The numbers behind the migrant crisis and how much cartels have profited are truly staggering

That number can’t be right, I thought.Too many zeroes.

I was sitting in my studio, preparing to go on air and deliver a report about how much money Mexican drug cartels had made per year since Joe Biden took office.There, in the research materials in front of me, was the figure $13,000,000,000. That’s thirteen billion dollars. With a b. There’s an old saying about the difference between a million and a billion dollars, which many people (including me) have trouble fathoming.

A million seconds, the saying goes, is 11 days.A billion seconds, on the other hand, is roughly 32 years.

And under the open-borders policies of the Biden-Harris administration, the cartels have made a billion dollars 13 times over.Shockingly, that number is up from just $500 million in 2018, when President Trump was in office.

(Recently, The New York Times published a story that included this figure, though it was hidden down in the 17th paragraph.)When it comes to the border crisis, especially in the fraught weeks leading up to the election of 2024, I worry that Americans have become numb to the giant numbers we hear every day.When Senator J.D.

Vance tells us during the recent vice-presidential debate 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 of the people who are suffering.Over the course of my three decades in journalism, I’ve often reported on the real human cost of illegal immigration and the horrific crimes that often come as a result.I’ve watched mobs of illegal migrants walk right over the border without anything resembling a background check.

In the summer of 2024, I was among the first American journalists to do a deep dive on the ultra-violent Venezuelan prison gang known as Tren de Aragua, which is currently engaged in crimes such as kidnapping, extortion, money laundering and il...