(The Daily Signal)—Mike Syzdek joined the Border Patrol in 1976. He says he “always liked the idea of law enforcement” and wanted the job security the Border Patrol offered.
At 57, after 31 years of serving at the Campo Border Patrol Station in San Diego County, Syzdek retired in 2007. He loved his job during those three decades, but today, he says he wonders what all his hard work was for.
It was common for him to work an 11-hour day because his team was small, the former agent says, adding that he does not know how many graduations and family functions he missed, but those “sacrifices” were “all for nothing,” he told The Daily Signal during a recent ride-along through the area he used to patrol.
“I think of all the agents, myself included, who were injured on the job and agents who were killed … only to find out that everything was for nothing,” Syzdek said.
“Over the course of my 31 years in Border Patrol, I caught, you know, tens of thousands of aliens,” he said.
“I caught 20,000, let’s say, I kept them out of here. But they’ve let 10 million in … so, everything that I worked for my entire career was for nothing,” he added. “And the only thing I feel good about is the many, many drug loads I busted and people I sent to prison and got the drugs off the streets.”
When he looks at the current situation at the southern border, Syzdek says, “it’s just heartbreaking that we have laws on the books and an agency to enforce the laws, and nobody’s doing it.”
Illegal crossings into the U.S. along California’s border with Mexico are not new. Established smuggling routes, more desirable terrain, and Tijuana’s proximity to San Diego, one of nine sectors along the southern border, have long made the sector a desirable crossing location. Border walls and border security policies worked to drive illegal immigration numbers down significantly in the sector from 2010 to 2020.
The Border Patrol encountered 53,282 illegal aliens between ports of entry in the San Diego Sector in fiscal year 2020, the last full year of President Donald Trump’s presidency. In fiscal year 2021, encounters in the San Diego Sector nearly tripled, rising to 142,459.
Since Joe Biden became president, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has encountered more than 9 million illegal aliens on America’s borders and at ports of entry. That doesn’t include 1.7 million “known gotaways.”
Syzdek says he and the men he served alongside “never imagined in our wildest imagination that our country, that we all worked so hard to defend for those many years that we were in, would have open borders.”
On today’s edition of “The Daily Signal Podcast,” Virginia Allen and Simon Hankinson, senior research fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, discuss their recent trip to the southern border in San Diego County and what they learned from their ride-along with Syzdek. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
Listen to the podcast below:
Independent Journalism Is Dying
Ever since President Trump’s miraculous victory, we’ve heard an incessant drumbeat about how legacy media is dying. This is true. The people have awakened to the reality that they’re being lied to by the self-proclaimed “Arbiters of Truth” for the sake of political expediency, corporate self-protection, and globalist ambitions.
But even as independent journalism rises to fill the void left by legacy media, there is still a huge challenge. Those at the top of independent media like Joe Rogan, Dan Bongino, and Tucker Carlson are thriving and rightly so. They have earned their audience and the financial rewards that come from it. They’ve taken risks and worked hard to get to where they are.
For “the rest of us,” legacy media and their proxies are making it exceptionally difficult to survive, let alone thrive. They still have a stranglehold over the “fact checkers” who have a dramatic impact on readership and viewership. YouTube, Facebook, and Google still stifle us. The freer speech platforms like Rumble and 𝕏 can only reward so many of their popular content creators. For independent journalists on the outside looking in, our only recourse is to rely on affiliates and sponsors.
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Independent media is the future. In many ways, that future is already here. While the phrase, “the more the merrier,” does not apply to this business because there are still some bad actors in the independent media field, there are many great ones that do not get nearly enough attention. We hope to change that one content creator at a time.
Thank you and God Bless,
JD Rucker
