Politics

US Border Patrol Chief Blames ‘Outdated Laws’ And Lack Of Consequences For Border Chaos

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U.S. Border Patrol Chief Brian Hastings called America’s immigration laws outdated on “Fox & Friends” Friday, and said those crossing the border aren’t facing real consequences.

“As of yesterday, 440,000 apprehensions along the southwest border, [it’s] very concerning for us,” he said.

“You’re talking historically 70 to 90 percent of those that we were arresting we could quickly return to the contiguous Mexico, whereas today we’re seeing up to 83 percent of those coming across the border from the northern triangle and about 63 percent of those are family units and children. Which we basically have no consequence that we can apply [to] that group. So, we see these numbers continue to rise with the outdated laws that we currently have in place. We need changes there, so we can apply a consequence to be able to affect that demographic.”

Hastings also said the lack of legal consequence emboldens illegal immigrants to cross the southern border and said the border patrol agency has become overwhelmed.

“Like I said before, there is no consequence that we can apply to this group currently. We’re overwhelmed. If you look at the agents on the border they’re doing a tremendous job trying to deal with this flow and this amount of family units. Our facilities weren’t built for this type of demographic. We have added a lot of medical assistants down to the southwest border. We’ve surged agents. We’ve got the office of field operations assisting as well,” he said.

“The Department of Defense is assisting but … they’re short-term solutions where we need a change in the current outdated laws that we’re dealing with for this current demographic and this crisis that we have.”

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