Borderland Talk with Jenn Budd Podcast

Jenn Budd
  • 4.7 (15)
  • Politics
  • Updated Monthly

Former Senior Patrol agent turned immigrant rights activist. Learn the truth about the Border Patrol created a fake invasion & gets away with criminality far worse than those they arrest. jennbudd.substack.com

  1. 11h ago

    The 411 on ICE with Jenn Budd & Lisa Gonzalez

    My apologies for not getting this podcast out sooner. I found it hiding in my drafts. Thank you LC - Silence is Complicity, Laura A. Drury, ArleneMach, Honey Badger, Karma, and many others for tuning into my live video with Lisa Gonzalez! Join me for my next live video in the app. Transcript: Lisa: Hi, friends. How are you? I appreciate it. Yeah, I know. So we weren’t sure how many people were interested in jumping on, but we wanted to get together and kind of do a little bit of an impromptu ICE conversation because Jenn, thankfully, has been all over the place. She has talked to so many different people about a lot of the same things. And my dear friend frequently will say to me, I’ve been talking about the same thing for how many years? Five? Jenn: Well, yeah, I mean, you know, I’ve been doing this work for probably a decade now. But I mean, as far as like the talking points in this mass deportation and what I’ve been warning about, I would say since 2017, 2018. Lisa: Yeah. So, and you’re like, I don’t understand. I’ve been saying this over and over, but I’ve had the good fortune of being able to chat with Jenn Budd offline about a lot of different topics. And we kind of get into some additional topics that she has, I’ve noticed that she has not talked about. So I wanted to kind of pick her brain about that and For those of you that follow her, for those of you that don’t, she’s a rock star. She is the author of Against the Wall and ICE, What everyone needs to know. She is a former senior Border Patrol officer and now immigrants rights advocate, huge immigrants rights advocate, and also has been on the... The Emmy award-winning show, HBO Critical Incident, Death at the Border, in which her work was just an enormous part of being able to uncover what’s going on with some of these, what is the name of the department again, Jenn? Jenn: Critical Incident Teams, the cover-up teams. Lisa: Critical Incident Teams, yes. We’re just going to go ahead and get into it. One of the things I wanted to make sure people are aware of, I live in the state of Ohio. And so, TPS stands for Temporary Protected Status. TPS status has been revoked. Jenn, could you chat a bit about what that is? Tell people what that actually means. Jenn: TPS stands for Temporary Protected Status, and it’s a status that essentially allows the president at any given time. So when there’s an emergency, like the Ukrainian war started and stuff, you know, then they can issue a TPS and say, you know, those people, obviously, they can’t wait. So we’re going to get them in. And so it’s essentially like, They’re a pre-authorization, not necessarily asylum, but just temporary protective status, meaning you come through and they do still do the record checks and the vetting, but because of the situation that’s going on in your country, you don’t have to make a case for that. We understand what’s going on and then we’ll help you get to where you need to go. A lot of times there’s a little bit of refugee resettlement compensation that can help them and they’ll also place them in communities that will help them. Lisa: So to put it in perspective, we, the United States, granted that status to Haitians, however many, how that was four, five, what? Jenn: We’ve taken it off and on throughout the years. I don’t know how many it applied to and as far as the Haitians. Lisa: There were several hundred thousand that came through from my recollection. Well, so there’s an enormous, so I live in this stupid state where they were talking about, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs. That was my, yeah, that was my state. Nobody was eating cats and dogs, friends. Nobody was eating cats and dogs. They were lying. I’ve actually been to Springfield. One of my dear friends had a child that was going to a college in Springfield. And because they were such jerks about the way that they put that out there, they actually had to shut down school for over a week while the students went home because there was so much media that descended upon there so that they could see all the cats and dogs that people were not eating. So, there were roughly 15,000 Haitian immigrants that ended up in Springfield. And my understanding from some of the organizations that I’ve been in touch with in Ohio is also that kind of compounds the issue. There are 1,200 children over the last five years or so since they have this enormous population in Springfield that have been born in the United States. So they are American citizens. Can you, first of all, well, first let me say this. So I want everyone to know what’s happening. What’s happening is all of those people are now receiving letters from the government that says report to the ICE office in Cincinnati. So we don’t have the enormous, like we don’t have Camp East Montana in Ohio. But they said they want them to report to the ICE place, I believe in Cincinnati. Jenn: It’s probably the regional office. Lisa: Yeah. OK. And if they could be detained or they will be given ankle monitors like criminals and be monitored in that way. These are people who came here legally, came here the right way, were granted status. And they have the people of Springfield will tell you there’s all kinds of information out there about how they have contributed to the community. And it was kind of like on the downward spiral, but they have like infused the community with, you know, all kinds of commerce and they are working and doing great things there. And now they’re all going to be rolling around with ankle monitors. So, and 1200 children that are American citizens whose parents are apparently expected to just go back to Haiti. I have a friend who recently actually became an American citizen who is actually from Haiti and shared with me still just how absolutely incredibly dangerous it is over there and in Port-au-Prince because everything’s been overtaken by gangs and how dangerous, how terribly dangerous it is. Jenn, can you walk us through what, what is that? So what happens when you had, when you were an ICE officer for, or I’m sorry, it’s different. You were Border Patrol. Jenn: I was a Border Patrol agent. You were Border Patrol. I never met a Haitian as an agent. Lisa: Correct. Okay. You only dealt with predominantly Latin Americans. Jenn: Right. People crossing the border, down on the southern border. Lisa: Okay. So, however, either way, when you have a child that is born in the United States and the parent is allegedly no longer welcome here for whatever reason, have you ever dealt with TPS? When somebody’s status has been revoked and their child was here but they were expected to go back? Has that ever happened to you? Jenn: Well, I’ve dealt with people who were here and were undocumented, and maybe I apprehended them at a checkpoint - the interstate 8 checkpoint and their children were United States citizens. I talked about this in my book, because I would have told you that I never separated families. But then I remembered that one woman I took off a bus, and she begged me to not return her. And she said, you know, “I have a thirteen year old child. She was born here. She’s a United States citizen.” And I still send her back. And so the issue with TPS and if you have a United States citizen child, in the past when I was an agent in the 90s and early 2000s, they typically tried to work with the person and maintain their status because you could not legally deport a United States citizen. Right? Lisa: Okay. Talk about that. So if they had a child here, they tried to work with them back in the past. That was your experience. Jenn: That was my experience. I’m not saying that it was for everybody, certainly. If you were somebody who, if the parent had committed a very serious, egregious crime, they would be separated from their child anyhow and be put in prison for a certain amount of time. And then that child would end up in the custody of other relatives and so forth. So that sort of took care of it. Then if they got out of jail, then... and they were deported, likely the child stayed with the family. But what we’ve seen over the years, in the last 10 years, but especially during this mass deportation, we see where, and we saw this in Florida with the woman whose child, Orlin Hernandez-Reyes, The two-year-old child was a United States citizen. She begged to take him with her. So they’re claiming that they give the parents that they’re going to deport the option right now. I think in some circumstances they are. So they’re not officially deporting the U.S. citizen child because they can’t legally do that. They’re just letting the parents taking the child with them. And the parent is deported. But in this case with Orlin and his mother, they deported her even though she requested to take him with her. And they instead turned him over to an uncle who then beat the child to death. Lisa: Right, right, right. Jenn: So in that instance, there’s a variety of different ways that they can do this and handle this. I would suspect that when it comes to Haitians, I will say the immigration agencies have a lot of hatred for Haitians. The American government has a lot of hatred for Haitians. Lisa: Why is that? Jenn: You know, if you talk to historians, they will go back to the fact that Haiti was the one country that overthrew the slave trade. Lisa: Okay. Jenn: Yeah, they fought against the French. Lisa: Damn them. Absolutely. Jenn: They were successful and they have a very strong history of that and so forth. I was in 2021, so in Biden’s first year. Do you remember when they had the Del Rio incident and there were like about, I don’t know, tens of thousands of Haitians that came across and then they were kept in this outdoor encampment? And that was kind of…that was kind of this weaponization of migrant bodies to create what looks like an inv

