Two Border Patrol agents tried to help the Texas Department of Public Safety secure the southern border last September. For that crime, President Joe Biden wants them punished.
Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Professional Responsibility released a 500-page report last Friday, summarizing the findings of a 10-month investigation into a 15-minute incident involving two Horse Patrol Unit agents on the bank of the Rio Grande near Del Rio, Texas.
The two agents earned the ire of a spineless White House after pictures of them allegedly “whipping” Haitian migrants shocked Democrats. “To see people treated like they did, horses running them over, people being strapped,” Biden said days later. “It’s outrageous. I promise you, those people will pay.”
The problem for Biden is that CBP’s final report makes clear that no horse ran over anyone and no one was “strapped.” It was all a figment of Biden’s geriatric imagination, as everyone paying attention knew at the time, since the photographer explained the scene he had witnessed firsthand.
What actually happened was this: As a candidate for president, Biden famously told migrants around the world that if he was elected, he would undo President Donald Trump’s border security policies, making it easier for them to cross the border. “You should come,” Biden told them.
When Biden was elected, word spread that now was the time to rush the border. “Now it is safe — now you should try to get into America,” read one text message that reached Haitians living safely in Chile.
And the texts were correct. Shortly after taking office, Biden loosened Trump’s Title 42 policy and ended Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy. Without these two policies that were keeping the border under control, the floodgates opened. Hundreds of thousands of migrants from around the world have since been caught and released into the United States by the Biden administration.
But sometimes migrants arrive at the border faster than Border Patrol agents can process them. And this is what happened in Del Rio, Texas, in September of last year. Many thousands of mostly Haitian migrants were showing up to surrender to Border Patrol, and the Border Patrol simply couldn’t process them fast enough. Instead, the Border Patrol was forced to hand out tickets with a number, like at a deli or the DMV. The backlog grew so large that the migrants formed a giant and unsanitary tent city under a bridge.
As the crowd of migrants grew past 10,000, the Biden administration was forced to admit it had lost control. The Department of Homeland Security begged for help, not just from the Texas Department of Public Safety but even from the Pentagon .
The Carrizo Springs Station Horse Patrol Unit answered this call and was instructed to “help where needed.” On Sept. 19, the Texas Department of Public Safety asked the Horse Patrol Unit to help disperse a large crowd of migrants at a boat ramp east of Del Rio.
While they were helping in this task, the agents acted in an “unsafe” and “unprofessional manner,” the CBP report concluded. Worse, the agents “carried out an operation at the request of [Texas Department of Public Safety] which directly contravened [Border Patrol] objectives.”
In other words, the agents had helped Texas officers shut down the border when it was the policy of the Border Patrol, under orders from Biden, to keep the border open.
Biden did finally manage to clear the migrant tent city in Del Rio, but only by flying over 5,000 Haitian migrants back to Haiti — including the ones that hadn’t come from Haiti.
“How could Biden do this to us?” one Haitian migrant said after being forced back to Port-au-Prince. “We did not know we were going back to Haiti. Nobody told us we were going back to Haiti.”
But knowledge of the Haiti flights soon spread. Over 8,000 Haitians who had successfully crossed into the U.S., originally thinking they would be released to their final destinations, voluntarily self-deported back to Mexico after they learned they might be sent to Haiti. Incentives matter.
Biden’s Del Rio border debacle was a crisis entirely created by a president’s arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence. It is the height of cowardice for his administration now to blame the incident on two Border Patrol agents who were just trying to do their jobs. Federal law enforcement officers everywhere — federal employees everywhere, for that matter — deserve better.
* Article from: The Washington Examiner
