We've added a second show in St. Louis on April 19 at the fabulous Fox Theater. Tickets are on sale now. We also have tickets remaining in Atlanta on April 5. Get all your tickets@theovon.com. Slash tour also, I want to let you know that one of my favorite hoodies that we've ever made, the template of the hoodie that they use is back, and I'm really excited about it. You can check these out now@theovonstore.com. Thank you so much for the support. Today's guest is a retired border patrol chief who spent more than 27 years on the job, most recently in Yuma, Arizona, and El Paso, Texas. And he really got a first hand look at what's going on with America's border. That's what we want to talk about, and we will and a lot more. Today's guest is Border patrol chief Chris Flem.

Shine that light on me I'll sit and tell you my story shine on me and I will find a song I've been singing.

The funny thing is I run into my friend yesterday. He's a chef, and he's like, dude, I think your guests are staying at our hotel. And I was like, really? That's awesome. I haven't been there yet.

Yeah, it's a nice hotel. You know how really small of a world this is. So I'm flying up here direct from Phoenix to nashville, and we're talking with.

Chris Clem here today. 27 and a half years as a border patrol agent.

Yes, I'm glad to be here. I was just saying I flew in from Phoenix last night, and the lady sitting next to me was staying at the same hotel. She'd never been to nashville. It's been six years since I've been in Nashville, and she's asking, if anything, what are you going to do? I said, well, I got some business I'm dealing with. Where are you staying? I said, well, I'm staying at this hotel. That's where we're staying. There's a whole party of people that she was with. There's like one of their girlfriends was having a birthday party, and so they all came up here. I'm like, well, I'm avoiding that crowd tonight, but it was a great place last night. Very comfortable and super nice hotel. Yeah.

Thanks for coming in, man. And, yeah, thanks for making the effort. We really appreciate it. You just always hear so much stuff.

Like, about the border.

It's like the border and immigration and the effects of it. And I'm always just curious about what's going on? What's the truth? What's the reality? So you're recently retired from your work as a border agent.

Yes.

And where do you finish up at?

I was the chief patrol agent in Yuma, Arizona, which was pretty much ground zero in 21 and 22 for the immigration and border security cris we've been dealing with. Yeah.

And when you say, what is our current immigration policy?

So a couple of things we want to talk about. Right. So immigration and border security are actually two separate. They're closely related, but this is where the problem comes in. We conflate immigration and border security, and we really need to kind of separate those. So I'll talk like, my expertise, my wheelhouse, is border security. Immigration is a long standing process that's been going on in this country for hundreds of years. Right. You have visas, you have people that come in through the ports of entry. They apply on the front end. So there's that immigration process. You have non immigrants and you have immigrants intended immigrants, you have residents. It's very convoluted. But what happens is so many people are coming in illegally, and we don't have the right fix for that mass of humanity. I mean, the laws and the books do it, but when you're dealing with volumes and volumes of people, it's very challenging. So what I'd like to do, what I do is talk strictly about more the border security piece.

Okay.

But it's not lost that you have to have the right mix because we have proven through history, go back 50, 60 years with good, lawful programs in place. The Brussero program is a prime example where they brought in guest workers specifically to work in the fields.

The brocero program.

Brocero program, yes. That actually was where farmers could hire people for those seasons. And there was a drastic illegal entry dropped because there was a more clear and lawful pathway for those that just wanted to come work.

There was a plan.

They just wanted to come work. Right. And they were willing to go back after the season. And that actually, we saw a drop historically in the number of illegal entries. We have proven it in the past so we can work and make things work.

In 1942, Bracero program, an executive order called the Mexican Farm labor program established the Brussero program in 1942. This series of diplomatic accords between Mexico and the US permitted millions of mexican men to work legally in the US on short term labor contracts. These agreements addressed a national agriculture labor shortage during the war, World War II, and implicitly they redressed previous depression era deportations during World War II. The US sought labor from millions of braceros who had returned to their country of origin after the work permit expired.

Right.

Okay, so you're saying there was a drop then because it was a plan in place, right.

It was strictly for a lot of seasonal agriculture work. And then, of course, when they concluded the program, obviously people were still wanting to come back, and so we saw an uptick in illegal entry. There are some nuances and stories about that program, like unions got involved and things like that. Then it became, you priced out the farmer. So, hey, you know what? I can't pay this kind of stuff. But it's an example that you can go back from 1942 for another 20 years till the, hey, you had a supply and demand. You had plenty of agriculture work. You had a demand for workers. And it can make sense, right? We've done that with h one visas and things like that over time. We need to fix the leak in the boat, right? Instead of just bailing out water, we need to fix the leak. And that's the border security apparatus. That's what I like to talk about. It's like, hey, we really need. Americans deserve to have a safe and secure border, and then we need to actually figure out better lawful, even short term pathways for those that want to come work. Tall fences and wide gates.

Tall fences is something that, look, it was actually Senator Fred Thompson, the late senator Fred Thompson from Tennessee that talked about that kind of phrase back in 2008. And I said, man, that resonated with me. So I kind of built off of that and said, look, if we secure our border where it makes sense, where we need it, the way the border patrol says, hey, this is the requirement. And we build out a wide gate. That's the lawful pathways, the ports of entries, programs like bracero and other visa programs. Because so many of the migrants that I've talked to and people I know talk to, they just want to come work. They're not really wanting to come here and live here for very long or immigrate here. They just want to come work and eventually go back. We got to make that better.

And they're using that influx of people all the time. I mean, even when I worked in farming, we always had some dude sleeping above me or next to me or separate beds, but, yeah, same room. And he was mexican. And we would lay there at night and try to say stuff to each other, and we couldn't. And then we would just go to sleep. But, yeah, you have to have a plan. It's like, you got to have a plan. When did that start to change. So they had the bracero program. So that was working for a while. When did it start to change where things got out of control with the amount of people coming in?

So we're going to fast forward. We're going to take a big leap because a lot of this stuff happened before I was even born, right? So in the was steady, mainly mexican adult men coming to work, doing seasonal work in the same thing. Right? The same thing. They all came in, they were looking for work. Even our farm and labor had not been industrialized so much. We were still hand picking things, right? So we've always had that steady flow throughout history in the, there was a lot of illegal immigrants here and President Reagan did an amnesty. That's always the fix. All politically. We'll do an Amnesty. We're going to clean the slate and we're going to really start doing some.

Things like you get grandfathered in. What does an amnesty mean?

That's basically saying you've been grandfathered in, you're here, you're here illegally, we're going to let you stay.

You made it like you're safe. It's almost like the guy in baseball, the referee, saying you're safe.

Yeah, I mean, you're already here. We're not going to deport you. Go ahead and try to start going through a legalization process. You're here to work. And that's a huge pull factor because oftentimes the migrants know, hey, if we can just get here, right, and we lay low, eventually we may get some kind of amnesty. So that began again in the, came in in 1995. I joined the border Patrol in 1995.

Okay.

It's very interesting, especially in today's political times. I think it was 1994, may have been early 95, but then President Clinton spoke at a state of the union and he talked about the crime bill, the 1994 crime bill, which is prevalent today because we know we have President Biden, who was a senator back then. In that speech, Clinton says we're going to put 5000 more police officers on the street to include border guards. I was one of those 5000 hires in 1995. And it was based on some of the things that then Barbara Jordan had really spoken about. We have to secure our border. We can't just have illegal immigration constantly threatening our businesses and everything else.

Was the crime bill started because they needed to secure the border. It was just a general bill. Like, we need more protection. We want to put more people on the streets.

So if you think about the crime bill, it had to do with gun control.

Okay.

Had to do with police reforms had a lot to do with jail sentencing. So it wasn't the best bill, but it certainly got more police officers and I got hired under it. So I was in favor.

But it was a general policy. It wasn't just about the board, right?

No.

Okay. Got it. Right.

So it was more police officers.

It is the largest crime bill in the history of the United States and consisted of 356 pages that provided for 100,000 new police officers $9.7 billion in funding for prisons which were designed with significant input from experienced police officers. Okay.

Yeah. So the 100,000, I think that was probably an end game and probably included jailers and everything. But it specifically talked about 5000 on the streets right away.

That's how you get started.

That's how I get started. And I started in a town. I'm from New Orleans. I grew up in Houston. And we can talk about some of my journeys over my career. But what's interesting is I had over 3000 people in my high school after college and I joined the border patrol. I went to a town of Lordsburg, New Mexico and the whole county had maybe 3000 people. It was crazy, right? The cultural shift from big urban life in Houston to the country. But I tell you what, I fell in love with it. But I went almost ten days before we made our first illegal alien arrest. I mean, things just weren't that busy. And it was mainly, again, single adult mexican nationals.

Occasionally you would get people from like farm hands.

Yeah, that's pretty much what kind of like what you were talking about earlier. We lived out on a ranch when we were there and the landlord landowner, he was know they come through here. I've watched them over generations and over time you would catch the same group every season because in New Mexico it was a lot of green chili. So they were all a lot of chili picking. And you would see these people and it was a cat mouse game. It was fun. And you saw know a couple times a year because you'd remove them and they'd come back and sometimes they'd get.

Away and people would probably leave water and food out for them at that point because there was probably a mature, when things are comfortable there's a level of sharing and caring that's able to be offered. I feel like when you're not operating from a place of fear, you're exactly right.

Because look, a lot of these folks would come through and they would muck a stall they'd mend a fence for food and a place to sleep and then to continue on their journey, that was just the way of life. And it really wasn't until the late 90s, so I'd been in a couple of years in the early 2000s, did we start seeing a change in aggression and more of a demanding mindset from the migrants. Even our culture in our society, we were getting a little bit more. Our youth was a little bit more kind of rambunctious. And so we saw that transition even with the migrants. So then they were demanding that you feed them or stealing stuff. We were seeing that change, which that was, I think, just naturally occurring across society. It wasn't specific to the migrant. It was just we had rebellion in our own streets.

That's interesting.

Yeah. Because they wouldn't fight back then. Then all of a sudden they started fighting and resisting. You're like, okay, what's this all about? This never happened.

I wonder if it was, like, because of music influenced that or. I don't know. I'm sure they probably listen to different music. It's just interesting. That's a big change.

Yeah. Because we saw start seeing a younger crowd coming in, and the younger, I call them kids, were a little more resistant than the older field farm workers. They kind of knew, like, all right, if I just don't run from the border patrol, they'll feed me and I'll be back in Mexico in a couple of hours and I can start a couple more days. And you would catch. Sometimes we can talk stories here later.

But they started getting more aggressive.

They started getting more aggressive.

People started getting more aggressive, yes. Maybe they were listening, like easy e or something.

It could have been, yeah, it was interesting. Right. We started seeing a change in a lot more of cartel control on the south, on the mexican side. So that kind of started pushing some of the influence of where they were going to come through. And then we noticed that the price to cross started increasing in the late 90s, early two thousand s. And I think that adds to the aggressiveness because they're dealing with bad actors. Right. The cartel, you want to cross through here, you're going to have to pay.

Right. So now there's a different energy coming over. It's not just a guy coming over to pick peaches or to be a part of kind of sharecropping, I guess, type of vibes. It's somebody who's paid a cartel. Can you expound a little bit more on that? The cartels start to recognize there's a business in letting people cross through the land on the mexican side.

Yes.

Is that what you're talking about?

Yeah. So people were still coming to look for work, right? Still going to do some of that field work. But now they had to pay somebody to cross. So now they're like, hey, I don't want to lose the $1,000 I paid to come through this area. Now I'm going to be a run. So I think that kind of increased some of the aggressiveness because, look, or they may have been threatened. And so now it's like, hey, I just paid to come through here. Now border patrol is about to arrest me. I'm running or I'm fighting because if I have to go back, then I'm at the pay again. We started seeing that dynamic, and I think that may have been, aside from just youth in general, across the world, we're getting a little more. You had more tv, you had more shows. We still hadn't had the onset of Internet and things like that yet, but I think that was the shift. And then obviously we talk about the cartel because that is a big business.

Yeah, but just to interject. So that was because when you say that people were having to pay to come, they were having to pay a.

Yes.

Yeah.

There is a plaza boss in every area along the border, right? It's run by the bigger. You know, if you want to cross near Palomas, Mexico, which was near my area, you're going to have to pay a plaza boss. So if you're going to come through here to work your way to a small farming community in New Mexico and you had to pay, you don't want to have to go back because you got to pay again.

Now you got skin in the game.

Or even worse, if you didn't pay and you snuck in around the Plaza boss, and you get returned back, the Plaza boss is going to say, hey, wait a second, I don't remember you paying me. And that could cost them their lives because the cartel was pretty ruthless. So I think that combined with just change overall in general of society across the world just kind of bumped it up. And it was in the late ninety s and early two thousand s. And on top of all that, we started a little bit more forward deployment and posture of the enforcement side. So it became a little bit more difficult to get across. So there was a combination of several things and it kind of plays into the overall story where we are today.

Wow, it's really interesting, man. So what is the current immigration policy? Is that a fair question?

Again, it's so vast. Like, are you coming over here as a tourist? Then you get a visa for six months okay, come here to work. You got to get a work. You got to have a passport and a worker visa. I think what we want to talk about is, like, hey, what's happening at the border right now? And why are we in this mess? Right? And I think we can kind of walk through that, because I think it's important for you and the audience to know to come to the United States, you have to have permission, and that starts with a passport and a visa. Now, there are so many types of visas, from entertainment to family to work, and it really just depends on what it is you're after. If you're coming here and you have a valid passport and you want to be a tourist for six months, you get a tourist visa and you get it stamped and you fly in or drive in, you come to the port of entry, and you're free to move out the country for six months. If you overstay, then you could be deported. But most tourist visas are for six months, and in that window, you come and go.

So why do people not want to use the pathways, the legal pathways to immigration takes too much time.

