The documentary filmmaker and daughter of the House minority leader, Alexandra Pelosi, is promoting a new and heartbreaking documentary about the crisis at the southern border. Pelosi spent weeks speaking with undocumented migrants who have been led to believe that the United States is not only caring for women and children who cross the border but welcoming them to do so.

“[A]ll the young vulnerable, migrant women who just got to America that I spoke with saw the Border Patrol as the heroes who came to assist them on their journey,” Pelosi recently wrote in an op-ed published on MSNBC.com. “They all said that when they saw Border Patrol, they finally felt safe and happy to have survived their harrowing odyssey to get to the Promised Land.”

Once the border-crossers have been processed by the Department of Homeland Security, they are released – so throughout the day, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement delivers them to the Greyhound bus station where they are dropped off and forced to fend for themselves.

Pelosi paints a picture of waves of hopelessly naïve and needy immigrants who are convinced, ignoring all evidence to the contrary, that the United States will not deport them if they simply explain how dire their circumstances are in their home countries.

The problem at the border has grown so bad that the president was asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Friday to clearly, unequivocally ask Central American would-be migrants to stay home.

“Our message absolutely is don’t send your children unaccompanied on trains or through a bunch of smugglers,” the president said. “That is our direct message to families in Central America. Do not send your children to the borders. If they do make it, they’ll get sent back. More importantly, they may not make it.”

But Pelosi noted that the problem America faces on its borders is not one that can be solved by rhetoric. In fact, she said, the issue has been exacerbated by American politicians and the media – including the president.

She added that the press and the political class, by not clearly asserting that bad actors on the other side of the border are funneling migrants into the United States, American institutions are complicit in a humanitarian crisis.

“I worry, in all of this, that we could be facilitating human trafficking,” Pelosi said. She added that cartel members are now recruiting women in order to confuse American officials who provide women and children with special treatment.

Pelosi concluded by claiming that security at the border was a “hoax,” considering that a border fence can be thwarted by tools as simple as ladders and migrants are now welcoming their capture by border police. But the crisis at the Mexican border no longer explicitly a humanitarian one. Disturbing reports indicate that the situation on the border has a military dimension as well.

“Border Patrol agents in Arizona were reportedly fired upon by a Mexican military helicopter that traveled across the border,” a local CBS affiliate reported.

KVOA-TV reports that Mexican authorities were conducting a drug interdiction operation when the incident happened early Thursday morning on the Tohono O’odham Indian Nation. The Mexican chopper fired at the agents and then flew back into Mexico.

It’s perhaps fitting that, 100 years after the start of World War I, U.S./Mexico relations are at their worst point since the Zimmermann Telegram.

History has demonstrated clearly that borders can be hardened against military threats if the will to do so exists. While it may require some creative thinking, it is within the realm of the imagination that the border can be secured against a busload or two of Honduran women and children as well.