National Border Patrol Council President: There is a national emergency on our border -- Here's proof
As a 21-year front line veteran Border Patrol agent and president of the National Border Patrol Council, I'd like to put to bed the false notion that there is no national emergency on the United States/Mexico border. I hope facts will do the trick.
Since November of 2013, I've been called upon to give expert Congressional testimony about various aspects of border security on 18 separate occasions. I've testified before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, the Senate Judiciary Committee, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, the House Judiciary Committee, and the House Committee on Natural Resources.
We're dealing with the smuggling of dangerous narcotics like opioids and fentanyl, which has caused an epidemic and American deaths at unprecedented rates.
We're dealing with a greater number of people from countries other than Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
And to top it all off, we're dealing with a greater number of people illegally crossing the border who have prior criminal records in the United States.
Clearly, if the United States was dealing with a border crisis – humanitarian or otherwise – in 2014, you must agree that we're now dealing with a complete border catastrophe.
Once again, we must deal with facts and compare apples to apples. While we made more arrests in the 2000s than today, what you're not being told is that we're on pace to arrest more people in fiscal year 2019 than ever before.
This sounds confusing but it's actually simple. In the mid-2000s, the vast majority of people (over 90 percent) were returned to Mexico within a few hours of being arrested. Upon returning to Mexico, the same people would simply attempt another illegal border crossing. Former Border Patrol Chief Michael Fisher once proclaimed he arrested the same group of people 10 different times in the same shift.
Although I personally have never arrested the same group of people 10 times in one shift, I did arrest the same group of people multiple times in the same shift. It was commonplace. And while working in the Intelligence Division in 2006, I generated "recidivism” reports. Those reports clearly showed that we arrested the same people multiple times.
