The Biden administration and Democratic lawmakers have bought into a lie about the Border Patrol agents doing their best to address the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Del Rio, Texas.

The lie — that mounted Border Patrol agents were recorded “whipping” Haitian migrants as they tried to cross the Rio Grande into the U.S. — was spread by partisan journalists and activists on Twitter, and quickly picked up White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki. This despite the fact that none of the existing photo and video evidence show any migrants being struck with what the mainstream press now admit were reins, not “whips,” as they initially claimed.

Democratic congresswoman Maxine Waters compared the Border Patrol agents to slave owners. Psaki condemned the “brutal and inappropriate measures” employed by agents at the border. She later announced that the Del Rio Border Patrol would no longer be permitted to use horses.

On Friday, President Biden himself weighed in, declaring that the mounted agents “will pay,” and opining that “it’s beyond an embarrassment. It’s dangerous, it’s wrong.” The agents have already been suspended pending a DHS investigation.

He also asserted that “people [are] being strapped.” Notably, the photographer responsible for some of the most widely circulated photos of these incidents has told a local NBC affiliate that "I've never seen them whip anyone."

George Syer, a retired horse patrol coordinator in the Rio Grande Valley and Border Patrol supervisor told National Review that the mounted agents were acting according to standard procedure — a fact he said would be obvious to anyone with even a passing familiarity with horses.

“Spinning the rein is what we do and any horse person that trains horses and has to deal with them, you will find out that they normally spin the end of the rope, and that gets the horse moving,” Syer said.

“It’s a training tool, and it’s a training aid if a horse does not want to cooperate with its rider,” explained Syer, and an especially useful one if “you have people in front of the horse and they’re 10 to 15 feet away and they’re raising their arms, they have bags, they’re trying to be aggressive in their body language — this horse does not want to go over there. If you need to apply additional pressure to that horse in order to make him go, you can spin the two-feet tail of your rein and the horse is gonna go away from the sound of that spinning rein and also the visual of it, because he can see it on the one eye that you’re spinning, that same side. Remember, a horse’s eyes are on the sides of its head.”

Syer added that the primary safety priority of riders is to prevent a collision between human and horse, emphasizing that “everything is to prevent that horse from making contact with a human being — everything.”

It follows then that in Syer’s estimation, the White House has erred not just in its diagnosis of what’s happening on the ground, but in its treatment plan.

“There are a bunch of cities all across America that deploy horses in a crowd control capacity,” he noted, arguing that that’s because the animals provide certain strategic advantages and act as a “force multiplier” when the Border Patrol is overwhelmed, as it right now. The Bureau of Land Management’s website observes that horses are “ideal” for traversing “the rugged and remote terrain, the Border Patrol is responsible for securing” as a result of their inherent “strength, endurance, agility, and intelligence.”

Moreover, Syer observed, every mounted agent receives “some of the most rigorous mounted horse training in the world” during an intensive six-week program.

“I would want to have all of the horses in the entire Border Patrol there just to make a perimeter around those camps,” said Syer.

Instead of stripping tools from Border Patrol, the administration should be working to ameliorate the crisis that forced them to use those tools in the first place, a former senior Border Patrol official told National Review. Under the Trump administration, cooperation from the Mexican government had, alongside tougher enforcement mechanisms, stemmed the flow of illegal entries.

“This is all borne by the rescission of those policies, a definite signal that’s been sent out to the globe that we’re going soft at the border, and then a domestic message that says we are not concerned about immigration enforcement,” he argued.

Part of the problem, expounded upon by former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott in a letter to Senate leadership, is that the administration is applying Title-42 — a pandemic policy allowing for quicker processing and expulsion — to fewer migrants. Instead, many migrants are being processed under Title-8, which not only takes up more manpower and time, but also ends with their being released into the United States with a notice to appear before a court later — “catch and release,” essentially.

Title-8 involves “hours of biographical information, biometric information, all of the particulars about where people come from, what documents they have, where they’re going in the States,” according to the former official who agreed to speak to National Review on the condition of anonymity. It’s a puzzling choice by the Biden administration — which purports to be chiefly concerned with mitigating the spread of COVID-19, especially during a migrant surge. Returning to Title-8 amidst the pandemic not only results in the release of a great many migrants into the country, it also deprives the Border Patrol agents on the ground of much needed resources at the most inopportune of times.

Both Syer and the more senior official emphasized that morale Border Patrol morale is collapsing due to the Biden administration’s misguided policies and heated rhetoric.

“You give this agency and these agents an impossible mission, and then when they try to accomplish it, you say disparaging things about them,” the senior official said.

Syer was similarly frustrated, but remains confident in the agents on the ground.

“The men and women in the United States Border Patrol we have been dealing with the worst locations in the United States for our assignments, and we continually come and do our jobs with integrity and honor and the off switch does not exist,” he said.