The Cipher Brief tapped experts Michael J. Fisher, former Chief of the U.S. Border Patrol and member of the Senior Executive Service and Rowdy Adams, former Senior Executive Service member in the DHS, CBP Office of Border Patrol specializing in border security operations to talk with us about the issues that are affecting security at the border and whether there is a conflagration issue when it comes to security and immigration.
We started with the numbers. In April 2019, CBP apprehended over 99,000 people attempting to cross illegally into the U.S. In May 2019, the number jumped to 132,887 people attempting to cross illegally into the U.S. They are numbers that gangs, human smugglers and narcotics traffickers and watching closely and exploiting.
Over the next two days, The Cipher Brief will be focused on how these numbers are or are not impacting broader national security, about how they are creating a different dynamic than we’ve seen in recent years and the role of technology and the media in understanding the depth of the threat.
The Cipher Brief: You always have a great way, Mike, of level setting where we are on this. Help us understand what these numbers mean.
Fisher: The numbers are high. One of the challenges in terms of both the humanitarian and border security crisis - and it is indeed a crisis - is that we're dealing with a different population than we were, let's say, a decade ago. There was a huge demographic shift that started around the middle of 2013 and piqued in the summer of 2014. The shift was abated in large part because of some of the work that our Mexican counterparts had done in stopping the flow of illegal crossings into the United States. But the flow has increased successively every year. So in April we find ourselves with 99,000, as you mentioned with two thirds women and children.
And the vast majority of all of those who are apprehended are from non-contiguous Central American countries, predominantly Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. And to just compare numbers from where we are today versus historical precedents isn’t sufficient. When you're processing a large number of people from a single country, Mexico for example, you basically are processing them once they enter the country illegally. You're taking their fingerprints, identifying any potential threats, and then within a few hours, they're repatriated back to their country of origin.
Although the numbers are high, there's a flow and a put-through process that is not typically overwhelming to the border patrol at that point. With the demographic shift, however, that is completely different. You are not able to return these people to Mexico. The detention facilities at border patrol stations were never built to house people beyond 72 hours and in most cases today, people are in border patrol custody for an excess of 20 days. There is no additional detention capability within the department, and so what ended up happening, is that most of those individuals were released on their own recognizance, many of whom did not show up for their court cases, which oftentimes are scheduled two to three years out because of the dockets are so overwhelmed at this point.
That is a different situation, however, that we're facing today. This is just like in economics where people are going to decide to come into this country illegally when the benefit exceeds the cost. Until and unless that paradigm shifts, they're going to continue to come.
The Cipher Brief: Rowdy, you have a rare perspective on this issue, earned over a very long career working in this business. What we see in the news media is staggering when you consider how many different moving parts that the folks at CBP and others that are helping them are managing. Can you give us some context so we can better understand the scope of the logistical operations along the Southern border?
Adams: In 2000, we went through a very similar influx, and we had a huge number of people coming in, but the dynamic was vastly different than it is today. We were able to process and get them through the system because they were predominantly Mexican nationals that we could push back into Mexico without any of the concerns for passports other than Mexican countries. So, we were able to move those numbers of people and be able to get them through the system more efficiently. At one point, I was in Douglas, Arizona, and we were apprehending about 24,000 people in a 24-hour period. Again, we were able to move those people through the processing system and get them identified, get them into the system, and then return them back South into Mexico. The dynamic that we’re seeing today is just exactly the opposite. We don't have the ability to get those people back to their country of origin in a succinct way. There's a multitude of reasons why - including a broken immigration system and laws, and the clouding of political asylum and credible fear considerations, but there is also the fact that these are mostly women and children that we didn't have to deal with before. That creates a different requirement for housing, separation, security and safety for their benefit as well as other concerns.
The Cipher Brief: When you see things like the tent shelters that authorities are setting up, and understanding what that demographic shift you’re describing means for the day-to-day lives of the CBP, the military and everyone else involved in this work, do you have a sense that this is sustainable? Can CBP keep this pace up for very long?
