The nation’s broken immigration system and the porous southern border that sees floods of illegal immigrants daily are directly linked to the opioid crisis and deadly gang violence we’re seeing thousands of miles away here in Massachusetts.
U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling, the Boston-based prosecutor who doesn’t shy away from that fight, spelled it out in an exclusive interview on my Boston Herald Radio show Tuesday.
“We do see a correlation as far as we see towns in the Commonwealth, where a significant percentage of the bulk drug dealers who we are arresting are also here illegally,” Lelling said. “And so while it’s true that the majority of people who come to this country illegally are not committing other crimes, some portion of them are, and so if you had a better functioning immigration system, the drug traffickers who we are picking up in a lot of these cases, wouldn’t even be in the United States in the first place to commit those crimes. We see that with MS 13. … You have violent gang members in the United States, who wouldn’t be here, if border security was stronger than it actually is now. And so that’s where you see the correlation.”
When I asked this region’s top federal law enforcement officer how severe the opioid threat is, he told me, “It is the worst public health crisis probably in 100 years.”
All the more reason Democratic lawmakers and government officials should be working with President Trump, funding his Wall and implementing other common sense measures to keep Americans safe. That includes two Massachusetts district attorneys, Rachael Rollins and Marian Ryan, who are suing to block ICE agents from entering state courthouses to deport criminal illegals.
When discussing a 14-year-old Maryland girl who was hacked to death, allegedly by machete-wielding MS-13 thugs, Lelling said, “Had ICE been able to detain and deport those MS-13 members, those MS-13 members would not have been here, and they would not have been able to kill this woman. So yes, there is a direct impact on the public safety …You can point to cases where there is a crime that would not have happened in the United States had ICE been able to do its job of arresting someone who had committed the crime of entering the country illegally. That person would be gone. Or if the border security was better, that person never would have entered the United States.”
Lelling added, ”When people come illegally through a porous border, you have no idea who they are. And for example, that is how MS-13 replenishes its ranks. We arrest you know, 50 or 60 MS-13 members, how do you think they replenish their ranks? They do it through illegal immigrants coming over the border and up to Massachusetts.”
Yet too many liberal officials and activist judges both here in the Bay State and across the nation care more about protecting illegal immigrants — at any cost — than concerning themselves with the safety of American citizens.
That’s the real crime — and come next election cycle, voters must show those elected officials the door before another American gets hooked on fentanyl or knocked off by gangbangers that don’t belong here.
Until then, Massachusetts can take some solace in knowing that in a sea of radical, far-left officials — who care more about politics than public safety — we have a highly competent U.S. attorney in Lelling who’s restoring the rule of law, fighting crime and corruption wherever he finds it.
How refreshing is that?
Too bad we don’t have dozens of U.S. Attorneys like him.
