A leaked video reveals a heated exchange between Border Patrol agents and the agency chief in front of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas during a visit from the cabinet official to the border this week.
The video, shared to Fox News, shows agents griping to Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz in front of Mayorkas, who was making his first visit to Laredo, Texas, on Friday.
In the video, Ortiz can be heard saying that he thinks the border enforcement agency is “losing too many agents.”
“As an organization, we gotta start taking care of each other,” he said.
“I get it,” the chief continued. “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.”
“We’re not,” an agent replied.
“I know you’re not,” Ortiz said. “That’s why I’m saying, we don’t give up. We stay focused, we continue to do the job and the mission that we signed up for. We all signed up for it, we all raised our hand.”
Agents piped up, with one saying, “It’s kinda hard to say that when…”
“It’s not hard to say it,” Ortiz interrupted angrily. “It may be hard for you to say it, I’ve been doing this for 31 years. It’s not hard for me to say it.”
The agents spoke up that “you keep releasing criminal aliens into the country.”
Ortiz dismissed their concerns, telling his officers that they were “getting bogged down in the policies and the politics.”
At this point, several agents spoke up in objection to the fact that, as they said, they can’t use the term “illegal aliens.”
One noted “That’s why Chief Scott left,” referring to Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott, who was forced out of office last year by the Biden administration, as The Washington Post reported.
“You just said it,” Ortiz retorted to the disgruntled agents. “Ain’t nothing gonna happen to you.”
As there was continued grumbling and dissent, Ortiz continued, asking, “Why are you guys getting caught up in semantics? … I’ve been doing this job as long as y’all.”
This was where things got a bit real for the embattled Border Patrol chief.
“That’s the problem, chief,” one agent noted, and as Ortiz asked him to clarify he repeated as the room got a bit quieter.
“For evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing,” the emboldened agent spoke up. “That’s exactly what’s happening here. Good men are doing nothing. You’re allowing illegal aliens to be dropped off in communities.”
This brave agent managed to sum up the situation pretty well.
The Biden administration, represented at Friday’s contentious Border Patrol meeting by Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas, vowed to virtually let illegal aliens flow freely into the United States, with President Joe Biden beginning his tenure in office by applying a 30-day moratorium on deportations to contrast his predecessor, President Donald Trump’s hardline approach to border security.
The year that followed would speak volumes about the extent to which Biden’s border policies have failed him, and the American people, as record numbers of illegal aliens have been flooding into the country, presenting Border Patrol and other border enforcement agencies with a crippling humanitarian crisis.
You see, the thing about crafting border policy for the sake of appeasing radical, wildly unrealistic goals of far-left activists is that it does absolutely nothing to confront the practical aspects of illegal border crossings.
Do Democrats seriously think you can simply give a big business boost to criminal human smuggling cartels without negative repercussions for everyone involved — except perhaps the violent cartel members who make fortunes illegally transporting human cargo?
One solution the Biden administration appears to have arrived at to cope with overcrowded border facilities is to simply release thousands of migrants into the U.S. interior — by smuggling them themselves in the dead of night into unsuspecting heartland communities so as to evade scrutiny, as a stunning report from last week revealed.
They might as well just hire the cartels as government agents at this point.
Of course, this would put the hard-working, law-abiding men and women of the U.S. Border Patrol out of work, when they’ve been the ones showing up to take the brunt of the crisis, and thanklessly at that.
Agents had another opportunity to slam the Biden administration’s absurd policies more directly on Wednesday, as leaked audio revealed Mayorkas himself was personally grilled by disgruntled Border Patrol officers responsible for the area around Yuma, Arizona.
In this instance, one of the agents reportedly turned his back on Mayorkas. When Mayorkas claimed he would never turn his own back on the Border Patrol, the agent responded that he’d already had.
Can you blame these men? I can’t imagine being expected to show up and do a job that I’d been virtually all but banned from doing, and facing the threat of being attacked by the mainstream media, even by the president, for even trying.
Let’s hope Mayorkas and Ortiz got much more of an earful than just what was contained in these leaked clip.
It’s high time that the administration started treating its hard-working public servants as though their job actually mattered, instead of playing with their jobs, their lives, and the lives of tens of thousands of migrant families as pawns on a political chessboard.
