The Trump administration has announced that Border Patrol official Rodney Scott will be named the agency’s new chief, following the retirement of Carla Provost at the end of this month after more than two decades there. Provost, you may all remember, was exposed last year as having been a member of a violent and racist Facebook group that mocked the deaths of kids in her agency’s custody. Now with her leaving, the administration is probably just glad to no longer get bugged about that anymore, right?
Except, as it turns out, Provost’s successor was also in this group. Only the best people.
In a letter to acting Customs and Border Protection commissioner Mark Morgan, House Homeland Security Committee chair Bennie Thompson writes that "According to media reports, Mr. Scott engaged with at least one social media site—the Facebook group 'I’m 10-15'—in which CBP personnel communicated vulgar and discriminatory comments,” as reported by The Intercept in July.
"I would like to understand the extent to which Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reviewed and assessed Mr. Scott’s engagement with social media sites,” he continued in the letter, “in which personnel from CBP engaged in racist and hateful dialogue regarding immigrants and members of Congress prior to his selection to lead the U.S. Border Patrol."
Last summer, ProPublica reported on the existence of this group where members, including as many as 70 agents, shared racist and violent content, including posts mocking the death of 16-year-old Carlos Gregorio Hernández Vásquez while in Border Patrol custody, and shared a faked image of Donald Trump sexually assaulting Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Provost denied to Congress knowing that this racist and violent Facebook group was in fact racist and violent, saying “I didn’t think anything of it at the time.” Now out of the agency several months later, Provost penned a CNN op-ed as sort of a public farewell where she urged “all of us, as a nation, to resume civil debate” on immigration. Too bad that doesn’t extend to her soon-to-be former employees, though.
It’s unclear if Scott himself shared any of the content from this website, but what’s clear enough is that he was a member of it—and what’s also clear is that we keep getting asked to trust an agency that doesn’t deserve to get trusted.
