As fire fights with foreign soldiers, on the southern land border increase, the Border Patrol reports that foreign nationals are attempting high-speed amphibious landings in San Diego County:
In the early morning of Aug. 26, agents from U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Air and Marine (OAM) stopped a panga off the coast of San Diego County loaded with 20 people attempting an illegal entry into the country.
At around 1 a.m., CBP Air Interdiction Agents in an OAM Multi-role Enforcement Aircraft (MEA) King Air 350ER spotted the 30-foot panga around 30 miles from the coastal city of Del Mar. The MEA crew directed two OAM Interceptor boats to the panga’s location.
The OAM boats caught up with and stopped the panga about 12 miles west of the city of Oceanside at around 2:30 a.m. The United States Coast Guard Cutter Tern was also in the area providing information and assistance.
The San Diego NBC affiliate reported that, last Monday, one high-speed amphibious landing was partially successful in Mission Beach:
Law enforcement officers are looking for more than a dozen people believed to have come ashore in a panga that landed on Mission Beach Monday. U.S. Border Patrol officials were on the sand right where West Mission Bay Drive ends and Ventura Place intersects with Strand Way.
This is a problem. While I would love to have free and open borders, where peoples of all nations could visit and trade with one another, our massive welfare state and terrorist threats to national security demand that our borders are enforced and secure.
We don’t need to pass an “enhanced PATRIOT Act”– spying on Americans is not going to make us any safer. Extended, overseas military engagements (unless the US or its Middle Eastern regional partners are attacked) are expensive and may be counter-productive.
The land border needs to be secured with personnel and technology. The sea borders need to be patrolled. It’s time to put the “defense” back into the Department of Defense and the “border protection ” into the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.