← The Watch Floor with Sarah Adams
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I'm Sarah Adams. Today we're going to talk about one of the misunderstood pieces of the border crisis. I'm going to focus today on the Chinese nationals that cross the border. But obviously this works along the lines of different illegal population that came across. So you probably heard about this uptick in Chinese Nationals that came over our border. You saw lots of headlines about Chinese migrants entering, especially through Mexico. There is tons of videos filmed of them coming. And then of course, you heard how they were also using the northern border. And that reporting is all accurate. Right. We don't even know the depth of the problem because we get lots of things like encounters. We get assumptions and numbers of got aways and then there's this whole, whole black hole of everyone else. But here's one of the interesting parts of this puzzle that a lot of people are missing. So when we look now at 2026, right, we do have more secure borders. We don't have these large population booms of people coming over. But we have to remember that even though crossings have dropped in 2020 and 2026, right, neither border is anywhere near closed. Today we're gonna focus more on the northern border, but there's still people illegally coming over both because the routes are still there, the facilitators are still in place. The smuggling infrastructure that was built kind of during that height in 2021 and 2022 is still prevalent. And so from an intelligence perspective, that's the most important. We did not go after the smuggling in infrastructure networks. We left them all in place. So let's talk quickly about the surge nobody expected from China. For years, Chinese nationals were coming over both our borders, but in what we believe to be relatively small numbers. Then something changed. So in 2021, Border Patrol at least encountered a few hundred Chinese nationals at the southwest border. But by 2022, they pointed out that the number had increased sevenfold. By 2023, it exceeded over 24,000 persons. By 2024, it was over 37,000. Again, we don't even know the exact number, but we do know it increased by over 600%, right? That's an insane number. And again, this isn't just Chinese nationals. That increase happened of different populations, especially as I talk about a lot of time, the terrorist numbers. And so we have to start talking about some of the issues surrounding this. What actually enables this? Do you ever feel like something is off? You're hitting the gym, you're crushing your goals, you're showing up every single day? Or have you noticed a change in your partner? Slower recovery time, less focus, and a drive that used to be there that just isn't. It's subtle, but it's real. Most people don't understand that testosterone naturally decreases 1% every year over the age of 30. Think about it. That slow change really does make workouts harder. 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There's essentially no risk to just go out and try it. 91% of users have felt, you know, some change in their performance and thousands have been happy with the product. I mean, just go see the reviews for yourself. And here is the best part. For a limited time, our listeners get 50% off for life, plus free shipping and three free gifts. When they go to MengotoMars.com it's literally the perfect way to continue the gains that you kicked off at the start of New year's. Again, that's men g o t o mars.com to get your 50% off and your three free gifts. And at checkout, let them know the watch floor sent you. Now, talking about the Chinese nationals is really important and it's good because they had one of the first, fastest increases involving any nationality, which also means then they might have some of the better smuggling routes. And so, you know, as a targeter, I want to zoom in right on Sinaloa Cartel because I know they have the best routes. But I also want to zoom in and see how are the Chinese moving in here because clearly they have pretty damn good routes and you want to target those routes and that infrastructure instead of getting ahead of this and being ready when it happened, when there's this huge influx of Chinese national first, our policymakers were caught completely off guard. I don't even know if they still caught up. Analysts across the government and Department of Homeland Security were caught off guard. And it immediately generated a host of questions nobody could answer. And I still don't think they can to this day. Who are these people? Why are they coming? And how the heck are they getting here. Now, most Americans have gotten really smart on the southern border over the last couple years because at least that became the focus of the outrage. But there was also trending happening at the northern border that a lot of people didn't really spend time putting any kind of spotlight on it. So obviously, it saw the same increased type of activity that we saw at the South. Right. Everybody said, this is the opportunity and the time to get into the United States. Go. And we talk about how terrorists, especially after the October 7th attacks, just started sending recruits, even if they weren't even fully trained. It's like, move now, move now, move now while the opportunity is right. And so we have to be honest about that. It's not just terrorists that saw this opening. Many other of our adversaries saw it, including China, clearly. So one of the clearest examples of where we saw a surge at the northern border was the Swanton sector. So this is the portion that's like New York, Vermont and New Hampshire. So historically, this was not a really prevalent illegal migration corridor. But then the numbers exploded. So in 2019, there was about 1500 encounters of illegals trying to come across this region. And by 2024, there's about 20,000. And again, that's encounters that doesn't even include everybody else who slipped on through. And of course, among those encounters was the same trend of a large number of Chinese nationals crossing at the same time. There was also this interesting uptick in the Pacific Northwest and other sections along the U.S. canada border. And the question was very simple. Why travel halfway around the world? Choose one of the most coldest and remote border areas in the United States. Right. The answer is it's because the area became attractive because nobody was focused on it. There are some companies you talk about because you like the product, and there are some companies you talk about because of who they are. This is both Bubs Naturals wasn't just built as a business. It was built on the memory and the legacy of Glenn Bub Doherty.
