Washington Conservatives host reporter Josh Gibbons


Independent journalist Josh Gibbons, shown above, spoke about his recent experience covering the border crisis for Rebel News at the Bee Tree Folk School in Weiser last week. Gibbons was invited to come speak to Washington County residents by ConservativesOf: Washington County. Photo by Philip A. Janquart
By: 
Philip A. Janquart
Editor’s note: This is the first of a series describing the experience of a Boise-based journalist who recently returned from the U.S. southern border to cover the immigration crisis.
 
 His job was to travel to Texas and report what he had seen.
 It wasn’t long after deboarding the plane in El Paso that he found himself staring the border crises square in the face. 
 Not that he had expected anything less, but he hadn’t even left the terminal.
 What Josh Gibbons had to say from that moment forward would be based on personal experience.
 “It’s insane,” he told attendees last week at a talk hosted by the ConservativesOf: Washington County and held at the Bee Tree Folk School in Weiser.
 Gibbons recently returned from the southern border on assignment for Rebel News, an independent media outlet that covered the World Economic Forum in    Davos, Switzerland last week.
 The 30-something independent journalist from Boise is the founder of What’s Happening Network and rightwingmedia.us. He is also a state committeeman for Canyon County Republicans, video editor and director at Spire Visuals, and owns Red Helium LLC, a political consulting firm. The husband and father is quickly gaining a reputation for his willingness to go to dangerous places, covering stories he says mainstream media refuses to.
 “I looked down the hallway and there were hundreds of people laying there with Red Cross blankets,” he said, describing the scene at El Paso International Airport. “I looked at somebody who worked there and said, ‘Hey, what’s going on here?’ They said those were people who were in the country illegally and were sleeping there. I thought, ‘I didn’t know we were opening up our airports for people to sleep in.’”
 That was Gibbons’ initial introduction to the human tragedy – and what some consider an outright invasion of a sovereign nation –  the situation at the border has become. Like most in America these days, the border crisis is a polarizing issue that has helped further divide a country that seems just a few short steps away from implosion. 
 But Gibbons couldn’t deny what he saw with his own eyes.
 “We recorded and reported on that and it made it on Tucker Carlson and all over,” he said of his experience at the airport.
 That night, from his hotel room in downtown El Paso, he could hear crying coming from outside his open window. 
 “I was like, ‘What is that?’ I went to check it out and was driving around and I looked, and there were hundreds upon hundreds of more people sleeping on the sidewalks and it was babies crying,” he explained, as the small crowd in Weiser sat silent with wide, attentive eyes. 
 “Now, I know we are all probably against illegal immigration, but I think we can all agree, you don’t want a baby sleeping with a tiny blanket in the middle of winter, in the desert, on the ground. It was heartbreaking that people were willing to put their children through this.”
 El Paso shares the border with Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, making the area a danger zone along the frontier between the U.S. and Mexico, with Ciudad Juarez, Gibbons said, subsequently carrying the dismal distinction as one of the most dangerous cities in the world. 
 It appeared on a 2022 report released by the Citizens’ Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice as the third most dangerous city based on homicides per 100,000, with 103.61, behind Tijuana, Mexico (105.15), another border city, and Celaya, Mexico (109.38).  
 All three have different rankings on other lists but are consistently listed in the top five. 
 The longer Gibbons stayed in El Paso, the more he discovered about the crisis and the more he was shocked.
 “I went on a full border run with a border expert and we covered just a little bit of New Mexico into El Paso,” he said. “We were told to stay tight; there were guns, there were people armed with us and then there were walkie-talkies telling us where to go.”
 He was taken to an area known as a sacred Christian site visited by both Mexicans and Americans.
 “While we were there, we heard chatter over the radios and it was people watching us and reporting on us,” Gibbons said. “It was the drug cartels’ lookouts.” 
 ... Read more next week.
 

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