The line is so long, and that's when you hear people say, the system is broken, it's because there's so many people in the system, and the line to come in the right way is so long. I mean, for example, if you're a small business owner and you can't find the workforce you need to maintain your business, it would take you probably two years, about $10,000. You got to deal with about four federal agencies to try to get those employees. Meanwhile, if you're just a startup and you're trying to start things up, you could lose business, lose that opportunity, because it's so convoluted and so long to wait.

If you need employees from out of country, anywhere. Oh, from anywhere out of country. Yeah, anywhere. Okay.

And so it deincentivizes, because for a small company to say, I got to spend this money, and I may have to wait years to even get those employees, but I can hire this guy off the street now, and nobody's asked any questions. That's why we've got to really clean up this mess. Right.

I see what you're saying.

There's people that, like, they call it the death visa. They've waited for so long, like, literally 20 or 30 years to get over here that they've got to really work on that. And I do believe that if we can come up with that wide gate, that clearer pathway, that will, to some extent, reduce the humanity that's coming in illegally, that's causing our security vulnerabilities.

And when you say, like, people to being hired and businesses having to wait a long time, most of those businesses, we're just thinking, like, labor type of work. Is that what we're saying?

Probably, yeah, in most cases. But you still have stem type businesses where people have to. There was work visas established, I think, in the late 60s, about 144,000 of non immigrant work visas, certain criteria, and that's not a lot of visas for people from. And every country has a bite at that. 144,000, I think, is the number.

And that's still all we have. Yeah.

They haven't changed it. It's 2024. That, I think, is where the frustration lies when you.

Is that true? That's. How many work visas can you.

Non immigrant visas? I think it's around 140 something thousand? Yeah.

Wow. And what does that mean, non immigrant visas?

They're not coming here to immigrate and stay. They're just here to work.

Oh, my gosh, that's so few.

Yeah. When you put that in perspective of how many people are getting caught and released into the country and they're looking at, oh, well, we want to give them work opportunities while they're waiting on their hearing, but yet you've had a quota established for over 50 years and you haven't willing to change that. What about the poor people that have been waiting in line to get that work visa? What about the business owner that has been waiting his turn to hire people?

These are the people from wanting to do it legally at a certain point.

Spot on. Spot on.

Why wouldn't they want to change the work visa? Why wouldn't they want to add more? Has it become man?

I think if I could answer that question, we would solve a lot of problems. It's Congress. It's Congress. When people, we talk about the problem. We don't need the bureaucrats and the elected officials in Washington making these decisions. We need them to go to. We the people, go talk to the business owners, talk to the community leaders, talk to the hospital staff, talk to the mayors, the county commissioners. Say, what is it that you need to attract and attain the best and brightest to come over here? What is it that you need to maintain your lifestyle in your community as an elected official? That's where those decisions get rolled up. And then Congress passes a bill that says, this is what we're going to do. If we're just relying on bureaucrats and elected officials that are in Washington, they're just doing it because of interest.

Lobbyists, right? It's lobbyists.

They're talking to the people who know. Because think about it. If you're in a community that says, hey, I'm trying to build this, I need fresh employee workforce. I don't have it here locally, but somebody from another representative from another part of the country makes a bill that doesn't impact you or impacts you and negatively, that's not representative. So we really need we the people represented. And I know that's kind of a very naive approach, but it is what is necessary, especially if we want to solve this Immigration issue. We know we have labor shortages. We know that there are people that want to come over here and provide and do good. Let's hear from the experts. And that's the academic world. That's the business world. That's your farm and ranch world. The people that make this country tick, they're the ones that need to come up with the solutions, and congress needs to support it. Unfortunately, it just seems like everything gets done in a circle inside the beltway.

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No, no. In fact, there's been an evolution and change, and I don't know if evolution is the right word, but a change in demographics over the last decade or more. Again, when I first started, it was mainly single adult mexican nationals. We started seeing influx.

Yeah, guys with some sandwiches, coming to work, coming to work.

It was what it was. Right then we started seeing an uptick in Central Americans. The northern triangle, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala. We started seeing that show up in the, they were always coming, but we started seeing an uptick in the mid two thousand s, in the two thousand teens, really 20, 12, 13. We started seeing a big change of family units and unaccompanied children and mainly Central Americans. In the last five or six years, it's been a world problem. I was the chief of Yuma from December of 2020 till December 31, 2022. So just over two years as the chief of that sector, rarely did Mexico or central american countries make my top ten daily or weekly numbers. It was all over the world. And so that's been the phenomena that's changed over the last few years. And that's another misnomer that most people think it's a mexican problem or it's Central America. No, it's not. It's people from all over the world coming in to this country.

Here's an article right here. It says chinese migrants pouring across southern border spark national security concerns. More than 20,000 chinese nationals have illegally crossed since the new fiscal year began on October 1. Is that true?

Yes. Today's Wednesday. So I think Tuesday, Monday or Tuesday. There was almost 270 in San Diego alone.

270 chinese people?

Yeah.

Where are they coming from? China.

Coming from China to Mexico and up the gut into the United States. So that's since October 20,000. And here's the other thing.

Too.

A lot of these chinese nationals and a lot of the people that we're catching and we're seeing down there are single adult men, like 18 to 45 year old range. I was in Eagle Pass, Texas, right before Christmas, and I was down in Lukeville, Arizona, right before Christmas when those places were really popping. And there'd be 1000 people on the ground there. 800 be single adult men. Wow. And the other 200 be families and some kids.

So does that mean that it's getting back to the traditional element that you're talking about?

Oh, no. These are people. A traditional element would have been a single adult mexican national. These are single adults from Mauritania, from New guinea, from west african countries, from China, from you, you name it. They were coming from all over the world. And it's also important, though, this is how they get here. They fly in to Mexico City or Cancun on a tourist visa, and then at least when I was in Yuma, they would fly from Mexico City to Baja California on that same tourist visa. And then they would take a shuttle bus to the border 45 minutes away and then come across. They're still doing that, and they're just coming up different locations. So they fly from all over the world into Mexico City. There is still lots of groups that will fly into South America and go up through the Darien Gap into Panama and into Central America and work their way, the traditional migrant route. But a lot of them are flying in, and they're really crossing the desert for 45 minutes.

Maybe nobody wants to work anymore. Even when it comes to migration, everybody's just cutting corner or, like, taking the easy route, I guess. So. That's unbelievable to me, that it's so diverse. So what are all these guys doing? Are these people whose families have been here and they couldn't get here to them who have been waiting for a visa? Are these people who need a job and they have a skill set that something has happened in their country, like, religiously or with a change in government or something. Is it bad people? Who is it?

It's really a potpourri of all of this. Right? So you hear the term asylum seeker thrown out a lot. Many of these people are not seeking asylum.

Okay, and what does that mean? Asylum seeker?

So that has been a narrative change that a lot of people on the progressive side, open border mindsets, is everybody's here trying to seek asylum. They want a better life. Well, we all want a better life, but there are certain standards to meet asylum. Asylum means you are pretty much being persecuted for your gender your religion, your political affiliation, living in a bad neighborhood, not finding a job, getting beat up by a gang, is not asylum. It may be a rough life, but that's Jacksonville, so they'll just basically say, everybody is asylum. That's not true.

Okay.

And by the way, there are two types of asylum, and this is going to get too much into this, but there's an affirmative claim where you are leaving your country because of you're being persecuted for these reasons. And you fill out like, I am seeking asylum. Like I am filling out. I think it's a 595 form. And I fill it out to the I need asylum because I'm being threatened for this. That and the other thing. That's an affirmative. Somebody outwardly seeking. For example, there's a piece in that asylum affirmative claim. It says, regardless of your status at entry. In other words, regardless if you're here legally or not, you can affirmative seek asylum if you meet a criteria that, for example, let's say you're a student on a visa, you're a student from the Ukraine, and the Semester's out and your visa is about to expire, but you want to go home for the summer. But there's a war breaking out in your country, and your neighborhood has been destroyed.

So you can apply for asylum.

And let's say your visa expired, right? Because you were waiting to get your plane ticket, and now you're out of status. So you're here illegally, but because of the situation, you can affirm the claim for asylum because there's nothing there.

So that's a way that seems like the way the law should be used.

Yes.

Right way to do it.

Something's changed. Yes. You are out of status now, but you can't go back to your country. Your government's in shambles. I need to stay here. I need to stay in. That's perfect. That's what the laws are for.

Right. Your government's killing women, your government's killing gays, your government. There's a war, right.

And I can't go back.

But people are abusing that.

Right? Well, that one, not so much. The other one where I was going is the defensive claim, and that's under a credible fear claim. So you cross the border illegally. You are arrested by border patrol. Border patrol process you for removal. During the process, removal is deportation. So you're going to get your hearing in front of the judge. We ask you if you have credible fear of return to your country. Well, most of them say yes, because then we ask a few other questions and they get to go have a credible fear screening. Now, nine out of ten people do not meet the criteria for credible fear, but it gives them an extra bite at the apple anytime during the process, because they're just coming to look for work. They're from a bad neighborhood, or they had an abusive relationship. That's not asylum. But they can use credible fear and asylum as a defensive claim. And that's what the majority of these people that we're encountering are using that as a credible fear asylum claim. And also on asylum just in general, is you're supposed to seek asylum in the first asylum country you step foot in.

So if you.

It would be Mexico.

It would be Mexico. Which is why the policy of the remain in Mexico, the migrant protection protocol. So many people were coming into the United States after passing through multiple countries that were asylum countries, but they were claiming it. Oh, I want it here.

Can you send people back based on that, or can you reject people based on, like.

So what we did under the Trump administration is we created the migrant protection protocol and said, all right, you're here. You passed New Mexico, you want asylum. You should have claimed it. Mexico. We would send them back to Mexico to wait for their hearing here. When that happened, the numbers just dropped. People realized we just closed that loophole because they didn't want to wait in Mexico. Because if you were really seeking asylum, if you were being persecuted, you take refuge in the first place, you could seek refuge.

Okay?

And some people are flying through multiple countries. Look, if you were from Pakistan and you were targeted because of your religion, and you got on a plane and flew to Germany. Asylum country. You flew from Germany to the UK. Asylum country. You flew from UK to Mexico. Oh, asylum country. You crossed the border illegally in the United States. Oh, no, I want asylum. Okay, you're playing a game here, man.

Yeah.

It may be the better place of all those countries, but if you're using asylum, you should have got off the plane in Germany and said, I need help. I need to seek refuge. And that's the loopholes that some of the policies that we had in place close. And the numbers, and I'm going to tell you the numbers because you can see where all this works. Let me just take this here.

So once people can just say, I'm here to seek asylum, does that limit the border patrol agents? Do you then have to follow a script? Once somebody says a certain thing, do you then have to go by a script and there's nothing else you can do?

Yeah. So, great question. So we're processing somebody for what we usually call a notice to appear. In other words, you're being processed for an appearance in front of a judge to be removed or make your claim. And we ask them if you claim fear. If they say no, it's just check a box, no. And you continue to process. And you would turn them over to immigration and customs enforcement for detention if there's spaces to hold them. If they say yes, it is five additional questions for us that we have to answer. And I don't recall the questions anymore.

They used to get answers.

Yeah. So if they say, yes, I have fear, I fear I want asylum. We ask these five questions and there's a form that we put on there. And so that case goes into a credible hearing process. In other words, they're going to get in front of an asylum officer to go through that. And again, that just gives them an opportunity to stay a little bit longer until that asylum officer decides, yeah, you meet the basic criteria, and then you'll get in front of a judge at a later date. But, yeah, absolutely. When somebody claims fear or claims they want asylum, we have a protocol, an extra form that we fill out and we take care of that. So that's another thing that was always kind of a misnomer. It's like, oh, border troyants are making those decisions. No, we're not. It's five extra questions. It's really easy for us.

Yeah, it says right here, unfortunately, a growing number of asylum seekers are well versed in our laws and more importantly, what they need to say in order to get a foot beyond the first asylum hearing. As a result, many individuals claim credible fear of persecution in the hopes of being released or allowed to remain in the US. This creates several significant problems. Improper claims clog the system and deny legitimate asylum seekers a swift education.

Adjudication.

Adjudication, thanks of their claims to the US government must devote valuable resources to the care, shelter and processing of large numbers of people who likely will not be ruled eligible for asylum or similar protections. And number three, the longer the asylum loophole exists, there will be human traffickers and false asylum seekers who will abuse the system and put their own lives at risk, too. What does that mean?

So they're coached. This is the marketing piece of the cartel. And I'll use the cartel and smuggling organization interchangeable. I mean, cartel is the hierarchy. They're the ones, the big boss. And each one of them have, they're commodity neutral. Whether it's people or things, they're going to smuggle it and pay for it. Whatever.

Okay. And they own kind of plaza space along the, what did you call it earlier?

The Plaza boss was somebody that owned the area near the crossings where people were going to cross.

And they may not own the land, but they're the mafia there.

Yeah, that's basically it.

Okay.

Difference is the cartel really has got huge influence over so much. But to those boys, it's a real.

Mafia, not like our mafia.

So I used to kind of compare the two. But the mafia, back in the day here in the United States, you wouldn't need a military to take it out. The cartel is well armed and well financed to handle things. And police officers are not going to go take out the cartel.

Right.

But those three bullets in kind of paraphrasing that is, number one, the rhetoric that goes on in our political and media sphere in the United States.

When you say rhetoric, what do you mean?

Oh, they're asylum seekers. We need to do this. The false choices of either for border security or you're anti immigrant or you're for immigration, that means you're an open border person. No. So the bad guys are, will listen to all this, right? So they hear this, oh, asylum seeker. Okay, this is going to be our marketing point. I'm going to charge you whatever I charge you.

I'll give you the information and tell you how things answer and say, and.

