The Biden administration’s decision to reverse its predecessor’s border policies without any contingency is a “tragedy” and the “direct cause” of the border crisis, former Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf told “Your World” on Friday. -market.
WOLF: Yeah it is a crisis that affects the men and women of the border patrol in an extreme way. The decision to revert MPPs [Migrant Protection Protocols] and ACAs [Asylum Cooperative Agreements]Proactively removing all of these tools from the table is probably the worst decision that has happened to agents in the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Patrol in their 18-year history. What they are having to go through today and every day, processing those numbers of individuals, not doing their national security job, is a tragedy at the end of the day. How do you solve this? You go back to some of the policies that we saw that worked throughout 2020. You can always improve them, if that’s what the Biden government wants to do. But removing them with nothing in place is the direct cause of what is happening today.
If you came in 2020, when the programs were in place, under Title 42 and COVID, we were reversing families and UACs [unaccompanied minors] quickly, in a few hours, in some cases, returning them to Mexico or staging them near airfields, where we would load them in aircraft and reunite them with their families in their country of origin, in the Northern Triangle. It all stopped. What this signals is that you can continue to push children and families to the border. In some cases, they are not even receiving notification from the court. They are not even in the immigration system, as they are released to American communities. What they did at the border … [has] it has become not only the inspection of borders, but also the inspection of immigration. There is no inspection at the border. Management continues to treat this as a capacity problem. Building larger facilities. This is important, but until you resolve illegal behavior and hold individuals accountable, it will continue and it will not get any better.
What we do know are cartels, traffickers and smugglers control that border. All individuals who cross that border are paying those individuals. They are astute about our policies and what happens when they cross the river and are apprehended by the Border Patrol. In 2020, they were reversed and removed from the country, so the flow stopped. As of January 20, all individuals smuggled across the border remain in the United States and are released. Very few single adults are returned to Mexico. They know it and are announcing it to the North Triangle and others. I’ve been to the border dozens of times. The description they made of the cartels across the river mocking them is true. That’s what they do. I saw the watchmen. They continue to do this because they know our policies better than we do. They know that the Border Patrol is not going to send these people back. They will rescue them from the water and bring them to land and process them at the Border Patrol facilities and probably release them. This is what they are selling to individuals in the North Triangle and elsewhere. It’s a good deal for them, unfortunately.
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