Ron Vitiello, a longtime immigration enforcement official, reflected on the significant failures that took place under former President Joe Biden’s administration during an exclusive interview with Blaze News senior politics editor Christopher Bedford on Thursday.
Vitiello has spent decades dedicated to protecting America’s borders, most recently serving as acting director for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during President Donald Trump’s first term and now as a senior adviser to Customs and Border Protection during his second term. Witnessing the contrast in immigration policy across different administrations, Vitiello tells Bedford that having Trump back in office after Biden is like night and day.
“It’s clear that during the Biden administration, uncontrolled border was their goal, right?” Vitiello told Bedford. “We had an invasion unlike we’ve seen before.”
‘Alejandro Mayorkas, as the secretary, watched what happened under the Trump administration, takes over as the secretary, and tears down all the things that were working for the previous four years. So they knew exactly what they were doing.’
“If you just used government numbers, and I know we’re all a little bit skeptical of those numbers, but using Biden’s own published numbers in public, 11 million encounters by CBP at the immediate border during the four years of the Biden administration,” Vitiello added. “That doesn’t count the number of people they abused the parole system to fly into the United States, which weren’t seen by law enforcement agents at the line where people would be responsible for vetting them and making sure they weren’t a threat to public safety.”
Another weak point for the Biden administration was the influx of migrant “gotaways,” which are illegal aliens who are never apprehended or deported after entering the country. Vitiello said that the increase in these migrant “gotaways” was the Biden-era exploitation of the CBP One app, which aided illegal immigration. Now under Trump’s leadership, the DHS introduced the CBP Home app, which instead helps illegal aliens to self-deport.
The bottom line, Vitiello points out, is that the Biden administration and the agencies he led were actively and knowingly facilitating illegal immigration.
“The Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, was the previous deputy secretary under the Obama administration when Joe Biden was the vice president,” Vitiello said. “And during the 2014 surge when I was still a government employee, we made recommendations to the Homeland Security office of the secretary and the deputy secretary on how to fix the surge that was going on in 2014.”
“They put those recommendations that we gave — myself, Tom Homan, and others — they took those recommendations and put them in place to reduce the number of people that were coming across the border illegally,” Vitiello added. “Those steps worked, and we had better outcomes. Other things happened since, but they knew how to fix it, and Alejandro Mayorkas, as the secretary, watched what happened under the Trump administration, takes over as the secretary, and tears down all the things that were working for the previous four years. So they knew exactly what they were doing.”
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