Truth From Border Patrol – What You Must Know About The Immigration Crisis – with Rodney Scott – [Ep. 233]

Linda J Hansen: Welcome. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Prosperity 101® Breakroom Economics Podcast. My name is Linda J. Hansen, your host and the author of Prosperity 101® Job Security Through Business Prosperity: The Essential Guide to Understanding How Policy Affects Your Paycheck, and the creator of the Breakroom Economics online course.

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And the future of our nation rests in the hands of we, the people. It's up to you, to us, to be informed and to educate others on the truth that will preserve freedom and human flourishing some of the key elements of freedom and human flourishing our safety, security, and economic opportunity, which are all negatively impacted by our wide open border, which has created a national crisis in which every town is a border town and taxpaying American citizens are suffering with increased costs, crime, and overcrowding.

This is not sustainable. Today, I'm honored to have my guest, Rodney Scott. Rodney is the retired chief of U.S. Border Patrol. He is a distinguished senior fellow at Texas Public Policy Foundation. He's a team member at Border 911 Foundation, and he serves on the Board of Directors at the U.S. Border Patrol Museum.

Suffice to say, he has first-hand knowledge and experience on this issue. And I look forward to his insights. So Ronnie, thank you so much for joining with us today. 

Rodney Scott: Thank you for having me on. I appreciate the opportunity. 

Linda J Hansen: Well, it's been great to just meet you and to learn a little bit about your own career.

And you have certainly been involved with border patrol experience and positions throughout your career. And you have served under different presidents. And so could you tell us a little bit about your own experience and insights regarding the differences in leadership and policies with recent administrations?

Rodney Scott: Sure. So, that's a big ask. I think I'm going to, if you give me a little bit of leeway, I'm going to back up to the early part of my career literally 1992. So, I was an Arizona kid, moved there, understood the border in the context of narcotic smuggling, not really illegal immigration. And when I joined the Border Patrol, I got sent to Southern California, and there was a massive invasion at that point in time of illegal immigration coming across the border.

It was pre any type of fencing, any type of border wall. Fast forward a little bit, and then the reason I bring this all up is under President Bill Clinton, He said enough is enough. San Diego, their crime was out of control. Tijuana, the crime was out of control. And they stepped in and just said something that stuck in my brain back then.

Actually, it was a second-line supervisor trying to simplify this big new national strategy they were rolling out. He said, Hey, we're going to slow down the flow. We're going to clean up the clutter so that we can identify the biggest threats to America so that we can actually figure out who they are.

Because at that time, kind of like today, we were arresting thousands of people during one single shift. And you just didn't have the time to like do interviews and debrief and figure out who's who. So that I argue adamantly. That strategy that we started building out as United States Border Patrol in about 1994, which was to prevent illegal entries, thereby deterring the crime and stuff that goes with that.

And then given agents more time to actually go out and patrol and look for the real bad guys. We were evolving and building out that strategy very effectively over my entire career up until January 21st, 2021, where Biden basically completely reversed it. Yes, the Trump administration kind of put jetpacks on that strategy and really supported us in a way that no other president had really done.

But every president between Bill Clinton all the way through Donald Trump actually supported our deterrent strategy and we were systematically getting better and better control over the border. I also want to simplify that because a lot of people get into this like, Oh, it's the border. It's so far away.

You've got to think about the U. S. border in a more simplistic way. Think of it as like your home. Border strategy on the national level is very much like you probably do at home. You expect people to come through your front door. You expect them to knock on the door and just ask for permission before they come in.

And based on your personal values and your risk tolerance, you pick and choose who you let into your home. But if anybody tries to break into your home without coming through that front door without your permission, that's going to elicit a negative response. You're going to try to stop that on a national level.

It's actually the exact same thing, except we have 328 legally established front doors. They're called ports of entry. And then anybody, no matter what nationality race, how heavy they are, what color they dye their hair, no, one's allowed to come in to the country in between the ports of entry. They have to come through a port of entry.

Okay. It's Border Patrol's job to stop them and then figure out which legal pathway, if you will, to put them in, if we can deport them, or if they need asylum or whatever. But when you overwhelm those agents with a chaotic illegal immigration, similar to like, all of a sudden, a ton of people are trying to push through your front door of your home, you can no longer manage or control who or what is entering your home or who and what is entering the country.

