Border agent charged with child sex trafficking, fraud in Cochise County

A Tucson Sector Border Patrol agent has been indicted on 24 felony charges, including 10 counts of child sex trafficking, the latest in a series of sexual-misconduct convictions or charges against U.S. Customs and Border Protection employees in Arizona.

Willcox border agent Bart Conrad Yager, 39, was also charged with six counts of “pandering,” or encouraging someone to engage in prostitution; one count of attempted child sex trafficking; and two counts of fraud, between July 2023 and March 2024 in Cochise County, indictments from the Cochise County Attorney’s Office show.

On Thursday, county prosecutors also charged Yager with five drug-related felonies: possession or use of the anabolic steroid trenbolone and testosterone; sale or transportation of trenbolone and testosterone; and possession of drug paraphernalia, all in 2025.

A CBP spokesman said the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility arrested Yager in Willcox on June 17, and executed a search warrant based on allegations of child sex trafficking, fraudulent schemes and pandering.

“CBP stresses honor and integrity in every aspect of our mission, and the overwhelming majority of CBP employees and officers perform their duties with honor and distinction, working tirelessly every day to keep our country safe,” an emailed CBP statement said. “An arrest is merely an allegation. The defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.”

A decade ago, Yager was the suspect in a now-closed Tucson rape case. But CBP never investigated the allegations against Yager, according to a CBP special agent’s statement filed in Cochise County Superior Court. The statement was first reported by the Herald/Review Media.

Special agent Bryin Cooper of CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility said, in the 45-page statement, that the Tucson Police Department “did not properly report” the 2014 rape allegation against Yager to CBP, which is the Border Patrol’s parent agency.

But TPD disputes that. Spokesman Officer Frank Magos told the Arizona Daily Star on Thursday that Tucson police reported the rape allegation to Border Patrol at the time.

CBP was unable to respond to TPD’s contention before the Star’s weekend deadline, a spokesman said.

The 2014 rape case is now closed, as the alleged victim “did not wish to pursue the investigation” after filing a police report in October 2014, TPD’s Magos said in an email.

Yager threatened the alleged victim with violence after she said she would contact police in 2014, according to text messages cited in Cooper’s probable cause statement, which details CBP’s recent investigation into Yager.

CBP’s investigation began in September 2023, looking into initial allegations that Yager misrepresented his location during work hours and fraudulently claimed travel reimbursements, according to agent Cooper’s statement.

The investigation found Yager often went home early, at times solicited sex acts for money while on duty, and got reimbursed with government funds for Pima County hotels where the sex acts took place, Cooper wrote. Between 2021 and 2024, Yager paid $42,400 in 231 transactions with women.

That includes $12,161 in 35 transactions to one sex worker who was a minor at the time, and who was previously documented as a sex trafficking victim in a Tempe police investigation, Cooper wrote. Cooper also described Yager’s interactions with underage girls in Willcox, as young as 13, some of whom expressed fear of Yager.

Yager demonstrated a pattern of workplace sexual harassment, Cooper wrote. Willcox Station Border Patrol managers were concerned about Yager’s anger, fearing he could “snap,” and nursing and contractor staff “knew him to be ‘crazy with a hatred towards women,’” Cooper wrote.

Yager, who was hired by Border Patrol in 2011, is being held in Cochise County Jail.

Latest of several cases

Yager is the latest of several Arizona-based CBP employees, including border agents and a port officer in CBP’s Office of Field Operations, who have been charged with or convicted of sexual misconduct and other crimes.

Yuma Sector border agent Ramon Marquez, 31, was arrested in May and has been charged with 15 felonies, including 14 counts of sexual conduct with a 16-year-old between December 2024 and April 2025, and one count of sexual exploitation of a minor, such as filming or photographing the encounter, according to a May 15 indictment in Yuma County Superior Court.

CBP port officer Aaron Thomas Mitchell, 30, was sentenced to 27 years in prison in March, after being convicted on federal charges of abducting and sexually assaulting a 15-year-old Douglas middle school student in 2022. Mitchell now faces state charges in Cochise County.

An investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Douglas Police Department found Mitchell approached the student as she waited for school to start, identified himself as a law enforcement officer and ordered her into his car. He then drove her to his home, where he sexually assaulted her for hours, according to a U.S. Justice Department statement.

In January, former Tucson Sector Border Patrol agent Efren Lopez Cornejo was sentenced to two counts of lifetime probation, but no jail time, after he accepted an October 2024 plea agreement, admitting to one count of child abuse and one count of indecent exposure.

