Tucker Carlson: America's southern border has been erased -- does anyone in charge care?

Ten days before the 2020 election, Mitchell Ferman, a reporter for the Texas Tribune,  came across a very strange sight in Starr County, Texas, which sits right on the border with Mexico.

Starr County is one of the poorest places in the country. Not a lot of people visit, but Ferman did, and he watched as more than 70 vehicles with Trump flags drove in parade formation from the little town of Roma to Rio Grande City. "All Aboard the Trump Train" read one sign.

This convoy was organized by a man called Roel Reyes, and not even he could believe the turnout. "I was expecting 15 to 20 cars, max," he told Ferman. The reason Reyes wasn't expecting more cars is that Starr County is not exactly a Republican stronghold. In fact, just four years before, Hillary Clinton defeated Donald Trump in Starr County by 60 points.

But things changed and they changed fast. In the span of just four years, Starr County moved from deep blue to almost red. Donald Trump finished within just five points of Joe Biden. That's a swing of more than 50 points. And the numbers are even more dramatic in nearby Zapata County. Donald Trump lost Zapata County in 2016 by 33 points, but last November, he easily beat Joe Biden. These are big changes, and you're seeing them all along the Rio Grande Valley.

FLASHBACK: TRUMP'S SUPPORT FROM BLACK, HISPANIC VOTERS GROWS FROM 2016

Now to the geniuses looking at these numbers in Washington, trying to figure out what they mean, the thing that leaps out to them immediately is that Starr and Zapata counties are overwhelmingly Hispanic. Starr County is 96% Hispanic, and Zapata is 85%. So how could Hispanics support Donald Trump in numbers like that? (They must be QAnon people!)

Not only are those two counties non-white, they're very poor. Nearly a third of the residents in Starr County live in poverty. The median household income in both those counties is under $35,000 a year. But they're voting for Trump. What the hell is going on?

Well, a lot of things are going on probably, but uncontrolled illegal immigration is definitely one of them, probably the main one. That's completely baffling to people in D.C. If you're a Yale-educated bureaucrat or a nonprofit executive living in Bethesda, you see everything through the lens of identity politics. You've been told to do that, and needless to say, you obey. You always obey.

Most illegal aliens are Hispanic. So you assume that most Hispanics support illegal immigration. That's just how you think. The problem is, you're an idiot. You have no idea what you're talking about, and you have no clue how ignorant you are. How could you know? You never leave Bethesda.

TEXAS DEMOCRAT WARNS BORDER SITUATION 'WILL BECOME A CRISIS' WITHOUT BIDEN ADMINISTRATION ACTION

Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, represents both Starr and Zapata Counties, and he sees what's happening. He can't ignore it. On Saturday, he told Fox News that his constituents are being overwhelmed by an influx of migrants from Latin America and the Biden administration is doing nothing to stop it. In fact, they're lying about it.

CUELLAR: It might have started under Trump, but when you're the President, you own the situation, whether it's a success or not a success ... I think in February we're going to get about 100,000 [border crossers]. And again, I don't care what we call it, but I can tell you this, those numbers of people that are being released, they're purposely withholding that information ... I now know that they're bringing people from McAllen over to Laredo, processing them in Laredo, and they're going to release them in my community."

Henry Cuellar says the Biden administration is purposely withholding the number of people being released. Now, why would they do that? How bad is it? Again, this is an elected Democrat admitting that he has no idea how many people are flooding into his community every day because the Biden administration is hiding that information.

Cuellar is supposed to be representing this area, but he has no idea how many of these people compete for his constituents for jobs. He has no clue how many of them are criminals. He has no idea how many of them have COVID. No one knows. The situation there is that out of control.

And it's not just Henry Cuellar who's upset about it. Another Democrat from Texas, State Senator Chuy Hinojosa from McAllen, has charged the Biden administration is encouraging illegal aliens to come, which obviously they are.

"It's gotten worse," Hinojosa recently told The Hill. "I don't think, quite frankly, the Biden administration was aware of what's happening on the ground here, which you can understand, because they're just coming in and trying to get people up to speed with what's happening. But I don't think they were aware that there were that many coming across. The Border Patrol is overwhelmed. They're throwing up their hands because they don't know what to do."

