The president of the Border Patrol union told a House subcommittee Thursday that human smugglers could be taking advantage of an open border to bring in “people from Middle Eastern countries.”
Brandon Judd, the president of the National Border Patrol Council, was testifying before a hearing held by the House Oversight Committee’s subcommittee on National Security on the need for a border wall. Earlier this week the White House said they will delay funding for the wall.
“We need it in strategic locations,” Judd said.
He has served as a Border Patrol agent for more than 20 years and told Rep. Ron DeSantis that a 2,000 mile-long border wall isn’t necessary, just the 700 miles that are authorized by the Secure Fences Act of 2006.
The Border Patrol union chief said that the wall would serve as a force multiplier for the agency and that smugglers are currently taking advantage of the vast open border. He said they encourage family units to cross at places that aren’t ports of entry, “which puts extreme pressure on us and takes people out of the field, which creates holes and allows smugglers to bring across higher cost value traffic such as heroin and potentially even people from Middle Eastern countries.”
These comments came a week after Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly spoke at length about the terror threat from the southwestern border.
“We face very real threats from so-called special interest aliens that move at great expense from vast distances outside the hemisphere along the network into the U.S. The ‘special interest’ is that they are from parts of the world where terrorism is prevalent, or nations that are hostile to the United States,” Kelly said in a speech at George Washington University.
“These individuals pay TCOs huge sums of money to transport them from, for example, the Middle East or Asia, through South and Central America and into the United States,” Kelly continued. “We don’t get to vet them. We don’t know their intentions. We don’t know they’re here. They slip into our country unnoticed, living among us, and we are completely blind as to what they are capable of.”