I’ve just read the testimony that Border Patrol agent Brandon Judd gave to the House Judiciary committee today.
Some longish excerpts:
In the late 1990s as a young Border Patrol Agent, I witnessed first-hand how adept these criminal cartels were at exploiting our policies. While I was working in the Buttercup Dunes in the remote California desert, smugglers would drive their products across the United States/Mexico International Boundary, easily making it to Interstate 8 just a few hundred yards away. In almost all cases the smugglers would drive west towards El Centro, California. If we attempted to stop the vehicle, the smugglers would drive across the median and continue west in the eastbound lanes and into oncoming traffic. At night it was worse, the smugglers would turn their headlights off as they drove into the oncoming traffic. The moment they crossed the median and began driving into oncoming traffic, we had to immediately terminate our pursuit.
The policy was that it was better for narcotics and illegal immigrants to enter the United States without apprehension than to put the general public at risk of vehicle accidents. Whether you believe this policy was sound or not, it was a policy that was exploited by the cartels. It took years for the Border Patrol to install vehicle barriers in this area and stop these drive throughs from taking place. During that time the cartel more or less operated with impunity…
Another example was the 500 pound marijuana smuggling threshold the U.S. Attorney’s office imposed on the Border Patrol in the mid-2000s. Due to prosecutorial discretion, Border Patrol Agents were not allowed to refer for prosecution anyone who smuggled or attempted to smuggle less than 500 pounds of marijuana into the country. Not surprisingly we started making quite a few 480 pound seizures.
Today our largest trouble area is in Texas. Criminal cartels are once again proving adept at understanding and working around our policies. Late in the year of 2013 and throughout all of 2014, anunprecedented number of unaccompanied minors entered our country illegally through the Rio Grande Valley Sector of operations. Instead of presenting themselves legally at Ports of Entry and asking for asylum, the unaccompanied minors were forced by the cartels to enter illegally at dangerous points along the border. In most cases, these minors were not trying to escape or evade apprehension, they were simply crossing the border illegally and giving themselves up.
The cartels understood that the unaccompanied minors would force the Border Patrol to deploy Agents to these crossing areas in order to take the minors into custody. I want to stress this point because it has been completely overlooked by the press. The unaccompanied minors could have walked right up to the Port of Entry and asked for asylum. Why did the cartels drive them to the middle of the desert and then have them cross over the Rio Grande only to surrender to the first Border Patrol Agent they came across? The reason is that it completely tied up our manpower and allowed the cartels to smuggle whatever they wanted across our border.
The creating of holes in Border Patrol operations was only one benefit to the cartels by the unaccompanied minor surge. The other was the exploration of our “catch and release’ policy. As this surge became too much to handle, the Border Patrol and the Enforcement and Removal Office began releasing nearly everyone we arrested. I believe this release allowed the cartels to increase their smuggling profits. With catch and release, the cartels could credibly say to potential customers that they would be able to remain in the United States without fear of deportation as long as they asked for asylum upon being apprehended. Although the problem began with unaccompanied minors, as word quickly spread of everyone being released, we started to see more crossings of complete family units, leading to a bigger problem than what we had in 2014. And once again we are playing catchup to a problem that in part we created through policy.
All individuals that were released during this period of time were given an official document that ordered them to appear before an immigration judge at some future date. These orders are called Notices to Appear (NTA). The only problem, however, is that these official orders are usually ignored; so much so that Border Patrol Agents have dubbed them Notices to Disappear. The latest data that I have seen shows that approximately 40 percent of the individuals being issued NTAs do not show up.
The willful failure to show up for court appearances by persons that were arrested and released by the Border Patrol has become an extreme embarrassment for the Department of Homeland Security. It has been so embarrassing that DHS and the U.S. Attorney’s office has come up with a new policy. Simply put, the policy makes mandatory the release, without an NTA, of any person arrested by the Border Patrol for being in the country illegally, as long as they do not have a previous felony arrest conviction and as long as they claim to have been continuously in the United States since January of 2014. The operative word in this policy is “claim.’ The policy does not require the person to prove they have been here which is the same burden placed on them during deportation proceedings. Instead, it simply requires them to claim to have been here since January of 2014.
