The Department of Homeland Security has announced that they plan to take punitive action against multiple agents who were caught up in debunked allegations that they whipped Haitian migrants in Del Rio in 2021.
The move has evoked fury among Border Patrol agents, who see it as just another attack on a group with already low morale among agents seeing a politicized investigation, hoping to deliver a beneficial outcome for the White House, even at cost to the department as a whole.
One agent described it as “f—ing bull—t.”
“What we’re seeing right now is the executive branch weaponizing the Office of Professional Responsibility to go after what President Biden perceives as political opponents,” National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd said in an interview with Fox News Digital. “He doesn’t like the Border Patrol. He has never liked the mission of the Border Patrol. And now he is going after these agents because he panders to open border activists. This should never happen in this country.”
The DHS plans to discipline multiple horseback Border Patrol agents who were involved in an incident with Haitian migrants in September of last year. Democrats and immigration activists accused officers of whipping migrants after images of the incident began circulating around Twitter.
The accusations were debunked when it was revealed that the “whips” were in fact split reins used by the agents to control their horses. In spite of this, President Biden would later comment on the incident, saying, “I promise you, those people will pay. There will be an investigation underway now and there will be consequences. There will be consequences.”
Now, after nine months have passed and the incident has largely been forgotten, the DHS’ Office of Professional Responsibility has brought it back into the fore. Many agents feel that political pressures may be impacting the decision to continue pursuing the case.
“The moment he made that statement, the moment he said that those agents would pay, the moment he convicted those agents without any evidence, without any investigation, there could be no doubt in anybody’s mind that these investigators were going to come back with some sort of charge against the agents,” Judd said. “They had no choice.”
Others believed that the case was brought back up in order to manufacture issues for the upcoming midterm elections.
“The public had already forgotten about this. Bringing this back up is a much-needed distraction [for Biden] and helps make BP agents’ ‘racist’ behavior a political talking point for midterms,” one anonymous agent said.
“You’re already doing a job that we’ve had [Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] come out and equate us to Nazis, you had the Squad come out and made false allegations that we were forcing people to drink out of toilets. These are the types of things that we have to deal with from politicians that simply do not like the mission,” Judd said later. “They don’t like the fact that we’re enforcing the laws of the United States. And so they come out and they attack us.“
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