For The Border Patrol, The Long Night Of Biden And Mayorkas Is Ending

A few days ago, I was talking to a friend who had recently retired from the Border Patrol. It’s been a few years since I pulled the plug on my own career, so it was interesting to catch up with him on things that had happened since I was no longer in the loop. This might be a little inside baseball, but some might find this interesting.

There was the usual gossip about who is going through a divorce and who had been promoted (whether deservedly or not). In order to get the best retirement possible, my friend had not gone on vacation for nearly a whole year. Considering how low morale is, that is impressive.

However, he said that he used a lot of his “Mayorkas Days”. Mayorkas Days? What in the world was that? It turns out that each time Mayorkas rolled out a new unpopular policy, he was giving Agents administrative leave. This did not count as part of the Agents’ annual leave and was meant to mollify the Agents.

Of course, if Agents are going on leave (regardless of what the bureaucracy wants to call it), then that means other Agents have to fill in the gaps. So, that meant fewer Agents processing or in the field which in turn leads to lower morale. Here’s an article on it from the Washington Times earlier this year: Taxpayers foot bill for Mayorkas’ generosity; employees given $2.6 billion in extra vacation time, By Stephen Dinan, September 2, 2024.

This might be great for the Agents still working, but it costs the government because you are paying for an Agent who is not there.

When I first came into the Patrol, we would often write up I-213s in the field grabbing the bare bones essentials on the illegal aliens we had just caught, i.e. name, DOB, where on the border they were caught. Officially, the I-213 is the “Record of Deportable/Inadmissible Alien.” The transportation Agent would pick up the aliens in a van, take the aliens back to the station, in put their info in a computer, then (as long as they were Mexican) drive them back to the Port of Entry and send them across the bridge back to Viejo Mexico.

The processing was minimal and you were back to work in no time. As we got more Other Than Mexicans (OTMs), then we had to do an A-file and that could take you over two hours, especially, if you hadn’t done one in a while. It also depended on how anal your supervisor was. Thanks to Angel Maturino-Resendiz, nicknamed the Railroad Killer because he would stow away in boxcars and kill people who lived near the railway tracks, we had to take fingerprints more and more often.

Maturino had been caught several times by the Border Patrol and simply sent back to Mexico as it was not known he was wanted. The fingerprinting slowed the processing down. We used to have to fax fingerprint copies to the FBI, and the FBI loved to send them back saying that the prints were poor quality. Over time, we got electronic fingerprint systems and this did speed things up, but it still took a good two hours, often more, to process up an A File on an OTM, or, anyone with a criminal background.

With the Mayorkas Administration (again, Biden was never running things), the floodgates of illegal aliens were all being let in, but they still had to be processed. So, to speed things up in 2021, they created a new position called a “Border Patrol Processing Coordinator”: U.S. Border Patrol Creates New Position to Support Border Patrol Agents, CBP.gov, January 29, 2021.

According to my friend, it was the right idea, but poorly executed. These BPPCs were given training on how to process, but not given any immigration law training. So, if a BPPC wrote up an A File (short for Alien File, every alien caught and released is supposed to have one) you still had to have an Agent there to sign all the forms.

In addition, the BPPCs were given firearms training, but because they were not officially federal law enforcement certified, they weren’t allowed to actually carry guns—they had to leave their handguns in the armory.

If the BPPCs went to transport an alien, they weren’t allowed to do it themselves, they had to have an actual Border Patrol Agent with them. It did streamline processing somewhat, but it could have been done better. I guess they didn’t want to give the BPPCs more training and certify them as officially being Law Enforcement Officers (LEOs) because then they would have to pay them more.

Eventually, a lot of the BPPCs wound up processing illegal aliens remotely.

I was told about going to Del Rio Sector during Mayorkas administration’s migrant surge. The friend was saying that he would show up at muster (muster=roll call) and there would be almost 50 people there. Of the fifty, only about 12 would be Border Patrol Agents. The rest of the people were contractors and some BPPCs. It used to be Wackenhut Security (now called G4S Secure) who supplied the security guards, but now it’s Trail Boss Enterprises, another security firm.

There were other contractors there bringing in food for the aliens, and transporting them. The contract companies love it. They make a lot of money off the American taxpayer. I wonder that if Tom Homan starts up mass deportations if there isn’t some way of getting the extra manpower to help pick up aliens in the field. The apparatus that has helped illegal aliens into the United States may be able to be used to remove them.

For a while, they were using ankle bracelets to monitor some of the aliens. That turned out to be a joke. The ankle bracelets were expensive and the aliens were cutting them off almost as soon as they were put on.

My friend said that going to the El Paso airport to fly out, you would notice some of the trash cans were full of ankle bracelets that had been cut off. Next, they tried giving the aliens phones. However, the phones could only call one number and only receive one number, plus they were GPS tracked. Once the aliens realized the phones were unusable for personal use, those got chucked in the trash too, a tremendous waste of government money. I wish we could charge every alien who got rid of a cell phone or ankle bracelet with destruction of government property or something along those lines.

Finally, morale has greatly improved with the election of Trump. Although the Agents know the Left will be back to trotting out the Kids in Cages style hoaxes and fighting every single deportation they can in court, there is a feeling of hope in the air. It’s going to be a tough fight ahead to actually implement any deportations, let alone “mass deportations.” The next four years are going to be interesting.