LTE – JoAnn Utphall – 11-17-2021
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According to the former (retired) Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scot, the Biden administration has put a gage-order on all Border Patrol officials so that they cannot speak to the public about the illegal immigrant situation at the border. He explained that he retired because he could not in good conscience follow the Biden Administration illegal immigration stand. Not only is there a threat of terrorist sneaking through the weak spots in our border, but the threat of spreading Covid. The illegals that are caught are not tested for Covid and huge numbers are flown by night to be dropped off in cities all over the US – unbeknown to local city officials. If the illegals get tested it is by non-profits groups who process them and provide them with food and shelter. Why is it that our government issues mandates that require Americans to be vaccinated for employment (etc.) or to fly on an airplane but not for illegals? And then our government turns around and flies airplane loads of non-vaccinated illegals all over the US.
Border Patrol agents screen the illegals they arrest in a database to identify people on a terrorist list but present Biden Administration considers the Terrorist Screening Statistics (number of terrorist that are arrested by BP) as classified information to keep the statistics from the public.
Biden stopped construction of the border wall even in places where the old wall had been torn down. This opens a portion of the wall for illegals to flood across. And all technology like the Fiber Optics cable installation was stopped. Millions of dollars’ worth of steel (for the wall) that was already paid for has been scrapped. The US government was obligated through their contracts to pay the construction contractors ($5 million a day) even if they weren’t building the wall.
Remember when Trump took office, he got rid of thousands of excessive regulations that he thought was hampering businesses. That is the opposite of what is happening now. One example is the bottleneck of ships wanting to unload in CA. According to Los Angeles ED Gene Seroka, he believes the problem is that the new tough zero-emission truck policies are already hampering drayage capacity. He is not the only one that feels this way. During a 2022 Supply Chain Outlook Webinar, NFI’s VP Aaron Brown stated “The new Clean Air Action Plan, even though it’s not even being enforced yet, is absolutely keeping a lid on drayage capacity.”
Both the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach have announced that future trucks that fail to meet the zero emission compliance will be charged a $10 fee per container. This fee is expected to raise $90 million in the first year from these two ports alone.
Besides the new mandates, more are on the way. Any trucker servicing the port for the first time, must have a 2014 or newer truck. By 2023, any truck older than 2010 will not have access to operations in the LA Long Beach port. Brown points out that “There’s multiple layers of equipment restrictions that are coming down the pipe over the next couple of years so that’s really keeping any potential new drayage capacity on the sidelines and more than likely pushing it to other sectors of the trucking industry,” he said. “We’re not getting access to that new potential drayage capacity even if there’s a willingness to work in the ports.”
California’s independent contractor law seeks to ban leased owner-operators from working in the state. The CA Truckers Assn. is challenging this in the US Supreme Court but it is pending. The Supreme Court has rejected other cases like this so who know if they will even look at the case. Brown stated “The vast majority of drayage drivers prefer to be owner-operators, probably something north of 95 percent, but there’s a lot of uncertainty of that model being viable going forward.”
JoAnn Utphall
Boyceville