By Former Agent
01/29/2023
A few days ago, I was talking to some Border Patrol agents still on the job. They were telling me that details down to the Del Rio sector are slowing down. Agents are still being sent there, but not in the quantity that they were. However, although the agents are not physically being sent to the southern border, they are still doing remote or virtual processing because of the Biden Rush. That means they sit in the office and process paperwork for illegal aliens to be allowed into the country. They are not going out into the field to make arrests, and, even if they did, ICE isn’t deporting anybody, so what good would it do? The agents said they could barely watch the news or had to change the channel when reports on the southern border came up. Yes, even when those reports were trying to show the disaster as realistically as possible.
One of the agents told me that one of the better guys at doing virtual processing could knock out 50 files in a shift. That’s incredible. For some perspective, when we (the Border Patrol) used to do A-Files (an A-File is the abbreviation for an Alien File), it could take two to three hours to knock out one file on one alien.
A-Files tended to be tedious affairs that resulted in lots of push back between the supervisor and the processing agent.
Agent: “Yes, but the date and time are noted in the drop down boxes on the form.”
Supervisor: “That doesn’t matter. The AUSA [Assistant US Attorney] doesn’t want to have to search around for it.”
Agent: “That’s because we searched for the exact charges and they weren’t in the list of things again in the drop down boxes. It’s the closest we could find.”
Supervisor: “Keep searching, it’s in there somewhere.”
Agent: “Does that mean I have to have the illegal re-sign all the paperwork I already got done?”
Supervisor: “Yeah, go wake the alien back up.”
Very few agents enjoyed processing. Most of us signed up for exciting careers (theoretically!) running around in the brush catching people. However, like hunting, you could be out in the field laying in on a trail you were convinced was good for traffic and come up empty. That could be a long boring wait.
Then, if you did catch somebody, the initial thrill of making an apprehension was dampened by all the paperwork involved. “You catch it, you clean it” was a common phrase, meaning that if you made an arrest, then you were the one doing the processing.
If you were lucky and made an apprehension early on in the shift, the agent assigned to “transport” might be able to take the alien off your hands and process him for you. However, as the shift went on and more apprehensions were made, the transport agent would get tied up and it was your responsibility to haul them in and process them.
Because no one enjoyed the processing aspect, it amounted to a punishment if you caught someone. If you had a supervisor who didn’t like you (every office has petty politics), he could make your life a living hell by continually finding mistakes with your file.
During the Trump administration, when Trump retreated from the Zero Tolerance policy implemented by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, allowing the flood gates to open (”Kids in cages!”), I met a Customs and Border Protection Officer whose job was to do nothing but A-files all day long. (CBP Officers work at the bridges, Border Patrol Agents do everything that’s trying to cross between the bridges.- That CBP Officer was able knock out about 10 files per shift. And that was all he did day in and day out.
But today, it appears, Border Patrol Agents who used to be able to process four or five A-files per shift are knocking out 50 files! How in the world are they doing it?
Well, they are not giving the illegals a “Notice to Appear,” which means a court date and place to show up. Instead, the Biden Regime is having them do a “Notice to Report,” which is much simpler.
Essentially, these illegals are being paroled into the U.S.
Parole was initially supposed to be a very limited thing. According to federal law [8 CFR § 212.5 — Parole of aliens into the United States] parole is to be used on a case-by-case basis for “urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit” [Texas leads 20 Republican states in suing Biden admin over migrant parole program, Adam Shaw, Fox News, January 24, 2023]. I’ve seen illegals paroled into the U.S. to serve as witnesses in court trials. For that matter, I’ve even seen one paroled in because he was the defendant in a drug smuggling case!
Unlike the elaborate narratives that we used to do on each individual illegal alien, the new narratives can be so short as to be just two or three sentences. Far from being “case by case,” the agents cut and paste the narrative from one file to the next.
The way the Biden Regime system works, the illegal aliens are supposed to get their “Notice to Report” documents upon crossing the border. They then proceed to their destination anywhere in the U.S. They are supposed to check in at the nearest ICE office, and then (I presume) an A-File is written up on them.
However, there is no real coordination to make sure the aliens are checking in. Many will certainly just travel to wherever they want to go without ever checking in. The agents I spoke with aren’t even certain that, if they do encounter one of these illegal aliens years in the future, they will then have to do an A-File on the illegal and release him, or if they can sack them up.
I speculate that Mayorkas and his minions like the confusion that they sow in the system. They are destroying enforcement, as the left likes to say, “by any means necessary.”
It’s nice to see that Texas and some other states are fighting back against this.
But they are doing it in court. The courts will take forever to rule and they may very well not rule in Texas’s favor.
As VDARE.com knows all too well, our courts have become completely corrupted by leftist ideology. The laws are what they say they are and not what the legislature intended them to be.
The solution has to be political. Impeaching Joe Biden (and Kamala Harris!) would be a start.
The author is retired from the Border Patrol.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.