They travel by military escort to get there, stopping at the charred car where they bury their faces in their hands and cry. It's the place where their family took their last breaths, victims of a massacre no one saw coming. In the three days since the news sent shockwaves around the world, there are no more answers for the LeBaróns' brutal deaths -- only questions about how a peaceful caravan of U.S. women and children could be in the crosshairs of Mexico's monsters.
Peppered with bullet holes -- more than 200 shell casings dotted the scene -- the cars are grisly reminders of Mexico's war zone, a place where drug cartels murder and ambush at will. "Not even mourning is easy for the family of the nine women and children [slaughtered]," one reporter observed, followings the cars of soldiers in bulletproof vests with guns slung over their arms. As the relatives come from Arizona and Utah to pay their respects, others shake their heads. "We watched as things got more tense, but we thought the same thing we always did," said Amber Langford, 43, a midwife in La Mora, "they won't come after Americans."
But come after them they did, barbarically shooting children at close range, burning babies alive in their car seats. For years, the Mormon community had co-existed next to the border. But that peace is shattered now, as more horrors spill out about the final minutes of the victims' lives. "In a testament to a mother's devotion, one woman reportedly stashed her baby on the floor of her Suburban and got out of the vehicle, waving her arms to show the gunmen she wasn't a threat. Her bullet-riddled body was found about 15 yards away." The eight children who survived made it to a hiding place in the bush, as rounds of ammunition sprayed into the area behind them. In shock from what they'd just seen, others walked for hours, bleeding from gunshot wounds, just trying to find help.
Thousands of miles away in Washington, President Trump is more determined than ever to use whatever means possible to stop the violence. For three years, he's tried to secure our border and keep murderers and criminals like these from streaming through our gates. But instead of helping him, liberals have thwarted him. Wednesday, on "Washington Watch," Breitbart's Brandon Darby says he hopes that what happened to these innocent people -- and so many others -- is a wake-up call to Americans about the barbarism knocking at our doors.
"I wasn't surprised that it happened, because we report on things like this all the time in Mexico. It's not [always] as egregious. It's not usually U.S. citizens -- women and children targeted -- but sometimes it is... [I]t isn't out of the norm [for] these cartels... They're very brutal to families and to journalists and to kids -- they kill babies." Obviously, this story is getting international attention because these were Americans with dual citizenship. But this happens, Brandon warns, routinely. There were a record 35,964 killings in Mexico last year alone.
"I wish that people would understand that there are millions upon millions of good people in northern Mexico on the border. And there are a lot of paramilitary, transnational criminal organizations that control the lives of those good people. [There are families like the LeBaróns] living in these communities trying to make it better -- and they're very powerless to actually do so. They don't have a 9-1-1 to call. They don't have the Second Amendment. They don't have any mechanism to fight back. And they have no governmental bodies to help them. And they're just ignored. So this is what happens when organized crime gangs are allowed to run the country..."
Americans think ISIS is bad. But ISIS doesn't have much on these cartels. "One is across the ocean," Brandon cautions, "and one is right here on our border." But unfortunately, the liberal media doesn't want to write about the horrors in Mexico "because they're afraid that if they do, it's going to support Trump or support Republican calls for border security. And then, [there are] people on the Right, who don't want to talk about it, because if they do, then it would [give credibility] for the Democrats' calls for asylum. So what happens? People are ignored."
It shouldn't take the blood of innocent women and children for leaders in this country to realize that our nations are in crisis. The unease in Mexico and the disunity in Congress is a threat to American safety. It's time for both parties to come together and find real solutions to immigration and border security -- before more innocent women and children die.