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You know, I lost everything in the kitchen, including that note. Guess what came several days later. Yes, another care package from bubs. Right. Something they didn't need to do, but they did it anyway. I want you to understand who these people are now when we talk about the product. I've actually been using the Collagen peptide since 2023, so quite some time now. And when I started, it was because, you know, my joints were achy. I was having a hard time getting up and motivated in the morning, and I started taking it and started feeling a lot more youthful. And they make a number of other products. And another one I love and want to make sure you also look it up is their MCT Oil. But this isn't about collagen or MCT Oil. It's also about the people behind this. Right. They understand legacy, taking care of people and doing the right thing, even when no one is looking. That matters to me. Live better, longer. For a limited time, our listeners get 20% off at Bubs Naturals using Code Watch. At checkout, just go to BubsNaturals.com and you're all set. And after checkout, let them know the watch floor sent you. So when there's no focus, as you can imagine, smugglers adapt. They always have. They study enforcement patterns. They know where our resources are concentrated, especially because we put everything out in the press. They look and find areas that are less scrutinized. And for decades, America has really focused a lot on the southern border and taking their eye off the northern border. The northern border simply doesn't have the same density of infrastructure to enforce our border laws. Personnel. It doesn't have close to the surveillance coverage. And that, as you can imagine, makes it incredibly, incredibly attractive for smugglers. The geography of the northern border also helps. Right? You have thousands of miles of forests. You have farmland, you have rivers, you have remote terrain. You have long stretches where there's nobody living for miles. And all those characteristics matter. If you're trying to bring people in and you're trying to do it secretively, there's been this long Misconception. It's because we saw so many at the southern border that, oh, all Chinese just fly into Mexico and they come across. And that's not true at all. They take so many different routes, and we have to be honest about that. They come through all portions of Latin America, you know, especially places like Nicaragua. We've seen plenty of Chinese in the Darien Gap. When we were trying to collect on the terrorists moving through the region, there were Chinese who actually got into some of the pockets, like some Afghan migrants were coming through. And people would team up and make like, little small teams to safely go through the Darien Gap. And we talked to a number of Afghans who actually had Chinese nationals kind of in their pocket as they moved through this area. So even migrants were seeing these large number of Chinese. But because everything was focused on the southern border, we only thought of them coming that way. And we have to remember they come in through both the southern and the northern. Just like any other actor we're concerned of. The terrorists use the south border still, they use the north border. It's where you can get across. Sometimes it's based on the safest, sometimes it's based on the cheapest. Remember, they're spending thousands upon thousands of dollars. Sometimes it's based on just how many smugglers or facilities you gotta transfer through. If there's been problems or risks in one of those sectors involving one. And you're making a risk assessment decision. And that's even why so many came over in the same window. They said this is the best time to get in the United States, so it's worth taking the risk. And once you decide I'm going to take the risk and go to America, then you got to decide, okay, is it safer to me to cross the south or the north? And so just view it as that. It's almost like a 50, 50 choice if you have the funds. Right. Because the. The northern border can be a lot more expensive to traverse. But again, a lot of these actors have the money to move here. And that's another thing that nobody's really honest about. You know, there are individuals who pay 10, 20, even $50,000 to come to the U.S. that's an insane amount of money. So a person who paid 50,000 likely did not come here for economic reasons. And I wish we would do a better job of even just looking at the migrants and who spent the most and who spent the least, because I am a lot more concerned with those who spent tens of thousands of dollars to come here than someone who really was moving his way through looking for a job. Because at the end of the day, when we let in over 14 million people and we have to narrow down and get to what they say, the worst of the worst of the country, right? We have not done that, but there are ways to target and do that and we have to do a better job of that. So there is a question, we're not answering it today, like, why did so many Chinese leave China in the first place? So there's a lot of explanations out there, but there's no one single answer. Of course, we had some come for economic reasons. We had some come due to political concerns. We had some come because of personal circumstances. And we'd be foolish to say that nobody came for espionage or future sabotage. Of course, China is one of our near peer enemies. But there's a lot going on within China to where it's difficult to pinpoint one issue. They have an economic slowdown, they have major youth unemployment challenges, they have this property sector instability. And then they have this tightening political environment that really makes it hard to live under. Now we have to be honest though, that at the end of the day, it's a very different country. A citizen of China really does believe they serve their government. So you can't assume too, if someone leaves the country that they don't feel like they have some sort of commitment or responsibility or accountability back to the government. They do. And so we have to be honest about that. We can't just say, oh, these are all poor people and they came here for a better life and they're anti China. Like, that's a very dangerous assumption to have. But when we're talking about migration flows, there usually is some strong push and pull factor that makes it happen. Right? Like a war kicks off, there is a massive economic downturn. And we didn't see this exactly in China. And it really falls back on the fact that it became clear all across the world you could look at anything. You could look at telegram. And everyone was saying, the US border is open, come now. And that really was a catalyst that moved a lot of people. And we have to be honest about that. So our government essentially put up a giant welcoming sign around the world and everybody said, this is our chance, let's roll. Now, obviously when the new administration came in, they did make border policy pretty much the top priority. So of course, a lot of things change. By 2025, the number of illegal border crossings dropped dramatically. I mean, the government says that the southern border is zero. Of course it's not zero. There's