Name: Border Patrol Chief | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #486
Uploaded: 2024-03-04T17:01:01.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Border Patrol Chief | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #486' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-03-04. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Border Patrol Chief | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #486' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-03-04. Transcript available.

Border Patrol Chief | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #486

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today's guest is a retired border patrol chief who spent more than 27 years on
the job
most recently in yuma arizona and el paso texas and he really got a first-hand
look at what's going on
with america's border that's what we want to talk about and we will and a lot
more today's guest is
border patrol chief chris klem
the funny thing is i run into my friend yesterday he's a chef and he's like
dude i think your guests
are staying at our hotel and i was like really that's awesome yeah it was i've
even been there
yet yeah it's a nice hotel um i've never you know what's how really small of a
world this is so i'm
flying up here direct from phoenix to nashville and we're talking with chris
klem here today 27 and a
half years as a border patrol agent yes yes now i'm glad to be here i was just
you know saying i flew
in from phoenix last night and the lady sitting next to me was staying at the
same hotel she'd never
been in nashville it's been six years since i've been in nashville and she's
asking if anything you
know what are you what are you going to do i said well i got some business i'm
dealing with she's
you know where are you staying i said well i'm staying at this hotel that's
where we're staying
it was there's a whole party of people uh that she was with there's like one of
their girlfriends
was having a birthday party and so they all came up here i'm yeah i'm like well
i'm avoiding that
crowd tonight but it was but it was a great place uh last night very
comfortable and uh super super
nice hotel yeah yeah thanks for coming in man and yeah thanks for making the
effort really appreciate
it you know you just always hear so much stuff like about the border you know
it's like the border and
immigration and like the effects of it and i'm always just curious about like
what's going on you know
like what's the truth what's the reality um so you're recently retired from uh
your work as a border
agent yes and where do you finish up at i was the chief patrol agent in yuma arizona
which was
pretty much ground zero in 21 and 22 for the immigration and border security
crisis we've been
dealing with yeah yeah and when you say like well like what is our current uh
immigration policy yeah
so a couple things we want to talk about right so immigration and border
security are actually two
separate you know they're not they're they're closely related but this is where
the problem comes in we
conflate immigration and border security and we really need to kind of separate
those so i'll i'll
talk like my expertise my wheelhouse is border security immigration is a a long-standing
process
that's going on been going on in this country for hundreds of years right you
have visas you have people
that come in uh you know through the ports of entry they apply on the front end
so there's that immigration
process you have non-immigrants and you have immigrants intended immigrants you
have residents
it's a it's very very convoluted but okay what happens is so many people are
coming in illegally
and we don't have the right fix for that mass of humanity i mean the the laws
and the books do it but
but when you're dealing with volumes and volumes of people it's very
challenging so what i'd like to do
is is in what i do is talk strictly about more of the border security piece
okay but but but it's not
lost that you have to have the right mix because we have proven through history
go back 50 60 years with
good lawful programs in place a bracero program is a prime example where they
brought in
guest workers specifically to work in the fields the brocero brocero program
yes that actually was where
farmers could hire people for those seasons and there was a drastic the
immigrant illegal entry
dropped because there was a more clear and lawful pathway for those that just
wanted to come work
there was a plan yeah they just wanted to come work right and they were willing
to go back after the
season and that actually we saw a drop historically in the number of illegal
entries so these are i mean
we have proven it right in the past so we can work and make things work the
1942 bracero program an
executive order called the mexican farm labor program established the bracero
program in 1942 this series
of diplomatic accords between mexico and the us permitted millions of mexican
men to work legally in the us on
short-term labor contracts um these agreements addressed the national ag uh
agriculture labor
shortage during the war world war ii and implicitly they redress previous
depression era deportations
during war to the us sought labor from millions of braceros who would return to
their country of
origin after the work permit expired right okay so that was like so you're
saying there was a drop
then and if there was a because it was a plan in place right i mean it was
strictly you know for a lot of
seasonal agriculture work and then of course when the plant when they concluded
the program obviously
people were still wanting to come back and so we saw an uptick in illegal entry
they'll there's some
you know some nuances and stories about that program like you know unions got
involved and things like
that then it became you know you know you priced out the farmer so hey you know
what i can't pay this
kind of stuff but it's an example that you can go back you know from 1942 for
another 20 years to the 60s
that hey you had a supply and demand you had you had plenty of agriculture work