None of this is a problem if you're Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. If you actually live there and you're poor, it's a huge problem.

You shouldn't be surprised by this, either. Our policymakers realized a long time ago that they could simply hide most of the relevant data on illegal immigration and no one would bother to look into it. The total number of illegal immigrants living in the United States has been 11 million "officially" for decades. Everybody repeats that. They keep repeating that number even when all available evidence contradicts that number.

That number is a complete lie. There is some good, nonpartisan research out there that suggests there are at least twice that number of people living here illegally, and possibly many more, quite possibly more than 30 million.

TUCKER CARLSON: SO HOW MANY ILLEGAL ALIENS ARE REALLY IN THE US?

But journalists and the politicians they protect don't get to the bottom of it because it doesn't bother them. They’re all part of one class, the professional class. They run the Democratic Party. And more illegal immigration means cheaper, low-end labor for them.

It doesn't really matter what effect it has on the country. It doesn’t really matter what more crowding does to the environment. We have about 100 million more people living in the United States now than we had 30 years ago. What does that do to the environment? No one cares. Who does it hurt? They don't care.

Of course, if you are being hurt, you do care. If you're living in poverty in the Rio Grande Valley, none of this is an abstraction. The actual numbers matter very much to you.

FOX News’ Casey Stegall recently did what most journalists are refusing to do. He went down to the border to try to understand the scope of the illegal immigration surge that has intensified since Joe Biden became president.

This is obviously a humanitarian crisis, both for Americans and the migrants themselves. Whatever happened to "Those kids in cages! All those unaccompanied minors! Maybe some don't have their parents with them!"? Nobody cares anymore.

It's hypocrisy, yes, but it's so in your face that you have to conclude the hypocrisy itself is not the point. They humiliate you and wear you down by ignoring their own previous statements and blowing right past you with their new agenda.

As Cuellar pointed out, all of this is intentional in the way they're hiding the data, as well as the complete 180 on child overflow facilities. People living in Starr and Zapata counties voted the way they did for a reason. Is it surprising to you that they're being punished for it now? It shouldn't be.

This is a bigger story than just south Texas. It's not just affecting border towns in the Rio Grande Valley. What you're seeing is an attack on an entire social class, an attack on working people; the ones who've been hurt the most by COVID, the ones who saw their lives destroyed after a year of incoherent health mandates from incompetents posing as experts. Just to rub it in, in case you missed the point, the administration is demanding that American citizens remain under Corona Law while foreign nationals living here illegally can do essentially whatever they want.

NUMBER OF COVID-POSITIVE MIGRANTS RELEASED IN TEXAS SURGES, OFFICIALS SAY

Illegal immigrants, some infected with coronavirus, can get on a bus and just take off. Who knows where they're going? No one. No one's checking. That would be racism.

Meanwhile, a mom in Ohio dares to watch her son's football game sitting alone in the stands. And for doing that, she gets Tasered, wrestled to the ground, and arrested because she wasn't wearing an obedience mask.

ABBOTT HITS BACK AT BIDEN: RELEASING COVID-INFECTED MIGRANTS INTO TEXAS IS 'NEANDERTHAL THINKING'

It's awful on every level and, a functioning media would expose it. But instead, our media create diversions so that you won't notice it's happening in the first place. Joy Reid, MSNBC's "race lady" who claims to be oppressed despite being Harvard-educated, will tell you that you have no moral right to worry about COVID.

JOY REID, MARCH 4: You know who the absolute worst is? Texas Governor Greg Abbott. Yes, he's a repeat offender. He's deflecting criticism by dishing out anti-immigrant xenophobia ... For that absurdly racist claim, Governor Abbott is the absolute worst for the second time this week.

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"An absurdly racist claim," says the race lady from Harvard. Taking precautions against COVID is racist. Just the other day, they were telling us exactly the opposite. Tomorrow they will tell us something completely different.

They don't mean any of it. Maybe we should ignore them. What actually matters is keeping our country from falling apart. And right now, effectively, we have no southern border. That's a much bigger problem than COVID.

This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the March 8, 2021 edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight"