For our September+October issue, we investigated the Border Patrol’s sharp growth, its troubling record on civil liberties, its culture of impunity, and its role in shaping the current political moment—one that echoes the anti-immigrant fever that led to the agency’s creation a century ago. Read the whole package here.
The desert around Artesia, New Mexico, had cooled to a comfortable 79 degrees by the time local police officer Beth Hahn steered her black-and-white Chevy Tahoe into the parking lot of the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. It was just after 9:40 p.m. on September 15, 2019. She surveyed the scene in front of her.
Half a dozen people encircled a young woman in a parking lot near the dorms where hundreds of paid Border Patrol recruits stayed during their four-month training. Before getting out, Hahn clicked on her pocket recorder. She also left the Tahoe’s dashcam rolling, just in case.
The call to Eddy County 911 dispatch had come earlier that night from Claude Claflin, a supervisory agent at the Border Patrol Academy. In a Texas drawl, Claflin said there’d been a rape. He identified the victim as a trainee. He didn’t know her name, he said, and also wasn’t sure “how long this victim is going to be able to talk.”
As Hahn approached the group in the parking lot, she introduced herself, making small talk before turning to the trainee. “There are a lot of people here,” Hahn said quietly. “Can we talk privately?”
The pair climbed into the Tahoe. The interior stank of a blend of confiscated marijuana and old broccoli. It had been a busy day; Hahn’s lunch remained untouched. “I’m sorry it smells like feet in here,” Hahn said sheepishly.
Violet was focused on the immediate surroundings: Had anyone seen her get into the car? Would her classmates think she was a snitch?
The trainee, whom I’ll call Violet, didn’t reply. She was a 25-year-old Latina single parent who’d left her daughter at home in California to attend training. She’d been working convenience store jobs while trying to get into the Border Patrol Academy.
Violet’s answers were clipped. Hahn tried various tactics to build rapport: I know it can be tough, as a woman in law enforcement. This doesn’t have to define you. This doesn’t have to follow you in your career. Nothing worked. Violet was focused on the immediate surroundings: Had anyone seen her get into the car? Would her classmates think she was a snitch? Almost all the supervisors, instructors, and training center officials in the parking lot were men. They all held rank over her.
When Hahn returned to talk with the group, she asked if anyone knew the perpetrator. A few agents mumbled affirmatively. No one offered details or a name. Finally, she asked directly. According to Artesia police records, they identified the suspect as a fortysomething instructor and midcareer agent from Texas. (Due to the sensitive nature of the case, Mother Jones has decided not to name the man.)
Hahn paused. She’d already called her department to confer about what to do next—local police investigating federal law enforcement was always delicate. She asked the agents whether the suspect was on the premises, and none of them seemed to know. She asked where he resided. Same result. The trainee wasn’t cooperating, she told them, and hadn’t said anything about pressing charges.
Claflin, the supervisor who’d called 911, accompanied Hahn back to her truck. Approaching Violet, he asked her for “a favor.” Would she text him early the next morning, before entering any of the main buildings on campus? “That way, I can make sure that we don’t have any run-ins,” he said. “I just want to know that I know where you’re at and I know where our detail instructor is at. I don’t want you bumping into him in the hallway or anywhere else. Okay?”
“Yes, sir,” Violet answered flatly. She gave him her number and waited while Claflin bungled saving it in his phone.
Nearly an hour had passed. The suspect was still unaccounted for.
The first federal investigation into Border Patrol corruption and “excessive violence” was launched in 1930; by 1933, the government had fired every single working agent.
At its start in 1924, the Border Patrol was a small outfit, so underresourced and isolated that agents adopted an ethos of scrappy self-reliance. Recruits brought their own horses and saddles. Uniforms didn’t exist. Almost immediately, their autonomy—and a lack of centralized oversight—emboldened bad behavior.
Three years after the agency’s founding, the first “full-scale house cleaning” took place in South Texas, after an investigation into immigrant smuggling “forced just under half of Laredo’s twenty-eight border patrol inspectors and the chief patrol inspector to quit or be fired,” UCLA professor Kelly Lytle Hernández writes in her 2010 book, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol. The first federal investigation into Border Patrol corruption and “excessive violence” was launched in 1930; by 1933, the government had fired every single working agent and forced them to reapply in an effort to weed out bad apples.
