On Wednesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Will Cain Show,” former Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz stated that he would put the estimated population of illegal immigrants in the U.S. as “much higher than 20 million people.”
Host Will Cain asked, “I’ve seen varying figures. The one that’s always quoted is something like 20 million illegal immigrants in the United States. … Do you have any sense, how big is the population of illegal immigrants in the United States?”
Ortiz answered, “I would estimate it’s much higher than 20 million people. When you think about, just even over the last ten years, how many folks that actually got away from the Border Patrol, and then those unknown gotaway numbers, that we [were] never able to manage because the Border Patrol agents were conducting other duties outside of their enforcement duties. And so, what we’ve seen over the last five, six years, I think is really just a telltale sign of what happened over the last 20 years. I can remember when I was a young agent in southern California in the early 1990s, there were droves of people walking up the interstates day in and day out. And those are those populations that have embedded in southern California. 1992, during the L.A. riots, we had to send Border Patrol agents up to L.A. to help support the men and women up there, and what that does is create this environment along the border where [you] diminish security both at the border and in these communities along the southwest border.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett