“No one knows who they are, where they’re from, or where they’re going. But there are millions of them in the United States.”

So begins Charlotte Cuthbertson’s “The Gotaways: The Hidden Crisis at the Border.”

By now, most Americans are surely aware that, on day one of his presidency, Joe Biden and his administration opened the U.S. border with Mexico to essentially unlimited immigration. Since then, more than 6.7 million of these migrants have crossed the border and turned themselves over to authorities, claiming to seek asylum. These are the people we see on the nightly news.

What we don’t see are those known as the “gotaways,” the illegal immigrants who slip into America undetected, evading the Border Patrol and other law enforcement and scattering out across the country. By means of camera, footprints, and face-to-face encounters with residents, Border Patrol agents have recorded 1.7 million of these gotaways since January 2021. Untold tens of thousands more have likely crossed the border without leaving a trace of their passage.

In her article, Cuthbertson tears away the curtain that has thus far hidden this national catastrophe from the American public. She is able to do so because she is a journalist who practices her craft. She personally did the legwork and got her story straight from the people on the front lines of this disaster:

As a senior border security reporter for The Epoch Times, I initially covered the topic by traveling to the border from New York or Washington, DC. In 2021, I decided the best way to tell the story was to live it. I moved to a small Texas county on the border and gained a whole new perspective of what my neighbors, local ranchers, and local law enforcement were forced to deal with. I decided to focus on one population of illegal immigrants that’s often overlooked by mainstream media: the ‘gotaways.’

Cuthbertson’s lengthy and engaging article includes valuable statistics detailing this calamity, but it is the stories she tells of those who are suffering the brunt of this invasion that bring the reality home to us. These are the people of Kinney County, which shares a border with Mexico: Sheriff Brad Coe; County Attorney Brent Smith; ranchers like Cole Hill, his wife, and three young children; and officials like Henry Garcia, director of Kinney County’s emergency medical services.

From them we learn of the property damages done by these trespassers, the weapons and drugs that some illegals carry, the criminals among these immigrants, and the subsequent enormous strain placed on the budgets of county law enforcement, medical services, and legal services.

During 2022, for example, ranch manager Ben Binnion discovered 21 dead illegal immigrants on his property. He found one of them while he had one of his kids with him. “I don’t want to have to explain to a 4-year-old why there’s a dead person laying in the middle of nowhere on our property,” he said.

Binnion and other ranchers all point to the expensive destruction left behind by these gotaways, the cut fences and the damaged outbuildings. Binnion has a full-time employee whose only job is repairing fences and picking up trash. And like others on the border, in addition to migrants from Mexico and Central America, Binnion reports encounters with illegals from Congo, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and China.

In this stew of nationalities are criminals: human traffickers, convicted sex offenders, drug mules, and petty thieves. As Sheriff Coe indicates, these same people will commit crimes against U.S. citizens. “I can’t, in clear conscience, just sit back and do nothing,” he says, “while these people get into Oklahoma City or Kansas City or Detroit, or whatever, and commit some type of heinous crime.” A Border Patrol agent for over three decades, Coe then adds: “Now that Biden’s here we’re seeing … something I’ve never seen in 37 years. And we’re gonna pay the price for what’s going on now.”

The Americans living on the border are already paying that price for a blitz on the border not only permitted but encouraged by our government for more than two years now. That cost also comes with an ongoing butcher’s bill of murder, rape, and death by fentanyl.

Cuthbertson has cast a bright light on this dark and ugly self-inflicted fiasco. As has happened so often in the recent past, however, the question remains: Will anyone in our federal government do the right thing and put an end to this madness and chaos?

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