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Nov. 24, 2023 - Epoch Times
34:43
San Diego Declares Crisis After 3,500 Illegal Immigrants Arrive in a Week With No Plan | Bill Wells
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Time Text
They're being dropped off at one of four drop-off locations in San Diego County.
We're one of the drop-off stations.
Ninety percent of the people coming across the border are single-aged, military-aged males, and we don't know anything about them.
I'm hearing from people in think tanks and the Border Patrol guys themselves is that there's a huge influx of people just on the horizon that will be coming, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Meet Bill Wells, the mayor of El Cajon in San Diego County.
Join me in today's candid conversation as we explore the far-reaching implications of illegal immigration on small cities and the border landscape of California.
At some point the system breaks down and there's no longer any services available.
You look at San Diego, because of the homeless crisis, our emergency rooms are already overrun.
They're at capacity 24 hours a day with Waiting times is 7, 8, 10 hours.
Homeless shelters are completely full.
Resources are stretched to their limits already.
I'm C.M.I. Korami.
Welcome to California Insider.
Bill, it's great to have you on.
Welcome.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
We want to talk to you about an issue that's affecting us in California.
We have a lot of people crossing the border.
We are hearing some news about it, but it's not really talked about a lot in terms of our cities and places in California.
Your city, you're in San Diego, El Cajon, your city of El Cajon is one of the hubs that people are getting dropped off.
Yeah.
And you've been pretty vocal about this.
Can you tell us what's happening?
Well, this really started back when Title 42 ended, and we were expecting a lot of migrants to be coming across the border and into the cities.
And we braced for that, but a lot of people didn't come.
They did come, but they immediately were helped out by Jewish Family Services and Catholic Charities who made sure they got to their destinations.
And so it really wasn't the big problem for the cities that we expected.
So then recently we heard that another wave was coming and the problem was this time those organizations no longer were able to help these people.
They were kind of overrun and they no longer had the capacity.
So now we really wonder, well, what's going to happen?
These people are going to come, be dropped off.
Maybe they will have nowhere to go.
Maybe they're going to need help from the city.
And what we're seeing is in San Diego County, in the last five days, we've seen about 3,500 people dropped off.
Wow.
Which is not nearly as much as you're seeing in places like El Paso.
New York, probably.
Well, they eventually end up in New York, but a lot of them are overwhelming the Yuma Station and some of the Texas stations.
But San Diego, we believe, is on track to become a much larger place for dropping people off.
And the reason for that is kind of interesting.
What my friends on the Border Patrol are telling me, not what I'm getting from the federal government.
Is that the cartels are really directing where people are going.
The cartels are coming up on these groups of migrants coming up and they're pulling guns, machine guns, and they're redirecting them towards the San Diego border.
And we think the reason for that is, is that by tying up the San Diego border, by pulling all the border patrol guys off the line, And into the station so they can process these people, that they have free reign to cross the border for their sex trafficking, for their narco trafficking, for their gun trafficking, and all the other illegal things that they want to do.
That might be part of the reason, but we're not completely sure about anything.
And these 3,500 people that are getting dropped off in San Diego, what will happen to them?
Well, we don't really know.
They're being dropped off at one of four drop-off locations in San Diego County.
In my city, El Cajon, I'm the mayor of the city of El Cajon, and we're one of the drop-off stations.
So it's been kind of a trickle for us right now, about 25 or so, maybe 35 a day being dropped off.
We're trying to get these people directed to a bus station or to an airport so they can go to where they need to go.
But some of them don't know where they are.
They have no money.
They have no cell phone.
They don't know how they're going to even care for themselves.
So we're seeing that becoming more of a problem.
The thing that bothers me most is what I'm hearing from people in think tanks and the Border Patrol guys themselves is that there's a huge influx of people just on the horizon that will be coming, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.
We might see a lot more people coming.
And if people cannot go anywhere, so some have destinations to go, or they have friends and family, is that how they're going to places where they have?
