A private property owner and rancher in Arizona is providing better insight into what is happening on the border with his own personal experience than the Biden administration. John Ladd’s ranch shares 10.5 miles of Mexico’s border. By 2019 he had an average of 12 illegal aliens crossing his land daily. He says Border Patrol was able to apprehend roughly half of them.

Ladd says unambiguously, the number of crossings rose right around the time Biden won the 2020 presidential election. And today, Ladd says about 300 individuals cross into his property, which sits between the US-Mexico border and Highway 92; a convenient route for smuggling.

The Border Patrol is only able to catch roughly 30 percent of the illegal immigrants, drug smugglers and human traffickers, on a “good day.”

Ladd told the Epoch Times in an interview in December, “I’m not going to say there’s no hope, but nothing is going to change as long as Biden is there and his administration is there…And what are we going to do? Let them pass?”

“These people cannot turn themselves in, they will be deported. These are the bad people. We’re dealing with the worst of the worst,” Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels said of those who cross in and near Ladd’s property.

The illegal immigrants coming through Ladd’s ranch aren’t seeking asylum: They’re mostly single young men dressed head-to-toe in camouflage and doing their best to avoid police forces and make it to Phoenix.

The Epoch Times reports:

Dannels’ border team has placed hundreds of trail cameras throughout the county since 2017 to detect illegal aliens, traffickers and smugglers.

“We put our cameras in areas where Border Patrol didn’t go,” he said. “We went to the river areas, we went into the mountainous areas, we went to the desert areas,” he said. The money for the cameras came from private donations—Dannels refuses to accept government money that comes with strings attached.

The highway that accompanies the border wall, lights, cameras, and sensors remain unfinished since January 2021, when President Joe Biden halted all border wall construction, in Cochise County, Arizona, on December 6, 2020. 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

The drugs keep coming, but the cartels are making endless amounts of money smuggling people, so they’ve added a lucrative new source of revenue.

Currently, Dannels’ cameras are detecting about 6,000 illegal aliens a month in the county, while the Border Patrol detects another 10,000.

Detective Jake Kartchner, who is part of the sheriff’s border team led by Sergeant Tim Williams, said each illegal alien must pay the Sinaloa cartel between $7,000 and $9,000 on average to cross the border.