amount of net migrations to the US from Mexico. More people leave the US to go to Mexico than Mexicans coming to the US.
Yet you will often hear rhetoric about how America stole the land from Mexico and the Mexicans are just taking it back. This is a misnomer popularized by a media that wishes to incite divisiveness among the American Public. Other than some areas that have significant levels of cartel violence, Mexico is a nice country and many parts of it are safer than the US. Mexico has a modern healthcare and dental care system, and there are even some clinics there that offer better service and more cutting-edge care than what can be found in the US. Many American ex-pats have chosen to retire there due to the lower cost of living, weather, and some attractive beach towns and mountain villages. This doesn’t mean Mexico is better than the US, it’s not, but Mexico is not nearly as bad as how it is commonly depicted in the media.
As a direct result of existing border policy and the policy of releasing migrants into the US, we are causing thousands of deaths directly, along with tens of thousands of injuries. We are also allowing an unknown amount of people from all countries in the world, including people on the terror watch list to freely enter our country at will.
Border Patrol has apprehended 5.8 million people in the last 3 years crossing the border, but it’s estimated that they apprehend less than half of those attempting to cross. It wouldn’t be a stretch to estimate an additional 12 million illegal immigrants are in the country now than were present at the start of 2021, the last official estimate for the illegal immigrant population in the US was 46.2 million in November 2021.
This is not how any serious country in the world operates and our Southern Border is an anomaly in the modern world. It resembles the informal borders of countries like South Sudan in Africa which is barely 10 years old and recovering from the civil war that created it in the first place.
Rampant Child Trafficking
Anyone who thinks this is a good state of operations is deeply naive, misinformed, or genuinely in support of human suffering.
How bad is the human trafficking on the border? It’s horrendous. During the last House Oversight Committee Hearing (seriously, click on this link) we learned from the Office of Refugee Resettlement that 85,000 children went missing during the process after being apprehended illegally crossing the border from 2021 to April 2023 (that’s nearly 200 children a day).
We also learned that of the ~345,000 unaccompanied minors apprehended crossing the border from 2021 to April 2023, roughly 2/3rds were being “sponsored” by a few entities who were then putting these underage children to work in factories and on farms. Most of the UAC (unaccompanied children) that were accounted for were only discovered during interviews where they told CBP the adult they were traveling with was not related to them. Even so, they were often released into the country with these mystery adults or “sponsors” who were far older than them and not family.
Not only that, but our taxes are paying to fly these children to their “sponsors” all over the US. 85,000 of them were never heard from again and could not be found. Of the remaining 260,000, only 30,000 ended up in an appropriate home for a child. The other 230,000 are being used for illegal forced labor or worse. The “children in cages” narrative of the 2010s is especially disgusting when you realize what the ORR was doing with those children and why they were in such a rush to get them out of the cages. They just wanted to move the children into labor, and exploitation as quickly as they could.
I don’t have the space for it here, but the open border is just as much a means to smuggle children and captive labor (slaves) into the US as it is a means to smuggle drugs and contraband into the US. Leaving the border open is creating a market for these illicit activities. Every day it remains open, the human suffering and child exploitation continues.
I don’t care how cheap the maid service is, it doesn’t excuse this kind of evil.
3. The Modern Day Opium War
The border is a mess, but many Americans don’t live in border states or anywhere near the border. How does this impact you?
If you live in any major city, you’ve probably noticed that our streets are filthy. A spiritual sickness runs through the veins of this collapsing country. Red state, blue state, it doesn’t matter. Of the cities I’ve been to recently the rot is on clear display. Denver, Austin, San Francisco, Washington D.C. Seattle, Los Angeles, Portland, Houston, Anchorage, etc. In all of these places, I have seen this kind of rot with my own two eyes. I’m certain it is occurring in other cities that I haven’t seen it in as well.
In most large American cities there are some blighted areas covered in tent cities and open-air drug markets; if you walk often enough in the city, you’ll eventually come across the dead body of an overdose victim like I did in 2019.
