During a campaign rally Sunday in Arizona, Trump received the endorsement of the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC), which declared that the Republican presidential nominee will end the chaos at the U.S.-Mexico border "once and for all." NBPC president Paul Perez said the former president has been a true ally – and lamented that millions of unvetted migrants have entered the country illegally under the Biden-Harris administration. He told the crowd:
“America, I have a message for you. If we allow Border Czar Harris to win this election, every city, every community in this great country is going to go to hell. The untold millions of unvetted people who she has allowed into this country, that are committing murders, rapes, robberies, burglaries, and every other crime, will continue to put our country in peril. Only one man can fix that. That is Donald J. Trump.”
Ira Mehlman, media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, doesn't find the endorsement surprising.
"These are people on the front line [who] obviously … feel that they would be able to better do their jobs under a different administration," he tells AFN. "It's no secret that they have expressed a lot of frustration over the past few years about the direction things have been going, [and about] the orders that they're getting from Washington about what they can do and what they can't do. So, it's not surprising at all that they would be looking for a change in direction."
Mehlman says the endorsement reinforces what a lot of people already know: "That our border is out of control and that the policies of the Biden-Harris administration are directly responsible."
Trump responded to the endorsement at the rally by pledging to hire 10,000 more agents, give Border Patrol agents a 10% pay raise, and provide agents with a $10,000 "retention and signing bonus."
The NBPC represents approximately 16,000 Border Patrol agents. Under the Biden administration policies, according to the Council's website, approximately 3.5 million migrants have been released into the U.S., monthly "encounters" have averaged more than a quarter-million, and "gotaways" have averaged about 50,000 per month.
