Hardly a week goes by without a criminal conviction or charges being filed against Border Patrol agents that swell the number of disciplinary actions taken against employees of Customs and Border Protection (CBP). CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility (CBP-OPR) has the duty to “identify, mitigate, and counter these threats or vulnerabilities which may undermine CBP’s workforce integrity and security.”

It’s difficult to measure illegal activity, especially that committed by law enforcement officers (LEOs) in a law enforcement agency (LEA). All we have to go on are arrests, convictions, and allegations of illegality. Arrests, convictions, and allegations of illegality rely upon the actions of LEOs charged with enforcing these crimes, prosecutors, and the degree and frequency with which people break the laws. This is the same problem with measuring criminal activity in society at large – we just don’t have a cosmic measurement of crime outside of surveys – so we don’t have a cosmic rate of Border Patrol or CBP criminality. All we have are the figures for terminations, arrests, and other disciplinary actions. Those figures show a stunning degree of misconduct in CBP.

Figure 1 is updated from a 2017 policy analysis I wrote that examined termination rates by federal agencies. These federal employees were terminated for discipline or performance reasons, which is “based on misconduct, delinquency, suitability, unsatisfactory performance, or failure to qualify for conversion to a career appointment. [This] [i]ncludes those who resign upon receiving notice of action based on performance or misconduct.” Terminations for discipline and performance includes corruption and other criminal offenses but is not limited to them. The average termination rate for LEOs is higher in CBP compared to other federal LEAs during the entire period although it does fluctuate considerably. Figure 2 shows that the average termination rate for Border Patrol agents (per 1,000) over the 2005–2019 period was 40 percent higher than for correctional officers at the Bureau of Prisons. Since it is so difficult to fire unionized federal LEOs, this high termination rate for discipline or performance is damning evidence of severe problems.

Since 2015, CBP-OPR has been recording the number of arrests of CBP employees. Border Patrol is the subagency with the highest number and rate of arrests in every year except 2018, when CBP Office of Field Operations agents were the most likely to be arrested (Figure 3).

The least disruptive way to reduce the disciplinary, performance, and criminal problems inside of CBP is to hire more internal affairs officers (OPM classification 1811). Internal affairs officers are responsible “for the coordination and completion of criminal, civil, and administrative investigations involving alleged misconduct, criminal activity, and/​or corruption by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) employees and related entities.” The number of internal affairs officers in CBP has risen from 174 in 2015 to 252 in 2019. Still, as a percentage of all LEOs in CBP, the number of internal affairs officers in CBP only increased from one per every 274 CBP LEOs to one per every 193 CBP LEOs. The New York Police Department (NYPD) has one internal affairs officer for every 66 sworn LEOs. At a very minimum, the federal LEA with the most extensive discipline, performance, criminal, and corruption problems should have as many internal affairs officers per LEO as the NYPD. Thus, CBP should currently have at least about 750 internal affairs officers – about 550 more than were on staff in 2019.