Border controlBehind the recent reports on corruption in Customs and Border Protection
Two recent government reports on the status of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) – one by the GAO, the other by the DHS IG — must be considered in light of agency history, including organizational culture, rapid growth, and methods of data collection. The GAO report (the DHS IG report will be discussed in a future column), by failing to address some of the fundamental problems CBP faces, contributes to masking these real issues and, as a result, continues to expose CBP employees to systemic corruption by offering only superficial remedies. This GAO report does not demonstrate the increased efficacy of the CBP. Rather, when placed in a historical, organizational, and fact-based context, it reveals vital structural problems requiring public examination and comment.
Robert Lee Merril, professor of sociology at East Carolina University // Source: ecu.edu
Recent government reports on the status of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) must be considered in light of agency history, including organizational culture, rapid growth, and methods of data collection. The brainchild of the Department of Homeland Security, CBP is a combination of two very different agencies with two very different organizational cultures. The Border Patrol now number 21,400 agents, and 21,790 CBP officers are stationed at our ports of entry (see Snapshot: A summary of CBP facts and Figures, April 2013.) Crowded under this same umbrella are 2,366 Agriculture Specialists, 1,215 Air and Marines, along with canine teams and horse patrols. In sum, almost 60,700 men and women are employed by the CBP.
Rearranging boxes on an organizational chart, however, while well-intentioned, do not in fact successfully merge the two disparate agencies which dominate the CBP. These two agencies still maintain different organizational cultures based upon their previous histories and present law enforcement tasks. Both agencies must, in fact, battle over limited resources in a zero sum Congressional budget game.
The Border Patrol of 2013 remains the brawnier of the two, growing from around 3,500 agents prior to the events of 9/11 to its present numbers. Tasked with patrolling the border, its agents are much more likely during their work shifts to confront violence and risk their lives in doing so; these men and women spend much of their time chasing undocumented workers and drug smugglers in adverse conditions of made more difficult by terrain and weather.
In contrast, CBP officers within the Office of Field Operations stand on alert in fixed positions at ports of entry looking for stolen contraband and identifying criminal suspects entering and leaving our national. Rather than contending with individuals in open terrain and under the cover of these, CBP officers stationed at our ports of entry work in a highly controlled and built environment designed to protect them from violence acts.
While both agencies are vital to our nation’s safety and economy, these two jobs, patrolling the line and repeatedly checking and rechecking vast numbers of vehicles for goods and suspects, are as different as night and day (every day, according to CBP statistics, these federal officers admit 963,000 passengers and pedestrians).
And the fact is that the vast majority of illegal drugs continue to come through our ports of entry, not between our ports of entry.
