Media
Event Summary
As Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the nation’s largest federal law enforcement agency, Rodney Scott oversees the front lines of America’s border and national security operations. Under the leadership of DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, CBP has taken on an increasingly central role in implementing the administration’s immigration and border security agenda, making Commissioner Scott one of the most consequential voices in immigration policy today.
Commissioner Scott joined Center Executive Director Mark Krikorian for an in-depth conversation on the challenges facing CBP and the administration’s broader enforcement strategy. The discussion examined current efforts to secure both the southern and northern borders, combat human smuggling and cartel activity, expand border wall system construction, strengthen coordination with ICE, and facilitate lawful trade and travel while protecting national security.
Date and Location
April 23, 2026
Washington, DC
MARK KRIKORIAN: Good afternoon. My name is Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. Thanks for appearing in person. And for those of you tuning in, thanks for tuning in.
Just so I don’t forget to say it, because my comms director will punish me if I don’t say it, if you have questions email them to [email protected] – obviously, only if you’re watching this live. Otherwise, other people will ask the questions and you’ll be stuck listening to their answers.
So this is another in our series of Immigration Newsmaker interviews. We’ve done several of those over the past year, year and a half. And today we are fortunate to have joining us Rodney Scott, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection. For those of you who are writing stories, never say Customs and Border Patrol. (Laughter.) It’s one of those mistakes. Just don’t do it. Customs and Border Protection. It’s the part of DHS that deals with the Border Patrol, but also the immigration inspectors or the inspectors in general at the airports and the ports of entry. He oversees more than 67,000 employees, which to me would be a nightmare – I mean, I have 16 employees and that’s hard enough for me to deal with – a $19 billion budget. He retired from the Border Patrol. He was 24th chief of the Border Patrol, retired in 2021, had been in the Border Patrol for 29 years, I think. That’s a long time. Has, obviously, gotten a lot of experience both in the field and in various management/headquarter-type jobs.
So I’m delighted, Rodney, you could join us. And first thing I wanted to ask is something that’s in the news, because as I understand it today, this afternoon, the House is supposed to vote on the reconciliation bill, the funding bill the Senate already passed to fund both ICE and CBP through the end of this presidential term, because the Democrats apparently have decided that there should be no CBP and ICE and so they’re opposed to funding those agencies at all. So, anyway, this is a pretty important thing, it seems to me. But why is this necessary now, because didn’t the Big Beautiful Bill fund everything that CBP does anyway?
COMMISSIONER RODNEY SCOTT: Thank you for bringing it up. And in short to your last question, no, the Big Beautiful Bill does not fund everything. The Big Beautiful Bill was basically an infrastructure and improvement, but the baseline funding that comes through appropriations for salaries and daily operations, that’s what we’re talking about here. And I really appreciate you bringing it up because it seems like a lot of America kind of forgot that parts of the government are still shut down.
So, for CBP specifically, it includes a specific line that’s categorized as border security but really it was all of the United States Border Patrol was going without pay. Let me – and I’ll caveat that in a minute, but no official pay. And then there are other – there are other line items within CBP that fell under that as well, that – operations or personnel – that literally, if we didn’t find other ways to pay them in the short term they weren’t getting paid. DHS, it was basically robbing from Peter to pay Paul just to give the guys a paycheck so that they could actually just pay their bills, but quite a few of them went a long, long time without it.
The reconciliation package – it is kind of horrible we’re at this point that half of our government doesn’t think that literally knowing and controlling who and what comes into your home is important enough to fund. But the reconciliation package, if and when it passes, will pay for the salaries of the Border Patrol agents and for ICE through the end of this administration, and that will give us some stability.
MR. KRIKORIAN: And I’ve seen there are things like paying contractors and stuff, too. That wasn’t covered by the Big Beautiful Bill money, is that correct?
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: That would be considered operations, yes. So there was a point in time we were literally looking at shutting down all of our aviation assets because we didn’t have maintenance contractors. So anything that has to do with operations, think of it as anything like your utility bills. The utilities weren’t being paid – electricity, water at our stations. A lot of contractors leaned forward and gave us a little bit of leeway, but not all of them. A lot of small businesses just couldn’t afford to do that.
MR. KRIKORIAN: So Border Patrol agents didn’t get paid, they kept working, but some, you know, guy providing spare parts for airplanes can’t do that kind of thing.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: Correct.
MR. KRIKORIAN: I mean, he’s got to get paid because he’s got other people to pay.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: Correct.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Interesting. So, as I understand it, the vote is this afternoon. Who knows what will happen. But it seems like a pretty important issue and, like you said, it does seem to have fallen off the radar because of the administration found some other ways to kind of work workarounds, but they’re not long-term workarounds.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: Correct. Basically, borrowing money, so other programs are going to – are going to be robbed. And I know it needs to happen, it needs to pass, because we need to pay our government employees, and we need to provide the services Americans have already paid for. And Congress is just playing tricks with the money.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Because the interesting thing about what CBP does is, the way I kind of describe it, it’s sort of the skin of the United States. In other words, the borders – obviously the land borders, the maritime borders, but also every airport and it’s all – they’re all borders – and so you all are in charge of not just the immigration part, but making sure nothing gets in that shouldn’t be in, including whatever – you know, nuclear weapons, but also, like, you know, desiccated monkey meat from Africa or whatever.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: You name it. And I think we overly complicate it sometimes. I tell people the only place that you can separate out immigration and narcotic smuggling and IPR, or, you know, endangered species as far as the international border goes, is in the media and on Capitol Hill. Because in real life, CBP officers and Border Patrol agents are charged with, first, just knowing; and then controlling who and what comes into our home, consistent with federal law. You don’t know what it is until after the fact. So our agents and officers have to be out there, they have to be motivated, they have to have the right equipment to, first and foremost, just have that baseline knowledge of what is coming in. And then we make educated enforcement decisions on what’s allowed in and what’s not. But it’s just like your own personal home. It’s no different.
MR. KRIKORIAN: So one of the things that’s also been in the news was Secretary Mullin said that at least it was being considered to stop CBP inspections in sanctuary cities, like at airports – like JFK, LAX, that kind of thing. Is that – is that a real thing? Is there planning going on? Sort of what’s the status of that?
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: I think the biggest thing everybody needs to understand about the Trump administration in general is that America is coming first and that everything’s on the table. So we’re not making rash decisions. The decisions are thought out. We sit down and figure out what are the second- and third-level effects, can we mitigate some of those unintended consequences. But I will tell you, everything is on the table. No idea is ruled out without going through that systematic process, to include not having customs inspections and immigration inspections at certain airports if they don’t support us.
