Border Patrol hiring spree offers lessons as another immigration agency embarks on massive growth

McALLEN, Texas — In 2006, top U.S. Border Patrol officials were asked how long it would take to hire 6,000 agents, a roughly 50% increase at the time. Michael Fisher, then deputy chief in San Diego, says the officials concluded they would need five years.

''You have 2 1/2 years,'' Fisher recalls being told.

With Immigration and Customs Enforcement now preparing to add 10,000 employees within five years to assist with President Donald Trump's mass deportation efforts, the Border Patrol's torrid expansion in the early 2000s serves as a cautionary tale. Hiring and training standards were changed and arrests for employee misconduct rose. Pressure to turbo-charge growth can also lead to attrition.

"If they don't uphold pretty rigorous standards and background checks, you can end up hiring the wrong people, and then you pay a huge price in how the public perceives them,'' said Gil Kerlikowske, who was commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol's parent agency, from 2014 to 2017.

ICE, the main agency responsible for arresting and deporting people within the U.S., is set to get $76.5 billion, nearly 10 times its annual budget, under a bill Trump signed on July 4. Most of that money is for detention, but some is for hiring and other uses. The White House says ICE will grow from 20,000 employees to about 30,000.

''To do it today is an effort that needs to start years ago,'' said Matthew Hudak, former Border Patrol deputy chief. ''The funding is there, but it is nearly impossible to bring in that many people that quickly because you hit challenges."

Sponsoring a NASCAR race car and bull riding contests

The Border Patrol nearly doubled its workforce from 11,264 agents in October 2005 to 21,444 agents six years later.

To recruit officers, the agency sponsored a NASCAR race car and bull riding contests. It aired ads during Dallas Cowboys football games. It advertised at military bases. Billboards and job fairs hundreds of miles from the border promised fulfilling careers, resulting in thousands of applications a week.

The agency also loosened some hiring guidelines and training requirements. The age limit for new hires was raised to 40 years old from 37. Spanish language training was cut by up to 30 days, some training was moved online and other instruction was shifted to the field to lessen time at a training academy that the agency opened in Artesia, New Mexico, during the hiring surge, according to a Government Accountability Office report.

Arrests for illegal crossings fell to their lowest levels in decades — a sign for some that the strategy succeeded.

But other measurements were more troubling.

In 2008, the Border Patrol struggled to keep new agents, with about 20% failing to graduate from the academy and more leaving after returning to their stations.

Arrests of CBP employees for misconduct increased to 336 in the 2012 fiscal year from 190 seven years earlier. The agency saw a spate of high-profile corruption cases, including agents accused of smuggling people across the border or working with drug cartels to bring illegal drugs into the U.S.

The polygraph pass rate for new applicants tumbled to 33% in 2012 from 58% four years earlier. While the accuracy of the tests came under scrutiny, one applicant admitted that his brother-in-law, a known Mexican drug smuggler, asked him to use his employment to facilitate cocaine trafficking. Another admitted to using marijuana 9,000 times, including the night before the exam.

A 2015 Homeland Security report found that the number of investigators assigned to internal wrongdoing was ''woefully inadequate'' for the agency's growth.

"Any time you have massive political pressure to beef up overnight, it never turns out well," said T.J. Bonner, the former president of the Border Patrol agents union who retired in 2011. "Too many corners have to be cut. Then when things go wrong. the fingers get pointed.''

Stiff competition for qualified applicants

ICE and Homeland Security did not respond to questions about lessons that the Border Patrol's hiring spree or detailed plans for hiring at ICE.

''The unprecedented funding for ICE will enable my hard-working officers and agents to continue making America safe again by identifying, arresting and removing criminal aliens from our communities,'' Todd Lyons, the acting ICE director, said after Trump signed the bill.

Critics say the administration's policy to target anyone in the country illegally, not just those with criminal records, could lead to abuses. Stephen Miller, Trump's deputy chief of staff and lead architect of his immigration policies, had set an aggressive target of at least 3,000 arrests a day even before any additional hiring.

''When there are no priorities, everybody's a priority,'' said Nayna Gupta, policy director of the American Immigration Council. ''You're very likely to see confusion, delay, wrongful arrest, more mistakes when law enforcement agencies, especially large ones, don't have clear direction and guidance for prioritization.''

Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, said competition for qualified law enforcement is tough, with departments now offering signing bonuses of $10,000 to $100,000.

Border Patrol staffing has yet to return to its peaks of the early 2010s. Trump tried to increase staffing in his first term. A contract with consulting firm Accenture PLC cost $13.6 million to set up in 2018 and resulted in only two hires over 10 months.

Trump's bill allocates about $170 billion for border and immigration enforcement, with $4.1 billion for CBP hiring that includes 3,000 more Border Patrol agents. It comes at a time of historically low crossings after they reached a record high in December 2023.

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Spagat reported from San Diego.