And the people that don't, what happens to them?
Well, at that part, we're trying to figure it out as we go along.
I mean, some of them are accessing the hotel in San Diego where they've leased this entire hotel for migrants, but it's pretty full.
So some of them are reaching out to homeless shelters and trying to get into the homeless shelters.
But as you know, California has most of the homeless people in the nation, so there's not a whole lot of room for another wave of people.
You would think that somebody from the federal government is talking to our office and saying, hey, we've got these people, they're coming, here's what we're going to do, here's the plan.
Nothing.
We get no information from the federal government whatsoever.
We get a call from somebody on the Border Patrol the day of, and they say, hey, we're probably going to drop 35 or 40 people off today.
And, but they don't tell us when.
And by the way, in San Ysidro border crossing, that trolley station and at Oceanside, they're getting like 500 people a day.
So they're getting a much worse number of people than we are.
But I know it's the same for them.
There's no direction.
There's no funding from the federal government.
There's no plan from the federal government.
There's no even acknowledging from the federal government that this is happening.
Yeah, and most people don't know about this, right?
Some people have watched the news about it, but a lot of people still don't know that this is happening.
Yeah, it's pretty appalling.
I mean, in my frame of reference, the federal government caused this problem.
This is a completely artificial problem that didn't have to happen.
We've always had people that want to cross the border, but there were always...
The legitimate ways that people could come into our country.
And usually that meant if you wanted to apply for asylum, you went to an embassy in your country, applied for asylum, and then you were granted it or not granted it.
But you didn't make the trek from Venezuela up to the border.
And then apply for asylum.
The government is telling us that most of these people are women and children, families that are looking for a better life.
But what we're seeing is 90% of the people coming across the border are single-aged, military-aged males from countries Africa, Middle East, Asia, China.
So it's a big disparity between the kind of people they say are coming and the kind of people that actually are coming.
And what are your concerns about?
You're pretty concerned about this.
Can you tell us why?
I've got a lot of concerns about it.
I go back a little bit.
So I was talking to somebody yesterday from an immigration think tank.
And they said there's a place called the Darien Pass, which is in Venezuela.
And the Darien Pass is kind of a bottleneck where people from all over the world end up coming and they have to go through this bottleneck to get up into America.
And normally there would be about 10,000 people in a year that would attempt to make this crossing.
Oh, they said there was 85,000 last month.
And they expect double that this month.
So, those are the people I'm worried about.
It's those, you know, 200 and some odd thousand people that are Just out of Venezuela now moving towards us that concern me because that's unprecedented.
We've never seen that number of people coming across.
And then you asked me my concerns about that.
Well, I'm concerned on many levels.
One is a humanitarian level.
Certainly, if people are going to be showing up in my town, regardless of the politics of the situation, we have to provide help for those people.
If we have hungry, unsheltered people, In my town, we're going to find a way to take care of them, make sure that they're fed and clothed and housed, even though I may not agree with the politics that brought them here.
So that's one of my concerns.
I'm also concerned about all the reports I'm getting about sex trafficking.
You know, we've had over 100,000 children go missing since they crossed the border.
We don't know where they are, and they are popping up in sex trafficking rings, and that's very concerning to me.
I'm also concerned about the indentured servitude nature of this.
There's a lot of people that are coming across the border that are being taken to shops and factories all across America where they're being forced to work 18, 20 hours a day to pay back their debt to the cartel.
So the cartels are doing that to them?
They make them go?
Yeah.
And they're starting to be found all over the country.
That's a big concern.
But probably my biggest concern is when you have young men, single men, coming across from places like Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan and Somalia and other places like that.
Countries that oftentimes have taken an adversarial role with the United States.
They consider the United States an enemy.
And they're coming across and we don't know anything about them.
We don't know what their history is or what their politics are or what their intentions are.
I think it's a bad precedent.
I think it sets us up for terrorist attacks into the future.