And that's why I always argue. Border security has to come first. All these discussions about immigration reform or immigration policy, who should we allow in? Who shouldn't we allow in? You stop and think about it. Every one of those conversations is built off a foundational belief that you can enforce it.

That's border security. So without border security, all of that is irrelevant. To answer your question more directly. On January 21st, 2021, based on exactly what we heard during the campaign, and this shouldn't be political, it's just factual, the Biden administration came in and through a bunch of executive orders, reversed every effective program that we'd ever come up with to deter illegal immigration and literally opened the floodgates, just turn on, just do a quick internet search and you'll see that the aftermath.

10 million encounters with illegal aliens during the Biden administration, just the Biden administration. But that's only part of it. Those are the ones that Border Patrol actually touched. There was another 2 million that Border Patrol documented crossing the border, but they were out of resources. They did not, they literally couldn't do anything about it.

And I'm going to come back to that, why that's so important in a minute. But I also want to talk about the fact that but those are still only the known. So right there, there's 12 million known, but what a lot of people don't understand is there's a lot of very remote sections of the border where our strategy was actually having agents out there, patrolling, taking mobile technology with them, because there's no power, there's a lot of places.

There's no big mountain that you can put a camera pull on to see like a big area or anything like that. It's flatland, especially South Texas. So you have to take equipment out with you. But when the agents didn't go out, there's nothing to tell us who or what crossed through that area. And after the last three and a half years of this chaos, dealing with 10 million illegal alien encounters, the Border Patrol literally evacuated hundreds and hundreds of miles of border and left it completely wide open.

So we have no idea what crossed through any of those areas. The ones that crossed through there and the 2 million unknown, or I'm sorry, the 2 million known, this is what we do know about them. They're not still at the border because the border is not some far-off distant thing. It's a line that people have to cross going to your home, your town, whether it's Milwaukee, whether it's Chicago, whether it's Springfield, Missouri, it's a transit area.

That's where you kind of see them under a microscope. But all that stuff that crosses the border is going throughout your entire home. And in this case, a national level Trump administration simply listened to Border Patrol, took actions on our recommendations. The Biden administration basically told all the government, the career border security professionals, they really didn't care what we had to say, kind of pushed us aside, replaced us with political appointees, and then implemented their strategy.

But I want everybody to know this final thought, and I will shut up. It was intentional. We briefed them, myself and my team, as they were coming in. Gave the Biden administration, Biden and Harris administration, the exact same briefings that we gave the Trump administration. We explained to them how the cartels use illegal aliens to overwhelm law enforcement and then get a second wave through a lot easier.

The second wave is usually where they put criminals, narcotics. Anyway, we explained all that to them and explained, if you take away these deterrents, the physical border wall and the policy deterrences that we're going to get hit with a wave of illegal immigration, you cannot even imagine. Yeah. And they told us they didn't want to hear it.

They had a plan. And to think back, Secretary Mayorkas about first or second week that he was a secretary went on all the Sunday talk shows. And he said over and over again. We have a plan, we're acting on our plan, and our plan will be successful. Think about that for a minute. I would argue from their perspective, all of those things have come true.

Because this was intentional. 

Linda J Hansen: It was intentional. And I'm so glad you brought that up because over the last four years, so many people have said, or, three and a half plus years before, since he was elected. People have said, “Oh, they're so incompetent.” I'm like, no, this is not incompetence.

This is strategic planning on their part to produce the results they want, which is a, an America that is destroyed from within an America that can be trolled can be controlled by the globalist regime, an America that no longer. Is the America we know and love and the shining city on the hill for all the other nations in the world.

So this was intentional and it's heartbreaking to see, but there are things that we can do to stop it. And what would you say to the listener now? Like what's the most important thing that they can do to help stop this horrible abuse of our immigration system? 

Rodney Scott: So you touch on, I think the first thing is slowing down, getting a little bit, stepping back into politics a little bit and accepting the fact that it was intentional.

