Refugees | Michael Patrick Leahy

National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd on Southern Border: ‘If the Outrage Exists, Then a Change Can Happen’

Live from Music Row Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed special guest Brandon Judd, President of the National Border Patrol Council to the newsmakers line to discuss the current surge of Haitians under the Del Rio International Bridge and how it is up to the people educate themselves to make a change to the Biden administration’s border policies.

Leahy: We are joined on our newsmaker line right now by Brandon Judd, the President of the National Border Patrol Council. Brandon, apparently there are reports that there are more than 10,000 Haitians are under the Del Rio International Bridge on the southwestern border of Texas with Mexico. How do they get there and what’s happening with them?

Judd: I spent all day yesterday, and I’ll spend all day today down under the bridge. And what we saw is at the height, it was 14,870, some odd people that we had under the bridge. Now, these people were not in custody.

And as long as they didn’t try to further their entrance into the United States, they were able to stay under the bridge until we can take them into custody, transport them, process them, and then determine what’s going to happen with them from there.

The idea and these stories that are coming out by The Washington Post, by The New York Times, by all of these outlets are saying these people are going to be deported. That’s just not true.

Only a quarter of these individuals are going to be amenable to Title 42 and are going to be expelled because the vast majority of them are family units. And we know the Biden administration doesn’t expel family units from the United States.

The vast majority of these individuals crossed our borders illegally, they violated our laws, and they’re ultimately going to be rewarded for violating our laws.

And as long as we do that, we create this magnet that draws all of these people to come here to the United States illegally. And it’s completely and totally surreal. It’s a situation that we’ve never seen before.

And if you are able to get down there personally, what you’re going to see is that it seriously appears to be like a war zone. It’s crazy what is taking place right now.

Leahy: How does it happen? I mean, how do 14,000 Haitians get from Haiti to a bridge under the bridge of the Del Rio International Bridge on the southwestern border of Texas and Mexico? How does that happen?

Judd: Oh, they walk for the most part.

Leahy: They don’t walk from Haiti. That’s an island.

Judd: The cartels facilitate it. What’s very interesting about this is the majority of them are not coming from Haiti. The majority of them are coming from Chile or Brazil. Back in 2010, during all of the disasters that were taking place in Haiti, a lot of these people left and went to South America for economic reprieve.

And Brazil and Chile excepted these people in. Now that the pandemic has hit those two countries hard, and there’s been a huge economic downturn, these people are leaving those two countries and they’re coming to the United States.

They didn’t have to take boats up to where we’re at. They were able to come straight up through South America and Central America, up to the United States and the cartels, they facilitated this.

The cartels were able to get them up. And this is what’s amazing about what’s taken place is the cartels understand that all they have to do is cross really large groups. We’ve never seen anything like this before, but they know that all they have to do is cross really large groups then the border patrol will have to deploy the resources to that area.

And when we deploy our resources to that area, we create all of these artificial gaps in our coverage along the border. And when we do that, they’re able to cross their higher-value products such as criminal aliens and drugs into the United States.

It’s completely and totally crazy that we continue to operate the way that we do because we’ve conceded control of law enforcement operations to criminal cartels.

Leahy: Is this intentional on the part of the Biden maladministration?

Judd: That would be speculation on my part. If you were to ask me, I don’t have evidence of it, but, yeah, I believe it is. I believe it is. But, again, that speculations. That’s just my opinion. I don’t have any evidence of it. But I do believe it is.

Leahy: I don’t have evidence, but I have logic. I can’t see any other way this would happen unless this were intentional on part of a Biden maladministration.

Judd: When you look at the Biden administration bringing back the catch and release magnet, that then-President Trump was able to get rid of, we dropped to a 45 year low in illegal immigration.

The Biden administration almost from day one, when they came into office, reintroduced that magnet. And that’s why we have 200,000 apprehensions two months running. We’re expecting to see those apprehensions to be over 200,000 again in the month of September.

So, yeah, it’s crazy what’s going on. And until the people recognize that the policies of this administration that it’s not just border security.

It’s everything. Look at the economy right now. Look at the jobs market. Look at Afghanistan. Everything that’s happening in this country, these policies are horrible. And until the country stands up and recognizes this, he’s not going to change.

He’s just not going to make any changes as it pertains to the border. He’s not going to make any changes as it pertains to this very hard leftist movement and the defund, the police, and everything that comes with the negatives of a very liberal government.

Leahy: What does this do to the morale of the National Border Patrol agents out there?

Judd: All of the agents were all completely defeated. When we put on that uniform, we want to go out and we want to do the best job that we can for the American public. Our desire is to protect the American public.

