Former national deputy chief of the U.S. Border Patrol Ronald Colburn tells National Review Onlinethat the Obama administration has undone all of the progress made at America’s southern border since 9/11.

“We’re back to a pre-9/11 situation basically, and this administration did that in the past five years,” he says. “All of the good that was done after 9/11 up to now has been reversed singlehandedly.”

Colburn, who spent more than 30 years working for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, says the resulting national-security risk has to do with the “clutter” of people at the border. He says all of the gains made since 9/11 came as a result of reducing the number of people crossing the border. The Border Patrol’s task is to sort through the haystack of people as they come across, he says. “What this situation on the border is doing is growing the haystack, is adding clutter, so that those dangerous needles get through because we’re tied up capturing, instead, juvenile children from Guatemala and El Salvador,” he says. “When you see the cartels — the Zetas and MS-13 and the Gulf Cartel — laughing about this on the Internet, you know what’s behind it.”

Colburn says the “gangsters down south” enjoy social media, taking selfies, and talking about one another online. Border Patrol officials monitor the cartels’ online communications along with officials from the Department of Defense and intelligence community, he says.