Now, I don't want to get into the speculation of why or anything else, but I will tell you, think this through the first thing. One of the first things that by the administration did was they reversed the ruling that Trump had put in place about how you count the census or how you count people for the purpose of congressional delegating correct congressional seats.

Under the Trump administration, they made that just U.S. citizens. Biden administration reversed that very quickly to make sure that illegal aliens were counted, regardless of immigration status, towards the census for the purposes of congressional seats. And then they fought adamantly against any kind of voter identification requirements.

nationwide. And then all you got to do is go back and look at the rhetoric. Never in any meeting, not a single meeting I was in with anybody in this administration, the Biden Harris administration, were we allowed to actually have any conversations about what's best for America or what's best for America?

How do we actually secure the border? It was all about reducing the amount of time that an illegal alien was held in custody. And it was all about taking care of the rest of the world, not about America. So Just putting those pieces together, I think it's really hard for the average American, at least from what I've seen, to accept the fact that you would have government officials that look into a TV screen and smile, that literally don't have your best interests at heart.

They're used to fighting about 10 percent tax versus 20 percent tax, or should schools be controlled locally or at the federal level? But these are like core issues now that kind of they go past that line in the sand that most Americans actually understand it is intentional and all the evidence is out there for anybody that wants to look at it and look for it because it's not going to be on mainstream media.

And I want you to do that. And then when you go into the ballot box and you vote, that is where we get to speak out. Elections have consequences and you need to vote your values and you need to vote if you want. care about this country. I challenge you to think about this name, any topic on the ballot, anything anybody's concerned about today that matters at all.

If we don't have, and literally a foundational principle of having a nation is having borders that you can control, because if you don't, then any law you pass, regardless of whether it's a speeding law or whether it's healthcare, no matter what it is, if you can't control who that affects, i.e. you can't control your boundaries, All those conversations are actually irrelevant.

The number one issue on the ballot should be national security. Border security is a big part of it. Voting is the number one way, actually right now, this isn't about perspectives anymore, like a little bit of a gray area. This is black and white. You have one candidate that completely destroyed border security.

The cartel in Mexico are advocating hard for that candidate to get reelected. And you have another candidate that said the cartels and human traffickers are public enemy number one. wants to deem them terrorists and wipe them off the face of the earth. It's really about that clear. So vote for what you believe in.

Linda J Hansen: Well, it is about that clear. It is very clear. And I don't think there's ever been a time in American history where it has been so black and white. Like you said, where it's just such a marked difference. A lot of times in politics, the lines get blurred because everybody uses these talking points and the low-information voter just gets confused.

Kind of get swayed one way or the other, but this is really clear. And I said before, every town is a border town. And, before we were recording, we were talking about how we raised our family in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, and it's a small little town, Southwest Wisconsin, less than 6,000 people.

And I began to notice changes there when I would go back and visit, and a few weeks back, they arrested a Venezuelan immigrant. He was a member of a violent crime cartel group, a gang, a violent car gang group, and he had been dropped off there. And they arrested him for assault, and he had, was committing a crime, and I'm sure he's not the only one.

And this is one of the things in small towns everywhere. So you may live in a small town listener. You may live, you may be hearing this and think, oh, it's, we live in Mayberry, right? But you don't, Prairie du Chien is like that. It's a sweet little town with wonderful people. It's always been safe.

It's just a beautiful location, but I knew things were changing as I would go back and on all the signs I even posted one time the McDonald's sign, it said hiring today apply within or something like that, all in English, everything else on that page. Rotating sign was in Spanish and, you're used to seeing this, like say on a border community down in South Texas or Southern Florida or something, but in a little town in Southwestern Wisconsin.

So that was a symptom of a larger problem. And the fact that the crime has increased there and these gangs have increased it's everywhere. It's absolutely everywhere. 

Rodney Scott: I'm glad you bring that up. There's so many aspects. So I really push the border security side that we just need to actually be able to know and then control who and what enter.

But there's so many aspects of the immigration piece of that bad immigration policy makes it impossible to secure the border. Good immigration policy doesn't secure it, but it surely makes it a lot easier. But what you just talked about is almost, I don't mean to like, I don't need to be light and make light of this, but it's almost just a statistical thing.

