移民事務焦點人物訪談：與美邊境巡邏隊長班克斯的對話

Hello, my name is Mark Krikorian. I'm the Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies. And this is another in our news maker series of interviews with people who are instrumental in our immigration policy. Today's guest is Michael Banks, who is the 27th Chief of the U.S. Border Patrol. Mike is a Georgia native who has a long career in law enforcement. Was in the Navy, was basically a cop. I don't think they call them SPs anymore. My dad briefly was an SP during World War II, but was in law enforcement in the Navy. And then spent 23 years in the Border Patrol. I looked at his bio. He apparently did a lot of the things. He rode horses and boats and went into tunnels, I guess, or at least checked them out. As well as management leadership type positions. I'm going to ask him a little bit about his background. But he retired in 2023 because of the Biden administration's policy of basically turning the Border Patrol into Walmart greeters at the border. And was Texas Border Czar for two years. And so with the arrival of the new administration, he returned to the Border Patrol, now as Chief. So thanks for coming in, Chief. I really appreciate it. And the first thing I think I'd like to ask before I get to what's happening at the border. You were out of the Border Patrol for two years, but still working on border type stuff because you were Border Czar in Texas. Did that give you kind of a different perspective that, say, if you had stayed in the Border Patrol maybe the whole time, you wouldn't have had? So I think it did give me a different perspective. And it gave me a perspective looking at it from a state level and the impact that it's having on the state. My entire career, I looked at everything as the big picture, not necessarily how it impacted individual states. And so it really opened up my eyes to the direct impact at the state level. So why did you leave? I mean, I can impute why you left, but why do you think you left? What do you want to say about that? No, I'll tell you the same thing I tell every agent when I meet with them. I made a decision that I did not feel that I could honor the oath that I took as a Border Patrol agent and abide by the policies that the Biden administration put into place. I felt those policies usurp the law. And as someone who had been in law enforcement since I was 17, I just didn't feel I could honor my oath. And so I got an opportunity to go to Texas and apply my knowledge and experience of years in the Border Patrol and years of law enforcement at the state level to try to help protect the state of Texas. So now about what's going on at the border. Obviously a huge difference, 90 plus percent drop in illegal crossings. Just to begin with, why? What happened? So, you know, you heard a lot over the previous four years that we needed new laws to secure the border, right? We've already proven that's not true. We didn't have one single change in law since January the 21st that applies to the Immigration and Nationalization Act. What we simply needed was an administration that would allow Border Patrol agents to enforce the law. And the reason why your border is secure now is because this administration, from President Trump to Secretary Nome and to Commissioner Rodney Scott, is they've empowered the Border Patrol to go out and do exactly what we know how to do, which is enforce the law. And so imagine this. If you know that if you give up everything in your home and you make this long treacherous journey and you arrive at this country and you come in illegally, that there will be zero consequence. Why would you not come? And so we're back to delivering consequences. If you come, you're going to be apprehended. If you're apprehended, you're going to be prosecuted for whatever crimes you violated. And when you're done serving that time, you're going to be returned to your home country or a safe third country. And so once you take the pull factor away, you take the benefit of breaking the law away and you provide a consequence for breaking that law, that controls a lot of the traffic that you see. Now one of the things is you had talked about, this was a tweet or something, that there had been zero releases of people apprehended at the border. And the releases is one of the things that's attracting people like you had suggested. One of the reasons it was hard to do zero releases was if you have huge numbers of people, where are you going to put them all? When you have lower numbers of people, it's easier to do that. So it seems to me almost like a chicken and the egg thing because if you don't have space to hold everybody, then you're letting people go and more people are going to come. So why was it that were you detaining everybody at the beginning or do you think that it was kind of a Trump effect where people were terrified, fewer people came over and that enabled you to basically catch up with the problem? Do you see what I mean? So I always say words matter. When you're speaking, words matter. And when you're sending a message that there will be no consequence for your action, you're going to see everyone take advantage of that. When you start showing, not just saying, but showing that there's going to be consequences for your action, that helps. The biggest thing with crime control, and I refer to illegal immigration as crime control, it is deterrence. It goes back to a speed limit. Why do you choose to abide by the speed limit? Well, you got two daughters in college and you really don't want your insurance to go up when you get a speeding ticket. If that's enough consequence to keep the average American from violating the speeding law, imagine the consequence of not being released and being prosecuted and returned back to your country. Why would you make that trip? Why would you give up everything you own and make that trip to come here if you don't believe that you're going to be released? And one of the things that I talked about was my last week on the job before I left under the Biden administration was I decided I was going to go out the way I came in. I'm not going to wear my collar devices. I'm just going to go out there and patrol the river for one full week. And it reaffirmed that I was making the right decision and leaving and going to the state at that time because I remember that every illegal alien I encountered in my career, when I would arrest them and start asking them the questions that we asked, one of the questions was, why are you coming here? And almost every single person I ever apprehended had a reason, a destination and an excuse for why they chose to come here illegally. Under my last week in the border patrol in 23, not a single illegal alien knew where they were going or why they were coming. I'm not saying not a single illegal alien that crossed the border didn't have a destination, but I'm telling you, not a single illegal alien that I spoke to in that week. I had an illegal alien, a group of illegal aliens from Columbia that said, where can I go? I'm like, that's not how this works. You came here for a reason. They said, well, I heard that I could go to Florida, but there's too many Colombians in Florida, so I don't really want to go to Florida. I don't want to go too far north because it's too cold. So where's somewhere in the middle I could go to? And I was like, you literally believe that we're a travel agency and that we're here to accommodate furthering your entry into the country. And then I thought about it and I said, you know what, that's what we've been converted into. And so it reaffirmed that I needed to go out and needed to fight that fight from the state of Texas. And I can tell you now, the overwhelming majority of people that are crossing the border illegally are criminals that are trying to evade arrest. If you look at December of 2023, we had a record number of entries in one single day, which was around 12,000 people. 