Retired Border Patrol Chief Aaron Heitke, who left his position at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in early 2023, says President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’s administration has worked to hide the mass release of migrants into American communities.
During a House Homeland Security Committee hearing on Wednesday, Heitke detailed the breakdown of federal immigration enforcement at the United States-Mexico border on Biden and Harris’s watch.
The actions they took, Heitke said, started with limiting the ability of DHS to return migrants to their home countries and cutting migrant detention space which then forced the agency to start mass releasing migrants into the U.S. interior.
Heitke told the Committee:
Throughout the first three plus years of this administration, I saw a steady decrease in countries we could send people back to. For the first time in my 25 years and under five different administrations, whether through neglect or on purpose, I saw a large-scale lapse in our ability to return people to their country of origin. The inability to send people home meant that most people being arrested for illegal entry would either have to be detained or released. [Emphasis added]
The current administration, however, from day one, made a point of decreasing the amount of detention space available nationwide. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s funding for detention space has steadily been cut and private detention eliminated. [Emphasis added]
The fact that so many illegal aliens were being released into the United States spread worldwide very quickly. As this happened the numbers the Border Patrol encountered illegally crossing the border increased exponentially. [Emphasis added]
According to Heitke, the Biden-Harris administration’s mass release of migrants means that oftentimes 100 percent of border patrol agents are pulled away from their duties at the border to process groups of hundreds of thousands of migrants who are arriving every month.
“Border Patrol zones across Texas, Arizona, and California had no agent presence for weeks and months at a time,” Heitke said. “Those who did not want to be caught could simply walk in. We have no idea who and what entered our country over this time. Throughout 2022 and 2023 I sent agents to Texas and Arizona to count gotaways. Those sectors could not even put enough agents in the field to see what they had missed.”
In an attempt to hide the mass release of migrants, Heitke said the Biden-Harris administration ordered two migrant flights every week from San Diego, California, to Texas “to quiet the problem” that started severely impacting southern California communities.
“These flights simply brought aliens that would have been released in San Diego over to Texas,” Heitke said:
Each flight cost approximately $150,000. This was the administration’s way of trying to quiet the border-wide crisis. Once these flights stopped and releases continued, California saw the true economic impact. I received calls from the governor’s office, local mayors, and hospital administrators asking if we could keep injured aliens in our custody so the federal government would pay the bills. [Emphasis added]
Through pressure from the administration, my headquarters became more interested in the fiction being portrayed in the media and not at all concerned with reality. Each time we asked for help in dealing with a new issue it fell on deaf ears. At times in San Diego, we had 2,000 or more aliens sitting in between the fences asking to turn themselves in. I was told to move them out of sight of the media. [Emphasis added]
Heitke said mass deportations must be carried out by any future administration to “return to a policy of enforcing the law.”
“The only true consequence we have to slow down and discourage people from coming to the United States illegally is sending them back to their country of origin,” Heitke said.
“The problems we are facing at the border have solutions. These solutions can be quite simple and cost far less than the mess currently occupying so much time and money … returning illegal aliens to their home countries is required,” Heitke said.
Since Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took office in early 2021, almost 8 million migrants have been welcomed into American communities, including almost 2 million illegal alien got-aways.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at