If people think about it. You're always going to have bad people mixed in. I don't go to any religion, any community, right? You've always got people that want to take advantage and criminal element that's there. So this isn't to say that all migrants are criminals. However, they're all actually complicit in the crimes because they're providing cover intentionally or unintentionally by creating this chaos coming across the border for criminals to get away in that second wave.

And it's across the entire country. And even if you don't want to talk about the criminal aspect there's a lot of organizations that will put real numbers on this for you. You can look into it, but think about some of these small communities that literally have a very small school and they're trying to basically educate our children.

And then traditionally what the average American thinks of as immigrants coming into the community would be from South America, maybe Mexico. And now you've got a few non-English speakers. They speak Spanish that you have to try to teach English and math and science. And that takes extra time, but that is not what's going on during the Biden administration completely tore down border security and we're getting hit by every nation in the world.

There were over 170 different nations in the, and some of those nations have multiple different dialects that cross the border in the United States. One of the big problems of processing. Processing them is actually trying to communicate with them. Find somebody that speaks their language. Now you go to some small town in Wisconsin and the kids are in school.

And we're mandated to try to teach those kids. So it's literally taking thousands of hours away from teaching the American children that are already here. And then now you're not really even teaching the new migrant children because you're literally just trying to figure out how to communicate with them.

And I'm not even getting into the hospital issues and everything else, but this is a real, this isn't good for anybody. It's not good for the migrants that are already here that came legally. It's not good for the ones that are coming illegally. And it's surely not good for America. It's Tom Holman always says.

Tell me one good thing about having an unsecure home. Tell me one good thing about having an unsecure country. We can change the laws about who we want to let in and who we don't let in. But we don't have that luxury right now because we can't control it because we've chosen not to control it. But every administration prior to Biden was showing that we could control it and we are getting better and better, but we know we can't, we're just choosing not to.

Linda J Hansen: Yeah, absolutely. They're choosing not to. And these ripple effects that are being felt around the country, it isn't just the crime, like the assault, crime or things you've heard in Springfield, Ohio, or different things that are popping up around with stories of activity. But we have the fentanyl crisis, which I'd like you to touch on the sexual trafficking, the human labor and sexual trafficking.

We have, this is. This is bigger than the drug trafficking because, you sell a drug, you sell it once, you sell a child, you can sell them over and over throughout the day. And it's just horrendous. And we have 320,000 missing children under the Biden administration.

Where did these children go? And, the world, Just persecuted Donald Trump saying, Oh, he had kids in cages and things when it wasn't actually him. And there's actual laws about protecting children, taking them from those who may not actually be their parents, even though a journalist might be there.

Or a media person, I might not want to call them a journalist, but someone with a camera might be there to take a picture that they can say, Oh, look how bad this is. This child is crying when actually that child might be taken. From a captor a kidnapper, a trafficker, and put in a safer environment.

And so we have to look at the big picture. It is not, even just numbers, which are costing all of us, billions of dollars, really. To accommodate all this, there's the corruption of what's going into NGOs non government organizations that are getting paid by the government to do so much.

We're paying for people to be in hotels. We're paying for their education, their transportation, their food, their clothing, everything, while our American taxpayers are suffering. And while we're paying for this. The crime rate is going up. The fentanyl deaths are rising. The human trafficking is increasing.

And our economy is in shambles. And I do, at the end of that, I do want to say not every immigrant is bad. America is an immigrant-loving nation. We want them to come legally, and every single legal immigrant that I have ever spoken to. Begs me to keep talking about this and keep fighting for America because they know that a legal path to immigration helps America be strong and free, but what's happening now is just going to destroy America from the inside.

Rodney Scott: so I want to touch on how illegal immigration actually really Completely decimates our ability to accept and process legal immigrants.

I, I don't know a better analogy than thinking about the, you're waiting in line to go into Disney World or something, Six Flags, something like that. And then literally all of a sudden hundreds, if not thousands of people, like start cutting in front of you in line and they get released inside.

So the legal immigrants right now that are waiting, some of them have been waiting for years. I've had conversations with a few. They're getting super frustrated because they're seeing this massive amount of illegal immigration pour across and they're getting hearings before the people that are doing it right.

