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Source: Katie Pavlich/Townhall Media
PINAL COUNTY, Ariz. - For years, the Pinal County Sheriffs Department, located 70 miles north of the U.S. southern border with Mexico, has been fighting drug and human smuggling. Under the policies of President Donald Trump, the anti-smuggling unit made significant progress against the enterprise.
Now, a repeal of previous and effective deterrence policies have erased much of that progress and lucrative human smuggling in Arizona is on the rise.
“It’s horrible. Not only have we lost ground but we’ve gone so far backwards that we’re going to have to fight twice as hard to retake it,” Pinal County Chief Deputy Matthew Thomas tells Townhall. “It’s almost like dealing with gangs. So whenever you have an area instead with gangs, you have a gang squad that focuses on those gangs, you suppress them, the community helps. That’s what was going on here. We had this problem suppressed. The minute you back out of that, they