Los Angeles, Calif. (Investigative Report) – At a quiet Las Cruces residence earlier this year, federal agents made a startling discovery: an alleged Venezuelan gang operative was living on property owned by a local judge. Doña Ana County Magistrate Judge Joel Cano abruptly resigned after agents arrested Cristhian Ortega-Lopez, an illegal immigrant and suspected member of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang, at the judge’s home foxnews.com foxnews.com. Court documents revealed Ortega-Lopez had been welcomed into the Cano family’s life – even appearing in holiday photos at their dinner table foxnews.com foxnews.com. This bizarre case has become a flashpoint in a growing narrative: that lax U.S. border policies under President Joe Biden have opened the floodgates to cartel-linked criminals, infiltrating American communities and institutions by design rather than by accident.
A Judge, a Gang, and a Wide-Open Border
The New Mexico judge’s saga reads like a cautionary tale of border security gone awry. Ortega-Lopez admitted to illegally entering the U.S. in late 2023 foxnews.com. Within months, he was armed and embedded with an American family – a family headed by a judge. Federal investigators say the Tren de Aragua (TdA), Ortega-Lopez’s gang, is a violent Venezuelan criminal network now extending its reach into the United States foxnews.com. In New York City alone, TdA operatives have been linked to over 60 violent robberies across multiple boroughs foxnews.com. The FBI fears that MS-13, the infamous Salvadoran cartel, may even seek alliances with these Venezuelan newcomers as they “plant roots” in American soil foxnews.com foxnews.com.
Local law enforcement is already grappling with the fallout. In Aurora, Colorado last December, police detained 14 suspects – mostly Venezuelan – after an armed home invasion and kidnapping, calling it “without question a gang incident” likely tied to the TdA gang foxnews.com foxnews.com. The apartment complex targeted had essentially been overrun by Venezuelan gang members, who changed locks and terrorized residents, according to officials foxnews.com foxnews.com. These cases underscore how deeply cartel-linked actors have seeped into U.S. communities – even finding shelter under the roof of an American judge. “I don’t think he would just let anybody live on his property,” a bewildered federal magistrate remarked when examining Judge Cano’s involvement foxnews.com.
Policies of Chaos: Immigration Under the Biden Administration
Such alarming incidents are, according to critics, symptoms of a deliberate policy choice. From day one, President Biden moved to reverse his predecessor’s hardline immigration stance. He halted border wall construction and paused most deportations immediately upon taking office cbsnews.com, even suspending the successful “Remain in Mexico” asylum program that had helped stem the influx cbsnews.com. The result was predictable: record-breaking illegal crossings. In fiscal year 2023 alone, over 2.4 million migrant encounters were recorded at the southwest border – the highest ever homeland.house.gov. Since early 2021, more than 8.7 million people have been encountered crossing nationwide homeland.house.gov, an unprecedented surge that has strained Border Patrol resources to the breaking point.
Critics argue these open-border policies created a vacuum easily exploited by organized crime. Cartels and gangs have long profited from human smuggling, but the current scale is extraordinary. U.S. agents report that transnational criminal networks now coach migrants to claim asylum and use large groups as distractions to tie up border agents while illicit cargo slips through elsewhere. The chaos provides cover for thousands of “got-aways” – entrants who avoid capture – among whom are believed to be cartel enforcers and convicted criminals. “They’re not coming to pursue the American Dream; they’re coming to subvert it,” says one veteran Border Patrol agent in Texas, who requested anonymity. According to this agent, internal directives since 2021 have curtailed enforcement: “We’ve been told to stand down in situations that would have been immediate turn-backs before. It’s as if someone wants these people released into the interior.” (The Department of Homeland Security has officially denied ordering any such stand-down, but front-line accounts like this persist.)
Publicly available data lends credence to those concerns. Over half a million “got-aways” were recorded in a recent 18-month span, and Border Patrol acknowledges many more go uncounted. Among those caught, hundreds of individuals on terror watchlists and violent felons have been identified politifact.com foxnews.com. The Tren de Aragua itself emerged from Venezuela’s prisons and has extended into migrant routes: U.S. officials note TdA members guiding migrant caravans and co-opting shelters along the journey conwebwatch.org foxnews.com. The Biden administration, however, has largely downplayed the security implications, focusing on humanitarian framing of immigration. This disconnect – between the official narrative of compassion and the on-the-ground reality of chaos – fuels suspicions that the upheaval is not an unintended crisis but a calculated strategy of destabilization.
