Ex-Border Patrol Agent Reflects on 31 Years of Service Undone

JACUMBA HOT SPRINGS, Calif.—Mike Syzdek joined the Border Patrol in 1976. He says he “always liked the idea of law enforcement” and needed the job safety the Border Patrol provided.  

At 57, after 31 years of serving on the Campo Border Patrol Station in San Diego County, Syzdek retired in 2007. He cherished his job throughout these three many years, however at the moment, he says he wonders what all his laborious work was for.  

It was frequent for him to work an 11-hour day as a result of his group was small, the previous agent says, including that he doesn’t know what number of graduations and household capabilities he missed, however these “sacrifices” have been “all for nothing,” he instructed The Daily Signal throughout a current ride-along by way of the world he used to patrol. 

“I think of all the agents, myself included, who were injured on the job and agents who were killed … only to find out that everything was for nothing,” Syzdek stated.  

“Over the course of my 31 years in Border Patrol, I caught, you know, tens of thousands of aliens,” he stated.

“I caught 20,000, let’s say, I kept them out of here. But they’ve let 10 million in … so, everything that I worked for my entire career was for nothing,” he added. “And the only thing I feel good about is the many, many drug loads I busted and people I sent to prison and got the drugs off the streets.”  

When he appears to be like on the present scenario on the southern border, Syzdek says, “it’s just heartbreaking that we have laws on the books and an agency to enforce the laws, and nobody’s doing it.” 

Illegal crossings into the U.S. alongside California’s border with Mexico will not be new. Established smuggling routes, extra fascinating terrain, and Tijuana’s proximity to San Diego, one of 9 sectors alongside the southern border, have lengthy made the sector a fascinating crossing location. Border partitions and border safety insurance policies labored to drive unlawful immigration numbers down considerably within the sector from 2010 to 2020.  

The Border Patrol encountered 53,282 unlawful aliens between ports of entry within the San Diego Sector in fiscal 12 months 2020, the final full 12 months of President Donald Trump’s presidency. In fiscal 12 months 2021, encounters within the San Diego Sector almost tripled, rising to 142,459. 

Since Joe Biden grew to become president, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has encountered greater than 9 million unlawful aliens on America’s borders and at ports of entry. That doesn’t embody 1.7 million “known gotaways.” 

Syzdek says he and the boys he served alongside “never imagined in our wildest imagination that our country, that we all worked so hard to defend for those many years that we were in, would have open borders.” 

On at the moment’s version of “The Daily Signal Podcast,” Virginia Allen and Simon Hankinson, senior analysis fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, talk about their current journey to the southern border in San Diego County and what they discovered from their ride-along with Syzdek. (The Daily Signal is the information outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

Listen to the podcast under: