‘It’s All Political’: Border Patrol Council President Says Biden Admin Hid Border Numbers To Pass Omnibus

The president of the National Border Patrol Council blasted the Biden administration Friday, saying it hid border numbers to help secure passage of a $1.7 trillion spending bill.

“It’s all political. Everything that this administration does, it has a political calculus. They didn’t want to release the numbers because they knew the omnibus was coming up,” Brandon Judd told “Fox and Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade. “If they would have released the numbers, you would have seen a larger push to get border security funding in that omnibus. That’s what this administration does. They don’t care about the American people, they care about politics.”

The House of Representatives passed the omnibus bill Friday, with nine Republicans joining 215 Democrats to send the bill to President Joe Biden.

United States Customs and Border Protection received $1,563,143,000 for “operations and support” in the omnibus spending bill, but the legislation prohibits the use of those funds “to acquire, maintain, or extend border security technology and capabilities, except for technology and capabilities to improve Border Patrol processing.”

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The prohibition comes after United States Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) encountered over 2.3 million migrants in fiscal year 2022, with another 230,000 in October, the first month of the new fiscal year, according to official figures, while another 600,000 migrants evaded CBP, Fox News reported.

“There’s a small hiring of 300 agents, but that doesn’t matter because we can’t already meet our hiring quota. Last year we weren’t able to meet the 1,700 agents that we were supposed to hire. We hired about 200 less than that,” Judd added. “So we can’t even meet that quota as it is. And that’s law enforcement across the board, throughout the entire nation. It simply, again, comes back to politics.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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