As part of his effort to ramp up his mass deportation force and make America white again, Donald Trump wants to relax hiring standards in order to recruit thousands more Customs and Border Protection agents. This is already a fucking awful idea when it comes to any federal agency with such immense power and reach, but it could have dire consequences when it comes to border agents and national security. According to the Atlantic, 140 C.B.P. 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”:
Though the number of corrupt agents represents less than 1 percent of CBP’s 44,000 sworn officers—the largest police force in the U.S.—“any amount is bad, and one person alone can do a lot of damage,” John Roth, the inspector general at the Department of Homeland Security, told The New York Times. “It doesn’t have to be widespread.”
Corrupt officials have given sensitive information to cartels, and waved tons of drugs and thousands of undocumented immigrants through the border in exchange for millions of dollars in bribes. Many operate at official ports of entry, undermining the billions of dollars the government has already spent on fencing, drones, radar, surveillance blimps, agents, and now, perhaps, President Trump’s border wall.
Last year, a Department of Homeland Security report found that corrupt border agents are such an urgent problem, they “pose a national security threat,” and called for more aggressive measures to root them out.
The Atlantic report details one military-veteran-turned-Border-Patrol-agent who was involved in a grisly homicide and helped his brothers “move drugs and guns across the border.” While C.B.P. agent Joel Luna eventually escaped murder charges, he was convicted of organized criminal activity and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
A good portion of the agency’s corruption problem stems from a hiring rush following 9/11—also in the name of border security—when the Bush administration doubled the number of border agents to over 20,000. “In order to inflate its force that quickly, CBP relaxed its hiring standards. Border Patrol sent some agents into the field before background checks were complete, and unlike other federal law-enforcement agencies, they didn’t use polygraphs to vet applicants”:
During the hiring surge, some veteran agents worried about the quality of the new recruits, and mocked what they dubbed the Bush administration’s “No Trainee Left Behind” policy.
Corruption and excessive use of force complaints spiked, and James Tomsheck was hired to help clean up the Border Patrol. As the agency’s head of internal affairs, he testified to the Senate in 2010 that drug cartels “are doing all that they can to infiltrate CBP through our hiring initiatives.”
Tomsheck decided to take a closer look at the hiring process. During his decades at the Secret Service, he’d used the government’s standard polygraph test to vet agents. The FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives also use the test. Tomsheck began to pilot the polygraph on CBP applicants. “What we found was shocking,” Tomsheck said.
During the piloting process, Tomsheck and his team uncovered about 30 applicants sent by cartels to infiltrate CBP, he said. “That made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.”
In response, in 2010, Congress mandated polygraph testing for all new Customs and Border Protection hires. But the agency didn’t retroactively test those hired before the reforms, like Joel Luna, who joined one year before the Anti-Border Corruption Act passed.
Already, a 2014 independent review found that border patrol agents “have deliberately stepped in the path of cars apparently to justify shooting at the drivers,” with “67 shooting incidents from January 2010 to October 2012.” The two failed Muslim bans have shown how careless and reckless Trump and his white nationalist advisors have been in their rush to push brown people out of this country, and now they are yet again weighing relaxing standards for yet another hiring surge, which will almost certainly lead to more Joel Lunas. History should be a lesson here, but those in control don’t seem to be listening.
