President Joe Biden's incoming administration was warned about the consequences for changing the border policies enacted by former President Donald Trump, according to retired Customs and Border Protection Chief Rodney Scott on Newsmax.
"I personally participated in several of the transition meetings, and my staff participated in all the transition meetings specific to Department of Homeland Security and border security," Scott told Monday's "Stinchfield."
"The [incoming] administration was told over, and over again, if they rolled back all the programs that we put in place, we would see an influx that we could not control, and that's exactly what is taking place today."
Scott said he was "dumbfounded" the Biden administration has claimed they were not aware of the dangers to the border that reversing the Trump policies would create, and the "surges" they saw early on were "normal" fluctuations in migration.
"Poverty, high levels of violence, and corruption in Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries have propelled migration to our southwest border for years," DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in March.
"The adverse conditions have continued to deteriorate. Two damaging hurricanes that hit Honduras and swept through the region made the living conditions there even worse, causing more children and families to flee."
Biden promised during the presidential campaign he would reverse the Trump policies such as "remain in Mexico," "safe third nation agreements," and expedited removal of some illegal migrants, which he did on his first day as president.
In the months since, illegal migration has increased dramatically, straining personnel and resources at the border, and breaking decades old records for the number of crossings each month.
More than 200,000 were reported crossing in both July and August, with more than 1 million estimated to have crossed the border during the first eight months of the Biden administration, according to CBP numbers.
"There's no excuse; they knew," Scott said. "There's a lot of political appointees without experience involved, but the secretary of homeland security's been around before. He was part of an administration before.
"He knew without being told, but we told him to solidify it. He ignored those recommendations as the administration seems to do. They just don't want to listen to the government experts, and they decided to go their own way."
In another move, Biden paused the building of the southern border wall that Trump pushed for, and canceling those contracts is costing the taxpayers an estimated $5 million a day, according to Scott.
"There is 100 miles of border wall steel that's already been paid for," he said. "That's just going to get scrapped because these contracts being shut down."
Scott said the walls that were built during Trump's term were working to keep illegal migrants from crossing the border in the more open areas instead of legal points of entry.
"The facts are, the information was made available to them, at many different briefings, in many different forms," he said. "There's absolutely no way they could argue that they did not know the costs and that they did not know the operational impacts."
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