Recent actions by management of DHS are not helping the men and women in the field.
I think it was Andrew R. Arthur over at CIS.org who once said, “With immigration, you never lack for something to write about.”
Actually, I do struggle for what to write about, there’s simply so much stuff that I don’t know where to begin. There’s the controversy over D.H.S. telling their Agents not to make arrests except of criminal aliens in the run up to the midterms. I wrote a note about that, but I may expand upon it with an actual article. There’s this article in Revolver about how Chicago Public Schools lost 11,000 kids in a single year. I suspect that many of the niños who left were anchor babies, but when papa gets deported, or, voluntarily leaves, then families tend to leave together. In any case, that’s good, keep it going.
There’s articles where the author at a conservative outlet still does not know the difference between a CBP Officer and a Border Patrol Agent. (CBP Officers work at “Ports of Entry” -P.O.E.s- which are things like airports or international bridges. Border Patrol Agents patrol out in the field on things like ATVs, horses, boats, but most often in Chevy Tahoes or Ford Expeditions).
However, I’m reading a book right now called, “The Road Past Mandalay”, by John Masters about his time fighting in World War II in the South-East Asian theatre. I’m not very far into the book and Masters is talking about the importance of “morale”. One of his superior officers comments to him that the individual soldier feels very lonely in combat. Apparently, despite all the other soldiers and things happening around him, when bullets are whizzing past your head, it’s easy to feel like there’s no one around to help you out of the mess. The individual soldier has to have discipline ingrained him to do the job despite no one telling or forcing him to do it.
Now, I know that being a soldier and being a cop are very different things, but there is some overlap. Morale is one of them. In both professions, you are going to be doing some violent things and you can be injured or you can injure someone else. Believing your superiors have your back when things go sideways is very important.
Previously, I wrote about slugs in the Patrol who never made an arrest. I followed up with an article about ICE Agent Christian Castro who is being persecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Daniel N. Rosen. This will have a negative effect on morale.
Another thing that is going to have a negative effect on morale is ICE firing Deportation Officers. One of them, Joe Moore, committed suicide. That’s really not good for morale. He was looking at being fired after getting into a vehicle accident while with ICE and for not being upfront about being terminated from the Lower Frederick Police Department. Moore seems to have felt that his dream of a career in law enforcement was over. He had a wife and two children to support.
When I was with the Border Patrol, we had a rash of suicides. We had to undergo mandatory suicide prevention training. The first time I underwent it, I recall it being in a classroom. However, taking guys out of the field to attend a class resulted in too few Agents making actual arrests, so, they changed it to an online course. The one take away I remember form a Border Patrol chaplain was the saying, “Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.” I wish Moore had realized that being fired and not having a law enforcement career is not the end of the world.
I do believe that the Deportation Officer management could have handled it better. I don’t know that it was necessary to fire him at all even if what was said about him in the Washington Post were true; so what if he broke a window trying to get illegal aliens out of a vehicle. You gotta get them out of there somehow.
There are many different jobs within being a Deportation Officer. When I encountered some former colleagues employed as Deportation Officers, they were complaining about whether or not they would be selected to go down to Guantanamo Bay for a month at Christmas. Management could have told Moore he was going down there to process and guard aliens for a few months. That way, he wouldn’t be driving around getting into accidents, or, having to smash windows to physically pull the reluctant Guatemalan patriots out of their comfy seats.
They could have had him processing in the station rather than being out in the field. I’m told that at the Buffalo Federal Detention Center (which is actually in Batavia, New York) some of the senior Deportation Officers do paper work all day and are reluctant to go out in the field. He could have been on flights where we send back criminal aliens to their homelands. I remember talking to one Deportation Officer who was looking forward to a flight to West Africa. He said that after dropping off the criminal aliens with authorities, the only available hotel that was deemed safe for an American law enforcement officer was a Club Med affiliated place. He planned on hitting their gym, and then lounging by the pool, “Don’t tell my wife. She thinks I’m going on some hardship duty and will be miserable the whole time.”
Instead, they were about to fire Moore without a backup plan for him. They could have at least talked to one of the private security contractors who run ICE Detention Facilities and convinced them to hire him.
They could have offered him a downgrade to doing something like dispatch, or, have him doing intelligence gathering (how I closed out my Border Patrol career doing intel, and I loved it).
It makes no sense. ICE is still trying to hire new Deportation Officers and, in Moore’s case, you’ve got someone with prior law enforcement experience willing to do the job and you want to fire him. Now, you’ll have to wait months to get a replacement for him, and once you do replace him, you will have to train up the new person which will take more time.
What Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) management has done is ruined morale. Now, a lot of the Deportation Officers will be looking over their shoulder wondering if they will be fired next. If you combine that with Markwayne Mullin’s unofficial verbal order to avoid arresting regular illegal aliens who have no additional criminal histories, and the persecution of ICE Agent Castro (I wasn’t able to figure out if Castro is an HSI Special Agent or a Deportation Officer), then they are tanking morale.
Is this intentional, or, is it simply poor management? The guys in the field are under a lot of pressure both to make arrests and from Antifa/BLM/Democrat traitors trying desperately to keep illegal aliens in the country.
P.S. On the off chance that a Deportation Officer or Border Patrol Agent reads this and is still on the job, do yourself a favor and join the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association (FLEOA).
They can help you out with lawyers to keep you from losing your job.
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.
