The influx of illegal immigrants is causing chaos in some areas along the California coast, including some very upscale communities. Illegal immigrants are arriving in small boats and fleeing into communities on foot.
San Diego native and videographer Jack Enright captured such an incident recently as he was out one morning at Marine Street Beach taking pictures of the waves. Suddenly he found himself having to swim out of the way of a motorboat speeding toward him.
He said the small white boat "flew up" onto the shore carrying about eight people. He couldn't remember if the driver killed the engine as it came ashore.
"It was just chaos, honestly," he told Fox News. "And everyone just jumped and started running."
The illegals ran up the stairs that led to the street and disappeared. As Fox News Channel's Bill Melugin reported, they scrambled away into an upscale neighborhood in La Jolla among multi-million dollar homes.
Enright knew he had witnessed human smuggling. It is a near-daily occurrence along the California coast.
I'm not surprised that Bill Melugin had the story. He is the top reporter on the invasion of illegal immigrants since President Biden opened up the southern border, in my opinion. Maritime smuggling via the Pacific Ocean is nothing new but it has greatly increased over the last three years.
According to Brandon Tucker, director of Customs and Border Protection's Air and Marine Operations in San Diego, there has been an "exponential increase in maritime smuggling."
In fiscal year 2020, federal, state, and local law enforcement recorded 308 maritime smuggling events in the California area of responsibility, according to CBP. Last fiscal year, they recorded 736, a nearly 140% increase.
Air and Marine Operations uses planes equipped with radar and cameras to patrol above, looking for smugglers. Airborne agents are usually the first to find pangas, small fishing boats frequently used to smuggle migrants or drugs to the U.S., Tucker said. Then his team, as well as their Border Patrol and Coast Guard partners, can coordinate intercepting the boat at sea or on land.
Now that he is the director, Tucker doesn't fly as much as he once did. His team needed a pilot on March 27. Within minutes of being in the air, radar detected a suspicious vessel. It was a panga with more than a dozen illegal immigrants on board.
Border Patrol agents reached the beach just before the boat did. They apprehended at least 10 migrants, plus the driver of a suspected getaway car, Tucker said.
"Normally, that gets us some pretty good intel on the smuggling organization," he said, adding that the drivers — often U.S. citizens — frequently take migrants to stash houses before they move into the nation's interior.
Sometimes, CBP or the Coast Guard can stop them. Nearly 8,000 people have been apprehended while trying to enter the U.S. illegally through the Pacific Ocean, its coastlines or its inlets since 2020, data provided by CBP show.
Does anyone think that California Governor Gavin Newsom will do anything to stop the boats from landing on shore? No one should. The progressive Democrat governor encourages illegal immigration with a buffet of benefits afforded to them at the expense of California taxpayers. He embraces his state's sanctuary status. He is firmly on the wrong side of the issue.
On the other coast, Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican in Florida, is pro-actively acting to secure Florida's coast. He understands the problems and the national security risks. And, on the Gulf Coast, Governor Abbott is working diligently to secure the Texas border despite lawsuit after lawsuit from the Biden DOJ.
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