This number cannot be correct, I thought. Too many zeros. I was sitting in my studio, preparing to go on air and deliver a report on how much money the Mexican drug cartels had made each year since Joe Biden took office. There, in the research papers before me, was the figure $13,000,000,000.

It’s one o’clock billion dollars. With a b.

There is an old saying about the difference between a million and a billion dollars, which many people (myself included) have difficulty understanding. One million seconds, it is said, is equal to 11 days. A billion the latter, on the other hand, correspond to approximately 32 years.

And thanks to the Biden-Harris administration’s open border policies, the cartels have made a billion dollars. 13 times more. Shockingly, this figure is up from $500 million in 2018, when President Trump was in office. (Recently, the New York Times published an article including this character, even though it was hidden in the 17th paragraph.)

When it comes to the border crisis, especially in the difficult weeks leading up to the 2024 election, I worry that Americans have become desensitized to the giant numbers we hear every day.

When Senator JD Vance tells us during the recent vice presidential debate over the fact that there are “20 to 25 million illegal immigrants” living in this country, or that the Department of Homeland Security has lost “320,000 children” at our southern border, it’s easy to just hear the words and not think about the people who are suffering.

In my three decades of journalism, I have often reported on the real human cost of illegal immigration and the horrific crimes that often result.

I’ve seen crowds of illegal immigrants crossing the border without anything like a background check. In the summer of 2024, I was among the first American journalists to report in-depth on the ultra-violent Venezuelan prison gang known as the Tren de Aragua, which is currently engaged in crimes such as kidnapping, extortion, money laundering and drug trafficking. , earning them the nickname “MS-13 on steroids.”

As I say in my new book, “Incoming: On the Front Lines of the Left’s War on Truth,» The things I’ve seen have convinced me that this election is the most important we’ve ever seen.

On one side, we have the woman who served as Joe Biden’s “border czar” during the most horrific period of illegal immigration in our country’s history.

As much as Kamala Harris and Tim Walz would like to go through this election on a high, avoiding the press at all costs while telling blatant lies to the American people, we cannot afford another four years of open borders.

The human cost is already too high. In February 2024, Laken Riley was brutally murdered by an illegal migrant named José Ibarra. On June 16, police arrested an illegal alien named Victor Martinez Hernandez for the murder of Rachel Morin, a mother of five who had been raped and killed while hiking in Baltimore.

A day later, on June 17, a machete-wielding illegal alien from Ecuador was accused of raping a 13-year-old girl in a New York City park in broad daylight. That same summer day, police in Houston, Texas discovered the body of a 12-year-old girl named Jocelyn Nungaray in a creek.

It didn’t take long to realize that two illegal aliens, Johan Jose Martinez-Rangel and Franklin Peña, were responsible.

In saner times, these stories would have been headline news on major broadcasts for days. But to Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and Joe Biden (who, you may have forgotten, is still president), these people are just inconvenient statistics. Fortunately, there is hope on the other side.

Every time I tell a story about illegal immigration, I remember what it was like to finally hear Donald J. Trump deliver his now-famous words in the lobby of Trump Tower.

“They bring drugs. They bring crime. They are rapists. In the years since, as I have examined the true human cost of illegal immigration, I have come to believe that President Trump may have been a little too lenient in his assessment of our situation.

Right now, our country is in grave danger. The millions of illegal immigrants who flooded into the country during Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ four years in the White House are making themselves known and people are suffering.

We need someone with a real plan, not empty promises. I have spent most of my career reporting on the devastating human cost of illegal immigration, and I know that solving this problem is not a matter of political slogans or partisan bickering.

It’s about taking serious and effective action to secure our borders, enforce the law and protect American citizens.

Whether it’s completing the wall or cracking down on the cartels, we need leadership that sees the border crisis for what it really is: a matter of life and death for too many. families. We can no longer afford to ignore it.

The lives of American citizens depend on it.

This article is adapted from Bianca de la Garza’s upcoming book “Incoming: On the Front Lines of the Left’s War on the Truth”; Copyright 2024 by Post Hill Press.