Adams: We'll keep it up as long as we're willing to facilitate some of these claims of asylum and the credible fear piece. We have had similar circumstances in the past where they've overloaded the system with credible fear claims. I think it was in the 2006-2008 timeframe with a number of Brazilians entering South Texas. They were overloading the system with a very similar set of circumstances. They were not women and children, primarily, but because of the processing requirements and the passport requirements and the identification by their home country, getting through all of the legal pieces, it took about 20-21 days to get them returned. We had to deal with that for about a 21-day period, and so the message got delivered that people were being sent back. The difference today is that you've got a humanitarian effort that's going on with women and children that tugs on the heartstrings, and sending people back to some of these locations, especially with the women and children, becomes untenable to some folks. We're going to continue to deal with this until we start removing people and sending them back to their country of origin.
The Cipher Brief: Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has recently forwarded a proposal that would shift U.S. support away from security assistance under the Merida plan, and more towards development assistance. He's said in recent statements that he doesn't need more helicopters with machine guns, but he needs more development and humanitarian assistance. If the U.S. carves out more investment for development, will that have the greatest impact on addressing the current situation?
Fisher: Any humanitarian assistance whether it's in North America, in Mexico, or in Central America, that’s aimed at helping to lower unemployment and stabilize those countries should continue. That's a long term-effort though and it’s not going to solve any of the immediate challenges that we're having on the border today.
One of the pressing things that gets lost in the numbers, and stories of women and children, is the fact that along the Southern U.S. border right now, along one of the three largest sectors, 60% of the border patrol agents are not patrolling the line. They are processing, and taking care of the women and children, and making sure that the humanitarian effort is going well. So, you can imagine the level of exploitation that exists under those circumstances. When the office of field operations posts their numbers at the end of this year, take a look at the number of drug seizures at the port of entry compared to previous years. I would suggest that those numbers are going to be exceedingly low, and it's not because the smuggling organizations are not smuggling narcotics anymore. They have shifted. They will always go to the path of least resistance. Right now, that path of least resistance is in between the ports of entry, and those are coordinated efforts that the cartels and the networks are using to flood those areas with people from Central America, knowing full well that the border patrol is not going to be able to patrol the border, and all the narcotics are pouring through.
Michael J. Fisher, Former Chief, U.S. Border Patrol
"To minimize or oversimplify the challenge that they're facing right now as only a humanitarian crisis negates the fact that there is an evolving threat that I have not heard a lot of people talk about other than those who are seeing it firsthand at the border and are feeling helpless and unable to address the drug flow that's coming through right now."
The Cipher Brief: What does Mexico need to do to fix this problem? The President has said that he will redirect resources toward both the countries northern and southern borders.
Adams: To Mike's point, the humanitarian efforts absolutely have to continue but it's not a short-term strategy to be able to deal with what we're currently seeing. Mexico has a major, major role in this situation. It is as simple as 541 miles of Guatemalan border versus 1954 miles with the U.S. It is much easier to defend and much easier to stop the flow at that border. Certainly, people moving through your country and coming into your country illegally from is something that Mexico can very easily address with more diligence in making sure that those who are trying to enter their country illegally are getting turned around and sent back to Guatemala. So, I think Mexico holds a huge key piece of this.
Fisher: If you took a look at the migration flows from Central America through North America into the United states, and you take a look at 2014 and you compare that with 2015, you'll see a dramatic reduction of illegal entry into the United States in 2015. That wasn't because the people stopped coming. It's because Mexico was enforcing their own immigration laws. The vast majority, and I would venture to say close to 100% of the individuals who are traveling through Mexico, are doing so without documents. That has been enforced in the past with Mexico, but they have not been able to sustain it for a variety of reasons. So, what they need to understand is that any agreements they've made with the United States in terms of a shared border relates to all threats, and to take that seriously. As we've seen with the waves of people and the recent chaos, there's always going to be the criminal element, and that increases the threat. So first and foremost, they need to enforce those laws like they did in 2015 and sustain it.
