The southern U.S. border is largely unprotected and American leaders simply lie to the public when they claim otherwise, according to a new video from Project Veritas.
The report also depicts a border county sheriff in Texas declaring the border fence to be a joke, border patrol agents doing everything but patrolling the border and wondering if President Obama even cares that there is even an unguarded footbridge in his county that connects the U.S. and Mexico across the Rio Grande.
Project Veritas President and Founder James O’Keefe crossed the shallow, narrow river a total of five times and twice in video, one dressed as Osama bin Laden to emphasize how terrorists could exploit lax border security.
In his first crossing out of costume, O’Keefe takes just a few seconds to cross the Rio Grande.
“I don’t see a single federal officer anywhere, no walls, no guns, no people” says O’Keefe upon reaching shore on the American side in the video.
His efforts are shown immediately after video clips of Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano all insisting the border was very secure. In our subsequent interview, O’Keefe says the message of the video should be pretty clear.
“I think the message here is that border security is national security and that the American people don’t really understand just how bad it really is. The political representatives are lying to them. The president is lying. Senator Reid is lying. Members of Congress are lying and misleading people. If a person who’s dressed up as a terrorist can walk across the border in broad daylight with no federal Border Patrol agents to be found, I think the president is violating his oath,” said O’Keefe.
The video was shot in Hudspeth County, Texas, in the western part of the state. O’Keefe says the county is a microcosm of security problems across the southern border, ranging from small, separate components of the unfinished border fence to a footbridge connecting the U.S. to Mexico to a river that takes only a few seconds to cross.
O’Keefe is joined in the video by Hudspeth County Sheriff Arvin West. The sheriff didn’t directly answer when asked by O’Keefe whether President Obama is aware of the security problems in his county.
“It doesn’t matter whether he knows it’s here. Does he care? says West.
As for the border fence that President Obama once declared to be almost finished, O’Keefe says Sheriff West and other border security advocates know that’s not true.
“The sheriff intimated the fence is a joke. They don’t think there’s a fence. If you watch the video, there are these 20-foot high iron pillars that are attached to a concrete base. That goes on for about three miles and then just abruptly stops. You can walk around it,” said O’Keefe, who says Sheriff West believes he knows exactly what it would take to secure the border in his county.
“He said we could secure this border with about 75 guys. He currently has 12 deputy sheriffs in Hudspeth Couty for a 78-mile stretch. Remember, Congress is thinking about allocating three billion dollars. With just 75 deputies, that’s far, far less than three billion. He could secure an entire stretch of that border. So he’s giving a practical solution. Of course, given the way this government works and the way this country works, they’ll never look for that practical solution because they don’t want to actually secure the border,” said O’Keefe.
O’Keefe says another alarming result of his conversation with Sheriff West was to learn there are plenty of Border Patrol agents on the payroll, but most of them are nowhere near the border.
“The federal border patrol is not on the border. They’re inland, they’re elsewhere. They’re not actually protecting the border,” said O’Keefe.
Some observers of the video accuse O’Keefe of breaking the laws of two countries by publicly depicting how to illegally cross the border. He’s not sure what Mexican officials might do but says the U.S. Border Patrol has already issued a statement claiming they simply cannot be everywhere at once. O’Keefe isn’t worried about prosecution in the U.S. at all.
“What laws are people referring to? What law has been enforced on our border? There is no law,” he said.
Project Veritas is well-known for its hidden-camera investigations of Planned parenthood, ACORN, National Public Radio and how easily voter fraud can be committed without photo identification. As with those probes, critics say O’Keefe is finding the exception rather than the rule when it comes to our borders. He says that’s ludicrious.
“It’s pretty amazing the lengths my adversaries will go to undermine and discredit me and what we expose at Project Veritas. I don’t think that people are necessarily surprised by the notion that people can cross the border. I think it’s important to show people in the most outrageous way that this is the way it is,” said O’Keefe.
O’Keefe says Project Veritas hopes to act as a uniting force in the country because he believes people of all political stripes do not want to perpetuate a system that allows terrorists to waltz unimpeded into the country. He hopes people will demand answers from their lawmakers and from the president. O’Keefe says Obama is facing an important moment and his group will be ready to hold him accountable.
“What is his response to what we’ve shown? How is he addressing the issue of terrorists sneaking across the border? How are his solutions going to prevent what I just did from happening again? Maybe I’ll go and do it again. Maybe after his solution, I’ll go across, pose as ISIS or as if I have Ebola and we’ll see what happens then,” said O’Keefe.
