Shortly after entering Mexico last Friday, the four Americans were caught in the crossfire when rival cartels opened fire on each other. Video footage from the scene showed the cartel members casually dragging the Americans, living and dead, into the back of a pickup truck after the gun battle.
The fate of the four Americans illustrates the terror that has prevailed for years in Matamoros, a border city of a half-million people located across the Rio Grande River from Brownsville, Texas. The city is also dominated by a drug cartel, known as the Gulf cartel, that often fights among its own people on the streets.
Mexican officials said a Mexican woman also died in the crossfire.
Ira Mehlman, of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, tells AFN a “dangerous situation” on the border has only worsened by the open-border policy of the Biden administration that is allowing the drug cartels to operate.
“We pay attention to those four people who were kidnapped - two of them were killed in Mexico - but this same thing is happening to innocent Mexican civilians every single day.”
On average, Mehlman says, 80 people are murdered every day in Mexico by the cartels that are growing more powerful, and more wealthy, thanks to the porous border. Those cartels are operating inside the U.S., too, he points out.
“Until the administration demonstrates that we are not going to tolerate it,” he concludes, “this is going to keep happening."
