Cesar Valdes is 89. Magdaleno Medina is 73. Federal authorities have charged both of them with armed drug trafficking and stolen firearms counts. Both are illegal aliens who slipped into the country decades ago, more than 45 years by some counts, and never left. The full report is here.

The open-borders crowd likes to say the people in this country illegally are all grandmothers and kids hiding in churches. Well, here you go. One of these suspects is old enough to be a great-grandfather, and he's charged in a trafficking case involving a gun that wasn't legally his. The harmless-elderly-illegal-alien story took a hit this week. So did the argument behind it.

The charges are serious. Armed drug trafficking means the government alleges these men moved narcotics while carrying, or with access to, firearms. The stolen weapons charge means at least one of those guns has a dirty history of its own. What the record shows right now is current alleged conduct. Whether there's more underneath that, I don't know, and I'm not going to guess. The charges speak for themselves.

Taxpayers should sit with the timeline. Valdes, 89, entered the country illegally and has allegedly been here more than 45 years. Forty-five years. Medina, 73, same story. Two men living here illegally for nearly half a century before anybody put cuffs on them. The border didn't fail them. They beat the system by outliving it.

In my 26 years with the Border Patrol, I learned the system doesn't fail all at once. It fails one continuance, one missed court date, one declined detainer at a time. We used to call these cases ghosts. They got in, vanished into a city, and outlived every warrant with their name on it. To be clear about what the record shows and what it doesn't: nothing in the reporting ties these two men to a sanctuary city or a declined detainer. What it shows is they got in, stayed, and are now facing federal charges at ages when most men are playing dominoes.

Credit where it's due: somebody picked up these cases and worked them. Armed trafficking with stolen firearms is exactly the kind of priority federal agents should be hitting, no matter how old the suspect is. A criminal with a walker is still a criminal with a supply line. If the allegations hold up, these two were moving product and guns well past retirement age, which tells you the money was good enough to keep them in the game.

The open-borders people will ignore this story completely. An 89-year-old drug trafficker doesn't fit on a poster. I won't ignore it. Numbers matter, but so do cases, and this one is worth more than a thousand press conferences about enforcement being cruel.

Scoreboard: two illegal aliens, ages 89 and 73, off the street and facing federal charges for armed drug trafficking and stolen firearms. The system finally caught up. It just took most of a lifetime.