00:00Thank you for your service and leadership.
00:03Thank you, Dr. Villese.
00:05We'll start with a round of questions, five-minute rounds.
00:09And as you can see, due to conflicts, a number of our members have other commitments
00:15and aren't able to be here in person.
00:17But I know Senator Padilla and I will have some questions,
00:21and perhaps others will join us along the way.
00:23Ms. Vega, like Ms. Nobles, you've shared with us a painful experience in your life.
00:33Most people don't know exactly what you had to do during the incident
00:38that resulted in your son's death and the wounding of your husband.
00:45That is, holding a gun against the perpetrators to defend your family.
00:49Nor do many people understand the lasting impact on your children
00:54as they witness the death of their father or grandchildren,
00:59their father before their very eyes.
01:02You mentioned flashbacks.
01:05Are you still dealing with the effects of that incident today?
01:11Yes, sir, I am.
01:13How so?
01:15It's horrible.
01:16I need to stay busy around the clock because the minute your head hits that pillow,
01:24everything plays out over and over, and you can't stop it.
01:31Now, Ms. Vega, I think some people wrongly suggest that the Hispanic community
01:37in this country are somehow opposed to enforcement of our immigration laws.
01:44And I think it was Sheriff Boyd made the important distinction
01:50between legal immigration and illegal immigration.
01:53To be sure, legal immigration has been one of the secrets to our success as a nation,
02:00a nation of laws.
02:01But illegal immigration has been an unmitigated disaster for so many families,
02:06including the Hispanic community in Texas and elsewhere.
02:09So your family came to the United States legally.
02:14Some of our colleagues here and others you've heard in the news say that,
02:20well, people can break the law and come to the United States illegally,
02:23but because they've been here a while, they ought to be able to stay
02:27and should not be forced to return home to get legal status.
02:32Do you agree with that?
02:34No, sir.
02:35They've had ample time to rectify their citizenship status.
02:41It's an honor being in this country.
02:43When you're from another country and you come here, it's an honor.
02:51Ms. Nobles, what are some of the worst things reported in the news about your daughter's death
02:57that you want corrected for the record?
02:59Ms. A lot of it is they confuse the terms, you know, immigration and illegal immigrants.
03:09We're talking about illegal immigrants who have broke the law.
03:12Kayla did not live with Walter Martinez.
03:16He was put there without their saying in anything.
03:20Also, the whole thing about that illegal immigrants commit less crimes.
03:31How do we know that?
03:32We don't know who's in this country.
03:35They have not been vetted, background checked.
03:37We have no identification of them.
03:40We have no idea who they are.
03:42They're not in the system.
03:43We were really lucky to get a conviction from Walter because they checked and he was not
03:51in the system.
03:52They had to try to find out who he was by calling Border Patrol, getting his name and his
03:58date.
03:58And they had to call El Salvador to get any information about him.
04:02Nobody knew him.
04:03He wasn't in the system.
04:04No fingerprints.
04:05Nothing.
04:06We don't know who they are.
04:08We don't know who's coming here.
04:10And we don't know what crimes they committed because they haven't been caught.
04:14We were lucky that he was caught.
04:16And the ones that we do know of, they actually got caught.
04:20There's no way of knowing because they can live under the radar.
04:24They can live in the communities.
04:25They can.
04:26Her murderer can act like a 16-year-old child.
04:29I've seen him in the beginning of the investigation.
04:31He was sitting there acting all scared and acting, you know, and acting.
04:35Asking permission to eat.
04:37And then in the end, when he got caught, his whole demeanor changed.
04:42He sat in that chair and they told him he was being arrested for a homicide.
04:47He sat in that back chair.
04:48He looked so much older, so much wiser.
04:52And he was like, and he said homicide in Spanish.
04:55He just sat back and was like, okay.
04:59Like that, laughing about it.
05:00Like it was a joke that he murdered my daughter and just left her on the floor like trash.
05:06It was a joke to him.
05:09Sheriff Boyd, it seems like during the four years of the Biden administration,
05:14the U.S. government outsourced its immigration policy to transnational criminal organizations,
05:22otherwise known as cartels, and as part of Operation Lone Star, that task force,
05:29I know you have tracked the human smuggling flow chart and also the flow chart of cartel drug operations.
05:39But in your experience, dealing with the broken borders or the open border policies of the Biden administration,
05:47didn't it allow not only the trafficking of children and women,
05:52but the movement of drugs and other contraband across the border
06:00without any distinction between that and people who want to come here to work
06:07and perhaps want to achieve a better life?
06:11Yes, Senator.
06:12So what had happened is Border Patrol was basically turned in from an enforcement agency
06:17into a babysitting and processing agency.
06:20They were tied up on the border actually processing people to get them into this country as fast as possible.
06:26Friends of mine in Border Patrol said they would get in trouble for not processing enough people
06:29into the country in a timely manner.
06:32And what that did was that left our borders wide open for people to come through
06:36and to bring stuff through.
06:37But I will tell you that during that time period,
06:40slave trade outpaced narcotics as far as the revenue that the government was aware of that the cartels made.
06:47And so that's one of the problems that we're seeing now is this was not an immigration issue.
06:51This was a slave trade issue.
06:54These people were brought here by the cartels because we ceded our authority of the border
06:59from the U.S. government to the cartels.
07:01And they brought those people here and put them into indentured servitude.
07:04And I've seen that firsthand.
07:06We have imported millions upon millions of people.
07:09We have put them in a peon class.
07:11And they are now trying to pay off their debts to their masters.
07:14They are beholden to workplaces, whether it be in a farm, whether it be in a kitchen, whether it be at the hotel,
07:21or whether it be unloading 18-wheeler loads of dope or moving different product or killing people.
07:26They are beholden to the cartels to do whatever it is they are told to do by the cartels and their affiliate organizations.
07:33And that's a direct result of the last four years.
07:35And, Sheriff, is it your experience that the only thing or maybe the main thing that the cartels care about is money?
07:42That is absolutely it.
07:44And I will touch on one thing that Senator Padilla mentioned about people working in the fields.
07:49I don't know if y'all have ever sat down face-to-face with a Sicario in a small room, but I've done it on multiple occasions.
07:57Those individuals didn't just kill people for a living.
08:00They also worked out in the fields.
08:02They were welder's helpers.
08:03They worked on pipelines.
08:05They had regular jobs during the day.
08:07And they killed people on their time off for the cartels.
08:10So just because somebody works at the local farm or works in some industry doesn't mean they don't have the capacity to do evil and do those things.
08:20And so that we need to understand.
08:22And finally, you were part of Operation Lone Star Task Force, and I believe you supplied us with a couple of charts here.
08:29One, a human smuggling flow chart, and one, a simplified flow chart of cartel drug operations.
08:37Is that correct?
08:38That is correct.
08:39And those are based off of our experiences of conducting investigations.
08:43These will, without objection, these will be made part of the record.
08:47Senator Padilla?
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