Tipsheet

Border Patrol Chief Pushes Back on Controversial Senate Border Bill

President Joe Biden continues to play host to the tens of millions of illegal migrants making landfall in the United States thanks to his open border policies that are wreaking havoc on the country with no end in sight.

U.S. Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens said that not once in his 28 years of service has he seen the southern border “secure.” 

During an interview with Martha MacCallum, Owens addressed the controversial Senate border bill that has seen widespread criticism from Republicans. 

As a Border Patrol chief, Owens is responsible for providing information to Congress members on how to give the agency the tools and laws it needs to stop the flow of illegal migrants storming the U.S.-Mexico border. However, he said he has never “seen a situation where I, as a law enforcement professional, would have said the border is secure.”

The Border Patrol chief explained what is needed to keep illegal migrants out of the U.S. and how agents can better do their jobs. 

We need more people, we need more agents on the line, they need more force multipliers in the way of technology, equipment, and infrastructure that doesn’t just help them do their job better, it helps keep them safe. There are aspects of this bill that would have added additional hundreds of border patrol agents to our rank and file that would have given us more technology, would have given us more equipment infrastructure. Of course, I’m going to be supportive of that. 

The mission of the Border Patrol is not to process asylum seekers — we are dealing with this migrant influx that really should be applying for entry into the country through an established port of entry,” he said. “And when they don’t do that, what it does is number one, it puts them in danger because it puts them in the hands of smugglers and cartels who extort from them, they exploit them on a very dangerous, dangerous journey. The other thing that it does is it pulls us off of task. While we’re busy doing this, the cartels are taking full advantage of it somewhere else along the border to bring in who knows what and who knows who. These are the types of things like fentanyl, other hard narcotics, and hardened criminals that do represent a danger to our community.

Owens continued to explain that he is unsure of the number of illegal migrants who are dodging law enforcement at the border and managing to enter the U.S. every month in part due to the agents not having “situational awareness," adding that the crisis is out of control. 

He also noted that most of the migrants illegally entering the country have either prior criminal backgrounds or have criminal intent, warning that they are a threat to Americans.