The U.S. border between Mexico and Texas has been porous for months, but with red states’ National Guard and police forces pulling out, wide swaths of the border are now going unmonitored.
That has left the border “wide open,” Border Patrol agent Chris Cabrera, vice president of the Border Patrol union’s Rio Grande Valley chapter, told the Washington Examiner.
“We were already stretched thin with their help and having them here relieved a lot of pressure on us,” Cabrera told the Examiner. “Now they took away manpower that we can’t really afford for them to take away.”
Just 6% of the National Guard forces deployed to the southern border from Republican-led states remain in Texas to help staff mobile camera towers or call in illegal border crossings or drug smuggling attempts.
“They would monitor the mobile center, mobile tower trucks, camera trucks,” Cabrera told the Examiner. “Nobody is bringing those out because they’re not there. These were static positions where we would put a vehicle and two guardsmen in there so if somebody ran across that area, they could call it out.”
The agents usually deployed in the areas pointed out by Cabrera were pulled from their posts to help processing of illegal migrants under the Biden administration’s border policies that have stressed immigration resources and checkpoints.
For four months National Guardsman from Arkansas and South Dakota, as well as state troopers from Florida, Iowa, Nebraska, and Ohio were deployed, but nearly all have returned home.
Former acting Customs and Border Patrol Commissioner Mark Morgan warned of the unstaffed 224 miles of the Del Rio sector of the U.S. border in September in an interview with The Patriot Depot.
“No one likes to hear it, but the Border Patrol does not have a statutory humanitarian mission,” Morgan told The Patriot Depot. “It is a law-enforcement border security agency, and that’s what they are appropriated for.
“But they are doing nothing more than processing and transporting aliens – leaving our borders wide open for the smugglers to push drugs, criminals, and gang members across our borders.
“We are witnessing history – we have lost control of our U.S. border in Del Rio, and the state of Texas is now doing the job of DHS, responsible for our homeland.”
