Report Shows CBP Officers Rarely Punished For Abusive Actions

Here's how the CBP is defending our borders -- even before the Trump Administration's "surge:"

Everyone they detained was an American citizen, coming back to the US after attending a wedding of a cousin. They were treated terribly, put in a cold room with no food or drinks, and no information on what was going on. CBP demanded they hand over their electronics, and made it clear they might not get them back. The thing is, this isn't a unique situation. As the report notes, there's almost no oversight over CBP actions, allowing them to act with impunity. In the report, the story is told of a 4-year-old girl, an American citizen, who was detained for 14 hours, in a cold room, without being allowed to speak to her parents and given no food beyond a cookie. And then she was deported. Even though she was a US citizen. She was allowed to come back weeks later, but now has symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

And that was at the Canadian border. Down south, treatment of citizens and (especially) non-citizens is even worse. The CBP has a vast amount of power but very minimal oversight. The fact that they deal with non-citizens frequently tends to result in a "They're not Americans, so who cares?" attitude.

In 2013, the American Immigration Council studied data on complaints against the CBP. What it found was depressing, if unsurprising.

The data, which the Immigration Council acquired through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, covers 809 complaints of alleged abuse lodged against Border Patrol agents between January 2009 and January 2012. These cases run the gamut of physical, sexual, and verbal abuse. Although it is not possible to determine which cases had merit and which did not, it is astonishing that, among those cases in which a formal decision was issued, 97 percent resulted in "No Action Taken." On average, CBP took 122 days to arrive at a decision when one was made. Moreover, among all complaints, 40 percent were still "pending investigation" when the complaint data were provided to the Immigration Council.

The most common complaint was physical abuse, occurring in nearly 40% of the studied cases with excessive force following close behind with 38% of reports. This should be expected, as the CBP is a law enforcement agency. Many US law enforcement agencies believe the most effective response to almost any situation is violence, and they deploy it frequently in various forms.

Complaints about CBP officers are notoriously difficult to substantiate. It's not that the complainants are more unreliable than complaints against other agencies. It's that there's usually a language barrier to be dealt with and the odds of the complainant having been whisked into Mexican/Canadian cornfields are much higher. No other agency has the power to deport its unhappy customers.

Three years later, the Immigration Council has compiled another report [PDF] based on FOIAed documents covering complaints from 2012 to 2015]. There has been no improvement.

This data, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, includes 2,178 cases of alleged misconduct by Border Patrol agents and supervisors that were filed between January 2012 and October 2015. These cases range from instances of verbal abuse, to theft of property, to physical assault.

Even though assessing which cases did or did not merit disciplinary action was not feasible with the information CBP provided, the overall findings of this report are still remarkable. For example:

95.9 percent of the 1,255 cases in which an outcome was reported resulted in "no action" against the officer or agent accused of misconduct.

The complaints contain allegations of many forms of abuse, with "physical abuse" cited as the reason for the complaint in 59.4 percent of all cases.

"No action" was the outcome of many complaints against Border Patrol agents that alleged serious misconduct, such as running a person over with a vehicle, making physical threats, sexually assaulting a woman in a hospital, and denying medical attention to children.

A 1.1% "improvement" in sustained complaints is nothing more than expected variance. However, physical abuse appears to be on the upswing, jumping nearly 20% in the last three years. Again, the sheer amount of alleged abuse -- and the allegations themselves -- make for harrowing reading. Here's a small sampling of complaints against CBP officers.

Border Patrol agent allegedly placed Taser in the mouth of a U.S. citizen, resulting in injury (Tombstone, AZ)

Border Patrol agent allegedly beat, kicked, and made a UDA ["Undocumented Alien"] (a citizen of Ecuador) eat dirt while he was apprehended (Imperial Beach, CA)

Border Patrol agent allegedly verbally abused and threatened a UAC ["Unaccompanied Alien Child"] with rape and either a weapon or [self-defense] spray (Laredo, TX)

Border Patrol agent allegedly put a gun to a UAC's ["Unaccompanied Alien Child's"] neck and threatened to kick and kill him (Weslaco, TX)

A UDA ["Undocumented Alien"] alleges she was raped by two male Border Patrol agents prior to her apprehension by a female Border Patrol agent (Casa Grande, AZ)

Taken altogether you have an agency that has little fear of reprisal for its actions. Bolstering this is an opaque complaint process exacerbated by language barriers. On top of it, there's the general dehumanization of everyone the CBP interacts with, which only encourages staff to treat people like meat, rather than with any sort of restraint or dignity. Sitting all the way above it on the federal organizational chart is a president who's decided to make anyone without US citizenship a scapegoat for overstated leaps in criminal activity. It's only going to get worse. And considering how long the CBP has been able to escape punishment for its behavior, there's really no reason to append "before it gets better" to the previous sentence.