And I have a feeling that the Biden administration is lighting a time bomb that will blow up on our soil pretty soon.
What about your community in San Diego?
How will this impact them?
Well, it's yet to be seen because we really don't know how many are coming.
I think if it stays at this level, you know, several hundred a day, It will be difficult, but we'll make it work.
But what happens if it gets to be places like Eagle Pass, Texas, and El Paso, Texas, and Yuma, Arizona, where they're getting...
Some of these places are at 600-700% capacity of what they normally could do.
At that point, at some point, the system breaks down and there's no longer any services available.
You look at San Diego, because of the homeless crisis, our Emergency rooms are already overrun.
They're at capacity 24 hours a day with waiting times of 7, 8, 10 hours.
Homeless shelters are completely full.
Resources are stretched to their limits already.
We've been told to expect as many as 3,000 migrants a day coming across.
You start adding 3,000 people a day to this complex equation, That don't have services.
It's not long before you get to a point where services are just overrun, just like what you're seeing with Jewish family services and Catholic charities.
And do people, can these people work?
Do they have the right to work, or is it not clear?
It's not clear to me, but I just read something this morning that the Biden administration is trying to make it a quick pathway for people to be able to go to work.
But, you know, that's a whole other question as to what happens to the jobs now that indigenous Americans, people that are citizens, don't they have a right to have those jobs first before people that don't live in this country?
There seems to be a freneticness about this that it's hard to understand.
Why are we rushing through the process?
Why are we just forcing There's millions and millions of people in, and we can't ask questions about it.
We don't know anything about it.
We don't know where they came from.
We don't know what their history is.
We don't know where they're going.
We don't know who's going to pay for it.
We don't know if it's legal for them to work.
We don't know if it's legal for them to vote.
All these are questions I think a citizenry should have the ability to ask and be satisfied with that.
So I think the way they're going about this is completely wrong.
I believe that if you have a nation without a border, you really don't have a nation.
I think having a border is a very important thing.
And frankly, I think that the people in charge of our federal government right now are not in favor of borders.
They're more of a one-world government, globalist kind of thought process, which I disagree with.
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Now let's go back to the interview.
Now, in terms of San Diego, you're the mayor of El Cajon, and you've been actually in the city.
You were born and raised, right?
Yeah, yeah.
All my life.
Where do you think the city is headed?
Because when I moved there in 2001, it's an amazing city.
Where do you think the city is headed?
San Diego has always been one of the most beautiful places in the world.
Very clean, very friendly, very safe.
And now if you try to go to downtown San Diego, you have to walk through miles and miles of encampments that are worse than Bangladesh.
Trash everywhere, people using drugs in the open air, people having sex on the street, people defecating and urinating on the street, pit bulls, You know, barking at people that are trying to pass by.
You'd take your life in your hands if you had to walk a mile in downtown San Diego.
Wow.
And we're having situations where people are being assaulted, and there's all kinds of problems with that.
There's no reason to live that way.
This is a political ideology.
This is a decision that homelessness should be acceptable.
And frankly, California has passed laws that have made it almost impossible for cities to do any kind of enforcement.
So they've really basically said to the people throughout the country, come to California and be homeless.
We'll give you lots of benefits, lots of money, and we won't bother you.
You can do drugs on the street.
You can steal up to $950 a day without being arrested.
You can be violent without being arrested.
And I think California has become a much, much worse place.
And you can see that, I mean, California lost enough people to lose a congressional seat last year.
And just coincidentally, Florida gained enough people to get another congressional seat.
So it tells you that people are fleeing California.
And now, does this worry you about the future?
Of course.
Of course.
I want to stay in California.
I was born and raised here.
This is my home.
I don't want to go live anywhere else.
But it's not just the homelessness.
It's the lawlessness.
California has basically decriminalized crime.
Almost nothing can put you in jail anymore.
People get away with just about anything.
And the cost.
Like right now in San Diego, they want to have a mileage tax to pay for this transportation system that, frankly, nobody wants and nobody needs.