That does two things. One, a lot of those legal, potentially legal immigrants get frustrated, and then they're like, well, then I'm just going to do it the bad way too. But then those that do wait get pushed farther and farther back, and it's just a no-win. I want to talk about the child trafficking and actually, you didn't bring this up, but I want y'all your listeners to know a couple of very misleading talking points from candidate Harris right now.

Child trafficking is a huge, a big deal, but it's very hard to detect at the border. And there's many reasons for that. But the number one way, actually the only way United States border patrol agents have ever discovered children being actually trafficked humans, not smuggling, but traffic at the border, is through good interviews.

Talking to the kids, getting something seems weird off about their story, separating them from the adult, having a conversation with them, and then all of a sudden you can figure stuff out. Or for a while we had rapid DNA testing, and sometimes even just threatening that you would get people to break and tell the truth that it really wasn't their kid.

They had bought the kids so they could get released into the United States because we have some loopholes in law. If you come with a kid, you automatically get released in 21 days, which we'll touch on that in just a second. Actually, I'm going to touch on that right now. So basically a settlement agreement, a crazy judge out of California and a well intended federal law that just didn't work right.

created this loophole that anybody that crosses with a child and any child themselves, if they cross on a company, has to be released from federal custody within 20 days. The processing for the immigration case to get him in front of a judge to listen to their case. We can't get that done within 20 days.

Currently, we were working on that during the Trump administration, but this administration completely walked away from any of those efforts. So it basically creates a system where if you bring a child with You're going to get released into the United States within, well, no more than 21 days that created child recycling for one example.

So most people think of child trafficking is just like sex slavery or forced labor, but literally, people were renting kids to cross the border with them as a family. And then the child would get sent back to the Southern border of Mexico to travel all the way through Mexico again with that family so that they could get to, get to know each other.

So they wouldn't be sending off that bad vibes when they came across the border. And then they would come across, they'd get released, most of that specific smuggling organization was going to North Carolina, and then they would do it all over again. But literally, they're recycling children.

But the only way that was discovered was Border Patrol agents doing a good debrief. When Border Patrol is making three to four thousand arrests a day, they don't have time to do any of those interviews. This administration knows that, we told them that. Now, let's fast forward. Our current vice president candidate for office keeps erasing this.

Supposed bipartisan Senate bill that was supposedly going to solve world hunger and fix the whole border that supposedly Trump killed. I want you to know the truth. That bill was horrible. And I think six Democrats even voted against that bill. But the number one, and I fought against that bill and as well as many other of my colleagues, Tom Holman, Mark Morgan, others before it was ever made public, because first and foremost, it didn't touch that child trafficking loophole.

I was told off the record, I can't verify this, but I was told off the record that was a line in the sand for the White House. They refused to do anything to touch the Flores Settlement Agreement or change the mandate to release kids and their parents within 20 days. That literally, that was my line in the sand.

I'm like, you only get so many chances to fix major laws and programs like this. If that issue went away, we would never get a chance to bring that up in Congress and get it fixed again. And then I was like, why would you want to keep the loophole for child trafficking open? And I'll let you figure that one out on your own because I'd be speculating now.

But there's a lot of other huge problems with that bill. It mandated in law that we accept a minimum of 1, 400 illegal aliens a day through the ports of entry to process them in. It gave another one, another, not just new, another 1. 4 billion to the non-governmental organizations to provide plane tickets, care, and feeding for illegal aliens after they crossed the border, that's just going to incentivize even more illegal immigration, even though they said it ended catch and release.

It literally mandated in law that certain categorical groups of aliens would be released into the United States immediately, and they would be given work authorization. Like this did nothing to secure the border. Then they threw in a couple of emergency provisions that when it got to four or 5, 000 illegal aliens a day, the president could step in and close the border, but they limited the amount of time he could do that for.

And then, no one's talking about this either. That clause, that little one section of law, it's sunset in three years. It literally went away. We would be stuck with the horrible provisions of this law forever. But the good, if you would argue it's good, I argued that it was just actually smoke and mirrors.

