Protecting our border with Mexico

The Border Patrol, more formally the United States Customs and Border Protection (C.B.P.), has been protecting our borders for a long time. Most of the protection has focused on the Mexican border. As with so many things post 9/11, the size of the agency has dramatically increased, from 11,000 to 20,000 agents. This doubling in size has not been monitored very well. The idea that the Border Patrol is a law-enforcement agency has been subverted into a military agency. While the reputation of police today is not what it was years ago, few police departments consider themselves military agents. Perhaps the military agency idea is responsible for some disturbing reports about the Border Patrol.

• For example, a 2013 investigation by The Arizona Republic found that since 2005, C.B.P. agents had killed at least 42 people, a majority of them in the United States, but most of the agents’ identities had been kept secret, and the officers faced ‘‘few, if any, public repercussions, even in cases in which the justification for the shooting seems dubious.’’ Thirteen of the cases involved American citizens; at least three involved unarmed teenagers who were shot in the back.
• A 2010 internal study reported that 60 percent of a pool of Border Patrol agents and customs inspectors who had been administered polygraph tests were deemed unsuitable for service.
• By 2011, the sheer number of C.B.P. misconduct cases had become glaring — an average of one C.B.P. officer was arrested every day between 2005 and 2012, 144 of them for corruption-level offenses.
• Between January 2010 and October 2012 a Border Patrol agent had used deadly force 67 times, 19 resulting in deaths.