U.S. Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens expressed that the border has never been secure during his nearly thirty years of service.
He discussed the recently unveiled border bill, highlighting both positive and negative aspects.
Owens emphasized the need for more personnel, technology, equipment, and infrastructure to enhance border security and protect agents.
WATCH: @USBPChief Jason Owens:
"In the better part of 28 years, I have never seen a situation where I as a law enforcement professional would have said the border is secure…"
Owens on gotaways: "There’s so much of the border that we don’t have control [of]… It's in the… pic.twitter.com/9qH3NWzybB
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) February 7, 2024
He criticized Congress for its failure to pass a satisfactory border package, stressing the danger posed by uncontrolled migrant influx and the diversion of resources from combating criminal activities.
“There are definitely aspects of that bill that I liked for the agency,” Owens said. “And there’s aspects of it that, of course, I didn’t.”
“In the better part of 28 years, I have never seen a situation where I as a law enforcement professional would have said the border is secure.”
“We need more people, we need more agents on the line, they need more force multipliers in the way of technology, equipment, and infrastructure that doesn’t just help them do their job better, it helps keep them safe,” he said.
“There are aspects of this bill that would have added additional hundreds of border patrol agents to our rank and file that would have given us more technology, would have given us more equipment infrastructure. Of course I’m going to be supportive of that.”
“The mission of the Border Patrol is not to process asylum seekers — we are dealing with this migrant influx that really should be applying for entry into the country through an established port of entry,” he said.
“And when they don’t do that, what it does is number one, it puts them in danger because it puts them in the hands of smugglers and cartels who extort from them, they exploit them on a very dangerous, dangerous journey. The other thing that it does is it pulls us off of task. While we’re busy doing this, the cartels are taking full advantage of it somewhere else along the border to bring in who knows what and who knows who. These are the types of things like fentanyl, like other hard narcotics, hardened criminals, that do represent a danger to our community.”
Owens also emphasized the importance of consequences for illegal border crossers and the need for improved situational awareness at the border.
“We don’t have situational awareness, there’s just so much at the border that we don’t have control of and [places] we’re not at right now.”
“So I know what we see, what we’re able to to actually capture, and it’s in the hundreds of thousands,” he said. “And those are the numbers that really, for us, keeps us up at night because if you know that all you need to do is turn yourself in to the Border Patrol and go through the process, what possible reason would you have for wanting to evade capture and put yourself in danger to cross through the desert or be in a stash house or lock yourself in the back of a tractor trailer? Could it be that those are the folks that probably have criminal intent, that have bad intent, that represent a possible threat to the people of this country? That’s the kind of thing that keeps us up at night.”
He believed that the bill could have had a positive impact if it provided for holding individuals in custody until their removal.
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