My goal today is to outline for the Commission some of the history of ICE and CBP and, in particular, to outline what has changed — and what is changing — as the Trump administration floods both agencies with money from the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill.”
What I hope you will take away from my testimony today is that the problems, abuses, scandals, and controversies involving CBP and ICE that have been on display over the last year in far too many American cities and social media feeds — from deadly shootings and agent brutality to the routine abuse of Constitutional and civil rights and liberties — is entirely consistent with long-identified problems in CBP and ICE that have gone ignored and uncorrected both by a generation of Congress and multiple Democratic and Republican administrations alike.
These are not aberrations — these incidents are the entirely foreseeable consequence of specific funding and management decisions and how the nation has approached immigration enforcement since 9/11 and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.
In particular, CBP has been likely the deadliest and certainly the most troubled federal law enforcement agency for the better part of two decades now. Since 9/11, the culture of ICE and CBP has meant that the agencies have been what you might call a fascist-secret-police-in-waiting, troubled agencies simply waiting for an ambitious would-be authoritarian.
ICE is an agency whose recruiting and training standards are so low that other federal law enforcement agents say pejoratively that ICE is “hired by the pound, from the pound.” And the paramilitary CBP, especially, has been uniquely callous with human life and suffers from a deeply ingrained culture of racism and misogyny, all of which is enabled by an all-but unequaled longstanding sense of impunity.
CBP — the nation’s largest law enforcement agency — has been plagued for two decades by a tidal wave of crime, corruption, and misconduct driven by a disastrous post-9/11 hiring surge that flooded the force with thousands of agents and officers who never should have been given a badge and a gun — including, as one CBP commissioner told me, even accidentally hiring members of actual drug cartels.
Criminality is so rampant inside CBP that it has seen one of its own agents or officers arrested every 24 to 36 hours since 2005. CBP’s misconduct scandal is so long-running that today it would be old enough to drink.
In total, according to CBP’s own discipline reports, over the 20 years from 2005 to 2024 — the last year numbers are available — at least 4,913 CBP officers and Border Patrol agents have been arrested themselves, some multiple times. (In 2018 alone, a single CBP employee was arrested five times.) To put that number in perspective:
- The population of CBP agents and officers who have been arrested would make it roughly the nation’s fourth largest police department — equal to the size of the entire Philadelphia police.
- Indeed, for much of the 2010s and likely before and since, it appears the crime rate of CBP agents and officers was higher PER CAPITA than the crime rate of undocumented immigrants in the United States.