Ivory Hecker: Our Border Is Still Wide Open

BUCK: There are a lot of areas where you could criticize and should criticize the Biden administration, the economy, national security, inflation, gas prices, all kinds of stuff where you can point to that are just disaster areas. But one that is a massive problem, one the American people should be hearing more about and continues to get worse day in and day out under this Biden regime is our southern border. It is lawless. It is porous. It is effectively open. Some folks are going down there to tell us what’s actually happening. One of them joins us now. Ivory Hecker. She is an independent journalist. She spent most of last week doing journalism down at the border telling us what’s going on. Ivory, thanks for being with us.

HECKER: Hey, thanks so much for having me.

BUCK: So, what did you see? Tell us what’s going on right now. You speak to Border Patrol. You speak to people who are trying to help out the Border Patrol. What are they saying about the current state of security and the rule of law down there?

HECKER: Well, it’s a constant stream of migrants swimming through the Rio Grande, they told me. I shadowed a local militia group for three days this past week and turns out while I was there, media reports was four people ended up drowning in the Rio Grande. I got tipped off about a 4-year-old girl drowning while attempting to swim across with her family, and Border Patrol confirmed that to me. She ended up being one of four. But, first day there when we drove up to the Rio Grande in Maverick County, Texas, not even — we couldn’t even get out of the truck before there were already migrants swimming across so we just turned on our cameras, started rolling. I put all the footage on YouTube and watched this group of about six people swim across the Rio Grande. When they got on shore they said that they had come from Cuba. They had spent a month traveling from Cuba.

And it’s really interesting that the girl who drowned was from Nicaragua. Turns out, another little boy drowned the week I was there. He was from Uruguay, which is way down in South America – southern hemisphere. So, people — I mean, the word is out that if you want to get into the United States, you go to Mexico and then you swim across and make your way right in.

CLAY: Ivory, do we have any idea what percentage of people that are trying to cross the border we actually apprehend or come in contact with at all? In other words, you’re down at the border. I know it’s difficult, and we have a lot of people working on the border who feel disrespected in the Biden administration in general. But what kind of odds do you have of getting across without any sort of significant interaction with American Border Patrol at all?

HECKER: Well, it — you know, the border is so long that there’s no telling how many people are honestly getting right through without even being detected. So, you know, when you look at CBP data, it shows that more than two million people were encountered attempting to cross the border last year. But in a percentage of those people were sent back, a percentage of them were accepted into the U.S. But how many were not encountered? And that’s what —

CLAY: It’s a monster number, right, that we never interact with at all, Buck, right?

BUCK: Oh, there’s tens of thousands of got-aways when I’ve spoken to Border Patrol that are every month coming into the country, meaning they don’t even — they’re never even apprehended. They just run into the country. The numbers we see about encounters and what Ivory’s talking about, people that are coming across and Border Patrol is apprehending them, that’s one number. But the got-aways is why — it’s 1.6 million apprehensions last year. When you add the got-aways, it’s basically two million people entered the United States illegally.

We’re speaking to Ivory Hecker, who is an independent journalist who was just down at the border last week. IvoryHecker.com is her website. You can check out the video of exactly what’s going on down there. Ivory, I haven’t spoken to Border Patrol about this in person in, you know, well, almost a year now. I was down there last March. The morale at the start of the Biden administration was low. When you spoke to Border Patrol last week, what were they telling you, and do they feel like the federal government is even backing them up when it comes to getting their jobs done?

HECKER: Well, you know, when I talk to them, I talk to a couple of agents who are just there. You know, they’re not allowed to speak to media at all, but they — they were very nonchalant about accepting these guys in. When the Cubans came, swam through the river, border agents walked right up with plastic bags, handing plastic bags. It was a routine. It just seemed very routine to these guys to accept these migrants in, give them plastic bags for their wet clothes —

BUCK: They’re like the welcoming committee now, basically, you cross the Rio Grande illegally and there’s like a federal taxpayer-funded welcoming committee for you now?

HECKER: Exactly. And the militia was joking all the time that these guys are called the Uber for migrants now, because it’s not as if — they’re not really hired to keep people out anymore at this point. I mean, if you — a lot of migrants know that they should run right into the arms of Border Patrol at this point because they will indeed get filed onto a warm van and sent off to a station where they have a good chance of remaining in the U.S. And if they do get sent back across the border, they can just try again.

But nothing bad’s gonna happen to them if they get caught by Border Patrol, a lot of these guys are learning. Nut it was interesting to me in those three days, I never saw Border Patrol agents out there in action, you know, chasing after migrants. I did see the Texas National Guard dispatched by Governor Abbott. Those guys were sprinting at times trying to chase down some of these migrants. Border Patrol was nowhere to be seen in regards to the that. They would mosey up and hand plastic bags to migrants who’d swum across. But I wasn’t — I wasn’t seeing that.

When I was there several months ago, Border Patrol had a lot of buses that they were filing migrants onto, taking to Catholic Charities and I watched Catholic Charities give plane tickets to the migrants to head in — further into the U.S. So, it’s just a very strange scenario, and I think that’s why we see Border Patrol’s morale plummeting. Because they’re sitting there questioning whether — you know, why are we called Border Patrol, and why are we believed to be protecting the border, when the people on the ground are seeing us and calling us Uber? Because that’s what they seem to be doing now.

CLAY: Ivory, what do we know about fentanyl and other drugs crossing the border? Obviously, part of this major issue, huge part of it is people. But, also the drug trade is coming across the border in massive numbers, I believe. What did you hear about that?

HECKER: Yeah, shadowing the border, the militia, they were always on the lookout for drugs. They said that sometimes the little bags, you’d see a lot of bags around the border, and some of them would have migrants’ belongings in them, but some of them would be disguised as migrants’ belongings but they would actually be drugs. Like, at one point the militia was cracking open cans of tuna, there was a bag with food in it, but they said previously they had encountered a bag of food and when they opened the containers of food, it was straight drugs. So, they were – part of the militia’s job was just going through what is left there, making sure none of it is drugs, because that is such an issue.

BUCK: IvoryHecker.com for more of Ivory’s reporting from down on the border. Ivory, thanks for being with us. We appreciate it.

HECKER: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s all on YouTube. I put the coverage of the border on YouTube.

BUCK: Oh, fantastic. Go check it out. What’s your YouTube channel?

HECKER: Just search Ivory Hecker.

BUCK: All righty. There we go. Thank you, Ivory.