Lopez Cornejo was initially charged with 14 felonies in 2021, including child molestation, sexual abuse of a minor and sexual conduct with a minor under 15, which allegedly took place mostly between 2011 and 2017. The two victims were family members, and one was 9 when the alleged abuse started, an interim complaint said.

Under the plea deal, overseen by Pima County Superior Court Judge Casey McGinley, Lopez Cornejo does not have to register as a sex offender.

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Pima County Attorney Laura Conover said the plea deal came after the trial ended with a hung jury, and prosecutors decided not to pursue a second trial.

“Trials can bring some measure of closure and healing,” Conover said. “But all too often trials are another trauma” for the victims.

Prosecutors pushed for prison time for Lopez Cornejo, in addition to lifetime probation, but ultimately, “it was the judge’s decision,” Conover said.

‘Culture of impunity’

Critics and civil rights advocates say a long-standing lack of accountability and weak oversight within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — the parent agency of CBP and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE — has meant agents haven’t faced consequences for abusive behavior, sexual harassment of colleagues and excessive use of force in the field.

“Abuse by CBP agents is not an issue of just a few rogue agents, but is a systemic problem across the agency that has existed from its very start,” said Ricky Garza, border policy counsel for the Southern Border Communities Coalition, which advocates for “rational” immigration policies, humane and accountable border-enforcement practices and quality of life in border communities.

“The agency has a longstanding culture of impunity, of racism, of abuse and use of force against people in the border region,” Garza said.

Former Border Patrol senior patrol agent Jenn Budd has become a vocal critic of the agency, and an immigrant-rights advocate, since she resigned in 2001. Budd told the Star she’s been tracking border agents’ crimes for three years, hoping to bring attention to what she calls excessive criminality at the agency, dating back decades.

Only 5% of Border Patrol agents are women, said Budd, who recounted in a 2022 memoir being raped during her Border Patrol Academy training in the 1990s, and the retaliation she experienced due to trying to report it, and due to her gender.

“Border Patrol agents are taught that women lie, and that they (agents) are the victims,” she said.

A 2022 report from the Project on Government Oversight, or POGO, found the DHS’s Office of Inspector General had systemically suppressed reports of its agents committing domestic violence and reports of sexual harassment among its employees.

In response to what he called the “deeply concerning” report, then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, a Biden nominee, called for a 45-day review of employee misconduct discipline processes.

Based on the results, Mayorkas said in a June 2022 statement the department would “implement significant reforms to our employee misconduct discipline processes, including centralizing the decision-making process for disciplinary actions and overhauling agency policies regarding disciplinary penalties.”

Katherine Hawkins, senior legal analyst at POGO, said there’s been scant detail on those reforms.

“It’s been hard to get insight into the details of what they were and how they’re working,” she said. The OIG had previously said it would republish the reports POGO found had been suppressed.

But, Hawkins said, “Nothing ever came out and it’s not listed as ongoing project anymore (at DHS), so I think it was just abandoned.”

CBP was unable to respond to the Star’s Thursday questions on those reforms before deadline.

Until 2022, Border Patrol teams investigated their fellow agents following “critical incidents,” such as use-of-force cases or in-custody deaths, in what critics called a clear conflict of interest.

Facing pressure from U.S. Congress and groups including the Southern Border Communities Coalition, CBP disbanded the controversial “critical incident teams” in 2022, under CBP’s then-commissioner Chris Magnus, former Tucson police chief.

CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility took over investigations of critical incidents but, especially in use-of-force cases, those investigations are “still extremely deferential to the agency,” Hawkins said.

Ramped-up hiring, less oversight

Now, at a time when federal funding for immigration enforcement has surged to unprecedented levels, and as ICE and CBP intend to quickly hire thousands more agents, DHS is reducing oversight when it’s needed most, Garza said.

Under the second Trump administration, DHS has dramatically reduced staff in three oversight agencies: the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, and in the independent Office of Immigration Detention Ombudsman and the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman, he said.

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a March statement that the offices have “obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles. ... Rather than supporting law enforcement efforts, they often function as internal adversaries that slow down operations.”

Migrants are particularly vulnerable to abuse and often have little or no ability to report it, and with the gutting of DHS oversight offices, even more abuses will go unreported, advocates say.

“If the agency’s internal processes aren’t protecting their own employees, they have even less incentive to protect migrants,” Hawkins said. “Although there are individual agents who treat people respectfully, there’s a culture of hostility and dehumanization toward migrants.”