Throughout the 20th century, the Border Patrol remained a minor agency. By 1975, it had about 1,700 agents; by 1991, a little more than 3,600. But the terrorist attacks of 9/11 changed that trajectory, as politicians started looking at the border through the lens of national security. With the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, the Border Patrol was placed under the umbrella of one of DHS’s new divisions, Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The Bush administration mandated more boots on the ground, and the agency complied by lowering its hiring standards. “The Border Patrol grew incredibly fast,” says sociologist Robert Lee Maril, whose book Patrolling Chaos: The U.S. Border Patrol in Deep South Texas chronicles his two years of being embedded with agents in the early 2000s. “The first victim of that rapid growth was their professional recruitment and training.”
The resulting problems shouldn’t have surprised anyone. There weren’t enough supervisors to oversee the crush of new hires. Agents with little training and less management experience were promoted as a stopgap. And because the workforce was divided into 20 distinct geographic sectors, each run by a chief who operated with little outside oversight, what happened in Texas could easily stay in Texas.
The consequences became clear soon enough. Between 2001 and 2011, the number of agents more than doubled, and misconduct proliferated. Crisis after crisis emerged, most notably cross-border shootings that hit children and teenagers in Mexico, drug smuggling by agents on behalf of cartel bosses, overtime fraud that swindled taxpayers out of $9 million, and an inability to retain female agents due to an often sexist and hostile work environment.
One of the many reports from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) during this time stated that the Border Patrol had no plan or strategy to improve workforce integrity and cited the agency’s “significant cultural resistance” to oversight. By 2014, CBP leaders estimated that 1 in 5 agents were corrupt. An advisory panel was convened at the request of then–Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson. Among its recommendations: Double the number of criminal investigators evaluating internal misconduct.
That same year, an FBI assistant director, Mark Morgan, was named chief of the Border Patrol. The appointment was supposed to send a message: time to clean things up. His outsider status was unprecedented and, Morgan tells me, one of his “most significant hurdles.”
“I came in at a really challenging time, and with that came a lot of angst among the workforce, a lot of trepidation,” he says, recalling how he’d been given a pair of cowboy boots stamped with the Border Patrol insignia as a welcome present. “You know, he never had the uniform. He didn’t go through our academy.”
That mattered.
In Violet’s dorm room, Officer Hahn worked quickly to bag and tag a set of white government-issued sheets. Violet had confided, reluctantly, that the black dress she’d been wearing remained in the room. Hahn found the dress and also entered into evidence underwear that was stuffed among the bed linens.
As she worked, agents hovered in the doorway. Artesia cops knew enough to protect their investigations from Border Patrol meddling. The reason was simple: The agents didn’t know what they were doing.
Basic police procedure like crime scene preservation isn’t generally taught at the Border Patrol Academy. Instead, recruits study immigration law, participate in fitness training, and learn high-speed vehicle pursuit and conversational Spanish. Training is proudly militaristic: Recruits shine their boots and jog in formation, barking out cadence and carrying class flags. Students take oaths to protect America’s borders from enemies and pledge loyalty to each other and the Border Patrol family.
As Hahn prepared her report, she wrote down what the Border Patrol officials had told her. A small group of students and instructors had gone out drinking at Epiq Night Club in nearby Roswell. Fraternization is forbidden at the academy, but the agents who rotated in and out as instructors had a history of partying with their trainees at clubs, bars, restaurants, and residences.
According to dozens of former agents, the Border Patrol’s highly sexualized workplace leads to pervasive harassment and assault.
Later that night, Hahn wrote in her report, the suspect brought Violet, intoxicated, back to her dorm room. She passed out. When she awoke, the officer continued, “[redacted] was on top of her, having penetrative sex. [He] did not wear a condom.” This information, Hahn noted, was relayed to her by supervisor Claflin and a CBP peer support counselor: “The student was very reluctant to talk to me. She is worried about her job…She just wants the whole incident over.”
Violet hadn’t even reported the rape; a classmate had. She was unfamiliar with sexual assault investigations. Hahn carefully explained what a rape kit is. She assured Violet that the Artesia police were entirely independent of the Border Patrol and urged her to get a sexual assault exam. That way, she’d be covered if she later changed her mind about pressing charges. The statute of limitations gave her five years. The evidence would be secured in a police storage locker.
