The Human Tide the Cameras Ignore
The nightly newscasts have moved on. The caravan footage disappeared. The aerial shots of flimsy tents and desperate crowds no longer fit the preferred narrative, so they vanished from prime time. But the border did not close simply because the cameras did. The numbers are still being compiled by federal agents in dusty processing centers and quiet county sheriffs' offices, and they tell a story that an honest press would put on the front page every single morning. A serious country does not stop counting arrivals just because the counting becomes politically embarrassing.
During fiscal year 2024, U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded more than 2.1 million encounters along the southwest border. That figure does not include the hundreds of thousands of known gotaways who slipped past agents, nor the unknown number who crossed without detection. In the first five months of fiscal year 2025 alone, border agents tallied roughly 975,000 additional encounters, putting the country on pace for another record-setting year. The total is larger than the population of nearly half the states in the union, yet it is treated as a footnote. These are not abstract statistics. They represent bus schedules, school enrollments, hospital emergency rooms, and housing markets already stretched past their limits in communities that never asked to become border towns.
The burden does not stay at the Rio Grande. It moves north on buses and trains and in the back seats of vehicles driven by smugglers who know exactly which sectors are understaffed. Local governments from Arizona to Maine have declared emergencies. Shelters meant for American families have been repurposed. School districts have hired bilingual staff they cannot afford to serve students whose immigration status is uncertain and whose records are incomplete. None of this was voted on. None of it was explained honestly to the taxpayers footing the bill.
Crime Data the Activist Press Buries
It is not xenophobic to read a crime report. It is the minimum obligation of anyone who claims to care about public safety. Yet when the data conflict with the open-borders fairy tale, the activist press either ignores the numbers or buries them beneath soft-focus features about migrant hardship. The result is a citizenry that knows more about a single detention video than about the cumulative toll of criminal activity tied to illegal immigration.
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement data, there were approximately 662,000 noncitizens with criminal convictions or pending charges on the agency's docket as of late 2024. That is not a rounding error. That is a population larger than several American cities, and it sits inside the country because enforcement was deliberately dismantled. The Texas Department of Public Safety has documented that illegal aliens accounted for nearly 489,000 criminal arrests in the state between June 2011 and February 2025, including thousands of homicides, sexual assaults, and robberies. In fiscal year 2024, CBP agents apprehended more than 370 individuals on the terror watchlist attempting to enter the United States, a number that has climbed steadily since enforcement standards were relaxed. Any one of those encounters could have become the next national tragedy.
The response from the usual outlets is predictable. They run fact-checks that parse verbs and ignore totals. They quote advocacy groups with a financial interest in open borders. They accuse skeptics of fearmongering while refusing to interview the victims whose names do not advance the narrative. A free press is supposed to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Today it does the opposite, shielding the politicians and nonprofits whose policies created this mess.
What Honest Reporting Would Look Like
If the press still practiced journalism instead of activism, these figures would lead every broadcast and dominate Sunday talk shows. Reporters would ask the uncomfortable questions. They would demand to know why sanctuary jurisdictions refuse to cooperate with federal detainers. They would investigate the cartel revenues generated by human smuggling, estimated to run into the billions of dollars annually. They would interview Angel Families without editing their grief into a political talking point.
They would also explain the opportunity cost. Every dollar spent housing, transporting, and processing illegal entrants is a dollar not spent on veterans, the homeless, or struggling American workers. Every agent pulled from the line to process paperwork is an agent not patrolling the desert. Every policy that encourages more arrivals guarantees more deaths in the brush, more fentanyl in the suburbs, and more strain on the social compact that holds the country together.
Instead, the public gets silence, euphemism, and the occasional lecture about compassion from commentators who live in gated neighborhoods far from the routes migrants travel. The compassion they champion is paid for with other people's safety, other children's classrooms, and other towns' strained budgets. A sovereign nation has both the right and the duty to control who enters its territory, to remove those who pose a threat, and to prioritize its own citizens in the allocation of scarce public resources.
The border statistics that should be headlines are not complicated. They are the record encounters, the swelling criminal docket, and the terror watchlist apprehensions that accumulate while the establishment media looks away. They are the empty beds in shelters that used to house American veterans, the crowded classrooms in districts that cannot make payroll, and the overdoses traced back to narcotics carried across an open border. Americans deserve to know the truth, even when the truth is inconvenient for the prevailing narrative. The Alamo Post will keep reporting it.
