Journalist Digs Into Years Of Corruption, Dysfunction At Border Protection Agency
GROSS: You call Customs and Border Protection America's most troubled law enforcement agency. What makes it qualified for that dubious distinction?
GRAFF: Customs and Border Protection is the nation's largest law enforcement agency, with 45,000 gun-carrying officers and agents. That's larger than the NYPD. It's larger than the Coast Guard. And yet at the same time, it has been wracked by what is now really more than a decade of an epidemic of crime, and corruption and mismanagement that is unparalleled in American policing. From 2005 to 2012, there was one CBP officer or agent arrested every single day. And even today, there's an officer or agent arrested for misconduct or violence, drug smuggling, even murder, every 36 hours.
GROSS: And then, like, a new development that was discovered is that there's a Facebook group of Border Protection agents with approximately 9,500 members in which agents have made racist and misogynist comments. And the chief of the Border Patrol has been part of that group. What kinds of comments? Have you read these posts?
GRAFF: Yeah. And this is the latest example of what has been a very long-running and actually well-known insular racist and misogynistic culture that has pervaded the work of the Border Patrol and CBP really since its founding in 2003. The agents and officers routinely use misogynistic and racist terms to even refer to the people that they are detaining on the border, the people that they are entrusted with keeping safe and rescuing and detaining.
That - and probably the most egregious example - it's been shown in court that agents actually refer to people caught crossing the border as Tonks, which is a phrase that agents will tell you derives from the sound that comes from when you hit one of them over the head with your flashlight.
https://news.wjct.org/post/journalist-digs-years-corruption-dysfunction-border-protection-agency
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