The Daily Signal - What Happens at Southern Border Every Day

Episode Date: March 28, 2024

On today’s edition of “The Daily Signal Podcast,” Virginia Allen and Simon Hankinson, senior research fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, discuss their recent trip to the southern border in San Diego County and what they learned from their ride-along with retired Border Patrol agent Mike Syzdek. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.) Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Thursday, March 28th. I'm Virginia Allen. And today we are changing things up quite a bit. I am stepping aside of the microphone to the opposite side of the mic. And my colleague, Brian Gottstein, is going to be having a conversation both with myself and my Heritage Foundation colleague, Simon Hankison. Simon is in the Heritage Foundation's Border Security and Immigration Center. And I had the privilege of being down on the southern border last week with Simon.

and we were in the San Diego sector at the border, spent a day with a former border patrol agent, spoke with many illegal aliens at the border. So we're going to be talking about what we saw, what we heard, and what we learned while we were down there. So stay tuned for our conversation after this. So what is going on with Ukraine? What is this deal with the border? How do you feel about school choice? These are the questions that come up to conservative.

sitting at parties, at dinner, at family reunions. What do you say when these questions come up? I'm Mark Geinney, the host of the podcast for you. Heritage Explains brought to you by all of your friends here at the Heritage Foundation. Through the creative use of stories, the knowledge of our super passionate experts, we bring you the most important policy issues of the day and break them down in a way that is understandable. So check out Heritage Explains wherever you get, your podcasts.

Thank you, Virginia, and welcome, Simon. It's great to have you both here, and Virginia said she got on the other side of the table, but actually she didn't move. She was just painting a visual picture for us. Yeah, trying to explain what was happening today. I have so much to learn from you. People ask, who's this Brian guy? Wow, do they ask?

Because they get a lot of fan mail, so I'm shocked that people are asking. Oh, you've done a great job on The Daily Signal's top news for about the past goodness, almost three months, right, that you've been helping out with the Daily Signal's top news show every day around 5 p.m. Yeah, I think that's when the bonus paycheck started about three months ago. You get those, right? I need to talk to personnel about that. Well, it's great to have you both here, and you had a recent trip to the southern border.

Now, you spent time on the border before, but did anything surprise you when you were down in San Diego this time? Well, thanks, Brian. And yeah, I've had the pleasure of traveling to the border four times, three of them with Virginia from the Daily Signal. We went to Texas, to Arizona, and finally to San Diego. And what's surprised me is how consistently awful it is. Every time we go, we see the same thing. We see large groups of illegal aliens crossing the border being processed quickly and then released into the country, and nothing seems to change. I would just echo that. And I think you reach a point where almost feels like nothing can surprise you at the border because you realize, like Simon said, it's just a machine. And every day so many illegal aliens are coming in, I think the moment that stuck out to me probably the most was when we went to a facility or a location, rather, in San Diego where they're doing street releases.

There was a large center that was helping illegal aliens to get plane tickets, bus tickets, food, all this kind of thing in San Diego County. And the city had funded them with $6 million. They went through that money very, very quickly. They ran out of money about a month ago. And so now Border Patrol doesn't have anywhere to take the hundreds of illegal aliens that are, if not thousands, that are daily crossing the border into the San Diego sector and specifically San Diego County. and so border patrols just forced to street release them. And so it was, it's just eye-opening that had, you know, in the course of one morning, we watched two busloads full of illegal aliens

pull up to this transit center. It's a train and bus station in San Diego, open the doors and illegal aliens from Cameroon, from Russia, from Georgia, from Guatemala, literally all over the world from China, get off that bus and they're asking you for directions. They're asking if they can use your phone to call home or call someone who's going to wire them monies so that they can buy a plane ticket. They don't speak any English. Both Simon and I were using, I relied very, very heavily on Google

Translate, which is a great tool when you're interacting with people literally from all over the world and just wild to hear their stories and see right in front of you. Okay, this isn't rare. I think we were there, Simon Wood, on a Thursday morning. That was a very typical Thursday morning. In fact, we learned from Supervisor Desmond there in the county that that was actually a really low release day. There was only about 100 illegal aliens brought in that morning. He said, you know, it's pretty normal to have upwards of 500.

