Back in 1998, a remarkable arrest took place in Tucson β of a relatively new Border Patrol agent who turned out to have been a murderous drug dealer only a few years before.
It was the latest in a run of arrests of agents over that stretch of time.
As a reporter covering the border then, I watched the case of Hector L. Soto closely. I talked to leaders of the Border Patrol agentsβ union, with agency officials, and with outside experts who all said the same thing: A rush to hire agents in the mid-1990s had led to poor hiring decisions and a rash of misconduct and arrests.
This pattern has repeated since then. Politicians demand the hiring of more border agents, funding is approved, a rush to hire occurs, and in the aftermath, misconduct and arrests happen.
In April 2017, when Trump was newly in office the first time, the American Immigration Council warned: βThe last time the Border Patrol received a large infusion of money to hire thousands of new agents, cases of corruption and misconduct spiked in the agency. New hires were not sufficiently vetted, novice agents were not adequately supervised, and agents who abused their authority acted with impunity.β
Now weβre poised for a bigger hiring spree than ever. The reconciliation bill passed in early July funds the hiring of 3,000 additional Border Patrol agents, 3,000 more Customs and Border Protection officers for the ports of entry and up to 10,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
Federal immigration agents block the road during a raid in the agriculture area of Camarillo, California, on July 10.
This means a massive increase in federal law enforcement, threatening to create an immigration-led, police-state presence wherever they choose to apply themselves β currently Southern California, potentially Tucson. The hiring surge presents a risk to the public, especially if the Trump administration or Congress eases hiring standards to bring agents on faster.
Last week, as if to remind us of the stakes, a Southern Arizona Border Patrol agent was indicted on charges of child sex trafficking, fraud and possession of anabolic steroids. Willcox-based agent Bart Yager faces 24 counts and was reported by the federal Office of Professional Responsibility to have been a suspect in a rape reported to Tucson police in 2014.
As my colleague Emily Bregel reports today, he is the fourth in a series of Arizona CBP agents and officers to be arrested on sex-related charges in the last four years.
Gallego leading charge
Of all people, Arizonaβs Democratic U.S. Senator Ruben Gallego is leading the charge to loosen some standards for hiring Border Patrol agents and CBP officers as this hiring surge looms.
Gallego has introduced the Border Patrol Recruitment Enhancement Act, which would waive the polygraph requirement for some current, local or federal law enforcement officers or members of the U.S. armed forces.
The polygraph exam has been a major obstacle to hiring for years, despite some efforts to reform or even eliminate it. Gallegoβs bill would allow current local law enforcement officers to bypass the polygraph if they have a clean record and have submitted to a polygraph in the last 10 years.
The bill would not require federal law enforcement officers or military members to have gone through a polygraph, but it would require them to have clean records, with no pending investigations.
βCBP is stretched thin, and the hiring system is part of the problem. Weβre losing qualified applicants to red tape and delays,β Gallego said in a written statement.
His perspective on the agencies is rooted in the past. These are no longer the somewhat rulebound agencies of the Biden, Obama or even first Trump administrations.
DHS and its subparts like CBP and ICE now serve as the vanguard of a Trumpβs political project, targeting undocumented laborers in California as they try to fulfill administration deportation goals, but also hassling travelers who arrive from outside the country with unwanted political views, and removing students who donβt fit the administrationβs desired profile.
Itβs not just that. The administration is touting the most secure Mexican border in history, a claim supported by Border Patrolβs extremely low arrest numbers. So whatβs the rush?
Between the use of these agents as political enforcers, and the low rate of crossings at the border, there is no need to speed up hiring. Quite the contrary.
Cap on immigration judges
When Hector Soto was arrested, way back in 1998, Doris Meissner was the commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the predecessor to todayβs DHS immigration agencies.
Sheβs still active in this area, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute in D.C.
What she recalled, when I spoke with her last week, was the distorting effect of each effort to hire many more agents. More agents meant more arrests, which meant more detention space, more immigration courts, more transportation needs, more judges, more government lawyers.
βThis bill, and the vision for this bill, certainly is heavily weighted in terms of visible, highly aggressive interior law enforcement, not necessarily due process or systematic connecting the dots of what the chain of actions needs to be to improve the functioning of the system as a system,β she said in an interview Wednesday.,
The number of immigration judges is even capped in the bill, Meissner noted.
The lack of an effort to build up the system as a whole makes her wonder if the administration isnβt going to try to work around the system more than it already has. In fact, although hiring processes didnβt change much in the first Trump administration, Meissner suspects the processes could change now.
βEvery assumption we have about the way things were done in the past is being questioned and reworked,β she said.
A dangerous effort
Thatβs why it strikes me as dangerous for anyone, especially an Arizona senator, to try to accelerate the process through law. It endangers us, his constituents.
Think about it: Who exactly wants to join the Border Patrol or ICE now, with the videos all over the internet of masked, armed agents taking down gardeners and janitors, arresting protesters and carrying out the administrationβs political projects across California and in other states?
Not many people I would trust with a badge or gun.
We know the administration is likely to bend the rules and laws to the breaking point in pursuing its aims β thatβs what theyβve done for six months. There is no need to give them any help as they ramp up the agencies that may be used against us in their project of political cleansing.