The second thing is that people who are fleeing their home countries and are expressing credible fear for either religious persecution, political persecution, not economic crisis but based on that, if they're claiming legitimate, credible fear, they need to claim it in the first country where they feel safe. That would be Mexico. They need to process those individuals if in fact they're claiming asylum when they're coming into custody or through the checkpoints in Mexico. So, they need to take ownership and responsibility in that regard as well.
The Cipher Brief: Attorney General William Barr recently traveled to Central America and El Salvador, to learn more about MS-13. I'd like to get both of you to comment briefly on MS-13 because it's easy for people to forget about this organization and the threat that it presents to the United States. How big of an issue is MS-13 as it relates to the border problem that we're seeing, and then more broadly speaking, how great is the threat to American cities? What would you say to Attorney General Barr if you were briefing him on MS-13?
Adams: MS-13 is a huge issue and we’ve felt the effects of it in the United States for years. We beat it back and it winds up reconstituting itself in different arenas or it moves on to another state or locale. I think it's an important issue because it's being used as a reason for many of the asylum claims for those folks fleeing that organization in their home countries. I think if I were briefing the Attorney General, I would be trying to demonstrate to him that the host nation needs to do a much better job of trying to eradicate MS-13 from their country.
Rowdy Adams, Former Chief of Operations, U.S.Border Patrol
"If you study some of the asylum claims, folks are claiming that basically MS-13 is controlling entire municipalities, they're controlling states, so there needs to be a much bigger effort within the host country to eradicate that issue or to address it closer to the source rather than wait until it gets to the United States. Now, sending people back for MS-13 violations or for other criminal acts in the U.S. has to also be a priority. We need to figure out a way to deal with those folks when they try to come back to the U.S. and not just let them loose or allow them to return to society."
Fisher: MS-13 gets a lot of notoriety primarily because of their brutality and how they operate, the crimes they commit, and the atrocities that get reported on the evening news. It is certainly a gang to be reckoned with. The attorney general's recent trip to El Salvador reminded me of a period in the early 90s, after the civil war in El Salvador. El Salvador was standing up a new national police force. They recruited from a vast array of the population including former guerrillas and gang members, and they started building a cohesive law enforcement entity within that country. Unfortunately, and we see this happen too many times, when the level of corruption is high, as it is within some of those Central American countries, and wages are extremely low, and when there is a large amount of illicit narcotics and money that is available through bribery and extortion, things can get somewhat muddled into the overarching criminal enterprise which then makes it very difficult for these countries to sustain a legitimate law enforcement capability to reroute or at least manage some of the gang activities that we've seen in Central America. Certainly, the same could be true in some of our cities where you have MS-13 and other gangs that prey upon vulnerable populations.
MS-13 is a real threat. They are preying upon the migrants as they're coming up through Mexico. They own and operate the “beast” or the train that is taking a lot of these migrants from Southern Mexico up through Central Mexico, and there's very little that is done in Mexico to stop those gangs from exploiting those individuals as well. So, it's not just a problem in El Salvador, although oftentimes we look at El Salvador because that's the genesis of MS-13. It transcends into North America, and we see that here even in our own cities.
The Cipher Brief: You both are so intimately familiar with so many aspects of border security and immigration. We've talked about a couple of the external influences. We've talked about the demographic shift that's compounding the issue. But there are other areas too, like technology and the role of the media.
Technology has allowed us to advance the way that we can conduct surveillance over a broad area, the way that we can interconnect surveillance and have more of a common operating understanding of an environment. That's been a great advance in the world of military and law enforcement. Technology has also enabled folks like the cartels to be able to cross our border with a much greater ease. Mike, you've talked about that in the past with drones.
Also, modern society is quite complicated. Cipher Brief expert General Michael Hayden has mentioned that fact numerous times in The Cipher Brief. I'd like to get you to comment on that as well. How can people have a clearer understanding of this issue, despite the complexities and how it is reported? Is this going to continue to be a political football for the rest of our lives that never gets solved?
