The Biden Administration is making it clear what its priorities are at the southern border —and it isn’t the safety and protection of Americans and our Border Patrol Agents. Heck, it’s not even the safety of the migrants crossing dangerous terrain.
It’s the terrain.
Despite 227,547 migrant encounters logged along the southern border in September, and more than 2.75 million logged in fiscal year 2022, the Biden Administration is focusing on how all that foot traffic is affecting nature, ignoring the sources of the traffic and the traffic itself.
The Department of the Interior announced $275,000 in research grants under the Southwest Border Resource Protection Program to assess how human trafficking and drug trafficking across the border affect “natural and cultural resources in national parks.
This is real.
“Several National Parks located along the U.S. border with Mexico have recently experienced serious resource damage due to illegal cross border activities including drug traffickers and undocumented persons traversing the parks,” according to the grant notice posted by the National Park Service. “Other national park units within the desert southwest have also experienced impacts to their natural and cultural resources.”
The border is on fire and the Biden Administration is worried about the plants and wildlife.
“Thousands of miles of unauthorized roads and trails have been created, major ecological processes and the migration patterns of wildlife have been disrupted, important historic sites have been vandalized, and archaeological sites have been looted,” according to the synopsis of the funding opportunity.
Program funding will be awarded to applicants “conducting scientific research and monitoring of species, as well as conservation, interpretation and preservation projects designed to help protect and preserve natural and cultural resources located near or along our international border,” the NPS specifies.
A record-breaking 856 migrants died at the southern border in 2022 —where’s the funding to study how we can stop this from happening?
