Sheriff Mark Lamb of the Pinal County Police Department regularly patrols the Southern Border, acting as the country’s “last line of defense” against dangerous Mexican drug cartels, the New York Post reported in an exclusive interview with the lawmaker.
Lamb, along with his team of deputies, are responsible for intercepting drug traffickers at the border and keeping America as free from illegal drug substances as possible.
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The 46-year-old Mormon lawmaker grew up in Panama and the Philippines and is fluent in Spanish.
He also completed his Mormon mission work in Argentina and has won multiple awards for his excellent work. Not only does he proudly bear a belt buckle engraved with the word “Sheriff”, but his cell phone ringtone is also the “G.I. Joe” theme song. To put it simply, this guy is serious about his work.
As for his role as Sheriff, he said he isn’t satisfied simply sitting behind a desk all day.
Following his 2017 election to the position, Sheriff Lamb has kept busy outside of his office, partaking in patrols of the border twice a week.
His district includes the Tohono O’odham reservation which shares 62 miles of the border with Mexico. Since this area is off-limits to law officials, drug cartels use the tribal border for smuggling substances into America.
In this area, the “border” is little more than a simple barbed wire fence, while other parts have no barrier whatsoever.
Lamb said cartels will take advantage of the smuggling opportunities this region provides, both with its lack of physical defenses and legal repercussions. Traffickers and migrants know they can’t be charged on tribal land.
He, along with his team of 210 deputies, patrol the area to protect the U.S. from these cartels.
Specifically, they battle Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel which was once headed by onvicted drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and is still considered one of the country’s most powerful and most dangerous groups.
“We are the last line of defense in Pinal County before the drugs head to California and other parts of the country.”
Lamb said he has established a special smuggling task force consisting of both local law enforcement and Customs and Border Protection agents to come up with ways in which they can really crack down on the illegal drug trade and prevent substances from being smuggled into the country.
He also said drug cartels will regularly take advantage of migrants and force them to act as smugglers.
These migrants pay the traffickers thousands of dollars to help them illegally cross into America. In exchange, they are forced to become drug mules for the cartels. Lamb said he’s intercepted dozens of these unwilling smugglers who have been saddled with as much as 30 pounds of marijuana on their person.
“Forty percent of all drugs coming in to the US, come through our borders, right here.”
Lamb said the drug trafficking problem and how to stop it has been drowned out by political debates over the cost of border solutions without offering any “real answers.” Political deadlock is leading to an overflow of trafficking into the country.
“While we’re bickering about a $5 billion border wall, the cartels are making as much on smuggling bodies as they are on drugs,” he said.
His team makes up to three drug busts every week, intercepting smugglers as they attempt to cross the scorching Sonoran desert.
Lamb said cartels have surveyors who closely monitor the border and signal to traffickers and their mules to arrange for pick-ups. These people usually wear camouflage and “carpet shoes”, which are cloth slippers that help them be as quiet as possible while walking through the dessert.
“If you’re wearing camo and carpet shoes, you’re not here for a good reason,” Lamb said.
As someone who works on the ground, Lamb has some insights into the current border crisis Americans hear so much about.
He also feels his international experience have given him a unique perspective on the problem, which he says needs “common sense solutions.”
These solutions include allotting more federal funding to local sheriffs to patrol the borders.
Lamb said another solution would be to create a more efficient migrant system that would eliminate the need for illegal migration.
Any migrants entering America in search for employment would be given a short-term working visa so they could enter legally, rather than having to resort to dangerous and life-threatening illegal means.
According to Lamb, the immigration crisis being hotly debated in the government has ironically opened the doors to the border, so to speak.
“We’re seeing something we’ve never seen in America before,” he said. “The traffickers have taken advantage of the immigration crisis to flood the country with drugs. Both sides have paralyzed the debate on immigration, and now we need to get serious. We need common sense solutions to end it.”
h/t: New York Post
