Aaron Heitke, a former Border Patrol chief who retired from his job at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in early 2023, says the administration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris has tried to cover up the mass release of migrants into American communities.
During a House Homeland Security Committee hearing on Wednesday, Heydtke detailed a breakdown of federal immigration enforcement at the U.S.-Mexico border under Biden and Harris.
Heitke said the steps they took began by limiting the Department of Homeland Security's ability to return migrants to their home countries and reducing immigration detention space, forcing the department to begin releasing large numbers of migrants into the U.S.
Heitke told the committee:
Over the first three-plus years of this administration, I have seen a steady decline in the number of countries to which people can be sent. I don't know whether it's by neglect or by design, but for the first time in 25 years and five different administrations, we've seen a significant decline in our ability to send people back to their countries of origin. The inability to return people means most of those arrested for entering the country illegally will either be detained or released. [Emphasis added]
However, the current administration has focused on reducing detention space across the country since the start of its term. Funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention space has been steadily cut, and private detention facilities have been phased out. [Emphasis added]
Word quickly spread around the world that so many illegal immigrants were being released into the United States. When this happened, the number of illegal border crossers encountered by Border Patrol increased dramatically. [Emphasis added]
Heitke said the Biden-Harris administration's mass release of migrants means that 100% of Border Patrol agents are often pulled from duties at the border to process the hordes of hundreds of thousands of migrants arriving each month.
“Border Patrol areas in Texas, Arizona and California had no agents for weeks or months,” Heitke said. “Anyone who didn't want to be caught could just walk in. We have no idea who or what entered our country during this time. In 2022-2023, I sent agents to Texas and Arizona to count the escapees. These departments couldn't even get enough agents on the ground to see what they missed.”
To cover up the mass release of migrants, Heitke said the Biden-Harris administration ordered two weekly migrant flights from San Diego, California, to Texas “to calm a problem” that was beginning to severely impact Southern California communities.
“These flights simply transported aliens to Texas who were supposed to be released in San Diego,” Heitke said.
Each flight costs about $150,000. This was the administration's way of trying to calm a crisis across the border. As these flights stopped and the releases continued, California saw real economic impacts. He received calls from the governor's office, local mayors and hospital administrators asking if they could detain injured aliens with the federal government paying for them. [Emphasis added]
Due to pressure from the administration, my headquarters became more and more interested in the fiction portrayed in the media and completely uninterested in reality. Every time we asked for help to deal with a new problem, they didn't listen. Over 2,000 foreigners were sitting between the fences asking to turn themselves in. I was asked to move them out of the reach of the media. [Emphasis added]
Heitke said future administrations must implement mass deportations to “return to a policy of law enforcement.”
“The only real way we can slow down and stop illegal immigration into the United States is to deport them to their countries of origin,” Heitke said.
“There is a solution to the problem we face at the border. The solution is very simple and much cheaper than the disruptions that are currently costing us so much time and money: we need to deport illegal immigrants to their home countries,” Heitke said.
Since Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took office in early 2021, roughly 8 million immigrants have been welcomed into American communities, including about 2 million undocumented immigrants.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter. here.