MR. KRIKORIAN: So there’s no actual, like, timeline or anything like that for doing that yet? I mean, there’s no immediate plans for, like, essentially shutting down international flights to JFK and LAX?
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: So I’m not going to give you the answer you specifically want, but I will ask you to look back at CBP a little bit. There’s no better agency on the planet to respond within hours to a crisis. Our entire business model has been, unfortunately, responding to different crises at the border, whether it be COVID, whether it be mass immigration. We have a whole litany of contingency plans in place, that the real topic isn’t as important; it’s the processes. And we can adjust on the fly pretty rapidly.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Mmm hmm. OK. Secretary Mullin also gave an update about the wall, how completion – sort of what the timeline was, that sort of thing. If you could tell us a little more about that, wall – there is wall being constructed now as we speak, right? And sort of what’s the pace of it and what’s the expectation?
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: So I testified to this recently, and I never thought as a government employee I’d be able to say this, but we’re ahead of schedule and we’re below budget on building border wall. (Laughter.) Trump 45 got a bunch of border wall money in place. OB3 three added to that. The Biden administration did everything they could to prevent the border wall from being built, but Congress never rescinded that money so they could not legally shut off the contracts. They couldn’t legally officially stop it. They just slow-rolled it for four years and wasted millions and millions – actually, probably billions of dollars. We turned that back on on January 20th. We kicked that back into place and started leveraging that money. And then the Big Beautiful Bill provided $46.5 billion to finish building out the smart border wall system.
It’s not just a wall. I think some of our messaging, if I criticize us internally, it’s been that. It is a barrier. There’s a 30-foot-high bollard wall that everybody’s familiar with. They see it. But I call it a smart wall because it’s infused with technology that allows our agents to be spread out farther. It cues them when anybody’s even close to it. It also includes some camera systems. The primary border wall will – I’ve made a commitment to the president will be done by the end of 2027. Everywhere the Border Patrol has plans to build that wall will be done in 2027.
MR. KRIKORIAN: How many miles, roughly, would that be? Do you know off the top of your head?
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: There’s a couple of gaps, but basically from San Diego all the way to the Gulf.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Oh, really?
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: So the only places we’re not building border wall is places where we’ve made a conscious decision that we don’t need it. Because Big Bend National Park, for example, super remote, remote area, some very, very high cliffs, you can’t drive through the area. There’s some other –
MR. KRIKORIAN: A guide once referred to – we were at Big Bend and looked at the other side, and he said: That’s the Great Wall of Chihuahua.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: (Laughs.) Yeah.
MR. KRIKORIAN: And so – yeah, right, in a sense.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: Yeah, so you understand, because I’m not into wasting taxpayers’ money. We just want to make sure we provide the border security that they deserve. And then by the – probably by about July, maybe at the latest August – and the reason I’m a little flexible on that is there’s weather, there’s a lot of different considerations – we’ll have the entire system, to include a secondary barrier in places we need it, the water barrier in the Rio Grande River, and the technology that was paid for by OB3.
MR. KRIKORIAN: So it’ll be next year. Yeah.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: We’ll have it done by July 2028.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Wow, really. OK. So that – how much of that river barrier stuff is there going to be? Is that going to be in addition? Will there be physical land wall in addition in places where there’s that river barrier, or?
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: In most places, yes, there will. The physical border wall, the location of it, if you followed this during Trump 45 at all, you can’t put it in the middle of the river, right, so it’s automatically within the United States. And then we look at the hundred-year flood plan or flood predictions and we make sure that we build it in an area that’s not going to cause more damage than it helps. And then the new water barrier, the buoy barrier that we tested during Trump 45 right at the very end, as chief of the Border Patrol I was trying to deploy that, and then the Biden administration shut it all off. There’s going to be several hundred miles of that throughout the Rio Grande River.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Oh, wow. OK.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: That is the equivalent of a physical border wall on the border.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Right, right. So you mentioned what you were trying to do as head of the Border Patrol at the end of Trump I and the beginning of Biden II. You resigned or retired, or however you want to describe it, as head of the Border Patrol partway into the Biden administration. And so what advice did you give them? What were they not doing that you had suggested they do that caused you to reconsider whether you wanted to stay as head of the Border Patrol?
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: The job, to be quite honest. So I was the chief of the Border Patrol for the first seven months, through August of 2021. There was no recommendation that was pro-border security that was taken into account. As a matter of fact, there was very adamant. I sat in meetings. I listened to people systematically figure out how to work around Congress to stop building border wall. The performance metrics got shifted immediately. It wasn’t about securing the border; it was about how fast can you process people and then let them go. We were being forced or they were trying to push and force us to work with NGOs to provide benefits to – everything that you saw later during the Biden administration that literally facilitated illegal immigration was what I was basically arguing against for the first seven months.
And then exactly everything – not just me, everything that any border security expert that had a chance to whisper in their ear told them, without consequences, you are literally opening the dam. Like, this isn’t about the 15 people standing in Tijuana right now; this is about millions of people around the world. They’re going to see this as an invitation to come to the United States. And I honestly have to admit, even I was surprised that they were like: And?
MR. KRIKORIAN: (Laughs.)
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: They literally just had a completely different perspective on the world. They didn’t see America as, like, a place to preserve or to protect or to put first. They saw it as a place to provide freebies to other people from anywhere around the world.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Now, you weren’t and aren’t a politician, but did somebody at least tell them, look, this is probably going to blow up in your face?
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: Oh, no, we all did. I thought, as a – well, not thought – I believed, and I still believe today, as a career law enforcement officer and as the chief of the Border Patrol that wasn’t just that I should; that was my responsibility. So, no, I told them. Many other people told them. We put it in writing. We showed them historically when certain things had taken place and there was no consequences to illegal immigration that – what would happen.
But more so – and I want everybody to understand this – it’s not about illegal immigration. I explained to them in detail how the cartels depend upon illegal immigration to distract and overwhelm law enforcement so that they can get the second wave of whether it be people, narcotics, or anybody willing to pay extra to avoid a law enforcement officer. That second wave is always a higher threat. That’s what the illegal immigration does for them. It provides cover so they can get all that in. It literally reduces –
MR. KRIKORIAN: In other words, so agents are occupied elsewhere, basically, and the cartels can move stuff in.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: Correct. And it’s not just ad hoc. They literally map out what the Border Patrol does. They know how long it takes to get from a station to a remote area. And they would push kids and families through super remote areas out in New Mexico, knowing that that would wipe out the entire station for at least eight hours and then they could get whatever they wanted across the border. And they did it again and again and again. And we showed the Biden administration facts and evidence of the how that happens, how they work it out, and they didn’t care. This administration cares, and we shut it off immediately.
