De La Cruz [Homeland Security Committee Hearing]: Right here where I represent has the one of the highest drone detections along the southwest border. The cartel drone detections, just right here in the Rio Grande Valley sector, in fiscal year 2022, was thirty-five thousand drone detections…that are watching our agents, watching our American communities, and leading illegal immigrants through our southwest border…out of thirty-five thousand drone detections, only ten thousand were intercepted.

The Border Patrol Chief did not agree, but De La Cruz says that in debriefings by the Border Patrol, the cartel drones come up to eight miles into America.

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Gimenez [Homeland Security Committee]: Do you think the president of the United States is dumb?

Colonel McCraw: I'm not going to comment on that.

Gimenez: Do you think that the secretary of homeland security is dumb?

McCraw: Certainly he's not. There is no question.

Gimenez: So the only thing you can come up with is this is done on purpose. [open border]

McCraw: I can't see it otherwise. It's done on purpose, I don't know that it's meant to be malevolent.

Gimenez: You'd have to be pretty dumb not to see that what you're doing is malevolent and it actually has dire consequences to the United States. So it's actually done on purpose. I've come to that conclusion a long time ago. Now why, I don't know.

Sheriff Coe: If we show up on scene and the landowner wants the [illegals] caught on his property processed and prosecuted for criminal trespass, but Border Patrol got their hands on them first, they will not give them back to us. It's not because agents in the field don't want to. It's not because the patrol agent in charge doesn't want to. It's coming from Washington.

Chris Caberera [Vice President, National Border Patrol Council]: Just the other day…it was about 35-40 degrees, and we had a little boy that was brought up by another group that found him crying on the river. He was four years old. He had one shoe on, he was soaking wet, and his parents were already here in the United States. We see that all the time. We see little girls, five, six, seven years old, that their parents are already here, and they sent them in care of a smuggler…I saw a lady, I think in her late 50s, and she was just pummeled to a bloody pulp…the reason she was pummeled is these river guides tried to get to her twelve year old granddaughter, and she fought them off, but she paid the price for it…if you did mandatory detention, mandatory removal, we wouldn't see this, because we wouldn't be incentivizing people coming over.