Violet’s case is not an isolated one. According to dozens of former agents, the Border Patrol’s highly sexualized workplace leads to pervasive harassment and assault. Indeed, the first Latina ever hired as an agent, Ernestine Lopez, said she was raped by an academy classmate in the 1970s. After speaking out, Lopez was fired. She later filed suit and settled with the agency. Forty years later, former CBP internal affairs chief James Tomsheck became a whistleblower, publicly accusing the agency of covering up lethal shootings, creating a culture of evasion and deceit, and failing to conduct adequate training or investigate misconduct. Sexual misconduct, Tomsheck later told me, was “a very disturbing pattern and practice of abuse that appeared to be part of the Border Patrol culture.”
But determining the frequency of crime and misconduct within the agency can be next to impossible. It’s difficult to obtain such data without a lawsuit—and even then, compliance is spotty and haphazard, in part because the Border Patrol relies on agents to self-report their arrests. Even if they do so, an allegation such as rape could fall under more than one of the many arrest categories described in CBP’s annual employee integrity report, including Domestic/Family Misconduct, Sexual Misconduct, Violent Crimes, Crimes Involving Children, and Drug/Alcohol Related Misconduct.
According to records I received through a Freedom of Information Act request, CBP claims there were 186 alleged incidents of sexual harassment, sexual assault, rape, and/or sex discrimination committed by or perpetrated against Border Patrol agents between 2000 and 2022. At least four occurred at the academy. (CBP didn’t say whether the incidents were included in its annual misconduct reporting.)
Yet the list CBP sent me contained glaring omissions, including cases of reported sexual misconduct involving trainees at the academy from 2021, 2019, 2008, and 2007 that were unearthed in records from local court systems, the training center, or media reports. The list also failed to include Violet’s September 2019 incident at the academy, a case that has now been investigated by the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, DHS’s Office of the Inspector General, the Border Patrol’s Office of Professional Responsibility, and the local police. (CBP said OPR is still investigating but offered no further details.)
Even as Hahn was collecting evidence from her dorm, Violet was still unsure about pressing charges. “He’s an agent,” she told Hahn. “No one will believe me over him.”
The insular culture of the Border Patrol, observers say, creates a shroud of silence around allegations of wrongdoing—a cultural aversion to oversight that stands as a barrier to reform. “I think that most people in leadership positions who have a moral compass don’t want to admit there are systemic problems,” says former agent Kathleen Scudder, who retired this past March. “Because that would mean that they would be on the hook to address them, weed them out, change culture—really hard things to do.”
While Scudder was employed as a supervisor at the Border Patrol station in McAllen, Texas, an agent kidnapped, tortured, and sexually assaulted three Honduran migrants and later fatally shot himself in a standoff with the FBI. It was one of a string of high-profile crimes involving the agency; another Texas agent and his allegedly Gulf Cartel–affiliated brother, for example, were charged with working with drug traffickers and decapitating a “snitch.”
After Scudder transferred to the San Diego sector, she helped lead the response after a male supervisory agent planted a video camera in a work bathroom and recorded female colleagues. “It makes you angry when someone tarnishes the honor that you feel [as an agent],” she says. “Every time, I’d be like, ‘No, that’s not how the agency is. There are a lot of good people.’ And then someone goes and murders a prostitute…How do you defend that?…I don’t want to admit it, to be honest. I was a loyal agent and employee for 27 years and I see the good in the agency. But I can’t deny that the worst that I’ve seen has come at the hands of agents, and not the criminals we’re supposed to arrest.”
In 2019, ProPublica exposed a secret 9,500-member Border Patrol Facebook group in a report that triggered a full congressional investigation. Agents had been posting disturbing images and memes, including videos of migrant deaths, photos of dead migrant children, and rape fantasies featuring doctored images of elected officials such as Democratic Reps. Veronica Escobar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “These posts are completely inappropriate and contrary to the honor and integrity I see—and expect—from our agents day in and day out,” then-Chief Carla Provost said. “Any employees found to have violated our standards of conduct will be held accountable.”