What does this have to do with the border?
The Sick Men of Asia
In the 1700s, China opened up for trade with Europe through British Hong Kong, British Singapore, Dutch Taiwan (Formosa at the time), Portuguese Macau, the Spanish Philippines, and other European colonies in Asia. For the British in particular, their citizens developed a taste for Chinese Tea and Chinese silk garments. However, the Chinese didn’t have much desire for British goods. Due to the trade imbalance, the British Empire paid China several million ounces of silver each year for tea and silk.
Britain did not want to sustain this level of currency outflow to China, and used their colony of India to grow Opium and began shipping it to China in the early 1800s. Chinese citizens got hooked on the drug and eventually, the trade balance reversed to the point where China was sending Britain several million ounces of silver a year to cover the trade imbalance. Many millions of Chinese got addicted and became homeless, living on the streets or in Opium dens. Many millions died.
China made opium illegal and then 30 years of British ships smuggling Opium into China with the help of Chinese smugglers followed. This culminated in a head with China executing drug dealers, and putting British merchants under siege until they turned over 2.6 million pounds of Opium to be destroyed. The British weren’t happy and this led to the first Opium War, which China lost. The peace treaty forced China to accept increased shipments of Opium from the British. A second Opium war broke out in the 1850s after China arrested the Chinese crew of a British-flagged opium trading vessel; China again lost, after Beijing was captured and the Qing Summer Palace was looted by French and British troops. This resulted in even more Chinese ports being opened to both British and French Opium traders to continue to flood the country with drugs while extracting wealth.
This did not end until Mao Zedong took over the CCP in the 1950s. The CCP did a lot of harm to China, but they also eradicated a multi-century drug scourge that laid waste to Chinese cities. Credit where credit is due. The problems caused by Opium in China are still a very recent public memory and there are probably some centenarians alive in China today who could tell you their first-hand experiences watching fellow Chinese struggle with Opium and the problems it caused them.
In Fist of Fury, when Bruce Lee’s dojo is taunted by the Japanese Karate school, they are called the “Sick Men of Asia,” and the Japanese leave a sign calling them such at their school.
The moment when Bruce returns and beats up the entire Japanese Dojo is a triumphant moment for many reasons. But it holds a strong cultural connotation among the Chinese as well. It was a depiction of their own beliefs regarding how they overcame a centuries-long drug problem imposed upon them by colonial powers with youthful vitality and a re-emerging honor culture. This scene, in the 70’s would have absolutely slapped. Chinese men in theatres would likely have been amped up for weeks after watching the end of this scene.
“We are not sick men.”
When China finally resolved its opium problem, they viewed it with a level of disgust that you rarely see displayed in America. I heavily empathize with their viewpoint.
Synthetic Opiates and US cities
If you look around the streets of many US cities today, it looks indistinguishable from descriptions of Chinese Opium dens of a century ago. It’s still the same base product. Opiates and synthetic opiates.
The influx of synthetic opiates to the US is another symptom of the crumbling border. Fentanyl in the US almost exclusively comes from China these days. Up until recently, Mexican drug cartels were the primary ones smuggling it in, but several major Chinese pharmaceutical companies have realized they can cut out the middleman entirely.
Starting at 16:38 in the video below, you can see just how ubiquitously the drug markets in Philadelphia are controlled by the Mexican Cartels and a single Chinese Chemical Company from Wuhan (HanHong Pharmaceutical). It’s to the point where the existing gang violence is simply a proxy war between the cartels and Hanhong Pharmaceuticals paying local gang members to kill dealers that are using other suppliers or cutting the drug.
America is the sick man now. Some people view this as justified payback by China plaguing us with the same mess that the British plagued China with. Except, we’re not Britain, we were shooting at the British at the same time they were flooding China with drugs. This is just as evil as what China went through. The extent to which our cities and our people are destroyed is the extent to which we are willing to tolerate an open border.
