RIGHT SPEAK: Former Border Commissioner: ‘We Have Lost Control of the Southwest Border’

The southwest border during President Joe Biden’s first year in office reached historic levels of illegal crossings, pulling agents off the front line and leaving large swaths of the border unpatrolled. Drugs, especially fentanyl, flowed in, and overdose deaths are at an all-time high.

“What we’re experiencing now on the southwest border is a complete, utter catastrophe,” Mark Morgan, former acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which oversees Border Patrol, told The Epoch Times on Jan. 7.

“We have lost control of the southwest border.”

During the 2021 calendar year, Border Patrol agents apprehended close to 2 million illegal immigrants from 150 different countries along the southwest border—more than double 2019, the last pre-pandemic year, according to CBP data.

Last year, Border Patrol agents detected but didn’t catch an additional 600,000 illegal border crossers, known as “gotaways,” Morgan said.

“That’s the equivalent to the size of the state of Vermont,” he said. “Think about the bad people that are in that 600,000 that got away.”

Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times

Mexican nationals made up 28 percent of encounters in fiscal year 2021, the lowest proportion in recorded history, according to the CBP.

The northern triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador made up 44 percent, and the remaining 28 percent were from other countries—double the previous record for the latter demographic.

“This trend is important because the Department of Homeland Security does not currently have agreements to electronically verify nationality with these different countries of origin, making removing or expelling their nationals more resource-intensive and time-consuming,” the CBP stated in a Jan. 3 press release.

Outside of Mexico and the Northern Triangle nations, the countries accounting for the largest number of encounters in fiscal year 2021 were Ecuador, Brazil, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Haiti, and Cuba, the CBP stated.

On the Mexico side of the border, across the Rio Grande in Texas, hundreds of discarded passports, visas, and identification papers can be found every day. Illegal aliens are told it’s harder to be deported from the United States without papers.

“This is not a surge. This is an invasion,” Morgan said. “I mean, this is a catastrophic amount of illegal aliens trying to break into our country.”

The result in some border areas, he said, is that most Border Patrol agents are being pulled off the “national security mission” to be “day care providers, processing agents, and bus drivers.”

Morale among the Border Patrol workforce is at an all-time low.

Upon taking office almost a year ago, Biden was quick to dismantle several key border security initiatives that the Trump administration had established, including a halt to border wall construction, and the “Remain in Mexico” program, which contributed to up to an 80 percent drop in “catch-and-release” by requiring asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico until their final court judgment.

Now instead of waiting in Mexico, most illegal immigrants are released into the United States to wait for future court dates that can be set years into the future.