Days later, the Intercept outed Provost as having been a member of the same Facebook group for years. So were at least nine investigators from the Border Patrol’s Office of Professional Responsibility, according to an ensuing investigation by the House oversight committee. The Border Patrol refused to share details of its internal investigation with Congress. But of the 60 agents involved in the probe, only two were terminated.
“I see the good in the agency. But I can’t deny that the worst that I’ve seen has come at the hands of agents, and not the criminals we’re supposed to arrest.”
The latest available CBP statistics (for the 12 months ending September 30, 2022) show 3,468 allegations of misconduct involving the Border Patrol, a 44 percent increase from fiscal year 2018. And the 131 arrests of agents during the 2023 fiscal year represented an increase of 27 percent over the previous year.
Recent media reports on misconduct have involved some of the top brass. In February, Acting Deputy Chief Joel Martinez was suspended after several female CBP employees accused him of sexual improprieties. In October 2022, the patrol’s third-ranked official, Tony Barker, resigned after he was accused of pressuring female employees for sex, which he has denied doing.
The GAO’s latest report on CBP, released in May, noted that the people evaluating claims of critical misconduct for the Border Patrol are often retirement-eligible agents working in the Office of Professional Responsibility as a last hurrah. According to the report, many of them found the investigative work “incompatible with their skills and what they wanted in a job.” The office only had about half the number of investigators recommended by the CBP Integrity Advisory Panel in 2014, and more than half of those hired in 2022 came from within the agency, creating “increased risks for impairment to independence.”
The day after Officer Hahn collected the evidence at Violet’s dorm, another Artesia cop, Thomas Frazier, was assigned to the case. He didn’t have much better luck. Violet “stated that she did not want to talk to anyone about the incident,” he wrote in his case notes.
Frazier, too, had tried to reassure her that his work was independent, both of the Border Patrol and the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, a separate DHS division that CBP had alerted to the “possible sexual assault.” A FLETC investigation report stated that the trainees and four instructors had been called into a senior staff building and “were giving written memorandums regarding the incident,” though it wasn’t clear what the memos said. The rape allegation was also reported to the Joint Intake Center.
Violet had no interest in talking with FLETC’s investigator: “[redacted] asked if she wanted to proceed with reporting the sexual assault. She sat quiet with no answer.” She remained unresponsive when asked whether she wanted to undergo a sexual assault exam. As for pressing charges, according to the investigation memo, Violet initially said no “and then stated she wanted to think about it, but did not want to talk to us and just wanted to go home.” By the end of that day, less than 24 hours after Claflin called 911 to report the rape, Violet had quit the academy and was on a plane back to California.
The Artesia police kept checking in with her periodically to see whether she’d changed her mind about pressing charges. (The case notes don’t mention the suspect.) In an April 2020 follow-up report, Frazier wrote that he’d spoken with CBP Special Agent Christina Barrera, who was also working the case. She’d told him that FLETC had obtained footage from the night of the alleged rape “and would be getting me the video,” he wrote. “I also spoke to [Violet] on this date. She wanted to get a copy of the report and would contact me back after she reviewed it.”
That’s when the investigation seemed to go dormant. A year later, in May 2021, Frazier was killed when his pickup struck a big rig. The Border Patrol Academy saluted him on Instagram: “All law enforcement is family.” “RIP Det. Frazier,” Barrera commented.
The final entry in Violet’s case file, dated June 2021, was from Artesia Police Commander Pete Quinones, a supervisor who’d been closing cold cases to reduce the number of open investigations. “Due to the victim not wanting to cooperate with the investigation, this case will be closed out,” he wrote. “[It] can be reopened if the victim desires.” There’s no mention in the file of Violet ever being contacted again.
Citing privacy protections, neither CBP nor the Border Patrol would speak with me about the case—or about the suspect, who hasn’t responded to my phone calls. Violet, whom I reached by phone, said she didn’t want her real name associated with what had happened.
I also spoke with Claflin, who at first insisted he had “no idea” about an alleged rape during his time in Artesia. “I don’t ever recall calling 911 about anything from the academy,” he said. He changed his mind after I emailed him the 911 transcript. “I do remember the situation,” he said in an email, copying another Border Patrol official, “and cannot provide you with any other information.”