    The 411 on ICE with Jenn Budd & Lisa Gonzalez

  2. 4d ago

    Live with Humane Borders

    Thank you Cat: Poli-Psych, PJ Schuster, Dr. Susan Mayne, Donna Everett, Patricia Scott, and many others for tuning into my live video with Laurie Cantillo! Join me for my next live video in the app. Laurie Cantillo stops by to talk about Humane Borders mission and to give us an update on the border. Contrary to what the media and administration are telling us, the border is not closed nor sealed as they claim. Pima County, Arizona reports 19 deceased migrants found in July 2026 alone. Transcript: Jenn: So, we’re getting started here. Today I wanted to, you know, usually I do a lecture, but the last two times I’ve had people I wanted to talk to, and - my dog’s playing on the ground if you hear hacking and stuff. She’s rolling around deciding now’s the time to play. But you sent me a message, and they said, well, I’ve got to have you on then, on a live. We have to talk about this. Once again, on Borderland Talk, we have a live guest, and this is Laurie Cantillo of Humane Borders. And I have supported, gosh, I don’t know how long I’ve been supporting you all. I know I’ve done a couple of trips down there to the Tucson border area where you’re mostly situated. And we’ll talk about your organization and stuff and give everybody an idea of what it is that you do. And then we’ll talk about the message that you sent me and why that’s so important. How does that sound to you? Laurie: All right, perfect. Thank you, Jenn. I’m happy to be here. Jenn: All right. Well, and thank you for being here. So like I said, I’ve supported Humane Borders for a while now. They’re a nonpartisan organization and they’re mostly supported by private donations and volunteers. I’ve been fortunate to be able to go out on a couple of trips with them in the Sonoran Desert. Which if you have not been to the Sonoran Desert, it is beautiful, but it is god-awful hot. And sometimes it has downpours during the monsoon season. I think y’all are in monsoon season right now, aren’t you? Laurie: Oh, absolutely. We’re getting some big storms and erosion and mud to deal with on top of everything else with this god-awful heat and humidity. Jenn: Yeah, it’s a little humid over here in San Diego, but obviously not as much. I can tell it’s raining out where I used to work in the mountains just by the clouds, but it’s not been too bad here in the city. And you all operate a bunch of water stations, big old barrels along the southern border in different areas. But you also maintain maps on your website at humaneborders.org. and that identifies thousands of migrant bodies that have been found over the years. These deaths are the result of the U.S. policy called deterrence that was enacted by democrats under the Clinton administration in 1994. It is estimated that this policy has intentionally sent at least 80,000 people to their deaths. Untimely deaths. And it has been a complete failure because as we know, deterrence does not work and has not stopped anybody from crossing illegally. So let’s first, let’s talk about the water barrels and what all it is that you all do and how that helps people out there, first. Laurie: You bet. Again, I really appreciate the opportunity to talk with you and your viewers and your support of Humane Borders all these years and going on water runs with us, which we welcome. Anyone who’s interested in going out with us, please reach out at info at humaneborders.org. So we were founded in the year 2000, which is when we really started to see an increase in migrant deaths in Arizona. And it was a group of faith leaders who got together and said, not in our backyard. So they decided to start working on a system using 55-gallon blue barrels and blue flags, with blue being the universal symbol of water, and they’re all permitted. We work with both government officials as well as private property owners who don’t want to see people dying on their ranches to put these stations out. And we locate them based on a couple things: where people have recently died as well as our ID hikes that we take regularly in the desert and we’re looking for not only people in distress, but migrant remains or migrant belongings, things like camouflage backpacks or what they call carpet shoes to hide footprints in the desert. So, that informs where we put our water stations. We’ve been doing it, as I said, 26 years now. The founders thought when this originated that this will be a few years and then we’ll get on the other side of this. Surely the government’s going to see that prevention through deterrence policies are causing people to die by the hundreds in the deserts. But actually, those deaths were somewhat intended consequences of prevention through deterrence, which essentially says, no, you can’t come in through safe ports of entry. But this creates a funnel effect, which forces people into increasingly remote and dangerous areas right in the center of Arizona. And the reason I reached out to you recently is that I was disturbed when I looked at the July data that we cooperate with the Pima County Medical Examiner and saw there had been 19 new records for just the month of July. And that is the highest month that we have seen in two years. Certainly, there have been other occasions where deaths have been high, but this is the highest in recent memory. And so we’re trending to be well over 100 deaths again in 2026. And I’m offended by that because it’s right in my backyard. Jenn: Well, Laurie, are you sure about this? Because I’m pretty - I’m being sarcastic - because I’m pretty sure that the Trump administration has said that the border is closed and sealed right now and nobody is crossing. Laurie, are you telling me that they are lying? Laurie: (laughs) Um, I think they’re playing a little fast and loose with rhetoric there by saying the border is, quote, closed. They’re trying to send a message, of course, to migrants who might want to take the risk. But I actually monitor the CBP’s own apprehension data, and in the last couple of months, we’ve noticed it averages around 10,000 a month across the entire southern border. It’s been upticking to 12,000, 13,000. So what we’re seeing is more people chancing it and therefore more people dying in the desert, especially in these triple digit temperatures that we have. Jenn: You know, there was an interview with one of the L.A. Taco guys, I think the main guy that everybody knows, and I can’t remember his name off the top of my head, and he had said, you know, they already know people that were picked up by ICE in L.A. in the beginning of the ICE raids, and they are already back within months. And when this all started, I was like, they’re absolutely lying to you all. At least here in San Diego, we were seeing checkpoints that were actually kind of intermittently shut down. And that’s because they’re sending all their agents into the cities. When you close your checkpoints down, then you have no idea how many gotaways you have. All of a sudden, as soon as Trump was sworn in, they were like, oh, there’s no gotaways. Nobody’s crossing. It’s just absolute b******t. It’s just absolute b******t. And the one thing that we know in the Border Patrol and in CBP is that if you do not give people legal avenues with which to cross, they will cross illegally every single time. That’s what MPP and Title 42, when they shut down the asylum system. And so as soon as they started this, it’s like you can take people out of the cities and a lot of them will - and deport them or expel them - and some of those people will stay away. But especially the people who’ve been living here for 20, 30, 40 years, they’re going to come back. They have nowhere else to go. And so it’s - but what I find interesting is is that. I haven’t seen, now are they talking about it locally in the news over there in the Tucson area? Are they reporting Border Patrol has found any of these deaths or are they just not talking about it at all? Laurie: Locally, people who are in communities along the border are well aware of this challenge. I would say the rest of the country has no idea. In our database, we have now 4,505 records in the last 26 years. And I want to point out that, yes, these are mostly younger men who are of working age. They either want to improve their lives economically or They’ve been deported and they want to get back to their wives and kids. Who can blame them, right? Even if it is 117 degrees. So that is unfortunate, but also there are women and kids dying out there as well. And that’s heartbreaking for everyone. And I want to point out that the water security is not only for migrants. We’ve had several Border Patrol agents come to us and say, Hey, do you have some extra water? I had a leaky water bottle or a guy on horseback who showed up and asked for water and thank us because it makes their job easier. And you know this, if you don’t have to process human remains and go through all of that trauma, but you can have an apprehension rather than a death. And we like to say that the desert should not be the judge, jury and executioner of people. They need to be, if they’re apprehended, put them through the legal process. Let them have their day in court. But to condone deaths of human beings, men, women, and kids in the desert is just heartless and it’s wrong and it’s not what my version of America is about. Jenn: I see here Sunny is asking, they said, don’t the dead body counts have to be documented by the feds, the gender, the age? No, they have not been documenting it for decades. And what Laurie is talking about with Humane Borders, when they started to see this uptick in the year 2000, so that was right when I was leaving the Border Patrol. I was stationed just to the west of where Laurie is by about, well, Tucson’s about six hours from San Diego, let me say about five hours from wher