12,000 people entering and 6,000 of them came through Eagle Pass, which in a matter of three days, you had doubled the population of Eagle Pass. The system was so backed up that when the migrants were being released, they were walking to San Antonio from Eagle Pass along the highway. And so you look at the number now, 7-day average, 152. You look at the number of getaways, thousands of people were getting away every day. And back then, it was even a bigger concern than getaways are today. Getaways are a big concern for us because they are the unknown, but thousands of people were getting away. Why would you avoid apprehension by the United States Border Patrol if you could simply surrender and be released? Because those thousands of people didn't qualify for a release because they came from a country that shared their information with us and they knew that they would not clear Betty. Amongst the thousands that were released, there's not a day go by that our teams under operation at large along with ICE, operation Midway Blitz in Chicago, that at least one person a day we don't arrest is someone that was released by the United States government under the claim that they were vetted and they were cleared. Just two days ago, a Brazilian wanted for multiple murders. A serial murderer in Brazil was captured and released by the United States government because Brazil just didn't share that information with us back then. Interesting. You mentioned prosecutions. That's something that's... Generally speaking, they haven't prosecuted people for jumping the border. It's a misdemeanor if it's your first offense, a felony later. But there have been like experiments in certain parts of the border where they prosecute people. Have you guys committed to... Well, it's not your decision, really. It's the U.S. attorney's. But has... Is there being 100% prosecution now or what's the story with that? I can tell you right now our prosecution rate is about 93%. Wow, OK. That's unprecedented, isn't it? It's... If you would have told me nine months ago that we were going to get a 93% prosecution rate, I would have said, yeah, I don't believe you. But I'm seeing it. And I think one of the things that... And you said, you know, it is up to the attorney. But I think if you look at something that I think is very important... I was just talking about this with leadership at a leadership meeting at our training center two days ago. And my entire career in the Border Patrol, you would always hear the words whole-of-government approach. We're going to take a whole-of-government approach, meaning that we're going to bring every resource in the U.S. government to bear on a problem in this country. I'd never seen it. I'd heard about it a lot. I can tell you right now for the first time in my career in uniform and from the military up to here, going on 36 years now, I'm seeing a whole-of-government approach. How did we get there? We got there because we had an administration that said we're not going to accept no for an answer. You're going to enforce the laws. If you need more attorneys, we're going to find more attorneys. If you need more agents, we're going to find more agents. I remember we were talking. I had a supervisor at one of these meetings yesterday raised his hand, and he said, You know, sir, it used to be when an agent was assaulted, we tried to prosecute this individual for assaulting an agent. Three questions always came from the U.S. attorney's office. How many hours is the agent going to lose off of work for the injury? Is the agent going to be hospitalized and was there blood drawn? If the answers were no, they didn't bother? They didn't bother, right? And what message did that send, right? It sent an increase in violence against our agents. That's not the case. We just have to suffer prosecution from someone the other day for spinning on an agent, right? And so what we said was this isn't going to be tolerated anymore. There has to be consequences. Consequences equal deterrence. And so we're truly seeing a whole-of-government approach. And another good example of that is we've seen, you know, drug boats that have been disabled are completely disintegrated in the Gulf of America or off the coast of Colombia near national waters. It is a message. Do not bring those harmful drugs into this country. We're not going to tolerate that anymore. And I can tell you that we've had Mexican cartels say, you know, we're going to hold off going up the coast. But it wasn't by chance that we were on the coast. We knew as we squeezed that balloon on our land borders that that traffic was going to move to the littorals. And so we planned ahead of that and we prepared for that. And so I have never seen a whole-of-government approach in my career until January the 21st and moving forward. And it's truly a whole-of-government approach. And so you referred to people smuggling, kind of going around the land border by boat, both for drugs but also now for people, which is relatively unusual. Is that... Now, that's a new challenge in a sense, but there's only so many people you can move in a boat. I mean, doesn't that just make the problem easier? In other words, even though you're squeezing the balloon, what they're doing isn't... just can't... it's got to be easier to stop and it's a smaller problem. Or maybe not. Well, it is a smaller problem. It's easier in the sense that once you locate the target, being able to interdict that target and those bodies are confined to that boat versus being wide open along the land border. Well, that's true. They can't scatter. Right. Much more difficult in locating that target because it's such a wide swath of land. And then when you come through ship channels in major cities, major port cities like San Diego or L.A., they try to blend in with that regular shipping traffic. And so it's identifying the illicit traffic and then being able to target it. But once you've identified it, much easier for interdiction. So another... if you're squeezing the balloon to continue the metaphor, there's another whole border which is, what, 4,000 or 5,000 miles long with Canada. Has the illegal crossings increased there? And isn't that a... that's kind of a different nut to crack, isn't it? Because it's just so much bigger and remote. So the northern border, we have seen an increase in apprehensions. Based on our data collection, we don't believe we've seen an increase in entries. Oh, OK. We believe we've seen a decrease in entries. But what you have is at one point, at a large period of time over the four years in the Biden administration, you had 75% of all of your law enforcement agents assigned to the northern border, temporarily assigned to the northern border to assist... I'm sorry, to the southern border to assist in processing. And so what you have now is, as you're seeing more apprehensions but less crossings, it's because you actually have the border patrol agents out there on the ground conducting law enforcement operations and interdicting it. We know for a fact that less drugs are crossing our border. But we watch our seizures go up. And so the message that should send is that during the previous four years, those large seizures we're seeing were the large seizures that weren't happening and they were getting to the United States and they were