Then you clog the system up. And since there's no room at the end, in other words, there's no place to detain them. Once we've caught them, they get released. And that's what they want because they're in the United States. They are going to find work, generally, it's going to be below board. That third bullet is the one that should concern every one of us. If we're really going to make this a humanitarian issue, which it really is, is the human traffickers, because how real is that? It's so real. So many people do not realize they are in this trafficking vortex until it's too late. There are stories out there, and we don't need to even go that way today. But I can just tell you that it is real. It's what I'm pretty much dedicating my life to now, looking for solutions. And we can talk about some of that down the road here. But let me just say this. So many people. Well, let's just cut to the chase here. So these people are being sold a bill of goods that they're going to be able to come over here and live the american dream.

All right? It's so controlled by cartels and trafficking organizations that they were charging anywhere from $5000 to $15,000 a person to come across. People don't have that kind of money, so they're going to have to pay that off. Indentured servitude, whether it's going to be put them in forced labor or prostitution, things like that, narcotic, smuggling, all that.

So people are paying that. They'll say, you'll do it in trade.

Yes.

Wow.

Or they don't know that. Like, hey, yeah, give me 20,000 for the four of us to come across. Well, I have 20,000. Okay, well, give me what you got, and I know where you live, and I'll put you to work when you get there and you can pay off your debt. Sounds like a great deal. Until they realize what they have to do. If what was real, this is real, you'd have families show up at the border in Mexico. They're still in Mexico through the cartel organization, the smuggling trafficking organization. Say, okay, this husband and this husband are going to swap wives. This kid's going to go with this single adult, and that's going to be a family. You two are now a family. You two are now a family. You're going to cross in California, you're going to cross in Arizona. And then when you get released, you play the script. When you get released, y'all can be reunited.

Now, that made it because if they were families, they faced a different.

They would be released. We weren't detaining family units, so they combined people. And by the way, they would just be released. Yeah, the process, there's no place to hold family units.

So if things were full and you were a family and you came across and you guys caught them, we'd process.

Them and we released them and just.

Release them into America.

Into America. To the nonprofits. And the nonprofits would facilitate. So here's what happens. If that was my wife with some other guy being pushed across someplace else a hundred miles away, I'm going to do whatever it takes to ensure her safety, which means I'm going to play that script, I'm going to pay that debt, and pray that I get to reunite with her in the next few days.

Right.

That's the mental trauma. And by the way, my kids are involved in this, so I'm hoping that I've at least got my kid with me or she's got a kid, but they'll separate those families on the south side of the border to control and manipulate. So I won't say a word. Because, number one, you know where I'm from, you know where I'm going. You've got my family, so I'm just going to keep my mouth shut and I'm just going to play the game and I'm going to just try to get through this without being discovered by border patrol that this isn't really my family.

We cartels afraid they're going to be rated out? Is that what you're saying? Why would they?

No, the cartels really aren't worried about being rated out. Well, I'm curious, but they've tell the migrants if you rat me out, if you squeal, they're not going to get paid. So we're going to take it out on you. So it is completely mental and emotional human exploitation.

So I guess I'm still confused and I don't know why. It could have just been. I didn't sleep much. So they'll mix and match the family?

Yes.

And send them over control.

You're going to pay me the money that you owe me, or if you want to be reunited with your family and you can't pay, I'm putting her to work over here.

Oh, wow.

That's the mind control game that's happening. And so much of this was, again, and we were caught up in this as agents, too. Right? So you'd have, oh, they're separating families, or the families are being separated and released. We didn't know. You catch 1000 people in 8 hours, you don't have all the time and the resources to dedicate, to ask every question that you should be asking because you kind of pick up on things, right? When, why the wife is not talking and the guy is given all the instructions. I mean, when you have time, you can pick up on that stuff. But when you have got so many people coming and you're overwhelmed, we miss those things. I used to get asked what would keep me up at night, chief? And I'd be like, well, my agents well being. But then the people that we missed because we know that was happening.

And when you can't do anything, you can't say, hey, this seems suspect.

If it does. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And we would bust up these fraud families when we had the resources and the time to do it when we weren't overwhelmed with, look, theo, the numbers, let me tell you, let's put this kind of in perspective, why this becomes a challenge. I think it was 2019. We had just over 900,000 arrests in the southwest border. In 2020, that number dropped to just over 400,000 because we had wall being built, we had technology being deployed, we had strong policies in place that were closing loopholes. We reduced the number of illegal entries over half. Well, we had a change of administrations, and all that got basically put aside. We went from just over 400,000 arrests in 2020 to 1.66 million in 2021 arrest arrests, 2.2 million in 2022. In 23, I think the number was around 2.4. And we didn't increase border patrol agents.

No way.

So when you look at the number of people, the number of people, it just becomes a math problem. When I was chief in Yuma in 2020, the year that I got there, so federal fiscal year ended in September 30, we had just over 8800 arrests that year. I was like, this is going to be great. Those are fun arrests for border trades.

Right? And not to interrupt you, I guess I am, but I just saw this the other day, and this was in the New York Times, an immigration shift, and it had a graph in here. Can you go down annual southwestern border apprehensions, and it showed. Yeah, look at those numbers. 20, you were at less than half a million.

That's the 400,000 I was talking about.

And then in 2022, up to 2.21 million. That's almost five times. That's almost five and a half times.

And that's only border patrol arrest, because what they're doing now is they're playing numbers. Those that are illegally arriving at the ports are not included in that. So there's still another 500,000 that were released by the ports. Let's put that in perspective. There's only 18,000 border patrol agents in the entire United States. Southern border is about 16,000, then the rest of the northern and the coastal. So you do that math, and you look at shift work, you look at days off. I mean, you're really outnumbered 201 every day in certain areas. So think about this. In 2020, we had just over 8800 arrests in Yuma with a little over 900 border patrols to include myself.

Right, 800 arrests.

Yeah. And it went up to 114,000 in 2021. So we went from 8800 to 114,000 arrests. And in 2022, it went up to 310,000 arrests. And I still had the 950 more or less border between. I was literally out there as chief. I wasn't processing, but I would be out there with the men and women, and I'd go out to the border and literally see 500 people at a time walking through a hole in the wall.

What can you do sometimes as a border patrol agent, are you so outmanned and overwhelmed that all you can do is watch them go by? Yeah.

Well, so a lot of these people were given up.

True. Yeah.

So a lot of these people. Here's the thing. The cartel is controlling where they're coming through, right. So they knew they were delivering 200 to 500 people at a time.

Are they strategic about it?

Yes, absolutely. Putting them right there. These people weren't running from us. They were giving themselves up because they were wanting to come to the United States. Here's the kicker, and that's fine. They weren't running. There was always going to be something going on in that group. There was usually a sick person or there's maybe a woman in labor, or the agents had to respond. But while we're diverting our resources to handle that group of 100, 200 to 500, what do you think is happening 10 miles the other way? The people we really should be going after are jumping over the fence and taking off and running into the neighborhoods and getting smuggled out. That's the kind of things that are happening right now. And here's the other thing, like, let's.

Send 100 right here, and then in the meantime, let's send 1000 over there when there's some response. Yes.

So we're going to put all our resources into that one. The cartel was controlling our border operations that way. In other words, controlling.

Oh, they were manipulating the situation.

Yes. I'm going to send a couple of hundred people here that's going to get a response by border patrol. Meanwhile, the ten criminals that are either prior deports, potential terrorists, drug runners, we're going to send them a mile the other direction because all the resources went there. And that's how this has happened. Look, the gotaways, those are the gotaways that people talk so much about. There's been a half a million gotaways every year the last few years, and we have no idea who they are.

And they're just in the country.

They're in the country.

See, that's the part, like, I am all for legal immigration. I don't think it's fair that I get to be born in a place that is like. Or that somebody has to be born in a place where they have to suffer or struggle or that they. I feel like people should be able to go, but I do feel like we can have an organized plan, because if you don't have an inventory, if you don't know what's on your shelves, you can't accurately Offer aid, you can't accurately have teachers in a community, you can't guarantee anybody's safety. It's like to not have a fair inventory is you can't do anything. If, I don't know, if there's 20 cats in my house and I walk in and I have food for one.

Cat, goes back to your plan.

Right.

And that's all we're saying is come through the front door so we can have the inventory. And that goes back to when I was talking about going to the community. You brought up teaching. My wife's a lifelong educator. Right. So this hits home. Let's think about some small town in the middle of America, right? Well, let's talk Covington, Louisiana.

Yeah.

All right. What if all of a sudden 100 brazilian families who speak Portuguese showed up in Covington? Because is the Covington school district, is St. Tammany Parish going to be able to have portuguese speakers there? Because we have an obligation to educate those children. Maybe there's one or two that could do it.

Maybe Linda Green, if she was the.

Teacher, she was good. But think about Lewis.

Yeah, there was definitely some great ones.

People from all over the world speaking all these different languages. But those are the type of things that you think about, right?

You tax the system. And now the students and the teachers in the town probably feel bad that they can't help.

Right?

So their morale is low. They don't know what to do. Now they're like, teachers are up at night, like, trying to learn Portuguese, Portuguese online, and it's a nightmare. And the portuguese people are sitting there like, they probably feel bad. They don't know what to do.

It becomes a deprecating cycle that doesn't get better. If we just want people to come through the front door so we know who they are. They're invited guests. Right. And we should be. That goes back to the wide gates. We want to invite guests. I think charity starts at home. We need to clean up our own backyard. We've got homeless children, veterans and all that stuff.

I totally agree.

But we can certainly invite guests in if we can control it and know who they are, what the strengths and weaknesses are, where they're going. So we can apply resources that way. Because not only is it the educators, but the EMS and the first responders, something happens and they don't speak these languages, it becomes a challenge for everybody. So again, it can be fixed. It's complicated because it's people. Right. If it was easy, we'd have fixed it years ago. It becomes vitriolic and political and it's complex because it's people. So that's why it's a perpetual cycle that keeps getting the can keeps getting kicked. But we've got to figure out some way to stop the leak on the security side so we don't have mass people coming in illegally and then figure out the human side of it to bring people into the front door and invite those guests so they can be proactive. I don't want to broad brush anybody, but I think the majority of them want to do a, there's going to be a good minority chunk of these people that are probably just not doing good. We've seen that in New York City, right.

Recently, the migrants that beat up the, that we got to get that dangerous.

Goldilocks up there just running around in the house eating the honey, able to shoot the bears if they come in and it's not even their. There's, well, one thing it does.

Yeah.

This was the case, right?

Yep.

Brawl between migrants and police in New York's Times Square touches off backlash. A video showing a group of migrants brawling with police in Times Square has touched off a political furor and renewed debate over a long standing New York City policy that limits cooperation between local police and federal immigration authorities.

So those are sanctuary city laws where certain cities will not cooperate with immigration and customs enforcement. In other words, if this person tells them they're a non us citizen, those cities have passed policy that they're under obligation to report their immigration status to federal officials.

But can they detain them or.

No, they won't because of, not for immigration status. That's the federal responsibility. But there used to be, we have what we call a detainer program. And what would typically happen and what still happens in non sanctuary cities if they encounter somebody and they ask them, what's your citizenship? And they're from, you know, wherever, name a country of Mexico or Central America or Venezuela. Do you have any documents to allow you to be here? No. That would be a call to federal immigration authorities. Say, hey, I've got John Doe over here who's illegal alien from Venezuela. And they would put a detainer on them. So ICE would come pick him up after the state crime if they weren't charged him, but he was here illegally. It's the federal immigration. Those are these sanctuary city laws that have been really pushed and shoved.

Yeah. The past eight years and stuff. And what are the benefits of the sanctuary city laws?

Here's what it comes down to. There is this.

What are the benefits? Sorry.

The idea behind it is if the migrants are witnesses of crimes or have been a victim of crime, they won't report it to the police or cooperate if they feel that they could be deported.

I see.

So what they've said is you're not going to be turned over to immigration if you report a crime. So they're not cooperating with federal immigration. I think that can probably be debunked because there are visas we can give people. If you are a victim, if you are going to be a witness on behalf of the state. They just politicized the whole thing.

Well, it also seemed like it's being used as a loophole.

Absolutely.

It's like another way of where somebody's like it's set up for a good reason, but it's taken advantage of.

So many of our laws and policies are that way.

Right. Well, it's like at a certain point, if you get so taken advantage of, you have to start to adjust the advantages you offer. It goes for humans because at a certain point you've stressed your population and your people where they don't feel safe anymore to have people where they buy a piece of land or they buy a home. Right. And they're raising a family and they can't even go to bed at night without thinking if there's thousands of people passing through their area and some of them are desperate and there's no rep, like they're not going to face any. You don't even know if you can face any criminal charge. You don't even know who they are, right.

Yeah.

It's just very scary. It's not fair that people should have to live in fear. I think we have way too much ability. We send all this foreign aid, it's time to take care of this country for a while. And it feels like it's just been sold out to the highest bidder, that the american dream was just auctioned off years ago. And it almost feels like we're pretending sometimes the rest of us that still believe in it. And I don't mean to sound dower and hopeless.

There is a true erosion of empathy that's happening because of all the situations around the world and right here at our border. When you are a multigenerational rancher who is putting food on the table, but now you have to be armed to take your kids to the bus stop because groups are coming in that are evading arrest in certain parts and are stealing your cars, are breaking into your homes where a generation ago they were, hey, can we get some food and I'll clean up your stall. I'm just trying to go look for some work. It's changed so much. So Americans shouldn't have to live in fear. At the same time, the migrants shouldn't be living in fear because they're being exploited just to try to get an opportunity. And that's where it kind of boils my blood when I hear all the humanitarian cris at the border, but they're not fixing it. They're just talking about it and kicking it for the next election cycle. It seems like they always do that. And that's where it gets frustrating. It's like we need to take care of the people. And by the way, the humanitarian issue is not just the migrants.