people filming people coming across every day. So that's a little bit of a narrative. They have dropped. Now on the terrorist side of things, I can tell you Al Qaeda has not stopped moving people over the southern border. So while it dropped and it dropped for probably a lot of people, especially who live in Latin America and were coming up, when you're a bad actor with a lot of money and you're really cemented within these smuggling networks, both the southern border are still open for you. And so we have to be truthful and honest about that, right? We're not here to give government talking points. We're here to tell the truth. So when this trend started happening of encounters going down, that was at both the south and the north border. So we don't have the numbers we had obviously three years ago. There's some sectors of the northern border where they saw apprehensions decrease by 70%. So great number. And in the Swanton sector, it fell 90%. So this is a very fascinating thing. As we told you, the smugglers decided this is a key area to target and move people through. We increased enforcement and they realized it and saw it, we have to be honest that they chose no longer to use that route. But that does not mean they then lifted and shifted to a better route. We have to be honest about this because remember, an infrastructure was built during this time. So let's for a minute talk about that concept of infrastructure because it's less important how many Chinese nationals crossed back in 2024. First off, our government does not have an accurate number. The bigger question issue right now actually needs to be, well, what was built during that time, right? What system was put in place to move such a large number of people? Because those migration pathways didn't go away, right? We didn't hear these huge raids on the northern border where we got all the pieces of these pipelines. So think about it. The safe houses still exist. The transportation routes are still there. The document forgers still got their jobs. The money transfer system is still in play. The smugglers are still there. The facilitators are still there. The corruption that allows all this to occur, still in place. So when you're looking at this from like an intelligence perspective, we like to focus on this piece we call infrastructure. It's not roads, it's not bridges. It's this human infrastructure being the networks, the relationships, the access. Because that surge that we allow to come in here created massive amounts of infrastructure. And that infrastructure can be reused again and again and again because we never tackled it. Now, this concept is building of infrastructure is of course, not a new phenomenon. Historically, terrorist organizations have really been kind of the key leader in taking previously created pathways and using it for other purposes, right? So they would take cigarette smuggling route, and now we move foreign fighters through it. Very good about doing this, very smart about doing this. And so they would take a criminal smuggling route, and now it's a terrorist route. They would take a migration corridor, and now it's a terrorist facilitation route. They would take a fraud network, and now it becomes a terrorist logistics network. So once a pathway is proven and tested, it enters this ecosystem, and there is no set rule that that pathway is going to remain for Chinese nationals. Because everybody wants the solid, safe, secure pathway that works to get in the United States. They will pay for it. And now they know, hey, these exist, we need to find them, we need to make the relationships, and then we need to take advantage and also use them. So historically, we've always known these routes have attracted the bad actors. That's why long time ago, Salma bin Laden wanted to create the relationship with El Chapo and the Sinaloa cartel, a relationship that is very strong and exists today because he wanted their routes. It's a very, very simple concept, but people kind of forget this. We look at everybody in their own pocket, in their own bubble, and nobody spends time on the crossover of these things. But it's in the crossover where you can have effects, where you can thwart something, where you can collect, like, real information or real intelligence. You know, as people are moving, they're confused. They don't know where they are. You know, it's a key time to gather information on what is coming next. That's why when you're in an intelligence role, you pay a lot more attention to the networks than you ever do to the headlines. Especially because a lot of headlines our government puts out is purely propaganda. It's exaggerated. It's to get you looking here while there's still a problem here. As we all know, as we now move through 2026 and we understand this issue, at least with the fact the infrastructure is still there and it's still in play. What should we actually look for to determine if a problem is getting worse, staying the same, or getting better? First off, we have to see if any of these migration numbers go up or spike. Again, it's good to look at the Chinese nationals, because I think they do a little better job of collecting on them. It's a good one to watch. Does it increase again at all. Second, we need to see whether activity changes or increases at the northern border because there's such a focus on the southern border. The third is we need to see if there's any actual efforts or attempts to stop these smuggling networks. Again, you have to go after the pathways, the facilitators, the money launderers who are doing this between China, Latin America, Canada and the United States. If nobody does any enforcement against them, they are still moving something we don't want into our country. And we have to be honest about that. It could be people, it can be weapons, it can be fentanyl. It doesn't really matter what the item is that's coming in. We want to keep it out. You know, another thing to watch for is changes in conflicts, economies, again with China watching what happens with their economy. And last, it's any sort of information that comes out where we see kind of another actor coming through some of these locations and zones that, hey, for the last couple years, we've mostly seen Chinese move through here. Now we're seeing Syrians. Right? That's concerning. That's kind of one of those data points we really need to dig into and find out why. So these routes are a lot less important than the people who are behind them and running them and sustaining them and shifting them and making them happen. So we all saw this surge happened, right? We all saw it with our own eyes. The numbers climbed, the routes were tested, this infrastructure was built. Now the question is, what happens next? So we have this massive issue we talked about today where there is still infrastructure and bad actors are still coming through it. And then we also have the question of the bad actors that came into our country over the last five or six years. What is their intention? What are their plans? And we can't just say, hey, that time's over. Our border's secure now. We let them in. We are still letting them in, and we have a huge problem. Thanks for being here today on the watch floor.