Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has “personally apologized” to US Border Patrol’s horseback agents after the previous Biden administration wrongly accused them of whipping migrants.
Images of the horse-riding agents trying to control a surge of roughly 14,000 Haitian migrants who arrived at the small border town of Del Rio, Texas, went viral in September 2021 — and top members of the then-Biden administration and Democrat lawmakers jumped to conclusions and wrongly asserted that the law-enforcement workers were whipping the illegal border-crossers.
Noem, during a recent visit to the Del Rio border, expressed regret to the agents “for the way they were treated and mentioned that it should have never happened,” said a Homeland Security source with knowledge of the situation to The Post.
The whipping accusations had been swiftly debunked by the photographer who captured the incident and later through an official Customs and Border Protection investigation.
Yet just days after the images surfaced — and after the photog who took them denied the whipping allegations — then-Vice President Kamala Harris told the “View” that the snaps “invoked images of some of the worst moments of our history, where that kind of behavior has been used against the Indigenous people of our country, it has been used against African Americans during times of slavery.”
Then-President Joe Biden also called the images “outrageous,” pledging that the agents “will pay,” the day after the photographer dismissed the false whipping claims.
Noem’s predecessor, Alejandro Mayorkas, was eventually forced to walk back his own quick criticism of the horseback agents.
“I made the statements without having seen the images,” he admitted to reporters 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 said, referring to slavery in the US.
Nearly a year after the viral incident, the whipping claim unraveled for good after an internal federal probe found that there was no such actions that day.
Still, the probe did determine that the agents “engaged in unprofessional or dangerous behavior, including one instance in which an agent used denigrating and offensive language.”
“Whips are not part of Border Patrol training or equipment,” the then-CBP acting commissioner Chris Magnus said at the time.
Since President Trump took office Jan. 20, illegal border crossings have plummeted to historic lows.
In the first eleven days of February, Border Patrol agents have seen an average of 359 illegal migrants crossing a day, putting the US on track to have the lowest monthly numbers in at least 25 years, according to leaked Customs and Border Protection data obtained by The Post.
Border Patrol sources credit Trump’s decision to end the country’s problematic “catch and release” program, deploy thousands of additional soldiers to the border and ramp up a mass deportation effort for the slowdown.