infecting our communities, right? We all know what the opioid crisis is doing to this country because they had free reign. You typically never interdicted a large, hard narcotic load crossing the border. They were all small loads. In between the ports of entry? In between the ports of entry. You would see large amounts of marijuana. But when it came to hard narcotics, fentanyl, heroin, cocaine, you didn't see large seizures being pushed across a river because the risk was too high. During the previous four years is when you started seeing large amounts of hard narcotics because they felt very confident and very comfortable they were able to get them north due to the lack of interdiction. So not only have we been able to return our northern border agents back to their northern border, but as part of the Big Beautiful Bill, we were funded for an additional 3,000 agents. And the expectation is that we're going to right-size the northern border with enough agents to continue doing what they're doing. The northern border is beneficial to us based on the terrain because it is so rugged and it is miles, if not days, walking a lot of the border along Canada before you can reach a populated area. And so those are places where you don't see a lot of traffic. We're able to monitor those electronically right and respond to that traffic. And then also you have the weather element. When it gets too cold up there, you don't see a lot of traffic moving during those times. And so, yes, we can control the northern border with less resources, at least boots on the ground, but we still got to get right-sized. And so the previous administration didn't just deplete our resources in the forms of technology, vehicles, and it depleted our resources in the way of manpower, too. And so as we're working to get our resources built back up, you're going to see us continue to be more and more effective. So one of the things that's different that this administration has done on the southern border is this national defense area where they basically declared, as I understand it, any federal land along the border to be Department of Defense or War Department land. In other words, even if it's not a military base, and some of them are, which means that MPs can arrest illegal aliens. How is that working? And how is the coordination or whatever with the Border Patrol? Is it seamless? How is that working? So the Department of War, formerly the Department of Defense, has always been involved in border security. I can't think of an administration in my career where we didn't have then DOD, now DO War assisting Border Patrol. What we've done now with the NDA makes us a lot more effective. And so I'll give you an example. Prior to creating this national defense area, if you had military there on the border, they were very limited in what they could do. Observe and report, call us. You would literally have soldiers saying, yes, a group of 30 just crossed. Okay, they're walking past me. All right, they're north of me. They weren't allowed to have any type of interdiction in that. Under the NDA, what we have done... This is a national defense area. Yes, national defense area. What we've done is we have annexed those federal lands and attached them to the nearest base. So now that national defense area is part of that DOD installation. And so while posse cumitatis prevents a Department of War soldier from being able to make an arrest on soil, on U.S. soil, that doesn't include onside a military installation where they can arrest for trespass. And so now it allows the Department of War soldiers to effect a detention, hold them there until an agent is available to come retrieve those bodies. And so in addition to us applying the illegal immigration charges on them, the Department of War can provide the Title 50 charges, which are charges that relate to military installations. Like trespassing? Trespassing, damage to military property. Oh, so if they cut like a fence or something, that becomes an additional offense. Correct. Interesting, interesting. Now this isn't your job, but are they... I mean, as I understood it, usually when they're prosecuting people who are coming across the border, unless they're like real hard cases, bad guys who are smuggling drugs, just regular folks, they usually didn't sentence them to significant jail time. In other words, it was like time served, but the point was you had a prosecution on the record. Are they doing something similar to that, or are some of these people actually serving time? So it depends on the offense, right? I mean, if it is simply crossing the border illegally, there are sentencing guidelines. However, there was a new executive order that just came out a couple of days ago that is creating mandatory minimums for anyone in the country. Oh, really? We're still working on putting that forward. Time served is more of an exception in this administration than it is the rule, because again, we need to send a clear message that if you come, you're going to be apprehended, you're going to be prosecuted, right, and then you're going to be returned. But even time served was much better than what we would have had in the previous administration, because what it does is it establishes a recidivism problem, and so when a person reenters, they can be given a stiffer penalty, right, in order to deliver a greater consequence. Now, one of the changes, I mean, one of the things that you saw under Biden was because this basically invitation went out to the world, you had people hopping planes from Tajikistan and every place coming. I mean, I've been... I remember Yuma at 12-7-8, I think is the name of the area, kind of because of the mile marker. People, you know, just coming across the border, they had to... like a carport to provide shade for the illegal aliens and port-a-potties and drinkable water and all this stuff. There were people from all over. I don't even remember meeting a Mexican. You know, people from the Republic of Georgia, from Angola, from everywhere. Now with things changed, is the flow more like it used to be in the old days, even if it's smaller? In other words, are they mainly Mexican men now? And many of them bad guys because they all want to be gotaways? So I don't know the exact number, but it's just under 200 recognized countries in the world. Right. And under the Biden administration, it was 179 different countries that were crossing our border. Which you wonder what was wrong with the other 20. What were they? I guess Vatican City nobody was seeking to cross the border. I mean, there were countries where we couldn't even find an interpreter for some of these countries and some of the dialects. So, you know, of your 152 daily average that we're seeing right now that we're apprehending, the overwhelming majority is Mexican, then followed by Guatemalan and Honduran. Right. So sort of a return to an older pattern. At a much lower level. But at a much lower level, yeah. The last thing on these numbers that I wanted to ask about is August, the numbers went up a little bit. They'd been going down consistently every single month since the administration took over, went up. Now, it's not that surprising. But what's the reason for that? And is that the kind of thing we're going to be able to expect? In other words, is fluctuation likely that's going to be going up some months? Because it can't go down forever at some point. It's zero, right? Well, that's the goal. I won't be happy until we get it to zero. I'm very proud of the work we've done. I'm very proud of the agents. They're out there every day delivering on it. It was literally