Despite a vow to quickly conduct an investigation into the allegations of Border Patrol agents using their horse reins to whip Haitian migrants, the Biden administration is reportedly still searching for answers.
The Department of Homeland Security under Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was supposed to conclude the investigation quickly after the mid-September allegations surfaced — even though they were quickly debunked by the photographer who took the photos of the alleged acts — but the probe has remained ongoing for weeks now.
“The investigation is ongoing,” a DHS spokesman wrote in an email to the Washington Examiner. “The department is committed to a thorough, independent, and objective process. We are also committed to transparency and will release the results of the investigation once it is complete.”
Mayorkas told Congress on Sept. 22 the results of the investigation would come in “a matter of days, not weeks.”
President Joe Biden had seen the allegations of mounted Border Patrol whipping migrants with reins, and vowed, “I promise you, those people will pay.”
The president of the Border Patrol Union, Brandon Judd, told the Examiner via text message he had not be informed of any conclusion to the probe, but he added to Fox News there is a DHS desire to find some wrongdoing to avoid making Biden administration leaders up to and including the president look bad for the fake allegations.
“They’ve already had the president, the vice president, [White House press secretary] Jen Psaki herself, and the secretary of Homeland Security have already passed judgment on what took place down there without an investigation taking place,” Judd told Fox News.
“So now the investigators are just going to go down there, and they’re going to have to find fault based upon what all of these extremely powerful people have already said.”
Allegations came from still photos of the mounted patrol holding the reins of their horses as Haitian migrants were seeking to illegally cross the U.S. border from Mexico, but were turned away.
“Some of the Haitian men started running, trying to go around the horses, and that’s kind of when the whole thing happened,” the photographer who took the photos, Paul Ratje, told KTSM, the New York Post reported.
“I didn’t ever see them whip anybody, with the thing. He was swinging it. But I didn’t see him actually take — whip someone with it. That’s something that can be misconstrued when you’re looking at the picture.”
Mayorkas vowed to conduct the investigation with “integrity.”
“This investigation will be based on the facts that the investigators learn, and the results of the investigation will be driven by those facts, and nothing less than,” Mayorkas told White House reporters.
“Let me just be very clear, and repeat what I’ve said, I am not concerned with respect to the integrity of the investigation, we know how to conduct an investigation with integrity.”
