According to the top uniformed officer of Customs and Border Protection, the agency no longer has operational control at the U.S. southern border with Mexico.
Those statements were made two months ago during a congressional hearing by Raul Ortiz, the chief of Border Patrol. Now, with Title 42 ending late last week, many people are expecting things to get much, much worse pretty quickly at the border that’s already experiencing so many problems.
When Ortiz made those comments back in March, there were an average of 5,000 illegal border crossings every day. That alone was more than double the 2,000 daily average that was happening during the end of the time when former President Donald Trump was in the White House.
Things have only gotten worse under President Joe Biden in recent months, though, not better. As of last week, there were an average of 10,000 illegal border crossings every day.
Many officials with Customs and Border Protection expect that number to cross 11,000 per day in the near future and could reach as high as 16,000 soon, too.
One of the main reasons is that Title 42 is no longer in place. That was a pandemic-era rule that allowed migrants to be quickly deported out of the country while they were awaiting asylum hearings.
As the daily number of illegal crossings have surged, the Biden administration has removed more agents with border patrol out of security roles into other roles where they are processing the migrants who are coming into the U.S. and then releasing them somewhere in the country.
Brandon Judd, who is an agent for border control, said recently that only about 10% of all available agents will still be roaming on patrol once that total reaches the 16,000-per-day mark, which will effectively hand full control of the border to drug cartels. Judd serves as the president of the National Border Patrol Council, which is the union that represents agents of the border patrol.
Judd believes that the tipping point for the border will arise sometime in the next few weeks, once all the media attention that’s currently being focused on Title 42 ending subsides. That will allow the drug cartels to take advantage and strike.
As he said during an appearance last week on the John Solomon Reports podcast:
“As the talk starts to die down, as you start to see the media go away from the border, that’s when we’re going to see the numbers start to shoot right back up. So, we can expect post-Title 42, we can expect that our numbers are going to go up anywhere between 13,000 to 16,000 apprehensions per day.”
He further explained what toll that all takes on the border patrol as a whole, when he said:
“When we’re apprehending 3,000 people, we’re pulling resources out of the field. We don’t have as many Border Patrol agents patrolling the border. When we’re apprehending 5,000 people a day – now we only have 50% of our border patrol agents patrolling the border.
“When we hit 10,000 apprehensions a day, that means we’re only deploying 30% of our border patrol agents to patrol the border.”