like taking the handcuffs off and saying, go do your job. Our goal is zero. I do believe that with the right level of enforcement consequence we can get there. There used to be you could almost set your calendar by when you expected the flow to ebb. Our typical flow... The time of the year kind of? Correct. Our typical ebb and flow was it went with the harvesting seasons of crops. Groups would come over. They would get in illegally, go work, make enough money, get back home and stay until the money ran out and then come back again. I always like to say that every president that I've ever served under or has been a president in my lifetime has done something to advance border security. Some at a much smaller rate, some at a much larger rate. The Biden administration was the first administration I've ever seen that regressed border security, that tore border security down and sent a message, come one, come all. People used to tell me, man, their border policy is a disaster. And my response was, no, this is planned. They know exactly what they're doing and this is planned. And then as we started spinning up toward the election, surprise, surprise, let's see if we can get them all to be able to vote even though it's against the law. And I'm like, OK, that's probably one. I think the census was probably another part of that. But we haven't seen those ebbs and flows under the last administration because it was just a steady flow. So I think it's too early for us to tell if that ebb and flow will come back. But I can tell you this. As soon as we started seeing a slight increase in traffic, we immediately started putting in new things into place in order to ensure that we're going to go back to going in the right direction. I do believe that some of the numbers you look at are the Border Patrol is doing a lot with ICE. We are working with ICE. We have a large number of our agents working in Chicago and Los Angeles and numerous other cities across the United States. And so a lot of times when you get a Border Patrol app, it's quantified as an at-entry app. And so when you see that Border Patrol apprehensions are going up, it's not a direct reflection on the number of people that are crossing the border. It's a direct reflection on the number of apprehensions that we have made. We've gone back to correct our systems to make sure that our systems are identifying the difference between an at-entry app versus someone that has been domiciled in this country. And so that immediately started making a correction on our numbers. And then the other thing that you're seeing is we're doing what we call a reconciliation piece. And what we do is when we apprehend someone on the interior of the United States that is not an at-entry app, we go back through intel collection and try to be able to determine when that person came so that we can associate them with that getaway that we had before in order to reconcile those numbers to ensure that we have accurate numbers. And sometimes it takes days for those numbers to settle. But the very slight increase we saw in August, we were already seeing that number decrease again. And that leads me to think about the kind of political reaction to the success that you have had is that, or at least it seems on some people's part, maybe even in Congress, but also some in the public, they figure, OK, well, the border's fixed. It's like this is all set and, you know, what do we need? Why are we spending all this money? Right. Since we fixed the border. And my sense is, well, but if you stop doing that, then you're unfixing the border. So, I mean, is this something you've sort of had to deal with? I mean, are there... I guess the way to say it is I'm not trying to ask you what you're talking to members of Congress and stuff, but do you get the sense that there are some who are saying, OK, well, this is solved, it's off the table, now we're done, right? So I guess I get the sense that some are going to say it's solved when there's 10,000 people coming across the border a day. And so, which we've seen, the border's secure, and I'm like, I'm not sure what border they're referring to. I will tell you this. The United States Border Patrol would not have been able to get the border as secured as it is today without the help of the Department of War, without the help of DOJ. Look, everyone out there that is a law enforcement officer in the federal government is in some way, shape, or form working on border security right now. Now, as the Border Patrol starts building our resources back up with the funding that we've been given, we want to get back to a point, we will get back to a point where we will control the border without the assistance of all of this support. But you cannot take that support away. And when it comes to finances, there's two things I like to quantify which are the biggest tax savings to America. One is a border wall system. A border wall system has proven time and time again everywhere we've ever built it that it allows you to control a much greater area with a much smaller workforce, right? And so... It increases productivity, basically. It's a force multiplier, right? It allows us to see the traffic coming, to put our agents in the right place at the right time for the interdiction. And so everywhere we've ever built wall, those areas still today are controlled with much less manpower. The border wall pays for itself time and time again. As far as the money we're spending on resources for the Border Patrol and the money we're spending on agents for the Border Patrol, it will get us back to a position where we can do this without the support of the other agencies. We're always going to work together, but without them being so heavily involved in what we're doing, which is going to be a huge cost savings to the taxpayers because when you're employing Border Patrol agents that live in that area, that reside in that area, it's much cheaper than when you're having to temporarily assign people to a location. You're paying lodging and you're paying per diem any time you're able to do that. Additionally, resources that we're getting from both DOD or DOW, or Department of War and other locations is we're getting a lot of technological support that is helping us, such as the ability for them to spot traffic moving in the night, the ability for them to spot traffic moving in the daytime in the form of technology. As we build back up our technology, we can dial back on those resources. And do it ourselves, basically. And do it ourselves and get them back to doing their original mission. But I have to give credit to this administration and truly putting whole-of-government into action and the level of support that we've had. I have 33, 34 years now in uniform and I have never seen the level of can-do, will-do, must-do. Failure is not an option that I've seen right now from this whole-of-government approach. So you mentioned the wall and what's the progress on that? Because, I mean, I went to various places in the wall. I remember in New Mexico we went to a section of the wall where they'd finished the wall and they'd put the doorway in for the gate that's required by the Boundary and Water Commission. But they were told to stop work before they put the gate in. So it was almost like a scene from Blazing Saddles, you know, where they have this toll booth in the middle of the desert and you can just go around it. It's sort of the opposite of that. They have a wall and there's a big gate with nothing there. Are those gaps being filled? Is that the first priority? Anyway, the point is what's going on with the wall? So every gap