But this problem did not start with China. An American pharmaceutical company holds the patent for Fentanyl, and several Western companies started the opioid epidemic. It’d be hypocritical of me to point at China as the cause, they simply joined into a pre-existing feeding frenzy that would require an entirely separate post of its own to explain properly.
Salt Lake City is the only American city I’ve ever walked through and not been met with an overwhelming sense of disgust. I presume the Mormons live differently up there. The rest of this country is rotting before our eyes. I find myself amazed at the apathy with which many people view this issue. I even find myself sometimes letting my eyes glaze over as I start “seeing, but not seeing,” the endless masses with drug-induced schizophrenia sprawled on the street in my city in the blocks around the transit center, on the block around the shelter on Fannin street, and covering the park in front of city hall. If we survive as a country, our descendants will look back at this period in time with complete embarrassment.
I can only hope that our children have their own vitality movement in the future.
We may be sick men. But I pray that they will not be.
4. The Texas Governor Pushes Back
Many say that this is a political stunt by the TX governor who has waited until an election year to make his move on the border. That is not the case. This has been an ongoing conflict since the Biden Administration tossed out the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) during his first week in office in 2021. The MPP is part of US legislation requiring anyone caught illegally entering the US to be deported and to wait outside of the US for their hearing date. The Biden Administration gave us the current policy, which gives those caught a court date and releases them into the US, as described in Section 2.
If you’re familiar with basic US civics, the president does not have the authority to throw out legislation, the US legislature would have to end the law. The Biden Administration already lost a court case on the matter. However, the CBP and ICE have still been operating as if the MPP no longer exists, which violates existing federal legislation, as the executive branch of the federal government does not make law.
In March 2021, Governor Abbot and the TX legislature passed Operation Lone Star, which declared a state of emergency on the Southern Border and deployed the Texas State Guard to assist CBP in enforcing the existing federal legislation. Since the law went into effect (Fiscal 2022, which begins September 2021) TX National Guard began receiving additional state funding to assist in securing the border, where they could, and where the state owned land on the border.
This began escalating in 2023, a year when the TX governor began ordering the TX National Guard to lay down razor wire along the border and in the Rio Grande River.
As discussed in Section 1, Texas does not have the legal authority to do so. Full stop. However, the executive branch of the government does not have the authority to directly aid and abet human trafficking, smuggling, and other crimes unless and until the Federal Legislature writes a law saying that they can.
Further into 2023, we saw the US Border Patrol actively cutting and lifting the fence that the TX National Guard put down to allow migrants to cross as they pleased.
The TX Attorney General Ken Paxton took this to a US District Court to try to get Border Patrol to stop taking down the fence and other barriers. While the judge ruled in favor of the Biden Administration in November, she left the matter open that if TX could provide enough evidence that this was not being done for medical emergencies or saving lives she would rule against the Biden Administration.
“The law may be on the side of the [Biden administration] and compel a resolution in their favor today, but it does not excuse their culpable and duplicitous conduct,” Moses wrote in her ruling.
In her order, Moses said she understands why Border Patrol agents may be cutting the wire, especially in cases of emergencies to prevent injuries or deaths at the Rio Grande, where countless migrants have died. Still, she said, those problems “are of their own creation.”
“Any rational observer could not help but wonder why the Defendants do not just allow migrants to access the country at a port of entry,” Mose wrote “If agents are going to allow migrants to enter the country, and indeed facilitate their doing so, why make them undertake the dangerous task of crossing the river? Would it not be easier, and safer, to receive them at a port of entry?”
You’ll note that the Federal Judge here agrees with my assessment from Section 2.
Border Patrol could simply escort the migrants across the bridge less than 1/4 mile away from where they are cutting the fence. Instead, Border Patrol is making the migrants swim across a 264-foot river where over 1 person drowns to death a day so that CBP can lift the fence and then process them on the other side of the border. They are creating the deadliest border in the world intentionally because the administration does not wish to follow the legislative process to change the law.
The Federal government eventually lost this case in December and was barred from removing or destroying border barriers unless they could clearly articulate an immediate danger to an individual’s life.
That leads us to where we’re at today.