It's our agents. It's our border communities. It's the people that are suffering in these sanctuary cities. I don't want to leave that Topic just yet because you hear the mayors of New York and Chicago and Denver now they're crying about all this, but they were with their bullhorn a few years ago saying, we welcome everybody. And now all of a sudden they realize, hey, this is kind of a mess. I will say this, to defend Mayor Adams to some extent from New York, he sent his team down to the border. We met with him back in 2022 and showed him this is what's happening. This is what's going on. There was a lot of jaws dropping, like, oh, my gosh. Didn't realize this. So they kind of knew.

How can you not know what's going on?

I know.

How do you have, like, I don't even know what's going on and I know what's going on. Daylight savings time is starting up again for most states. God, it makes me nervous because I just don't even know what's going on. And I feel like my watch doesn't even do is out of a job. But I'll say this, if you're hiring, it doesn't necessarily help you find qualified candidates for your roles any sooner. There's only one way to do that, and that is ziprecruiter right now. You can try it for free@ziprecruiter.com. Theo, once you post your job on Ziprecruiter, they send you up to 100 plus job sites so you can reach more of the right people. See why four out of five employers who post on Ziprecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Just go to this exclusive web address to try Ziprecruiter for free. That's ziprecruiter.com, Theo. Once again, that's Ziprecruiter ziprecruiter.com. Theo Ziprecruiter the smartest way to hire I want to let you know about blue cube baths. That's right. They offer the best cold plunge in the market. If you value american made and pinnacle cold exposure, this is your cold plunge.

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I think if you don't prosecute or eliminate or get well, it's tough because these people are obviously in a state of desperation. They've been kind of released into a place where there's no clear path for them either, probably. So they don't know what to do. But the fact that they're putting the officers at risk, any of that, you got to go.

Did you see the video when they were released that day after the assault?

They're walking in front of, slipping everybody off. They don't care.

So think about it.

They all think they're so that right there, broad brushes.

All these migrants, not all of them are that way. Agreed. Again, fortunately, the second you kick a.

Fucking cop, though, dude, I think it's a bad look to the people of this country who are still trying to obey the laws.

Yes.

And uphold them that you don't make a point, you're gone.

Well, that's the lack of consequences, right? These people, now, I don't know all their story, but I know they were processed and released and went to New York. These people have been.

I don't give a fuck who these people are. Get them the fuck out. To be honest with you, this is.

What we're talking about, right? Yeah, this is him.

This is the Guy right there, dude. Let that motherfucker loose around, son. Strickland will beat the shit out of that. This is what a heartbeat.

This is what pisses off the border patrol agents. Because we've had to process and release these type of people. And this is what they end up doing, right?

I will beat the horseshot out of that motherfucker right there. To be honest with you. I just don't like it, man. That shit is sick right there. We've got enough sick way to behave, man. And I don't mean that against anybody. I have countless mexican friends and all kind of shit. I don't need to justify myself. But there's a total lack of respect. And when we don't show any respect for ourselves, after a while, there's a lack of respect that's going to keep coming, man. It's like you're attracting it.

The law enforcement profession has taken a hit over the last few years, right, wrong or otherwise, from different incidents that have taken place. But right there, when you see that and you look at and go, this is why some of the cops end up acting the way they do, or they just don't end up responding. Because it's like, why do I want to go get in this mess right here? I mean, it literally took cops being assaulted, these people being released, flipping off the cameras for it to gain enough attention to where people said, okay, this is enough. It shouldn't get to that.

Well, it's because the media, finally these people are in New York causing some trouble. That's what I'd say. If you're going to go into.

The.

Richest neighborhood, that's the guy, you got to go. You're down here battling in the freaking to then some things would be adjusted.

That's the old not my backyard mindset. Like, hey, it's fine until you bring it in my backyard, right?

I think now it's ending up in New York City. It's ending up in backyards where people are noticing it. But also, the media is extremely. It's all one group, and they don't want to show the truth. They want to live in this fictional world that doesn't create reality. I don't think a lot of times or reflect reality.

So the bussing of the migrants, right? So I hate the fact that we had to get to that.

Yeah, that's a big thing. So you see this a.

I don't blame these governors.

Right?

Again, I hate the fact that we had to do that. That's because of failed policies coming out of Washington. And these states have said enough's enough.

Right. So let's back up real quick. Okay. Let's get to, to, we spoke to a border patrol agent a few years ago, Roy Villarreal.

I know Roy. Yes.

Amazing guy. Just awesome guy. And he was saying that one of the issues was then that the legislative part was the issue because they were doing the paperwork on guys, but no one was really being prosecuted. People were being re released. And so then it was just you were constantly arresting some of the same people. What is the problem that you're saying now that, what are the problems that are holding up the border patrol from doing their job effectively?

So it's a combination of things. Right. Number one. And I think this is a great question and it's really important. Let's talk about the requirements that agents need to do their job.

Right. Okay.

So every administration, and I remember I mentioned earlier I started under Clinton. Every administration had leaned forward on border security. Clinton brought people on board, hired more people. We had the tragic of 911 and that addressed illegal immigration and border security. So President Bush started building infrastructure and access roads. Obama built a lot of wall, 15 foot wall. Trump comes in and says, hey, candidate Trump was build the wall. Right? President Trump's hey, we're going to build the wall. But candidate Trump, candidate, when he was candidate, oh, when he was running for president, he was build the wall. That was a campaign slogan. When he became president, he's like, we're going to do this. Building the wall was so much more than the actual wall. It was years, multiple administrations of requirements that agents have said, we need. That wall that President Trump built was not only was it a 30 foot steel wall where it made sense, it was cameras, it was lights, it was sensors, it was access roads. There are so many places on the border that Mother Nature will, through a monsoon storm season, will wash away and you can't even drive to the border.

So we needed all weather roads. That was the wall system.

There was so much more. There were places where agents could stop. There were places where they could sleep, get was.

It was so much to that.

Right, right.

The wall was the talking point. The system was what was important to us. We didn't need a wall from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean where we needed it was in the urban. So the border patrol has decided through our requirements and our experience that there are three operating environments. Urban, where the vanishing point is seconds to minutes. Like, literally, if they cross, they can disappear. El Paso is a great example. 100 yards, they're in a neighborhood, they're in a high school, they're in downtown. You get into rural areas, it's minutes to hours. They can disappear. And then you get into remote areas, it's literally days to weeks. They can disappear because it's 100 miles trek through the desert. So where it made sense, we built a wall based on agents required, not just all the chiefs requirement. It was, what do you need agents to do your job, sir? We need more wall here or double wall here. We need cameras. So we built that package, and that package was being deployed and was being effective. As I mentioned, the numbers, you combine that with consequences through policy, detaining people, prosecuting people, that took those numbers from 900,000 to 400,000.

But by a stroke of several pens, under this administration, the wall was stopped. The migrant protection protocol was turned off. This administration halted all deportations for no less than 100 days, which means nobody was being removed.

Is that true what you're saying? Yes.

Look it all up. It's all executive orders, Biden's election.

The foreign born population has grown spectacularly in millions. Yeah, I see. Yeah.

There are places on the border right now, theo, where you can drive and see 30 foot wall and then a quarter mile gap with stacks of steel right there that was just left there. Some of it's being sold off for salvage now.

Wow.

Our agents had to drive by spools of fiber optic cable with a trench, but we couldn't deploy it because when they signed that, when they ended that wall, it was the system, the whole package. There's right there. That's that, Herb.

Morale down there.

Do you feel like. So that was the big kicker. We actually had a.

Because these are our agents. It's like, why don't you care about the people who are doing a real job? I'm just so sick in this country how they don't care about people who are really fucking doing a real job, man.

So without border security, every town becomes a border town. Every state becomes a border state because it doesn't stop at the border. They're not all hanging out in Yuma. They're not all hanging out in Tucson. They're coming to Nashville, they're coming around, and people are seeing that. You talked about the morale. We went from an administration, the Trump administration, who championed border Troytons who had them at the state of a union, had them at his inauguration parade.

Now, Obama had done a lot. You said, too.

Obama had. So let's talk about Obama on that one, because if you remember going into his second term, he wanted comprehensive immigration reform. The DACA, which is deferred action against childhood arrivals, which I don't think anybody disagrees with. If you're an adult and you bring your one year old kid over and that kid has stayed here all his life or her life, and they're graduated high school, you're going to deport them because they're not. That's what DACA was for. Right, right. That makes sense. No one's going to boot that kid. All this kid knows is american life. Right?

Right.

As long as he's not a criminal and doing bad things and trying to contribute, let them stay.

But there was the issue. But there was another thing that he did where it was like he did.

Dapa, which was on the parents. Now you could bring your parents in. So what happened was he wanted comprehensive immigration reform. The Republicans said, well, we border security first. So he said, okay, I'll give you border security if you give me immigration reform. So he went to bat and started removing people. He had a lot of deportations under Obama. He built a lot of wall. And then in typical political fashion, they argued over the definition of border control, operational control of the border. And so the left and the right started the political football back and forth. What does control mean? What's an effective level of control? Obama said, okay, enough's enough. I'm just going to start doing, I'm going to start writing this as executive fiat and do executive orders and I'm going to start allowing people to stay here. I'm going to do that. And that's what he did. And that's when it kind of went. Look, the Republicans at that point missed an opportunity. Why?

Because.

They could have had more border security and championed some kind of immigration reform because we hadn't had any changes in immigration law for 20 years before that. So there was an opportunity. And to Obama's credit, at least on the front end. Now, I don't know all, I'm not going to get into all the behind the scenes stuff, but at least on the front end, he gave it the old college try, I'll give you security, but you got to give me something in return. And when we argued on the definitions.

Semantics of it, yes.

He said, fine, I'm going to do my own thing and we're going to start letting if you were, he started doing his own executive actions and that was a pull factor. So we started seeing this huge increase of people in 2012 13 and 14 under the second term of Obama.

Why? Because, you mean they're seeing these reactions in the news and stuff like that and they're knowing, okay, now's a time.

Now is the time to come. He's not going to remove you. He's going to reunite families. He's going to do all this stuff. So people just started. That's when it all started changing was in about 2012. Remember earlier I was telling you, single adults, mainly mexican nationals, a few Central Americans in 1213 and 14, we started seeing this huge increase. And I'll tell you a very funny story. It's not funny, but it's a true story. I'm sitting here in Washington, DC. It is, believe it is Mother's Day weekend. The Friday before Mother's Day, 2014, we had so many people in McAllen, Texas, Border patrol station that it was making the headlines. And we were on the phone, it was a lot of children and families and there was literally hundreds of them in a Sally port where you bring them into the station. And Border patrol stations are short term holding for single adults. They're not designed for detention, long term detention. So you had bodies stacked everywhere, sleeping in these mylar blankets and stuff. It was an ugly scene, but it was the reality. It was out of control. In south Texas, we were on the phone with people from Department of Homeland Security.

I'm in board chill headquarters in Washington, and we're telling this is, this is getting out of control. And they said, well, let's think about what we want to do. Let's have a good weekend and we'll reconvene on Monday. And one of the guys that work for me, he's just like, chief, let me say that. Tell him. He says if you wait till Monday, you'll have a full blown crisis on your hands. Now, that was Friday. Sunday, then Secretary J. Johnson rerouted his plane and went down to McAllen, Texas with his wife. It was Mother's Day, saw what was going on. On Monday, he made a secretarial proclamation. This is all hands on deck. And then by the end of the week, the president got involved and said, we're going to do everything we can. I mean, that's how quickly. And we were catching less than 3000 a day. That was 2013 and 14, 3000 a day was a full blown crisis.

Wow. And now we're at, we're at five times that.

Well, so for most of last year, we hovered over 10,000 arrests a day. Right now, we're sitting around 6700 arrests a day.

So now we're at twice that.

Twice that. It was a full blown crisis under Jay Johnson and Vice President Biden. And fast forward, we've doubled that, yet we won't acknowledge the crisis from the White House. Now, wait a second. What happened? And then in between, you had President Trump, who tried to fix it and was making huge progress, only to be kind.

Even though now some of the democratic policies are turning into the republican policies, they're, like, coming over because at a certain point, there's no argument against organization, there's no argument against investing in our infrastructure and wanting to have this machine run.

Well, it's like you asked about morale, and that's kind of where we were going. So let's think about that. One of the biggest morale killers for us was in September of 2021 in Del Rio, Texas. The horse patrol incident that people would talk about. And you could probably bring that up. Yeah, we had over 16,000 people showed up in Del Rio, Texas, in a matter of, like, three or four days. Now I'm over in Yuma dealing with a large number of people, but just not that many in three days. All the resources were shifted down there. And our horse patrol, which is our traditional, we started that. We were going to be 100 years old in May. Every agent had a horse back then, and I've ridden horses. Horses are great tools on the border. They were keeping the chaos organized. People were going back and forth to Mexico. They were setting up, vendors were setting up on Mexico, selling them tacos and food trucks. Yeah, food trucks. Right. As we were trying to organize all this chaos. So this one particular subject grabbed food from this family and was running across the river. The horse patrol, and, like, you can see in that picture, comes down there to try to round him up.

Right. The image that was taken, the actual still photo, was iconic. The horse in the river, the cowboy hat, the split reins, the migrant running, it was a beautiful image. It was captured by the secretary, the vice president, and the president as they re whipped those migrants. And the president of the United States said, I promise you those, they will pay for strapping those people. And he made that motion. Number one, the person that took the picture said, there's no whips. Nobody was being whipped. There's the image. Right? That's a split reign. That's the guy controlling the horse, trying to grab this guy who just stolen stuff from people, and he's running away from the agents, right?

That's an agent of cost and somebody who's stealing.

Yeah.

And maybe for desperate reasons, but stealing, well, you're stealing lunch from a family.

So if you've ever ridden horses and you split reins, that's how you control the horse. Right? So we knew all that. And this was something to hear the president say, they will pay.

Wow.