MR. KRIKORIAN: So for – again, to come to this, to what you’re dealing with now, one thing that occurred to me is that when you’re talking about they knew what the Border Patrol was doing, they used to have spotters, you know, on our side, kind of hidden and keep seeing wind shift change and all that. Has drones changed that? And what does – what is the challenge you guys face from drones? Is it mainly sort of surveillance stuff? How does that work?
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: So, back to how you started it, the spotters still exist. And it’s more complicated and less complicated than people think. They just pay people for information. So it could be any shop owner, any kid on a corner in the U.S., anybody in the neighborhood. How many Border Patrol agents? How many cars left the station today? They have people reporting on that all the time.
On the south side, they literally set up on high points and watch everything we do along the border. The drones have, obviously, made that a lot easier. But the drones, to be quite honest, are a little bit more overt. So we’ll see the drone flying along the Rio Grande River, watching and videotaping where all of our guys are; we’ll work with the Mexican government to try to figure that out and how to address it. Whereas the traditional scout sites, they try to be very hidden up, like, on a mountainside, camouflaged out, and kind of watch what we do.
But the idea, though, is exactly what you just said. They use any method possible to watch what we do all day so that they can make better business decisions on how to get their commodity across the border without getting caught. That is their business model. Drones definitely make it easier. They’re also smuggling narcotics across with drones as well. Yeah.
MR. KRIKORIAN: That’s what I was going to ask about. I mean, presumably that has to be relatively small, high-value things because you can’t use a drone to move bales of marijuana, even if they bother. I don’t even know if they smuggle that anymore.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: That’s the change, right? So my whole career it was, like, truckloads full of marijuana, and cocaine as well, but that’s not really the threat now. The threat is cocaine; heroin; hard narcotics; and fentanyl, of course; and then, like, knockoffs of fentanyl. Much smaller commodities need to be moved across. If the fentanyl, for example, is in a pill, that’s a much bigger – a bigger smuggling load. But if you keep it in the raw – you bring it across and then mix it and press it into pills, which is what we’re seeing more and more – that’s a much smaller package, if you will. It takes up a lot less space. And the drones are getting bigger and bigger all the time. You know, God bless Amazon, but they pushed this whole package delivery thing that really made it much more available to be able to get a drone that has a payload.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Do we have our own drones?
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: We do. We have – we are building out our capacity all the time. CBP has the whole spectrum. So we have agent-portable. They can take them on the field, just small, what you guys are thinking about, like almost off the – commercial off-the-shelf drones. All the way up to we also have the MQ-9s, which is basically a predator-like military-style drone that we’ll put up for 24-plus hours at a time, high altitude, videoing along the border.
MR. KRIKORIAN: It’s not shooting anybody, though.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: Not shooting – shooting video, but not bombs. Yeah.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Right. (Laughs.) Right. So the – in April there was a court ruling that struck down the administration’s asylum policy, that if you were coming across illegally you weren’t allowed to apply for asylum, which, frankly, it contributed significantly to regaining control over the border, as I understand it, that’s being appealed or still being litigated. But have you all guys given thought on what you’re going to do if that sticks, if that ruling sticks and you end up with another wave of phony asylum seekers, basically?
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: Yeah, we have, to be quite honest. And I’ll even back up. So before this administration came in a lot of planning went into place: How do we fix this? So I was part of some of that planning and a lot of other people from my background were part of those plannings. But the number-one thing that came out of it was assume we’re going to get sued and have a backup plan, and have a backup plan to the backup plan, and a backup plan to that backup plan, so it may not all work, but the number-one thing was slowing down the flow because, just like the cartels used illegal immigration to distract us, that illegal immigration completely overwhelms and backs up the court system, which is what the open borders people want, because then you can’t afford the detention and then you start releasing people and then the snowball just keeps going. We saw it, right? We lived it.
So it was this – it wasn’t just the 212(f). That’s a big part of it to help slow it down, but once you slow down that flow we have more – we have empty beds now. ICE actually has more capacity right now than they have people in custody. Why is that? Because if you back up, you’ll remember the first thing that we did in this administration wasn’t, like, all of a sudden just overnight build a border wall. But the flow stopped. Why was that? Because there were consequences. We started working with different countries around the world, and this current administration put leverage on them like never before to say: Hey, you need to take back your own citizens. This recalcitrant country thing, this is ridiculous. You cannot not accept back your own citizens that came here.
There was a little hiccup in the beginning, but if you remember, there were – we ended up having the Department of War helping us because we are deporting so many people so fast. We’re flying to countries around the entire world. We’ve worked out agreements with more countries than I could list here currently to actually accept third-country nationals if need be. So instead of just saying I’m afraid to go back to Mexico – which we all, by the way, know is false. Like, there’s just no asylum claim that’s ever legit. It’s a free and open society, from the government itself. They’re like, OK, well, what about this next six, and how are you going to show that you’re afraid of all these?
We’re building into the system ways to eliminate the fraud, because that’s what people need to remember it was about. We still want to give asylum to the person that really needs it. But unfortunately, 99.9 percent of the people that were going through the system, it was fraud and they were preventing us from ever getting to the people that actually really truly needed help.
MR. KRIKORIAN: So one of the issues – another issue that’s in the news is the World Cup. And I, frankly, have no time for soccer so I don’t know the details, but there’s a lot of foreigners coming here. And there’s been several instances – I have a question here from a reporter about some Somali referee and an Iraqi something, either a player or photographer, whatever – people were detained and turned back. And sort of from maybe either specifically that or more generally, what is CBP planning for the World Cup and all the people arriving?
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: Sure. So, yeah, World Cup’s a big, big deal this year, and we’ve been – CBP has been part of the planning from day one. I’m not going to comment on very specific cases, but I will tell you America and our entire economy is built on a lot of tourism, a lot of legal trade and travel, people coming and going. This administration wants to keep that going. We just want people coming legally, for the right reasons, and to add value. So the FIFA, whether they want to come celebrate for the – for the 250th birthday of our country, we want to make sure that they can come in and they can come in quickly.
But we’re not going to ignore threats to this country. Again, CBP’s number-one responsibility is to know and then control who and what comes into our country to make sure that our kids, our families are all safe, right?
