During portions of an interview with NewsNation aired on Wednesday’s broadcast of “Elizabeth Vargas Reports,” Jason Owens, who served as Chief of the Border Patrol from June 2023 until early 2025, said that he doesn’t think the border is secure yet.
Owens stated, “I don’t want to say that the border is secure, because I don’t believe that we have achieved that yet.” And “If something tries to cross our border illegally, we are going to be able to detect, identify, respond to, and interdict that traffic with a certainty, if we can’t tell the American people that, if we can’t assure them of that, then we don’t have any business saying that the border is secure.”
NewsNation Senior Border Correspondent Ali Bradley then stated, “So data sent to Congress and obtained by NewsNation shows that, in fiscal year 2025, Border Patrol detected about 394,000 crossings. They caught or turned back 323,000. That’s an interdiction rate of just over 82%. But that leaves roughly 18%, or more than 70,000 illegal immigrants classified as gotaways, meaning they were detected, but not captured, sneaking through the holes where they know agents won’t be. Now that number is down from the 250,000 gotaways in 2024, it’s worth noting, there were actually 2 million recorded under the Biden administration. … And we just got our hands on these details, for this year, exclusively, from CBP, when it comes to gotaways, right now, we’re averaging about 48 a day, which puts us at nearly 10,000 for the fiscal year so far, we still have half the year left. But even at that pace, it’s a far cry from last year’s totals. But Chief Owens says even one is too many.”
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