When Teresa Chapoy looks out her window these days, she’s not surprised to see illegal aliens walk across her lawn into the United States over the Mexican border in Val Verde County.

“The other morning I was awakened at 6:00 a.m. because somebody opened the water spigot outside my house,” Chapoy told the Lone Star Standard. “This kind of person is not the same type of illegal alien from years ago. What makes it so hard to deal with is that now I have to walk around with a handgun all the time.”

The retired customs and border protection officer believes conditions at the U.S. Southern border have reached crisis levels.

Chapoy | Submitted photo

“It's like a nightmare that I can't seem to wake up from,” Chapoy said. “Down the street from me, a neighbor had an illegal alien with a baseball bat trying to break down her door in the middle of the night while her husband was away. She was home alone with her children.”

Chapoy inherited the Val Verde home she lives in from her grandfather.

“In those days we could sleep well,” she said. “We didn't have air conditioning in the house, so we slept with the windows open and the air that we had was what came in through the screen windows. The doors were open because we didn’t worry about anybody coming in or trying to hurt or harm us in any way, but now everything is topsy turvy. Nothing is like it was before.”

Former President Donald Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), also known as the Remain-in-Mexico policy, is cited by a Department of Homeland Security assessment as effective in limiting illegal immigration, empowering the Mexican government and quickly processing meritorious claims for relief.

The rushed canceling of the policy without notice to local law enforcement by the Biden administration is what bothers Val Verde County Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez, according to media reports.

“They’re traitors,” Chapoy said of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. “They should close the border, let border patrol do their job and deport the people who come in illegally.”

Since Biden's inauguration, the U.S. Border Patrol has reported nearly 900,000 land-border encounters along the U.S. Southern border, representing nearly 300% more encounters than were noted all of last year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data. 

“Last Monday, I was walking through my living room and I saw these two guys just run past my bay window,” Chapoy said. “They were wearing black clothes and were soaking wet. They hadn't stopped to change. Yesterday, there were three guys who were changing into dark clothing on my street. They had come across the river, too.”

Even Texas Democrats have been critical of the Biden administration’s handling of the crisis at the border. State Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Corpus Christi) told the Washington Post in late March that Biden had created a “system that incentivizes people to come across” and was sending a message “that if you come across, you can stay.” 

For Gonzalez, the fix must be “by changing the policy at our doorstep,” without which the flow “isn’t going to stop or slow down.”

U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Laredo) has been raising the alarm for months. Cuellar told the Washington Post that he told the Biden administration early on that “we need to get a handle on this before it gets out of hand.” 

More recently, Cuellar has continued his criticism of the administration’s lack of attention to this issue. The Texan reports that while he recently thanked Vice President Harris for discouraging “potential illegal immigrants from attempting to travel to the US,” Cuellar added that “somebody needs to listen to our local communities. With all due respect, just coming and doing a staged event is not enough. They have to understand.”

More than two-thirds or 68% of Americans think the current administration is doing a “bad job” at dealing with the border crisis, and 79% believe it is very or somewhat important to reduce the number of asylum seekers at the U.S. border, according to a recent Pew study.

“We have no sovereignty,” Chapoy said.

Along with a spike in illegal immigration, the crisis at the border has brought with it an increase in other crimes related to cartel criminal enterprise. The West RGV News reported earlier this year that generational South Texas rancher Whit Jones III noted that immediately following the Biden administration's rollback of Trump-era policies, he has seen a “significant increase” of human trafficking and smuggling. 

“I'm concerned about human trafficking,” Chapoy said. “I'm concerned about all these little boys and all these little girls and all of the perverted stuff that comes along with that. Yes. I'm concerned about the women who are being raped by the cartels and everything that's happening with that, but there's a bigger picture and nobody's paying attention to that, which is terrorism.”

According to Reuters, many cartels in Mexico that previously stole oil and sold drugs are shifting to a new line of work — human trafficking. Mexico is an origin, transit and destination country for the sex-trafficking industry, and has recently seen an uptick in gangs shifting to dealing in people. 

Cartels that have shifted to the human-trafficking industry include the oil-pipeline tapping and Guanajuato-based Santa Rosa de Lima gang, as well as the Mexico City Tepito Union drug gang. 

“It’s not just the criminal element,” Chapoy said. “Terrorists are more than likely coming in, too. We have given Iran and Syria, which has been a state sponsor of terrorism since 1979, we have given Yemen, we have given Sudan, we have given Somalia – we've given them all temporary protected status. So, if they make it across that river, when they're ever apprehended, we can't deport them because they are protected.”

Fox News recently reported that Mexican cartels make as much as $14 million a day smuggling individuals across the border and into the United States. Retired Tucson Border Patrol Chief Roy Villareal recently stated that trafficked individuals become slaves to pay to be smuggled across the U.S. border.

“A lot of these vulnerable populations use their life savings,” Villareal said. “Some are essentially indentured servants and they're working off this debt for a long period of time. In other cases, some of these migrants are asked to transport narcotics or some form of crime to work off a different part of their debt.”

Santiago Nieto, head of Mexico’s Financial Intelligence Unit, is heavily involved in the investigation and arrest of cartel members. He recently told Reuters that many gangs are shifting to sex trafficking as their predominant source of revenue.

“A lot of criminal groups are mutating,” Nieto said. “When one possibility ends ... they start to link up with other kinds of criminal activities.” 

Nieto estimates that trafficking has become the third-largest illicit activity in Mexico, behind drug and arms dealing.