A new report from the DHS inspector general is calling bull on Donald Trump’s $3 billion dollar mass deportation plan to hire 15,000 additional immigration agents, saying that his administration would need to vet 1.2 million candidates in order to find enough qualified agents who will stick around. Quite a challenge for a man who could barely vet his own communications director.
The report also “calls into question whether DHS officials even need 15,000 new hires to target undocumented immigrants. Agency leaders have done such poor planning for what their workforce should look like, with an understaffed, poorly trained human resources operation, that they cannot justify thousands of new employees, the report says.”
With border crossings at record lows—thanks in large part $20 billion-a-year his predecessor pumped into immigration enforcement—the inspector general said that “neither [U.S. Customs and Border Protection] nor [ICE] could provide complete data to support the operational need or deployment strategies for the additional 15,000 agents and officers.” Among the reasons why DHS would need to vet so many people is because Border Patrol, in particular, attracts so many bad apples:
The immigration and Border Patrol departments have long had trouble hiring qualified candidates quickly and retaining them because of polygraph requirements, remote workplaces and low pay compared with other law enforcement jobs. Turnover averages 6 percent a year for the Border Patrol and 4 percent for ICE.
According to the Atlantic, 140 Border Patrol agents have been “arrested or convicted on corruption charges in the past dozen years,” with one former official saying the agency’s corruption rate has “exceeded that of any other U.S. federal law-enforcement agency.” Under Donald Trump’s tenure, in fact, DHS faces a lawsuit following Border Patrol agents turning away asylum seekers, a violation of international law. But the “law and order” candidate, right?
The inspector general is also questioning why Trump is calling for 5,000 more Border Patrol agents when DHS has plenty of border agents who aren’t assigned to the border:
They note that 61 percent of the 21,000 Border Patrol agents actually patrol the Southwest border, a number that “may actually understate” the number of employees assigned to management and administrative work. Almost 1,000 more agents than headquarters officials have allocated are assigned to intelligence roles in the field, auditors found.
“The use of Border Patrol Agents performing duties not directly tied to ‘ensuring complete operational control of the border’ calls into question the department’s operational need for 5,000 new agents,” the report said.
“It’s not surprising that President Trump’s decree to drastically expand the Border Patrol and increase his deportation force was put in place without a clear need for the 15,000 new agents and officers or a plan for hiring and deploying them,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS.). “I hope DHS goes back to the drawing board and shows us the need for new personnel along with a clear plan on how to better manage them once deployed.”
So how long until Trump declares his own DHS inspector general fake news?