Unsafe at Any Border: U.S. Border Patrol Corrupt, Violent, Flush with Funding—And Unaccountable

Politico Magazine has a
lengthy expose by Garrett M. Graff of the financially bloated,
systemically corrupt, often violent U.S. Customs and Border
Protection (CBP).

Earlier manifestations of the CBP, such as the Immigration and
Naturalization service, have historically been understaffed,
underfunded, and largely ignored. But the post-9/11 hysteria
heightened fears about border security, leading to the creation of
the CBP under the Department of Homeland Security. It also ensured
that the new border protection agency would get a generous share of
the national security cash pie.

The CBP during the Bush years morphed into a goliath lumbering
along America’s borders. Tom Ridge, Bush’s post-9/11 homeland
security czar, recalled that “people just wanted to give me
unlimited amounts of money.”

The agency would eventually grow into “the nation’s largest law
enforcement agency, with its 46,000 gun-carrying customs officers
and border patrol agents and massive $12.4 billion annual
budget”:

Customs and Border Protection not only employs some 60,000 total
personnel—everything from desert agents on horseback to insect
inspectors at airports—but also operates a fleet of some 250
planes, helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles like the Predator
drones the military sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, making CBP both
the largest law enforcement air force in the world and equivalent
roughly to the size of Brazil’s entire combat air force.

The Border Patrol wing of this vast apparatus has experienced
particularly dramatic growth: By the time the Bush administration
left Washington, the fiercely independent agency—part police force,
part occupying army, part frontier cavalry—had gone from being a
comparatively tiny, undermanned backwater of the Justice Department
to a 21,000-person arm of the largest federal law enforcement
agency in the country.

The Bush administration had been keen on increasing the
capabilities of the agency as quickly as possible. This urgency
came with its own human price tag—one the Obama administration has
been unwilling to address:

Corruption and excessive force have also skyrocketed along with
the massive hiring surge. In fact, between 2005 and 2012, nearly
one CBP officer was arrested for misconduct every single day—part
of a pattern that Ronald Hosko, former assistant director of the
FBI’s criminal investigation division, calls “shocking.” During
Obama’s first term, the sheer number of allegations was so glaring
that, according to two CBP officials, DHS under Secretary Janet
Napolitano ordered Customs and Border Protection to change its
definition of corruption to downplay to Congress the breadth of the
problem.

That redefinition differentiated between two supposedly distinct
types of corruption:

The agency began to differentiate between “mission-compromising
corruption”—bribery, narcotics-smuggling or human-smuggling
allegations—and “non-mission-compromising corruption,” a “lesser”
category of cases that included things like employees’ sexually
assaulting detainees or workplace theft. Only the
“mission-compromising” problems, the agency now decreed, would be
reported to Congress…The distinction helped them wipe nearly a
third of the corruption cases out of statistics.

Graff lists some examples:

There was the Miami CBP officer who used his law enforcement
status to bypass airport security and personally smuggle cocaine
and heroin into Miami. There was the green-uniformed agent in
Yuma, Arizona, who was caught smuggling 700 pounds of marijuana
across the border in his green-and-white Border Patrol truck; the
brand-new 26-year-old Border Patrol agent who joined a
drug-smuggling operation to distribute more than 1,000 kilograms of
marijuana in Del Rio, Texas.

Not to mention the excessive force complaints, the victims of
CBP assault, and those killed by trigger-happy border agents.

The expansion of the CBP into one of the most dangerous
government agencies in America should be deeply unsettling to
everyone—particularly now, when roughly two-thirds of Americans
live in
a “border” zone where the government claims the right to
conduct stops and searches without warrant or cause. 

The piece is eminently worth reading in its entirety.