(Daily Signal)—Border rancher John Ladd says President Donald Trump is “doing everything right.”
Ladd’s Arizona ranch shares 10.5 miles with the border of Mexico, and during the four years of the Biden administration, about 50 illegal aliens crossed through Ladd’s property daily, and sometimes that number rose to as many as 200, he told The Daily Signal.
“As soon as Trump got elected, it started slowing down,” Ladd said, adding that as of the beginning of March, Border Patrol told him they are “catching three a day, with no getaways” on his ranch.
Ladd attributes the dramatic decline of illegal border crossings through his ranch to Trump’s reimposing the “Remain in Mexico” policy and the “consequences” illegal aliens now face when they are caught illegally crossing the border. Illegal aliens who have criminal records “don’t want to take a chance” of being caught and risk being deported or imprisoned, he said.
The Trump administration has made 113,000 arrests and carried out more than 100,000 deportations since Jan. 20, including sending hundreds of criminal illegal aliens to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center.
Ladd’s family started ranching along Arizona’s border with Mexico in 1896. Since the 1980s, Ladd said, illegal aliens have been crossing through his land every day, but “the only time that hadn’t been the case was the four years” of Trump’s first term, from January 2017 to January 2021.
The Daily Signal visited Ladd’s ranch in 2021, about six months into the Biden administration. Despite a border wall running the distance of his shared border with Mexico, Ladd told The Daily Signal, the illegal immigration through his land created safety concerns.
“When you go out in the morning, you check what’s in your truck,” he said in 2021. “Is somebody laying in my truck? Or under the truck? Or in my wife’s car? Are they out here? Every time you open the door, you kind of look, and [I’ve] been doing it for 30 years.”
The dead bodies of more than a dozen illegal aliens have been found on the Ladds’ ranch over the years.
The illegal aliens crossing through Ladd’s ranch in Cochise County, just east of Tucson, want to go undetected by Border Patrol, the rancher explained.
“They’re all military-age male,” Ladd said on a phone call with The Daily Signal in early April. “We didn’t have asylum-seekers or family or women.”
The illegal aliens use a ladder and a rope to climb over the border wall, or they cut a hole in the fencing, Ladd said, adding that it usually took two to three days to repair under the Biden administration.
Because of game cameras that Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels set up along the border, law enforcement knew the number of illegal aliens crossing onto Ladd’s ranch during the Biden administration. But even if local law enforcement arrested the illegal immigrants, they were not legally allowed to permanently hold them, the rancher explained, and the Border Patrol “didn’t have manpower to show up to get them,” so the illegal aliens were then released into the interior of the U.S.
The rancher said that he and his family were able to let their guard down during the first Trump administration, but “during Biden’s deal, you know, we went back to that same old deal [of] looking over your shoulder all the time.”
Now, Ladd says, he is relaxing a little bit, adding, “We’re going to enjoy the next four years, but it’s going to take a long time for us to get … over looking over your shoulders all the time.”
