Leadership Quote by Ric Keller

The line is engineered to do two jobs at once: dramatize a border in chaos and assign blame to a system that supposedly refuses to enforce its own rules. Keller doesn’t lead with data; he leads with a scene. “On my recent trip” functions as a credibility badge, the classic lawmaker move of laundering a political argument through firsthand witness. The detail is deliberately sticky: the “same coyotes 20 times.” Whether literally verifiable matters less than its rhetorical payoff, which is to make enforcement feel absurd, like a sitcom loop where the antagonist keeps strolling back onto the set.

The subtext is punitive and prosecutorial. Keller isn’t primarily arguing for more agents or fencing; he’s arguing that the real failure is downstream, in prosecutors, judges, or federal policy that declines to press charges. “They are not prosecuted” is the dagger clause, implying that the agents are doing their part while someone else - often coded as soft, bureaucratic, or ideologically permissive - is undermining them. It’s a neat transfer of frustration from the complexity of migration to the simpler moral grammar of negligence.

Contextually, this sits in a long-running political tradition: immigration framed less as a labor market, humanitarian, or regional stability issue and more as a breakdown of deterrence. By centering “coyotes” rather than migrants, Keller seeks a safer villain - criminal middlemen - while still justifying harsher enforcement. The intent is to make “prosecution” sound like common sense, and anything less like surrender.