Guest Columnist Idaho Senator Brian Lenney: The Men Stopping a Modern Day Slave Trade at the Arizona Border Offered Idaho a Blueprint That Works…but the Idaho’s Sheriffs Association Went to Boise and Said “No Thanks”

I just got back from two days at the Arizona-Mexico border with some of the most experienced law enforcement people in the country.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform put the trip together. I bought my own plane ticket and went with a few other Idaho legislators. Sheriffs and law enforcement officers from across the country were there with us, all for the same reason: somebody had to actually go see this rather than read about it in a press release.

Our shepherds for the trip were Sheriff Mark Dannels of Cochise County and his team, including Detective Cody Essary, who walked us through the desert personally and showed us what their surveillance network captures every single day. Sheriff Mark Lamb, formerly of Pinal County and now working with FAIR on border security full time, was there too, as well as Art Del Cueto (who spent decades working the border). Between these men you’re talking about decades of combined law enforcement experience and thousands of hours working this specific problem from ground level.

Every single one of them used the same words.

Modern day slavery.

That’s the operational reality as described by a 42-year law enforcement veteran who chairs border security for the National Sheriffs Association and sits on the Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council. Sheriff Dannels has personally briefed RFK Jr., Dr. Phil, Tom Homan. When he used those words it carried the weight of someone who’s been watching this happen from 83 miles of the most trafficked border terrain in the country for over a decade.

I filmed what gets left behind.

The debris field out there tells the story better than any press release ever could. Physical evidence of human beings moved through that landscape like freight, because to the cartels running this operation, that’s the accurate description of what they’re doing.

Cody told us how cartels charge $10,000 to $30,000 crossing fee for every single person who makes the trek.

He didn’t get that number from a government report. He got it from the people themselves, in the field, in real time. He’s worked that desert long enough to have seen this end every way it possibly can. He’s been at scenes where people didn’t make it out, where evidence of what they paid and what they still owed was scattered around them in the heat. When Cody describes what these crossings actually cost and what the debt does to people afterward, he’s pulling from conversations he’s personally had with human beings in the worst moments of their lives.

Here’s what that debt actually means in practice:

Can’t pay upfront? You cross on credit and that balance follows you into the interior. Now you’re here illegally and owe $15,000 to an organization that knows where your family lives back home, and surfacing to any authority risks everything.

What happens next is pedictable…

You do whatever the cartel needs done.

Sex trafficking. Prostitution. Running drugs. Labor. Whatever they need that week, that’s your life now because the cartel owns you and everyone you love. Don’t comply? They know your mother’s address back home. Your kids’ school. Noncompliance isn’t a negotiation, it’s a death sentence, and sometimes they make an example out of the people closest to you first just to make sure you understand how serious they are.

And the debt never quite clears either, because something new always gets tacked on. These guys have watched this play out enough times that they can finish the story before you ask him how it ends.

They walked us through the mechanics of the crossings too.

Cartel scouts sit on nearby mountains with binoculars guiding movement by radio. The crossers get outfitted in cartel-supplied camouflage with carpet shoes designed to wipe their tracks, and in some cases they drag blankets to erase the trail completely.

The Cochise County SABRE program (Southeastern Arizona Border Regional Enforcement) runs over 1,000 hidden cameras throughout that desert, solar-powered and built into fake rocks so smugglers can’t locate and destroy them. Dannels started this in 2017 with game cameras and rancher partnerships. Since then SABRE has detected over 116,000 illegal crossings and put roughly 437 drug smugglers in custody. All with only six deputies running the whole operation, fixing their own equipment in a garage because sending cameras to the manufacturer means weeks offline they simply can’t absorb.

People who make it through get ferried to cartel stash houses in Phoenix and moved north into the American interior. Whatever the local network needs that week, 25 to 30 percent of everything they earn goes back south to the cartel. Sometimes the business owner genuinely has no idea because the manager is the cartel’s person. In a lot of destination towns there’s a restaurant or a storefront functioning as a cash collection point where workers hand over their cut.

The children are the hardest part to sit with.

They’ve documented around 5,000 cases of children being drugged and cycled through fake family units specifically because families move through processing more easily. They get recycled back into Mexico and inserted into a new fake family for another run. The cartels have no regard for human life and children in this system are a rentable asset, nothing more.