But even if it was good, it went away. And then the 1500 new border patrol agents they said they were going to hire would literally just be doing the same thing they're doing today, which is processing and releasing illegal aliens into the United States. It would have done nothing to actually secure the border, just like the bill that Biden and Harris proposed right after they came into office.

about it was a citizenship bill. It was legally amnesty for several million illegal aliens, which again would create a huge draw for illegal immigration across the border. I don't care what her ads say. You need to follow the evidence. Harris has always supported open borders. She wanted to defund ICE. He was extremely disrespectful for the board of virtual agents and basically supported the whole whipping thing, allegations down in Del Rio, which were not true in any way, shape, or form.

She has a very clear track record of supporting sanctuary cities, sanctuary states. Please just do your own homework and just don't believe that the ads look into these things a little bit more, and you'll see that everything I'm telling you is verifiable. And it's the truth. 

Linda J Hansen: I'm so glad you brought up that legislation.

People refer to it as the Lankford bill, and you'll hear people talking about how, Oh, it was the conservatives. It was, it was our side of the aisle on the border issue. Basically, that stopped it. Well, as you mentioned very clearly, there were so many loopholes in that. And so listeners, this is how it is.

I mean, I hate to say it, but this is how politics works a lot right now. And the media too, they'll give you the little sound bites that, and. This is just horrible. We have to look beyond the headlines, beyond the sound bites, and actually see what's in the bill. And then, if you want to solve a problem, go to the people closest to the problem.

And so if you want to solve the problem of illegal immigration, that's out of control, you go to. The border patrol people and the people who live on the border. You go to the people who are closest to the problem, and that's who you need to listen to. Instead, they are listening to a host of other peopl,e and it does not involve securing the safety and well-being of American citizens and our nation as a whole.

So another thing that I want to bring up is, you mentioned about how important it is for us to vote, we need to be informed. We need to go vote in this election and vote our conscience. And, listeners, as you've heard these things, you hear the differences in the administrations and what was done under the Trump administration, and now what was.

done under the Biden-Harris administration. We have a unique opportunity in America right now that we have basically four years of history with each candidate and we can compare that immigration views. We can compare economic policies. We can compare, and there's never going to be a perfect candidate, but what is going to fit your needs the most for protecting this nation?

And so you need to vote, but along those lines, you need to make sure that the people voting in your areas are only citizens because it is against the law. Or illegal immigrants to vote. It's against the law for anyone who's not a citizen, even a legal immigrant, should not be voting unless they are a citizen.

So for those of you who out there who are poll workers or poll observers, or even just, talking with neighbors and friends, just make sure people realize that we have to make sure that. Only citizens vote in American elections. And that's a really important piece to helping solve this crisis.

Rodney Scott: Hey, thank you for bringing that up as well. Let me, and I put it into context. Cause a lot of people hear that. Not, I lived in California for several years. So there, a lot of people would hear that and think, Oh, you're a racist. You're a xenophobe. It has nothing to do with that. I want people to think about something else.

Think about an organization that you're part of. Maybe it's a church. Maybe it's a school board, whatever it is, actually younger kids here just learning to vote. Think about prom and voting on who the king and queen is. Are you going to really open that up to the whole state? Open it up to other schools?

No, because they don't understand the dynamics and the culture within that group. Are you going to open up your church votes on what you believe and don't believe? To people that have not become members of your church or of your organization that haven't even taken the time to learn what your organization was actually built on and what it stands for, what its principles are.

That's the reason that we only want us citizens voting, not because of anything to do with race or. Or their color, gender, none of that. That's all silly because America is made up of a melting pot of all the people you could possibly think of in your brain right now, but we want them to understand the constitution of the United States, what our forefathers fought for and literally gave up.

Pretty much everything they owned and lost everything to give to us the ability to pick our leaders. And it's very important. And the rest of the world, Americans have a tendency to forget, does not operate this way. Recently, we just saw England stepping in and stomping on freedom of speech. And we think of them as like our closest tie, right?

And you're like, oh, wait, maybe that's why we left. Voting and making sure that people vote, that understand the impact is critically important, and that's why only US citizens can vote. But it is very important. If I could add one more thing, since I got the mic. That you go in and inform and there's a lot of misinformation out there right now specifically even to the border security type stuff Don't listen to the rhetoric.