    Live with Humane Borders

  3. Aug 13

    Mo Goldman on ICE targeting DACA

    Thank you Ali Hart • عَلي هارت, "Sushi"(Jen) of MIND HAVEN, Rarelightmare, PJ Schuster, Stephanie Munoz, and many others for tuning into my live video with Mo Goldman! Join me for my next live video in the app. Immigration attorney Mo Goldman drops by for an update on DACA. Transcript: Jenn: Well, welcome, everybody. This is…Hi, Anna Maria. This is Borderland Talk, and we are with Mo Goldman. He is an immigration attorney from Tucson, Arizona. He is my buddy. (laughs) We hang out together when I’m in Tucson, when he’s in San Diego. Mo also ran for Congress, but the Democrats didn’t choose him because they’re losers.(laughs) Yeah. Yeah, they made a bad choice, but, you know, we’ll support their candidate. Mo: We all make bad choices in life. Jenn: Yeah, we all make bad choices, but you would have been a great congressman, Mo. Mo: I mean, I made the choice of being an immigration attorney. (laughs) Jenn: There you go. Mo: In retrospect, that was an insane life decision. (laughs) Jenn: Well, I mean, the other thing about Mo that’s important to know is that he’s the grandson of Holocaust survivors. And he has written a book. Please give the name of the book, Mo. Mo: It’s “The Last Survivor, Lessons from the Past and the Dying Dream of Freedom.” Jenn: And in that… I always make him say it because it’s such a long title. And sometimes he forgets it as well. But it documents what his grandmother and grandfather went through. And then I also believe, too, when your grandfather passed away, she remarried, correct? Mo: Yes. Jenn: And that man was a survivor as well. Mo: He was also a survivor, yeah. Jenn: Yeah. Mo: We had a litany of survivors in my family. Jenn: Yeah, but it’s especially interesting because then your mother became an immigration attorney, you and your sister are immigration attorneys. And then to be going through this, and I think what the book does is, through Mo’s eyes as an immigration attorney and knowing his history, his Jewish history, the Holocaust history that directly affected his family. I mean, he wouldn’t have been here if his grandparents hadn’t survived. And then seeing what we’re going through today, I recommend picking that up. And you can order that online. But today, Mo, I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to invite you on and talk about what’s going on over there in Tucson. You have several, a handful, maybe less than a handful of clients who are DACA clients. And that’s, what is that, Deferred Action? Mo: for Childhood Arrivals. Jenn: For Childhood Arrivals. And so DACA is for children who were brought here, very young, through no choice of their own. And it was something that the Obama administration did. It’s kind of a temporary immigration status, I would say, right? It doesn’t give them full protection as we’re finding out now. And what we’ve seen because ICE is lazy and they’re not really going after the worst of the worst and they’re going after children and they’re going after people who are here legally. And DACA is one of those groups. Last week, I believe it was last week, the Tucson Sentinel, or within the last two weeks, came out with a report about you guys had a press conference, and three of your clients that you’re going to talk about, Carla Toledo, Roberto Navarro Bocanegra and Myndy Valencia Sanchez. And at that press conference, which I was very impressed by, you had Tucson Mayor Regina Romero. So it’s good to know that your mayor supports you all. City Council Member Lane Santa Cruz and then also Congressional Representative Adelita Grijalva. And what she stated I thought was pretty interesting, she said that she feels these attacks - because obviously ICE is claiming that they’re going after the worst of the worst, but they’re not - they’re going after people who are trying to do it the legal way and using you and paying you to file immigration documents with USCIS, which is the legal way to do it - she stated that she feels that ICE is trying to sow anxiety among immigrants so that they do not apply or they just give up and self-deport and leave. I agree with her. I think that’s correct. And the three clients that you’re going to talk about today kind of demonstrate that. Mo: Exactly. Jenn: Before we went live, we were talking because I said in the article when I was congratulating you about Karla Toledo that you won and you said, well, not really. (laughs) I didn’t catch that in the article or it wasn’t in the article. So you did manage to get her DACA renewed. So that’s good. So she has her legal documents. But now please tell us what is going on with Ms. Karla. Mo: So Karla Toledo, just to give a little bit of background, she has DACA. She came to the United States when she was one year old. She’s now 31 years of age. So she’s been in the United States for 30 years. She graduated high school. She went to post-secondary and she’s