Up to 38% of Border Patrol shifted from ‘enforcement’ to ‘processing’

A staggering percentage of border agents have been shifted from protecting the U.S.-Mexico border to processing illegal immigrants due to the uncontrolled surge into America prompted by President Joe Biden’s policies.

Several border officials have revealed to House investigators that 12%-38% of Customs and Border Protection agents have at times been forced off the front lines to process, care for, and feed illegal immigrants.

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As a result, officials said morale among the staff has declined and border safety has been further jeopardized.

“Operations will suffer. Operation will be impacted. They will be lessened in order to do that other humanitarian mission,” Deputy Chief Patrol Agent Dustin Caudle of the Yuma Sector in Arizona warned.

“Most recently, when I looked at it, it was about 38% of the Border Patrol staff in Tucson is doing processing/detention stuff,” Chief Tucson Sector Patrol Agent John Modlin added.

Several border officials were interviewed this year by the House Homeland Security Committee and revealed how staff have been forced into caring and processing from enforcement, leading to security and moral problems. Some sectors have even had to send agents to other sectors where the crush of migrants is larger.

The situation has worsened recently as the surge of illegal immigrants has jumped to historic levels. CBP is even offering hiring bonuses of $20,000 to fill its ranks.

“Any time there is a surge of individuals processing care, feeding and care of those individuals takes Border Patrol agents away from their primary job of preventing bad people and bad things from coming across the border,” Chief Patrol Agent Gregory Bovino of the El Centro Sector in California explained when he was interviewed during the summer.

Rep. Mark Green (R-TN), the chairman of the committee, said the shift of agents off the border and into processing facilities sends the signal that it is OK to break U.S. law and illegally enter the country.

“You cannot take the dedicated and patriotic Border Patrol agents, who signed up to secure the border and protect their communities, and force them to process illegal aliens into the interior — effectively rewarding those who broke the law. These brave men and women signed up to be law enforcement, not administrative agents working against their own department’s mission. Biden and Mayorkas’s policies have forced these agents to act against the law enforcement duties they swore to carry out,” Green told Secrets on Tuesday.

He also expressed concern about the immediate and long-term impact on border agents, their morale, and the leadership vacuum in the Department of Homeland Security.

“It’s no surprise that morale is at all-time lows across the Border Patrol. Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is responsible for this sea change in the agency — if he had not opened America’s borders and enabled an unprecedented number of individuals to enter our country illegally, Border Patrol would not be overwhelmed today, and our agents would be better off. It’s time to get our agents back in the field, enforce the law, and hold the secretary accountable for his actions,” he said.

The border officials interviewed by the committee did not comment on Mayorkas but often said that agents are eager to get back to their primary jobs.

Chief Patrol Agent Sean McGoffin of the Big Bend Sector in West Texas said that about 16% of his staff were working processing instead of enforcement last spring when the surges began. “The majority want to be out doing standard Border Patrol work in the field,” he said, according to transcripts of the committee’s interviews provided to Secrets.

“There’s a lot of people that are stuck processing for a long time,” he added.

(Eric Gay/AP)

Chief Patrol Agent Gloria Chavez of the Rio Grande Valley Sector in Texas said that the border agency struggles with keeping a high percentage of agents working enforcement during migrant surges.

Here’s one section of the transcripts in which she addressed the matter in September:

Q: Do you know what kind of impact, or was it a similar impact just on logistics that that surge had on RGV?

Chavez: So, when we have the surges, it’s pretty typical. The logistics, the personnel, the impacts are very similar. The one thing I think that we are doing quite well in RGV right now is that we’re still maintaining a semblance of enforcement assignments for our agents. It’s between 52% to 64% that we try to keep our agents on the front line doing patrol work versus the processing and nonenforcement details. But surges, when they happen, logistically, they absorb resources, right? So it’s pretty similar with one to the other.

Q: So, more agents that are doing processing, less front line, during those surges?

Chavez: For the most part.

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Q: What kind of impact does that have on agents’ morale?

Chavez: It has a significant impact. I think agents, for the most part, want to be on patrol. They want to do the mission of border security. To us, it’s a concern everything that happens between those ports of entry.