Immigration

‘Time For Us To Wake Up’: Spike Of Chinese Nationals Entering US Tied To Cartel Drug Smugglers, Experts Say

(Sgt. 1st Class Gordon Hyde/Wikipedia)

Drug smugglers are helping Chinese illegal immigrants enter the U.S., experts warned during a Thursday panel in Washington, D.C.

Drug cartels determine where and when Chinese illegal immigrants enter the U.S. depending on what U.S. law enforcement likely knows about them, Rodney Scott, former U.S. Border Patrol chief, said during a panel session at the America First Policy Institute. While the drug cartels are allegedly motivated by profit, the Chinese government seeks to flood the U.S. with illegal immigrants and narcotics in order to destabilize the nation, experts said.

“They’ll push a group across to overwhelm whatever law enforcement is in that area,” Scott said during the America First Policy Institute panel.

“As soon as law enforcement is overwhelmed with responding to the illegal aliens, the second wave — whether it be people who paid more to get in, because they may have a record or think we might have a record of them, or its a pickup truck or a boat or a backpack full of you-fill-in-the-blank — that’s what goes through the second wave undetected.”

Scott told the DCNF that Chinese nationals may be among those in these “second waves” crossing the southern border.

However, the drug cartels also deliberately send some Chinese illegal immigrants with clean backgrounds across the border at a time and place when they’ll be easily intercepted by U.S. law enforcement, Scott said.

“If they have a pretty high-level of confidence that we don’t have any records on them, then they don’t care, they would rather actually interact with law enforcement because when Border Patrol catches them, under the current administration’s policies, if we don’t have any ‘derogatory information’ they’re going to get released in the United States,” Scott said. “Now they have a paper that allows them to move freely about the United States until their next court date, which in many cases is two, three, four years down the road.”

During the panel, Scott said that “fighting-age males” who have been intercepted by U.S. law enforcement appear to have been “coached to basically answer a couple of quick questions,” and that the Chinese government often assisted them to “beat the first step of the asylum process and get released into the U.S.”

Tennessee Republican Rep. Mark Green expressed concern about the recent surge in illegal Chinese immigrants during America First Policy Institute’s panel on Thursday.

“What’s really been upsetting to me recently is just the number of Chinese nationals coming across the open southern border,” Green said. “Suddenly you get this massive spike in Chinese nationals. There’s not something that happened in China in the last six, eight months that would compel that much of a migration shift.”

While U.S. law enforcement reported 2,280 nationwide “encounters” with Chinese illegal immigrants in October 2022, the number of nationwide encounters more than doubled to 5,434 by April 2023, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data. Furthermore, CBP records show that single Chinese illegal adults accounted for over 90% of these nationwide encounters.

Some of the Chinese illegal immigrants have also allegedly been linked to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Green said during the panel.

“We’ve had a sector chief tell me that, very specifically, many of those that are being released into the United States have ties to the PLA,” Green said. “This is a concerted effort by the Chinese to destabilize the United States, to harm our society and to facilitate the basic execution of their version of the global world order.”

“The Chinese Communist Party wants to unseat America as the global superpower,” Green said. “Some would argue in some areas, whether it’s diplomatic, informational, military or economic warfare, they’re winning — so, it’s time for us to wake up.”