Michael Cutler -- Terrorists are Among the Vast Majority of Illegals

I former colleague at the INS read my recent commentary in which I suggested that we should give members of the United States Congress who refuse to secure our nation's borders against the smuggling of narcotics and the entry of illegal aliens including gang members, drug traffickers and terrorists the "Fiddle Award" because they reminded me of the expression that "Nero fiddled while Rome burned!"

This retired INS officer has always demonstrated a capacity for creativity and this morning, he sent me the photo of the Congressional Fiddling Award.

The obvious question is "which member of the House of Representatives or the United States Senate is most deserving of this "honor."

There are so many really deserving politicians!

As you contemplate who you would nominate, I would suggest you consider how dire the situation has become in Mexico and how much this is not only costing the lives of so many decent people in Mexico including law enforcement personnel and members of their military as well as prosecutors, judges and politicians as well as their families, but innocent Mexicans whose lives are in imminent danger.

The news reports talk about the violence spilling over the border into the United States. This crisis is far more serious than violence "spilling over the border!"

The image of this is that you are at risk if you live in proximity to the border but that the further you get from the border, the safer you are.

Certainly the communities that lie in close proximity to the Mexican border are at greater risk. Consider that Phoenix, Arizona now suffers an average of a kidnapping or home invasion every day being reported to law enforcement. It is believed that many such crimes go unreported because there are drug dealers whose family members are being abducted but don't want to call attention to themselves to law enforcement.

However, no one living in any part of the United States can feel safe while these cartel members operate inside the United States. The President of Mexico has referred to the cartels as a "cancer" as you will see in one of the news articles I attached below. This is a good way of describing these violent criminal organizations that have apparently taken many pages out of the terrorists "playbook" killing large numbers of people who are first tortured and even beheaded as a way of intimidating those who oppose them.

When a patient is diagnosed with cancer the doctor will evaluate the seriousness of the malignancy by determining what stage the cancer is at.

Stage one is an early tumor that has the highest possibility for cure. Various factors increase the number of the stage to a worst case scenario where the patient's potential for survival decline as the number of the stage increases.

Two of the of the most important determining factors are how far the cancer has spread or metastasized and how large the cancer has become.

Where the drug cartels are concerned, they have spread clear across our nation. Earlier this week the headlines announced that more than 700 gang members were arrested in communities from coast to coast. Clearly the malignancy that the drug cartels represent to our nation is at an advanced stage. You would think that our "leaders" would be moving swiftly and decisively to eradicate this threat!

Yet there are members of Congress who still adamantly refuse to secure our border with Mexico. There are members of Congress who are adamantly opposed to having the government enforce the immigration laws within the United States.

There are so many solid reasons to secure our nation's borders and enforce the immigration laws within the interior of the United States. As you probably know, I spent nearly half of my career at the former INS working on investigations involving aliens who trafficked in narcotics and related areas of crime.

The very same establishments that were needed by illegal aliens were absolutely essential to the terrorists we investigated. They used telephone arcades and disposable cell phones to communicate with little fear of wire taps. They used mail drop services to also conceal their communications and to move all sorts of documents. They used identity thieves to operated in plain sight under assumed identities and also bought high-quality counterfeit and altered identity documents for the same reason.

These drug traffickers, and terrorists as well, also used money wire services (remitters) to either receive money from their organizations in their home countries or to move the proceeds of their crimes to their organizations in their home countries. The gold buying services that spring up in neighborhoods that have large numbers of drug traffickers as well as illegal aliens, make it easy to move large sums of money by enabling the criminals to convert the ill-gotten proceeds to gold that can be far more easily moved than could the equivalent amount of cash.

Additionally, illegal aliens who are desperate to get their hands on as much cash as possible are often willing to do relatively minor tasks for the cartels to receive money for their assistance.

Houses of prostitution, often involving young women from foreign countries are often coerced into participating in prostitution to service the many single young men who have entered our country without their families.