you had a demand for
workers and it it can it can make sense right we've done that with h1 visas and
things like that over
over time we need to fix the leak in the boat right instead of you know just
you know bailing out
water we need to fix leak and that's the border security apparatus that's what
i like to talk about
it's like hey we really need americans deserve to have a safe and and and
secure border yeah and and
then we need to you know actually figure out better lawful even short-term
pathways for those that want
to come work tall fences and wide gates tall fences is is something that look
it was actually senator
fred thompson the late senator fred thompson from tennessee that talked about
that kind of phrase back in
2008 and i said man that resonated with me so i kind of built off of that and
said look if we secure
our border where it makes sense where we need it the way the way the border
patrol says hey this is
the requirement and we build out a wide gate that's the lawful pathways the
ports of entries
programs like bracero and other visa programs because so many of the migrants
that i've talked to
and people i know talk to they just want to come work they're not really
wanting to come here and live
here for very long or immigrate here they just want to come work and and
eventually go back we've got to
make that better and they're they're using that influx of people all the time i
mean even when i
worked in uh in farming there was we always had some dude sleeping above me or
next to me or you know
separate beds but yeah same room and um he was mexican yeah and we would lay
there at night and
try to say stuff to each other and we couldn't and then we would just go to
sleep yeah but um
yeah but yeah you have to have a plan it's like you got to have a plan um when
did that start to
change so they had the bracero program so that was working for a while um when
did it start to change
where things got out of control with the amount of people coming in so you know
we're going to fast
forward we're gonna take a big leap because a lot of this stuff happened before
i was even born right
so you you in the 70s you know there was it was steady mainly mexican adult men
coming to work
doing seasonal work in the 80s the same thing right the same thing they all
came in they were looking
for work even even our farm and labor had not been you know industrialized so
much you know we're still
hand-picking things right um so we've always had that steady flow uh throughout
history in the 80s in
1986 there was a a lot of illegal immigrants here and uh president reagan did
an amnesty that was
that's always the fix all politically we'll do an amnesty we're gonna we're
gonna clean the slate
and we're gonna really start doing some things like you get grandfathered in
what is an amnesty
that's basically saying you've you've been grandfathered and you're here you're
here illegally
you you we're gonna let you stay you made it like you're safe it's almost like
the guy in
baseball the referee saying you're safe yeah yeah i mean it's it's you're
already here we're not gonna
we're not gonna deport you go ahead and try to start going through a legalization
process you're
here to work and and that's a huge pull factor because oftentimes the migrants
know hey if we can
just get here right and we lay low eventually we may get some kind of amnesty
so that that began again
in the 80s i came in in 1995 i joined the board patrol in 1995. okay um it's it's
very interesting
especially in today's political times i think it was 1994 maybe in early 95 but
then president clinton
spoke at a state of the union and he talked about the crime bill the 1994 crime
bill which is prevalent
today because we know we have president biden who was a senator back then in
that speech clinton says
we're going to put 5 000 more police officers on the street to include border
guards i was one of
those 5 000 hires in 1995 and it was based on some of the things that uh then
uh barbara jordan had
had really spoken about we have to secure our border we can't we can't just
have illegal immigration
constantly you know threatening our our businesses and everything else so was
the crime bill started
because they needed to secure the border it was just a general bill like we
need more protection we
want to put more people on the streets so if you think about the crime bill it
had to do with gun
control okay had to do with police reforms a lot of do with you know jail sentencing
so it wasn't the
best bill right but it certainly got more police officers and i got hired under
it so i so i was in
favor so but it was a general policy it wasn't just about the board no okay got
it right so it's more
police officers um it is the largest crime bill in the history of the united
states and consisted of 356 pages
that provided for 100 000 new police officers 9.7 billion dollars in funding
for prisons
which were designed with significant input from experienced police officers
okay yeah so the 100
000 i think that was probably an end game and probably included jailers and
this but it specifically
talked about 5 000 on the streets right away um so that's how you get started
that's how i get started
and we were still when i started in a town that's really you know i grew up
from new orleans i grew up in
in houston um and i'll we can talk about some of my journeys over the my career
but what's interesting
is i had over 3 000 people in my high school i went to a and after college and
i joined the border patrol
i went to a town of lordsburg new mexico and the whole county had maybe 3 000
people it was it it was
crazy right the the the cultural shift from you know big urban life in houston
to to the country but i
but i mean i'll tell you what i fell in love with it and um but i went almost
10 days before we made
our first illegal alien arrest i mean it was things was just weren't that busy
and and it was mainly
again single adult mexican nationals occasionally you would get people from
like farmhands yeah that's
pretty much what and and and kind of like what you were talking a