So people tend to forget sometimes that a visa is literally – I always say it’s just permission to ask permission. But, basically, a visa gives you the right to get on a plane and come to the United States, meet a CBP officer, and then ask for permission to come into the United States. It’s a check and balance that we want in process. Think of it as a two-step process. So if we learn something new between the time that the visa is issued, or when our CBP officer is doing their job and they’re actually asking them about their intent for coming, why they came, or looking through their stuff – to include, if need be, electronics; it’s a sensitive topic sometimes, but it shouldn’t be because it’s the equivalent –
MR. KRIKORIAN: In other words, checking people’s phones or computers?
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: Yes, the equivalent of the old-school looking through somebody’s book to see if they have little messages hidden in it or whatever else. When we learn something new that we believe that person is a threat to the United States or they’re inadmissible for any reason, even though they had a visa they’re not coming in. That happens every day, over and over again. That happened recently two times that got a little more attention because of the FIFA connection. But I tell people all the time I don’t really care what you do for a living; the law is still the law. If you’re a lawyer and you smuggle, I’m going to prosecute you. If you’re playing FIFA, you’re a referee or whatever, but you meet these other – or, you don’t meet the qualification to come into the country, we’re not letting you in just because we want you to referee a game.
MR. KRIKORIAN: And so the point there is that, I guess – and you said it – the visa is not the permission to come into the country.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: Correct.
MR. KRIKORIAN: The visa is the permission to ask to come into the country, basically. Yeah, interesting.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: That’s how I put it. It allows you to get on the plane. It allows you to come over here and talk to a CBP officer. But the CBP officer by law makes the admission – the decision on admissibility, whether you can get in or not.
MR. KRIKORIAN: So something that CBP also was involved in was the CBP One app. And so that happened – that was developed at the end of Trump I, as I understand it, and then, obviously, changed. And now it’s a different thing, CBP Home, or I think initially they called it CBP Go but they didn’t like the name. So if you could you tell us, what’s the status of that? What was the background? Were you involved in that at all? Because the Border Patrol doesn’t really run it, right?
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: Yeah. Yeah, a lot of it. Yeah. So early on – and I’ll just go way back – it wasn’t designed for this. So the CBP One app was designed, actually, for trade. So people could frontload information, share it with CBP in advance, and kind of expedite some processes. The Biden administration – the word I was just thinking to use is inappropriate,. So they hijacked it. That’s a better word.
MR. KRIKORIAN: (Laughs.)
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: They hijacked it and turned it into this system where people that wanted to come to the United States illegally – they had no immigration documents, no right to be here – could basically get an – they could apply for an appointment, and then either get on a plane or come to a port of entry, and then meet a CBP officer, make a fraudulent asylum claim – I’m sorry, make an asylum claim – and then they would get released into the United States. As you see or you saw, it devastated the border.
So at a port of entry specifically, the Biden administration had decided they were going to do at least, minimum, 1,400 a day. So let me explain to you what that means. Fourteen hundred a day, that’s about two hours of processing for each individual.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Oh, wow.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: So when you do the math, that immediately overnight took 350 CBP officers away from enforcement duties, away from processing legal trade and travel, away from looking for fentanyl, away from doing interviews of people that we’re not really sure why they’re coming in. And that was just the CBP One app. There was the CNHV. There were other programs with parole that took even more officers off the line.
So one of the – actually, the very, very, very first promise kept by this administration was shutting that off. Within minutes of President Trump being inaugurated, that entire function, that app was shut down. There is – I would say that app is dead and gone. Some people would say it was relabeled because we did use the base foundation that was originally created for legacy – for trade issues. We decided, hey, let’s just end some of the – honestly, some of the stuff that the Biden administration had built into it. We’re like, well, let’s take something that was built what I would call for bad and turn it into something good.
So we created the CBP Home app that illegal aliens could still go on, and they could still use the app, but was a way to expedite their exit from the country on their own, that they could get – and it’s still up. Please tell your friends and family right now. Illegal aliens in the United States can go onto that app right now. We will help them get a plane ticket. We will basically give them a stipend, which has varied off and on. But basically, we’ll pay them cash to leave the country, to voluntarily leave the country on your own. That may seem crazy to some people, but it’s about – the math depends, but it’s between 17(,000 dollars) to $18,000 estimate for every illegal alien we have to go out and find and then deport. And the CBP One app, even if we paid for a $500 plane ticket and gave them another 2,500 (dollars), $3,000 to leave the country, it’s still saving taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Interesting. Now, you mentioned that CBP One app was developed initially for trade. And we’re an immigration organization, we don’t really deal with trade, but you – but CBP – but CBP deals with anything coming over the border. So just as kind of as a – I was kind of curious, with all of this back and forth about tariffs, you know, where there is a tariff and there’s not a tariff and all that stuff, how do your officers at the ports of entry deal with that kind of just constantly changing environment?
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: So another lesser-known part of CBP is the Office of Trade. So CBP is made up of four operational components. Everybody’s really familiar with Border Patrol. They’re really familiar – even though they don’t know the name, they’re familiar with the Office of Field Operations; that’s the Customs and Border Protection officers at the ports of entry. And then most are familiar with our Office of Air and Marine – tan uniforms, they fly planes and drive boats. But we also have another office called the Office of Trade. And that office works directly with Commerce on all the tariff issues. We don’t decide the tariffs, but we are in charge – legacy Customs is the revenue agency for the United States to collect those tariffs.
We have a system called ACE, which is basically just our automated system that works with trade, looking at imports, exports. Most of the tariffs changing – and there were quite a few; that was a lot of work this last year –
MR. KRIKORIAN: Yeah. (Laughs.) That’s why I wanted to ask.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: – it’s behind the scenes on the technical side. So it’s literally the computer systems, if you will. The CBP officer’s main job is to look at what’s being imported and make sure nothing else is hidden in there and we pop it open. A lot of trade-based money laundering or trade-based criminal activity is based on mis-manifesting. So they’ll claim it’s one item that’s a super-low tariff, but it’s actually another item that should be higher. Or mis-manifesting, again, based on metals or whatever it is to try to get around it. They’ll also do transshipments, try to ship it through another country that doesn’t have the tariffs. So that’s what the CBP officers focus more on, is the criminal behavior behind it. But once you identify it the rest of it’s fairly automated, and the Office of Trade does all of that.
MR. KRIKORIAN: The computer basically deals with that. So – and this is something that’s relevant to both Border Patrol and the inspectors at the ports of entry – as it becomes harder to, you know, get across the border, there’s going to be – people are going to try to evade. I mean, there’s always going to be illegal immigrants trying to get in. So what kind of things are you seeing? Because in the news you see, for instance, people coming on boats up the California coast and then going in. Are you seeing more people trying to – more imaginative ways of stuffing people into gas tanks or dashboards of cars to sneak them through, you know, the ports of entry? What are you seeing about the responses of alien smugglers to the more difficult environment?