been just a great, great community member. ICE showed up at her house on May 18th of this year. They didn’t have a judicial warrant. They, it appears showed up thinking they were going after somebody else who did not live in that home. She was living there with her husband. And then when she resisted and said, I want to see a judicial warrant. They wouldn’t leave and eventually coerced her out and she ended up getting arrested and detained by the ICE agents. There were five of them. Thankfully, there was surveillance camera footage that caught a lot of what occurred. Through some public pressure and media attention, we were able to get her released from Eloy Detention Center a few days later. And then ICE put her case in front of the immigration court. They charged her as being deportable despite the fact that she has DACA protection. They also lied in that - I know this is a big shock to everyone. Their spokesperson lied about her, accusing her of being a criminal, accusing her of entering the country illegally, even though the last time she entered with a permit called advance parole. Just to try and, of course, smear her name in the public eye and to continue to spread the propaganda that all these immigrants are horrible, vile criminals. So this is where it gets really weird. In early June, I think it was around June 3rd, ICE agreed to dismiss her deportation case. And then a day later, after the judge ordered dismissal, they reinstated, they recharged her with a new deportation proceeding with her husband. And their reasoning behind it was, we’d rather you guys both be deported as a couple, as a family unit. Jenn: Well, how kind of you. (laughs) Mo: Yeah, very generous. Jenn: B******t. (laughs) Mo: And so, thankfully, Karla is... she epitomizes courage. She has been very outspoken in spite of the fact that she’s in this perilous position. She’s done media appearances. She goes out... she supports a community. She has become a rock and a pillar to a lot of the other people who are facing removal who have very similar backgrounds. So I am so grateful in a weird way that I got to meet her through this situation. Jenn: Yeah. Mo: You know, the weird kind of juxtaposition that you and I were talking about is that while her deportation case, which is still ongoing in the immigration court, is going on, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, USCIS, approved her DACA extension for another two years. Jenn: Well, what’s the basis of the deportation? Don’t they have to have a, this is the cause for us to bring a charge? Mo: Yeah. The Department of Homeland Security does not – so when Obama introduced DACA, the idea behind DACA was that the government would use their prosecutorial discretion in a much broader way than just on case – I mean, every case is evaluated separately, but it gave a large swath of individuals if they met certain requirements including being here since June 15, 2007, had to be present in the U.S. on the date that the program was announced, which was June 15, 2012, they have to undergo a vetting process. They put it all out there. Jenn: They jump through a lot of hurdles to even get that DACA, right? Mo: Yeah, and they’re exposing their undocumented status. So there was always going to be a risk that this could end up backfiring, you know, and people knew that. But the allure of it is most of these folks, if not all of them, well, most of them, were never able to have a legal work authorization card or a social security number or any sort of semblance of a life so that they could move forward with with something. You know, so they’re not just sitting on their asses all the time. You know, not being able to function in our society. And it’s better for our economy, it’s better for our streets, just having people out there who are licensed drivers, who are insured. You know, there are economic and societal benefits to it. So the problem with DACA, however, is that it is not a permanent legal status. And so that’s where we get this like real bizarre scenario arise where you have people who have DACA protection, which is supposed to protect them from being deported. And now ICE is saying, well, we can still deport them. It makes no sense. Jenn: Do you think it eventually, I mean, because - so knowing the culture of the agencies and stuff, it feels like to me, and I see this with the Biden CBP One app that was used to bring in people legally during his administration. Do you feel it’s that same kind of thing where they’re like, well, we just don’t recognize it. We don’t like it. Mo: Yeah, it’s exactly what it is. Jenn: In our mind, it’s not legal. Mo: Yeah, but it’s just a bizarre scenario when you’re getting approved on DACA and then on the flip side, they’re trying to deport these people. It’s like mixed messages. Jenn: Yeah. Mo: And I’m not saying... I’d rather have mixed messages than them saying, no, you’re not going to get DACA. But I was shocked when

