Border Patrol out-of-control law enforcement agency

The Green Monster

How the Border Patrol became America’s most out-of-control law enforcement agency.

By GARRETT M. GRAFF

But the Border Patrol has also become one of the nation’s deadliest law enforcement agencies over that same period, involved in more fatal shootings—at least 46—since 2004 than perhaps any other such agency. (As this summer’s events in Ferguson, Missouri, showed, definitive statistics on fatal law enforcement shootings are notoriously difficult to collect.) An internal report last year that the agency tried to keep secret accused its agents of shooting their weapons not out of fear for their lives but instead out of “frustration.”

As one senior DHS official told me, “The agency has created a culture that says, ‘If you throw a rock at me, you’re going to get shot.’”

Corruption and excessive force have also skyrocketed along with the massive hiring surge. In fact, between 2005 and 2012, nearly one CBP officer was arrested for misconduct every single day—part of a pattern that Ronald Hosko, former assistant director of the FBI’s criminal investigation division, calls “shocking.” During Obama’s first term, the sheer number of allegations was so glaring that, according to two CBP officials, DHS under Secretary Janet Napolitano ordered Customs and Border Protection to change its definition of corruption to downplay to Congress the breadth of the problem.

Yet the agency’s response has been paralyzed by bureaucratic turf battles and the broken Senate confirmation process, which left CBP without a Senate-confirmed leader for five years. Now, just as he rebuilt police departments in Buffalo and Seattle, Gil Kerlikowske’s new job is to bring order and discipline to a force so long lacking leadership, and to weed out what he calls “bad apples” like Manzanares who should have never been hired in the first place—a problem, CBP officials admitted during an internal meeting this past spring, that might take a generation to fix.

This article, tracing the rapid growth of the Border Patrol since 9/11 and the host of problems that spawned, is based on more than 50 interviews—including nearly all of the seven men who have headed CBP in the past decade and all three former DHS secretaries—as well as officials at the White House, Justice Department and Congress. I also reviewed thousands of pages of documents, including inspector general investigations, CBP performance reports and budgets. What emerges is the largely overlooked story behind the story of the perennial border crises, in which the best intentions and worst impulses of the Bush administration met the laissez-faire management and political cynicism of the Obama administration. The result? A massive agency—freshly militarized by billions of dollars of weapons and technology and thousands of poorly vetted gun-carrying personnel hired in the panicky years after 9/11—was left adrift as violence and corruption in its ranks rose dramatically.

CBP officials in Washington refer to the Border Patrol, somewhat endearingly, somewhat ruefully, as the Green Monster, a name derived from the patrol’s proud historic tradition of dark green uniforms.
This is the story of how the Green Monster came alive.

Then and Now | The U.S. Border Patrol has ballooned since its founding in 1924. At left, agents in Texas round up a group of immigrants in 1948. At right, agents in 2006. | Left: Harry Pennington/Keystone Features/Getty Images; right: Charles Ommanney/Getty Images

CHAPTER I: THE POOR STEPCHILD
The irony of New York’s Statue of Liberty is that the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed on its base at its dedication in 1886, “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free,” marked almost precisely the moment the nation’s borders began to close to new immigrants—especially the tired, the poor and the huddled masses.

That same decade, Congress passed the first comprehensive immigration act, expanding earlier limits on Chinese and other Asian immigrants to include bans on “lunatics, idiots, convicts, those liable to become public charges, and those suffering from contagious diseases.” In 1891, the United States began to deport those who entered the country illegally. By the 1920s, Congress created the first force to patrol the country’s 7,500 miles of unguarded borders with Canada and Mexico. When the Border Patrol got up and running in 1924, its first agents were transfers from the Mounted Guard of Chinese Inspectors, who had enforced the Chinese exclusion acts in the U.S. West. Much of their early patrolling was done on horseback in the rough terrain of the Arizona deserts and Texas scrub, making them the closest thing to cowboys in the U.S. government.

The Border Patrol: A Brief History

1882: Congress passes the Chinese Exclusion Act to keep out Chinese laborers thought to be taking American jobs. The law begins decades of legislation regulating immigration to the United States.

