Do you know about Colony Ridge, a massive illegal-immigrant settlement in the U.S. created by foreign drug cartels?
From The Daily Wire. The Republican Party of Texas unanimously passed a resolution calling on Governor Greg Abbott to convene a special legislative session to address Colony Ridge, the massive housing development north of Houston that’s become a hub for illegal immigrants.
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The resolution, which passed by a vote of 61-0, says a special legislative session must be convened in order to “prevent further settlement of illegal aliens in Colony Ridge and any other areas of Texas.” The power to call a special legislative session is with Abbott, who has already been urged by the state’s Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick to do the same.
The party’s resolution honed in on a number of specific concerns highlighted in The Daily Wire’s investigation of the development, noting that “the developer allows for illegal aliens to obtain loans to purchase land using Individual Tax ID Numbers (ITINs) instead of Social Security Numbers” and that Colony Ridge “has grown to an estimated 50,000 to 75,000 inhabitants and spans over 60 square miles.” …
Matt Rinaldi, the Chairman of the Republican Party of Texas, told The Daily Wire that Colony Ridge should be a “grave concern for all Texans,” but isn’t getting the attention it merits from elected officials in his own party. …
The resolution comes as several Republican leaders have expressed their concern about Colony Ridge. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asserted that it is “completely insane that they can set up these villages with illegal immigrants” while also noting that his office is looking into potential “deceptive trade practices.”
“The legislature could address this and should address this. Because right now, we don’t have a real clear path to being able to stop it,” Paxton said. “We can maybe affect the financing or the financial aspect of it to some degree but I don’t think right now the legislature has given me the authority to do anything about it.” …
The resolution charged that Colony Ridge has “resulted in an unmanageable amount of growth” in the neighboring school district, also referencing The Daily Wire investigation, which reported that the Sinaloa and Gulf cartels are believed to be active in the development.
But the resolution did not just call for an investigation into Colony Ridge, but also into the development company’s “possible connections to elected officials in the region.”
Though none of the elected officials were named, there are several with financial links to Colony Ridge and its developer, William “Trey” Harris. Gov. Abbott, for example, has received a combined $1.5 million from Harris and his wife for his political campaigns. …
From Center for Immigration Studies. A Mexican national is on the run after slaughtering a family of five Hondurans next door, including an 8-year-old child, in a small Texas town a two-hour drive east from here called Cleveland. …
[This] horrific crime happened in what is regarded as America’s largest settlement of illegal immigrants, one literally exploding in population amid a U.S.-government fomented mass migration border crisis. In Liberty County, and now spreading into neighboring San Jacinto County where the massacre occurred, old-timers have been fleeing a new diversity of violent crime, murder, all-night weapons firing, and cartel drug trafficking that has boomed alongside the population. Indifferent U.S. immigration enforcement agencies leave this area to itself.
My recently released book, Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History, dedicates a chapter of reporting to this massive illegal immigrant “colonia” as a warning to America about the coming consequences of an unfettered mass migration event now in its third unmitigated year that has already seen more than five million foreign nationals settle into U.S. towns and cities. Following are edited excerpts from the chapter “Forever Impacts”.
“The originals” of Liberty County, Texas — the self-descriptor of lifelong Anglo residents like Jimmy Rollins, who trace their lineage to early settler families — have mostly fled what they regard as ruinous, irredeemable change. …
Until very recently, the loggers, train mechanics, ranchers, and state prison workers made their homes in and around Liberty County’s quaint old townships carved out of dense pine forests with names like Plum Grove, Cleveland, Dayton, and Splendora. They raised each other’s barns and dug one another’s wells.
Now 72, Jimmy Rollins was still farming near Dayton when I met him in May 2022. …
“It was all country people. We got our meat out of them woods there. They was behind in time, but everybody pretty much knew everybody,” Rollins recalled. “I enjoyed living here.”
Not anymore.
A vast jumble of single- and double-wide trailers on low stilts, hand-hewn shacks made of leftover construction material, and parked motor homes has quickly overtaken tens of thousands of Liberty County acres and eradicated its rural way of life. The community is named “Colony Ridge”. Upwards of 50,000 mostly Spanish-speaking Latinos, maybe more — nobody knows, really — are living on some 30,000 homestead lots they purchased in recent years over some 35 square miles from “Houston Terrenos”, the land development company started by an “original” named William Henry “Trey” and his brother John Harris a decade earlier.
The boom began without letup about a decade ago when Houston Terrenos, on Spanish-language media platforms with international reach, began marketing lot purchases with its unique “owner-to-owner method” that didn’t require traditional bank loans, proven job history, or Social Security numbers.
A significant portion of the new population that bought Terrenos lots are illegally present, according to the settlers themselves, local police, school officials, teachers, and other residents. …
Liberty County and its booming Colony Ridge development make for an apt, emblematic harbinger of the kind of change that sudden explosive growth in illegal alien population can portend for citizens and residents already living in receiving communities as a result of the Biden border crisis. …
A Frightening New Diversity of Crime
Before all the change, crime mostly consisted of a few white country meth-heads, two local police investigators who work in the area told me privately.
But now the crime is so different in the view of local old-timers like Rollins and Walker that they welcomed news that their grown children would flee Liberty County. …
In June 2022, a Liberty County dog brought home a human hand, which led to the discovery of a badly decomposed body of a man who had been buried with his gun. Police couldn’t identify the corpse and were left to post photos of the clothing in hopes someone would recognize them.
In September 2022, passersby in Colony Ridge found the body of a 16-year-old Honduran girl who’d been shot to death and dumped in a ditch by the side of a road, still wearing her uniform from her work bussing tables at a local restaurant. Gang unit police arrested three foreign nationals, all under 21, and charged them with the murder of Emily Rodriguez-Avila, citing “gang overtones” as a motive. …
Mexican Cartels Come to Town
The Gulf and Sinaloa Cartels invested in Colony Ridge from its earliest inception, they said, financing lots for local operatives to run safe houses through which they move smuggled drugs and people from the border to interior America. They were using them still to smuggle people coming in under Biden.
Evidence of cartel involvement dates to the earliest days of the illegal-alien settlement boom. To at least 2013, when federal, state, and local investigators raided a Mexican drug cartel’s marijuana grow operation on 300 acres in Liberty County, finding explosives, 6,000 marijuana plants, worker bunk houses, and guard towers. Local police at the time called it the “largest and most sophisticated marijuana-growing operation” in the county’s history. …
This kind of criminality grew so problematic by 2021 that the fearful town leaders of Plum Grove established a first police department that works in concert with two county-paid bilingual constables that Liberty County funded to exclusively patrol Colony Ridge.
The addition of several police officers amounts to a drop in the ocean, one officer from the region told me. Drive-by shootings, stealing, and drug trafficking are rampant, victimizing mostly the new community. …
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(Excerpt from The Daily Wire. Photo Credit: John Moore/Getty Images)