Murrieta's Cliven Bundy Moment

By Douglas V. Gibbs

I've been living in Murrieta since 1989, when it was a rural area with few homes, many dirt fields, and ranches dotting the hills.  Murrieta incorporated as a city a couple years later, but at that time my home remained outside the city limits.  Then the housing boom hit full throttle, and with annexations and an incredible import of new residents, Murrieta's population leaped over the 100,000 threshold, and the sleepy little bedroom community became a bustling city tucked between the Los Angeles Basin and San Diego County.  Other cities in the area also experienced massive growth, putting the Murrieta-Temecula-Menifee region well over a quarter of a million people.  We are not a part of Los Angeles, Orange County, Riverside, San Bernardino or San Diego.  We are our own little corner of small town attitude away from the madness of the big cities that surround us. . . and we'd like to keep it that way.

For eight months the Murrieta Border Patrol station has been receiving illegal aliens, sometimes in small numbers, and sometimes when you add up the busloads during the week, hundreds per week.  The shipments have been during the dead of night, at times when nobody notices, and in small increments in order to keep the truth hidden from the average Murrieta resident.

The Illegal Immigrants are being shipped in from overcrowded facilities in San Diego, and Texas, where the massive onslaught of new arrivals have overwhelmed the locations on the front line.  Escondido, a quick half hour drive south of Southwest Riverside County, at one point, was designated as a location to dump these people, but Escondido fought back, and turned the nightmare away.  So, the federal government moved to the next location further north along the Interstate 15 Freeway - Murrieta, California.

Suddenly, the numbers of illegals being shipped in rose dramatically, but nobody except those paying close attention, was aware of what was going on.  I was one of those people.  I did not originally realize that the unwanted encroachment of illegal immigration was being dumped on the streets of my hometown of over twenty-five years, but once I found out, I got involved.

A month ago, my granddaughter was diagnosed at an urgent care center with having a viral infection called hand and foot disease.  This disease normally breeds in areas where conditions are not the best, usually infects communities, and there is no treatment available for it.  It is a four-day viral infection that includes fatigue, a sore throat, and sores in and on the mouth, and on the feet and hands.  When my son took his daughter to the doctor, the man told him that incidents of hand and foot were on the rise in the local area, but he did not know why.  I immediately put two and two together, and began to do a little investigating.

Local politically-involved folks tend to know each other, so I contacted my group of friends that are involved in Murrieta, and the surrounding area, politics, and they informed me of the influx of illegal aliens coming in through the local Murrieta Border Patrol station from San Diego and Texas.  These undocumented aliens, however, are not being deported for breaking American immigration law, but are being processed, held for 72 hours, and then are being released into the general public.

The numbers I have been told have changed based on who I have talked to, ranging from 500 a week to 50 here and there.  However, based on my conversations with local officials, the number recently has been jacked up to 200 every 72 hours.  200 people, strangers in a strange land, who don't speak the language, and are often sick with communicable diseases, are being shipped in, processed, and then released into the general population, every three days.

For a legal immigrant like my wife, who came to the United States with her family as a child from Mexico, and naturalized in 2007, allowing illegal immigrants into the country and letting them stay through de facto amnesty, is a slap in her face.  However, to then endanger that woman's family with disease when she left Mexico and came here legally in order to place all of that behind her, is just wrong.

What is worse is that these people who came across the border seeking the promise of a better life are being treated like cattle, unable to sleep in a bed, bathe, or be fed at facilities not designed to handle numbers like we are seeing.  The Murrieta station does not have beds for these people, nor are they able to give them basic services.  Then, after being processed, and housed like animals, they are taken out into the city and are dropped off, given a bus ticket, or shipped off to some other place they are unfamiliar with, and with no housing or basic services.

They are treated like cattle for a political agenda, exploited, abused, and left to fend for themselves.

In Murrieta, it all came to a head on Tuesday Night, when bus loads totaling about 140 illegal immigrants arrived at the Murrieta Border Patrol Station.  Between 200 and 300 protesters were waiting, blocking the road, and demanding that the buses be turned around.

The scene mirrored the confrontation in the Nevada Desert between the Bureau of Land Management and the supporters of rancher Cliven Bundy.  The protesters stood their ground, refusing to allow themselves to be bullied by the federal government's plans.  The buses stopped in their tracks, the situation was assessed, and hoping to avoid confrontation, the buses full of illegal aliens turned around and departed from Murrieta, presumably returning to San Diego.

Local activism had prevailed.  Citizens, gathered together not by big national groups, or by party affiliation, but by concern for their city, had stood up to the federal government, and for one moment pulled off a victory.  The federal government backed down. . . for now.

The last protester departed from the lonely road leading up to the Murrieta Border Patrol station at 1:00 am.  A bus with 40 illegals on board arrived in the dead of night, at 1:30 am, shortly after the last protester departed.  The illegals were debarked while nobody was looking, processed behind a curtain, and will probably be released in the dead of night as well.

Such is the deceptive nature of the federal government, and their scheme to import illegal aliens, whether the citizens like it, or not.

-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary