President Donald Trump Tuesday tweeted there will be more agents brought on to secure the nation's border with Mexico, after National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd praised the president for his work and noted that hiring practices are keeping his ranks short-staffed.
The president tweeted:
Shortly before the tweet, Judd told Fox News' "Fox and Friends," "The problem is, we have such a high attrition rate that we have a hard time keeping up with hiring . . . The main reason we have had a hard time keeping up with hiring is we haven't done the hiring correctly."
But, he added, 2018 already is shaping up as a good year, because "we had a businessman elected as president who came in and did something in one year that most people thought was going to take two to three years."
Judd noted that it can take up to nine months to hire a Border Patrol agent, partly because the agency's polygraph system has not been operating correctly.
"If you look at a normal polygraph system with any law enforcement agency, local, state, you have about a 26 percent, 27 percent failure rate," said Judd. "In the Border Patrol, we're having up to a 67 percent, 70 percent failure rate, which tells you we're just not administering the polygraph correctly, and that's one of the main problems that we're having."
Judd said his advice to Trump would be to build the wall "in many different" locations, and hire new guards.
"If you look right now, we have a sector in Texas called Big Ben, that there's no infrastructure whatever," he said. "So there's a lot of different places. Rio Grande Valley is the focus area right now. But criminals take the path of least resistance. And when you beef up one area, and you leave another area open, you're susceptible to the crime going to that area. So we have to take a holistic approach to border security."
Judd added that he has worked in areas where there was no fence, but when one was added, "it dropped the number of apprehensions exponentially."
Further, it's not only Mexicans coming over the border, he said.
"We have them coming from all over the place," Judd said. "I personally have arrested people from Russia, Poland, China. We arrest people from all over the world...they're coming through Mexico, but we're arresting them from everywhere."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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