every day. We're out there. We're turning and burning. It's all gas. No brakes downhill. And getting those gaps filled. We've produced almost 82 miles of wall since January. I want to quantify that, though. We're doing that with money that the prior administration had and the legislative language, the appropriations language said you cannot use this money for anything else. And they just refused it. So this isn't the new money. This isn't the new bill. OK, wow. I will tell you that now that we have the new money, we're going to continue. We're actually, the progress we're making right now is spending the money that the previous administration refused to spend that could only be used for that. And then the additional money, we're going to continue. We're going to continue with our border wall system. And I think it's important if I could take a few minutes to kind of describe what that system is because when people say wall, well, what's a wall going to stop? It's not just a wall. It's all the attributes that come with it. It's ground-based sensors. It's camera systems so that we can see the threat as it's approaching and position ourselves in place. It is actually roads which is one of probably the biggest things we need on the border. There are places along the U.S.-Mexican border where I can sit and look 200 yards away and watch a bundle of narcotics even come over a wall, but I have no way to get there. And so now both of us are racing up to the highway and then it's a pursuit down the highway. And listen, if you run from us, we're going to pursue you. But if I can do anything to prevent a pursuit from happening, it makes it a lot safer for everybody including the community. And so with that wall comes that lateral system to allow agents to be able to rapidly move east and west along that border. And so that's our biggest investment is the wall and the technology that comes with that wall. Build a wall and walk away from it, it does you no good. Build a wall and man it and it's been proven for centuries, right? It is a very effective defense of the nation. So we have a question here, something I wanted to ask also. This is about staffing up. You've got the money for up to 3,000 new agents. Staffing up fast can be a problem. Vetting people, training people. Years ago, you probably weren't in D.C. at the time. I was. The MPD, the local police, staffed up and they did it way too fast, sloppily. They ended up having drug dealers become police officers and it was a total disaster. What's the Border Patrol do? How fast can you staff up? How does that work? So there's a lot of factors when you start talking about manpower and human resources. Let me first talk about our recruiting efforts. We have watched our recruiting numbers set records every month since January. Last month was another record-breaking year with almost 12,000. We believe we're going to break over 14,000 applicants this month. Do you have colleges where you have a percent that are admitted? Right. Do you see what I mean? That was my second point is that the more applicants we have, the tougher we can be in ensuring that we're getting the best top-quality candidates. When you can't pay someone enough bonuses to join and you've got to take what's available, it makes it much more difficult. But I can tell you our quality of candidates, our vetting system is very firm. We do require participation in a polygraph examination to become a Border Patrol agent. And so we set a record right now at the academy, at our Border Patrol academy right now, we have about 1,100 trainees going through our academy. We have not, for lack of a better term, dumbed down our academy. The standards are the same today as they were four years ago, as the same they're going to be next month. We're not going to decrease the amount of training we give. I will tell you that I thought it was going to be a lot more difficult to get our recruiting numbers back up. But it really is as simple as this. When someone applies for law enforcement, they want to go in and they want to do law enforcement. Imagine that, they want to enforce the law. And being a part of an administration that says, go out there and enforce the law, our recruiting numbers fix themselves because people want to apply to be a part of this mission to help secure America to go out and actually perform those law enforcement functions. And so, we are going to be very careful. We are having to utilize a lot of resources to manage the process of getting them from the time they apply to get into the academy. And then, we have an almost six-month-long academy. It's one of the longest academies out there. But we feel very confident that we're going to meet our numbers. Hopefully we'll exceed them. Is attrition down? Because that's always been a problem. When morale isn't high, Border Patrol, like you said, it's a very extensive training. So they're highly trained. You have to know Spanish. And so, you're pretty marketable to the Houston PD or somewhere else. So there's always been attrition retention has always been a problem. Is that better now? Yeah, there have been. And so, the earliest age you can retire as a Border Patrol agent is the age of 50, right? No matter how much time you got in, no matter how young you came in, you have to at least achieve the age of 50. You're mandatory in all federal law enforcement at the age of 57. Right. Prior to the Biden administration, the average retirement age for a Border Patrol agent was 56 and a half years. Agents left their jobs. They stayed until mandatory. And couldn't they get waivers too? I remember talking. And you could get waivers up to 60. So some people stayed longer. With physicals and participating in physical fitness exams to make sure you could still do the job. I can tell you that within weeks of coming back into the Border Patrol, we saw thousands of people pull their retirement paperwork and decide to stay. Our average retirement age dropped from about 56 to 50. People were going as soon as they were amenable. I've been probably half of my time back. I've either been in the field, at a station, at a sector, talking to the agents, talking to leadership. And I've never seen morale this high. Morale wasn't this high during the first Trump administration. People are excited. They're happy to be able to go out and do their jobs again. And so they've never seen the level of support that we're getting. And so I'd say morale is probably the highest it's ever been. Look, we're not always going to be happy about everything all the time. But I can tell you that our morale is through the roof. That does great things for recruiting because agents are back out there. They're walking with pride. They're holding their head high. They're actually getting to do their job. They're not being told go cut a fence and let people in. They're being told shut that fence down. You're not going to let people in illegally. And so morale's through the roof. Our numbers are going back up. We're getting there faster than I thought we would without making any concessions to the quality. And we've got a better pool of quality candidates to pick from. And over the past 4 years, like you said, I mean, I don't want to cast dispersions on anybody, but I can deduce from what you said quality maybe was down some, but also people just learned differently. New agents, all they knew is to be Walmart greeters, welcome wagons. And so was, and people were retiring early. So was there a loss of kind of institutional memory? I mean, because any organization like that, you know, the older guys are the ones who are teaching the younger. I