Shortly after Donald Trump’s upset election victory in 2016, official State of Texas business brought me to two ICE immigration detention centers in South Texas. I ran an intelligence group for the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division. What I learned there has informed my beliefs about illegal immigration ever since.
Back then, part of my routine was to help the feds interview apprehended aliens from Pakistan, Syria, Somalia, and Afghanistan and collect intelligence about potential Islamic terrorism. The South Texas Processing Center in Pearsall, Texas, some one hundred miles from the Mexican border, was always filled to the brim with detainees.
But to my surprise, for the first time, it was as empty as a football stadium in baseball season. The same was true of ICE’s larger, ever-packed-to-capacity Port Isabel Service Processing Center…