I mean, I was 1000 agents. Yeah, the agents, they're going to be in trouble for this. The cameraman said there's nobody got whipped. It was a good distraction from the chaos that was happening. Right. Let's shift it to the bad border patrol agents, as opposed to my bad policies that allowed 16,000 people to come in in three days. You want to talk about morale killer? When the commander in chief, the president of the United States in a country where you're innocent until proven guilty, says they will pay. When the facts were they didn't whip anybody, they were doing their job and.

Throw his own board of patrol under.

The bus, on the bus. And so, I mean, I was 1000 miles away going, oh my gosh, my agents were just like deflated. And not only the agents, but let's think about the agents parents and their loved ones who are going, they're down there trying to do the best they can. The president just called them out. Now, if they had done something wrong and they had beat somebody like that on camera, yeah, there's a consequence for those agents, but that wasn't the case.

That's somebody doing their job. It's like at some point you have to have people do their jobs.

So the morale just tanked from that. It was already tough with the flow and we expect under every administration some kind of change. And we figured it would be a few months. We didn't realize it would be that long. Then it just compounded and got worse and worse. And actually the following year, I think we had 14 border agents commit suicide and we had one of them in Yuma. And I'm not going to say that it was because of the border crisis, but I could say that not being happy at work, feeling demoralized and not having a purpose, no purpose is a contributing factor. I'm sure there's financial, emotional, physical issues that they were dealing with. But when you can come to work where it used to be, hey, I can go out there and make a difference. And now I'm being relegated to transportation and babysitting. There's just no happy place for them, right?

You take away somebody's purpose. We had a great thinker in here. John Vervekian, he talks all about purpose. Right here it says between 2007 and November 2022, CBP. Is that California border protection?

No, that's Customs and Border protection. That's our parent agency. So DHS, Customs and Border protection. US Border patrol.

Okay. Customs and Border Protection protection has lost 149 people to suicide, among the highest rates compared to other law enforcement agencies. I just don't understand why there's no support. I don't understand why you have to beg for support. I don't understand why you give people a job and give them all this training, but then don't even give them the fair environment to do their job in and then look down upon them when they're doing their job just for what? It's just unfortunate.

And you want your law enforcement just like you want your doctors and your teachers to have their head on straight and head in the game and not distract, at least minimize all the distractions while they're doing that. Because number one, if it's a doctor, it could save your life in surgery. If it's law enforcement, it could protect you and save your life in an event of a tragedy. And if it's a teacher, you want them to educate you so you can make your own decisions as you learn and grow. We have to support all our military and law enforcement and first responders in that mental health resiliency world because it's so important, because we need them. We need to recruit the good people, too. So we need to offer that, like, hey, not only are we going to expect you to do your job, and Theo, I'll tell you, too, I'm from old school, you're going to roll your sleeves up and get the job done. But it's okay now to talk about it. Like, okay, what I'm dealing with, how I feel with that. I'm not saying we need to be soft on all this stuff because we still have a very difficult job and you've got to get dirty, but it's okay to talk about what's bothering you afterward or, hey, I wasn't 100% day because of this.

All right.

How can I help you? That is okay. Yeah, we all grew up in get some dirt on it and go back in there. Right? And that's okay. But we can talk about it now. And I think that's the difference in where we evolve professionally and we grow as a leader. That's where I saw I couldn't make policy changes under President Biden, but I could make operational changes. Say I can devote some funds to mental health and resiliency with my workforce and bring people in to champion our agents and tell them the same thing. As chief, I would say something like, okay, yeah, chief. That's just box checking. You're the boss. Right? But when I bring in an NFL player to come in there and say the same thing, like, you guys are heroes. Thank you for doing what you're doing, it changes. They come to, they're happy. Like, hey, somebody appreciates us. And so just little things like that. It's cliche, but thank a cop. That's what you want to do because you want them on your side. And by the way, nobody hates a bad cop more than a good cop. And so we're not going to tolerate bad stuff amongst our ranks.

But there are so many good people out there, whether it's a border patrol agent or domestic law enforcement or an FBI agent, there's so many good ones doing good work. We've got to champion them, because what are the alternatives if we don't? Complete chaos.

Yeah. And I want to say that, too, to people out there who are in a position where you're a teacher, where you're an officer, you're a sergeant, you're a community worker, that isn't. You're not rewarded as well financially as you should be by your environment, by your city or state or country. I just want to say, just hold on. Just thank you. And just know that citizens, they feel that with you. I don't know. Maybe I'm just kind of getting preachier.

Weird.

I don't know. It just makes me sad, man, because it doesn't add up. And I think people are tired of even nice people are getting like, fuck, yeah.

It's that erosion empathy, right. That we talked about. So, look, we understand that we can't always pay people in their bank accounts more money, but we can pay them in that emotional bank account by thanking them.

Oh, 100%.

That's important.

We had a garbage man on, dude. Legend, bro.

Yeah.

And he said the best thing he can do, go out there once in a while. Thank you, garbage man. He said they never even see anybody. Nobody's even awake. They're out there doing the long haul. Buy him a sixer, Wayne Owen. Yeah. There he is right there, man.

You're right.

So, Chris, let me ask to, just before we move forward, I know. I want to think about some of the political stuff because you hear a lot of things, right? Like being in an election year right now. It's like you start to see the political kickball, like you were saying. Being kicked around of the border. Right. It's the border. The know, you start to see a lot of that happening. And one of the things that you hear recently is that democratic party wants to allow people into the country to be able to get them to be able to vote even by whatever means to be able to get them to become democratic voters. But also I was thinking, is there a value in the republican side in also letting it be an issue? Because then they can say, hey, this is an issue. So you have to vote this way. So those are two things that I hear kind of, and that I think about. What is that like? Is that something that border agents feel at all?

Yeah. Unfortunately, we did not want to be in the limelight and not be in the political sphere, but we are because we're on the news all the time. So let's dissect this a little bit. For the democratic side. It is all about victim the poor migrants. We need to help them out. They're being exploited. We need to bring them over and give them a better life. Right. That's a feel good story right now. There's some truth to that. There are victims and there are people that want to, but that becomes a feel good story. The Republicans will say, hey, look, it's a security issue. They'll talk about security. We need to save our country and secure our borders to prevent terrorism and criminal aliens and drugs and all that stuff because that's a real problem, too. So they're both real. They just present them as false choices. Like, you can't have one without the other. And if you want one, then you're against the other person. And that's the divisiveness that this country has become is you can be pro security but still have lawful immigration. The other piece too is if you utter this, people will say it's kind of a conspiracy, but you have to start kind of thinking about where are they going with, why would you allow upwards of 7 million people to come in here?

And one theory and that people will float around is, well, not necessarily to have them vote because your only citizens are supposed to vote. But you know what? Census determines representation and ultimately electoral college numbers and things like that. So if you can flood Texas and you take it from red to purple, you get more representatives that may vote. Swing to a district that could be a more Democrat.

I see. So if you feel like your party could influence to get more electoral votes or representatives. Or representatives. So if you feel like your party could get more representatives because there's a larger population in that area and you feel like you got the ability to get more players in the game, then you're going to be pro that.

Without the truth, without somebody saying, well, here's why we're letting 7 million people in. You kind of start floating these ideas. And I'm not saying that that's the case, but if you look at it, if you have a state that is split 50 50 when it comes down to Republicans and democratic elected representatives, but you can put in five more million people into that state and the next time they redistrict or do a census and okay, well, you get to increase the number of representatives and it's leaning one direction or the other, you're going to lock it. And look how close the house is right now. One extra or two extra democratic officials now on the House swings everything to the party of power again, without somebody telling you, hey, why are you letting all these people in? Why are you bogging the system down? Someone floats that idea, he's like, well, now, if that's the truth, it's evil genius. Great, at least we know now we can work the devil you know versus the devil you don't know. Right, right. Because for the life of me, I can't make heads or tails of why this would happen.

Right. So as an agent, you're like, these people should be given a hearing and removed because they're not going to meet the merit. Instead, we let them go and we house them.

But then it's about control. Because then it's about a sickening few people with such control. Like, where is the value in that as a human being? It's like the people that are controlling shit have no. Do they have any fucking feeling? I'm just like, what is even going on?

I think because why would you let.

All of these people suffer? Not only the people who are being, who don't have a clear path to asylum or to residency or to comfort or to peace, they're not in peace either. If they're having to sleep, hiding behind something, to not get arrested all the time, and also the families and people who are just citizens of the country.

First of all, my wife tells me this a lot. Clear is kind. We need to send a clear message. If somebody's sitting here for seven years before they get their first hearing, that's not clear. They don't know what the results are going to be. They don't know if they're going to get to stay. They don't know if they were going to get a work permit. That is not very kind, right?

No, it's not.

And then I also, to your point about this sick, demented, whoever's pulling the strings here, they want servants over citizens. Because you know what? Citizens will stand up eventually. We will speak our mind. But if I can bring you in and give you handouts and control you, you are going to be my servant, and you will do what I tell you to do. Again, I don't want to be a tinfoil hat wearing person, but without the facts, without somebody telling me what the plan is, you start inserting these things, and some of it kind of starts making sense because you can lean things, you can control things. If you have a bunch of servants.

Well, it's where conspiracy theories really, that's how it starts. I was talking about this with a friend yesterday. It was like, well, when the news got bad and got not news, and it was just like the news was just trying to say what it wanted to say and not just give the facts. That's when conspiracy theories start, because people have to make sense of things.

Right.

So your brain's only function is to organize and to make sense of things. That's all it's supposed to do. And so a lot of conspiracy theories, it's like.

It'S just not adding up.

Yeah. When things don't add up, the equation needs to make sense. So that's only reason why a conspiracy theory even gets created, is to make things make sense. And when things aren't making sense anymore, then the conspiracy theories could be what does make sense. And oftentimes these days, it is. Yeah.

And the naysayers just throw that back at you. Well, they don't know what they're talking about. They're a conspiracy. Well, no. One in one is two. It's not three, and it's not adding up to two. So what's the deal here? It is kind of crazy because we've seen such an evolution of what's happened at the border. Right. I've talked about that. There's solutions out there. We just got to be able to, I like to say, get the extreme left and extreme right, take extreme recess and get some common sense in the middle right to start coming up with some solutions.

Well, and they're not doing it. I mean, they just had the Majorcas. Guy who was the, he was the.

Secretary just got impeached.

Yeah, he just got impeached. But that was impeached by the House of Representatives. Right.

Right.

Which is only. The Senate's not going to pass that, so he's not really going to be impeached. No.

It's just like President Trump, just like President Clinton. They were impeached in the process, but they weren't convicted, so they're not.

You've given up. The american public has almost given up on all of this charades of bullshit because you can't even follow it. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has been impeached by the House of Representatives. A cabinet secretary has not been impeached by the US Congress since 1876. The office of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who is the worst, I think, said Majorca's impeachment trial will begin later this month. So this is just going to be a whole big hoopra.

It's a process, man.

And it probably will not happen unless they need to have a patsy to make it look like they're going to do something different.

Yeah. So, I mean, you can have the trial and it's still going to require two thirds of the Senate, too. So that would be everybody on the republican side and half of the Democrats saying he's convicted.

Right.

And that's not likely to happen if this even happens. And it's easy to say it's likely to begin in a month, but you've got all these other world events happening again. That's the politics of it. And this is a classic example of an election cycle. Last go around, they ran on going to impeach the guy. It took two years for them to finally do it. And did it change anything? No, nothing.

And they ran on the Russia shit. I'm okay with letting people make their own choice. Right? You would think people can get a sense and trust their instincts and find a leader that has enough of their commonalities, things that they believe in. Right? I don't think I ever fall into identity politics where I'm going to vote for somebody just because they're one party or this party. I've voted for people from both parties.

Back to choices. Think about it. Everybody wants choices until it comes to politics. Then they forced their choice on you. We want to be pro choice in all things in life, right? We want to have options. Doesn't matter what those options are, but we should have options, right? Then it comes to politics. Oh, no, you can't have a choice. Back to the politicalization of the border. I tell you, I had so many congressional delegations under President Trump. I was the deputy chief in El Paso.

What is a congressional delegation?

That is where a group of congressional members, representatives will come down and they want to hear and learn. It's a field trip for them, right? Sometimes they're caucuses, like hispanic caucus or a border security caucus or african american caucus. There'll be a group of like minded, mainly, usually one party. They go down there and they want to hear what's happening. Oftentimes it's oversight committees will go down there under President Trump in El Paso. I kid you not. I couldn't turn around without tripping over a congressional delegation wanting to point the finger at big bad Trump and what he was doing and all the people. That was when the AOC was said they were drinking out of the toilet. All that kind of stuff was when I was there in El Paso. Completely ridiculous. But you know what? Under this administration, when I was the chief in Yuma, I had two Democrats come down to the border. One was Democrat, he came down. But I had Mark Kelly, the senator from Arizona who worked with me to try to fill some border gaps. So it took us 18 months, but we finally got something done. And I had Gary Johnson out of the Homeland Security Committee, Senator Johnson from Michigan.

Only two Democrat sitting representatives that came down to the border, a lot of Republicans, but they wanted to ignore the problem. I had some phone calls from Senator Sinema, but never came down there to meet with me. Only two. But when it was President Trump, I had hundreds of.

So why aren't more coming even just because it's one president or the other? That shouldn't determine why one of them.

Because one side doesn't want to talk about the problem, the other side wants to blame the problem. So under Trump coming down to blame, just like the Republicans come down there now to point the finger at the Biden administration.

Right. That's what I was saying. It's like the Republicans also, part of them is happy that it's open because they can say, look, this is the problem. So it gives them also, there's a.

Handful in every party that really want to try to solve this, but unfortunately, they're the minority piece. Right. There's people that just don't want to deal with it.

Right.