Not a lot of people use public transportation.
It's very difficult to do that anyways in San Diego, right?
Well, San Diego's 4,500 square miles, so it's not like Manhattan, which is compact, and you can take public transportation.
So if you live in one side of the county and work in another side of the county, there's no possible way you could get there by buses and trolleys.
But nevertheless, they're so focused on getting people out of their cars that they're just frenetic about wanting to build a system.
So they want to spend $170 billion on this transportation system.
Now, to put that in perspective, that would be the largest public works project in the history of America.
Even more money than it costs for the interstate highway system, even with today's dollars.
But so to do that, they want to add sales tax.
They want to add a mileage tax.
That would be, they put a transponder in your car and they'll charge you for every mile that you drive.
And then at the end of the year, you have to send them a check for, I think they said on average, about $1,000.
But, you know, for some people it would be higher, depending on how far they drove.
But San Diego has the highest cost of electricity of any place in the country right now.
The highest natural gas cost of any place in the country.
We're being taxed everywhere you can possibly look.
And there's so many regulations that it costs $185,000 just to start building a house.
Before you buy land or before you buy any timber or materials, you've got to pay $185,000 in fees just to start building a house.
So it's really hard to live in California right now.
And what about your colleagues that may be on the different political system, you know, they're Democrats or you're a Republican.
I'm a Republican, yeah, if you couldn't tell.
Yeah, what are they thinking?
Are the people, are they okay with what's happening, the situation that you're mentioning these problems?
Do you guys have conversations or is it like really...
I tell you, there's not a lot of discussion across the aisle anymore.
It's become so contentious.
And I've been doing this for a long time and I used to...
I talk to Democrats all the time.
And mainstream Democrats, I think, are very reasonable people.
I don't think being a Democrat is a dirty word.
But I think their party has been hijacked by ultra-radicals.
And so most of the people that I know that are in office right now on the Democrat side Are very focused, like most politicians, on moving up the ladder and retaining power.
So they think the ticket to do that is to be as far left and woke as they possibly can.
So they're championing all this.
When I asked them, I said...
You're going to drive everybody out of the state.
You're going to make it impossible for people to live.
They're like, we don't care.
These things have to happen.
It doesn't matter how much it hurts.
It doesn't matter how much it costs.
People are going to have to give up their cars.
People are going to have to stop using gas.
People are going to...
Have to live in small apartments, and they have to live in the city, and they shouldn't be driving outside of their 15-minute area.
And that's kind of their philosophy, and to me it has very totalitarian overtones.
How did that make you feel when you heard that?
Was there a moment when you found out this is what really is going on?
Well, it's been coming for a long time.
I think it was COVID that really woke me up to how serious the situation was because certainly they wanted to lock us down and to have total control.
They didn't want people to go to the churches.
They didn't want people to open their businesses.
And as a result, I ordered my police department not to enforce any COVID regulations.
So I let our churches stay open.
I let our businesses stay open if they wanted to.
If you didn't want to, that's fine.
You can close up.
Was it shocking for you to hear this is happening to your colleagues, the Democrat colleagues that are...
Yeah, I mean, at first you scratch your head and you say, how can any reasonable person believe these things?
How can any reasonable person say it's compassionate to let people die on the side of the road in their filth and drug addiction?
You know, how is that compassionate?
But they believe it.
And after a while, you hear it enough, and you say, okay.
I mean, you talk about the school situation where parents want to have a say in what their children are being taught in school, and the Attorney General of California comes out and says, no, parents don't have a right to know what their kids are doing in school.
In fact, if you push the state, they're trying to pass a law right now saying that if you are disruptive at a school board meeting, that you can be arrested.
And we don't even know what the word disruptive means.
That's not America.
That's a totalitarian government.
So what is the solution to all this?
Because I think these people that are doing this, they think this is the right thing, right?
Do you think they think this is the right thing?