And that is every single day. It's been happening for months, and there's no sign of it stopping. Okay. I call me a little old-fashioned, but in the old days when illegal aliens, across the border, didn't they used to just turn them around and send them right back? I'm not sure our listeners understand why we're talking about, quote-unquote, street release, how these people, they're in custody, if you can call it that, and they know they're illegal. If they're on a bus, why not just drive back across the border?

Simon? Well, in a nutshell, the biggest change is that while the law says anyone who crosses illegally into the United States should be detained throughout their entire immigration process. So if they claim asylum, they're detained until the end of it because 90% of them don't get asylum. They don't qualify. And if they're detained, we know that about 98, 99% of them will actually be deported. If they're released, they disappear somewhere in that process. If they get an adverse decision, sorry, you don't get asylum, then they're like, okay, thanks very much. They leave out the back door and you never see them again. But under the Biden administration, they've been releasing lately it's over

85% of people that they catch, essentially on bail. So just like here in D.C., where the prosecutors don't prosecute, they arrest somebody for shoplifting, they release them and say, you know, once you come back to court in six months, maybe they drop the charges. So these people being released, they have a letter, and I saw some of them from a group of guys from India, who never would have qualified for a visa in a million years, 20 years ago when I was doing interviews. They are caught at the border.

They get a letter that says, you're here in the United States illegally. you have to come to court. It's a notice to appear in six months, three months, sometimes years in the future to explain to a judge why you're here illegally. And then that's the time when they'll say, well, I claim asylum because I'll be persecuted if I go home. And you go through that whole rigmaral, which could take years. So they're being released basically against the law, which says they should be detained because the administration claims that they don't have the capacity, the wordwithal, to detain them. So it's a bit of a theater that's going on right now. And is there any kind of check, a criminal background check or anything like that that's done before they're just released onto the streets?

There is only a check done using the name that they give and the date of birth that they give and probably their fingerprints and maybe facial recognition against U.S. databases. So if they committed a crime in the U.S., in any state, most likely that'll be flagged. But if they are a terrorist or have a long criminal record back home in Venezuela or in India or Kazibati. Tajikistan, we would never know. DHS has no means of checking that automatically. They can inquire through diplomatic channels if it's a friendly country and there's a whole process that they might be able to get records. But of course, they're not doing that on, you know, 5,000 people a day that they're releasing.

And I'll just add, when we were at the site where they do the street releases, that was one of the questions that Simon and I were asking and kind of trying to find out more of, okay, when you arrived and surrendered to Border Patrol, what were the kinds of questions that they asked you, what was the interview process? Did you see a doctor? And from what we were able to pick up with the language barrier, with most people, it was pretty basic information. It was name, birthday.

I asked one gentleman from the nation of Georgia. If he was asked, if he had a criminal record, he said, no. I asked a couple folks, were you asked why you came into the United States? They said, no. Ask them, had you seen a doctor? They said, well, they checked our skin, but there wasn't like a formal physical process. So it's, and I think Simon Kirby, if I'm wrong, but I think a large part, it's just the sheer numbers.

There's no capacity to do this really, really in-depth question asking, and they're not being required to do so. No, because the Biden administration early on sent out the message that they were not going to deport people, they were not going to detain people, and they were going to lighten up on interior enforcement, people have WhatsApp, they have Facebook, they have social media, the word gets out. So all over the world, people understand that if they can make it past the fence, which is in most places has giant gaps and holes in it, which we saw, they're going to be released. And that's really what they want. They're coming here, the bulk of them to get a job, to go work. And they don't really care about the paperwork. That catches up with them later.

So it is a machine. It's an almost industrial process now of bringing people in as quickly as possible and getting them off the border. Now, since you were on location, Were you able to talk to any Border Patrol agents? Did they provide any insight or talk about their morale or, you know, the process or anything like that? I'll just say this. You know, I've worked with Border Patrol and all other federal agencies over my career. I have a lot of respect for those guys.