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: Sure. And again, for the context I know we’re primarily focused on immigration, but I’ll remind everybody at the border that doesn’t really exist anymore. Cartels will smuggle anything to get money. The immigrants are one aspect of it. They make money off of it, but they also like to use them because it keeps us super busy. When we seize narcotics, you just put it in a closet. Or, it’s a – it’s a safe, but basically you put it in a room, you lock it up. You don’t have to worry about it again until court.
MR. KRIKORIAN: I see.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: When we arrest illegal aliens, it takes people off, we got to feed them. So the cartels always want there to be illegal immigration because it takes us off the line.
But the answer to your question flat out is yes. But we’ve seen it before; we’re not surprised. During Trump 45 when we really started locking down some sections of the border, primarily El Paso and San Diego, we saw it shift. First, violence actually increases because the mid-level smugglers that are getting paid off of each load start losing money and they start getting frustrated. So we’re reminding our officers and agents to be more careful, be keenly aware of what’s going on around you, because they start acting out.
And then, well, you talked about it. We started seeing more stuff in drones. We’re starting to see more activity going up the coast. But we’ve already shifted Coast Guard, we’ve already built out some surveillance towers going up the coast, so it’s not like we haven’t prepared for this. You start seeing more – you start seeing sophisticated tunnels. I’ll remind people, we just saw one in the news this last week between San Diego and Tijuana. You haven’t really seen a sophisticated tunnel in about five years. Why? Because Biden administration let them all come across.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Oh. Oh, there’s no need to have the tunnel, yeah.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: There was no need to actually spend those kind of money to hide. And then just this last week, in your last note, yeah, we found a Chinese illegal immigrant built into the dash of a car. They had completely taken it apart, put the alien in there, put it back together. but we have tools now that we didn’t have in the old-school days when you and I were kind of growing up, you know, X-rays and –
MR. KRIKORIAN: So did a – did a dog detect that, or was that –
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: X-ray saw that – saw that, when we X-rayed the vehicle, yeah.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Oh, interesting. OK. Interesting. So this is an interesting question, and I’m not sure if CBP is involved in this, but you have people, they claim persecution or they claim fear of persecution, and then, you know, maybe they’ll get asylum but then they’ll go right back to the country supposedly they were fleeing. Is this the kind of thing CBP keeps track of or not?
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: We work with CIS on that. So CIS –
MR. KRIKORIAN: USCIS. We’re the original CIS, yeah. (Laughter.)
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: USCIS, the other CIS, yeah. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. We work with them to share that data. There are rare occasions where they will let somebody leave and come back for – but we don’t make those determinations. CIS will make those determinations. But for the most part, when you leave and you go back to the country you claimed you’re afraid of, you don’t have return rights.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Oh, I see.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: They came illegally. There’s no immigration document to come back. So it is nuanced.
MR. KRIKORIAN: But it is – but let’s say they got asylum, though, because then they would have a document. They’d be allowed to come back.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: If they’re allowed to come back. A lot of times it’s just a border crosser card. They don’t have –
MR. KRIKORIAN: I see.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: They don’t have a permanent alien resident card.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Oh, I see what you mean.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: But CIS, we deal with this quite often. Sometimes it’ll be a parole while they’re waiting. Sometimes it’ll be because they literally gave them a document.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Another question, sort – I mean, it’s – I asked about the wall and you answered that, but do you have off the top of your head how many miles you either have now, how many miles are being built a day, or what’s the target miles, that kind of thing? Can you quantify that?
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: So right now we’re building about six miles a week. Since – just in this administration we are just over – we’re about 110 miles of new barrier. That’s a combination of primary border wall, the buoy barrier, and some secondary wall. About 80 miles of it, plus or minus, is new primary wall. There was – I’ll have to get back to you on the numbers long – when we’re done, but there will be wall with a few gaps from coast to coast.
MR. KRIKORIAN: OK, wow.
There’s another question here. And this – again, I think this is something you all deal with. Remain in Mexico, which is formerly the migration – Migrant Protection Protocols, was reinstated under – when the president came back into office. What’s the status of that now? What is the – what’s going on?
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: So, officially, Migrant Protection Protocols is alive and well. We have used it, but we have not needed it.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Oh, OK.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: There’s just been – we have not have the backup, the family issues. We’ve had other ways to get people either deported to a third country – yeah, we have needed it, to your –
MR. KRIKORIAN: That’s what I was – actually, I joked about that on Twitter because there was apparently a new agreement with the Central African Republic to send I assume it’s third-country, you know, removals. My joke was instead of Remain in Mexico it’s now remain in Bangui, which is the capital of the Central African Republic.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: There you go. And honestly, it’s “remain in” and there’s a nice list.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Yeah, right. Exactly.
So this is another question which is – directly relates to CBP. Has the government of Mexico become more or less cooperative? Or how does that work? What kind of relationship do you have with them?
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: They’ve been very, very cooperative compared to my experience, my history. We are sharing information in a way that we’ve never really shared before and actually getting results. So, border specific, we have what we call foreign operations or foreign liaison units, where agents and officers work directly with Mexico. The information that we share on load houses, on criminal activity from the interviews, we’re – that’s the other thing that changed when we slowed down the flow. Now everybody we arrest is getting a deep – what I would call it a deep-dive interview. Basically, we’re sitting down beyond the arrest and we’re asking them: Where did you cross? Who did you pay? What did the house look like? What kind of car? What was your entire route of travel? We’re actually having time to get that investment –
MR. KRIKORIAN: For purposes of intel, in other words?
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: Yes.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Oh, OK.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: To build out the cartels to know who the real threat is, because the illegal alien is almost – I don’t mean this in a bad way. They’re still human beings. But in this process they’re kind of a commodity for the cartel. The cartel is the real threat. They’re the ones that are bringing the people nonstop.
So we’re looking at how do we wipe out the logistics. I don’t – and again, I don’t mean to dehumanize anybody, but another analogy from a business perspective is the old-school way of doing things, we just kept going in and basically taking everything off the shelves at Walmart every day and then sending it back. What we’re doing now is we’re trying to figure out how it’s getting there. What is the trucking companies? What is – what are the manufacturers behind the scenes? So we’re doing that through the intel. And then we’re working with Mexico and other countries to shut off the criminal enterprises where they begin farther downstream, even in Panama, South America, certain airports where we’ve identified corrupt officials that are getting people from Europe or even Africa into South America and up. We’re attacking the entire problem now instead of just processing the illegal alien after they cross. And Mexico has been helping us out a lot.
