Morning Wire - Border Cartel Concerns & West African Crisis | 8.9.23

Episode Date: August 9, 2023

Suspected cartel members are seen crossing the border raising stoking concern and reaction from lawmakers, the GOP primary shifts as former Vice President Mike Pence qualifies for the upcoming debate, and a coup in Niger is threatening to destabilize an entire region of West Africa. Get the facts first with Morning Wire.  Consumer Tax Advocate: http://www.CovidTaxRelief.org is helping all types of businesses and nonprofits receive up to twenty-six thousand dollars per employee.  Bambee: Get access to your own dedicated HR Manager at http://www.bambee.com. Make sure to type in Morning Wire under podcast when you sign up! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Men carrying guns and wearing body armor were seen crossing the southern border into Texas as concerns over cartels rise. What do we know about the incident and how are lawmakers reacting? We cannot have a border where the cartel has operational control. I'm Daily Wire, editor-in-chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Wednesday, August 9th, and this is Morning Wire. Former Vice President Mike Pence has now officially earned a spot on the presidential primary debate stage later this month. We're working hard at it. I'm not giving out gift cards.

I'm not even offering soccer tickets or kickbacks. How if Pence and other GOP candidates shifted their campaign strategies to try to take down Trump. And a coup in Niger is threatening to destabilize an entire region of West Africa, who is behind the government takeover and will it lead to a regional war? Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know. A group of armed gunmen were seen crossing the southern border over the weekend.

They appeared to slip back across the border before being arrested or causing an incident, but their presence emphasizes the concerns about the threat of cartels. Here to talk about safety concerns at the southern border is Daily Wire reporter Tim Pierce. Hi, Tim. First, what do we know about these armed men? Not much, other than their thought to have been cartel members. Several men were photographed near Fronton, Texas. They all appeared to be carrying long guns, and at least one looked like he was wearing body armor. Border Patrol dispatched Bortak tactical agents to the spot, but the gunmen were gone by the time the agents arrived.

The gunmen are believed to have been cartel members, but what they were here for and what they did can only be guessed at. As far as we know, a search of the area by the Bortak agents came up empty. According to Fox News's Bill Malugian, who first reported these images, the Fronton area is troubled by cartel members fairly regularly. In May, Texas and federal authorities arrested five suspected members of the Cartel del Noresta. Two of them were armed with rifles, and the group was escorting several miners. Many other suspected cartel members are seen in the area but never caught, and that says nothing of the cartel activity in other places along the border. For instance, cartel members in the city of Matamoros blocked roads near U.S. checkpoints leading into Brownsville, Texas. And in October 2021, authorities with the Texas Department of Public Safety reported being taunted by cartel members across the border.

All right, so cartels openly present and aggressive on the border. Are these concerns being heard in Washington? Yes, lawmakers in D.C. have grown pretty concerned about the cartels and how much control they have along the border. It's well known that the cartels extort immigrants who want to come to the United States. And a recent report from the Washington Examiner suggests that the U.S. may be helping facilitate that abuse. Cartels have reportedly figured out a way to exploit the CBP One app and get around its geofencing. In theory, the app should restrict applications for immigration parole based on nationality. But cartels can reportedly bypass those restrictions, essentially giving human traffickers direct access to a legal immigration pathway.

On Monday, the House Homeland Security Committee announced an investigation into the app. And committee chairman Mark Green accused President Biden and Secretary Mayorkas of providing cartels with, quote, more innovative ways to evade our laws, raking money from human and drug trafficking, and wreak havoc in our country. So there are supposed solution might actually be more of a problem. In other border-related news, Massachusetts Governor Mora Healy declared a state of emergency over the impact immigration has had on her state. What do we know about that situation? This is another example that the immigration crisis is a national issue and one that's not just fed from the southern border. The swan sector that covers parts of New Hampshire, New York, and Vermont on the U.S. northern border has seen more immigrants cross illegally in the past 10 months than the past nine years combined.

