Sen. Kamala Harris of California leads a letter to top Trump administration officials “expressing concern and demanding answers” over a reckless, Stephen Miller-led decision allowing unqualified Customs and Border Protection agents—“as opposed to highly trained asylum officers within USCIS”—to conduct some asylum interviews of vulnerable families fleeing gang violence and persecution.
The administration claimed it was stripping authority from some of these trained and experienced officers to these unqualified agents in response to families waiting at the southern border, but as the senators noted in their letter, internal emails revealed Miller believes Border Patrol will be tougher on these families. “Miller and other administration officials have reportedly sought the change because they were outraged by the rate at which individuals passed their initial screenings.”
To have the same Border Patrol that takes vulnerable families into custody then conduct a credible fear interview, advocates have previously said, “is like having an arresting police officer also sit as the judge.” But it’s also Border Patrol’s “history of misconduct and anti-immigrant sentiment,” the senators tell Homeland Security, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and CBP, that should disqualify agents from conducting interviews.
In just the past year alone, Border Patrol agents have been accused of sexually and verbally abusing detained children, have pleaded guilty to assaulting migrants, have wrongfully jailed a U.S. citizen, have continued to separate families at the border in violation of a federal judge’s court order, and have been members of a racist and violent Facebook group that mocked the death of a migrant child under custody. In the year before that, agents were also caught on film destroying lifesaving jugs of water left for dying migrants in the desert.
“Because of CBP’s law enforcement mission and history of anti-immigrant sentiment, CBP agents are not equipped to apply our laws and regulations to vulnerable individuals seeking our protection,” Democratic Senators Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Michael Bennet of Colorado, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Robert Menendez of New Jersey, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, and Patty Murray of Washington say. “The change endangers the lives of countless vulnerable individuals, including children.”