Assistant United States Attorney. (Image created with Craiyon AI).
Back in the 90s after I graduated from college, I was working a dead end customer service job. The room for advancement was practically non-existent. Both my parents had advanced degrees and they encouraged me to think about getting one. I thought about becoming a lawyer. My grandfather had been one, a patent attorney. I was seriously thinking about it when during a night on the town in D.C. I ran into a recent law school graduate. He absolutely hated being an attorney. He said that it was more like learning a trade than getting a college degree and you worked long hours in the beginning with little gratitude. After trashing the law profession, he told me it was probably more worthwhile to get an MBA.
Somewhere during that time frame, I had also gone to a cocktail party with my parents. There were some prominent people there, authors and the like. Somehow, the subject of Jimmy Hoffa came up. Because I had read books on Robert Kennedy’s “Get Hoffa” crusade, I made some comment about the union boss and his organized crime ties. I was interrupted by a tall gray haired man who claimed to have been the judge who presided over Hoffa’s trial. He said he knew everything there was to know about Hoffa and proceeded to say that Hoffa was NOT mixed up with the mafia. He embarrassed me in front of the other party attendees, but rather than make me think he was right, it made me think that an advanced degree in the law can make you an idiot. Sometimes, it takes an education to become so stupid. I preferred reading stories from the beat cops and Special Agents who were actually out in the field arresting drug traffickers, bank robbers, serial killers and the like. The FBI Special Agents who wrote about Hoffa had a very different take on him, and they were seeing things first hand, not indoors in a court of law.
All the books I was reading at the time were either history books or true crime books. I stopped being interested in works of fiction and still to this day rarely read fiction. I was told to go back to school for what interested me, and so I went back for a Master’s Degree in “Justice, Law and Society”, American University’s version of a Criminal Justice degree.
Eventually, I wound up in the Border Patrol with hopes of becoming a Special Agent in another department. One thing led to another and rather than another job materializing (Diplomatic Security turned me down for health reasons, DEA for the same, FBI said I flunked their test, Customs Special Agent and ATF simply never responded to my application) I stuck it out with the Border Patrol.
Now, as a Border Patrol Agent, you make plenty of arrests. However, you, the arrester, don’t always wind up in court. Most immigration cases are very cut and dry. On the southern border, it was especially simple. You often caught them when they were literally still wet. If they were Mexican, most of the time, they opted for a “Voluntary Return” to Mexico, so, they avoided court altogether and just went back to Mexico to try again the next day. If they were Other Than Mexican (OTMs), or, if they had previously been formally deported and/or had a criminal history in the U.S., then they were sent to “camp”, meaning immigration detention. From there, they almost all get their day in court. The average Border Patrol Agent would not go to court. We had Agents assigned to “Prosecutions” who dealt with that. Our Agents had to deal with the Department of Justice’s Assistant United States Attorneys (AUSAs). I was told from the Agents assigned to prosecutions that the AUSAs hated immigration cases. They weren’t fun or “sexy”. Most of the cases were cut and dry. Does the alien have papers giving a legal right to be in the U.S.? No. Is the alien in the U.S.? His butt is in the defendant’s seat, so, yes. Guilty, next. The AUSAs preferred narcotics cases. They wanted to be part of Miami Vice.
I had a supervisor who had worked in California and said that once upon a time, they let Border Patrol Agents serve as the government lawyers since the cases were pretty straight forward. That was back when the Border Patrol was still part of the Department of Justice. It’s been decades since that has occurred.
Unfortunately, for some ungodly reason, a lot of AUSAs appear to be of the leftist variety. In order to get a law degree, you have to spend more time in academia and maybe this allows more time for liberal indoctrination to occur.
When I got to the northern border, I served briefly on ICE’s Border Enforcement Security Task Force (BEST team). It was all focused on going after drugs coming across the border, and almost exclusively they worked with CBP Officers who located narcotics coming across one of the international bridges from Canada. (They sometimes did identify drugs coming up from the southern border too). I remember overhearing their banter about the AUSAs. There was often a battle to get the drug case to pass the hurdle of having an AUSA accept the case. One AUSA in particular was known for being a dead end. If your drug case was assigned to her, pretty much all the long hours of surveillance, the scanning of phone records, the interviewing of suspects etc… had been done for nothing. Rather than act like the government’s prosecutor, she would sit down with the Special Agents and act like a Defense Attorney demolishing their cases. Whatever info they had was never enough, she would ask for more evidence, more confessions etc… It was to the point that the ICE Special Agents had to wonder if she ever prosecuted a case at all. The best the Special Agents could hope for was some sort of plea agreement.
Another time, I was sent to seminar on environmental law. I think the reason I wound up there was that if our boat patrol was out on the Niagara River or Lake Erie and spotted a vessel leaking oil, we had some idea of what to do (basically, call the Coast Guard and get the hell out of the way). There were a few different speakers there, but I remember one of the AUSAs speaking enthusiastically about how he prosecuted this multimillionaire who became wealthy by getting government contracts to dispose of asbestos. Now, there are all sorts of regulations about how you tear out asbestos and then what you did with the asbestos afterwards. This AUSA was bouncing up and down with the enthusiasm of a climate change fanatic totally convinced that he was putting away the worst kind of criminal. One of the ways this criminal was able to get away with it was that he brought in “undocumented workers” (his words) to do the work. The illegal aliens didn’t know anything about what they were doing. They were told to rip out the asbestos and they did. They may have worn dust masks, but that was about it. With asbestos, you are supposed to cover your eyes too because the dust can cling to the moisture in your eyes. The AUSA was enthusiastically bouncing along about which laws he was getting the guy on. I was waiting for him to say 8 USC 1324 for hiring illegal aliens. Maybe he did, but he didn’t mention it as he was so enthusiastic about all the other charges he had going. Whether he did or didn’t, it sort of showed his priorities.