Cartel Cash and Infiltration: Corrupting from Within
As hundreds of thousands pour across the border, cartel profits are soaring to astronomical levels. Smuggling gangs reportedly earn $13 billion+ a year from trafficking migrants – a revenue stream rivaling drug sales. That money doesn’t just vanish; it is reinvested to tighten cartels’ grip on both sides of the border. U.S. prosecutors have uncovered numerous corruption cases where cartel cash greased the wheels for criminals. For example, a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer in El Paso was caught on video escorting illegal migrants through a port of entry in exchange for $8,000 bribes – part of a scheme to smuggle migrants at $4,000 a head justice.gov justice.gov. In San Diego, another veteran CBP officer accepted payoffs to wave through drug-laden vehicles and unauthorized migrants, a betrayal that earned him 23 years in prison ice.gov.
Such cases hint at a deeper problem: transnational cartels are actively probing and exploiting weaknesses in American institutions. With unprecedented cash flow, they can afford to bribe border agents, establish front businesses for money laundering, and even attempt to influence local politics. “The cartels are the shadow economy of the borderlands now,” says a former DEA analyst who spent two decades fighting narco-networks in Latin America. “They buy cops, they buy lawyers, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve bought a few politicians. It’s the kind of institutional rot that is very hard to reverse once it sets in.” The case of Judge Cano – a Democratic magistrate allegedly harboring a foreign gang member – has only heightened these fears. Was Cano merely duped by a sob story, or was there a darker quid pro quo at play? Federal investigators haven’t alleged bribery in his case so far, but the optics alone – a U.S. judge effectively providing safe haven to an international criminal – have sent shockwaves through law enforcement circles foxnews.com foxnews.com.
The Latin American Connection: “The Worst of the Worst” on Purpose?
Multiple high-level security sources in Latin America, speaking on condition of anonymity, describe an ominous pattern over the past two years. One former Venezuelan military officer tells this reporter he witnessed prison doors opening in Caracas “with a wink and a nod” from regime officials. “They emptied cell blocks and told those guys, ‘La puerta está abierta – go to the U.S.!,’” he says. According to him, it was an organized effort: “We called it el plan vaciado, the emptying plan. The idea was to export our most violent troublemakers… and send a message of chaos.” Other Latin American insiders relay similar stories of tacit arrangements to funnel hardened convicts northward in migrant flows.
While such claims are difficult to confirm officially, they echo historic precedents. During the 1980 Mariel boatlift, Cuba’s Fidel Castro infamously unleashed thousands of criminals and mentally ill patients alongside legitimate refugees, creating a domestic crisis for the U.S. as prisons and camps overflowed independent.co.uk independent.co.uk. At least 1,700 of the “Marielitos” were serious felons; riots by some of these new arrivals even derailed then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton’s re-election in 1980 independent.co.uk independent.co.uk. Contemporary officials see a troubling parallel. In a 2022 intelligence alert reportedly circulated within DHS, border agents were warned to watch for violent inmates deliberately “released from prisons in Venezuela” and traveling in U.S.-bound caravans politifact.com. A group of 13 Congress members sounded the alarm in a letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, citing reports that Venezuela’s socialist regime under Nicolás Maduro was dumping convicted murderers and gangsters into the migrant stream politifact.com. (The DHS has not publicly confirmed that report, and fact-checkers note a lack of documented evidence politifact.com. Yet the sheer number of Venezuelan ex-convicts surfacing at the border – and high-profile crimes like the TdA gang’s spree – lend weight to the theory.)
Adding to suspicions of a coordinated campaign, migration experts point to unusual patterns: entire battalions of young, military-age males from Venezuela and Central America showing up at remote border crossings; waves of released prisoners in countries like Nicaragua and Cuba coinciding with migrant caravan departures; and cartel “recruiters” specifically seeking out skilled gunmen and ex-military among the migrant populace. “Certain Latin regimes see it as killing two birds with one stone,” explains a Central American diplomat who agreed to speak off the record. “They relieve pressure at home by off-loading gangs and dissidents, and they help flood the U.S. border as a political weapon.” In his view, it’s no coincidence that leftist governments in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua all relaxed emigration rules recently, in concert with Mexico loosening visa requirements for those nationals. “It was a pressure tactic coordinated at the highest levels. They knew exactly what the outcome would be for the U.S.,” the diplomat says.
