Accusations from Todd Lyons, the new acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, that the Biden administration was inflating migrant arrest numbers come as no surprise, Goliad County, Texas Sheriff Roy Boyd said on Newsmax Sunday.
"We saw it firsthand," Boyd told Newsmax's "Wake Up America Weekend." "Unfortunately, the Biden administration was working hand in hand with the organizations that were assisting the cartels in their illegal smuggling operations. "
Lyons told reporters last week that the Biden administration was "purposely misleading" Americans by categorizing tens of thousands of migrants who were processed and released into the United States as ICE arrests.
"The fact that they would fudge the books and do what they were doing comes as no surprise to us," said Boyd. "We were absolutely overwhelmed with everything they were bringing through and the people that we would catch and did turn over to Border Patrol ended up in the country anyway. "
Former Drug Enforcement Agency agent Michael Brown, also on Sunday's program, said it is difficult to assess whether there will be any accountability on the findings.
"We have to remember that any misreporting simply enabled the ability of the cartels," Brown, now the global director of counter-narcotics technology at Rigaku Analytical Devices, commented. "So whether or not there will be accountability, I think remains to be seen. But at least at this point, President [Donald]Trump has closed the border, denying billions of dollars in revenue to the cartels for human sex trafficking."
ICE, meanwhile, says it is falling short by $2 billion in the latest government spending bill and doesn't have enough funding to keep up with arrests.
But Boyd said that the arrest rates can be maintained and even improved, "but there's a different model that's going to have to be looked at."
"We've talked with [border czar] Tom Homan, we've talked with different people in the administration over the last several months," he said. "What we have to do is we have to utilize the full spectrum of law enforcement. That's local, state, and federal law enforcement."
Further, if the federal government would enact a task force, then it would be able to achieve Trump's goals without incurring a permanent impact to taxpayers' dollars, said Boyd.
"There is a way to do it economically, responsibly," said Boyd. "But we're going to have to change our mindset, our methodology, and the federal government is going to have to conduct business in a different way than it has in the past."
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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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