Mike the Mad Biologist

Garrett Graff, summarizing findings from his testimony before the State of Illinois’ “Illinois Accountability Commission”:

Criminality is so rampant inside CBP that it has seen one of its own agents or officers arrested every 24 to 36 hours since 2005. CBP’s misconduct scandal is so long-running that today it would be old enough to drink.

In total, according to CBP’s own discipline reports, over the 20 years from 2005 to 2024 — the last year numbers are available — at least 4,913 CBP officers and Border Patrol agents have been arrested themselves, some multiple times. (In 2018 alone, a single CBP employee was arrested five times.) To put that number in perspective:

• The population of CBP agents and officers who have been arrested would make it roughly the nation’s fourth largest police department — equal to the size of the entire Philadelphia police.

• Indeed, for much of the 2010s and likely before and since, it appears the crime rate of CBP agents and offices was higher PER CAPITA than the crime rate of undocumented immigrants in the United States.

As he notes, this only will get worse as even more unqualified–and racist–officers are hired. Body cameras and incremental reforms won’t fix this. We will need some kind of border security force, but disband this agency (if for no other reason that it’s the easiest way to fire people), require higher standards (e.g., make them GS-1811s), and specify their authorities much more clearly.

And to my fellow Democratic primary voters, find yourself a Democrat who looks at ICE and CBP the same way Russell Vought looks at CDC and NIH.