They join with the intention of serving their country. You know, it's not like they're getting rich, but they're patriotic, they're hardworking. I think their morale is at an all-time low right now because they're not doing what they're. they're paid to do. They're paid to patrol the border, to stop drugs coming in, to stop people coming in illegally. And yes, they do it humanely. But their job is not to make sandwiches, change diapers, and act as social services for people being brought in en masse. And that's what's happening. So they obviously are dutiful and they don't want to talk out of turn. But privately, they will tell you, one guy said, you know, I hate going to work every day. This guy can't be

more than 30 years old. So it's very sad to see what's happened to the morale. We also had the privilege of spending a day with a former Border Patrol agent who served for 31 years and retired in 2007, and he was kind enough to show Simon and I a lot of the gaps in the fence in the area that he had patrolled when he was an agent, and it was really heartbreaking to hear him say, you know, I feel like all my work was for nothing. He said, you know, maybe during the course of my career, I kept about 20,000 individuals out of the country. And he's like, you know, I look at it now, though, the millions that have been allowed to come in, and I just wonder what all my sacrifice was for.

And so not only for current agents, is it really hard, but also for those who are retired and who served for years and gave their life to defending our borders to now see what's happening is obviously a challenge for folks like Mike Sadek. Now, Simon, you mentioned gaps in the border a couple different times when we were talking. And Virginia, one of your articles on Dealey Signal prominently features one of the locations you went at the San Diego sector, it's over a mountain range or a hill, hilltop area. And you can plainly see there is a huge, there's a border fence and then there's a huge gap in it that some are going through.

Why is that gap there? That's a great question. Is there because the materials were hauled away that were intended to fill that gap under the Biden administration. So that gap in the wall has been there for a long time. And under the Trump administration, those materials were acquired to be able to fill in that gap. And then on day one, President Joe Biden signed an executive order that stopped all wall construction. And we spent a little bit of time, Simon and I, with some individuals who are local landowners in that area.

And they were kind enough to take us up to the area that looks out over that large gap. And they said, yeah, the materials were just kind of down the hill. And then they were taken away when Biden became president and the gap remains. And it was really fascinating to stand on top of that hill because we watched is, you know, one side off to your right. You can see Tijuana and off your left is the United States on the other sides of the wall. And it was fascinating as we watched this man walk along up this path in Tijuana and just walk between the gap and the fence and then just start walking down the fence. It's on the U.S. side, and Border Patrol was nowhere to be seen, again, because they're so slammed and they're so stretched.

And my thinking, it was fascinating to see what that individual did. He seemed leery of us. He didn't seem necessarily, he wasn't too alarmed that he didn't cross. He could see us from where we were standing. So he still crossed, but he didn't seem to want to get close to us. So he then ended up kind of walking back the other direction and just sat by the wall until, presumably until we disappeared. But we had seen, in driving to that location,

we'd seen a group of probably about seven illegal aliens that had just crossed through that gap and were waiting, just sitting by the fence, waiting for Border Patrol to come to pick them up and process them to be a part of this mass parole that Simon just so eloquently described. But again, it's happening every single day.

Now, on his first day in office, President Biden signed an executive order. I'm going to read it to a part of it, declaring that, quote, building a massive wall that spans the entire southern border is not a serious policy solution. It's a waste of money that diverts attention from genuine threats to our homeland security. That was about three years ago. Simon, was he right? He was absolutely wrong. It's been said many times by those who oppose borders that walls don't work.

Well, no wall is intended to keep out 100% of the people trying to get over. Even the Great Wall of China or Hadrian's wall didn't do that. They're there to make it harder for people to get across and to channel your assets to where they can do the most good. So if you have an effective wall and you've got surveillance drones, aerial surveillance, you've got sensors, then you can take a limited number of border patrol in their trucks and their ATVs and send them where they need to be to intercept the groups coming over. If you have no wall, like in the U.S.-Canada border, you've got 5,000 miles for people to just boat or walk or swim across. If you look over to the Dominican Republic on Hispaniola, they're putting up a 250-mile wall between their country in Haiti. And they're not doing that because they think it won't work.

