Although Vice President Kamala Harris refuses to acknowledge it, we indeed have a humanitarian and criminal crisis along our southern border. Since the Biden administration hastily reversed Trump-era policies that had dramatically slowed the pace of illegal immigration, cartels have been working overtime to recoup the human smuggling income they lost during the Trump years. According to US Border Patrol sources, the going rate to be smuggled over the border is $10,000 a person, and there’s no guarantee that the smuggled will arrive healthily or even arrive at all.

Such was the case Wednesday morning when a van carrying 30 people (yes, you read that correctly) crashed near Encino, Texas, about 80 miles north of the US/Mexico border, killing 11 people and severely injuring 20 more. The driver was one of those killed. Brooks County Sheriff Benny Martinez had harsh words for the Biden administration, telling Breitbart Texas:

“This is yet another example of the consequences of our out-of-control border under the current administration’s policies. While this incident did not involve a police pursuit, our deputies, Texas DPS troopers, and Border Patrol agents are frequently forced to engage in pursuits where human smugglers recklessly flee from apprehension.”

The atmosphere created by Biden’s sudden reversal and the uncertainty about how long this reversal will last given that some high-profile Members of Congress are publicly fighting it is a dangerous one. As referenced, due to COVID and Trump ending the catch-and-release program, illegal crossings hit an all-time low in 2020. Then Biden sent the Bat-signal, and the cartels – who likely saw a huge drop in revenue because they were unable to get their normal quantities of drugs and people across a much less populated border – are looking to make up for a loss of revenue. So the coyotes (yes, liberals, the word is “coyote”) evangelize throughout Mexico and Central America about how easy it is to get into the United States and recruit clients they’ll eventually treat worse than animals, using them to smuggle drugs into the country, or as sex slaves, as indentured servants at illegal marijuana grows, or simply pack them so tightly into vehicles that there’s barely room to breathe.

The coyotes’ concern isn’t with ensuring that these items of inventory (that’s really what the people are to them) are breathing when they get to the United States. Dead or alive, the family owes them the money. The smuggled are expendable; if one needs to be pushed off the top of a 30′ border wall and paralyzed or killed to create a distraction, so be it. If they lose one van full of people due to a crash, well, that’s just the price of doing business. The cartels are probably more upset at the loss of the van involved since it’s an income-producing asset. If it’s regularly carting 30 people over the border, that’s $300,000 a trip.

In Wednesday’s crash:

Sheriff Martinez said the human smuggler was speeding in an overloaded van and lost control. The van rolled and struck a utility pole, ejecting the migrants leaving at least 10 people dead and 20 injured. Nine of the dead were adult males and one was an adult female. The dead migrants included 3 Mexicans and one Guatemalan. The remainder were Honduran nationals.

We aren’t publishing them here, but Breitbart’s article contains extremely graphic photos showing the lifeless bodies of the van’s occupants strewn throughout the field next to the van, legs, and arms bent in unnatural shapes (the faces are blurred, though). They’re difficult to look at, and the first response is to wonder why such pictures would be published. But when the Breitbart report is contrasted with the clinical and barely-descriptive CNN writeup, the purpose is clear. People in the United States need to understand the human cost of Biden’s immigration policies. It’s not caring to look the other way while people who live in terrible conditions in a foreign country are victimized by international criminal cartels and pay those cartels to treat them like cattle. In a best-case scenario, an immigrant survives a brutal journey (especially in the summer) but then owes labor to the cartel for a set amount of time.

In a worst-case scenario, they die of dehydration or injury in the desert, or in a horrific crash, or end up maimed – or, for teenage girls and women, they’re repeatedly brutally raped and killed.

“These human smugglers have no regard for human life,” the sheriff said. “In addition to these needless deaths, we have had at least 60 other migrants die in the ranchlands surrounding the checkpoint.”

Wednesday’s crash was the third mass casualty vehicle accident involving illegal immigrants this year. In Imperial County, California, 13 illegal immigrants died in a fiery crash on March 1. Border Patrol sources told Fox News that coyotes jammed 25 illegal immigrants into a Ford Expedition, which has a seating capacity of eight and drove into the US through a hole that cartels had cut through a portion of an old section of border fencing:

“Two vehicles crammed with illegal immigrants inside had driven through the ten-foot wide hole in the early morning hours of Monday’s midnight shift, sources say, somehow evading a mobile camera system set up nearby. The sources added that the border patrol was not looking for the smugglers until they were notified by the Imperial County Sheriffs Office about the crash, which occurred about 8 miles north of where the fence was cut.”

Less than two weeks later eight illegal immigrants were killed in a crash in southwest Texas when the driver crashed head-on into another truck after leading police on a 50-mile chase.

After the California crash numerous Democrat members of Congress, including Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), spoke out against Biden’s policies. Axios reported:

“[Cuellar] hopes the administration continues using a Trump-era public health order to quickly expel migrant adults and families, at least during the pandemic. He said smugglers will likely use the shift in immigration tactics from the Trump to the Biden administration to convince migrants to come to the U.S.”

“The bad guys know how to market this,” Cuellar said.

Cuellar’s colleague, Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, also of Texas, warned of the potential consequences of not changing the policy, telling CNN:

“Well, my concern at this in the recent weeks in my district, migrants who made it across the border, who even pass the line of MPPs [Migrant Protection Protocols], who were 5,000 folks that have been waiting for two years across the border, made it across the Rio Grande Valley were processed and released, If that is the message that we send to Central America and around the world, I can assure you, it won’t be long before we have tens of thousands of people showing up to our border.”

“And it’ll be catastrophic for our party, for our country, for my region, for my district, in the middle of a pandemic, in an area where we’ve lost over 3,000 people in my small congressional district. So, I think we need to have a better plan in place. I think asylum seekers should be able to ask for asylum and be processed in their home country or a neighboring country. And we shouldn’t have a policy in place that impulses people to make this 2,000-mile trek where cartels and human traffickers are enriching themselves.”

He wasn’t wrong. We’ve seen the throngs of people pouring into the country every day, mostly thanks to Fox News’s Bill Melugin’s dogged reporting. We know that COVID has surged in Texas, and even though Rochelle Wolensky and Jen Psaki would walk on broken glass before they admit it, the fact that the number of apprehended illegal immigrants testing positive for COVID-19 surged 900% in the first two weeks of July (nevermind those who weren’t apprehended) and the fact that the majority of apprehended illegal immigrants refuse to take the vaccine just might have something to do with that.

Psaki, Harris, and most of the rest of the Democrats in charge claim to follow “facts” and “science,” and the facts here are clear: their refusal to fix the broken immigration system and their border “security” policies are inhumane, dangerous, and lead to suffering and death – both of Americans and of those attempting to find a better life. The blood is on their hands.