Hardly a week goes by without a criminal conviction or charges being filed against Border Patrol agents that swell the number of disciplinary actions taken against employees of Customs and Border Protection (CBP). CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility (CBP-OPR) has the duty to “identify, mitigate, and counter these threats or vulnerabilities which may undermine CBP’s workforce integrity and security.” It’s difficult to measure illegal activity, especially that committed by law enforcement officers (LEOs) in a law enforcement agency (LEA). All we have to go on are arrests, convictions, and allegations of illegality. Arrests, convictions, and allegations of illegality rely upon the actions of LEOs charged with enforcing these crimes, prosecutors, and the degree and frequency with which people break the laws. This is the same problem with measuring criminal activity in society at large – we just don’t have a cosmic measurement of crime outside of surveys – so we don’t have a cosmic rate of Border Patrol or CBP criminality. All we have are the figures for terminations, arrests, and other disciplinary actions. Those figures show a stunning degree of misconduct in CBP. Figure 1 is updated from a 2017 policy analysis I wrote that examined termination rates by federal agencies. These federal employees were terminated for discipline or performance reasons, which is “based on misconduct, delinquency, suitability, unsatisfactory performance, or failure to qualify for conversion to a career appointment. [This] [i]ncludes those who resign upon receiving notice of action based on performance or misconduct.” Terminations for discipline and performance includes corruption and other criminal offenses but is not limited to them. The average termination rate for LEOs is higher in CBP compared to other federal LEAs during the entire period although it does fluctuate considerably. Figure 2 shows that the average termination rate for Border Patrol agents (per 1,000) over the 2005-2019 period was 40 percent higher than for correctional officers at the Bureau of Prisons. Since it is so difficult to fire unionized federal LEOs, this high termination rate for discipline or performance is damning evidence of severe problems.
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