The Polish have put up a wall. The Hungarians, they're putting up walls because they are effective. And as a result of stopping construction on the wall, it's been that much easier for not just illegal immigrants to come in who don't have nefarious purposes other than crossing and working illegally, but for a larger number of people. of terrorists' suspects than we've ever seen before to be intercepted. And for the so-called Godaways, people who sneak in without even surrendering that the people we saw were ready to surrender to Border Patrol, 10 years ago they would have run away from them. Now they're like, please, where's the green truck?

We want some water and our free ticket to New York City. But the ones who don't want to get caught with the backpacks full of fentanyl that killed, I think, 100,000 people last year, they're finding and exploiting all these giant gaps in what's left of the wall. So I think the real waste was not finishing it and allowing these gaps to remain. Simon, in several of your pieces on the Daily Signal, you've written about the parole program. Can you tell us how you saw it in action when you were on this border visit? Sure.

So distinct from catch and release where people are theoretically in removal deportation proceedings, parole is a power that is supposed to be used for a few hundred cases a year for medical emergencies or people to testify. trials, it was never intended to be used on a class or countrywide basis. But President Biden has used it exactly that way. Programs for Cubans, Venezuelans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Ukrainians, Afghans, people waiting for immigrant visas to the tune of maybe 50,000 a month. So one group that comes in under this program are Haitians. And what's supposed to happen is they have a sponsor in the U.S. who agrees to pay all their

bills, so they're not a public charge. They are allowed to fly in after filling out this application. on their phone, and then they get two years to live in the U.S. and work legally while presumably they claim asylum. That's a whole different story. But what actually happens, I got up early one day because of jet lag, and at 6 o'clock in the morning, I saw a couple guys who looked like they weren't from Latin America, and I started talking to them.

They spoke French. They were from Haiti. And by the time we left at about 10, there were maybe 25 or 30 Haitians in this Home Depot parking lot. They'd all come in under the parole program. So presumably they had a sponsor somewhere who was supposed to take care of them, but yet they were all looking to work illegally out of that parking lot. So this program has brought in more than half a million people, as far as I remember,

since President Biden took office under essentially false pretenses that they are genuinely asylum seekers. Many of them don't even bother to claim asylum, and the majority of them probably wouldn't get it if they did. Okay, well, thank you. Virginia Allen's senior news producer, and normal host of this podcast. And Simon Hankinson, Senior Research Fellow with the Border Security and Immigration Center

here at the Heritage Foundation. Thank you both for your outstanding work in the field. Now, where can we see your work? I know, Simon, you produce a regular weekly column at the Daily Signal. Virginia's always writing every day at the Daily Signal. And Simon, some of your work is seen in newspapers across the country. Where can we see your work at the Daily Signal?

There's a weekly column called The Borderline, and then on Twitter or X, Watchful Waiter 1 is my handle, and I try to tweet everything out there too. Okay. And, of course, you can always follow all of our work at the Daily Signal. It's just DailySignal.com, and you can find me on X, formerly Twitter, at Virginia underscore Allen 5. And of course, make sure that you're listening to the Daily Signal podcast every day. At least the top news segment with Brian Gottstein. Both, Brian, both. Virginia and Simon, thank you very much.

Thanks, Brian. And with that, that's going to do it for today's episode. Thanks so much for being with us here at the Daily Signal podcast for this special edition. Hope you all enjoyed that conversation. And as Brian and I mentioned, make sure that you're checking out our evening show every weekday. We bring you the top news of the day. These are the headlines that you don't want to miss to stay informed. And take a minute to subscribe to the Daily Signal wherever you like to listen to podcasts.

we're across all podcast platforms. Plus, take a minute to leave us a five-star rating and review. Thanks again for being with us today. Have a great rest of your day. We'll see you right back here at 5 p.m. for our top news edition. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. Executive producers are Rob Louis and Kate Trinko. Producers are Virginia Allen and Samantha Asheras.

Sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop. To learn more, please visit DailySignal.com.