1891: The first Office of Immigration is established, as part of the Treasury Department. The agency, which formalizes the immigration process, is actually meant to encourage more Western European immigration to the United States.

1904: The first informal border patrols begin to police the Mexican border. In 1915, Congress formally creates the Mounted Guards to prevent immigrants from crossing the border illegally.

1924: The Border Patrol is founded, housed within the Labor Department. Its 450 inspectors are initially charged with guarding the Canadian and Mexican borders, and later the Gulf of Mexico and Florida.

1933: President Franklin D. Roosevelt consolidates the Bureau of Immigration and Bureau of Naturalization into the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). The agency shifts its focus to law enforcement and is moved, in 1940, to the Justice Department.

In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt combined the Border Patrol and the Bureau of Citizenship into what came to be known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and on the eve of World War II, it became part of the Justice Department, where it would remain for six decades—always understaffed, increasingly neglected and largely forgotten in the government bureaucracy.

For its first quarter-century, most of the agency’s staff and resources were expended securing the longer northern border with Canada, and it was only in 1954, long before political correctness hit the government, that Operation Wetback marked the Border Patrol’s first large-scale deportations of illegal Mexican immigrants. Periodic INS crackdowns and raids over the coming decades followed, but the country never really took illegal immigration seriously until the 1990s, when Mexican border enforcement became a political lightning rod.

Only twice before 2001, in fact, did the Border Patrol make concerted efforts to “secure” the border—and both were localized initiatives rather than national strategies. As late as the beginning of the Clinton administration, the Border Patrol had just 4,000 agents, though steady growth spurred in part by popular border crackdowns in El Paso and San Diego brought it to 9,000 agents by 2001.

It was clear that still wasn’t anywhere close to enough. In 2000, the peak year of illegal immigration, the Border Patrol apprehended 1.6 million people crossing the border. “And a large part of what was coming through wasn’t even getting apprehended,” recalls David Aguilar, who later became chief of the Bush-era Border Patrol and prior to that led its Tucson sector. “There was a lack of intestinal fortitude to address the border. We were being overrun.”

Near the top of the Border Patrol’s list of complaints was the policy known internally as “CARP,” the Catch-And-Release Policy. By the end of the Clinton administration, 80 percent of people who were caught and released with a notice to appear at a deportation hearing never showed up in court. But despite millions of border crossings, the Border Patrol had the financing in 2001 for just 60 detainees a day across the entire country. “They could turn themselves in and have a high confidence that they wouldn’t be returned to their home countries,” recalls Michael Chertoff, who would go on to become President George W. Bush’s second secretary of Homeland Security.

Mostly agents just asked border violators for their names and then did a cursory background check before returning them to Mexico or releasing them into the United States. Sometimes they ran fingerprints, sometimes they didn’t. In June 1999, agents captured one of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives, a rapist and serial killer named Ángel Maturino Reséndiz, aka “The Railway Killer,” and unknowingly released him back into Mexico, whereupon Reséndiz promptly sneaked back into the United States and murdered four more people before being apprehended by Texas Rangers.

As the 9/11 Commission dryly noted in its report on the terrorist attacks, “In the decade before September 11, 2001, border security—encompassing travel, entry, and immigration—was not seen as a national security matter.”

That changed quickly after the 9/11 attacks.

Tom Ridge, the Pennsylvania governor soon installed as Bush’s homeland security czar, singled out airport and border security as top priorities.

He had good reason to seek improvement.

“Within the INS structure, they were the poor stepchild. That was how most of INS viewed them at every level,” recalls Robert Bonner, who was Bush’s commissioner of Customs and in 2003 became the first head of CBP. “They weren’t appreciated and weren’t viewed with respect, and that created this defensiveness and insularity within the Border Patrol.”

Besides, CBP simply didn’t have anywhere close to the manpower, system or resources needed to police the border adequately—never mind secure the detainees it did catch. Richard Falkenrath, Ridge’s policy adviser in the White House, recommended in December 2001 that the United States create a single unified border agency—but that proposal collapsed when nearly every Cabinet secretary involved vetoed it. As White House chief of staff Andy Card later told Bush, “Tom tried to sell his plan to them and the response was classic Washington: ‘Don’t take anything away from us, just give us more money.’”