Not only do we release these individuals that by law are subject to removal proceedings, we do it without any means of tracking their whereabouts. Agents believe this exploitable policy was set in place because DHS was embarrassed at the sheer number of those who choose not to follow the law by showing up for their court appearances. In essence, we pull these persons out of the shadows and into the light just to release them right back to those same shadows from whence they came…
Immigration laws today appear to be mere suggestions. There are little or no consequences for breaking the laws and that fact is well known in other countries. If government agencies like DHS or CBP are allowed to bypass Congress by legislating through policy, we might as well abolish our immigration laws altogether.
Once again, you saps fellow citizens, the word is “anarcho-tyranny”. Are you getting angry yet?
16 Comments
Angry yet? Angrier everyday. What is to be done?
This?
https://cambriawillnotyield.wordpress.com/2016/01/30/to-hate-where-we-should-hate/
For further reading on this [and (heh) “closely related”] stuff, see here;
http://federaleagent86.blogspot.com/
[A] post in particular JK found interesting. But one will have to do one’s own Google of significant events around the timeframe Search to figure out why ol’ JK found it so.
http://federaleagent86.blogspot.com/2015/07/does-federale-agree-with-sheriff-ross.html
JK figures it to be one of them Schelling points Waka was on about a couple posts back.
JK, I’m not sure why any sane person would believe the Obama Dept. Of Homeland Security claim of deporting X many hundreds of people. How is it to be proven? Ask some already trained agitprop actors who are funded by OfA to do their act while their deported friends have been circling a distant airport only to return later? Meantime the media covers the deportations as fact, the “outrage” as “real”.
From the first link- “Apparently she thinks that government employees take some sort of Fuehrer Oath of personal allegiance to Barack Hussein Obama”. Damned if that doesn’t tell it. Government employees, media people, academics, ministers. The list is endless.
It’s utterly mind boggling, the spell that the globalist establishment has cast over the bulk of the population in America and Europe. It could scarcely be more clear that demographic replacement is deliberate policy and that 3rd worlders are being actively recruited for this mission.
But yet the populace remains asleep. It believes the narrative, because they keep us just comfortable enough and keep the demolition just out of sight.
I dunno…I have some hope for a dramatic nationalist reversal via a Trump presidency, but there are probably better odds the white middle class will just lay down and die.
And then there are the self-styled “intelligentsia” like the incorrigible OEM and his ilk. The latter are the most detestable because, on top of their destructiveness of civilized society, their cherry is the insult to intelligence.
Henry, wouldn’t it be ironic if the ultimate reckoning against the Cathedral came not from the Cold Anger of the middle class, but from inside the Leviathan in the form of an angered FBI, CIA, DEA and Border
Patrol just for starters? Then let the Angered middle class join in along side some fine people who will take their oaths seriously. Let the self anointed ‘intelligencia’ quake and quiver while they are forced to choose. That would be Justice delivered.
That would be justice, Robert. Unfortunately, our Department of Justice has perished from the earth.
“our Department of Justice has perished from the earth.” That is the Dept of Social Justice. They have career people in the real DOJ, but may not be needed along side the first agencies just yet. The amusing part will be watching the self appointed smug people who are no longer so self assured out across the American side of the beltway.
I like your optimism, Robert. Unfortunately, I am a career pessimist. Sigh …
I am not a bible clinger, Robert, but I have perused it. Doesn’t it mention in Matthew that, “The scumbags shall inherit the earth”?
“Doesn’t it mention in Matthew that, “The scumbags shall inherit the earth”?” Why yes I think it does…but I heard the lines spoken in a high class British accent–O’Toole or Guinness maybe.
I thought so. Most people tell me it’s the meek who are scheduled to inherit the earth. But, as I recall from bible class, the meek are supposed to inherit the wind (or a lump of coal — I can never remember which).
In any case, bible studies was not my forte. I did, however, excel at physics and math. But these days, that doesn’t count for much, because white privilege. Thank god I managed to squeak into retirement before Hopey-Dopey became de rigueur.
I know I can be somewhat obscure, so to clarify my reference:
[img]https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/f_83dd42hv2uxp7eUQG8Wsr3eo8LeTjM7Pd2PdxLEL6nwbHu8dJRpqqyZ_a2JfAMiU3mCto=s85[/img]
“At night it was worse, the smugglers would turn their headlights off as they drove into the oncoming traffic.”
There seems to be a workable solution to this. If a Mk19 on the Border Patrol vehicle destroys the smuggler’s vehicle before it goes into the other lane, the problem is solved.
Works for me.