Federal immigration policies have made migrants feel "entitled" to enter the United States illegally and led to the violent physical encounter between protesting immigrants at the border and U.S. Border Patrol agents earlier this week in El Paso, Lt. Christopher, Olivarez, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, told Newsmax on Thursday.
"The federal government allows this," Olivarez said on Newsmax's "Wake Up America." "They incentivize this and that's why these agents are having to encounter these events every single day, and they get criticized for doing their job."
And, he added, "it all falls back on these policies that we're seeing, the fact that some of these illegal immigrants feel entitled to enter this country, and have no respect for the rule of law."
According to reports, the clash between the migrants, believed to be mostly people from Venezuela and Honduras, and Border Patrol officers took place at the Rio Grande International Boundary while the immigrants were protesting changes to the Biden administration's immigration policies.
Video footage shows the migrants attacking the Border Patrol agents with flag poles, and there were reports that one migrant threw a rock at the agents. The patrol responded by firing pepper balls from a distance to drive the immigrants back toward the Rio Grande river, a move that has brought complaints from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
"This is the latest in a long line of abuses carried out by CBP," the ACLU said in a tweet. "Our government's failed attempts at preventing people from seeking protection in the US lead to death and suffering. The Biden administration must restore a humane process for seeking asylum."
"Some of those illegal immigrants did assault several of those agents with rocks and flagpoles and that right there, that is a situation where that could have turned into a deadly force situation," Olivarez said Thursday, pointing out that the use of rocks or flagpoles could have "seriously hurt or even killed one of those agents."
He also said that the Border Patrol agents "showed constraint. They maintained their composure by maintaining that crowd control."
Pepper ball guns, Olivarez added, are a "non-lethal weapon" used for controlling "larger crowds, riots, anything of that nature where you won't injure those individuals but it's a very effective tool to gain control of the situation."
However, the agents are being criticized for their actions in the same way other officers were criticized after photos surfaced showing agents on horseback and Haitian migrant, with claims made that the immigrants were being hit with horsewhips, said Olivarez.
"We know that was completely false, so again, that just shows that these agents are not getting the support they need from their leadership in the federal government," he said.
But as long as the federal government allows President Joe Biden's open border policies, there will be more incidents such as the one that happened this week, said Olivarez.
"We're going to continue seeing more illegal immigrants come across," said Olivarez. "Just yesterday alone, in Eagle Pass, Texas, in a town with a population of 30, you had a group of 1,000 illegal immigrants that came across," he said. "It just completely overwhelmed federal resources."
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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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