Retired San Diego Border Patrol Chief Patrol Agent Aaron Heitke revealed during a congressional hearing last week that he was directed by the Biden-Harris administration not to disclose arrests of illegal border crossers identified as “Significant Interest Aliens” who have ties to terrorism.
Heitke testified before a U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security hearing on Wednesday about how the Biden-Harris “open border policies have undermined our safety and security.”
“The only true consequence we have to slow down and discourage people from coming into the United States illegally is sending them back to their country of origin. Throughout the first three-plus years of this administration, I saw a steady decrease in the countries we could send people back to for the first time in my 25 years, and under five different administrations, whether through neglect or on purpose, I saw a large-scale lapse in our ability to return people to their country of origin,” Heitke testified.
“The inability to send people home meant that most people being arrested for illegal entry would either have to be detained or released. The current administration, however, from day one made a point of decreasing the amount of detention space available nationwide. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s funding for detention has steadily been cut, and private detention eliminated,” he added.
Within a few months of taking office, President Joe Biden put Vice President Kamala Harris in charge of dealing with the “root causes” of mass illegal immigration to the U.S. But on her watch, the illegal crossings only increased to record numbers, with Heitke being the most recent former Border Patrol official who dealt with the Biden-Harris policies to testify about how bad they were for the country.
“The fact that so many illegal aliens are being released into the United States spread worldwide very quickly. As this happened, the numbers of the Border Patrol encountered illegally crossing the border increased exponentially. The impact to me and my agents were significant. Sectors were ordered to take in and process all the illegal aliens encountered on the border,” the former chief testified.
“We have no idea who and what entered our country over this time throughout 2022 and 23,” he continued. “I sent agents to Texas and Arizona to count gotaways. Those sectors could not even put enough agents in the field to see what they had missed. Simultaneously, in San Diego, we had an exponential increase in significant interest aliens.”
Prior to the Biden-Harris administration, the sector averaged 10 to 15 SIAs per year, the Center Square reported.
Heitke then testified that he was ordered to cover up the chaos.
“These are only the ones we caught. At the time, I was told I could not release any information on this increase in size or mention any of the arrests,” he told the House panel. “The administration was trying to convince the public. There was no threat at the border. Fentanyl is another issue. The San Diego area sees between 80 and 90 percent of the methamphetamine and fentanyl seizures annually for our entire country.”
“With little enforcement at the border, these drugs were coming through in mass. During my last year in San Diego, the price for a single pill of fentanyl, for example, went from $10 to $0.25. To make matters worse, during 2022 and 23, I had to shut down San Diego traffic checkpoints which are critical for drug interdiction because the resources had been diverted to the process and release mission,” he said, otherwise known as “catch-and-release.”
The Biden-Harris administration finally made some effort to enforce the border in that past few months, Heitke said — as the election approached.
“While current numbers of aliens crossing our border are lower in comparison in recent months, there’s a reason for this. After nearly four years, this administration finally started to ask Mexico for help in slowing down the traffic through their country,” he said.
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