On Tuesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Your World,” former Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz stated that, during the Biden administration, “One of the things we struggled with when I was the Chief was getting engagement from policy officials and the White House. You’re not going to see that with Tom Homan.” And Homan’s appointment is “a tremendous step, not just for the crisis that we’ve been dealing with for the last two or three years, but also for border security and national security.”
Ortiz said, “One of the things that it tells me is that selecting Tom Homan as the Border Czar means that this administration is going to take the border very serious[ly], as their number one priority. One of the things we struggled with when I was the Chief was getting engagement from policy officials and the White House. You’re not going to see that with Tom Homan. He’ll roll up his sleeves. He’ll get down to the border. He’ll talk to the men and women of the Border Patrol, of ICE, of Customs, and he’ll find out exactly what they need to get the job done. And so, I see that this is a tremendous step, not just for the crisis that we’ve been dealing with for the last two or three years, but also for border security and national security.”
He added, “I think he’s going to work closely with the State Department to open up deportation flights to some of these countries that we haven’t been able to deport people to for a very long time. With the selection — or the proposed selection of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) as the secretary of state, I think that’s going to help open up some lines. One of the things that the Border Patrol and ICE have always struggled with is we process them, but there’s no mechanism to return them back to their home country. We’ve got to be able to put them on a plane and send them home if they aren’t deserving of an immigration benefit here.”
Ortiz further stated, “One of the things you find quite often in workplace enforcement is that there’s total neglect of the rules and the procedures, and so, you have migrants that are coming to this country or that get away from the Border Patrol and they find themselves working in — whether they’re factories or large agricultural areas, and I think what you’ll see is a lot more companies, a lot more organizations, starting to follow the rule of law, and that’s what needs to happen. We have policies in place. We just need to enforce them. And I see Tom Homan as the type of individual that’s going to make sure that that happens.”
He concluded, “[O]ne of the things that I’ve always said is it’s got to be a mixture of the right amount of agents, the right amount of technology, and then you’ve got to have that infrastructure in place. We have thousands and thousands of pounds of steel on the border right now just rusting away, because, these last three or four years, we weren’t able to do anything with all of that material. Now, I think, under this new administration, we can go back and finish some of the projects that we started that are still very, very important.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
