EXCLUSIVE — Border Patrol agents are lining up at the chance to leave the border and temporarily deploy to United States cities to re-arrest illegal immigrants whom they were forced to release into the country by the Biden administration.
U.S. Border Patrol Chief Mike Banks shared in an interview with the Washington Examiner that federal agents who lived through the nation’s historic border crisis between 2021 and 2024 are fired up at the opportunity to go after people they knew should never have been let into the United States in the first place.
“We have a significant amount of United States Border Patrol agents assisting [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] on op-at-larges in multiple cities, not just Chicago’s and LA’s,” Banks said on Wednesday. “Twenty-seven plus cities across this country where we are working on the interior. … We have a long list of volunteers volunteering to go on those assignments.”
The 27-city deployment is far broader than previously disclosed by Border Patrol, part of the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency.
The border crisis not only ended and returned to normal levels of illegal immigration attempts when President Donald Trump took office, but the number of people caught attempting to enter the country from Mexico illegally has plunged to levels not seen in more than five decades.
It has freed up the Border Patrol to have the time and resources to assist ICE with its interior mission of arresting, detaining, and deporting illegal immigrants. Trump has vowed to carry out the nation’s “largest-ever” deportation.
It’s good for morale, Banks said, but added that the deployments were about more than just helping ICE; they were about agents getting a chance to right a wrong.
“Nothing could be better for morale than allowing a Border Patrol agent to go into the interior and look for those people that they were forced to release into this country, knowing that it was a safety threat to America,” Banks said.
“They are lined up with the opportunity to say, ‘I now get to go apprehend and provide a consequence for people that the Biden administration made me release into this country claiming that they were vetted, knowing good and well that the Biden administration was lying to the American people and they weren’t being vetted because they couldn’t be vetted because the countries they were coming from refused to share that information with us,'” Banks said.
During the first three years of the Biden administration, between 100,000 and 250,000 illegal immigrants were apprehended attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border between ports of entry per month.
Families are not legally permitted to be detained by Border Patrol or ICE for more than 20 days, which is not enough time for their cases to be heard by an immigration judge, and forces federal law enforcement to release them into the country to show up for court down the road.
Similarly, law enforcement was so overwhelmed with the number of people coming across the border per day that they were unable to vet the identities and criminal records of adults who crossed the border unlawfully during the Biden administration.
At the height of the crisis, agents were overwhelmed apprehending people and processing them, and millions of people were released almost immediately, often onto the street.
In numerous instances seen since that time period during the Biden administration, individuals who posed as minors or claimed to be coming for economic purposes were only determined to be criminals after being released.
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A 20-year-old Maryland woman, Kayla Hamilton, was murdered in her home in July 2022 by a man who was released at the border after posing as an unaccompanied child.
Hamilton’s since-convicted killer was determined soon after her murder to be an adult who was affiliated with the MS-13 gang, raising questions from House lawmakers as to why he was released into the country at the border rather than removed.
