The head of the Border Patrol’s union said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas deserves to be impeached for misleading the public into thinking agents mounted on horseback were whipping migrants in Texas last year.
Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, also said a new document showing that Mr. Mayorkas was made aware there was no whipping, even as he allowed the whipping narrative to percolate, undercut the department’s attempt to punish two agents accused of “unprofessional conduct” in the encounters with illegal immigrants.
“This should be completely thrown out. It should be over,” Mr. Judd said. “Those agents should be exonerated immediately.”
The document, obtained by The Heritage Foundation, is an email sent to Mr. Mayorkas by his chief spokesperson, Marsha Espinosa, with the text of an article about the September 2021 encounter between agents and Haitian migrants in Del Rio.
Ms. Espinosa highlighted a portion of the article where a photographer who snapped images of the encounter said that despite what people thought they saw, no agents whipped migrants. The article quoted the photographer saying the images were “misconstrued.”
Hours after receiving the email, Mr. Mayorkas led a press briefing at the White House and said the images “painfully conjured up the worst elements of our nation’s ongoing battle against systemic racism.”
Mr. Judd said the secretary knew better but inflamed the situation.
“He perjured himself,” Mr. Judd said. “By withholding facts, by not telling the American people the facts, he knew, and only giving them one side of the story, he perjured himself. That qualifies as high crimes and misdemeanors. He disqualified himself from the current jobs that he holds, and he needs to step down.”
Mr. Judd said Mr. Mayorkas’ actions rise to the level of impeachment.
The email obtained by The Heritage Foundation was first reported by Fox News.
In a statement, the Homeland Security Department said Mr. Mayorkas was processing a lot of information about the incident at the time.
“At that time, it was one news clip in the midst of many others, and a formal investigation had already been initiated,” a department official said. “The responsible action in any such scenario is to await the findings of the investigation and not make assumptions from any single press clipping. That’s exactly what the secretary said at that press briefing, cited in the article.”
The official pointed to Mr. Mayorkas’ other statements at the White House, including that he had ordered an investigation.
“I’m going to let the investigation run its course. I’m not going to interfere with that investigation,” the secretary said at the time. “The facts will be determined by the investigators, and then the results will be driven by the facts that are determined.”
One reporter cited the news story that Mr. Mayorkas had been emailed and pointed to the photographer’s statement that he never saw Border Patrol agents whip anyone.
The reporter then asked whether it was helpful to the investigation if President Biden, just hours earlier, said the agents “strapped” the migrants.
Mr. Mayorkas did not confirm or contradict the president’s assertion that migrants were whipped. Instead, he defended the investigative process.
“I know how to maintain the integrity of an investigation, and this investigation will have integrity,” he said.
That explanation didn’t ring true for Mark Morgan, who ran Customs and Border Protection in the Trump administration and served as chief of the Border Patrol in the Obama administration.
“If he knew it was a lie 2½ hours before his press conference, why in hell would he utter anything about the image conjuring up racism? How can something that did not happen conjure up anything?” Mr. Morgan told The Times. “By his words, he continued to add fuel to a false narrative. A lie we now know he knew was a lie.”
Mr. Morgan said Mr. Mayorkas could have mentioned the photographer’s account as a way of acknowledging that the facts were still developing or could have asked for all sides to “step back, stop jumping to conclusions.”
“He had a choice. He chose to intentionally omit a key piece of evidence that he had. An essential piece that would have immediately derailed the false narrative and driven the rhetoric down,” Mr. Morgan said. “He chose a disgusting partisan path and threw away the agents as collateral damage. That man is a danger on many levels.”
The images stemmed from one of the worst black eyes from the Biden administration’s unprecedented border crisis, when thousands of Haitian migrants waded the Rio Grande, set up a camp on the U.S. side of the river and demanded entry. They overwhelmed the Border Patrol, which called for reinforcements.
Among those reinforcements was a mounted horse patrol unit, which was assigned to help block more migrants from joining the 10,000 or so already camped on the U.S. side of the border.
Images from one encounter between a mounted agent and a migrant ducking away from the horse went viral. High-profile Democrats, including Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, said the images showed the agent was whipping the migrant.
In the immediate aftermath of the incident, Mr. Mayorkas appeared to give the agents involved a pass by saying they were trying to control their horses. But after a talking-to by the vice president, he changed his tone and said the images “conjured up” the worst of American history with racism.
He said the probe would be completed in days.
Instead, it dragged on for months, with a massive report released in July largely exonerating the agents, specifically finding they didn’t whip or strike migrants. The report did find that agents shouldn’t have used their horses’ bodies to block access to the U.S., and one agent was found to have used insulting language.
In total, four agents were recommended for discipline over what current CBP Commissioner Chris Magnus called “unprofessional and deeply offensive conduct.”
The report did blame supervisors for putting agents in an impossible situation by asking them to defend the border against overwhelming numbers of people crossing at will, essentially erasing the international boundary.
The investigation found that Border Patrol leaders lacked a strategy for dealing with the migrants already in the U.S. and for addressing those streaming across the border.
The horse patrol agents were given only the slimmest of briefings before they were sent into the field.
Complicating matters was the presence of Texas law enforcement, which had its own goals of protecting state property and blocking the river to try to prevent more people from crossing.
Agents were told not to interfere with the migrants but also told to assist the Texas Department of Public Safety. When Texas authorities asked the Border Patrol for help to block migrants’ entry on Sept. 19, agents from the horse patrol were deployed.
They asked for guidance from their supervisor, who called up the chain of command but got no answer and gave the go-ahead to help Texas authorities, investigators concluded.
Mr. Judd has questioned why supervisors didn’t face discipline over the fiasco.
Now he says Mr. Mayorkas must answer.
“The intent to deceive is a lie. And if you lie to the American people in a Senate-confirmed position, you are perjuring yourself, and perjury is considered a high crime and misdemeanor,” Mr. Judd said.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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