CBP and Border Patrol are not sending us their best.

This morning I woke to Trump’s comments about the shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington D.C. The shooter, an Afghan national who was vetted and worked for the CIA, was again vetted when he entered the United States under the Biden Administration and vetted once more when he requested and was granted asylum under this current Trump Administration. But none of this matters to the current administration. All they can see is a Muslim man they can use to further their racist propaganda about immigrants of color.

DHS, who is forever unable to stop such violence but always quick to respond with a tweet on social media, gave Americans this holiday message: 

While the president and his cabal continue to strip our country down to sell it to the highest bidders, while they give Russians and others access to our national secrets, while they continue to give our tax money to billionaires and eliminate programs to help Americans and while they send DHS and its goons in to beat and kidnap people in our cities every single day, it is actually their foot soldiers who are being arrested and charged with all sorts of violent crimes.

In the last three fiscal years, CBP has seen at least 751 incidents of employees arrested. Add in this last October, and they are up to 772 incidents. 

Note that I wrote “incidents” and not number of employees. CBP routinely obfuscates their statistics of employees arrested by referring to “incidents” instead of “employees.” This means there could be more employees arrested if multiple employees are arrested during the same incident or investigation. This most often happens when employees work together to smuggle narcotics or people into the country. It could also happen if employees are out drinking in groups or perhaps when they are hazing new employees with rape games. 

It is also important to remember that incidents involving domestic violence and sex crimes by employees are rarely charged as victims tend to be reluctant to file charges against CBP and Border Patrol agents for fear of retribution. Additionally, CBP and Border Patrol rely on their employees to voluntarily report their arrests. This means not every arrest is reported. 

And the agency required to report these arrests, has refused to release a report since 2021:

At best these statistics are woefully underreported. At worst, CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility is intentionally hiding the number of arrests of employees. My experience tells me it is the latter. When we further break down the crimes, we can see that CBP and Border Patrol are not hiring the best. In fact, it would seem they are hiring the worst of the worst. Imagine if the place you worked had this many arrests in three years. 

Number of CBP employees arrested by crime during the last three years:

• Drugs and alcohol - 351
• Domestic family violence - 163
• Assault (not including sexual assault or domestic violence) - 31
• Sexual assault (not including children) - 12
• Crimes against children (includes sexual assault) - 31
• Corruption - 36
• Weapons - 20
• Property crimes - 29
• Obstructing justice - 22
• Traffic crimes - 30
• White collar crimes - 10
• Violent crimes (serious harm/injury or death to another person) - 3
• Threatening behavior (stalking, harassment) - 8
• Civil rights - 3
• Miscellaneous - 7

When Trump states that immigrants coming from poor countries are “from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels,” he is not only blowing his racist dog whistle, he is being hypocritical. One look at CBP and Border Patrol shows they have long hired people with criminal pasts like the former Tucson Sector Border Patrol Chaplain Dana R. Thornhillwho was arrested for child sexual assault when he was 14-years-old. Thornhill was allowed access to migrant children for nearly 20 years as an agent before being arrested and convicted of decades of downloading and making child pornography. He also raped his daughters during that time. 

Border Patrol and CBP notoriously do not require the most basic of psychological exams like local police departments require. This leads to the agency hiring mentally unstable individuals like Esteban Manzanares who kidnapped a woman and two young girls while on-duty, sexually assaulted them and then tried to kill them before shooting himself in the head. The Border Patrol even hired and made a supervisor out of Juan David Ortiz only to discover he was killing transgender sex workers. CBP and Border Patrol’s background investigations of employees with mental instability are so bad, a serial killer managed to get in their ranks and be promoted into management. 

The list of employees with drug cartel ties is so long, it’s difficult to determine exactly how many there have been. Just to name a few examples, there’s CBP officers Manuel Perez Jr., Jesse Clark Garcia, Diego Bonillo, Margarita Crispin. Here’s a sample of some of the Border Patrol agents: Jorge J. Jimenez, Joel Luna, Carlos Victor Passapera Pinott, Oberline Pena. 

It is not accurate to say that all CBP and Border Patrol employees are criminals coming “from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels,” but it is quite scary to see how many of them are hired. This Thanksgiving, DHS should stop making room at the table for their criminal employees.