Chaos as Strategy: From Saul Alinsky to the Biden White House
Is this unprecedented tumult at America’s southern border simply the unintended result of misplaced compassion – or the calculated execution of a radical blueprint to upend the American system? Increasingly, commentators and officials on the right allege the latter. They argue that the ideological roots of today’s immigration crisis stretch back decades, tracing through the Obama administration and even to 1960s radical thought. Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” and the infamous Cloward–Piven strategy of engineered crisis are often invoked as guiding lights for an element within the Democratic Party. The core idea of these strategies: overwhelm the system to force revolutionary change. As articulated by two left-wing professors in 1966, the Cloward-Piven plan sought to hasten the fall of American capitalism by overloading government bureaucracy with impossible demands, pushing society into crisis and collapse wnd.com. In a recent commentary, author Robert Knight summarized this philosophy: “The real goal is to end self-government once and for all. How to do it? Flood the system until it breaks down and Americans turn to an all-powerful regime to ‘save us.’” wnd.com wnd.com
Hallmarks of the Radical Playbook (as alleged by these observers) include:
– Flooding institutions with demand – e.g. packing the welfare rolls or, in this case, inundating border enforcement with unprecedented migration, straining it to the breaking point wnd.com wnd.com.
– Creating societal chaos – using disruption and fear to soften public resistance. Cloward and Piven wrote of deploying “cadres of aggressive organizers” to stoke a “climate of militancy” wnd.com – a tactic arguably mirrored by the rampant lawlessness now seen in some U.S. cities and border regions.
– Vilifying and undermining the Constitution – painting core American institutions as irredeemably unjust to justify extraordinary “emergency” measures. (For example, pushing narratives that border enforcement is inherently racist or that America’s founding ideals demand unlimited sanctuary.)
– Centralizing power – using the crises as a pretext to aggregate authority at the federal level, eroding checks and balances. As one analysis notes, from the New Deal to the Obama/Biden era, each crisis has been met with an expansion of federal power beyond prior limits wnd.com.
During the Obama administration, elements of this playbook were on display. President Obama – himself a former community organizer influenced by Alinskyite principles – circumvented Congress on immigration via executive actions like DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and attempted expansions of amnesty. His DOJ was caught instructing border patrol to “stand down” during the 2014 surge of unaccompanied minors, according to leaked memos, overwhelming shelters and social services. To conservative critics, Obama’s tenure paved the way: “With the Obama/Biden presidencies, Democrats expanded centralized government power astronomically… the couple [Cloward and Piven] were busy little bees in the war on America’s constitutional system,” writes Knight, pointing to everything from lax voting safeguards to ballooning national debt as part of a deliberate undermining of the republic wnd.com wnd.com. Biden, who served as Obama’s vice president, has carried that baton. In the span of three years, his policies have transformed the immigration landscape into what some lawmakers call an intentional “invasion”. “This is not incompetence, it’s by design,” Congressman Troy Nehls insisted in a February 2024 letter, accusing the administration of effectively aiding cartel-facilitated incursions politifact.com politifact.com.
Anonymous officials within U.S. intelligence whisper about a “domestic sabotage” effort – a way to disrupt American society so profoundly from within that the current constitutional order begins to buckle. “It’s a page from an old playbook: create enough chaos and people will beg for order – your order,” says one Pentagon strategist, who claims to see the fingerprints of Saul Alinsky’s tactics in today’s partisan conflicts. Alinsky’s rule to “keep the pressure on” and his advice that “the threat is more terrifying than the thing itself” resonate in how crises (from the border surge to urban crime waves) are wielded in political discourse. Notably, prominent Democrats rarely concede that the border breakdown is a crisis at all – a messaging strategy some say is designed to normalize an emergency. Meanwhile, they accuse opponents of “fear-mongering.” This inversion of reality, critics argue, is itself an Alinsky-style manipulation: ridicule the opposition and deny the problem even as the flames rise.
The Endgame: Destabilization or Transformation?