Our desire is to be able to enforce the laws properly so that the public is safe. And when we see what’s going on, we basically become caretakers. We become babysitters if you will. And that’s not what we signed up to do.

We signed up to be able to go after the criminal organizations, the criminality that exists on the border. We’re looking at it. We know that all we’re doing is reporting to work to be babysitters caretakers, and prison guards, if you will. And that’s not what we’re supposed to be. Now we’re all defeated.

Leahy: Well, when you say defeated. Is it temporary? Is it permanent? Is there hope? What do the Border Patrol agents want to have happen?

Judd: There’s always hope. If we can get back to the mission that we originally signed up to do, that morale is going to jump right back up. But until that time when we say there’s always hope, there’s hope that the public is going to put enough pressure on this administration to do the right thing.

If that doesn’t happen, the morale is going to stay in the tanks. Now, the one thing, even with the moral being, what it is, I’m so proud of the agents that we have. I’m so proud of everybody that goes out there day in and day out.

We’re still going to do the job. We’re going to go out there and we’re going to do the best that we possibly can. We just don’t feel good about it right now.

Leahy: Well, that makes perfect sense. I mean, you’ve got three and a half more years of the Biden maladministration. Is there anything or anyone in the Biden maladministration, my words, not yours, that you trust? Or that wants to actually implement the law?

Judd: (Sighs) That I know of? No. If you look at DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, anytime that you change administrations, they’re able to come in and they’re able to appoint political appointees in very high-level positions.

The leader of the Department of Homeland Security is a political appointee. The leader of Customs and Border Protection is a political appointee. And the leader of the Border Patrol is not a political appointee.

The Border Patrol falls under CBP, Customs, and Border Protection. Customs and Border Protections fall under DHS. And even though the leader of the Border Patrol isn’t a political appointee, that person must do what those political appointees want them to do.

Otherwise, they can be removed from that position. They can’t be fired, but they can be removed from that position and just reassigned somewhere else. The political appointees will do exactly what the administration tells them to do.

If the Biden administration knows that the public is upset with what is going on, then you can see a change in the stances in the operations and the leaders of the agencies. They will fall in line with that.

There has to be enough public outrage. And if there is, then we will see changes. But anytime that you have The Washington Post, The New York Times sugar coating and telling half-truths, then you’re just not going to get the outrage that we need for the public to let him know that they want change.

And that’s why we have to look at both sides. You have to not just listen to those left-leaning outlets. You have to seek out the truth when you find the truth. If the outrage exists, then a change can happen.

Listen to the full first hour here:

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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 am to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.

Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies Explains Why He’s Called for the Withdrawal from the 1951 Refugee Convention Treaty

Live from Music Row Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies Mark Krikorian to the newsmaker line to discuss his recent call for the withdrawal of the United States from the decades-old 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 protocol as the southern border leaks more than Latin American refugees.

Leahy: We are joined now on our newsmaker line by our very good friend, Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. Mark, welcome and thank you, thank you.

Thank you for writing your very important article at the National Review Online. Time to Withdraw from the UN Refugee Treaty. Thanks so much. It’s about time, isn’t it?

Krikorian: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Because we’re talking about a lot of loopholes in the law, and how are we going to, you know, sort of nip here and tuck there. But you got to go to the root of the problem which is that we are subject, we signed a treaty 70 years ago.

This is a lifetime ago. A UN treaty on refugees. But it was written in – the terms of it are based on post World War II and the beginning of the Cold War conditions. That’s a world that no longer exists. And yet we have signed the treaty.

We signed the sequel to it, but it doesn’t matter. We’re still subject to its terms, and we incorporated them into our law. And the main problem here is not refugees that we go and pick and resettle in the U.S. That’s a problem.

But that’s something that’s up to us. We run refugee resettlement. I know Nashville has a real issue with a lot of refugee settlements, but that’s something that we under our law and under our decision-makers do. And I think we need to change it, but we have the power to do that ourselves.

The real problem with this treaty is that it sets up asylum law as well. Which are illegal immigrants coming into the U.S., sneaking in, overstaying a visa, whatever it is, and then saying, you have to let me stay because of the terms of this refugee treaty.

And that’s what we need to fix because if we don’t, we don’t have control over our own borders. Basically, the rest of our immigration laws are irrelevant. If illegal immigrants can just hop over and say, you have to let me stay, I don’t really care what your immigration law is.

Leahy: This treaty was the 1951 United Nations Convention relating to the status of refugees. President Harry Truman in 1951 did not sign that because he felt it infringed on U.S. sovereignty. This is from your article.

