(Photo Credit: REUTERS/Gael Gonzalez)
National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd said that agents have seen a “miraculous” drop in the number of migrants seeking to cross the border illegally thanks to President Donald Trump.
The significant reduction of illegal border crossings from Mexico to the United States is unprecedented, Judd told C-SPAN on Monday. Judd is the head of a union representing U.S. Border Patrol agents
“What we’ve seen is nothing short of miraculous,” he said. “If you look at the rhetoric that President Trump has given, it’s caused the number of illegal border crossers to go down, something that we’ve never seen in history at the Border Patrol.”
“We’ve never seen such a drop that we currently have.”
In June, the U.S. Customs and Boarder Protection reported a 53 percent decrease in the number of apprehensions and inadmissible persons along the Southwest border compared to last year. It says the drop in apprehensions has a correlation with those attempting to cross illegally.
Judd attributes this success to the Trump administration’s enforcement of the laws.
“We’ve got a set of laws on the books that say ‘If you cross the border illegally, or if you commit this crime, these are the consequences that have been established,” Judd said. “And the Trump administration said that ‘we are going to follow through on those consequences,’ something we didn’t see in the last four years in the last administration.”
“If you look at what we experienced in 2014, we saw something we had never seen in my 20-year career,” the council president said regarding the surge of Central American migrants that occurred under President Obama.
Judd said that those who crossed the boarder would willingly give themselves up to the police, knowing that they would be released and given a court date. However, Judd noted that 80 percent of those individuals never showed up the court.
Obama claimed he wants to bring illegal immigrants out of the shadows, Judd said, when in fact they were actually going into the shadows.