We may never know what happened that night. Without the 911 dispatch record, the case would have been invisible to the public. Violet never pressed charges, and the suspect wasn’t interviewed by Artesia police. Her alleged rape was never reported in the press and didn’t appear to show up in the Border Patrol’s employee integrity reports. Without a victim, there’s no crime. And without a crime, there’s no problem.
When Donald Trump visited South Texas after taking office in 2017, his administration called for 5,000 new agents and proposed loosening background checks on some Border Patrol applicants, modifying the entrance exam, and waiving the mandatory polygraph test (which two-thirds of recruits were failing) for veterans and former police. During his campaign, Trump had earned the endorsement of the Border Patrol union, and these moves—and his inflammatory rhetoric—sent a signal to agents: It was time to take the gloves off.
The outcry against the proposed changes, though, was immediate. The Cato Institute, a Koch-backed libertarian think tank, crunched numbers from the preceding decade and found that Border Patrol agents were twice as likely as their Immigration and Customs Enforcement counterparts to have been terminated for disciplinary infractions or poor performance. Former CBP Commissioner R. Gil Kerlikowske told the Associated Press that expediting hiring to meet quotas was “just a huge mistake,” and former internal affairs head Tomsheck wrote an op-ed for the Hill titled “Why Is Congress Proposing to Increase Customs and Border Protection Corruption?”
Veteran agents warn rookies against putting agency bumper stickers on their personal vehicles lest they get keyed or graffitied.
Trump’s executive order stood. The polygraph test—the validity of which has long been disputed—was “streamlined,” and applicant pass numbers shot up 88 percent. Yet, recruitment still floundered: In 2017, the Border Patrol had 1,800 unfilled agent positions; in 2018, it was short by more than 2,000. By 2019, it was clear that adding 5,000 new positions was more easily said than done.
“Law enforcement has this black-and-white narrative: You’re the good guys and you’re catching bad guys,” explains El Centro agent Guadalupe “Tiny” Valenzuela. After six months on the job, that perspective shifts, he says. The bulk of agents’ work has nothing to do with bad guys. “It was when I started seeing dead bodies—really, really bad injuries. When we see infants, beet red from the sun out in the desert, and people who walked for miles, sometimes abandoned. You start seeing the suffering. And it starts to weigh on you.”
Raising concerns or asking for help is frowned upon by many of his colleagues, Valenzuela says, and people who do these things run the risk of being seen as unfit for duty. Instead, troubled agents turn further inward—to the green family. Veteran agents warn rookies against wearing Border Patrol T-shirts or hats to the grocery store or putting agency bumper stickers on their personal vehicles lest they get keyed or graffitied.
Being a Border Patrol agent is one of the least lethal jobs in law enforcement, but agents kill themselves at higher rates than local police. In 2021, CBP hired its first-ever staff suicidologist, Kent Corso, who launched a suicide awareness podcast with episodes on meditation and survivor loss. Domestic violence and substance abuse among agents have been high for years, though here, too, the agency’s statistics largely rely on self-reporting.
At the end of May, the Border Patrol celebrated its 100th birthday in El Paso with a week of events, but a black-tie centennial gala (with sponsors reportedly paying up to $100,000 for a table) was abruptly canceled. Pictures had emerged on social media of top Border Patrol officials—including Chief Jason Owens and sector boss Gloria Chavez, one of the agency’s top-ranked women—attending swanky parties in Mexico hosted by a tequila manufacturer and an uberwealthy customs magnate. The posts—which sparked questions about disclosures, ethics, and contracts—prompted yet another internal investigation. (CBP said in a statement, “We thoroughly investigate all allegations,” but did not comment on the outcome of its inquiry.)
Things have been a good bit quieter over in the Texas Border Patrol station where Violet’s alleged rapist seems to still work as an agent. CBP won’t confirm or deny his employment due to its policy of keeping agent names secret, but he is listed as a union rep on a National Border Patrol Council website.
The union’s member guide talks a lot about the privileges members enjoy, including access to a legal defense fund and union representation in administrative, civil, and criminal investigations and disciplinary proceedings—the kinds of protections that aren’t afforded to new trainees. “[I]n your specific time of need,” the guide promises, “you will have the collective voice of a strong union behind you, and you’ll never stand alone!”
Read the rest of our Border Patrol investigation here.
