If you don’t defend it, you don’t own it: DeGette’s open border gamble

By Tom Anthony | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice

The road to owning property resembles a superhighway to some and a Colorado jeep trail to others. To the Sioux it resembled a torn up mass of earth and buffalo chips; to the Comanche, four hooves and a mane. To me, who has come by it in fits, starts, dead ends, and reversals the road signs say: “Adverse possession,” “Fence Out State,” “Prescriptive Easement,” “Permit Required,” “Tax Lien Sale,” and “Eminent Domain.” In other words, nothing too simple about it.

I see Congresswoman DeGette, married to a judge and who has held down the 1st Congressional seat in Colorado since 1997, now wants to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Division of the federal government.

In other words, dissolve the borders. The real property I own does have borders and as a landowner if I don’t defend them I don’t own them. Furthermore if I don’t pay my taxes so the government can function, the government can sell my land to a person that will pay the taxes.

These concepts go back thousands of years and have evolved through the courts to a simple mantra: If you don’t defend it, you don’t own it.

Apparently Ms. DeGette can’t understand why a car or house has keys, why you shouldn’t be able to walk into Home Depot and trundle out a shopping cart full of tools without forking over any moola, much less how her wonderful salary of $174,000 winds up in her bank account on a monthly basis, not to mention how her Federal Employees Retirement (vested after 5 years or, since 2002) will flow into her hands long after she steps down.

How does such a person get to rule over the rest of us? Did someone tamper with the voting machines?

The City of Denver reflects Ms. DeGette’s feckless ideas, with one set of high-rise buildings once valued at over $112 million being voluntarily sold for $3.2 million last year. Ooof, what a blow to the property tax base. The number of restaurant licenses in Denver has shrunk by 24% between 2023 and 2025, according to Denver’s Department of Excise and Licenses, with regulations and high rates of crime driving out the entrepreneurs who used to make Denver a pleasant place to go.

Following Ms. DeGette’s lead, we should abolish the Armed Forces, the police, and hopefully, the Department of Regulatory Agencies (DORA.) Congress would be next in line.

Our northerly neighbor, Canada, has 1/10th our population with about the same land mass, and has great fishing and hunting, lots of job opportunities and good pay, and free health care for all.

What would the Canucks say about taking down their borders and allowing a hundred million or so Americans into their salmon and pike waters, shooting their moose and caribou and clogging their roads with Humvees, not to mention lining up at the emergency room?

Ms. DeGette’s admonition ostensibly emerges from a concern for families and “the rule of law,” whatever that means to her. Families who have non-citizen members (which account for every family of an immigrant) can utilize the rule of law and their access to American commerce to enable other family members to migrate legally or, at worst, up their life quality in the nation they occupy.

So let’s get to what’s really behind Ms. DeGette’s new political goal of tossing our national borders: amnesty for 14 million illegal immigrants currently residing here. This would put the Democrats into the permanent driver’s seat, and make all the property much more affordable.

Let’s face it, when the Dems want to destroy the borders it’s not the Canadians they expect to take advantage of the new situation, but the Mexicans.

As I pointed out in an earlier piece, our neighbors south of the border consider that border malleable, subject to moral, judicial, and religious, if not historical, interpretation as having been unfairly imposed after having been stolen by the Americans. But let’s go a bit deeper. France ceded the Louisiana territory to Spain in 1762 (secretly via the Treaty of Fontainebleau) to compensate their ally for losses to Britain during the Seven Years’ War and to keep it out of British hands. France needed to end the war, and gifting Louisiana, which was becoming a financial burden, to Spain kept a major, allied power as a buffer against British expansion toward Mexico. Spain wanted it as a buffer between its Mexican silver mines and the British.

France regained the Louisiana Territory from Spain through the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso on October 1, 1800. Napoleon Bonaparte negotiated the retrocession, promising to create an Italian kingdom (the Kingdom of Tuscany) for the son-in-law of Spain’s King Charles IV in exchange for the territory. However, when Napoleon’s forces failed to re-take Haiti from the black slaves who had thrown out the French planters, Napoleon realized that France hadn’t the horsepower to regain and control Louisiana, and sold it to the Americans within weeks of his defeat there.

When Alvarez de Pineda claimed Texas for Pope and Crown in 1519, one thing stood in the Pope’s way: the Comanche. Spain finally gave up the battle with the heathen Comanche 300 years later by handing over settlement rights to the Austins, hoping by doing so to fight fire with fire and swoop in at the end of the last battle to reclaim the territory over the smoldering corpses of the dead Texans and Indians.

The perpetrators of the American Reconquista boast of the successes of Pizarro and Cortes in spreading Catholicism and like to leave out the fact that Native Americans numbered as many as 100 million, according to some archaeology and anthropological experts, who believe European diseases roared through the populace quicker and earlier than anyone had thought.

Still, the native sons of Extremadura had the boldness and courage to plant and sustain the rule of empire over the southern hemisphere. But not the northern.

The black Haitians stopped the French and the Comanche Indians stopped the Spanish (and Mexicans.) The “Reconquista” is a lie, because Spain recognized that conquest was central to ownership, otherwise why the Conquistadores? Until the US conquered the West, while many claimed it, nobody owned it.

I lived in an 85% Hispanic neighborhood for many years, and I spent 3 months living with the Otomi Indians of the Mezquital. I love Mexican food and a lot of other things about them. Like Americans of other races, they contribute strong threads to the fabric of our nation. But if we allow Ms. DeGette to give our country away, then we deserve to become ashes in the fires of historical crematory.

Tom Anthony was President of the Elyria Neighborhood Association during most of its 15-year fight to get I-70 buried. He incorporated CLEAN-IT (Citizens Loving their Environment And Neighborhood Invincible Together), the organization which successfully sued the EPA to get the 6-acre radioactive concrete monolith removed from 1805 South Bannock Street in Denver, the only time in its history the EPA has reversed a completed Record of Decision. The City of Denver removed him from his home of 18 years in 2017 after falsely accusing him of breaking a zoning law, to wit, storing building materials out of doors in the Industrial Mixed Use zone.

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