I think that most people think that what they're doing is right.
They talk themselves into ignoring things.
And I'm sure I'm guilty of that at times as well.
You know, we all kind of...
We have confirmation bias, meaning that we tend to look for evidence that supports our pre-existing notion of how things should be.
But I do think that at a point that people have to look at what their values are.
Do they have any values?
Does the Constitution mean anything?
Does America mean anything?
Or...
Do we want to tear down America?
Do we want to bring it down to its studs so we can rebuild it in a socialist or communist utopia?
And I think if people are, if that's what they're believing, then they should be resisted at all costs.
Now, you grew up here.
You saw this community.
Can you tell us your story?
You moved from one part of San Diego to the better parts.
Yeah, I grew up, my mom was a single mom.
My dad died when I was very young.
And so we didn't have any money.
And we were on welfare.
And my mom did her best and tried to give me a good life.
We lived in kind of a bad part of the city, a rough part of the city.
And I think she saw that my friends were all getting in trouble.
That there wasn't much opportunity where we lived.
So she moved us up to Rancho Bernardo.
It's a suburb about 40 minutes north of downtown San Diego.
And at that point it was very small and it was very exclusive.
And she did her best and found a room for rent in In that place that was so expensive, and we were able to afford to live there, and I went to high school, junior high and high school there, and it really changed my life.
People started challenging me and saying, what college are you going to go to?
And I said, I'm not going to go to college.
And they said, of course you're going to go to college.
It was slow, but I eventually changed my mindset and opened up my eyes to possibilities for myself that I never would have thought had been the case.
But I've lived in San Diego all my life.
And what was the values like back in the day between the leaders of the city versus what it is today?
How was it?
Well, one thing I think is different is even back when I was first starting in politics, Democrats and Republicans worked well together.
They maybe disagreed on how we're going to spend money or You know, minor things.
But I think most Republicans and Democrats were very patriotic.
They're very invested in the country itself, and they're invested in the Constitution.
You know, hard work was important.
Honesty was important.
Family was massively important.
Now there's other values that we're definitely colliding with.
You know, the transgender situation, I think there's a big collision about that.
And I think just morality in general.
You know, what is morality?
I think there's a great disparity between what people think morality is now versus when I was a kid, I think people pretty much agreed on what morality was.
There were some disagreements on On how to spend money and how to enact programs, but I don't think it was these massive, we're 100% different people.
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Now, what are some of the solutions for the city of San Diego based on what you're seeing?
You seem to be somewhat worried, right?
Well, let's talk about homelessness.
People oftentimes say, well, homelessness can't be solved.
It's a problem that's unsolvable.
I say, well, that's not true.
I mean, I lived in San Diego in the 60s and the 70s, the 80s and the 90s, and we didn't have a homeless problem.
So, obviously, we can live in a society without homelessness.
It's just having the political will to do so.
So, one of the things we have to do is we have to change our laws, and much of this transcends San Diego.
It's more...
Sacramento politics.
At the state level, right?
Yeah.
But, you know, we've got to...
Like, for example, we have closed two prisons in the past two years.
We've got thousands, tens of thousands of people on the streets as a result.
These people were not necessarily reformed.
We just changed the laws.
We just said that things that used to be a crime are no longer a crime.
I'll give you an example.
It used to be a crime, and it should be a crime, to have sex with an unconscious person.
But in California now, that's now not a felony.
That's a misdemeanor.
It used to be a crime if you would steal $950 worth of merchandise from a store.
That was a felony.
You'd go to prison for that.
But now, if you steal less than $950 a day in a store, you'll get a ticket.
And you can keep doing it, right?
And you can keep doing it every day.
And nobody will put you in, you'll never get arrested for it.
You'll just get tickets.
And eventually, supposedly, you get enough infractions, the judge theoretically could put you in jail, but they're not putting anybody in jail for those kind of things.
And, you know, I talked to my police chief the other day.
I said, so explain to me how bad it's gotten.