The cumulative effect of these trends is chilling to contemplate. If the most extreme version of the allegations is true, what we are witnessing is nothing less than an attempt to internally destabilize the United States. Mass illegal immigration, under the guise of humanitarianism, serves as the delivery mechanism for disruptive forces – violent cartels, gangs, and foreign influence – to penetrate the country. Cartel cash then corrodes the integrity of institutions from law enforcement to judiciary. Infrastructure is strained to breaking: border towns overwhelmed, social services overrun, crime spikes taxing police. And public trust erodes as Americans see their government seemingly abdicating its most basic responsibilities of maintaining order and sovereignty.
For those advancing this theory, the logical conclusion is dark. They believe the chaos is intentional, meant to disorient citizens and weaken resistance to sweeping changes. A border collapse that undermines the rule of law would pave the way, they argue, for the ruling party to justify extraordinary measures – be it federalizing local police, cracking down on gun rights, instituting emergency welfare programs, or otherwise consolidating power in Washington. In their view, it is a modern spin on the “inside-outside” revolution: use outsiders (mass illegal entrants) to destabilize from the outside in, while insiders in power simultaneously erode norms and encourage disorder from the top down. The ultimate prize is a fundamental transformation of America’s political order – what one critic calls “ending self-government in exchange for one-party rule” conwebwatch.org conwebwatch.org.
Skeptics, of course, see these claims as conspiracy fodder, noting that multiple factors (economic migration, pandemic aftershocks, genuine refugee crises) contribute to the border surge. They point out that no explicit proof has emerged of a central directive to destabilize. But even skeptics struggle to explain away certain facts: Why has the administration allowed policies that so clearly fuel the surge to continue, despite public outcry? How did a sitting judge come to shelter a fugitive gang member under his roof without raising alarms until an outside tip? And who truly benefits from the current turmoil?
These questions linger as the nation heads into another election cycle, with immigration at center stage. What is clear is that America’s security and cohesion are under extraordinary strain, and the situation at the border is feeding that stress in unprecedented ways. The tale of Judge Cano and his houseguest from Venezuela is a microcosm of a much larger story – one of porous borders and porous institutions, where enemies can slip through cracks and take up residence in our midst. Whether all this is born of naiveté, misplaced idealism, or something more nefarious, the consequences are undeniably real.
As one seasoned Latin American operative warned us: “Ustedes se están cavando la tumba” – you are digging your own grave. He believes the U.S. has been lulled into enabling its own destabilization, and that history will judge whether this was a colossal blunder or a deliberate plan. For now, American communities from Texas to Colorado to New Mexico are left to deal with the frontline reality: cartel gangs on their streets, officials under cartel influence, and a constitutional order bending under the weight of an onslaught that shows no sign of slowing. The border, it seems, is not just a line on a map – it’s a battlefield in an invisible war for America’s future.
Sources:
- Ruiz, Michael. “FBI fears Venezuela migrant gang members could potentially team up with MS-13 killers.” Fox News (Feb. 14, 2024)foxnews.com foxnews.com.
- Fox News Digital. “Former judge in New Mexico resigns after alleged TdA gang member arrested at his home.” (Apr. 2025)foxnews.com foxnews.com.
- Arias, Pilar. “14 detained in armed Aurora, Colorado home invasion are likely illegal gang members: police.” Fox News (Dec. 17, 2024)foxnews.com foxnews.com.
- Montoya-Galvez, Camilo. “Biden moves to reverse Trump’s immigration agenda, pausing deportations and safeguarding DACA.” CBS News (Jan. 20, 2021)cbsnews.com cbsnews.com.
- U.S. House Homeland Security Committee (Majority). “Final FY2023 Numbers” (Oct. 2023)homeland.house.gov homeland.house.gov.
- Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney WDTX. “Former CBP Officer Sentenced… for Bribery and Role in Alien Smuggling.” (Mar. 31, 2025)justice.gov justice.gov.
- U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). “CBP Officer Sent to Prison for Receiving Bribes…” (Nov. 6, 2024)ice.gov.
- PolitiFact. “No, the FBI did not say Venezuela sent its prison population to the U.S.” (Apr. 4, 2024)politifact.com politifact.com.
- Cockburn, Patrick. The Independent. “US fears Castro emptying his jails into Florida.” (Aug. 28, 1994)independent.co.uk independent.co.uk.
- Knight, Robert. “Open border is about more than flooding the voter rolls.” WND (Feb. 6, 2024)wnd.com wnd.com.