MR. KRIKORIAN: So you would have had experience with that at the end of Trump I. Is it – is Mexico more cooperative now than, say, five or six years ago?
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: Right now I would argue that – I would argue right now they’re more – they’re more cooperative. Yeah.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Interesting, interesting.
This is a question about overstays, because when someone comes in, like you said, the visa doesn’t mean they get in; the visa means they get to ask to be let in. When they’re let in they’re given a period of stay, a certain amount of time they’re allowed to be here. And if people don’t leave, then they’re overstaying their – they call it – we call it visa overstaying, but it’s not really visa overstaying. What role does CBP have in at least keeping track of that or maybe policing it at some point? How does that work?
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: Sure. So we play a very critical role. CBP – and I won’t get into really all the details because I don’t want to give up all the secrets – excuse me – but we have the import-export data. We have the commercial airlines data. Any time you leave the country, in many cases you are registering your exit, even though we don’t have a fully built out, you know, exit registration process, which we’re working towards.
MR. KRIKORIAN: I’m going to ask about that next. (Laughs.)
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: Yeah. At the ports of entry, when someone checks out of the country, they’re supposed to turn in their I-94. They can do it online now as well. There’s some apps that we’re using. CBP Home, for example, you can record your exit because it’s GPS-enabled so we know where you’re using the app from. But we use all that data in a way that we’ve never done it. But, like, we had it, but now we actually have time to do something with it. So we are routinely going through that data and then sharing it with ICE so that they know additional targets. So they have plenty of targets currently ordered removed, all the above. But we layer that information on with ICE so that they know who’s still here, or who do we think is still here, what’s the last address we had for them, what other information do we have, so that they can go out there. Because when you think about time invested in a process, when you go to arrest somebody 90 percent of the time commitment is figuring out where they’re at. The arrest is actually pretty quick once you can find them and you decide where you’re going to make the arrest. So we’re using all of that data to help narrow down the amount of time ICE – first off, to figure out who it is, and then narrow down the amount of time ICE has to invest finding the person. And then they can go out and make a quicker arrest, and then that snowballs as well.
MR. KRIKORIAN: So you’re referring to exit tracking of visitors. Congress, I think now it’s, I don’t know, 2020, five years ago, they required the development of an electronic check-in/checkout system for foreign visitors – entry-exit system.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: Yeah.
MR. KRIKORIAN: The entry part has gotten a lot better since 9/11. I mean, it really is a lot better. The exit part, not so much. And you said, you know, people fly out of the country, then there is a kind of way to know they’re leaving. If they’re going to Canada, there’s a way, because their entry systems, our exit system – or at least it has been; I’d love to hear about that too – but if they’re going to Mexico by land, how do we know if they’ve left? I mean, are there – are you guys working on, like, facial recognition, or what? What’s the status of that?
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: We’re working on a bunch of different concepts and technology. Some are being tested currently. But it’s the same struggle we always have, because border security is national security but economic security is a big part of national security as well, and there’s a border aspect to it. So the cross-border flow both north and south keeps our economy – on both borders, actually – keeps the economy of the U.S. running. So we’re always trying to balance the investments.
And then, from a law enforcement perspective – and this is just now my perspective – I’m always way more worried about who’s going to sneak into my house in the middle of the night than who’s going to sneak out of it.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Yeah, yeah. Sure.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: So our priority is focused on making sure that we really know who’s entering our home. And then, to the extent we have additional bandwidth, meaning that Congress actually comes through and funds us – which, as you know, has been a problem – then we will invest more in the outbound as well. So we’re trying to figure out the tools we have.
But you hit it. The land border itself, because Mexico doesn’t have a really meaningful, robust system – and they’re working with us better than ever before, but that doesn’t mean I necessarily trust their systems and plug into them. How do we do that without slowing down the flow, without literally – like, I always use an example like California, for example, San Ysidro. How do we create a system where we know who’s leaving the country with a pretty high level of confidence without backing up traffic to San Francisco in about two days?
MR. KRIKORIAN: Right, the way it’s backed up south of the border trying to get into the country.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: It would be almost worse.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Right. Interesting, interesting. The thing is, you’re right in the sense that, obviously, you want to know who’s in your country or who’s getting into your country. But from a policy perspective, my sense is – and I don’t know this for a fact, but I suspect it’s true – that the vast majority of new illegal immigration today is visa overstays because it’s harder to get across the border. It’s going to be harder to get through ports of entry fraudulently or something. And so most new illegal aliens are going to be visa overstays. So it’s important, even if per CBP maybe it doesn’t matter, for DHS in general it really does matter. You got to know who’s left to know who’s still here.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: Correct, and we don’t compartmentalize when it comes to that last part. What matters to ICE does matter to me. What matters to DOJ does matter to me. It’s whole of government, it’s put America first, and it’s all of the above. You still have to prioritize, but CBP does a lot to make sure that other agencies have the information they need. And we help other agencies to the maximum extent we can because it’s all the same mission to just protect America.
MR. KRIKORIAN: So before the readjustment of tactics after Minneapolis, Border Patrol was pretty involved in interior enforcement, which is, as – you tell me, but my understanding was that was relatively unusual. So what’s Border Patrol’s role now at all, if any, in the kind of interior enforcement we were seeing last year?
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: So this is how we – I’ll explain how we got into it and then we’re doing now. For years the focus, the threat has been right at the border, even in Trump 45. Right at the border, slowing down that flow, sealing the border. For the first time ever in my experience, during this administration we really just shut down that flow. We went from 18,000 illegal entries a day that we actually put hands on while leaving hundreds – actually, thousands of miles of border completely unmanned, so we have no idea what really came in. We shifted from that to actually having a very high level of confidence along the entire border, because we deployed military personnel and Border Patrol agents back to the border and reduced it to below – I think for a while there was about less than 200 illegal entries across the southwest border on a 24-hour period on average. We’re still below about 300. And that freed up an ability we never had before.
Every other administration my whole career, ICE and everybody came to help us. They were manning stations. They were helping us at checkpoints. They were out in the field. We just did the opposite this time. We knew that millions, tens of millions of illegal aliens had poured across the border. ICE had more targets, known ordered deported targets, than they had ever had before. And we also knew you have to have consequences to crime or it won’t stop.
So we had a short time window to prove to the world we were serious this time. You’re not going to just cross the little border and then get away. So we surged significant resources, both CBP officers and Border Patrol agents, to help ICE with known targets around the country. And we were deployed – Minneapolis got a lot of attention, but we are deployed to, and still are, to countless cities across the entire United States, working hand in hand with ICE.