    Mo Goldman on ICE targeting DACA

  4. Aug 6

    CBP and Epstein

    Thank you A. Eevie Bateman, Laura A. Drury, PJ Schuster, Ali Hart • عَلي هارت, Jolie, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. There have been several articles in large and small media outlets that have addressed the connections between CBP and Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking network. I do not want to take up too much time rehashing all these pieces. You can search for them and easily find them yourselves. What I hope to do in this piece, is give you a better understanding of how CBP facilitated the sex trafficking of children for over a decade, and address why CBP and even Congress seems to not even care to investigate these failures. This is a lot of information that I am going to try and boil down to an understandable synopsis. How CBP agents helped Epstein traffic children. It’s important to point out that any relationship with criminals, especially someone known for sex crimes against children is expressly forbidden in CBP. Giving favors such as light inspections, signing off on documents or even giving the impression of favorable treatment is a violation and grounds for dismissal at the very least. CBP officers asking wealthy travelers for money, loans, business advice and crossing the line from professional into personal relations is corruption. U.S. Customs and Border Protection states on their website that all their officers are highly trained to recognize human trafficking. They are the sex trafficking experts, or so they claim. Yet not a single officer reported Epstein and his plane loads of little girls. All the officers stated they believed the girls were women, and that they seemed “happy.” In the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell for her part of this trafficking organization, FBI agents interviewed several CBP officers working in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Epstein’s pilot, Larry Visoski stated in his FBI interview that Epstein routinely tried to create relationships with CBP officers to ease the customs and immigration inspections. He even tried to buy the CBP office in the Virgin Islands computers and turkeys which a supervisor turned down saying that such gifts would be unethical and against policy. And just to be clear, CBP officers are trained to be leery of people trying to gain favors in this manner. At first, Visoski claimed he was not aware of any gifts or preferential treatment given to Epstein by CBP officers but then later admitted in his interview that he had in fact given “one or two” helicopter rides to officers, that one CBP officer had a private lunch with Epstein on his island and that another officer played the steel drums at a party at his mansion. Epstein’s pilot further claimed that he and other staff were ordered to keep the phone numbers of these chosen CBP officers so that they could help facilitate their inspections upon arrival and departure. The inspections discussed in the FBI interviews all occurred after Epstein’s guilty plea, and the officers interviewed admitted they knew of his criminal record. At the same time, Visoski stated he was not aware of CBP’s involvement with helping Epstein traffic children. But the definition of helping someone traffic children is never explained by the FBI. It seems they are saying that CBP did not actively help him traffic or hide that he was trafficking children, and do not consider the favors given, the free helicopter rides and meals nor financial advice or lax inspections as aiding and abetting Epstein in his sex trafficking. That the officers knew Epstein was a child sex trafficker was shown in an email exchange involving the FBI New York Office’s Criminal Division where they stated that CBP officers routinely called Epstein’s plane the “school bus” and referred to his private island as “pedophile island.” (EFTA00165468) Yet, not a single officer ever seemed to report , investigate or question the plane loads of girls, and the FBI seems to think none of this is criminal or even problematic. CBP Officer Timothy Routch is an example of how Epstein maintained relationships with inspectors he considered friendly. Routch was interviewed by the FBI in the Maxwell case. He stated that he inspected Epstein’s plane several times a month for years. In the beginning of the interview, he claimed he never received any benefits or gifts from Epstein nor did he give the predator any favors. But just like Visoski, he contradicted himself the more he talked. He admitted to hanging around Epstein’s office and asked him if he could get him a better deal on a loan for some property he wished to purchase in the Virgin Islands. He eventually told FBI investigators that he became friends with Epstein’s pilot and boat captain by drinking at a bar with him and even visited the private island at least twice. He then stated he was taken to the island by the boat captain while not on duty to give Epstein an inspection of coconut trees, which is a favor. There he was treated to a free lunch with wine with Epstein and they then traveled back on his boat, which means he did accept gifts. He stated he noticed “beautiful women” playing in the ocean during lunch, but that they all seemed “happy.” When investigators asked Routch what he thought of Epstein and his sex crimes, the CBP officer stated he believed it was a set up and claimed that he was “a good guy.” Even though the officer knew of his criminal record, knew what it was for, inspected plane loads of girls coming to the island, stated that he knew many were of “eastern European” decent, he still thought Epstein was a “good guy” and never bothered to question anything. Routch even had an ex-girlfriend file a complaint with the FBI claiming that he had bragged to her about being close with Epstein and facilitating the trafficking. When questioned by his supervisor, Routch stated the complainant had a history of mental illness and a prior suicide attempt, and therefore her testimony could not be trusted. The supervisor admonished him verbally and warned him to be careful who he had relations with while noting that Officer Routch had a history of “international travel” for “personal rendezvous excursions.” (EFTA01249742 and EFTA0031495) Routch admitted to traveling extensively through Central America. It is important to note that Central America is a hot spot for sex tourism/prostitution (aka personal rendezvous excursions) within CBP and Border Patrol culture as is evidenced by the most recent Chief of the Border Patrol Michael Banks being forced to retire for said activities and by the murders of CBP agents Mathel Wasson and Jaime Eduardo Cisneros who were on separate “personal rendezvous excursions” in Colombia when they were killed. Routch would have never met Epstein had he not been inspecting his plane in his official capacity as a CBP officer. That’s what makes this corruption. The line from inspecting CBP officer to a personal relationship with benefits was clear, yet the FBI and CBP did not seem interested in investigating this possible corruption and instead suggested Routch was exaggerating his ties to Epstein. Routch has since claimed that all these statements from his supervisor and the FBI investigation are lies. Among all the CBP officers with close ties to Epstein and his sex trafficking organization discussed in the files, one seems to stand out: CBP Officer Carol Montgomery. In January 2010, Officer Montgomery sent Epstein and his pilot a New Years Eve card wishing them both well and signed off as, “a friend always, Carol.” This suggests that she was associating with Epstein on a personal level within a few years after his plea to solicitating prostitution from a minor in 2008. (EFTA02432318) In January 2011, in her official capacity as a CBP officer, Epstein’s staff was told to bring “the passports and boat documents” they wanted registered and she would take care of it. Officer Montgomery even gave directions and added, “he can call me if he get(s) lost.” (EFTA02389908) In February 2011, she asked if Epstein would help her invest $10,000. (EFTA01836903) In November 2011, she sent Epstein an email telling him to have a happy Thanksgiving and wishing him well. Says stated that she missed him. (EFTA01850531) In January 2013, she emailed Epstein wishing him a happy birthday writing: “The friendship we have had over the yea(r)s brightens every corner of the world. Your birthday is be [sic] perfect change for me to thank you jeffery [sic] for being a wonderful friend to me. Happy birthday! You are so special and never seem to ask for anything but bring so much joy to others -:). Happy birthday.” She signed it xoxo. (EFTA01907425) In February 2013, she emailed Epstein: “I do miss u how r u doing? I start my 7 days on 12 hr a day starting Thursday morning. I am doing a 17 day cruise April 21, 2013 that end in Copenhagen on may 13, 2013. Fly from Copenhagen into ice land back to Seattle. I will be in MYS April 19-21 Sunday I get on the ship if ur in that area I would love 2 see u carol big hugs. XOXO carol.” She added a photo of herself in her standing with Jeffrey Epstein, an adjudicated sexual predator. They are standing in front of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection seal. (EFTA01188239) In September 2013, then CBP Officer Carol Montgomery was in Washington state and desperate to meet up with her buddy. The FBI redacted much of this conversation, which leads one to believe she is possibly referencing the sexual trafficking or at the least possibly mentioning her involvement in helping him get around CBP regulations. (EFTA01955451) In February 2015, she wrote, “Hi Jeffrey now I realize why you were not able to come up the end of January so that you and I could celebrate our January birthdays together. I just wish that the news media would get over themselves and quit hashing over the same old stuff . What they think is new news was cleared

