The most recent national leader of the U.S. Border Patrol said the Biden administration has not treated the federal law enforcement organization properly and that its opposition to agents’ mission poses dangers to the country.
Rodney Scott, who involuntarily left his post as chief in August, recently spoke with the Washington Examiner about his fear that the Border Patrol’s mandate from Congress has been undermined or frustrated under the Biden administration and the effects it is having on agents and the nation.
“I’m very worried about ‘those left behind,’” Scott said. “It’s not that I left the Border Patrol behind. It’s that the Biden administration and [Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas] have clearly walked away from border security, and their public statements have left the Border Patrol behind.”
Scott noted that President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Mayorkas, and other administration leaders immediately condemned Border Patrol agents mounted on horses for “whipping” migrants in Del Rio, Texas, in September. Video of the incident shows agents did not use whips on the Haitian migrants, and agents are not issued whips.
The latest “assault,” he said, was the mandate that agents get vaccinated for COVID-19, though all federal employees, not just the Border Patrol, are required to get the shots or face termination. Approximately 1,000 of the Border Patrol’s more than 19,000 agents “are probably going to get fired” because they are not and will not get vaccinated, Scott said. The quadruple-digit firings would hurt the Border Patrol’s ability to maintain a physical presence on the borders or respond to astronomically high numbers of migrants being encountered at the southern border daily.
“I don’t want to speculate on the rationale or the reasons behind some of these decisions, whether it be the border security decision or the vaccine decision, but what I can tell you is from my experience,” Scott said. “Unlike some of the other people, Secretary Mayorkas is a very intelligent, very informed individual. He’s been part of DHS for a long time. He knows the implications and ramifications of the decisions he’s making and he continues to go along and make those decisions even if in private, he will tell you — and I was in some of those discussions that he agreed with the Border Patrol, for example.”
The Washington Examiner first reported in June that Scott would retire after 18 months in his position as chief, but it was not a normal retirement despite his 29 years in the patrol. Scott was told to resign, retire, or relocate.
Scott had privately expressed frustration after the Biden administration ordered federal law enforcement to stop using the term “illegal alien,” according to an internal document leaked to the Washington Examiner. Ahead of the April 19 announcement of the change in language from Troy Miller, the temporary leader of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Scott sent an internal memo to his superior criticizing the decision to replace immigration terms with ones seen as less offensive.
“I was accused of getting sucked into the politics. I argue that’s not true. I had the same position on border security from 1992 to 2021, regardless of the party. And I try to remind people that it’s about the Constitution, and about the sovereignty of the nation, not what’s on Fox News or what’s on MSNBC, but that’s getting harder and harder to do,” he said.
Scott, who last week joined the Texas Public Policy Foundation in Austin, Texas, said that the present circumstances will extract a high price from the organization as agents “do the processing and transport for all these thousands, up to 6,000 a day, that are being encountered.”
“Every single time we hit something like this, the Border Patrol not only survives, they come out better and stronger. But this time it’s not going to be without a lot of pain and suffering,” he said. “There’s a lot of agents that are electing to retire early. I continue through my own contacts to try to convince them not to do that. ‘Don’t give in,’ if you will. I’ve talked to and continue to talk to a lot of the Border Patrol leadership and try to pump them up and remind them that the mission is more important, that the mission is solid and it will be there forever, and not to get sucked into the politics.”
The mission, he said, is not about stopping illegal immigration but national security.
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“It’s not about the Haitians at the bridge. It’s about the whole system and how everybody is focusing on the Haitians allows the cartel, or even terrorists or another nation-state or whatever, to just cross our borders at will, in other locations. That’s a real threat,” said Scott.
