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 illicit drug trafficking, earning them the nickname “MS-13 on steroids.” 

As I say in my new book, “Incoming: On the Front Lines of the Left’s War on Truth,” the things I’ve seen have convinced me that this election is the most consequential one we’ve ever seen.

On one side, we have the woman who served as Joe Biden’s “border czar” during the most horrific stretch of illegal immigration in our nation’s history.

Although Kamala Harris and Tim Walz would like to coast through this election on “vibes,” avoiding the press at all costs while they tell blatant lies to the American people, we cannot afford another four years of open borders. 

The human cost has already been too great. In February of 2024, Laken Riley was brutally murdered by an illegal migrant named Jose Ibarra. On June 16, police arrested an illegal alien named Victor Martinez Hernandez for the murder of Rachel Morin, a mother of five who’d been raped and killed while hiking in Baltimore.

One day later, on June 17, a machete-wielding illegal alien from Ecuador was charged with raping a 13-year-old girl in a New York City park in broad daylight. That very same summer day, police in Houston, Texas, came upon the body of a 12-year-old girl named Jocelyn Nungaray in a creek.

It didn’t take long to figure out that two illegal aliens named Johan Jose Martinez-Rangel and Franklin Peña were responsible.  

In saner times, these stories would have led the major broadcasts for days. But to Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and Joe Biden (who, you might have forgotten, is still president), these people are just inconvenient statistics. Luckily, there is hope on the other side.

Every time I report on a story about illegal immigration, I’m reminded of what it was like to finally hear Donald J. Trump say his now-famous words in the lobby of Trump Tower. 

“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” In the years since, as I’ve dug into the real human cost of illegal immigration, I’ve come to believe that President Trump might have been a little too mild in his assessment of our situation.

Right now, our country is in grave danger. The millions of illegal immigrants who’ve streamed into the country during Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s four years in the White House are making themselves known, and people are suffering because of it.  

We need someone with a real plan, not empty promises. I’ve spent my most of my career reporting on the devastating human cost of illegal immigration, and I know that fixing this problem isn’t about political slogans or partisan bickering.

It’s about taking serious, effective steps to secure our borders, enforce the law and protect American citizens.

Whether it’s finishing the wall or cracking down on cartels, we need leadership that sees the border crisis for what it truly is — a matter of life and death for too many families. We can’t afford to ignore it any longer. 

The lives of American citizens depend on it.  

This article is adapted from Bianca de la Garza’s forthcoming book “Incoming: On the Front Lines of the Left’s War on Truth”; Copyright 2024 by Post Hill Press.