President Donald Trump doesn’t just want to build a wall along the southern border, he also wants Congress to hire 5,000 additional Border agents—a 25% increase—to patrol it. However, Border Patrol suffers from worse discipline, performance, and corruption problems than any other federal law enforcement agency, my study for the Cato Institute found.
Congress should fix those problems before even considering any new request for more agents.
Stories of Border Patrol misconduct and corruption have dribbled into the press for years. They range from ordinary corruption to brutal crimes. On the ordinary side, Border Patrol agents Raul and Fidel Villarreal were convicted of smuggling in around 1,000 illegal immigrants in exchange for $1 million. On the brutal side, Border Patrol agent Esteban Manzanares kidnapped, assaulted, and raped three illegal immigrant women he apprehended while on the job in 2014.
There are many other cases just like those, but the full extent of the problem is very unclear. Are these just a few bad apples? Or is it “conservative to estimate” that 5 percent of the Border Patrol force, adding up to about 1,000 agents, is corrupt, as James Tomsheck said after he was removed as head of one of the internal affairs departments that oversaw Border Patrol in 2014.
Government reports offer confusing, contradictory, and incomplete answers. According to evidence released under the Freedom of Information Act, 158 Customs and Border Protection (CBP) employees were convicted or charged with corruption from 2005 to 2016. The Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General found 358 corruption or misconduct convictions, but it doesn’t distinguish between government employees and civilians who conspired with them. CBP further complicates this mess by distinguishing between “mission-compromising” convictions, which include drug and immigrant smuggling, and “non-mission-compromising” ones, which include sexually assaulting detainees and murder.
Not only are records of corruption and misconduct poorly reported but the government can’t even agree on the definition of what constitutes a complaint. CBP even shifted the definition and reporting system for “complaints” in a way that reduced the number of those filed against Border Patrol officers. That’s why Government Accountability Office (GAO) watchdogs recorded thousands more complaints made against sub-components of CBP than CBP itself records against the entire agency, which just strains credulity.
A new Cato Institute study analyzed Office of Personnel Management (OPM) data on the number of terminations for disciplinary and performance reasons by agency and occupation – data that includes (but is not limited to) those fired for corruption. This data is more reliable because the agency actually records the reasons for why an agent left or was fired, something neither the CBP nor Border Patrol does.
From 2006 through 2016, Border Patrol agents had the highest termination rate of any large federal law enforcement agency. On the whole, they were 2.2 times as likely to be terminated for discipline or performance as federal law enforcement officers in general and 49 percent more likely than Customs officers, 54 percent more likely than guards at the Bureau of Prisons, six times as likely as Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, 7.1 times as likely as Drug Enforcement Administration agents, and 12.9 times as likely as Secret Service agents.
For full story visit: http://reason.com/archives/2017/11/30/trump-wants-more-money-for-corrupt-borde