mean, you come out of the academy, you still don't know anything until you actually are out there in the dirt in the middle of the night. So was there a loss of sort of the transmission of kind of the, you know, the lore, I guess for want of a better word of how to do the job and how do you backfill that kind of thing? So absolutely. Not only did you have agents retiring as soon as they were eligible, but you have to remember that if most agents have been in the patrol less than 4 years, all they know how to do is process. They just weren't given the opportunity to go out and actually do the law enforcement job. And so one of the things we've done is we've come back with a process that we've put in place called Back to the Basics. And so what we're doing is we're pairing up these younger agents that have only been allowed to process for 4 years with those seasoned agents that are still there so they can impart that knowledge, mentorship, right? I don't want to say field training program because that's a very regimented program that they've been through. But it is, you know, kind of going out there and reteaching them the art of sign cutting. I mean, there are things that the Border Patrol does phenomenally. We can look at a footprint on the ground and tell you, based on the toe dig, how fast a person's moving and be able to use math to determine how far they could go. It is no surprise that every time there's a manhunt in this country for an escaped felon or escaped convict, they call in the Border Patrol to help track them down, much like we did in Louisiana recently. And there'll be some stuff in the news about somebody we just discovered today out assisting up in Washington. That's an art form. That's not a science. That is an art form. It takes time. Being able to follow a group out and get to a bush and be able to look at that bush and determine whether or not that person has a backpack or whether that person has a mochila that's carrying narcotics just by things that may have been left behind on the branches. Those are an art form, and you lose that art if you're not constantly doing it. And so we've instituted it back to the basics to get these seasoned agents to bring some of these younger agents that didn't get to experience that, and get them back up to where they need to be. Are there any people who retire early that are coming back? Significantly. So we've reinstituted two programs. One is called a rehired annuitant program, and this is specifically to help with exactly what you were just talking about. And so what it says is if you've been retired for a certain amount of time and you're within a certain amount of age, we want you to come back. We want you to come back in. And are people taking them up on that? I'm signing off on stacks and stacks. Oh, really? It has been one of our biggest hiring pushes. And then we have a reinstatement program. And what it says is if you were a border patrol agent, you did the training, you were certified, and you left and went to another law enforcement agency, and you realize the grass is not green on the other side. Only federal or any law enforcement? Law enforcement. Okay. If you'd like to come back, we'd like to welcome you back home. Back home to the real border patrol that's going to go out and enforce the law and go out and do all the things that you left because you weren't allowed to do anymore. We want you back. Without having to go through the whole academy process all over. You've already been certified. You're certified. There's still a train up. You're not just going to come back and grab a badging gun and go out, but you're going to come back, go through that training process to get you caught back up and then get you back out there. Interesting. You had mentioned in talking about apprehensions that some of the people in those stats are people that you guys got in Chicago or Denver or whatever on these various enforcement pushes the administration is doing. How is that working? Doesn't that strip people off the border? Because obviously if you've got a border patrol agent walking around in Adams Morgan here in Washington, he's not on the border. How is that working? How is that... I mean, are the agents working with the local cops? Are border patrol going out on their own? How does that... What's the story? Depends on where you're at, right? Pretty much anywhere in the state of Texas. If you go... OK. We're working with the locals, the states, the cities, the counties. In other cities and states, they're very limited in what they can do based on their policies or what they're allowed to do based on their policies, which is something that we definitely understand. I kind of wrestled with this one at first when I was deciding whether or not I was going to agree with border patrol agents being north of the border because our number one priority is to get that border shut down. That is the border patrol's job. If it crosses between the port of entry illegally, we need to locate it, apprehend it. Our first job is to deter. Our first job is to convince them that you don't not want to come through numerous pathways. But if you do come, we're going to pursue you, we're going to apprehend you and put you in a process. And so I had a lot of agents tell me, Chief, you talk a lot about control the line, control the line, control the line. And I'm like, yes, that's our priority. But then we took agents and we pulled them off and we put them in interior locations. I did it first as a test. I wanted to test some theories. And it's actually been a huge deterrent for us. Because the message used to be... Deterrent, you mean sending people... It's been a deterrent for people coming. That's what I mean. Sending people to the cities. Oh, wow. And I'll give you an example. If you crossed anywhere on the border and you made it past the border patrol, where are you going to go? You're going to go to places that advertise themselves as sanctuary cities. You're going to go to places like Los Angeles. You're going to go to places like Chicago. You're going to go to places where you believe that you can get away with that. And even if you commit other crimes, well, we'll deal with it here, but we're not going to tell anyone. And so now the message is if you get past the border patrol, that does not mean you have nothing to worry about. People say, well, people are living in fear. Here's my response to people living in fear. If you were in this country illegally, you should be afraid that the United States Border Patrol is going to locate you, we're going to arrest you, we're going to prosecute you and remove you. If you were here illegally, then you don't have anything to worry about. And so that message has been resonating because once you start making interior apprehensions of people in the country illegally, the first thing they start doing is communicating with their people in their country. And the message gets out real fast. Sanctuary city does not mean sanctuary city because we don't accept that. And if you're here illegally, we're going to enforce that law. And we literally can draw a line at watching our numbers continue to decrease every time we add another another interior city. So in a sense, smart phones are a problem, can be, but they also help you in the sense that the word gets back right away. It does. And that's what we want. We want the message. We want everyone that we arrest to call back home and let them know I was arrested. I was arrested in the sanctuary city, right? I was arrested crossing the border. I couldn't get across the border because there's just too many agents