  5. Jul 30

    ICE's War on Children and Elon Musk's Crusade Against Immigrants

    Thank you Laura A. Drury, PJ Schuster, Stuart Cohen, Lori Modafferi, Jill B., and many others for tuning into my live video with THE LEFT HOOK with Wajahat Ali! Join me for my next live video in the app. Borderland Talk with Jenn Budd is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Borderland Talk with Jenn Budd at jennbudd.substack.com/subscribe

    ICE's War on Children and Elon Musk's Crusade Against Immigrants

  6. Jul 30

    ICE’s war on children.

    Thank you A. Eevie Bateman, LeftieProf, Lisa Gonzalez, PJ Schuster, Stuart Cohen, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. Donald Trump is fighting a war against immigrants that he claims are the worst of the worst. You know, unaccompanied children who come across our borders seeking safety. Chances are you’ve heard these stories. Chances are even better that you have forgotten them or not been able to see the war through the battles. The firehose of ICE stories from the last two weeks have left my brain with a cloudy coating of malaise. When this happens, I often find narrowing the focus of ICE’s criminal activity helpful. So, I’d like to focus on unaccompanied children this week. To hear ICE talk about unaccompanied children is to expose yourself to some of the most performatively empathic b******t you will ever hear. This was demonstrated most recently by Border Czar Tom Homan when he recounted how he forced a child to recount her rape and how hearing it traumatized him. They are completely unwilling to accept that it is their own closed asylum policies who put these children in cartel hands, instead insisting that they are the white knights riding in to save them. The truth is that the federal government has a long history of putting unaccompanied children into shelters that always seem to be crawling with predators. And when it comes to placing them with family or sponsors, there have been some terrible reports of forced labor and sexual violencethat extend back to the Obama era in 2015. Here is the link to various reports by the Office of Inspector General over the years covering presidents from both sides. And let us not forget that the first Trump Administration’s policy of taking asylum seeking children from their parents and labeling them as “unaccompanied” that led to at least six Indigenous children dying within their facilities: · Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez · Jakelin Caal Maquin · Felipe Gomez Alonzo · Wilmer Josué Ramírez Vásquez · Juan de Leon Gutierrez · Darlyn Valle Currently, the Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche are claiming that the Biden Administration placed nearly half a million unaccompanied children with sex and labor traffickers. All this hoopla over how the Biden Administration placed unaccompanied children is not unwarranted but is also not a new phenomenon created by the Biden Administration as the current Trump Administration would like you to think. While most unaccompanied children have been well placed with family and sponsors, administration after administration have consistently failed to properly screen all caregivers. Add to that failure the large increase in unaccompanied children seen by Trump’s shuttering of the legal asylum system that was continued erroneously by the Biden Administration, and it’s a not unreasonable to believe that there were failures that led to children being trafficked. This consistence in failing unaccompanied children goes deeper than whomever is president at any given time and begins with the culture of the immigration enforcement agencies and how they teach and train their agents to think of unaccompanied children. As you can imagine, it’s not good. Immigration agents are trained in the academies and in the field that immigrant children are simply just small criminals; criminals like their parents. I was told in the Border Patrol academy in 1995 that migrant children are “not like our children. They grow up faster. They are just baby criminals.” They literally say this to agents and anyone who claims this is not true is lying to you. To back up my claim, here is former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott in June of 2018 when he was the chief of San Diego Sector during the Trump child separation policy that led to the deaths of children in custody saying that training out loud to the press: “I would like to remind people too, what we look at as a child in the United States and say ‘oh that 14 year-old young man,’ that’s an adult in a lot of other countries, that kid’s been working for years, may or may not have been associated with the gangs. People get the picture in their head that it’s the kid who lives next door to you and it’s not. Some of these kids are hardened adults.” It is important to note that the man who made this statement, former Chief Rodeny Scott, is now the commissioner of CBP and running the mass deportation. Publicly, these officials will shed a tear. They will vilify anyone who calls out their performative concerns about the children dying in their custody, for those lost within their own systems, for the ones their systems give to predators and labor traffickers. They will blame the last president in office and never, ever accept any responsibility themselves. And they will use their failures of the very systems they designed and controlled to continue playing politics with people’s lives and with national