Part of it, too, when it comes political, is it goes back to that victim boogeyman thing. I can run on the emotions every two years as a congressional representative, Senate's every six years. But as a congressman or woman, I can say, if they would have just voted for my bill, we would have solved this. But if you elect me next time, we'll get it done. And think about this has been going, we've been talking about this since 911, 23 years we've been putting border security, immigration controls in the forefront, and we still can't. And it's the worst it's ever been.

It's the worst it's ever been right now.

Yes, it's the worst it's ever been. And we've been talking about it. Now, let's be clear. 911 was the worst, right? That was a separate event, but that triggered us talking about securing our border for 21 years or 23 years now.

Do they even have TSA at the border?

Well, they're at the airports, but not.

When you're walking across.

No, that's us. That's border patrol.

If people come in illegally, do they take their shoes off or anything like that? Or. No.

Well, look, if border patrol is encountering you've come in illegally, we're arresting you. We check everything.

I see.

So there's either people that are legal.

That are coming in and they are probably doing their paperwork and all that.

Yeah. So if you come into the airport, then you're going to be dealing. If your TSA deals with domestic stuff, international, that's the custom side of things. When you come in through an airport or through a port, eventually they're going to inspect you and everybody's subject to an inspection. When you come in illegally, you're arrested, and then you go through, just like if you were arrested in downtown, they're going to take you in, they're going to pat you down, they're going to go through your stuff, they're going to inventory your property and all that kind of stuff. We do the same thing at the border, which is a challenge when you're arresting 2.2 million people every year and there's no place to put you.

What percentage of people get arrested and sent back?

That's very few right now.

Really.

The ones that get returned back immediately are going to be mexican nationals because they're a continuous country.

Right.

They just send them right back. There are some 95% of the people I caught in Yuma were caught and released into America. Yeah. Let's talk about a couple of. Yeah. Here's a very important piece. Right. You've heard the term vetting. They're not properly vetted. Know they're being released without vetting. Let's let you in the audience know. So anytime somebody is arrested by border patrol, we are taking their biometric data, we are fingerprinting them, we are photographing them. As long as they are 14 years and older, there's laws from tender age minors.

Okay.

The problem with that is the record checks are only based on information that we have. So if you are a serial killer in New guinea and you've never been caught, and there's no system of record, we're not going to know who you are. We're going to take your fingerprints and photograph and say, there's no immigration or no criminal history in the United States, we have no place to hold him. So he's going to be processed and released. But meanwhile, he can go about his business.

You can't check with another country to.

See if they don't have the data in our system. That's the problem. The process the agents go through. Perfect. No one gets released, or everybody that gets arrested gets the data taken. But if there's nothing in the system because we don't have a relationship with our country, that goes back to the Obama and Trump travel bans, the reason why there was a travel ban on those countries, they did not have a vetted system of record for us to make compare notes to see if these people are good or bad. So if you are from a country, unless you're, like, in some kind of Interpol record that matches with us, if you've never committed a crime in the United States, we're not going to know who you are. So you could be an MS 13 gang member that has no visible tattoos.

That we can see in another country.

In another country, and never been arrested in the United States, and not in some kind of Interpol database. We could theoretically release you. That's why detention is so critical, so we can hold on to them to make sure, on no uncertain terms, that who this person is, what's their intentions, what's their background, who are their sponsors, where are they going to go? That's why holding people and doing all the extra checks is so important. And by the way, the databases and systems are only as good as the databases and garbage in, garbage out. Sometimes there's delays, sometimes there's a system upgrade. And when I ran your check today, it came back clear. I released you. Two days later, it came back as a hit. Well, we released that guy. So that's why we have to detain folks. The process is to detain them until they see the judge, but that never going to happen.

Pipes are clogged. Yeah, pipes are way too many people in line. When you release someone, right? You release them back into America. What do they have to do then?

Yeah, it's great. You're going to love this. So we process them, and they have to check in within 30 days of where they said they're going. So if I catch somebody. Somebody caught somebody in Yuma today. They said they're going to Nashville. We would give them the information for ice here in Nashville. Okay. So when they arrive in Nashville, they're supposed to call and check in and say, hey, I'm John Doe. I'm supposed to report to you. And there's that. There's also some ankle bracelet monitoring they'll put on so we can track and follow. But it's basically on the honor system. We don't have the ability to vet that location. Where you're going. There are places where you'll find 200 people using the same address. But here's another kicker for everybody, because we're all paying the price at the pumps, the gas, the grocery table, everywhere else. I was spending close to just over $400,000 a day in my soft sided migrant processing facility with medical, food, laundry, and migrant care services. Migrant care was really the minors. So if there were children, it wasn't agents having to babysit anymore. We actually hired people to do that.

That was 400 plus thousand dollars a day. There was six other southwest border sectors, or six total south that was kind of using the same model. So two and a half million dollars. I don't know my math. Not too quick. But when we process, they'd be in our care for maybe two to three days, and then we'd release them. We don't release them to the street necessarily. We release them to a non government organization who will take them in and then they will help facilitate if they want to go to Nashville. Do you have a plane ticket? Do you have the means to get there? If you don't, we'll help you get there. If you do, then we'll get you on a bus to sky harbor and you can fly. Those organizations are getting reimbursed dollar for dollar from FEMA through DHS grants. So now we're paying for the shelter and processing facility.

You guys are paying for it up.

Front, and then you're paying for the non government organization.

Well, the non government organization is a.

Nonprofit, yes, but it's getting reimbursed for the monies they spend by the government. So the government's paid twice now. Oh, and by the way, the sanctuary cities said, hey, we need $5 billion to handle these migrants that are being dropped off. So in theory, laundering. Yeah, in theory, we could be paying for the majority of those migrants up to three times.

So it's a money laundering. It's basically little Ukraine in America.

So when you're looking at the cost now, remember, a couple of years ago, former speaker Pelosi said that we didn't have the money to build a wall, but the states have now said we want $5 billion. We wanted 5 billion to finish the Trump wall.

We just sent 100 billion to another country.

Again, charity should start home, right?

It's just fucking unbelievable. And here's the saddest part is, Chris, is that it feels like as a voter, it doesn't even matter anymore. That's the part that starts to feel like this doesn't like what has to happen, where these sick people, here's an article right here. The Biden administration and the US Congress have directed more than $75 billion in assistance to Ukraine, which includes humanitarian, financial, military support. And I wonder where all that money is going. This war doesn't even seem like no.

One'S talking about it, right?

It's a facade. All we're talking about is the money being spent over there. It's a Zelensky I believe it is a money laundering.

So you know exactly what's so crazy about that with the number you threw out and what I was talking about as far as how much we're spending.

And a spirit laundering of the ukrainian and russian people, I think they're being laundered mentally.

Not that I'm in favor of paying off people's student debt, but if we just focused a little bit of energy here in the United States with the money that we were spending everywhere else, and I get it, we have to invest around the world. I'm not saying not do that, but not to the same. We could help people. My other problem I have is the homelessness and the mental health issues we have facing this country. What would $75 billion do right now to help the homelessness and the homeless veteran problem and the mental health issues addicted? It would be a life and game changer. Meanwhile, we're just printing money to go someplace else. But the ones that should matter the most, the american people, the people within our borders are suffering for that. And here's why it is frustrating.

But here's also why it's frustrating, because it's not like I want to say that, hey, we're fortunate enough, we shouldn't help other people. I don't believe that. I believe that if someone is, in a sense, place of power or possibility, they should do what they can to share it. Right. But I believe that you are killing the very people, you're killing the spirit of the people who do that work, by making them feel unsupported, by making them feel like their country doesn't have any tradition, that it doesn't have any purpose, that the borders that people died to protect don't even matter. You're killing the will and the spirit of the people that are going to do that outreach and work. And so you're going to get to a place, yes. Where, like you're saying you just have servants that if they even want to do that, as opposed to spirited american people that want to help others.

I'm with you. I don't want to keep saying it, but it goes back to that erosion of empathy, and not only empathy, but just the spirit, like you said, to roll up the sleeves and get the job done and go to work and fight for what's right, you just kind of numb them. And I think that's what the plan is.

Right.

If we can create that servant mentality, we're like, all right, fine. If I can't beat them, join them. And that's not what we are founded on, right?

No, it's not. But it's a bill of goods that people are starting to think that they were sold. That's not real. And that's why I think you start to have to start voting for people that have some real morals and ethics and some ethos. I think you got to start voting for those people who believe that. Yeah. Because if you don't take care of this, there's nothing for this. Can't do anything right. If you don't water a plant, nobody can see it or smell it or enjoy it, and it can't be a part of growth.

You're exactly right. I think that that's so empowerful or so powerful to have just a moral compass and the azimuth set for the right. It doesn't mean we're going to agree, but it's rooted in good faith. Right? And that's the problem. And we become so addicted to just immediate response or some kind of illicit of a response that we're not putting in the work anymore. It takes a little bit of effort to do that. If it was easy, we wouldn't be in this problem. It takes hard work. And just like are the men and women in the border patrol. I go back to that was my wheelhouse in my life for 27 and a half years out there walking in the desert in 120 degree heat, climbing up in the mountains when it's sub zero temperatures, sludging through the snow on the northern border, going through rattlesnake infested desert out there to track somebody one more mile because number one, you may rescue somebody or you may have gotten a drug runner or you may have gotten a potential terrorist, but if you just didn't put in the work, they're going to get away and they could cause harm.

And that's what I love about what was my profession for a better part of my life was it wasn't easy, it was rewarding, and it was hard work. But at the end of the day, the scars, the limps and all that stuff was worth it because of the camaraderie and the spree decor that we had because we were doing something good. You were. And to have that minimized and victimized and not supported is tough. We are a resilient agency. The men and women of border ride to the sound of gunfire. We just needed that shot in the arm every once in a while that says, hey, keep up the good work, we got your back. And we get that from a lot of people. We just need that from a broader brunch. Because for all the things that are wrong for this country, in order for us to get it right, we have to protect our country, both domestically through border security and then militarily, be safe around the world, because we know that there's fires everywhere, and that starts at the top, not only in your house and every day when you go to work, but the top of the country, which is the White House, has got to be able to establish that.

And we're not seeing that. I also believe, and I've been around the country the last few months and continue talking about the border around the country, and I'm noticing the pendulum swinging back to like, hey, enough's enough. When people are dying because of fentanyl overdoses, because it's coming through the border, because we won't shut it down from China and from mexican cartels, and it's coming in and it's killing people. When you have 300 opioid related deaths a day, and most of it's fentanyl related because it's coming through, because our overworked border security apparatus is not being able to do the job to the extent it can. People are getting fed up. It's no longer a border issue. It is an american issue. And I think that people are seeing it and they're seeing it's being shrugged off at the highest levels. And I think it sucks that it gets to this point. But if this is what's going to have to happen, this is what's going to have to happen. People have to got to wake up and make sure that we stop electing morons and get people in that have a good head on their shoulder that are pointing in the right direction.

We can disagree, that's okay. But I guarantee you if people will just pause for a moment and sit there and listen, they'll find more common ground than they have differences. And I think that's the spirit of America. That's the spirit of what makes this country tick and why people still try to come over here every.

I'm just amazed that people would sit there in places where they're not even brave enough to go to their own vehicle because they're scared, but yet they would vote for policies and people that aren't going to make sure that they have police and street lamps. I'm just sick. I think our souls are starting to feel sick, and I don't want to get just stuck in that. And I know you don't want to either. So what do solutions at the border look like? What does that look like?

Yeah, no, great question. I think what we have to look at, and it's great timing because we've talked about kind of the evolution of what's happened over the past nearly 27, 28 years of my life. The adversary has changed. Right. So traditionally, people would come across. You had your migrant workers we talked about earlier, but then you had the criminal side of the smuggling operation, whether it was narcotic smuggling or people smuggling. This is people. The smuggler crossing the border, guiding the people to a vehicle, jumping in a vehicle, and driving to the next city and then going to wherever they were going.

Right. What do you mean? Driving who to?

Yeah. So literally you would have, like, mean, this is all organized. So I'll use Arizona as an example. So a smuggler would come down from Phoenix or Tucson.

Okay. There'd be somebody on the american side.

On american side leaving a vehicle.

Oh, I see.

Coordinating with the south side. So it's a two day walk to this vehicle. The smuggler is smuggling through the desert, avoiding border patrol, guiding people to this vehicle. Sometimes they all get in together and drive off. Sometimes it's so well coordinated that they know they're going to show up in this window this 1 hour, and the smuggler drives in, picks them up, and then they drive back to the next city. That's how it used to be. And there's still factions across the border where that's happening, where you're having these pursuits. I'm telling you, it was so fun back in the day when it was really cat and mouse games. Like, we would chase these people for hours or shifts.

Yeah.

All those things on tv. People being smuggled. Theo, some of the funnest things.

You all use lassos. You don't use a lasso?

No, we don't do any of that stuff. No handcuffs. But what I would tell you what would be fun, and again, give it context. You got to realize you're chasing somebody. That's the thrill, right?

It's part of it.

Right?

The adrenaline robbers. Yeah.

You would get pursuits, and they would be going high speeds or sometimes low speeds, and then they would bail out, and people would. It was like hamster Shaw shanking out of the back of a pickup truck, my friend. Bailing out everywhere. Right. And so you would throw that vehicle in the park, and you would give foot chase. You had to go after the driver.

It's like when the pinata bus. You got to get the big snicker. Yeah.

So our goal was to go get the driver, because that's who we could prosecute. And then you go round up everybody else. But that was fun. And you would even almost kind of like. You and the smuggler would almost kind of like, all right, you got me. And that was before we had all the databases and systems to double check that this person was been caught. Now, we would know if we caught you ten or 100 times, but that was some of the most thrilling part of my job. It was rewarding because you were saving lives if you end up rescuing people. But then there'd be fun. Like, you'd pick up the two x four or the plywood on the back of a pickup truck, and it's like, hey, man, I can see you. And they wouldn't look at you, but you would get vans with.

You're in.