After Minneapolis we stepped back from that for a couple of different reasons, but not the least of which was the target deck is actually slowing down. ICE has hired a ton of new people, and then we are constantly reevaluating how do we target. We’ve gotten better at actually minimizing what I talked about a minute ago, about how long it takes to find somebody. We’ve refined a lot of the information we have, so it’s now not having to spend days on end to find one person because we’re refining those targeting packages, if you will. When I say “we,” that’s mostly ICE in this case. But we help quite a bit with that, so that when they go out to arrest somebody that arrest is taking place where we choose, not in a 7-Eleven, not on a street, so you just don’t see the chaos.
The second reason we deployed more Border Patrol agents to help ICE was the chaos. So we were helping them initially, but then we were going out and we were going to arrest someone, and all of a sudden chaos would break loose. We’d have all these protesters. We would have to send in another team –
MR. KRIKORIAN: As security –
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: – to actually protect the arrest team, and then sometimes even a second what we called – we ended up creating what we called QRFs, quick reaction forces. And they would be on standby because it was so predictable that you were going to have these different issues pop up. Once the state and local stepped up, even in Minneapolis, and actually started just doing their job – which was if one of our people got assaulted they responded and arrested somebody, or if we were being attacked or blocked in they would just respond and do their own job – we didn’t ask them to do immigration. I think you remember, I went up with Tom, so I was sitting there talking to the local officials. And once they started doing their own job, a lot of that chaos stopped and we didn’t need the resources there anymore. We’re still making arrests there every day, but you just don’t see the chaos because the state and local stepped up to help do their own job.
MR. KRIKORIAN: So I asked about cooperation with Mexico. How about with Canada? Because there’s been various, you know, higher-level disagreements with Canada that’s going on. How is – at the border level, how is cooperation with Canada?
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: At the border we get along great with Canada. There’s always different issues, different challenges. We wish they were a little bit better on some information sharing, but both countries have their own laws, are kind of constrained. But I have meetings with CBSA, the CEP (ph), or the Customs equivalent in Canada, on a regular basis – and with the RCMP, which is kind of like their Border Patrol. It’s more of a federal police, as you know, but.
MR. KRIKORIAN: The Mounties.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: They have my cellphone. I have theirs. We talk quite often. We get along pretty well.
MR. KRIKORIAN: So one of the things that Border Patrol has, you know, I don’t say boasted of, but you know, said that they haven’t been releasing anybody, the Border Patrol hasn’t. There have been no releases. But is that – some people have been released that you transfer to ICE, and then they get released, right? I mean, does that happen, too, or is –
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: That could happen. There’s always a case every now and then where they’re a family or whatever that’s in ICE custody. I won’t have details about that. But traditionally, over my entire career, large groups of people, because there was nowhere to put them, no detention space or whatever even before the Biden administration, would get a notice to appear. They would get set up for a court hearing, and then they would get a notice to appear on their own recognizance. That’s ended.
So right now, if you’re arrested by United States Border Patrol – I think we just put out a couple of videos that even had a clock on it to just show the public how fast we’re returning these people to their own countries. We’re making conscious decisions about who we prosecute and who we don’t prosecute. Some of it is for deterrence. Most of it – well, all of it is really bigger picture deterrence. That is why we prosecute. I have to remind people all the – all the time. The only reason that we prosecute people is to create deterrence, and it’s really expensive. So if you can create deterrence to committing a crime, whether it’s speeding, bank robbery, or illegal immigration, if you can do it without the entire prosecution piece and incarceration, that’s the goal, right? So some of the videos we’re putting out are really to show people how quickly we turn them around.
But in the last 12 months, U.S. Border Patrol has not had to release anybody on their own recognizance whatsoever. When we release them – we’re not releasing them – when we – well, when we release them it’s in another country off an airplane or at the border, or they’re getting transferred to either the U.S. Marshals Service if it’s a federal prosecution or to ICE if there’s some other actual prosecution. But again, the difference right now is ICE has bed space, and we’re managing that. They’re looking at building more out, but right now we’ve sped up the deportation process to actually beat the import – the illegal importation, if you want to call it that, right?
MR. KRIKORIAN: So you’re turning people out faster than they’re coming in, right.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: My whole career, more were coming in than we could get rid of. We have flipped that upside down, and we’re getting rid of more now than are coming in. So we haven’t needed to release people.
MR. KRIKORIAN: So the prosecution thing is interesting because at various times in past administrations, for instance in the Bush administration, they had tried to, like, prosecute everybody in certain areas of the border. And the point was, even if it was misdemeanors, I mean, they just all – they’d bring them in 10 or 20 at a time, they would all plead guilty, they’d get time served, because the point was not to put them in jail but to get a criminal record. What’s the – are you guys doing that? What is your thinking about prosecuting people for the crime of illegally crossing the border without inspection?
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: So if there’s not a consequence to a crime, they’re going to continue it, right? So think about in any city if – and this is what we were doing before – if you got pulled over for speeding and the cop just told you to please slow down, but you knew and you learned over time you’re never getting a ticket, would you care, right? Would it – so we want the prosecutions, but more than the prosecutions we want to create the deterrence to keep it from happening again like I mentioned a minute ago.
So Border Patrol specifically created this. We called it a – I don’t remember what we called it, basically a menu where we would track everything we did, whether it was an expedited removal, an actual prosecution. We used to do what we called lateral repatriation, so you would take an alien from San Diego and repatriate them through somewhere in Texas. But we were for the year systematically tracking that. And then how long did it take before we ever saw that person again, or did we? And over years and years and years, nothing really beats prosecutions.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Really? OK.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: And the other piece of it is a 1325 prosecution doesn’t really do – that’s an illegal entry, so, sorry. Most of the time the illegal alien’s getting time served and they’re getting released pretty quick. They don’t really even understand the difference between that and maybe just being in detention for a couple days. But it creates a record in their formal deport, and you cannot prosecute somebody for felony reentry if you haven’t prosecuted them for the 1325. So we want to get that on record for the deterrence and for building the case long term.
