Summary
➡ The U.S. border has become uncontrolled and unsafe due to the administration’s policy changes, leading to a thriving cartel operation. Cartels have begun using advanced technology, like drones, for surveillance and smuggling. The U.S. government needs to regain control over border security through effective policies, including re-implementing an effective border system, encouraging cooperation among states and cities, and cutting grant funding to non-compliant areas.
➡ Rodney Scott highlights national security risks of current U.S. border policies, discussing how limited resources combined with relaxed enforcement endanger not just the Southwest border, but also coastal and northern borders; further, he implicates these policies in the rise of criminal activities such as trafficking. He argues for increased public awareness and calls for changes to offer more effective border control.
Transcript
Welcome Rodney Scott to on watch. Thank you for having me on tonight. Chris, today you survived your term as the Chief of the Border Patrol, starting out under President Trump. Then you last a little while into the Biden administration and then it was time to retire. But when I think about the border and the Border Patrol, you are uniquely qualified. You’ve been a patrol agent out there driving around by your lonesome and you’ve worked your way all the way to the very top of the entire U.
S. Border Patrol. So nobody knows the mission like you. No one knows the men and women of the Border Patrol like you. And I know that you have your eyes and ears open. You get great feedback from your former colleagues about the situation on the border. So let me just open up by saying you see all these reports, no matter where you’re looking online or on television. What is your assessment? What is going on on the border right now? Well, thank you for that lead in, Chris.
And I will tell you the reason I continue to speak to you and others is when I retired, wasn’t exactly my idea. And I promised all the agents that I would continue to fight for them just from a different position. Right. So I do talk to a lot of the guys continuously. And right now, really it’s trying to pump up morale. So border security has never been worse in this country.
And I don’t say that lightly. I go back to early in my career, there was only about 4000 agents patrolling all the borders of the United States. So one could ask, well, how could it be worse today with 20,000? Well, the difference back then was we were trying and the threats were very different. Right. But what’s happened is basically because of the policy decisions of the Biden administration, we have this massive influx of illegal aliens crossing the border every single day.
Right now it’s about 7000, 8000 per day that Border Patrol encounters. But what people aren’t really paying attention to is they’re literally seeing face to face thousands more that they’re letting just stand there because they don’t even have vehicles available to pick them up and take them into the stations. So this whole backlog is creating a situation where the cartel just continues to flood illegal aliens across because it keeps the Border Patrol busy.
And then there’s miles and miles of border that are left completely unopened. Some of those areas have technology, and that’s where we’re recording what you’ve probably heard as known Gotaways. And under the Biden administration, there’s been 1. 7 million documented Gotaways where it’s evidence on footprints or video cameras, technology where the agents knew someone was crossing, and they literally just had no one left to respond. Beyond that, the agents also know, and I know how many miles of border we’re leaving completely unpatrolled that have no technology today.
And then you layer on top of that the traditional cartel, the drug violence, the threats to the United States. And then there’s always been this terrorism threat. There’s always been this nation state threat. But that’s even worse today as we watched with Israel and what’s going on with Hamas. I was just going to say, all you have to do to appreciate a border is to watch the video of October 7 as Hamas breached the Israeli border and all the absolute, horrific, vicious, brutal terrorism that went on.
I know that you know the answer to this, but for our viewing and listening audience, just think about it. Can you imagine a more wide open border and what people that hate us and hate our way of life, what they would love to do, and they have a wide open border to do? How? How long before it happens? How long? And that’s the question that no one has an answer to right now.
But what I can tell you is, from my experience, even before the current threats, there’s been a connection between Hamas and the drug cartels for money making for years. Right. We’ve dealt with people, interacted with people on the National Terrorist Watch list trying to come across the border in the past. But the most under any prior administration in a year with US. Border Patrol is about six. This administration, we’re in the hundreds of people actually on the list.
But again, that’s not even touching on the ones that paid more to avoid interacting with law enforcement. Another lesson. There’s so many lessons that can be taken from this terrorist attack in Israel. They over relied on technology, and they over relied on what many in this country are pushing as a virtual border. Imagine that. Yeah, you actually need agents and infrastructure there. There’s a lot of lessons to be learned.
But we started this conversation with, what’s the current situation here in the US. And I don’t even have a word for it anymore. It’s frustrating right now, to be quite honest. I talked to lots of people, and I don’t see anything being done, but it’s a sieve. And the morale with the agents is just continuing to decrease because why? We talk about this right now for a few minutes, and your listeners will get, like, 30 minutes worth of information.