security. So, let’s look at the politics under this second Trump Administration that now purports to be rescuing and saving unaccompanied children brutalized by the Biden Administration. What is the system they have created during the last eighteen months? Wellness checks. From the outset, the second Trump Administration and immigration officials declared that they would find all the unaccompanied children from the previous administration and conduct wellness checks because they were so worried for their safety. In May of 2025, the L.A. Times reported that ICE agents were going to homes and schools. Advocates, parents and sponsors believed these checks were not about children’s safety but a guise to find people to deport because the agents were dressed for drug or terrorist raids and not child wellness checks. Some of those checks did in fact lead to deportations. A year later in April of 2026, Russell Payne of Salon reported that ICE was looking to hire cops to do their wellness checks for them. Local sheriffs were encouraged to use 287(g) ICE program authorities meant to locate the worst of the worst to identify where unaccompanied children were living and to identify what schools they were attending. This information was then passed onto ICE. According to Payne, “Local officers are given ‘prioritized case lists’ that lay out likely targets for deportation and are tasked with ensuring the ‘smooth facilitation of transfers when ICE determines that [an unaccompanied minor], sponsor or other aliens encountered should be placed into ICE custody for the next steps in their case.’” Note that none of those statements address the wellbeing of the child. Two months later, Andrew Thrasher discovered and wrote about how ICE is hiding the contracts and payment schedules for local bounties on unaccompanied children deep within layers of 287(g) contracts. The program is called UAC (Unaccompanied Alien Child) Safety Verification Initiatives and in Thrasher’s words offers a “bounty-style rewards package.” Confirm a child’s address, and a deputy can collect a cool $500. Visit the house to conduct an inspection and an officer can collect another $2,000 once a report to ICE is filled out. For $15,000, your local cops are required to “verify the child’s safety and living conditions and ensure no signs of abuse, abandonment, neglect” exist. More taxpayer money is paid if they verify their schools, addresses and submit another report to ICE, for a total bounty of $22,500 per unaccompanied immigrant child. That is the bounty system that your local police and sheriffs can claim for spying on unaccompanied children. So, what happens to these children if they are taken by ICE for failing wellness checks? Is ICE providing these children with medical and psychological care and a safe place to live? We do not know. While ICE has claimed they have rescued children from horrible situations and can point to a handful of cases, the percentage of those cases is minuscule compared to the number of children they are deporting every month; a whopping 10,000 children a month according to a recent ProPublica report. Some of these children are not unaccompanied, some are but the numbers are not publicly available. 10,000 child deportations a month is triple the number of past administrations, even during Trump’s first go around. So, it seems the majority of these unaccompanied children are likely ending up held in ICE detention and then deported back to the countries they fled. Back into the arms of cartels and traffickers. Way to go, ICE. Closing unaccompanied child shelters and denying legal counsel. While the administration is breaking records detaining unaccompanied children through wellness checks, it has been closing shelters across the country. This last May, New York Focus reported that the federal government was ending its contracts with legal counsel for unaccompanied children and shipping them to facilities in Texas. Advocates and attorneys believe this is being done because the Texas courts are notoriously willing to support any immigration policy laws the Trump Administration desires. The administration claims this is simply because the number of unaccompanied children entering the country has dropped, but that statement fails to address the 10,000 children a month being deported by ICE in ProPublica’s reporting. The Trump administration is now saying those unaccompanied children who entered under Biden were not properly vetted, are being abused or have now become criminals. What this suggests is that the administration and ICE are deporting children without any legal representation. This month the Texas Tribune’s Lomi Kriel reported that fifty shelters for unaccompanied children have been closed across the entire country, but hiring for shelter workers in Texas is on the rise. More kids in immigration detention in Texas must mean more legal

    ICE’s war on children.

  7. Jul 27

    The Cover-Up Machine: Border Patrol, ICE, and the Teams That Bury the Truth

    Thank you Mediocre mamma, Noble Blend, Stuart Cohen, Cathy Stein, Honey Badger, and many others for tuning into my live video with Chance Meeting and A. Eevie Bateman! Join me for my next live video in the app. Borderland Talk with Jenn Budd is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Borderland Talk with Jenn Budd at jennbudd.substack.com/subscribe

    The Cover-Up Machine: Border Patrol, ICE, and the Teams That Bury the Truth

  8. Jul 23

    ICE high risk traffic stops.

