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Boots on the Border

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By Sylvia Longmire
Contributor, In Homeland Security

President Trump has made it clear one of his administration’s top priorities is to secure American borders and deport illegal immigrants. His planned methods for accomplishing these goals are necessarily labor intensive, so part of his plan includes hiring 10,000 more Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and 5,000 more Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents. However, the hiring process has historically been dramatically slowed down by the extensive applicant vetting process. In response, some members of Congress are proposing a bill that will waive the polygraph requirement for some applicants.

Boots on the Border Act

On March 9, U.S. Senators Jeff Flake (R-AZ), John McCain (R-AZ), and Ron Johnson (R-WI) introduced the Boots on the Border Act. According to a press release, the legislation would help address hiring shortfalls at CBP by waiving “onerous and duplicative CBP polygraph hiring requirements” for applicants with qualifying law enforcement or military experience. Law enforcement officers must have served at least three years with no break in service, and must have completed a polygraph or background investigation as part of their employment. Military members must have held a security clearance, and all candidates must have no criminal history.

The request comes at a period of high demand for additional border enforcement agents in an environment that demands thorough applicant screening. ABC15 News in Arizona reported that according to Sen. Flake, close to 70,000 people apply for a position with CBP each year but only about 600 are hired.  The biggest hurdle, he said, is candidates failing the lie detector test. When asked about the question that trips up candidates the most, he replied, “Obviously with regard to (questions about) drug use.” He added, “We live in a culture now in which it’s more frequent than perhaps we’d like.  I think the agencies need to understand that.”

While at first glance it appears sensible to push through applicants who appear trustworthy on paper, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has a poor track record of allowing bad candidates to fall through the cracks during hiring surges. The number of corruption investigations opened against CBP and Border Patrol agents was historically relatively low until DHS went on a hiring binge in 2005 and brought in thousands of new recruits. In a report by the Homeland Security Studies and Analysis Institute, a DHS think tank, the authors stated CBP identified at least fifteen attempts by Mexican cartels to infiltrate the agency, and roughly 150 corruption cases were opened against agents between 2004 and 2013. The Government Accountability Office released its own report on the subject, which similarly concluded that CBP did not have a comprehensive strategy or sufficient internal controls to effectively address corruption problems.

Anti-Border Corruption Act

Those numbers were reached despite the fact that CBP started administering routine polygraph examinations in 2010 to comply with the requirements of the Anti-Border Corruption Act. Through the program, they started learning that prospective applicants were involved in aggravated assault, drug trafficking, and human smuggling. When the reports came out in January 2013, the DHS Inspector General’s office had 1,600 open employee misconduct cases. Because of the lack of strategy and the backlog of misconduct cases, agents have either been allowed to remain in sensitive positions while under investigation, or have had careers negatively impacted well before being exonerated.

Senator Flake told ABC15 News he doesn’t believe the candidates are always at fault, but rather the test itself. He also noted that current screening procedures have resulted in 1,768 Border Patrol positions and 1,046 Customs and Border Protection jobs remaining unfilled. However, the legislation would have to go through several steps in the Senate and House of Representatives before it could become law.