In 1968, Lyndon Johnson reversed course and signed the protocol, and the Senate ratified it, binding the U.S. to its terms. The provisions were formally incorporated into a U.S. statute called the Refugee Act of 1980. But you say in your article, Truman was right not to sign it.

Krikorian: Truman was right because he chose not to sign it at the time – 1951 – because he viewed it as infringements or provisions of it as an infringement on U.S. sovereignty. And we resettled refugees between Truman’s decision and then LBJ’s getting us into that treaty, with Congress, passed legislation.

And we did it on our own decision. What happened in 1968 is we bound ourselves to these asylum provisions. But even then, it didn’t make that much difference because, how many people were sneaking across our borders and then saying political asylum in 1968?

It wasn’t seen as a problem – was only when the Cold War ended and transportation and communications around the world became dirt cheap, relatively speaking, and easy and quick. So now, instead of one ballerina from the Soviet Union defecting – which is what asylum is for, defections.

Now we’ve got 200,000 people a month coming across our Mexican border. Not from Mexico or Central America, but from Uzbekistan, Mauritania, Romania, and you name it. We got people coming from all over the world and saying, oh, I fear return. You have to let me stay and let me stay as a refugee.

And Europe faces the same problem. But you know, that’s their problem. They need to deal with it, too. We need to deal with our own problems. And that is not that we’re never going to give asylum to anybody, but that we need to set asylum rules based on the national interest. Based on what’s good for the United States and not based on some UN treaty.

Leahy: Mark, you reference in your outstanding article at National Review Online, a book written in 2011 by John Fonte called Sovereignty or Submission, which is about the struggle between national sovereignty and global governance. Now, I guess, was prophetic. The past 10 years have not been so great for American sovereignty.

Krikorian: No, definitely not. And this book, Sovereignty or Submission, deals with a whole bunch of things. It’s not about immigration. My point was that this issue of refugees and asylum fit into that broader push by these mainly left-leaning groups that see themselves not as citizens of their country.

Not as American groups or French or German or British organizations. And the people in them don’t think of themselves that way. They think of themselves as citizens of the world and they want there to be more and more rules that countries have to follow, whether their people like it or not.

Globalism is kind of the shorthand we use. This refugee treaty is an important part of that globalism push because the point of it is to limit more and more the control a country has and therefore the people of that country have over their own borders.

Because if there are rules set by the UN about who you can deport, who you are legally required to let stay in your country, even if you didn’t choose it, even if they came against you without your consent, then you progressively lose sovereignty over your own borders.

Leahy: I agree with your suggestion that we withdraw from the UN refugee treaty immediately. Let’s talk about the politics of this. What’s the likelihood that in the current Congress that a proposal like this would have any chance of success?

Krikorian: First of all, it’s the president, whoever the president is can withdraw us from a treaty. The way a treaty works is that the president and the people who work for him sign a treaty, negotiate and sign it, and then the Senate has to ratify it.

Okay it or not. If they do that, it becomes law of the land according to the Constitution. The president can then back out of the treaty on his own. He doesn’t need a vote for that. President Trump, for instance, and I’m pretty sure President Bush got us out of a couple of treaties because all treaties have a provision that says, if you want to get out of it, you have to send us a notice.

And then however much time, in this case, one year later, you’re then free of the treaty. Obviously, (Chuckles) President Biden is not going to be pulling us out of the treaty. So this is something that would have to wait until we had a President who was not just more in touch with his surroundings, but just generally speaking, ideologically and politically, very different.

Maybe, hypothetically, a President DeSantis might do something like that. But even then, it’s the necessary first step. But even then, just getting out of the treaty doesn’t free us from the UN provisions. We have to then change the legislation, the law, and that’s something Congress will have to do.

You’ll have to see what the makeup of Congress is at some point. It’s certainly not going to happen with a Democratic majority. It won’t happen immediately with the Republican majority potentially either, because this is one of the reasons I wrote the article.

And that is that no Republican politicians have submitted changes, proposed changes to the refugee law. So this is a discussion that I’m trying to move along. And this kind of, you’re addressing the issue on your show is one step in that direction.

Leahy: We’re talking with Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. Mark, can you stay with us because when you come back, I’m going to ask the big question about the politics and your outstanding proposal that the United States should withdraw from the United Nations Convention relating to the status of refugees. Can you stick with us through the break?

Krikorian: Sure. I’d be happy too. Thank you.

Listen to the first hour here:

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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “1951 Refugee Convention” by UNHCR.