    Thank you Cat: Poli-Psych, PJ Schuster, Michael Catlett, Frances, Honey Badger, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. Today I want to talk about ICE traffic stops, because there is a lot of confusion out there. This is partially due to the media repeating ICE talking points and not bothering to give anyone else outside of the immigration enforcement agencies a say – many in the media ingest ICE propaganda and simply regurgitate it for their viewers. The confusion is also caused intentionally by ICE, CBP and Border Patrol who keep many of their policies hidden under “law enforcement sensitive” national security seals. When killings and violence like we have seen lately occur, the leadership of these agencies rely on their bosses at DHS, politicians and right-wing media to respond with political messaging and outright lies about the facts. In other words, the leadership of these agencies hide from accountability and instead send out their talking heads like Tom Homan who is the current Border Czar, which is a political position. Remember, I am not a lawyer. My opinions come from my criminal law degree, my experience as a former Border Patrol agent and my research and study of these agencies over the last decade. When I refer to ICE, I am also referring to CBP and Border Patrol as they are leading this mass deportation that has brought them to middle America. What is the legal authority for immigration stops? Contrary to this administration’s beliefs, ICE does not have the authority to stop people for basic traffic violations. Immigration agents do have the authority to make traffic stops for suspicion of immigration, customs and narcotics violations as well as crimes associated with terrorism. They can also make vehicle stops if they see a person commit a serious felony that is outside of this authority such as if they see you run over a person. However, immigration agents do not have the legal authority to stop people for traffic violations. If an immigration agent stops a car for a taillight being out or any traffic violation, that stop is illegal. If they stop you for suspicion of driving under the influence of alcohol, that stop is also not within their authority and will be thrown out by the courts. As an agent, I have seen this happen many times. Where this gets sticky is when immigration agents work with state and local police who do have the legal authority to make traffic violation stops. After 9/11, Congress created Joint Terrorism Task Forces or JTTFs. These teams were created with the concept of preventing another terrorist attack. One of the main complaints law enforcement had back then was that they were unable to stop the terrorists because various agencies could not communicate or share intelligence with each other. To be clear, it was never that they could not share intelligence, it was simply that they had to get a court’s approval to share that information. In other words, they had to develop a case and go through checks and balances before sharing that information - something the immigration agencies hate to do. The JTTFs generally did away with this requirement. Additionally, this combined joint task force of federal, state and local police meant that various agencies with different authorities were combined into one unit. This was problematic for the teams who wanted everyone on the team to have the same authorities. So, they were allowed to “share authorities.” This meant that if I as a Border Patrol agent happened to be on a task force with a local police department, I could engage in traffic stops for traffic violations or do knock and talks (which are knocking on a door and requesting to speak with a resident without a warrant); these are authorities not held by Border Patrol agents. This and 287G contracts with ICE are how your state and local police have suddenly gained immigration powers that they did not have before. This is one way in which immigration agents are getting around their limited authority issue. The main way ICE justifies traffic stops is simply by racially profiling for immigration violations. Within one hundred miles of any land or water border, immigration agents have the legal authority to use racial profiling to conduct traffic stops for immigration purposes. While a hundred miles may not seem to cover most of the United States, it does cover two-thirds of the population. The entire state of Maine is under this rule. This rule was recently upheld by the Supreme Court and because Justice Kavanaugh wrote the decision, they have been termed “Kavanaugh stops.” According to Kavanaugh, these immigration stops are brief, non-intrusive and living in a city where many undocumented people are suspected of living is enough reasonable suspicion. In other words, if you happen to live in an area where undocumented people live, then you are also subject to these stops that violate your Fourth Amendment rights to unreasonable searches. What Kavanaugh does not consider is how these stops occur outside the confines of the cushy Supreme Court. In real life, what we are seeing under Trump’s mass deportation are immigration agents using the constant sharing of authorities to stop people based on powers they do not legally have such as stopping people for traffic violations, not conducting immigration inspections at the scene, brutality, kidnapping and then dumping of victims. These are a terrorist tactics and not legal or professional law enforcement tactics, meant to create fear in communities, plain and simple. Additionally, while immigration agents are trained in the academies that they need to develop their reasonable suspicion before they attempt to stop a car as the law requires, the training in the field differs greatly from the official academy training. While agents do receive additional yearly training through their agencies, it is often incomplete and not like the academy training. Some of this after academy training is provided by private contractors who are often ex-agents or police officers who are biased and not lawyers well-versed in the law. This training often teaches how to get away with illegal stuff, and there is no oversight into this training. And since immigration agents have been allowed to do these kinds of stops for generations on the southern border without repercussions or accountability, they expect they will be allowed to continue to do so all across the country. So, what should a normal traffic stop for an immigration violation look like versus what is really going on? Stops conducted for the purpose of an immigration check are considered routine stops. A routine stop is one in which the agent believes a civil immigration violation has occurred and not a criminal violation. It is the same type of stop done when a local police officer stops you for failing to yield or crossing over the double white line. It is not a stop for a serious criminal offense but for a civil administrative violation. The agent is to notify dispatch of their location and the description and plate of the car. They turn on their red and blue lights and maybe give a chirp or two of their sirens if the driver does not see them. The agent then safely exists their car and approaches the stopped vehicle from a safe angle, often from the passenger’s side. The agent then identifies themselves as a federal agent and asks the person to state their citizenship. If they are not a U.S. citizen, they are asked for their immigration documents. That’s it. While a routine traffic stop can escalate into a high-risk stop, the initial reason for the stop should be handled in this manner unless circumstances change. The pattern and practice shown in the last eighteen months through analyzing court cases is that ICE stops vehicles without any reasonable suspicion for immigration violations other than the racial profiling element. The reason why I say this is because they have stated that is exactly what they are doing and have not been able to provide any other reason. In the most recent ICE killing of Johan Duran Guerrero in Maine, the agent stated he was surveilling a subject when he saw Johan drive by and decided to stop him. No reason has been given for this immigration stop other than that he looked undocumented, which is another way of saying he was Brown. This was racial profiling as this agent did not stop every car that passed him – he stopped the car with a Brown driver. Neither DHS nor ICE has given a public statement as to the reason Johan was stopped. What they have claimed was that Johan tried to run over Agent David Brouillette and then claimed he had to shoot and kill Johan because he was fleeing the scene and he feared for public safety. Note that the question of why the agent chose to stop this car is not being addressed. They do not want to answer the why of the stop because if the stop was illegal, everything the agent did after the stop was illegal as well. That means the shooting would possibly be unjustified. This same scenario is seen in the Lorenzo Salgado Araujo ICE killing that occurred in Houston, Texas during the same week. When asked why he was stopped, agents claimed they were surveilling another person when they saw Lorenzo drive by in a van that was the same color as the one they were surveilling. That is some weak sauce, but it a common tactic used by the immigration agencies. It is sort of a nexus to real criminal activity that they then use to justify other unrelated stops; that van looked like the van we were targeting even though the license plates were different and Lorenzo was not the man they were looking for. When asked why he was shot, the agency claimed Lorenzo tried to run over the agents. Once again, they cannot justify the stop legally and they go straight to the agent’s life was in danger answer to justify the shooting and make the press back down. Whenever their actions a

    ICE high risk traffic stops.
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Former Senior Patrol agent turned immigrant rights activist. Learn the truth about the Border Patrol created a fake invasion & gets away with criminality far worse than those they arrest. jennbudd.substack.com

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