The agents are seeing this every single day, and they’re asking themselves, why am I continuing to risk my life? Why am I continuing to do this when the current administration has completely opened up the borders and not taken a single step to try to slow down this flow. I encourage everybody watching this to go on CBP dot gov and look at some of the numbers for yourselves, look at some of the trends and you will see just how devastating millions and millions of people that don’t necessarily share our culture poured into this country every year.
Now, that’s going to completely change the dynamics in many, many ways, even down to like, schools, education. And it’s not simply Mexicans, Guatemalans, Hondurans, the number of countries, number of persons from other countries, and those numbers of other countries is growing exponentially as well. Correct. I was just at a change of command out in San Diego and in one of the presentations they said just San Diego sector had interacted with people from 180 different nations.
And then people need to pay attention to this too, over 200 different languages. So that makes it very difficult to process these individuals just getting their biographical information. But try to think about having a meaningful law enforcement interview to identify whether somebody’s a threat to this country or not in 200 different languages. It’s just not taking place. We have no idea what threats are pouring across. And thank you for highlighting that.
This is not the 1990s. When I talk about the border being less secure than ever before. Early in my career, the vast majority of people we arrested were Mexican nationals coming here to work. That is not what the Border Patrol is dealing with today. As a matter of fact, Mexican nationals are outnumbered by many of these other nations. And it’s from around the world, not just the Western Hemisphere.
And I think an important thing that you immediately went to in our opening couple of sentences back and forth was the cartel involvement in this. And I know that you can give great examples of this, but nothing, absolutely nothing crosses that border without the cartels getting a piece of the action. A percentage, a payment, a fee, permission, whatever it is. The cartels are the ones who have operational control of that border.
Unfortunately, that is a fact. And I think a lot of people just hear that and they don’t necessarily understand the practical implications of that. So really what that means is the Mexican cartels are picking and choosing who gets to enter the United States, not the American government right now. Well, how do they do that? The cartel, like any organization, even think of a sports analogy. If you’re going to run a very important play, if you really need to gain yards on the football field, if you really want to get somebody into the US.
You create a distraction somewhere else. So this nonstop flow of the illegal aliens willing to try to leverage the loopholes in our asylum system, and they’re fraudulent claims, but they still back up the system. The cartel pushed them across first in very large numbers. But they pick and choose where those people cross based on the intelligence that they’ve gotten from their scouts over the last 24, 72 hours.
They do that to make sure they completely overwhelm law enforcement. And then anybody and anything that wants to pay more to avoid law enforcement just waits for the second wave. Once law enforcement is busy, then they bring that second wave across. And that’s why I say the cartel is getting to make the decision of who makes it because in very, very high numbers, that second wave successfully makes it into the United States without interacting with law enforcement.
But please, please pick up on this. This is preventable. This is fixable. The United States board, which will over my whole career, was working on this problem set. And through an appropriate mix of border technology and infrastructure to include that border wall system, we were making the border more and more secure. We had a higher level of confidence of what was crossing and we could actually proactively decide where we were going to patrol and how we’re going to respond.
Right now, this administration is putting Border Patrol into 100% reactive mode and they can’t even react to everything they’re seeing. Cartels have their own intelligence network, their own collection capabilities, obviously human intelligence. But they’re even now running their own surveillance drones up over the border. Thousands of sorties, thousands of flights. And they are tracking and identifying and doing their own sort of matrix on who’s covering what, where and when against our own Border Patrol.
I mean, our Border Patrol is essentially targeted by cartel drone and surveillance operations. You’re 100% accurate and from what we’ve seen on our side, and again, they’re just using technology they have available, but they don’t have the administrative restrictions that the federal government has. They don’t have unions to deal with, they don’t have prevailing wage. They basically are paying people for information constantly, some of it’s social media.
But more and more they are using the drones. But people need to remember too. Luckily, on the US side, we’ve seen the drones used to bring narcotics across and we’ve seen them to do counter surveillance. But in Mexico, we have systematically watched the cartel weaponize drones, put explosives on them and literally fly them into military convoys, law enforcement convoys, and then their own fighting back and forth. It’s naive to think that those threats won’t come to the United States at some point in time, but we need to be eyes wide open to all the threats involved.
We as the United States government should be making decisions on who and what enters our home. That’s the government’s fundamental responsibility is to keep Americans safe by making sure that we can control our borders. And this administration has given that control 100% to the cartels. Has DoD assisted Border patrol with a counter drone program. DoD provides assistance in many different ways. I can’t get into that too much.