Years of building the political and legal case against enforcement created the operating environment the cartels needed.

The court filings, the sanctuary policies, the sustained campaign to make federal immigration enforcement as difficult as possible at the local level, all of it fed a system the cartels were happy to exploit.

Biden’s autopen halted wall construction within an hour of taking office.

What followed was a dark and deliberate unwinding of everything that made that border functional (e.g. surveillance equipment going dark, processing centers absorbing the agents who should have been in the field), and Dannels standing there with six deputies and a camera network built from donated dollars because the federal government had functionally abandoned that desert.

So when you see a construction bid come in mysteriously low, undercutting every legitimate competitor, or produce on a shelf priced below what it honestly costs to grow, that gap has to come from somewhere.

Arizona has been trying to fight this for fifteen years.

SB 1070 passed in 2010.

Governor Brewer signed it and Obama’s DOJ filed suit almost immediately, taking it all the way to the Supreme Court. By 2012 three of the four main provisions were gone. One survived, a single requirement that officers check immigration status of people they’ve already lawfully arrested, out of everything the law originally contained.

Then in November 2024, Arizona voters passed Proposition 314 directly at the ballot, going around a governor who’d vetoed every enforcement measure her legislature sent her. More carefully drafted this time, written around people caught in the act of crossing rather than anyone present in the state (it’s contingent on a parallel Texas case surviving federal court and that fight isn’t resolved). Fifteen years of work, and people dressing cartel protection up as civil rights advocacy have litigated most of it into nothing.

Just this month, Idaho had a chance to look at that history and do something with it.

But it didn’t happen and this wasn’t the first time.

I carried the harboring bills on the Senate side. House Bill 764 this session, along with nearly every other immigration enforcement bill in 2026, was mine or a bill I was directly involved in pushing.

What these bills would have done is give Idaho law enforcement the same basic authority Arizona built its entire enforcement model around, making it a state crime to knowingly assist someone unlawfully present in the United States.

But the House Judiciary Committee killed HB 764 without a floor vote. In 2025, our almost identical bill died in that same committee. The 2026 session wrapped up this month and every single immigration enforcement bill either failed or never got a hearing. Every one in a Republican supermajority, in one of the reddest states in the country.

The Idaho Sheriffs Association lobbied against these bills. ISA went into the capitol and argued against giving their own members tools that Sheriff Dannels has spent fifteen years refining, tools that drew sheriffs and law enforcement from across the country to Arizona to study firsthand.

That needs a straight answer…

What exactly is ISA protecting here?

Dannels built SABRE with game cameras and rancher handshakes and it became a nationally recognized enforcement model that law enforcement from around the country fly in specifically to study. Lamb’s years running anti-smuggling operations in Pinal County gave him a ground-level view of this pipeline that nobody sitting in a statehouse committee room is ever going to get from a briefing document. We stood in that desert alongside sheriffs and LEOs who flew in from across the country, and the reason every single one of them made the trip was sitting right in front of us the whole time.

The Idaho’s Sheriffs Association spent this session making sure their own members couldn’t follow that lead. While I was carrying these bills in the Senate, ISA was in the building arguing the other direction.

Crazy, right?

Even still, it’s worth knowing that morale from those actually working the border is genuinely high right now. Sheriff Dannels and everyone we interacted with said it directly.

The agents feel like they’re finally being allowed to do the job they signed up for.

The cartels still own the Mexican side of that fence though. A cartel scout sat on a mountain watching us through binoculars, same way he watched when Trump visited during the 2024 campaign. The machine kept running at lower volume, and cartels have a patience for this work that outlasts any administration. They’re counting on the fact that legislatures don’t have that same patience.

Idaho just burned another session.

Sixty miles of terrain in Cochise County alone sits without a wall. Steel posts intended for Trump’s original build are stacked out in that desert right now. The window is open. Someone in our state needs to find the spine to do something permanent with it before the next cycle closes it again.

Anyone making the case for continued legislative inaction needs to explain, with some specificity, how their position differs from anyone who’s ever looked at a slave trade and decided the economics were worth defending.

Still waiting on that answer from ISA.