Illegal Immigrants Overrunning National Parks

Above, rock formations at Joshua Tree National Park. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Here is a topic that isn't getting much, if any, notice by the mainstream media.

It is that illegal aliens are ruining national park land and wildlife preserves. Parks and lands nearest to our southern border are the ones most at risk.

According to the Washington Times:

Every year, hundreds of thousands of illegal border-crossers pass through our national parks and wildlife refuges on their way to the interior to secure unlawful work or to smuggle in people and drugs. The trash, waste and discarded vehicles brought in by these thousands of individuals is so large federal land management agencies have admitted it has altered the ecological processes and degraded habitats in these areas. Newly confirmed Secretary for the Interior Ryan Zinke has a chance to change this and make great again our nation’s worst effected parklands. 

Federal statutes like the Wilderness Act of 1964 were enacted to ensure that our nation’s most prized national endowments would be off-limits to exploitation and made fully available to the American public. But as the Interior Department’s National Park Service told the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), in some of our natural reserves today, like southern Arizona’s Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, nearly half of all trails and sites are completely closed to the public due to high levels of illegal immigration and smuggling activities. In the closed-off areas, even park service staff must be accompanied by their agency’s own special law enforcement, itself a recent development in direct response to the level of dangerous illegal alien activity. Internal agency reports show thousands of pounds of drugs being seized in our parks annually sometimes trafficked in with “cloned agency trucks.” And according to the Justice Department, this is all due to the region’s “largely unprotected border.”

We can thank the lack of border enforcement by the Obama Administration for this calamity. Had Hillary Clinton been elected instead of Donald Trump, we would likely have had more of the same during the next four years.

To read more, go here.