None of this is a part of the "American dream" but represents the daily nightmarish existence of illegal aliens living in our country. The violence that accompanies all of this madness permeates entire neighborhoods and has a huge deleterious impact on the lives of lawful immigrants and United States citizens who live in the midst of this lunacy.

However, the politicians and the illegal alien advocates who have a variety of goals in seeking to maintain the status quo are a huge part of the crisis that is now confronting Mexico and the United States.

In New York and in other cities across our nation, you will find that the drug trade is most prevalent in those neighborhoods that have huge illegal alien populations. Cartel members, gang members and those involved in supporting terrorist activities, find it easier (and safer) to live among thousands of people of similar ethnicity. They use these communities as a vast haystack in which these deadly needles can hide with virtually no risk of detection.

Consider this quote from the article.

DEA officials said the Sinaloa Cartel smuggles drugs to Los Angeles, where they are dispersed to 70 "distribution cells" in 26 states from Washington to Maine. She said the people arrested included U.S. citizens and foreigners, some of whom were in the U.S. illegally.

As I have previously pointed out, the proceeds of the drug trade and related crimes have provided a level of wealth to the cartels and other criminal and terrorist organizations that are all but impossible to fathom! Each and every year, it is estimated that tens of billions of dollars are drained from our economy and go right into the coffers of those malignant organizations.

This is money that buys weapons, cars, trucks, boats, airplanes, safe houses, false identity documents and other "necessities."

This is the money that corrupts governments and pays for the death of thousands of people around the world. This is the money that also leads to many of the deaths in the United States as the cartels seek to eliminate their competition and those who threaten their activities.

Yet there are politicians who are supposed to protect our nation and our citizens who will do anything in their power to keep that border open and to impede any effort to enforce the immigration laws that could help to combat the drug trade and other criminal enterprises. These politicians are also determined to blur the distinction between the lawful immigrants and illegal aliens.

They even seek to eradicate the distinction between citizens of this nation and illegal aliens!

As you read the two news reports I will ask you to consider who you would give the "Congressional Fiddling Award" to.

There are so many candidates to pick from! They richly deserve that "trophy" and an unemployment check!

In less than two years more than one third of the seats in the United States Senate will be up for election. In less than two years every single seat in the House of Representatives will be up for grabs! The politicians have become accustomed to expecting that the power of the incumbency is on their side. We only have ourselves to blame for this.

We the People need to take every opportunity to confront those who were elected to represent us and make it clear that if they fail to represent us, we will find someone who will!

The large scale apathy demonstrated by citizens of this nation has emboldened elected representatives to all but ignore the needs of the average American citizen in a quest for massive campaign funds and the promises of votes to be ostensibly delivered by special interest groups. There is much that we cannot do but there is one thing that We the People absolutely must do- we must stop sitting on the sidelines!

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The collective failure of We the People to get involved in make our concerns known to our politicians have nearly made the concerns of the great majority of the citizens of this nation all but irrelevant to the politicians.

I implore you to get involved!

Michael W. Cutler graduated from Brooklyn College of the City University of New York in 1971 with a B.A. in Communications Arts and Sciences. Mr. Cutler began working for the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in October 1971 when he entered on duty as an Immigration Inspector assigned to John F. Kennedy International Airport. In August 1975 he became a Criminal Investigator (Special Agent) for the INS at NYC.

He rotated through virtually every squad in the Investigations Branch. From 1988 until 1991 he was assigned as the INS representative to the Unified Intelligence Division (UID) of the DEA in New York. In 1991 he was promoted to the position of Senior Special Agent and was assigned to the Organized Crime, Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF) which required that he work with members of other law enforcement agencies including the FBI, DEA, ATF, U.S. Customs and local and state police as well as law enforcement organizations of other countries including Israel, Canada, Great Britain and Japan, to conduct investigations of aliens involved in major drug trafficking organizations. He retired from the INS in February 2002, after a career that spanned some 30 years.

Finally, Michael Cutler has appeared on numerous television and radio programs including Lou Dobbs, Fox News, MSNBC and many other television and radio news-oriented programs to discuss the enforcement of immigration laws.