If the millionaire environmental violator had tried hiring Americans, especially union workers, he would likely have gotten an earful about why things can’t be done the way he was doing things. The whole reason he was able to get away with what he was doing was because of his non-English speaking work staff. You would think that would be a good reason to hit the violator with that first.
Years went by and we wound up getting a case of a bunch of illegal aliens working at a job site. We, the Border Patrol, were hoping to prosecute the employer. As the senior AUSAs didn’t want to touch an immigration case, they assigned our case to a brand new AUSA, but the new guy did have a senior AUSA advising him. I remember sitting down in the Buffalo Patrol Agent in Charge’s (PAIC’s, and pronounced pack’s) office for a conference call with the AUSAs. As luck would have it, the senior AUSA advising was the environMENTAL guy whose lecture I had previously heard. Our Environmental friend was started bad mouthing our case. Basically, he argued that we could not prove the employer “knowingly” hired illegal aliens. Of course, the illegal aliens themselves could be charged with being in the country unlawfully, but that was about it. It seemed our BP case was falling apart when, much to my surprise, a seemingly soft spoken line Agent who had been involved in the case blew a gasket. Much to the mortification of the PAIC, the line Agent proceeded to have a minor melt down. I won’t say he was screaming, but he was talking very loudly and passionately about all the hours of surveillance we had put in to catch these guys, and now, the AUSA was dispassionately tearing the whole thing up! To our surprise, the environmental AUSA backed down and decided that there was perhaps something that could be looked into and prosecuted after all.
On such minor things are cases of law depended upon. If that line Agent hadn’t been asked to sit in on the call (which was likely) the whole thing would have been junked by the AUSAs. So much for dispassionately looking at the rights and wrongs of a case.
During Trump’s first term, I remember some of the ICE Special Agents bringing an alien smuggling case to one of the AUSAs. He told me that they had to have one on seven before a case could be brought. That means one person smuggling seven illegal aliens. When they found a case with seven illegal aliens, the same AUSA told them that now the number was 10.
I was told about one AUSA who was highly regarded by law enforcement. He had been a police officer before he decided to go to law school. Supposedly, he looked at the cases brought before him with sympathy towards the guys and gals who actually got down and dirty making arrests. Contrast that to the majority of AUSAs who will never have actually put cuffs on a suspect or read suspects their rights, and then hoped that the suspects would be dumb enough to answer questions without a lawyer present.
When I was in Maine, I remember one of my supervisors talking about his time on the southern border in California back when he was a line Agent. The supervisor was reminiscing about how he got into a scuffle with an illegal alien and had to take the alien down hard. Afterwards, he and his supervisor wanted to charge the alien with assault on a federal agent, 18 USC 111. The AUSA assigned to the case didn’t want to do it. My supervisor asked the AUSA, “What if he punched me in the face?” The AUSA responded, “That’s part of your job.” (I don’t seem to recall being told at the academy that one of my assigned duties was to serve as a punching bag for illegal aliens). As I recall, the Supervisor said to the AUSA something along the lines of, “How about I come across the desk and punch you in the face?” To which the AUSA responded, “Why that would be assault!”
I did know a lawyer who went to work for the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights division. She had previously worked for Amnesty International and she dreamed of going after the Ku Klux Klan types and cops who beat up suspects. To her surprise, a lot of the cases she wound up with were defending CBP Officers and Border Patrol Agents accused of violating suspects’ rights. She learned that a lot of plaintiffs lie. (She’s still pretty far left though. It didn’t red pill her).
The left is upset that Pam Bondi appears to be getting rid of a lot of AUSAs. As long as she’s getting rid of the lazy, incompetent and/or political biased ones, then I have no problem with it. Hopefully, it will light a fire under their collective buttocks if they want to keep their jobs.
Reportedly, a lot of career prosecutors left the Department of Justice when Trump came into office. Why? The laws didn’t change. She’s gotten rid of prosecutors involved in the January 6 deep state hoax. She’s fired AUSAs who have made anti-Trump posts in the past. Was he hired in the first place because of his anti-Trump stance?
It’s going to be a challenge to replace them. This is turning around a huge bureaucracy that was left leaning (left listing). When a new AUSA is hired on, they will find old cases needing prosecution that they will have to get up to speed on, and then there are plenty of new cases to be prosecuted. A whole lot of those new cases are going to be immigration cases, precisely the kind of case a liberal AUSA would not want to touch.
20 year veteran of the U.S. Border Patrol. Author of "What Bridge Do You Work At? Or, Kids Are Cute; Therefore, Open Borders" & "East into the Sunset: Memories of patrolling in the Rio Grande Valley at the turn of the century". Books are available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, as well as Thrift Books.
Master's Degree in Justice, Law and Society from American University.
Grew up partly in Europe.
