A tense exchange between Border Patrol agents and their chief took place during a visit from Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and revealed just how rocky the relationship between the president’s administration and the agency is right now as Biden continues to allow illegals to flood our southern border.
The battered relationship comes as many agents feel the president’s policies are directly responsible for stopping them from securing the border.
U.S. Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz was involved in a tense back and forth with agents in Laredo, Texas as Mayorkas visited the area. In video Ortiz confirmed that “morale is at an all-time low.”
Ortiz acknowledged agents’ frustration, with Mayorkas in the room.
“I get it,” Ortiz said. “You come to work, you’re frustrated. You’re upset because you didn’t get the desired outcome that you want. Doesn’t mean you give up.”
As the conversation continued Other agents chimed in that “you keep releasing criminal aliens into the country.”
With the agents seemingly still not satisfied with the answers they were getting, Ortiz asked them, “Why are you guys getting caught up in semantics? … I’ve been doing this job as long as y’all.”
“That’s the problem, chief,” one agent interjected. “For evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. That’s exactly what’s happening here. Good men are doing nothing. You’re allowing illegal aliens to be dropped off in communities.”
Mayorkas reference to the exchange in a tweet in which he said that “Challenges and frustrations voiced, solutions proposed, honor and duty to mission paramount.”
The video drew astonishment from Mayorkas’ predecessor, who called the exchange “remarkable.”
“I’ve never seen anything like that where Border Patrol agents are pushing back so aggressively on their leadership,” former acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf said.
“And I think what is probably most striking from that video, which is if you can see in the background the DHS secretary is standing right there, he does not step up. He does not address any of these concerns from the Border Patrol agents. There’s no vision,” he said.
“There’s no leadership. He just stands to the side because he knows he cannot talk to these agents and defend what is going down on the border because of the policies of this administration.”
The exchange came just a day after audio was obtained of Mayorkas’ remarks to agents in the Yuma sector, in which an agent reportedly turned his back on the secretary after accusing him of not allowing them to do their jobs.
Another agent reportedly pressed Mayorkas on how agents are unable to patrol the border due to the policies of the Biden administration, while another reportedly said that Yuma was better under President Donald Trump as “everyone was doing their jobs.”
“The job has not gotten any easier over the last few months, and it was very, very difficult throughout 2021,” Mayorkas told the agents, according to Townhall.
“I know apprehending families and kids is not what you signed up to do. And now we got a composition that is changing even more with Cubans, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and the like, it just gets more difficult,”
“I know the policies of this administration are not particularly popular with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, but that’s the reality, and let’s see what we can do within that framework,” Mayorkas added.
As for the agent who turned his back on him, Mayorkas reportedly told the agent, “You can turn your back on me, but I won’t turn my back on you.”
That was not the first time audio has been leaked from private meetings between Mayorkas and the men and women who serve on the frontlines of the crisis at the southern border.
In August, audio was obtained in which Mayorkas admitted that the border crisis was “unsustainable” and “we’re going to lose” if “borders are the first line of defense.”
“A couple of days ago I was down in Mexico, and I said look, you know, if, if our borders are the first line of defense, we’re going to lose and this is unsustainable,” Mayorkas said Thursday, according to the audio. “We can’t continue like this, our people in the field can’t continue and our system isn’t built for it.”
At that point, agents expressed exasperation to the DHS chief.
“For those of us who have been around here long enough … we don’t need to reinvent the wheel,” one agent told Mayorkas. “We’ve had this happen before. We know exactly how to shut it down. We need to make illegal entry illegal.”
A month later came Mayorkas’s fueling of the false narrative that agents had “whipped” Haitian migrants while on horseback which only made the relationship between Mayorkas and the agents even more battered.
Author: Chris Macovoy
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