BAD TREND

Criminal Misconduct by Border Patrol Officers Reaches Five-Year High: Report

According to an internal government report, arrests of Border Patrol employees shot up 11 percent in the past year.

According to an internal government report, criminal misconduct by border patrol officers has reached a five-year high. The unredacted report, obtained by Quartz, details data on officer misconduct for the 2018 fiscal year, which ended on Oct. 1. According to the report, arrests of Customs and Border Patrol officers and Border Patrol agents shot up 11 percent from the 2017 fiscal year. There were a total of 286 arrests—ranging from fraud to capital murder—of CBP officers this past year, giving the agency’s officers an arrest rate of about 0.5 percent. While the percentage of arrests per the agency’s more than 600,000 employees may appear low, James Tomsheck, CBP’s chief of internal affairs from 2006-2014, told Quartz that it is actually “high for any organization.”

Of the arrests, 11 agents were arrested twice; one was arrested four times; and one was arrested five times. When broken down into categories, the highest number of arrests fell under “drug/alcohol-related misconduct,” according to Quartz. “[A]n unacceptable number of CBP employees are arrested each year for violating federal, state, or local law,” reads the report. In addition to arrests, “approximately nine percent of of the total CPB workforce engaged in some degree of misconduct resulting in formal disciplinary action” during the past year, according to the report.