So Healy declared a state of emergency on Tuesday because her state's shelter system for the homeless is about to break, largely because of an influx of immigrants into Boston. Healy told Homeland Security in a letter that 20,000 people are currently living in state shelters. The state's shelter system, she said, is growing at an unsustainable rate and will buckle soon without federal aid. She blamed the problem on a federal bottleneck for issuing work authorizations that would allow immigrants to apply for jobs and support themselves. All right. So like New York, another sanctuary state, about to collapse under the strain of immigration. Tim, thanks for reporting.

Thanks for having me. Coming up, GOP candidates shift their campaign strategies as the first debate approaches. It's official. Former Vice President Mike Pence has qualified for the August 23rd GOP primary debate in Milwaukee. Pence had already achieved the polling numbers needed to qualify, but had struggled up until now to amass the needed 40,000 individual donors. The news comes as more details have been solidified about a upcoming primary debates. Here to discuss Pence and the evolving approach of GOP candidates in

attempting to dethrone Trump is Daily Wire contributor David Marcus. So first, how important was this milestone for Pence's campaign? Good morning. This was expected to eventually happen, but yes, it's vital for Pence that he be in the debate. Had he failed to make it, there's little chance that his candidacy could have survived, which for someone of his political stature would have meant not only the end of a race, but a real public humiliation. As it stands now, though, Pence is force in the polling behind Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Vivek Ranaswami. So he's going to be right near the center of the stage with at least one chance to make his pitch

to thus far dubious Republican voters. It was only within the last two weeks that Pence lost the third place spot to Ramoswamy. Has this polling dip had an impact on how Pence is approaching the race in general? It seems to have. And in a very specific way, in recent weeks, Pence has sharpened his attacks on Donald Trump, especially in regard to January 6th when Trump wanted the then vice president to deny the election results and throw it back to the states. Pence has always said he had no authority to do that, and it should be noted that the vast majority of legal scholars agree with him. Yeah.

Pence has tried to maintain an awkward balance of expressing pride in what he helped achieve in the Trump administration while condemning Trump's actions following the 2020 election. It was always thin ice, and now Trump is unleashing on pants, calling him in the past few days, delusional and claiming that the former Indiana governor has, quote, gone to the dark side. All right, so Star Wars references aside, the balance between praising Trump's presidency and offering a new vision is something that most of the GOP presidential campaigns have sought to strike. Is that changing now? Are candidates and not just Pence ready to aim more direct fire at the clear frontrunner? Yes. Ron DeSantis this week made his. clear a statement yet that Trump lost the 2020 election. Pence is throwing more elbows, as we just

talked about, and they joined former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie as candidates on the debate stage who may lay into Trump more than we saw was likely, even just a few weeks ago. Meanwhile, Ramoswamy, along with South Carolinians, Tim Scott and Nikki Haley, seem to be trying to stay on this Trumpian tightrope of praising the former president while offering a fresh start. Now for the $64,000 question, will any of these changes in the state of the race change Donald Trump's mind and lead him to attend this month's debate, given that so many knives are coming out for him? Not to sound too much like the White House Press Secretary, but I don't have anything to report on that. At least publicly and in some private conversations, Trump World is riding high right now with just over 50% in the polls, and he's still a no for the debate. That having been said, Trump's numbers have been still. steady for a few months now, which means he's not attracting new support. Allowing the other candidates, or at least most of them, to hammer away at him for two hours

on national TV, look, it's a risk. But thus far, about two weeks out from the event itself, it seems like a risk he's willing to take. Meanwhile, the indictment drama promises to keep Trump front and center in the headline, so his challengers have a heavy lift ahead of them. Dave, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. More than a dozen West African countries are meeting in an emergency summit tomorrow in response to a military coup in Niger

which overthrew the country's democratic government. The coup has been condemned by neighboring nations and could lead to an all-out regional war. Joining us with the details is Daily Wire researcher Michael Whitaker. So Michael, first off, tell us about the situation in Niger. Hey, Georgia. Just to get some background,

Niger is one of the largest nations in West Africa. It's about twice the size of France and is home to roughly 25 million people. It's also consistently ranked as one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world. and historically it's been very unstable. Nizierre declared independence from France in 1960, and since then, the military has successfully overframed the government five times.

