What kind of people are hired for immigration enforcement?

CONTENT WARNING: The following involves violent sexual crimes committed by Border Patrol agents.

In the past, I have stated that most who go into ICE, Border Patrol and CBP (immigration enforcement agencies) are often naive and ignorant of the realities of our brutal immigration policies. I certainly was when I joined the Border Patrol fresh out of college in 1995. The internet as we know it did not exist back then, and it would have required months of research at a library to understand the truth. Plus, we were not talking about immigration in Alabama as we do today all across the country. It took me a few years to understand what I was doing and how the system was inherently and intentionally violent to innocent people. Much more difficult, it took another few decades for me to face my own racism and brutality.

When I meet young agents today, I often think I can see that same naiveté and ignorance about the system in their faces. They are well armed with the same propaganda talking points I came with 30 years ago: there are legal ways, migrants just choose to flaunt our laws, we cannot take in this many asylum seekers, they are mostly criminals, their children are not like our children, etc. These are all lies of course, and it does take time to see this, especially if you were raised on Fox News lies and border hysteria.

But there is no denying that there is something different with today’s agents.

I am not saying that the Border Patrol, CBP and ICE’s former incarnations prior to 9/11 were not brutal and racist. They were. We were. The policies and systems have always been violent because they were designed by ex-confederates and leaders who often came from families who owned enslaved people. The culture of the immigration agencies has always been a direct offspring of the slave patrols. This is clearly evident when looking at how I used to patrol the border by tracking humans like animals. We hunted them exactly as the slave patrols did: on foot, on horseback and with dogs.

We started to build the Border Patrol staffing up in 1994 with the push for deadly deterrence policies that intentionally pushed migrants who could not legally enter the country out to the most dangerous terrain to cross. When I was hired in 1995, my background checks were handled by the federal government and its investigators. Within a few years, we agents noticed that new arrivals to the station did not even have their background investigations completed. This allowed many agents with criminal backgrounds to freely enter the agencies, and it often took years for them to be discovered. Today it is worse because the agencies use private employment background companies to screen applicants. These screenings are poor at best, and at worst they intentionally ignore criminal backgrounds and ties to cartel.

Border Patrol agent Dana Thornhill was the chaplain for all of Tucson Sector Border Patrol. He served 19 years and 11 months before being in an armed standoff with police in Sierra Vista, Arizona over an ICE HSI investigation into his use of child pornography in April of 2020. Once arrested, his adult daughters came forward to state that Thornhill had molested them during their childhoods. Additionally, it was discovered that the US Border Patrol hired him even though he had sexually assaulted a girl when he was 13 years old. He received 40 years in prison after pleading guilty to the molestation charges. The child pornography charges were dropped.

In 2019, Border Patrol agent Marco De La Garza Jr. was hired. He worked as a federal agent for 6 years before the agency discovered he was undocumented. This is the agency claiming they are the experts in determining if someone is a citizen or not. This incident of hiring undocumented people to become Border Patrol agents repeats itself every few years or so.

Screening and background checks do not account for all the changes I see in the New Patrol (after 9/11) agents. Supervisors from various southern border stations have contacted me over the last decade to state that MAGA and QAnon have taken over agent ideology. As if being inherently brutal and racist weren’t enough, the immigration agencies have targeted right-wing religious, political and conspiratorial people to hire. Supervisors have been telling me for years that younger agents are MAGA. They literally sit around after work talking about nothing but “Daddy Trump,” a term used by many Border Patrol agents. According to supervisors, you are either with them or a terrorist hell bent on bringing criminal migrants into the country to overtake the US.

In the Border Patrol, we agents are the recruiters, trainers and deciders on who gets to be an agent. In the Old Patrol (prior to 9/11) and under federal background investigators, we were not asked political or ideological questions. No one was arguing about Trump or MAGA being the only way. Yes, the majority were republicans, but we were all agents back then and not separated by how we voted. This meant agents like me who were not right-wing could be hired. This is not the case today. Agents like me are now identified earlier and are pushed out by a variety of means: failing them on their subjective Spanish exams, writing them up for minor violations, not providing them with backup in the field, harassment.

A great example that has stayed with me since reading comes from Todd Miller’s book, Border Patrol Nation. Miller describes a scene (chapter 4) when Border Patrol agents Bryon Gonzalez and Shawn Montoya of the Deming, New Mexico station were talking in 2009 on duty when traffic was slow. Gonzalez had stated he was proud of his Mexican heritage and that he understood why people crossed illegally. Montoya told him he needed to forget his Mexican heritage and become an American. Then another agent accused him of being a socialist. He was fired months later for what the agency stated was a lack of compatibility with the agency’s mission. I have seen agents fired for criminal records, not being a citizen, using drugs, for reporting their sexual assaults by other agents…but never for expressing pride in their heritage or being a socialist.

At the same time, even if we set aside the bad hires, crazy ideologies and extreme politics, all of the immigration enforcement agencies have a problem with their agents committing serious violent crimes. This is such a problem that CBP had to change how they reported the undocumented migrants with criminal records that they apprehended because their own agents were committing more crimes than the people they arrested. Since 2018, Border Patrol agents have committed more criminal offenses than the migrants they arrest according to CBP’s statistics. You may not know this because CBP began adding the misdemeanor crime of entering without inspection, a crime agents cannot be charged with, to their statistics to make it appear that their agents are not so criminal. Removing this statistic from the comparison shows that the agents are committing more crimes as a population.

This does not even account for the fact that most agents accused of crimes are never charged, never fully investigated, never taken to court and never even reported. In the rare chance that they are ever charged and tried in a court of law, their fellow agents are allowed to intimidate witnesses by attending their coworkers’ trials and even allowed to testify as federal agents on behalf of their fellow accused agent.

Take the case of Border Patrol Deputy Commander of Tucson Sector’s BORTAC unit Efren Lopez Cornejo. Cornejo was accused by his step-daughter and his own daughter of 11 years of molestation. The victims did not live together or know that the other one was abused by the same man. Cornejo often threatened them with the fact that he was a high ranking Border Patrol agent and no one would believe them. His fellow BORTAC agents attended the hearings and stated he would never do such a thing and that they would still trust him alone with their own kids. When the prosecution offered to erase 11 years worth of child molestation and 14 counts down to 2 counts, Cornejo jumped on the chance though he refused to admit any guilt which is normally a part of the plea deal.

Pima County Superior Court Judge Casey McGinley stated that Cornejo presented a problem for the court because on the one hand, he was a hero for serving his country. On the other, these now young women were accusing him of horrendous crimes. He further stated that he believed placing Cornejo (who just pleaded guilty to 2 counts of molestation and exposure to children) on lifetime probation with no requirement to register on the sex offender list would keep the community safe. This was after both victims testified and begged the judge to not let him do this to another child.

I don’t think today’s agents were as naive as I was. Most know what they are getting into with the decades worth of constant media attention.

This is the type of people the immigration enforcement agencies are hiring.

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