Yeah, I'd get 30 people in a van. You get ten people in a Ford Fiesta, and you're like, how does this happen? What was really funny is you see these older model vehicles. I'm like, my vehicle, I wouldn't trust driving it to Michigan in the middle of the night. These people didn't care. They were going.

But we had number one vehicle that got left down there. By the way, was there one vehicle.

That was always like, if you saw a suburban, any kind of suv, that was always just a giveaway. You're driving down a two lane border highway, and then there's, next to a culvert, there's some kind of suv. They love pickups because they could just jump in real quick. So pickups were very extended. Cabs were great because they could put people in the front end. And if you drove by, they drove by you, you wouldn't see anything in the bed of truck, and you couldn't see what was in the back. But we just knew because you'd see the yellow lights because they were usually older vehicles and they're riding like this. But we would get into all that. It was so much fun. Or you would track people for days, literally. Like, if you're a day shift guy, you're in at 06:00 in the morning, you're on a trail by seven. You work until three or four in the afternoon, turn it over to the next shift, you come back the next day and like, hey, we pushed it 20 miles. So you'd go out there and work it, and then you'd catch them. And it was people looking for work, people that were criminals, gang members, or.

Back then, it was the cash crop was marijuana. That was when everybody was backpacking marijuana. Now you don't even catch marijuana anymore. It's legalized in so many places, but it's changed now. It's changed because, again, for years, we fought a conventional war, if you will, against a conventional smuggling. Now, because of policies and the way things are so interconnected, people are making all the arrangements now on the cell phones, using online social media platforms. The smugglers oftentimes don't even cross the border anymore. All the arrangements are made prior to people getting to the border. As I mentioned earlier, the large groups are being pushed through in one area. The other ones are using their apps. And I'm not going to name the programs, but they will communicate with the smuggler via cell phone and via apps doing dms. And, hey, I'm lost. And it will send me a picture of what you see. And then they will text back, okay, you need to go through this way. And they'd roadmap it for them.

Oh, so the coyotes or whatever who are bringing them across usually aren't even going anymore.

They're either in Mexico or in Phoenix. Wow. And then everything's done through cash, apps, and everything else. So we have this beautiful thing called interconnectedness has made the unconventional, it made the adversary unconventional. So how do we attack? It's one of the things that I'm doing right now. And this is necessarily a big pitch, but the reality is there is so much online smuggling and trafficking done on our numerous social media platforms that children are being recruited to be smugglers. Children and people are being recruited to buy illegitimate narcotics, underground stuff. Hey, you want to pancake?

I've done it.

You can do this on the apps, and this is where it becomes so deadly because it may be pressed in a clandestine lab in Mexico as a Vicodin, but they don't have the same sanitary. So now you've got residual fentanyl. DEA put out a stat recently. Seven out of ten off market things have enough fentanyl in it now to kill them. That's ridiculous. So one of the things, a solution that we have created I'm part of, is using artificial intelligence and machine learning to target the online predators, whether it's.

Human traps doing that.

Yeah. So this is my company that I'm part of, massive blue. So we basically use deep tech and to identify the habits in the process of. Look, I worked on a physical wall. Now we've created a cyber wall to protect and target those that are going after people. Right. Look, there were over, I think, in the last seven days, close to 2000 unique individuals posting sex services in Nashville alone. Yeah. Who do you think those people are? Theo? You and I are close enough in age to remember milk Carton, missing kids in the milk carton. You don't see that anymore, right? It's this, it's these people. Not only are they internationally being victimized and trafficked domestically in Nashville alone, that many unique individuals, right? And about 25% of that stuff is narcotics crossovers. So not only are they selling people and services, there's also drug relief. So we have got to take this unconventional approach and use the technology that they're using. And we play by the rules, obviously.

Wow.

But we have got to create that cyberwall to protect our country, protect our community, our companies, because there's all sorts of corporate espionage. And our children, most importantly, because if you think that kids are upstairs going to bed on a school night at 09:00 and not on their social, do you think the person they're engaging with is really their friend or somebody that they know? This is where these predators and, boy, the sextortion, all the stuff that's going on. Look, I did this for so long that this was where I knew, wow, how can I continue to make a difference and not wear the badge and gun anymore is to go after the bad guy in an unconventional manner. And I think it's going to save lives. It's going to protect lives. There's so much we can do with it. Let's use the technology to our advantage. It's not going away.

Right?

Let's use it to help. And if I can minimize human trafficking online, if save lives, then I'm living the best.

How does this company do that? How does your company do that?

Well, I'm not going to get into too much.

You're just saying. But that's where you're headed.

That's where we're headed right now.

Okay. And that's where you're headed. Or you also think that that's where we're headed as a border patrol agency?

Well, so I would love to be able to get this in the hands of the border patrol because let's think about what's happening right now online. It really takes a person staring at a computer, data mining, just going through websites and going through all. Why not use technology that what I can do in an hour would take somebody a week or more. This is how we can get this into. We're working with a couple of states and a couple agencies with this program to help them use this tool. It's a great lead generator. It's going to do that and we're going to continue to evolve. We love online, we love our social media. And it's a good thing.

It is a good thing.

But let's put the safeguards and let's use it to, well, it goes back.

Again, though, to why doesn't our country have, and maybe this is me just expecting out of government. I've often said if you expect anything out of government, you're out of your mind. But you would think the one thing that you would want out of your government that you would get is safety, right? That is the number one thing that people always pay for is safety. And the fact that they just had Zuckerberg in court the other day apologizing with no emotion. I don't know if the guy's ever had a feeling. And he's in court because of families that have lost children or had children, sex trafficked or bought and drug. There's no wall. I don't know why an adult Zuckerberg apologizes to families of online child sex abuse in an unscripted scene during tense testimony Wednesday, Meta Platforms Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg stood before a PaC senate hearing. I am sorry for everything that you have all gone through, he said Wednesday while facing a crowd of safety advocates and parents holding photos of their children. It's terrible. No one should have to go through the things that you families have suffered. Yeah, I mean, it's unbelievable.

He's sitting there surrounded by all of his lawyers and it seemed like he didn't have an emotion. But that blows my mind why there isn't, how are you even allowed to use a fucking I can't even buy a deodorant that doesn't have a little thing on it, that has a plastic thing on it now so that some kid just doesn't put it on or put his mouth on it.

Right?

But yet you can have an app where some predator can reach out to my fucking child and not go to fucking jail for it. I feel like these guys should be jailed. It's the same with that family, the Sackler family that did the opiates with OxyContin. It's like they killed hundreds of thousands of people in this country. They killed hundreds of thousands of human fucking beings.

It's unbelievable.

And they didn't go to jail.

Yeah, it's unbelievable. That which is, again, your passion is exactly my passion when it comes to this. We need to be able to come up with tools to combat this, because, look, social media, the platforms, the different apps, it's not going away. We're not going backwards. So let's attack it from the front end. Let's beat them at the punch. And that's what my company has been doing. I'm super excited because I think that is a way that we can feel safe as a parent myself, I want my daughter to be able to enjoy the technology that's there. It's part of her generation, but I want her to be safe 100%, and I want to be able to we're invest in this to make sure people can be healthy and live life. For every story I can tell you, there's a dozen more of parents that have lost their children on something as simple as, I'm ordering this online. It got delivered to the house, and I thought it was a Vicodin. And they woke up. Well, they never woke up. I met a lady a year or so ago, and it's exactly that. Her daughter was dealing with some recovering pain from.

She was a gymnast, and her friends were chatting online. She's like, well, you can order this online. And she did. Mom went to bed. This got delivered to the house, and she woke up, went upstairs to find her daughter, and she was dead. And she found the exchange on her phone. And no parent should. It's tough enough just to imagine losing a child, but when you lose them because of something like that, that could be prevented, or at least there could be safeguards.

There's got to be.

There's no way they can tell what.

Kind of shit you like to look at and advertise you bullshit. But they can't have a little bit more efficiency with figuring out who is able to reach out to children or who children are able to reach out to. Now, I guess somebody could create, and look, obviously I'm not arguing the other side of it, that maybe somebody could create a platform, but if somebody hasn't been online long enough with a platform, then maybe they shouldn't be able to reach out to children or there should just be much stricter things in place, it seems like. Well, I don't know. I don't know enough about it.

It's a stark reminder that there's evil out there.

But it's fucking winning. That's what it feels like sometimes.

Yeah. And that's why we're invested in this. I can tell you that there are platforms out there that will recruit teenagers, and this is very prevalent, Arizona, in the Phoenix area, to get your mom and dad's suv, drive down, if you're interested, to make $1,000 a person, you want to make $5,000, get an suv. Dm me here. And then that message disappears.

Right?

But now they're messaging and they give them a pin drop and go pick up these five people. Well, now, these kids and most of them are minors, 1617 years old, so they haven't been driving very long. Now they're in mom and dad's suv. They end up picking up ten people in some remote area near Douglas, Arizona, and they're told, drive to Phoenix. And when you get to Phoenix, DME, I'll give you a pin drop. And don't stop for border patrol or cops. They're doing 100 miles an hour with ten people in their car, top heavy. They don't know how to drive because they're young. Anyway, they're rolling over, people are dying. They're t boning innocent civilians caught in an intersection killing people. This is happening every day and they're using social media to coordinate it. So the smugglers are not at risk.

Because they're doing the job anyway.

Burn the account, burn the phone. There's no overhead for them.

Wow.

They just used mom's suv. Oh, and by the way, if you were successful and you got to the drop off location, they're going to say, yeah, I got your license plate, I know who you are. I'm not going to pay you this time. You're not going to squeal because I know who you are. I know what school you go to. I know what your mom drives. The hooks in, man. The hooks in. Yeah, there's stuff right there that happens.

Migrants killing, pickup crashes, undocumented immigrants killed. Chase on border they killed eight. Wow.

It's nuts. And again, back to the solutions. How do we fix it? So we have to tack at the front. We still have to secure that border. Right? We got to plug the leak. Not just what this administration and what a lot of politics like, they could give you buckets to bail the water out. Just fix the damn leak.

Right? Yeah, but if they fix the leak, then they won't have something to fucking kick the ball around to use as a football. So we keep playing this game.

Yes, exactly.

You could make the choices. What would you do?

Well, I'd finish what we started as far as securing the border where it made sense, what the agents need, I don't need. Again, like I mentioned, I don't need a wall 2000 miles. Right, right. But where I need it, I need it. I need the technology, I need the agents. I need to put some of these safeguards back in place to close loopholes in the existing policy. I would put immigration judges en masse to quick court these people like we do sometimes in municipalities, night courts where they just go up there and see the judge. And so we can start thinning the herd of this backlog. Right.

The legislative side, you need help.

Yeah.

Is that legislative?

Yeah. So we need some laws. The laws in the books are good.

Right.

But we need laws to hold the executive accountable, to pursue the laws and not have too much latitude. So I would do some things and we need legislature to appropriate to fund.

You need people to do the processing. Yeah.

Well, so again, that's kind of one of those things where if we minimize the flow, then we could handle that. Hiring more people to process is a bucket to bail water. It's not fixing the leak.

Got it.

Forcing them through the ports of entry through better lawful pathways. Right. Instituting that migrant protection protocol where they're going to wait in the country they first stepped in for asylum until they can get here or until they can get those kind of things. We can modernize them, we can clean them up. A lot of these policies were highly effective. They were a little clunky to start, but they were working. They could have been smoothed out. That's what I would do. I would secure the border first and I would start right away with working on the backlog and then the preventive piece, which would be better pathways, but I would do it by not my circle of friends in Washington. I'd be out there in all 50 states saying, what do you need to make? And I don't want to sound political, but to continue to make this country great. To make sure that we are doing the right thing for we the people and opening that door to our invited guests as we need and see fit. Right. We, the country, should determine who and what comes in here and how they come in, not just come in en masse and we'll filter through it when we can.

That's no plan like you've mentioned. That would be the plan. Secure cleanup and preventive maintenance is what I would do. And there's people out there that see that and that want to do good. They want to secure that. They want to find that balance.

What do you mean when you say that?

Yeah, there's politicians out there that I think see this from a common sense and compare.

You had some that have showed up like that. Yeah.

Well, Bobby, Kendi, there's an example as a guy had. Well, let's talk about current.

Bobby gives a fuck. It's unbelievable. When you look at Bobby and you look at the other candidates, you're like, oh, he actually gives, he has thoughts and views on shit. Biden, I don't know any of his policies. Trump is very like, one handed kind of in a lot of know. He doesn't elaborate. Biden is not. He's just not. Hell, it's just not fair what they keep doing to that man. As a senior citizen. I think it's sick. But yeah, Bobby is dialed in.

Yeah. So I would say this has views.

He has views on things. He'll give you reasons why. You can tell that he cares. And I think he's open to whatever, but I just like to have anybody that gives a fuck.

I think you're going to see in that video, there's actually a picture of me and Alan. What he posted. He posted a couple of things about with me on it today. I'll say this. In the current sitting political pieces, for every one that gives a darn, there's a couple that don't care. Right? You just get it, right? They're down there for photo op. They're nodding their heads. It's like they don't want to solve that as we just talked about, so they can pawn it. Right? But then again, there's yours truly right there.

I'm not trying to sound like I'm not some right wing nut job. That's the crazy part, too. They start brainwashing you to feel like you're some far right crazy person if you just think there should be organization to the fucking program.

It's compassion and common sense. It's all we're talking about. Because there's yeah.

I don't want us to not have people here. I don't want us to not have diversity. I would hate that. But I don't want us to have people hiding in the desert who are scared, who don't know what the fuck is going on, who don't know how. They don't have a path. Both people need immigrants to have a path.

It seems like the current elected class, if you will, and I'll just say the former politicians, current politicians, they present you with false choices. And we've talked about a little bit today, either for it or you're against it. You can't be one or the other. No, that's not true.

It's not true.