I saw a couple campaigns from the Harris campaign, and I literally about choked. I couldn't believe you could put those blatant lies on national TV. But anyway, that's sidebar if you go to US Customs and Border Protections website It's an official government website cbp.gov. At the top of that page, there's a tab that says newsroom. Click on that. One of the drop downs will say stats and summaries.

The Trump administration was actually about transparency, not talking about it, actually doing it. They empowered me when I was chief to build out a website that has all, not all, but a lot of the key arrest statistics and encounter statistics for customs and border protection. This administration hates that website by the way, but they can't get rid of it because too many journalists use it.

Go there and look for the numbers yourselves. You'll see that it's a little overwhelming. There's a bunch of different tables and that you can look for terrorists. You can look for criminals or whatever, but most importantly, and at least at first, just look at the first dropdown where it says nationwide encounters.

And when you open that up for nationwide encounters, The numbers are just facts. Don't read the narrative spin because it's currently being controlled by politicals, but the numbers are factual and you will see the numbers do not match the rhetoric coming out of this administration that, oh, yeah, there's this significant drop off in illegal crossings coming across the border and everything else.

No, they just shifted some of it to a port of entry that used to be in between, but you'll see that it's still like 170,000 a month. I think that was August number. They're just there. I hate to say this because it's so harsh, but they're liars. I've never worked for an administration my entire career that asked me to lie and tell the Biden administration's big reason.

I'm sitting here talking to you today. I'm not still in uniform. I refuse to propagate their lives for them. So we butted heads. But if you do the information, you do the research on your own. It's out there. You can find the truth and then please go vote on the candidate that's telling you the truth. You may not like Trump.

What you see is what you get. You may like smiling Harris, man, she's a liar. 

Linda J Hansen: It's so true and I really appreciate the fact that you brought it up. And thank you for your bravery to stand up against it because, you've, we've seen careers ruined we've seen families broken apart from the stress.

This is not okay. I mean, the border patrol. Agents have known that this is a problem and it weighs on them. I heard a whistleblower talking the other day. They got a letter from the government saying, did you take money for doing this interview and everything? And he basically wrote back and said, “No, my compensation is a clean conscience.”

And knowing that before God, I can rest my head on my pillow, knowing I told the truth. And this is one of the things, I mean, it's too stressful for people. And so we just really applaud those who have been brave enough to buck the system and support truth. And before we close, I do want to just alert people, we talked about the rhetoric and the talking points that you hear in the media and all these things around the border and the border legislation that was promoted and things. 

But another thing you'll see, especially at this time of year, is signs that say count all votes. And people will say, count all votes. I remember in 2022, before I went to vote, I was in line, and there was someone overhead with an airplane, with one of those tail messages, and it's like count all votes.

And it's just an easy way, if you ask most people, you should say, do you think we should count all votes? Most people would immediately say, well, of course, right. And you have to almost educate them and say, wait, no, we should really only count those that are legally cast, certifiable, guarded by the legal chain of custody, and these are things that we should make sure we are alert about when it comes to protecting our election system and the integrity of every election. 

So we shouldn't count all votes. We should only count votes that are legally cast, legally taken care of in the proper custodial fashion. And, they have followed the law of that municipality. And so we just have to really make sure of that. 

And I think that's something where Americans have gotten a little lazy. We just think, oh, it'll be fine. We have freedom here. But we don't realize that a lot of people are behind the scenes working to diminish our freedom. 

Rodney Scott: And flat-out undermine it.

If I could just, like, foot stomp everything you just said. So there's another phrase, it's like, “Hey, make it really easy to vote and really hard to cheat.” And I want to, and we should want to count every legal vote. But there's another little spin, the more I've gotten into this because I was a career cop.

This whole political thing is very new to me. The more I've got into this, the statistics blow me away. And you can pick the category, but we got a little bit into religion here. So I'll pick on I'll pick on churches. The number of Christians, people that claim they're Christians, and then go to church that don't vote blows me away.

This is not a right, in my opinion, this is a responsibility. You don't just get to. Well, anybody can just go to church, right? But if you actually claim that you believe in something and that you believe in all the principles that are taught in the christian church, you have a responsibility to pick the government in this country consistent with that.

