I was reading Federale’s substack about how Markwayne Mullin’s DHS tried to squash rumors that Homeland Security Investigations (H.S.I.) and Enforcement and Removal Operations (E.R.O.) officers were ordered to only go after criminal aliens in the run up to the midterms and to ignore non-criminal illegal aliens. Mullin has already said that he will not go after worksite enforcement in Kansas.
This reminds me that in my book “What Bridge Do You Work At?” about my time in the Border Patrol, I documented all sorts of ways in which the Deceiver-in-Chief thwarted our ability to arrest illegal aliens. He closed interior Border Patrol Stations. He stopped our ability to do transportation checks unless we had “prior intel” (this is sort of like putting the cart before the horse. Usually, intel starts in the field and works its way up, back then, us to do the inverse-nearly impossible). He would only take into custody illegal aliens who had prior criminal CONVICTIONS- so, an illegal alien who had been arrested for DUI in California, but fled to New York state was not deportable because the arrest wasn’t sufficient, we had to show a conviction.
Obama passed DACA via internal memo, and tried to pass DAPA too.
In all of the ways that I documented Obama’s fraud, I left out AUO. Given how many ways Obama tried to prevent us from doing our jobs, it slipped my mind. The Obama administration didn’t even want us to be able to use Facebook or any other social media to track down illegal aliens.
AUO stands for Administratively Uncontrollable Overtime. When I first joined the Border Patrol, I was expected to work a 50 hour work week. 40 hours are a normal work week, but I was expected to work an extra two hours each day (10 for the week) in AUO. This was to help cover the gaps in shift change.
I won’t get into the weeds of it too much, but let me suffice it to say that when the Obama administration came in and was looking to thwart our ability to sack up illegal aliens, they looked at how much Agents were getting paid in AUO.
Some Agents were legitimately getting massive amounts of AUO (overtime). These were the guys on the southern border who knew the illegal aliens liked to cross near or during shift change and would stay a bit longer to see what they could sack up. If they caught somebody, the policy was often, “You catch it, you clean it” which meant that you couldn’t just leave with a pat on the back after making an arrest, but you had to stay to do the paperwork (sometimes with an angry Supervisor who would have rather you ignored the sensor and let the alien go rather than force him to stay late with you).
Above, Charles Bronson sign cutting footprints in the movie “Borderline”. It could be a long shift if you got on sign of a group late in the day.
What does this have to do with Federale’s post? Well, when the Obama administration cracked down on AUO, they didn’t want the bad publicity of confessing that they didn’t want Border Patrol working longer hours to try to make arrests. So, instead of putting it out in a traceable email, they sent word on down from on high verbally.
Virtually every single Border Patrol sector fell in line…except one, Swanton Sector. Swanton Sector (Vermont, with bits of New York and New Hampshire) was then under the command of Sector Chief Pfiefer. Pfiefer had a reputation as not giving a …. about D.C. He had been passed over for command enough times and he didn’t care what the brass in D.C. thought of him. He supposedly said, “If you want me to comply, put it in writing. If you are not willing to put it in writing go pound sand.”
Guess what? D.C. was not willing to put it in writing. I had one colleague who had transferred from the Buffalo Sector to the Swanton Sector. He reported back to us in Buffalo that his pay had not been cut. In fact, he had been working a lot of AUO trying to track down illegal aliens in the Vermont/New Hampshire area.
It sounds like Markwayne Mullin tried this same policy of cracking down on immigration enforcement via verbal commands. Unfortunately for him, he got a lot of pushback and now is pretending like no one ever said anything about it.
I’ll close out here. I need another drink and to shorten the story, I’m not a fan of Senor Mullin. Someone should do an audit of his 1,600 acre cattle ranch. Are all his farm workers legal?
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.