Some of the technology when I was still in, we shared some of the research, if you will. We leveraged some of the same technology, but the authorities are very different. So DoD obviously has the authority outside the US. To do a lot more kinetic type counter surveillance or counter activities here in the US. Really? The FCC is our big challenge because a lot of the things that we do to counter those drones aren’t kinetic.
They’re more technology on technology to take it over, to bring it down, or to jam a signal. And there’s a lot of concern about jamming other signals accidentally. So if a border patrol agent got out of his vehicle, hauled out a shotgun, and blasted a drone out of the sky that was hovering, would he get in trouble? Yes, currently, he would get in trouble. We were looking at making that a legit policy.
I argue you can do it safely. People duck hunt and goose hunt all the time. Sure. So agents know what to do. A lot of these areas are remote. I wouldn’t say that’s the most effective solution anyway. A lot of these drones are going higher and higher. But when this administration took over, the current administration, they walked away from any type of aggressive enforcement whatsoever. You’ve probably seen some recent video that came out where smugglers are just brazenly cutting the border wall in broad daylight with no fear whatsoever.
We had changed the policy to let agents use chemical munitions, some of the less lethal, to stop smugglers from doing that. And then we were working with mexico to prosecute them for damaging government property. This administration has stopped all progress on even initiatives like that. So there’s just so many layers to this. It’s not just about asylum processing. They’ve really, really cut the border patrol and border security off at the knees.
For the record, I would shotgun the drone. So would I just want to get that on the record. So I got to believe that there’s yourself and some of our other colleagues that we know who watch and track and have experience in this field and are concerned about it, that they’ve come up with some kind of a plan. So when 2025 rolls around, people can step in and have a solution and turn off the faucet and do some kind of damage control, do some kind of remedial efforts to regain control of our border.
I mean, the dirty little secret is we have absolutely no idea who is in this country. None. Correct. That doesn’t sound like much of a country. We don’t know who’s here. We don’t know how they got here. We don’t know who they are. So tell me, I know you’ve been doing some thinking and some writing on all this. What are some of the ideas or what’s some of the thinking for? Okay, there will come a day when sanity will return.
What do we do to get out of this? We may not be able to fix it, but we should be able to at least plug some of these holes, do some remedial, remediation something. What do we do? Yeah. So we wrote a pretty good and when I say we the last administration under the last administration, you saw a lot of initiatives go into place that made a very significant positive impact on the border.
And they had cascading or domino type effects, if you will. So all we really have to do is dust off that playbook initially. And that playbook means some of it is literally the border wall system. The United States Border Patrol designed that system to make every single agent more effective, which basically just means that taxpayers getting a better return on their investment, they can cover more area more effectively.
But we also worked on policies that just said, hey, we want to make sure there’s due process, but we’re not going to give you the prize until a judge adjudicates your case. That was the Remain in Mexico program. As soon as people knew they weren’t going to get released into the United States, about 80% of the fraud just immediately went away overnight. The cascading effects of that meant more Border Patrol agents were out in the field.
They could cover larger areas. And we started cutting the knees out from under some of the cartels. We’re making significant impacts on identifying cartel organizations, dismantling them, working with Mexico, holding them accountable. We can put that playbook back in place very quickly. We’re going to have a huge problem with interior enforcement, but as a good buddy of mine, Tom Homan, always says, we’ll start one at a time.
And I think Congress really needs to step in long term. We’ll push to get some changes so they close some of the loopholes in the asylum. And I also think one of the things we really need to do quickly is make sure that we cut grant funding to any state or city that has stated they are a sanctuary state or city and refuse to cooperate with the federal government on just simply making sure that people that we have approved and invited to the United States are the ones that are here and not people that snuck in through the windows in the middle of the night.
And even some of these folks who have claimed, oh, we’re in asylum city, we’re an asylum state, with the level of people flooding in, even they are having second thoughts or gee, we didn’t really mean that. Look at Eric Adams and mayor of New York. He’s claiming the city is broken because of the huge flood of folks coming into his city. But he’s not alone. There’s a lot of people who are having a little buyer’s remorse on that commitment to, oh yeah, we’ll take anybody and everybody because they’re realizing the consequences on their own communities, health care, schools, housing.
It’s corrosive you can’t do it. And that’s the catch. It feels good to say it. It sounds good. Initially, everybody wants to be compassionate, but they forget how big the world is. And when you completely open the doors to your home, to anybody, you stop being able to even take care of your own family. And that’s what’s happening in Chicago, New York and these other places. Right? So again, that’s another big reason that I keep continuing to speak out as well as some of my colleagues.