He said, you could walk up to me as the chief of police, punch me in the face, walk over Take a brick, break my car window, get in, turn the car on and drive it away, stop at a store, steal whatever you wanted, and take the stolen car and go away.
And the best I could do would be to give you a ticket for those things.
Wow.
For the police, to break into the police car.
Yeah.
And that's...
It sounds like you're making it up because nobody believes that we can live in a society like that.
But yet that is the situation in California right now.
And there's a lot of they'll make a lot of excuses.
Oh, well, that was because of an initiative.
It wasn't the state laws.
But, you know, they're changing the laws every single day.
I mean, they just changed the law to make it illegal for police officers to bother prostitutes who are on the corner.
You have to see money transacted between the prostitute and the person buying their services.
But just them hanging around soliciting prostitution is no longer a crime.
You can do that.
It's not just one example.
This is a pervasive attitude about law in California.
So one of the things that you could do would be to go back, reform those reforms, Because a lot of times these laws were well intended, right?
The intention wasn't to create what they did, right?
I'm not so sure about that, but, you know, that's all opinion, so I guess it doesn't really matter.
So you think we have to go back and change these laws?
Yeah, I think we have to go back and change these laws.
We have to reopen the prisons.
I think we have to take the ability to be homeless off the table.
Homeless off the table.
So I think when we go to people that are living on the streets, and I got to go back a little bit.
So I'm a doctor of clinical psychology, and I worked in, I did 25 years working in emergency rooms with a lot of homeless people.
So I get it.
You ask any cop or doctor or paramedic, they'll tell you the same thing.
The homeless people that are on the streets are there because they choose to be.
There are plenty of places we can get them into if they're willing to get off drugs.
But they don't want to.
They want to stay on drugs.
So when I was first working in the emergency rooms, I would often try to help people and say, hey, let me get you a place.
And they'd say, no, I don't want to go to a place because I have to stop using crystal or I have to stop using fentanyl or heroin or whatever it is.
They don't want to do it.
They like being on the streets.
So law enforcement has to have the ability to go to people and say, you can't live on the street.
We'd like to get you into treatment.
But if you refuse that, we're going to have to put you in jail.
Because right now, we can go offer people treatment, but they can say, yeah, forget it.
I'm going to live on the streets.
Okay, nothing we can do.
But I think there should be something we should be able to do.
I think we should have the ability to force people off the streets.
I think the mental health...
You can't even do that when you have space for them?
Oh, yeah, you can.
No.
So, we should also have the ability to take psychotic people...
And force them off the streets.
Now there is some mechanism to do that right now through the conservatorship laws.
But those laws are so difficult to access.
It's so hard to get somebody on conservatorship.
It's basically impossible.
So we should reform those laws.
So that when people are grossly psychotic and they're obviously unable to make a good decision for themselves, that we can force them into a state hospital.
And by the way, we're going to have to spend billions of dollars to build new prisons and new state hospitals.
Because this is a problem that we created and it's not going to get cleaned up easily.
It's going to be an expensive proposition to clean it up.
But you can clean it up.
So you have prisons to send people to when they won't.
You have rehabs to send people to when they need drug and alcohol treatment, and you have state hospitals to send people to when they are grossly psychotic.
And if you did that, then you could get everybody off the street.
Bill Wells, Mayor of El Cajon in San Diego County.
It was great to have you on California Saturday.
Thanks very much.
I had a great time.
And if people want to get a hold of me, they can send me an email at my city address, which is bwells at elcajon.gov.
El Cajon is E-L-C-A-J-O-N. And I would love to hear from anybody that wanted to talk to me or give me their ideas or tell me why I'm completely wrong.
That's fine.
I'm open to discussion.
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If you'd like to come on the show and be an insider, you can reach out to us at cainsider at epochtimesca.com.
Again, it's cainsider at epochtimesca.com.
We would love to have you on the show to tell us what's going on in your field in California.
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