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By Aliss Higham
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A migrant who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally complained about the lack of security when he entered the country.
In an interview with Fox News national correspondent Bill Melugin, a Turkish man who has not been named said there was no security or background check as he crossed into the U.S. from Mexico after paying a Mexican cartel $10,000 to get him across.
In April this year, almost 180,000 migrant encounters were recorded at the southwest border, a decrease of about 10,000 from March. Encounters along the U.S.-Mexico border hit an all-time high at the end of 2023, with 301,000 recordings in December, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported.
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The man told Fox News: "The American people is right, completely true. Who comes into this country? They don't know. OK, I'm good, but how if they're not good?"
"How if they're killers, psychopath, [something] else? No guarantee of that. Like, no security, no security check, no background check."
When asked if he was worried about who was crossing the border, he replied, "Yes, of course, because people are not normal." Newsweek has contacted the U.S. Customs and Border Protection in California for comment via email outside normal working hours.
Melugin posted the clip on X, formerly Twitter, writing in the caption: "A Turkish man who crossed into Jacumba, CA illegally w/ a group of other Turkish men told me he paid $10k to a cartel, & expressed shock at how easy it was to cross the U.S. border with no resistance, telling me Americans should be 'worried' about security & who is crossing."
X user Stephen Taylor commented on the post, writing, "Man immediately becomes a Republican after crossing."
Paul A. Szypula, a conservative political commentator, blamed the incident on President Joe Biden. "The Cartel love Joe Biden. He's been incentivizing them for over three years now to run their racket of illegally crossing our border," he wrote on X. "We have the ability to stop them but Biden is just unwilling to act and use his power of Executive Order. He should've been impeached for this."
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"A robust and efficient immigration system would allow individuals like this young man to be screened &, if cleared, to enter the country with his resources intact & able to immediately seek employment & become a net contributor, not a net drag, on the economy," another X user added. "But no, we choose a system where the cartels profit & American citizens pay for it."
One commenter suggested that crossing the border illegally might have been easier for the Turkish man than applying for a visa. "I am not defending illegal border crossing," they wrote, "but it takes about 2 years to apply for USA visa in Turkey."
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