Border Patrol Chief Breaks Down Border Bill, Declares Border Has Never Been Secure Over Last 3 Decades

U.S. Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens said during an interview this week that in his nearly thirty years serving in the agency, the border has never been secure.

Owens made the remarks during an interview Martha MacCallum about the U.S. Senate’s recently unveiled controversial border bill, which has received widespread pushback from Republicans.

As the head of the Border Patrol, Owens is responsible for trying to convince members of Congress to provide the agency with the tools and laws that it needs to succeed.

“There are definitely aspects of that bill that I liked for the agency,” he said. “And there’s aspects of it that, of course, I didn’t.”

When asked if the bill would have secured the southern border, Owens responded: “In the better part of 28 years, I have never seen a situation where I as a law enforcement professional would have said the border is secure.”

“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,” he said. “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.”

He said that he was “disappointed” in Congress’ inability to get an acceptable border package passed and stressed that by not doing so, they were putting the country in grave danger.

“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, like other hard narcotics, hardened criminals, that do represent a danger to our community.”

He said that the agency needs more technology, infrastructure, equipment, and manpower.

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He said that he has no idea how many illegal aliens are evading law enforcement and escaping into the U.S. every month because “we don’t have situational awareness, there’s just so much at the border that we don’t have control of and [places] we’re not at right now.”

“So I know what we see, what we’re able to to actually capture, and it’s in the hundreds of thousands,” he said. “And those are the numbers that really, for us, keeps us up at night because if you know that all you need to do is turn yourself in to the Border Patrol and go through the process, what possible reason would you have for wanting to evade capture and put yourself in danger to cross through the desert or be in a stash house or lock yourself in the back of a tractor trailer? Could it be that those are the folks that probably have criminal intent, that have bad intent, that represent a possible threat to the people of this country? That’s the kind of thing that keeps us up at night.”

When he was asked if the border bill would have “had a good impact and turning that situation around,” he responded: “If it allowed us to hold those people in custody until they were actually removed and it a delivered a consequence, then yes, it absolutely would have.”

WATCH:

WATCH: @USBPChief Jason Owens:

"In the better part of 28 years, I have never seen a situation where I as a law enforcement professional would have said the border is secure…"

Owens on gotaways: "There’s so much of the border that we don’t have control [of]… It's in the… pic.twitter.com/9qH3NWzybB

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) February 7, 2024