Last Week Tonight’s John Oliver hits the nail on the head when it comes why the massive Border Patrol hiring surge proposed by Donald Trump—a plan that even the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general vocally questioned in a recent report—is so fundamentally dangerous. According to that report, DHS would need to vet 750,000 applicants in order to find 5,000 qualified border agents to add to its 21,000-strong force. This is because DHS has been plagued by a disturbing history of corruption, one outlined by Oliver in the segment:
[Oliver] pointed to several cases of misconduct alleged against agents hired in that spree, including two agents who were accused of performing a lewd act at a Cirque du Soleil show in California; an agent, Joel Luna, who had ties to the Gulf Cartel and was convicted recently of engaging in organized criminal activity; and the outrage that followed the 2012 fatal shooting of a 16-year-old Mexican boy at the border.
“Despite all of these warning signs, we’re about to embark upon another ambitious border patrol hiring surge,” Oliver warns. The first surge was under George W. Bush, when the size of Border Patrol doubled. “The big problem was,” says Oliver, “as they doubled in size, meeting, and maintaining their hiring quotas meant their screening process wasn’t always as strong as they could have been.” And now that Trump wants to again increase the number of Border Patrol agents, DHS is considering relaxing hiring standards even more to speed up deportations.
Consider that when it comes to an agency where a “Department of Homeland Security report found that corrupt border agents are such an urgent problem, they ‘pose a national security threat.’”
“Trump seems determined to do this anyway,” said Oliver. “Who knows why? There’s a very good chance he only said 5,000 because somebody told him five bazillion is not a real number. For the sake of absolutely everybody—if we are going to hire all these new people, the very least we can do is be more careful this time around.”
But, the truth is that thousands of new agents are not needed. Border crossings are at the lowest in decades following the $20 billion a year (all taxpayer funds) that the Obama administration pumped into federal immigration enforcement. And on the interior, we’ve seen an unshackled Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rounding up undocumented immigrants with no criminal record, a 156 percent surge compared to last year.
We don’t need more federal immigration agents. As Oliver says, we need to learn from our mistakes, and that means instead shackling up the deportation machine we already have by not relaxing any standards and demanding strict, congressional oversight over federal immigration agents. Oliver’s segment is a much-watch below.