In January the TX National Guard and Texas Military Department moved troops into Shelby Park (a 50-acre park owned by the City of Eagle Pass and partially leased to CBP), right at the Eagle Pass Border station, and kicked out CBP and all federal officials. They are now arresting all people caught crossing the border or assisting in that in any manner.
Since then the TX National Guard has not allowed federal employees access to the area. On January 22nd, the Supreme Court granted a request by the Biden administration to overrule the previous ruling that stopped them from cutting fences unless someone was in danger. The SC released a brief unsigned order after a 5-4 Decision with Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanagh dissenting, stating that they would have left the lower court ruling in place.
Despite the SC ruling, the governor of TX has stated that they will not be allowing federal authorities access. Since then 25 governors of other states have signed their support behind Governor Abbot and several states have committed their own state National Guards in support of the border.
So what do we have? We have the Executive branch of the US government operating in direct violation of existing law as written by the Legislative branch of the US Government. And we have a State violating federal statutes regarding sovereignty of the border in an attempt to enforce existing federal legislation as it is written.
Neither side is legally right here. But from a moral, ethical, and common sense standpoint, the executive branch of the federal government has gone rogue and the other branches of the federal government are impotent to enforce their own authority. If we are to have a country, someone has to step in and intervene here.
But not just here, there are so many other issues where the existing legislation in this country has been trampled and left in a wet gutter by elected officials and employees. We have two sides of an issue, both in violation of some law. Pick your poison.
I know which one I choose.
5. How I Really Feel/Conclusion
You may remember my bias statement from the start of this article. I want my state to secede. But why? That statement isn’t the actual truth of what is at the emotional core of what I want.
What I really want is to feel a sense of pride in the place I live.
The urge for secession stems from a complete loss of national identity or purpose. When I travel elsewhere, I see places where people are proud to be citizens of their own country. I see places where people view their leaders as competent and representing their interests. I see cities with clean streets and people excited to work in some form or fashion. I see people united behind a common identity. When I went to Vietnam, the most palpable thing there was the energy and vitality of every single person I met. Even in the Dominican Republic, their national identity supersedes their racial identity.
We lack this cultural identity in the US. Worse, we are moving further away from this kind of unity with every passing day. Nobody here is American, nobody seems to want that identity. I want that, and if I can’t be in a community of people who feel that way, then I’ll settle for being Texan.
The push for secession likely stems from the emotional urge to surrender. At the national level, the problems simply seem too large for me to ever have hope of them being solved. We can’t even agree to prosecute the Epstein client list. Secession is giving up on the idea of solving these problems. It’s giving up on the idea of cultural unity in this country.
As a country, we have been demoralized so completely, that the identity that once held us together is fracturing and struggling to remain. If we are to address the TexIt Movement and other future secessionist movements here in the US, we will have to genuinely begin solving the problems that plague our country. Otherwise, we might soon be getting asked “What kind of American Are You?”
The urge for independence at its base level stems from a country that has completely lost its sense of pride. I don’t actually want to secede. I want to be proud to be an American again.
All parts of this government are captive to interests directly opposed to my moral and ethical core. How could I be proud? I want to fix that. Leaving the US is the easy solution, and so the emotional tug towards secession will always be there. But I know it’s not the righteous solution.
6. Internal References
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Great post. Super interesting comparison to opium and China. Also super disturbing about the kids at the border, all of what's happening at the border seems surreal.
I get dental work in mx now, it's been drastically better than any dentist I've seen in the states. Also went to Mexico city recently, loved it, felt safer than in LA/SF/SEA all of which I've visited recently. Beautiful architecture, culture, hospitality, coffer- it wasn't all perfect but really cool. Also only saw 1-2 homeless ppl the whole time and we were allover the city. It doesn't appear to be a thing there. I was reading some of it is cultural, like families don't let each other live on the streets, and also that building codes/zoning laws have made it so much easier for them build dwellings. Also I think it's a culture that takes pride in working.
Brilliant! Beautiful! What a time to be alive eh?