But right now, what hamstrung us before? Bandwidth, right? Whenever we did this, there’s always more cases to prosecute. Almost in any city even today, there’s more crimes that took place than the U.S. attorneys or even state and local prosecutors can actually push through the system. So you have to start prioritizing, and then at some point you just – you tip. When we had the massive numbers of illegal immigrants, we just couldn’t do it.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Right, obviously.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: But right now we’re prosecuting everybody we possibly can. If we – if we don’t prosecute somebody, it’s because we’ve made a conscious decision that we just wanted to deport them because we thought if we could deport them to a third country, or whatever the issue was, that that would have a bigger impact not just on them returning, but on the messaging for everybody else that you really don’t want to waste your money right now, pay a smuggler, give up your life’s savings to come to the United States. Sometimes that trip takes forever and you’re out of here in 24 to 48 hours. This is not a good investment.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Yeah. Actually, we have a post today on our site quoting something you had said to that effect: How much money do you want to spend – to give a smuggler in order to end up in federal prison or something? So, yeah. Right.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: Prison or home, but not here.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Yeah.
So we have – there’s another question related to this third-country deportation. It’s kind of interesting to me, is have you found that – sorry about that. Let me –
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: At least it wasn’t me.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Yeah, no. (Laughs.) Have you found that when people show up, do they know that they could end up in South Sudan or something if they’re not from there? I mean, have you got a sense where, I don’t know, some Honduran comes – somebody that – presumably Honduras takes its people back, but someplace that doesn’t take its people back, do you tell them, look, do you really want to end up in, I don’t know, Cameroon, or do you want to just go home?
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: Honestly, I haven’t asked that question. I would be speculating a little bit but I would say probably not, because most people, if they actually understood that – which is what the messaging we’re trying to send –
MR. KRIKORIAN: Who would be doing it in the first place, right.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: I – won’t come. A lot of people have gotten that message, which is why we’re not seeing the massive illegal immigration. So we’re just going to make sure that that message keeps going out.
MR. KRIKORIAN: So last question I want to ask is kind of a general one. You were in the Border Patrol for a long time. You’re now sort of overseeing – kind of in charge of the guys in charge of the Border Patrol. Has the mood changed? And how has the mood changed, not just in the past year and a half but maybe sort of broadly over time? What is your sense about the morale and, you know, kind of just sense of what, how the Border Patrol agents see their jobs.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: I think it’s changed dramatically, and I’ll give you a couple of times because you asked much more broadly.
When I joined the Border Patrol, for the first I don’t remember how many years it was illegal immigration, but in my mind that just meant migrant, like, farmworkers, because that’s kind of what you heard and that’s a little bit about what I saw, because I started my career out in San Diego and it was very seasonal. You’d have massive influxes in the spring and you’d see trucks going south around Thanksgiving, and narcotics smuggling. So it wasn’t until 9/11 hit that I realized there were other threats.
So, when 9/11 hit, I got pulled out of the field and I got sent to Washington, D.C., and I got asked to help set up this new office called Antiterrorism. And then I was one of the first agents to get pushed over onto the high side, basically working with CIA, NSA, these different agencies to build out a national terrorism strategy, antiterrorism strategy. And I got exposed to things that I was – made me angry. I was like, how could I be a Border Patrol agent on the line for all these years and no one told me about these other threats that are going on right in front of me.
And then that’s when I woke up that this isn’t about migrant illegal immigration, this isn’t about narcotics; this is literally about knowing and controlling who and what comes into our home. And you have to know. You have to just admit to yourself no matter where you are on the political spectrum there are people in this world, there are complete nations that hate us. They hate our way of life, whatever reasons. You don’t have to like it. It just works, right, so it’s just how it is. So I got exposed to nation-state threats, I got exposed to terrorist threats, and then I started seeing how the cartel, it was – it happened right in front of me and I didn’t click on it early in my career, how they intentionally used the immigrants. Whatever the cheapest thing and the most renewable resource to them was to keep us busy, and then they would run the narcotics right behind us. Or whatever – actually, it wasn’t just narcotics. Anytime you caught that second wave of people, it was almost always criminals. It was people that were smart enough to pay extra to not run the risk of running into law enforcement because they knew there was something there.
9/11 changed a lot of that and made a lot of agents – and even inside CBP it started making us message different that, hey, this is about national – your job really is national security. Border security is national security. And a bunch of people back then, like, pushed back, like you’re just trying to use a catchphrase. And I’m like, explain to me how it’s not. If you can’t control who and what comes into your own personal home, you have no security. You’re fooling yourself otherwise. If we can’t control who and what comes into our national home. So it upped the ante, if you will. And a lot of agents like myself that thought it was a great job, a lot of fun, all of a sudden you’re like, wait a minute, this is way more important. Like, I was having fun in the canyons, ATVs, or whatever, this is way more important.
And then you fast forward and you go through a few iterations, but the Trump administration came in, and it came in off of a low, to be quite honest, where law enforcement was beat up. You were kind of a second-class citizen if you were a cop. You’re got all these allegations. And all of a sudden you had a commander in chief that was your champion. I would argue Trump 47 just took what Trump 45 was – and I’m not trying to be political; this is just how law enforcement looks at it. And I’ll tell you, there’s some metrics you can look at to back this up. All of a sudden, they’re just like, yes, this matters. I want to serve, I want to give back, and I know the country cares.
Why do I say that? Because our recruitment numbers are off the chart, and so is every other law enforcement agency. We got a lot of money through OB3 to hire 3,000 more Border Patrol agents plus 2,000 that were already funded in prior that we couldn’t get. The money was there, but there weren’t any applicants, and then 5,000 new CBP officers. But now we’re exceeding every one of our recruiting goals. Our academy is packed out, both on the of OFO and on the Border Patrol side. And every other law enforcement agency I talk to talks about the same thing. Rhetoric does matter. When people know the job’s important and they’re supported and they’re going to be backed up, they’ll sign up and do it. So I think those are all indications that morale is pretty good.
Oh, and then I – last thing. I have this couple websites I let agents and officers, like, send me stuff direct, little complaints or whatever. And they’re – I don’t know a better word; I apologize – but it’s kind of like a little bitching. It’s like little petty things. And I’m like, awesome, because there’s no –
MR. KRIKORIAN: Because they’re not complaining about big things, yes.
COMMISSIONER SCOTT: They have enough time now, right, they’re focused on this little micro issue as opposed to, like, the things they were complaining about before, because we’re letting them do their job and we’re getting them the equipment they need. And hopefully later today Congress will freaking pay for them, and we’ll get there. Sorry. That was part of the –
MR. KRIKORIAN: (Laughs.) Thank you, Rodney Scott, commissioner of CBP. Really appreciate it. This – for those of you watching live, if you missed some of it, it’ll all be on our website, CIS.org. And I hope you’ll come to our next Immigration Newsmaker interview, which I can’t tell you about yet because it’s not set but we’re definitely going to have another one. So, Rodney, thank you. Thank you, Mark. Appreciate it. Good to see you.
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