COVID-19 is the top killer of agents with Customs and Border Protection, whose deaths from the virus are considered in the line of duty, even as public officials and Border Patrol union leaders advocate against a vaccine mandate.
Border Patrol Agent Anibal Perez died in the line of duty Nov. 5. Officials are not disclosing the cause of death, but several news reports cited unnamed sources saying Perez died from COVID-19. A spokesman with the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector said the cause of death was personal information but that Perez died of an illness.
COVID likely killed many agents who died this year in the line of duty. The virus is the leading cause across all law enforcement line-of-duty deaths, the Associated Press has reported.
Congress passed a law last year that all public safety officers who die from COVID-19 or related complications were presumed to have died in the line of duty for purposes of death benefits to the officers’ families, regardless of where they contracted the virus.
An official Customs and Border Protection in memoriam webpage shows that 30 officers and agents have died in 2021 and that 21 died in 2020. That’s far more than the average in the previous 15 years, in which usually two or three agents died in the line of duty, except for a few outlier years where as many as six or seven agents died in a single year.
At the beginning of the pandemic, COVID was listed as cause of death for a few officers. But by by June 2020, the most common cause of death was listed simply as a uniform statement that an executive panel and the CBP commissioner had determined the death occurred in the line of duty.
Only a few of the deaths give a different reason, such as heat-related death or an accident involving an automobile, which was the No. 1 cause of agents’ deaths before COVID.
However, a privately run memorial page, which was awarded a 2010 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice to provide nationwide line-of-duty death notifications about fallen law enforcement officers, lists 23 officers who died of COVID in 2021 and two who died in an accident involving a car. For 2020, it lists 16 who died of COVID and one whose cause of death is described as duty-related illness.
Chad McBroom was one of the Tucson Sector agents who died of COVID-19 this year.
McBroom, who was 47 when he died, had made local news in April when he spoke out against a mask mandate at a Sahuarita school board meeting and refused to stop speaking when his two minutes to talk had ended.
Law enforcement officers, including Border Patrol agents, have had access to COVID-19 vaccines since January. Although there are breakthrough cases among vaccinated people, there are very few COVID-related deaths among the vaccinated population.
Nonetheless, there continues to be pushback to the federal vaccine mandate, with a Monday, Nov. 22, deadline to be fully vaccinated for employees in the Department of Homeland Security, which includes CBP.
Customs and Border Protection is not disclosing the percentage of employees who are currently vaccinated.
CBP had more than 96% compliance with the vaccination reporting requirement and expected that rate to continue, as of about a week ago, according to spokesman Luis Miranda, but within that compliance rate are religious and medical exemptions.
As far as Border Patrol, CPB’s federal law enforcement arm, The Washington Post reported that 20% of agents and employees had not complied with the vaccine mandate or requested an exemption as of mid-November.
The Post obtained internal data that said 77% were fully vaccinated and 15.5% of agents and employees had requested a religious or medical exemption.
While that leaves about 4,000 unvaccinated Border Patrol employees who could face disciplinary action if either their exemption is denied or they don’t get vaccinated, it’s not clear what that discipline will be.
The deadline for the vaccine mandate “is not a cliff for employees to come into compliance as there will be opportunities for education and counseling,” Miranda said.
Republican Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, who has been fighting the federal vaccine mandate, and the Border Patrol union are making the argument that agents should not have to be vaccinated while asylum seekers are not required to be.
Brnovich asked for an immediate injunction against a vaccine mandate for federal employees, arguing that it is illegal to impose a vaccine mandate on federal employees while there is no such mandate on migrants entering the country without documentation. A federal judge denied the request last week.
Art Del Cueto, vice president for the National Border Patrol Council, says the union is looking for legal ways to assist agents who do not want to comply with the vaccine mandate.
“It’s difficult to sit here and hear people say, ‘Hey, you have to take this vaccine regardless of whether you think it works or not,’ when you’re seeing that over 1.5 million have been released in the United States that have entered the country illegally, be it’s claiming asylum, but for all purposes that’s how they entered, and none of those individuals are even questioned as to their measles (vaccine),” much less their COVID vaccination status, “and they’re just being released,” he said.
There were more than 1.9 million incidents of Border Patrol agents encountering migrants at a U.S. border during the 2021 fiscal year, but 27% of those encounters were from a person trying to enter the country more than once, and more than half of all encounters resulted in the migrant being immediately expelled back to Mexico or in some cases another country because of the pandemic.
There is no national mandate to vaccinate asylum seekers, but there are efforts to allow them access to the vaccines. Pima County has administered nearly 2,500 COVID vaccines to asylum seekers since May 5, and 84% of asylum seekers who turned down a vaccine from the county said they were already vaccinated, according to Chief Deputy County Administrator Jan Lesher.
The international borders reopened to tourists Nov. 8, but they need to show proof of being fully vaccinated to enter the United States.
“As a federal agent, you have to have the shot in order to remain employed and what they cite as the reason is it’s our responsibility to make sure that the communities are safe and all that,” Del Cuento said. “It would be different if they were actually enforcing vaccines of all kinds on the individuals that we’re releasing into the United States.”
The mandate is “to promote the health and safety of the federal workforce and the efficiency of the civil service,” the Department of Homeland Safety says on its website.