there. That's the message we want. And under Biden, they would, it was the opposite message. In other words, they get away, they take a selfie of themselves at the McAllen bus station and, hey, you know, I'm on my way. I was in Yuma, Arizona, um, right before I retired. And I watched a family come across with 18 pieces of luggage. Yeah. 18 pieces of luggage to cross into this country illegally. I have a border patrol luggage tag from Yuma where the border patrol, they filled out the luggage tag and they delivered it to the, I mean, it was just preposterous. It was. Yeah. so anyway, um, so there's a question here and this is, we've referred to detention space, but that, that matters to you guys because you have to have somewhere to hold people. Um, with the numbers down, obviously, it's easier, but is, are you guys planning for ways of responding flexibly so that you don't end up with this whole kids in cages thing which was all baloney in some sense anyway, but it was a real problem you had to deal with because you have these relatively small short-term detention facilities that, you know, aren't made for holding large numbers of people and certainly aren't made for holding women and children, so is there, are you, are there plans for being able to respond flexibly to that kind of thing? So there are. So when it comes to detention, you know, a lot, I want to put it in this perspective because a lot of people don't get it. The U.S. Border Patrol, I would equate us to being like your local law enforcement. A police officer makes an arrest for a DUI. They arrest you. They process the paperwork. They hand you over to the county jail and the county jail detains you. In this, in this situation, the Border Patrol makes an arrest for someone who entered the country illegally. We process that person for the, for the laws they have violated and then we hand them over to ICE. ICE in this scenario would be the county sheriff and their job is to hold them, get them through their court process and procedures. Part of the, the detention space that I, problem that ICE had was the Biden administration continued reducing the capacity, continuing ordering the capacity reduced to create this narrative that, well, we don't have anywhere to hold them, right, but it was a self-fulfilled prophecy, right? And so one of the first things we saw ICE doing was ramping up their detention space on day one under this administration and they're continuing to grow that and now with the funding from the big, beautiful bill, they're going to be able to continue to increase that and then we've also seen, again, a whole of government approach and working with states that, that do not want illegal immigration in their communities such as Texas and Oklahoma, also Florida, that they're building partnerships with them in order to make sure that we have that space that we need. And so at this point, we're headed in the right direction. We have enough space for, for what we're doing right now because you can imagine from arrest to removal, there's a time space in there, right, and there has to be appropriate detention. And then the other thing that I want to say, and again, I don't want to speak on behalf of ICE, but I can tell you that ICE probably got the toughest detention standards in the country. You mean the quality of it? The quality of it. Yeah, right. That's actually, I had that experience. I remember visiting a detention center as part of a county jail. And so I asked the warden or whatever his title was, you know, do you start people in the ICE facility, new guards, and then move them up to your regular county? And he said, no, it's totally the other way around because ICE's standards are so high, I need to put them in the regular facility and then weed out the knuckleheads and pick the ones that are actually more competent and responsible. So we have a question here about drones. I won't read the whole thing, but this is mainly a drug thing, I assume. In other words, that's the role that drones would play, although they do play some role that smugglers, the smuggling organization would use drones. So what is, what are you guys doing to respond to this really a new threat of drones? So we have a substantial drone program and a substantial counter drone program. I will tell you that it's only become substantial in the last nine months. It was, it was, we had great plans for it, we just couldn't receive the funding for it. And so there's a couple things you have to focus on drugs, on drones. Drones for transportation are used a lot for drugs, right? They can get the narcotics past us with a drone. But the biggest threat for us with drones is, as you've seen from the Russia, Ukraine conflict is the first time where drone warfare really came into place. And so there's plenty of open source information out there where you can actually see where cartels are using drones to drop munitions on top of their, their cartel counterpart. But not in the U.S. It has not happened in the U.S. yet. We have, we know, but, but it is a concern for us that they could get there, right? Because, you know, no matter how much we push, cartels aren't just going to pack up and say, all right, we're just going to stop making our money. They're going to push harder, right? We've got to be prepared for that. But the other big problem that drones cause for us is that they use them to recon and watch our personnel and try to see if they can get a pattern or find out when areas do not, do not have a significant amount of presence to push and traffic people through those areas. They always used to do something like that, right? But they had spotters. I remember people used to tell me, well, there's a guy usually up in this little crag up there with his binoculars and his radio. If you were going to run hard narcotics across the border in any area, you typically had 20 to 30 people either in vehicles patrolling the areas calling out any movement of law enforcement to people sitting on hills watching. The drones have allowed them to do it much cheaper and much faster. And so we're investing heavy in our counter drone. Which is what that involved? Like radio, like jamming the signals or something? So there's multiple type of systems out there. In some systems, you can just track it so that you can ultimately track it back to its source so that you can then go and take enforcement action at that source on the person patrolling. Correct. However, working with our partners, we've had success in tracking them back to locations in Mexico and then having Mexico go in based on our intelligence and serve once in Mexico and take action. Other options are being able to actually take control of the drone and land it safely and then exploit the information out of it that will help us know what kind of traffic. Like hijack it basically. Oh, interesting. And then ultimately if it's an event that we believe the drone has munitions on it, we can down that drone in a safe area that's going to be, you know, protect our forces out there to make sure they're not injured. Interesting. We have a couple questions here on sort of violent resistance or attacks on agents. So part of it is you guys are more effective. The people who are still coming across are harder cases, more likely to violently resist. But also, this is a question. A lot of people don't know the difference between CBP and ICE. And so maybe this is more a matter in the cities. What are you seeing, first of all, as far as violent resistance to agents and what are you doing about it? So attacks against Border Patrol, OFO, ICE are up about 1,000%. But that's everybody. That's