Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was told last year that there was no evidence Border Patrol agents had “whipped” or “strapped” Haitian migrants at the US-Mexico border — hours before he bolstered President Biden’s lies about the incident at a press conference.
A Sept. 24, 2021 email to Mayorkas from Marsha Espinosa, assistant secretary of DHS public affairs, highlighted an interview with the photographer who captured agents on horseback trying to corral migrants and block them from entering the US near Del Rio, Texas, according to Fox News.
Lensman Paul Ratje had told an interviewer that he did not witness the agents harming the migrants, but Mayorkas did not contradict Biden’s false narrative as he stood next to him at the White House podium.
“To see people treated like they did, horses barely running over, people being strapped — it’s outrageous,” Biden told reporters that day.
“Our nation saw horrifying images that do not reflect who we are. We know that those images painfully conjured up the worst elements of our nation’s ongoing battle against systemic racism,” Mayorkas said during the newser.
Biden and other administration officials had repeated immigration activists’ claims that the cowboy hat-clad agents were whipping the migrants, as the pictures originally appeared to show. GOP lawmakers accused the Democratic administration of trying to throw the agents under the bus to take attention away from the crisis at the overflowing makeshift migrant camp at Del Rio.
The three agents had in fact been using cord split reins to control their horses, and no migrants were harmed in the Sept. 19 fracas, a Customs and Border Protection internal investigation revealed this summer.
The agents were found to have used excessive force as they rounded up and charged at the men, women and children who had been crossing the Rio Grande while returning from Ciudad Acuna, Mexico with food.
“I’ve never seen them whip anyone,” Ratje told KTSM 9 News after the uproar.
“He was swinging it,” the shutterbug said of one agent who was seen spinning his rein back into place, “but it can be misconstrued when you’re looking at the picture.”
A day after the incident, Mayorkas and Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz defended the agents to the press, pointing out that the reins were used to control the horses, not to whip people. By the time Mayorkas appeared with Biden four days later, the DHS chief had disavowed his earlier remarks.
“I made the statements without having seen the images,” he said at the time.
“The horses have long reins, and the image in the photograph that we all saw, and that horrified the nation, raised serious questions about what … occurred and as I stated quite clearly, it conjured up images of what has occurred in the past,” Mayorkas added, referring to slavery in the US.
When asked specifically about the agents’ supposed “whipping,” Mayorkas did not correct a reporter, despite having being told that the photographer did not observe any such action.
“That is something that horrified us all,” he said.
The email from Espinosa to Mayorkas was reportedly obtained by the Heritage Foundation through a Freedom of Information Act request in March. When the DHS did not comply, the conservative think tank successfully sued the agency to obtain the documents, according to Fox News.
“It clearly shows [federal officials] are willing to lie to the American people for their self interests,” National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd reacted.
The three horseback agents and their supervisor face up to two weeks of unpaid suspension in connection with the incident, according to the report. The officials are still attempting to respond to the proposed discipline.