Adams: I certainly hope it's not a political football for the rest of our lives. Unfortunately, things just don't look like they're changing very much and one of the key issues and challenges we face today is social media and where people are actually ingesting news and information from, which often does not come from credible sources. Very little of it is based in fact. It's all about conjecture and supposition. The whole fabric of how we understand information and what's true, what's not true and how information is being processed is a huge issue whether or not it's actually factual or whether it's something somebody made up and the old urban legend scenario.
If you look at the influence that social media has had on some of these caravans coming north, its driving the narrative and an understating of what’s occurring so much that when these groups arrived south of San Diego, it was almost a carnival-like atmosphere. These people were coming north to enter the U.S. illegally and to fraudulently claim asylum, at least in my opinion, based on credible fear. I get concerned about the social media influence more than anything else and the level of veracity that goes along with it.
Fisher: I agree with what Rowdy said but I also want to back up a little. We need to stop, as a country, conflating border security with immigration. The challenges that I've seen throughout my career are continuing because I look at those as completely mutually exclusive.
Michael J. Fisher, Former Chief, U.S. Border Patrol
"When we're talking about whether it's a humanitarian crisis, a border security crisis, threats to this country and patrolling the border, that to me is border security. A separate piece is the discussion about immigration and immigration reform. We need to keep this in mind as we look at legislation, and as we watch how the media covers this issue."
Oftentimes when they get conflated, the discussion just goes to immigration reform. It's like, well, somehow we can't solve one without the other. This is clearly a border security issue. I've witnessed big changes recently in the use of technology as it relates to the transnational criminal organizations and their ability to market and recruit through social media utilizing propaganda to entice people into those networks for monetary gain for the cartels and for the networks that are moving these people. If you just think about those numbers we talked about earlier, 99,000 in April 2019 how do you logistically set up a network to be able to move that amount of people?
The cartels have adjusted. As a matter of fact, if you go back even a year, they would interview migrants that were apprehended by the border patrol or in Mexico, and these people would be walking for two or three months trying to get from Guatemala to the United States. Now they've got bus routes, they've logistically built infrastructure and transportation networks to move that same amount of people in a matter of weeks. That also is exacerbating the crisis at the border, because now you're having more and more people over a shorter period of time presenting themselves either with asylum claims, or just coming for family reunification, knowing full well that, and this is what the smuggling organizations are telling them, that they're going to be released. And that is the paradigm shift that has to stop. Until those people are apprehended, identified, and then sent back to their country, that flow is going to continue.
Like Rowdy said, it's not necessarily just the technology. It's the person who left their village and then three weeks later is calling home from Chicago, or Los Angeles, or from New York and saying, "Yes, they're still letting people go." That's as simple as a cell phone. When you think about the fact that most of these people as they're traveling through don't have any documentation, they have very little clothes or money, but a lot of them have cell phones and they're utilizing technology not just to get from point A to point B, but they're using it in enhancing communication networks that quite frankly, 20 years ago, never existed. It made that trek a lot more dangerous and more difficult to execute.
In part two of our conversation about border security, we will ask Former Customs and Border Protection Chief Mike Fisher specifically about Mexico's recent actions and how they might impact the broader security issue as well as the one thing that could hold them back. That is coming in Tuesday's Cipher Brief.
Michael J. Fisher is the former Chief of the U.S. Border Patrol and a member of the Senior Executive Service. He was responsible for planning, organizing, coordinating, and directing enforcement efforts designed to secure the Nation’s borders.
Chief Rowdy Adams retired in June 2011 as a career Senior Executive Service member in the DHS, CBP Office of Border Patrol after almost 30 years in law enforcement, specializing in border security operations, enforcement technology, strategic and tactical planning, and immigration issues. In March 2019 Chief Adams (Ret), along with 3 partners, launched Xenith Solutions.
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