One of the Border Patrol agents falsely accused of whipping migrants at the border in Texas and chastized by president Biden himself, has now been given an award by the same government.
The agent — whose name has been withheld since the September 2021 incident to protect his identity — received a Border Patrol Achievement award from the agency Thursday morning, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) source told The Post.
The agent was recognized for his intelligence work on human smuggling cases, they added.
The agent was one of the five photographed on horseback during the incident, where they were accused of whipping Haitian migrants at the riverbank in Del Rio, Texas, while trying to control members of a crowd of roughly 14,000 people crossing into the US illegally.
The pictures were widely misinterpreted, with President Biden calling them “outrageous” and saying of the agents, “I promise you those people will pay.”
A DHS source told The Post: “I find it hilarious and ridiculous that almost three years later, a Border Patrol agent who was accused of being racist and so vilified by this Biden administration now wins an achievement award for his efforts in preventing smuggling, before he gets a public apology.”
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) conducted a thorough internal investigation into the incident, which concluded that none of the Haitians were harmed during the altercation and noted the agents did not carry whips or strike anyone with the reins of their horses.
The probe, however, did determine that the agents used “unnecessary” force against the migrants, with one agent using “denigrating and inappropriate language” and maneuvering his horse “unsafely” at the time.
Days after the incident, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was forced to walk back a statement criticizing the actions of the agents on horseback.
“I made the statements without having seen the images,” he said from the White House press briefing room on Sept. 24, 2021.
“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 added, referring to slavery in the US.
The DHS didn’t respond to The Post’s request for comment. Boder Patrol Achievement awards are given internally by the agency and not publicly announced.
Following the September 2021 incident, the agents were removed from working the front lines of the southern border and barred from interacting with illegal immigrants.
The agent who received the award Thursday was reassigned to work intelligence on smuggling cases, which earned him the recognition from his superiors.
He eventually was permitted to return to working along the border and allowed to interact with migrants, according to the DHS source.