You don't, you shouldn't have like the luxury of sitting off to the sideline. I think you're gonna have this now I'm gonna be preaching, but I feel like you're gonna have to account for that someday that Literally out of the whole world. We were handed a country where we get to pick our own leadership.

We weren't given a king, and we were told, okay, this is in your hands now. And if you're not voting, you're literally out in the playground somewhere. You're, I don't know. I don't want to be you. I think you have a responsibility to go vote, not just the right. 

Linda J Hansen: That is just a great place for us to wrap up because I started this by saying the future of our nation rests in the hands of we, the people. It is up to us. And to a lot of people, that sounds corny or whatever. I've had some leftist friends say that's pretty political to say that. 

And I'm like it is, but it actually is we, the people. So listeners take your power back, take your power back and say, no, not on my watch, not on my watch, am I going to let this happen to the nation that I love or the people that I love? 

You do not want America to become Venezuela. We want to provide prosperity and human flourishing for our American citizens. But then America, when America is strong, we do that for people all over the world. We help people all over the world, but we, just like we tell people you can't pour from an empty cup, take care of yourself.

America needs to take care of America. And that's where that America comes in. Not America Only, but America First. Make sure we have a strong America and then we can branch out. So Rodney, if people want to get ahold of you how should they do so? 

Rodney Scott: Well, there's a few different ways.

I actually have a website called the honor consulting. org. They can get, contact me through Border 911. They can get a hold of me through Texas Public Policy Foundation. I try to make it as easy as possible. 

My entire mission in life right now is basically sharing my expert, my experience, and what I believe is expertise on border security and immigration and the impact so that people can actually take action based on knowledge.

It does probably sound like I'm a little bit political right now. I don't mean to be, but it's become black and white. Border security was not a political issue until very recently. It was called common sense. 

Linda J Hansen: Well, policy is by nature; it ends up being political because you have to choose. So you have policies and then you have to pick the people or the platforms that support the policies.

So it is political, right? But it doesn't—

Rodney Scott: You just said though, and I think that's where a lot of people go astray. You're supposed to be, or if it just works, you vote. For the person that's going to support the policies that align with your core values, beliefs, where you want this country to go, not the person you're voting for the policy.

And so we just get sidetracked with this whole Hollywood mentality of, Oh, or if they're smiling and giggling, I want to vote for them. You got to get a little deeper than that. 

Linda J Hansen: Right. Right. So support the policies and one other website I'd like you to share again, the website address to that government website where people can go and actually look up the numbers. Could you give them that address again? 

Rodney Scott: Here, that's probably the most important, and it's just the letter C as in customs, the letter B as in border, and the letter P as in protection, dot gov, as in acronym for government, and then at the top of the page, there's a tab that says Newsroom, click on that, and then scroll down to stats and summaries, and there's more numbers there than, probably have time to look at.

So focus on the national encounters. You can even pick nationalities and whether it's single adults, you can play around with some of the dropdowns, but we've built that website for you so that Americans would know what was really going on at the border. I really encourage you to look at it.

Linda J Hansen: Well, thank you so much for that. And so again, listeners, if you want to reach out to Rodney and learn more, you can learn obviously some stats from that website, but you can go to Texas Public Policy Foundation to reach him personally. You can go to Border 911 Foundation. You can find him a variety of ways. And if you have questions, you can always reach out to me at Prosperity101.com, and I can put you in touch with him. 

So, Rodney, thank you so much for serving our nation. Thank you for educating us on so many issues regarding the border and listeners, I know that this has gone a little bit longer than normal, but I know it's been full of valuable information that is just critical as you decide on what to vote or, and I noticed I said, what, not necessarily who, you're going to have to pick a who.

But you have to think about what and which person supports the policies that you believe in the most. So do you have any other closing comment before we say goodbye? 

Rodney Scott: Just one. Thank you. Thank you for staying in the fight, getting this information out there. It's harder and harder. To get facts out in today's media world and every single one of your listeners.

I know you could be doing something else right now. So thank you for taking the time to listen. And if there is feedback or you have specific questions, that's why I'm here. So please take advantage of those opportunities. 

Linda J Hansen: All right. Thank you so much, Rodney. We appreciate it. 

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