‘We’re not going away’: Border Patrol union chief vows return to enforcement under Trump

The president of the National Border Patrol Council claimed that under Trump’s new tax bill, Border Patrol will receive the necessary tools to secure the northern border.

Paul Perez, president of the National Border Patrol Council — the union representing more than 16,000 frontline agents — joined the Border Patrol in 1997 after serving in the U.S. military. He’s currently an active-duty agent assigned to the Kingsville Station in South Texas’ Rio Grande Valley Sector.

“In the big, beautiful bill, we’re going to get everything we need for the northern border as well. We’ve dedicated the time, resources, and manpower to the northern border, and we’ll secure it just like the southern border,” Perez said on “The Jason Rantz Show” on KTTH. “We’ve got the technology, cameras, drones, agents up there, everything that we need. We just don’t have enough of it, and under the big, beautiful bill, we’re going to get that.”

The U.S.-Canada border spans 5,525 miles, from Washington to the tip of Maine and along Alaska’s eastern front. In the 2023 fiscal year, northern border patrol agents seized approximately 55,000 pounds of drugs, the National Immigration Forum (NIF) confirmed.

Paul Perez’s battle at the border

Under the Biden administration, there were more than 8 million migrant encounters nationwide, with 6.7 million of those encounters occurring at the southern border, according to the House Budget Committee (HBC).

“[The Biden administration] encouraged the invasion, they facilitated it, and now they’re looking and realizing that it didn’t take any new laws,” Perez said. “It took a new president that actually wanted to enforce the laws that are actually on the books.”

Rantz addressed an article by The Atlantic, which claimed that federal workers’ morale has been low; however, Perez noted that for border patrol agents, this is not the case.

“Our agents are out there patrolling the border, they’re able to do the job that they signed up to do. I have not heard of any negative complaints about what is going on right now,” Perez said. “The complaining was during the Biden administration, when we were pulled off the line and forced to process, babysit, and transport millions of people coming across unvetted and then released into the country. That’s when morale was the lowest.”

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) noted that the Border Patrol is specifically responsible for patrolling roughly 6,000 miles of Mexican and Canadian international land borders, and more than 2,000 miles of coastal waters surrounding the Florida Peninsula and the island of Puerto Rico.

“Once we get operational control of the border, we’re going to maintain it. You can’t secure a border and then leave it alone,” Perez said. “That’s the job that we signed up to do. We’re not going away because the numbers are going to drop; that’s what our job is, it’s to provide operational control and border security.”

Border Patrol operations include preventing illegal entry of individuals and smuggled drugs, through traffic checkpoints, transportation inspections, marine patrol, and horse and bike patrol, according to the CBP.

“Our agents do a lot of training, and collateral duties that they engage in, so there’s enough work outside of just being on the line,” Perez said. “We make sure that we cycle people through so that nobody gets fatigued or bored while on the job. I don’t believe that this is a boring job at all.”

The CBP received 34,650 applications between January and April 2025, representing a 44% increase compared to the same four-month period in 2024.

“The border patrol the way it is now, we have a record number of people applying to this job, our recruiters are really great at what they do,” Perez said. “They don’t have to sell the job, it sells itself. Protecting our country, being outdoors, riding horses, ATVs, everything.”

Perez’s storied history with the U.S. Border Patrol

Perez touched on his more than two decades of service with Border Patrol.

“Having done this job for 28 years under five different presidents, I’ve seen the highs and the lows,” Perez added. “Trump’s first term, morale went through the roof. We were actually able to do the job that we weren’t able to do when Obama was president. When Trump left office and Biden came in with a lot of open border activists, they shut down all of our operations, and flooded the U.S. with millions of illegal immigrants.”

The NIF claimed that Border Patrol agents seized nearly 550,000 pounds of illicit drug substances nationwide in FY 2023, including approximately 150,000 pounds of marijuana and 140,000 pounds of methamphetamine.

“Trump is going to do such a great job that it’s going to put the next Republican candidate in a good spot to maintain the border security that we need and continue the operations that we have,” Perez said. “If our next president is a Democrat, hopefully they’ll maintain the status quo, and have to do absolutely nothing, which is all Biden had to do the first time.”

Listen to the full conversation below.

Listen to The Jason Rantz Show on weekday afternoons from 3 p.m. – 7 p.m. on KTTH 770 AM (HD Radio 97.3 FM HD-Channel 3). Subscribe to the podcast here. Follow Jason Rantz on X, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook.