It's no secret that Joe Biden's open borders has fattened Mexico's notorious cartels with profits from the human trafficking and "crossing fees" from illegal migrants. According to an ICE official, cited here, they "earn" between $2 billion and $6 billion a year from border crossing "fees" alone. More illegal migrants, more fees for the cartels. And that rolling cash does and will have knock-on effects, starting from the increased violence in Mexico to its spillover effect from Mexico to the states.

But now we're seeing a funny turn in events that raises natural questions about a connection as well as just how well U.S. prisons are run:

A cartel leader and hitman fond of videotaping torture sessions and decapitating likely dozens of enemies has gone missing from a federal prison in Florida, where he was serving a 49-year sentence.

As of November, Edgar Valdez-Villareal, a Mexican American cartel leader, had been mysteriously removed from the federal Bureau of Prisons website. He is now listed as “not in BOP custody” even though his release date is not until July 27, 2056.

Valdez-Villareal, 49, is known by his underworld moniker “La Barbie,” and headed up the Los Negros, an enforcement group of the Beltran Leyva cartel — one of Mexico’s most ruthless underworld groups. At one point, he was a top lieutenant for the Sinaloa Cartel, run by convicted drug dealer Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman-Loera.

"La Barbie," who's called that for his light skin and fair hair, is one of the most fiendish cartel kingpins ever seen in Mexico. He was Chapo Guzman's enforcer in the Sinaloa cartel and then got ambitious and decided to get his own cartel, the Beltran Leyva criminal group. In his battle to take over that cartel after its leaders were rubbed out in police shootouts, he pioneered the cartel specialty of dangling headless bodies from bridges, often decapitating them himself because he liked doing it. He trafficked two tons of cocaine a month to the states, and made the once-glamorous resort city of Acapulco into a gunfire hellhole nobody wants to go to. He launched the violence in Nuevo Laredo, south of his hometown Laredo, which turned that once-placid city into a no-go zone. In short, he's one of the foulest things on planet Earth.

When the Mexican lawmen finally caught up to La Barbie, and busted him in 2010, he was extradicted to the U.S. five years later and handed a 49-year sentence in a high-security Florida prison run by the feds. The idea of course was that extraditing him to the U.S. was the one sure way to ensure that he stayed in jail and didn't escape through a laundry basket or through potential payoffs to guards to look the other way, as happened once with La Barbie's former boss, Sinaloa cartel kingpin of kingpins, Chapo Guzman, who, was handed over to the U.S. feds the second time the Mexicans caught him, not wanting to go through that again.

Well, now La Barbie's missing.

Did he escape? Did he get sent to the hospital? Federal prison authorities are not saying where he is, not even to the Mexican government, which having entrusted him to the U.S. when they could have jailed him themselves, surely has an ironclad right to know.

They gave the New York Post this namby-pamby statement:

A spokesman for the Bureau of Prisons refused to say why Valdez-Villareal was no longer in federal custody, but told The Post that there could be many reasons. Inmates can be temporarily removed from the site if they are undergoing court hearings, medical treatments or unspecified “other reasons.”

Other reasons? Such as: He paid some corrupt federal guard off and managed to escape?

Did a corrupt prosecutor let him out in the name of "ending mass incarceration" or "social justice"?

Those are some obvious questions.

Why the heck is that beast out and about, or in some place that's not a high-security Supermax where escaping the joint for him won't be all that hard?

Are we in a situation similar to the "suicide" of Jeffrey Epstein, where somehow the cameras were off and the accused pervert who supplied of underaged girls to the celebrity class, all of a sudden decided to kill himself? Nobody was punished much for that one, which pretty well raises concerns about just how secure these places are for the world's worst criminals.

The same could be asked about La Barbie. Where is he? Did he get a lot of money from the open border trade and use it to buy his way out of prison? It's in the public interest to know, given that the public's already invested so much to ensure that this violent thug stays locked up.

If he's not, we need to know about it and miscreants need to be held accountable. Yet somehow, we don't and not even the Mexicans are being allowed to know.

That leads many to suspect the worst -- that this guy's cartel organization, fattened by migrant crossing fees, may well have had enough money to throw around to pay off anyone he wanted to get out of a high security lockup and it's too embarrassing for the feds to admit.

What does that say about the U.S. prison system, that they refuse to offer a reasonable explantion, and what does that say to countries such as Mexico and Colombia, both of which are regular extraditers of bad guys to the U.S., that the U.S. can't seem to keep track of the monsters in the bowels of its high security prisons? Are they more likely to extradite or just imprison the bad guys themselves? And if it turns out that El Chapo's top hitman had cash from cartels to get himself out of prison, what does that say about Joe Biden's cartel-enabling open borders?

Bottom line here is that there are too many questions here to just let this matter go. Maybe there's a completely legitimate explanation. But based on the prison authorities' evasions to the New York Post, it's funny stuff that they don't want to tell us.

Image: U.S. government mugshot, via Wikipedia // public domain