ICE too. The overall majority of that increase is in our interior. It is not on our border. And I will tell you that I have no doubt with 100% certainty that it's being driven by mischaracterizations and misinformation. In some cases, it's just that it lies. When you have an elected member saying that we are kidnapping someone, kidnapping, right? You pull over a guy for DUI. Is he kidnapping the guy when he takes him to jail? You hear about the mask. I can tell you that Border Patrol agents don't want to wear face masks. We're not hiding who we are. We are proud of what we do and we're going to fly our flag. What we don't want is our families doxxed. We don't want people showing up at our schools, which we've had, asking for our children by name. Seriously? Yes. We don't want them showing up at our spouses' or husband or wife's place of employment and harassing them because they don't particularly like what we do or they disagree with what we do. So my take is this. We are a professional law enforcement agency. I would love for us not to have to wear a mask, especially in south Texas in 120-degree temperature. We don't want to, but if that's what we have to do to protect our families and our agents from being harassed off duty. But what I would like to appeal to is the common sense of us as Americans and let's tone down the rhetoric, right? When a law enforcement officer clearly marked is affecting an arrest and you know it's a law enforcement officer, right? Don't go out and put out false information, say things like kidnapping. How absurd is that, right? And so I do believe that we'll see it start tamping down as people start realizing, OK, your argument that you heard someone on TV say we're kidnapping is not going to get you out of the criminal charges that you're receiving. And so we've made it clear that if you lay a hand on one of our agents, we're going to arrest and we're going to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law. And as you start seeing these prosecutions come to fruition from the arrest, you will see that our numbers will start going down, too. Again, it goes to consequence for actions. There was an issue where we were chasing a known criminal, illegal alien. We ran into a hospital facility, a treatment facility, and as we were affecting the arrest, employees there felt that they could put their hands on our officers and stop at them. And since then, they both have been surrendered to the warrants we had out for their arrest. Right, yeah. I heard about that one. Are agents actually patrolling the border, the ones down there on the line? Are they wearing masks, too? Or is... Predominantly no. Yeah, that's true. Right? Because those aren't the people that are going to want to attack us. They understand, right? They're trying to get away from us. They're not trying to get in a fight with us. There are some, though, right? When you make that apprehension and they're going to put up a fight because they don't want to go to jail. But on the actual border, the violence that we're seeing against the agents is much lower compared to what we're seeing in the inner cities, especially in places that take pride in calling themselves the sanctuary cities. Which is ironic because the cartels are less likely to attack border patrol agents than kind of ordinary crazies in the United States. Because they've learned. Historically, if you physically assault an agent, then you now become the focus of our attention, all of our attention, until we weed out that problem. It's bad for business if you're a cartel. The last question, and this sort of has a bunch of parts to it, but with the activity way down at the border, are more agents being assigned to doing things like anti-smuggling investigations and, you know, fraud investigations, that kind of stuff? And so, the U.S. Border Patrol is not an investigative agency. We are a law enforcement agency. Do we conduct investigations? Sure. But it would be equivalent to a large police department. You have your patrolman out there making their patrols, right? They get the information. They pass that on to an investigator. So we have investigators within CBP. We have investigators within ICE. And so, if it's going to be a long-term investigation, we're going to pass that off. I will tell you that we do have a significant amount of agents invested in our intelligence collection and our intelligence gathering. And so, and we'll do investigations, but we do short-term investigations to resolve a current issue. But if it's going to be a long-term investigation, we're going to turn that over to an investigative agency. And so, we can keep our agents on the line. Do you have agents undercover in Mexico? Or maybe... I mean, if you're not allowed to say, then just smile and don't say anything. But I mean... Yeah. OK. That's fine. At least in movies, that's always been the case. We have time maybe for one question from the audience. I mean, we have some anyway, but somebody didn't write a question. Yeah. I have a quick question. And maybe you can see it as self-service. But in training, do you guys go through the reasons why it's so important to enforce the law beyond just enforcing the law? Number one, interdicting drugs and criminals is crucial. But there are other profound reasons like trying to protect low-wage American workers from all this job competition. Or the fiscal cost of the overstrained hospitals and schools. I was just wondering, do they get any kind of unit on that? Do they at least understand that,yeah, it's very important to keep out criminals and restore the rule of law. But there are other sound reasons why we limit immigration and then we should enforce those limits. And that's where you come in. Do they get any of that in training? I'm just kind of curious. So they do. And I will tell you that one of the things I'm most proud about is that the instructors at the Border Patrol Academy are Border Patrol agents, right? They're certified instructional Border Patrol agents. So as they're being taught the curriculum, they're being given the context and they're being given the why behind it, which I think is very important, especially with our current generation. Context matters. I will tell you that the other thing that I'm very proud of is the predominant, the overwhelming amount of our Border Patrol agents that are in the Border Patrol are first, second, and third generation immigrants that came here legally to this country. And those are the ones and they understand it better than anybody else. And those are the ones that help us tell those stories to those that don't understand anything about immigration and maybe came from Indiana and didn't even know how to spell immigration until they decided it was something they wanted to do. And so that's very important for us in giving the context. And so I'm very proud of the workforce we have. I'm very proud of how resilient they are, how they've been able to hold on and get through those four years. And right now what we need to do is we need to take this opportunity under this administration to get the rest of the way secure. Great. We're 93% there. That's outstanding. But we are not waving a victory flag. We have got to get complete and operational control of that border so that it's going to be easier for us to maintain going forward. Once we get it there, then it's just going to be all about maintaining. And it's much easier to maintain something than it is to gain it. Thank you, Chief Banks. Really appreciate your coming in. Good luck in getting to the 93%, up to the 100% if it's possible. And great to have you. Thank you.