Analysis: The border patrol hits a breaking point
Now it will be Mark Morgan’s job to clean up these problems. He was appointed to be the agency’s new acting head last Sunday after a short stint asadvocating for a series of dramatic, publicly telegraphed immigration raids that ended up playing outBut CBP’s 16-year track record suggests the problems run deeper than one commissioner—especially a temporary acting one—will be able to fix, and it’s even less clear whether Morgan is the man to fix it.
It’s unclear how willing or able Morgan will be to bring the agency’s culture and resources in line with its actual responsibilities. In 2016, the former FBI agent was appointed chief of the Border Patrol amid the agency’s lone period of serious reform, and was actually been fired by Donald Trump as one of the president’s first actions in office. But he has unexpectedly earned his way back into the president’s favor by appearing repeatedly on Fox News as a pro-Trump, anti-immigration pundit.
For decades, patrolling the border had been highly lonely work, too, as agents often patrolled alone with backup sometimes hours away. The agency was comparatively tiny, and amid the security reckoning that took place in the wake of 9/11, its own studies concluded the Border Patrol did not have “operational control” over 97 percent of the border.
The money pouring into Ridge’s hands paid for a more than doubling of the Border Patrol, which surged from 9,200 agents in 2001 to ultimately more than 21,000 during its peak in the first term of the Obama administration, and similarly rapid expansion at CBP’s OFO, a rate of growth that completely outstripped CBP’s systems to manage its employees.
There were so many examples of corruption that CBP created its own internal website, called “Trust Betrayed,” featuring the stories of turncoat CBP officers and Border Patrol agents, as a cautionary warning to others. Examples from the site,to BuzzFeed’s Jason Leopold earlier this year, show agents who colluded with cartels, who were bribed to wave certain individuals through immigration lanes, who provided documents to smugglers, and even smuggled aliens themselves.
The flood continued, such that in 2013 the head of the DHS office investigating CBP misconduct in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley had fallen so far behind in investigating the rampant misconduct allegations that he began falsifying records—and ended up being indicted himself, along with another agent.
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