The most recent coup d'utat does not appear to have been ideologically motivated. According to Simon Harkinson, senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the personal interests of a single general ultimately caused the coup. The immediate cause seems to be that over the past few years, the United States, the European Union, and others have injected a lot of money into counterterrorism, efforts in Niger, and most of that money has gone to certain units that are not the Presidential Guard, which is about a 700-man elite that has, I guess, for a long time thought of itself as the top dog, and some are saying that that was the immediate instigation for this,

was that General Chiani, who has been in charge of that unit for 12 years, was about to get the pink slip and that he acted before that could happen. While there was some initial confusion, it appears that the rest of the military has rallied behind the Presidential Guard. the deposed President Bassoon is being held in the presidential palace. Niger's neighbors, however, have been less supportive. ECOWAS, the Economic Coalition of West African States, has condemned the coup and demanded the restoration of President Bazum.

They even threatened to intervene militarily if he wasn't returned to power by last Sunday. That deadline has passed, and now Ecoas is called an emergency meeting to figure out its next move. Now, if Niger is chronically unstable, why are neighboring countries so concerned about this latest coup? are they concerned about regional instability? Oh, definitely. The coup represents a very dangerous trend. Since 2020, there have been seven military coups in the region, including an ECOWS member states like Mali, Guinea, and Burkina Faso. Those three states were suspended from ECOWAS after the coups.

Niger's membership has also been suspended. The Blocks 11 remaining members are concerned that if the Nigerian military is able to overthrow its civilian government without consequence, unsavory elements of their own militaries might get ideas. But punitive action is easier said than done. The military governments in Mali and Burkina Faso have made it abundantly clear that they consider any action against Niger to be a declaration of war and will act accordingly. Both sides have taken aggressive action, but have stopped short of declaring all-out war.

Nigeria, which is about ten times more populous than neighboring Niger and supplies three-quarters of its electricity, shut down power exports after the coup. And Niger closed its airspace on Sunday in response to Icoa's threats. The U.S. and several allies have pulled out all non-essential civilian staff from the country, So they appear to be preparing for the worst. Now, on that note, how involved is the U.S. in this conflict? Are there any key Western interests that might tempt either the U.S. or Europe to get involved? At the moment, direct intervention seems pretty unlikely.

After the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and the ongoing proxy war in Ukraine, the American public really does not have much of an appetite for war. America and France both have about 1,000 troops in Niger already, mostly for counterterrorism operations. There are active Islamist insurgencies across West Western. Africa, including groups affiliated with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. Naturally, there's concern that a war and a withdrawal of Western forces could exacerbate that problem. If the eco-West nations are busy fighting each other, they'll have fewer

resources to fight the jihadis. There are also concerns that the war could lead to another migrant crisis. Many Africans who want to enter Europe pass through in Egypt. The collapse of Libya and Syria in the early 2010s led to mass migration to Europe, so those concerns are not unfounded. All right. Well, Michael, thanks so much for reporting. Thanks for having me. That was Daily Wire researcher Michael Whitaker. Another story we're tracking this week. Activists assembled in Texas this week for the ceremonial signing of the Save Women's Sports Act.

LGBT protesters also attended the event leading to a heated exchange. Morning Wire caught up with college swimmer turned activist Riley Gaines following the incident. They were yelling profanities at children. They were throwing bottles and pouring drinks and spitting on people. there are pockets of these protesters who are doing everything in their power to dissuade from our argument. But they can't do it with truth. They can't do it with science. They can't do it with logic or reasoning or quite frankly common sense.

And that's why they resort to name calling. That's why they resort to spitting. This does not deter us. This is actually almost encouraging. It encourages me to continue on and to continue pushing this in all 50 states. That's all the time we've got this morning. Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back later this afternoon with more news you need to know.