2024, it’s going to be a tipping point. We need people to understand when they walk into the ballot box what’s at stake. And that’s a big part of what I continue to do now, is just try to educate people on the facts so that when they walk in, they really do understand what decisions they’re making. And the consequences of elections go well beyond just some emotional feel good talking point.
Rodney, what’s something that you are keenly aware of that probably doesn’t get enough discussion or enough news media coverage or enough this sort of like, oh yeah, people suddenly realize that’s what that just for our viewers and listeners? What’s something that they should know or think about that is just lost on the public? Largely. There are so many things, and this may seem too tactical, but that this is a United States national security issue.
Most of the media talks about the southwest border and they show some families crossing the Rio Grande River. They don’t talk about the cartel aspects, but they also don’t talk about U. S. Customs and Border Protection has limited resources. So today, as we speak, the entire port of entry in Lukeville, Arizona has been shut down to legal, trade and travel so that those officers can be refocused on processing these fraudulent asylum claims.
These ripple effects are affecting everyone in this country in a national security. The northern border, we don’t ever talk about them, but most of the agents on the northern border are sitting in front of a computer screen, kind of like I am right now, except they’re talking to an illegal alien and typing the information into a computer system. So not only is it the southwest border, our coastal borders, our ports of entry, and our northern border are also at increased risk because this administration has knowingly decided, and they campaigned on this, that they were going to open the borders and basically let anybody come in and leverage our entire judicial system, our economic system.
But they don’t want to talk about the fact that those officers were already fully gainfully employed in enforcement duties and now they’re no longer doing those enforcement duties. You hear something about somebody dying from fentanyl, whether it came through a port or in between the port. Part of the reason that that is here is because this administration has taken officers and agents off of enforcement duties. It only had about 6 hours of newsworthiness before it was brushed off the headlines and the internet.
But there was a little bridge incident, the Rainbow Bridge. A vehicle came storming across. And so I always think to myself, if we had our own October 7 event here and somebody, let’s say militant Islamist islamist, violent terrorists decided that they were going to launch some kind of a truck bombing campaign or wanted to cross the border or God forbid they got a hold of a backpack nuke or something and they came into a US.
City across the border. It could be Tucson, it could be Detroit, it could be Erie, Pennsylvania, whatever. And they detonated something and they got across because of lax. Not just lax enforcement, but a biden administration policy that doesn’t even allow enforcement. Right? Yeah, basically invited them. And you can imagine all of the hollow apologies of oh woulda, coulda, shoulda, if only we didn’t know, we weren’t aware. I mean, they are on notice.
God forbid anything mean it is around their neck. They did this to the United States. Bibi Netanyahu is getting a lot of heat in Israel because they’re saying, how could you possibly let Hamas cross like that? How could you let them conduct an attack? Well, God help us. Literally. I mean that in a prayerful way. God help us should these bad guys try to launch something across one of our borders.
And as you just pointed out, doesn’t have to be Texas or California. It could be coastal, it could be Canada, it could be any of those places. The one thing about the border that people forget about as well is it’s a transit location. Nothing stays at the border. It’s all going to some city or town near you. And whether it’s the economic migrant or whether it’s a guy with a backpack or it’s just somebody coming in to watch left and right for Hamas, for Iran, for Russia, for China, report back and then wait for the opportune moment to strike, we’re not doing anything to slow any of that down right now.
And the thing is, we proved that we can and we could do it again. We just need the right policies in place. Rodney, where can our viewers and listeners follow you, read about your work, just keep track of what you think is important. How do you get out your information to the public? So a couple of different ways. I just joined forces with a few people you probably know tom Holman, Mark Morgan, Derek Maltz, a few others, and with Border 911.
So it’s WW divot border 911. It’s a new nonprofit and we’re just trying to educate and reach out. That’s great. I have my own Twitter accounts as well, just at Rodney Scott, BP. But I encourage people to there’s so much information out there. I encourage people to get on CBP, Gov as well and look at the statistics and information. Don’t read the spend, don’t read the monthly summaries.
Look at the actual facts without spend and share that with your friends and family because it’s millions and millions of people and you can see some of the different countries coming across as well. I am putting together a website, Just Honorconsulting. org, where I’m trying to just answer people’s questions and put some general information out there as well. But the information’s out there now, I think if people look for it too.
Chief Border Patrol agents all have their own twitter. This administration hasn’t been able to shut that off yet. They keep putting information out. That’s another good source as well. That’s great. Rodney Scott, former Chief of the US. Border Patrol, thank you so much for joining us on Watch. Thank you, Chris, for keeping up the fight. You’re very welcome. I’m Chris Farrell on watch. .
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