There is some common ground, and that's what I anybody to include yourself. That's why we're here today, that wants to learn facts, to learn about the border or come down to the border and see what's going on. Not just a photo op, not just saying, I've been there to check a box, but literally go down there and spend some time. Talk to the sheriffs, talk to the mayors, talk to the agricultural leadership, the farm and ranchers. Talk to the nonprofits, the domestic violence shelter. Talk to the superintendent of the hospital who has a $21 million bill from illegal immigration that hasn't been paid yet, who's supposed to serve the community. Talk to retired border patrol officials. Talk to people that have lived there to find out what's going on, not what one tv show or news station says or the other counterpoints it. Go down there. And that's why I appreciate what Bobby did. He came down there. It spent three days. I spent maybe a couple hours with him, giving him my take. That's longer than anybody else has spent. That's longer than the president, the vice president, the secretary goes often. But look, this is somebody.

That's what we want. We want those choices. We want that out of our leadership, whether it goes anywhere or not. You come down there and you listen, and when you listen, you can pause and you can maybe learn and maybe make a difference. And I think that's the critical piece as a country, as we talked about earlier, we want choices. We want options. We want to look at a menu. We don't want to be told what we're going to do. And so many of our elected, I don't even want to call them elected leaders because they're not leading so many of the elected politicians. Like you said, it's either one way or the other. It's either so stronghanded this way, and that's just not how we are. And so it's refreshing to have people that are actually listening, people like Bobby that come down and say, hey, I want to know. It's a good thing. And I think we need more of that to make this country.

I think, yeah, I would love to see Bobby get, I don't know if most people know if he's on the ballots. I think they're still figuring that out. But it's Trump, Biden and Kennedy. Those are the options. I don't even think some people realize that Bobby Kennedy is an, you know.

I tell you what, I listen to him often. I've had the pleasure. Look, his campaign reached out to me. The others, I'm, I don't care who you are, if you want to listen and you want to learn and you want to hear what I have to say, I'll be happy to talk to you about it. Yeah. I think the campaign is still trying to get on some of the ballots, but at the end of the day, that's the big three that are going to be probably left when it's all said and done. Don't know how that's going to play out because we still have a primary. There's still one republican candidate out there, two out there. Haley and Trump are out there. You got Biden and you got Kennedy.

Haley has some good border policies.

Doesn't kind of, I don't know who's advising her. I'm certainly not. I think she's about securing the border, but a lot more openness about it than some of the others. I think at least from Trump and Kennedy, it's like, hey, we got to secure the border. And I think Haley is saying the.

Same thing, but Biden's saying it now, too, or they're campaigning. Well, they're saying it.

I'm saying, yeah, the timing is impeccable.

Right.

The numbers at the lowest he's been. Border is a number one.

It's definitely a last ditch effort. I can't imagine he's going to run for president. I just don't think it would be humane, is my argument. I don't think it would be humane to do that to somebody.

Yeah. Well, what I will say is that candidates and campaigns, they change and evolve over a campaign cycle. We're months away, but those are long months away. Anything can happen with whether it's the current president or the other contenders. I'm just glad that we've got another option out there. I think that's what's important. And again, super smart guy. And I wish him all the best.

Me too, Bobby. And I like the underdog. Yeah.

It'S fun to listen to him because he's smart on the topics, right.

We can't even fucking understand him half the time. But that is just a vocal. Some people don't realize that. Some people are like, he's drunk. I'm like, no, he has a bad ecoord or whatever.

But you know what? When you listen to him and he talks about it, look, he told me, he's like, I didn't see this border issue. I thought it was some right wing deal, right? We don't have a country if we don't have this border. I mean, he literally changed his mind in 72 hours of where he was coming from. And to me, that's a win, and that is successful. And that is also someone that is showing compassion and common sense. And I've said that multiple times. I think that's what we stand for when it comes down to this border. Common sense is secure compassion not only for our agents in our communities, but also the migrants. And he sees that. He also wants to hold Mexico accountable because they've got a stake in this claim, too.

How was Mexico benefiting from the current border?

You know? Well, first of all, it'd be very interesting how much money transferred to Mexico when Marcus and Blinken went down there between Christmas and New Year's to address the issue. Because all of a sudden we went from 1012 thousand arrests a day to about 6700 arrests a day.

So you think maybe there could have been some sort of a payoff or something?

Oh, there were absolutely foreign aid to help support their. That's just money in the coffers. Look, I want to make it very clear the mexican people are beautiful people. They are God working. They are. So everyone that I've met and even some of the officials, but the government of Mexico is very difficult to deal with. And I'll tell you that I think that a lot of the, obviously there's the cartel influence on things and the amount of money that is coming through that country through smuggling and through just human beings transiting through Mexico to get to the United States is so what I will say is they probably are getting some kind of financial support from the United States. You're not hearing about the caravans anymore, right. They're being disrupted. I'm sure. I'm sure that's what Mexico is doing, is caravans of two, three, 4000 at a time coming up from Guatemala. They get dispersed. And Mexico is taking some of the migrants that get returned and they're flying them back to the interior. So they don't have an or so. Yeah, exactly. So if I caught you in San Diego and returned you in Tijuana, you just could come right back, right?

Well, if I caught you in San Diego, returned you to Tijuana, and Mexico flew you to Guanajuato or down to Oaxaca.

Yeah.

You got a whole nother journey to get back up to the border. So that disrupts that smoking cycle and gives us. So Mexico is cooperating with that. But it ain't happening without a lot of money. So I'd be curious how much arrangements there. And the State Department under blinken. State Department has so much money.

Well, how about send them 5 billion? That's what I would do. Then send them a decent amount and let's shut it down completely for a while. Yeah, well, but, yeah, I don't know.

Constitutionally, Mexico does not see immigration as, they see that as a human right. There's no laws preventing.

So they don't have any laws preventing people from wanting to come here. They don't say, hey, don't do that.

So that's a challenge.

Right?

So they have a constitutional challenge. So they'd have to do things like we would do, use executive actions as long as it's not considered unconstitutional. So they've had to navigate some things. But I'll tell you, they did it under President Trump because of the different mindset in the White House holding Mexico accountable. If you don't, we will shut this down, I will tariff you. And Mexico all of a sudden complied to establish their own humanitarian National Guard and all those kind of things. In fact, probably had the highest level of cooperation I ever had with my mexican counterparts. That changed a lot under this administration. Still good people. But they didn't have the pressures coming from Washington to Mexico City to do. Yeah, it's just challenging to ask another government, look, we should never be in the business of negotiating with another country for our own border security. Not as the american, not as the United States. I get it. Other countries have to do that. That's why we have NATO's and things like that. But the United States of America should never negotiate our security with another country, not here in this. The, we talked about it.

We hinted a little bit the government's responsibility is life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. You do that through a strong domestic security, a strong international security in the sense of our military to protect us. And I'm not saying going into wars, but just to protect us and then a strong economy so we can pursue happiness doesn't say we're going to be happy, but if the government would just focus on those three things and then get the heck out of our lives, we'd be a lot more fun. There are some safeguards, like we talked about that. That's the protection piece. But at the end of the day, where does all that money go to? Right? I know, it's crazy.

That's what's baffling. And it's still, at the same time, we're able to sit in a place that has heat and cool and have water and food and know that we can go eat when we get out of here. And I know that there's a lot of people that's far less fortunate than that in the world. But I again, go back to the fact that if we are healthy and safe and organized, then we as individuals, can best service other people who want to come to this country to stay or to visit or to work. We can better have a plan of how to make that happen as a group. But then as individuals, we can service that and be a part of that which makes you feel like you're part of immigration and you are grateful to share your country with other people. And that is a sense of pride, which gives you a sense of purpose. And a lot of that disappears when there's not a program in place. I think.

I think you're right. The sense of purpose in contributing is important to just living a good life. Right? And if we can get our act together as a country and we can contribute and number one, clean up our own backyard, but then also help others contribute to others to come.

Yeah, we can do a lot more from a healthy place. It's hard when you're in fear. It's really hard to do your best and to just raise kids, it's not good.

And I love you having this platform. And I think it's so important to be able to have these type of conversations because when you've got a status, a celebrity status that's got a podcast or you're a rock star or you're an athlete, you have an audience that doesn't always hear some of the things that are really going. So when you can use this platform that you have to talk about what's impacting people every day, that's impacting this country, I commend you. I mean, look, I love it when I see people like yourself having these type of conversations. It's so important because a lot of your audience, they've heard about it indirectly, but now they're actually hearing it today about, this is the real problem. What you're seeing on tv is real, and there's not a solution in place. There was a solution. Wasn't perfect, but it was working.

But now it feels like there's nothing.

Yeah. And we need a plan.

We just need a plan.

You need a plan. You do that when you hit your app to figure out how you're going to drive the grocery store. But we won't do it. To chart what's best for our country.

I know we need to feel safe so we can operate well. I don't think it's a thing where it's like, I don't want anybody to come over here. I think it's like, hey, let's get this. Things should be in an organized space, so you can come over here and we can be here and everything can work well for the better of the people coming and the better of the people that are already here.

I would say that add to that footstomp that secure our border, recruit and attain the best and brightest that we need. Right. Let's invite people, and let's have people sign up for the guest list so we know who's coming. Right. Let's have consequences for those that are taking advantage of those people that are violating the system. And then let's have full transparency about what's really happening so people can make informed decisions in life. People need to know what's going on on our borders because it's impacting them, not, look, when the administration is more about securing their narrative than securing the border, that's a problem.

That's what I see is the issue.

Yeah. Sorry to cut you off, but that was something that was thought was very important, that we have to have a plan, we have to create the invite list, and we also have to let people apply to be on that list as well and just know who's coming in. And we control that.

Yeah. And the fact that there's only so many visas, this thing needs a huge overhaul, and people know it. And I'm just amazed. I wish I could see a little bit deeper. I don't know what's past the first few shovels of know what's fucking holding the roots of some of this stuff in place that makes people want to keep it the way it is. Some of that I'm a little foggy on, but, man, I want to ask you one more thing. If you go to the border like you're going to Canada or something. And when they look up your stuff on the computer, do they know everything? Right. When you go through there? Like they border patrol? Yeah.

So if you're going lawfully in and out of Canada, they're running your car, your driver's license, your passport, with your vehicle license plate. Yeah. All that data, it's all public information that's in there.

Oh, so they just have all of that?

Yeah, it's all in the databases, which is interesting, because in New York, going back to sanctuary cities and policies, they refuse to share DMV motor vehicle information with the federal agents. So it's difficult for agents sometimes to run license checks on vehicles. How do you know who the smuggler is or who this person is that may be going through the border?

I wonder why they did that though.

Just because it was just seen as bad. But yeah. So if you go into Canada and if you go into Mexico, if you're crossing through a lawful port of entry, whether it's an air, land or seaport, when you present your identification, it's going through everything that we've got on you. That is a public record. So your driver's license there, it's always.

Curious because have you been here before? And you're like, oh, shit. Do they know if I've been here before? Do I know?

Yeah, they know your crossings I'm not going to get into. It's not anything that's secret or anything like that. But yeah, we have records, checks that know if you've crossed in the last 72 hours or how often your vehicle has crossed. And same thing, there's visa entry exit requirements in law. So we know when you come in and when you leave the country, even if you fly a domestically, sometimes they'll take a picture just to track you. You can voluntarily opt out of that kind of stuff, but it's part of it.

One last question. Why isn't the same problem at the canadian border that's at the southern border?

Who's to say it's not? It's just not volume. Right? So let's talk about that. About 90% of the canadian population lives within 100 air miles of the United States. All your major cities, because it's so much tundra and wide open land.

Yeah. Shout out Windsor.

Yeah. Every major organization, terrorist organization, affiliate like that has some kind of tie to all the cities in the world. Pretty much. But in that canadian population, in those cities. Right. So there is a threat on the northern border. Difference is it's not sexy enough because the volume now I can't recall off the top of my head, but I think there was probably only like 8000 arrests on the northern border compared to the 2.4 million on the southern border. So because of all the focus on the southern border, we've had to shift resources internally within the border patrol. And I want to say too much, but during 21 and 22, about half of our northern border agents were down on the southern border. Wow. So that creates a vulnerability. Now go back to morale and resiliency. So in the frozen north, you only have a few months that you can get your house and your life prepared for the winter. So when our agents are being deployed down south, they're left their family behind. It just creates a tough cycle. So by not fixing the southern border, you've created vulnerabilities on the northern border and our Coastal, which includes New Orleans sector, Miami sector, and Puerto Rico sector, those same resources were shifted to the southwest border as well.

So we're creating vulnerabilities on our coasts. So without plugging that leak on the southern border, you're creating vulnerabilities everywhere else. So, I mean, we got that right sized a little bit better than we were. So we're not as vulnerable up north as we were a few years ago. We've gotten better, but it's still something we have to consider. So if we fix a southern border, which this latest bill that failed was all about, the southern border, there's still a northern border threat.

Yeah.

Again, you have to think broadly on this.

Yep. You got to think broadly, and you got to stay positive, too. I know there's been a lot of kind of, like, it sounds dour here and there. It's a lot of looking at it and even. We got to stay hopeful, though, and that's where I'm at with it. Yeah. Chris, I got to hit an AA meeting, man. Thank you so much for your time, dude.

You got it, brother. This was great. Thank you for talking about it. I hope the audience appreciates it and just stop and think, man, if we can cause somebody to pause a little bit, to just take it all in and think about, hey, we can do better. I think this is a win for the show today, and I really appreciate you having me on and talking about something. This is a serious issue, but it can be solved, but we're going to have to roll up our sleeves and get it done.

Yeah. Awesome. Chris, Clem, thank you so much, man.

Yeah.

I appreciate your time, brother.

I appreciate it, man. This is great. Now I'm just sitting on the breeze and I feel I'm falling like these leaves I must be cornerstone but when I reach that ground I'll share this piece of my I can feel it in my bones but it's gonna take it.