Hispanic Border Patrol agents tell NR they’re furious over how they’ve been treated by the administration.
An unprecedented flood of migrants at the southern border combined with a new COVID-19 vaccination mandate and false accusations by the president that agents were running over Haitian immigrants with horses and strapping them with whips has led to a “perfect storm” within the U.S. Border Patrol, current and former agents told National Review.
The Border Patrol, part of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, has had longstanding struggles with morale. But morale among the patrol’s roughly 20,000 agents has taken an even bigger hit than usual this year due to the combination of pressures, capped off with the threat that agents who choose not to be vaccinated against the coronavirus will be fired in November, said Gil Maza, a 25-year veteran of the agency who retired in March.
Maza maintains a Facebook group for current and former agents where he posts Border Patrol news, line-of-duty deaths, and history pieces. He said that over the last several months he’s received a flood of messages from active agents documenting their concerns.
“The agents feel completely abandoned by this administration,” Maza said, adding that they also feel let down by management. “They feel like there is nobody out there for them.”
Maza said the Border Patrol has always been a political football, and, during his 25-year career, the agency has often gone through cycles of “hero to zero and back again.”
“This is completely different,” he said. “It’s almost like the perfect storm right now.”
Through August, border agents have made more than 1.5 million encounters along the Southwest border this year, more than three times the number from same period in 2020, and a more than 50 percent jump from 2019, when there was a surge under former president Donald Trump, according to Customs and Border Protection data. There has been an increase in encounters every month this year, even during the summer, according to the data.
More than a half million migrants have been released into the country this year with notices to appear or report, according to estimates. Many have been admitted under the refugee umbrella despite lacking legitimate claims to asylum, and hundreds of thousands more have been recorded as “got-aways” who escaped into the country without processing. In August, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas called the border surge “unprecedented.”
Art Del Cueto, a border agent at the Tohono O’odham Nation Reservation in Arizona and vice president of the National Border Patrol Council, said the border surge has pulled agents away from their duties to guard the border from criminals, drug cartels, and human smugglers. They’ve been redirected instead to facilities where they spend much of their time processing migrants who have voluntarily turned themselves in.
That results in gaps along the border, which are exposed by drug cartels, Del Cueto said, speaking in his role as a union leader. Meanwhile, many of the migrants they’re processing also are released into the country, “so that’s a real kick to your morale,” he said.
Del Cueto blames President Biden for the border chaos. Biden hesitated to condemn illegal immigration during the 2020 campaign, he turned back several Trump-era border policies once in office, and his administration has generally sent mixed messages about the border. That all has been a magnet for illegal border crossers and lawlessness, Del Cueto said.
“Individuals realized that all they had to do was cross into the U.S., claim that they have some type of asylum case … and they will get released,” he said.
Then there was the flare-up last month over allegations, driven by online photos and video, that border agents were “whipping” Haitian migrants attempting to cross the Rio Grande River into Del Rio, Texas. The agents actually were spinning their reins, a training tactic to control their horses. But when asked about it, Biden didn’t hesitate to condemn the agents. It was “horrible,” Biden said, adding that the agents would “pay.”
“To see people like they did, with horses, running them over, people being strapped, it’s outrageous,” Biden said.
Biden was not alone. Vice President Kamala Harris alleged that the Border Patrol’s horseback tactics were similar to tactics “used against African Americans during times of slavery.” Representative Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) called the Border Patrol’s handling of the migrants “worse than slavery days,” and Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) said it was “white supremacist behavior.”
Del Cueto said those comments angered him and other agents. Even worse, he said, is that Biden didn’t bother to learn the facts of the situation before wading into the controversy.
“You would think that as the leader of the country, you would reach out to someone within (the Department of Homeland Security) to question, ‘Hey, this is going on. I know that people are going to ask about it, the media are going to be all over it. Can I get clarification?’ That’s what infuriates me,” Del Cueto said. “I mean, he’s the president.”
He said he’s confident the agents did nothing wrong, and they acted within policy and per their training. “There was nobody getting whipped,” he said. “That was done to prevent injury to the rider, to the horse, and any individual dumb enough to stand in front of this horse.”
Del Cueto pushed back on the allegations of racism. Only about 2 percent of Border Patrol agents are black, but about half are Hispanic. Border Patrol agents “just all see ourselves as green,” he said, referring to their green uniforms.
“Border Patrol agents, they don’t’ see themselves as, hey, they’re agents arresting other Hispanics. They look at it as, hey, we took an oath, and we’re doing our job to defend our nation’s borders,” said Del Cueto, who is of Mexican and Spanish descent. “If you’re not an American citizen, you don’t have proper documents, that’s who gets arrested.”
Maza said that what affected agents the most was that Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz didn’t immediately defend them from the allegations that they were whipping people. That was “a punch in the gut to the agents on the ground,” he said.
Maza makes light of the Border Patrol pressures with some of the products he sells on his website, including a commemorative coin that redubs the patrol the “U.S. Welcome Patrol,” and one that commemorates the “Biden Immigration Policy 2021: Border Open 24/7/365.”
“This is kind of my way of commemorating the events that are going on, and the farce that I think this administration has turned the Border Patrol into,” Maza said. “The Border Patrol is an honorable organization.”
Many Border Patrol agents are frustrated now about the vaccine mandate, part of the executive order Biden announced in early September. Agents have until early November to be fully vaccinated, but many of them are hesitant.
“You’re seeing that this administration has released over a million into the country with no COVID vaccine, in fact no vaccine questioning whatsoever,” Del Cueto said. “You don’t question these people on their measles shot, their polio, tuberculosis, hepatitis, any of that. But you’re going to push a COVID vaccine on agents, or they’re going to lose their job.”
Problems with morale are not new in the Border Patrol. According to a 2020 survey of federal employees, Customs and Border Protection ranked near the bottom of federal subagencies in a “best places to work” ranking. It also ranked near the bottom in questions about effective leadership, teamwork, work-life balance, and its overall handling of the COVID crisis.