Rosa Arellano was a Democrat — as well as a Border Patrol agent — in 2015 as President Donald Trump began his campaign for the White House.
As Trump sounded alarms over immigration — and was attacked in the mainstream media for doing so — Arellano dug for the truth, and that led to a major change.
“The reason I left the Democratic Party was because back in 2016 I saw what happened at the beginning, as soon as President Trump said he was going to make a run for president,” she said Monday on “Fox & Friends First.”
Now retired, Arellano said a speech Trump made citing “bad hombres” that was reviled by the mainstream media struck her as on the money, reflecting a reality that was part of her job.
During a 2016 debate with Democrat Hillary Clinton, Trump said, “We have some bad hombres here, and we’re going to get them out,” according to ABC.
She said her respect for Trump grew after he took office.
Retired CBP Officer Rosa Arellano says she switched to the Republican Party because of Biden’s border crisis. pic.twitter.com/kQx3DV9vCY
— Brad Porcellato (@BradPorcellato) September 26, 2022
She said Trump “was the first president in a long time that I recall actually came down to the border.”
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“When he came down, and he spoke to the subject-matter experts of Border Patrol and us, the CBP officers, he listened to us,” she said.
She said Trump’s plan to stem illegal immigration reflected the reality she saw every day prior to her retirement.
“He listened to us letting him know that we needed a multi-layer solution to this situation. And we mentioned that we needed physical barriers, strategic locations, we needed better infrastructure, we needed more boots on the ground, better technology. He listened to us, and he pointed it out to the country,” she said.
Arellano had harsh words for blue state officials who bristle at the arrival of busloads of illegal immigrants.
New York Mayor Eric Adams recently attacked Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for sending illegal immigrants to New York City, calling the policy “inhumane,” “un-American” and “unethical,” according to the Texas Tribune.
Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser had suggested illegal immigrants did not belong outside of border states, according to the Washington Examiner.
She said, “We’re not a border town. We don’t have an infrastructure to handle this type of and level of immigration to our city. … We’re not Texas.”
Arellano said the comments reflect “pure hypocrisy.”
“If they come down and they check out what’s going on, I mean they would be baffled. We have our small border town that is just about 30,000-35,000,” she said. “It’s ridiculous that we’re getting illegals entering our area at a rate of about a thousand a day.”
