Roughly one-quarter of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who responded to a survey plan to quit their jobs in the coming year, according to Department of Homeland Security Office Inspector General Joseph Cuffari.
Cuffari said neither agency has a plan to deal with staffing issues that may arise due to problems cited by the agents. These include an increased workload, irregular border policies, being assigned tasks unrelated to law enforcement, lack of adequate resources, and working excessive overtime.
Cuffari said the survey was sent to 577,000 CBP and ICE agents. He presented the report to the House Oversight Committee’s Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs hearing on June 6. More than 9,300 agents responded to the survey.
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) was critical of Cuffari as well as the report, which he called “deeply flawed, politicized, and problematic.”
“This is a report that would not pass muster in any serious survey work,” Garcia said.
Subcommittee Chair Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) implied that Democrats’ criticism of Cuffari was politically based.
“I realize Dr. Cuffari was appointed by Donald Trump, and some people will never get over that,” Grothman said.
According to the report, from FY 2019 to FY 2022, migrant encounters increased by 143 percent, from 978,000 to 2.4 million.
The report states that staffing levels must catch up with the increased workload. In addition, the number of agents who qualify for retirement is expected to spike in 2027.
This could be a problem, Cuffari said.
According to the report, CBP spent $37,9 million on “details” from 2018 to 2022 for agents temporarily assigned extra duties, sometimes far from their homes.
Cuffari says this “creates turmoil for the agents and their families.” He said agents reported being sent on details at the southwest border for 30 to 60 days at a time.
“It’s a constant churn,” Cuffari said.
The southwest border also logged 5.1 million hours of overtime, costing $403 million in gross overtime pay. In the first seven months of FY 2022, CBP recorded 881,000 hours of overtime. The report reads that that’s equivalent to 14 extra work days for the year.
Agents reported feeling demoralized because they must spend hours doing administrative work, helping manage migrant processing centers, and feeling pressured to process illegal migrants quickly instead of securing the border as they were trained to do.
The report shows that 71 percent of CBP agents and 61 percent of ICE agents that responded feel their stations are not adequately equipped. Cuffari told the subcommittee that many stations lack the technology for tracking illegal migrants. He said he found DHS personnel using paper records and whiteboards to track people.
This has increased the number of so-called “gotaways.” These are illegal migrants that escape before they can be tracked. In FY 2019, there were a reported 150,090 gotaways. This quadrupled to 605,115 in FY 2022.
Democrats on the committee said the real issue is the Republicans’ refusal to pass immigration reform. They said the Biden administration provided the resources needed to secure the border.
Garcia said the report data were gathered by voluntary participation in a survey. He said the report itself states that the data could not be verified. He told Cuffari the survey was riddled with math errors and no more dependable than “a Twitter survey.”
Garcia and other Democrats also took Cuffari to task for not notifying Congress immediately upon learning the Secret Service had deleted text messages during an investigation of the Jan. 6 protests.
Cuffari said the data could not be verified because DHS didn’t provide key information when requested. He said he is working with DHS leadership on recovering any deleted text messages.
Garcia also pointed out that Cuffari is being investigated by the Council of Inspectors General and that watchdog groups have criticized him for allegedly ignoring improprieties in DHS. Garcia said a survey draft report revealed that many IG office employees feared speaking out about issues.
“He no longer has the support of his workforce,” Garcia said.
Agents Say Policies Are the Problem
Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) said the report confirms what anyone who visits the border knows. Biggs said the answer is always the same when he asks border agents how things are going.
“They ain’t going good,” Biggs said.
Grothman said the criticism of Cuffari is nothing more than an attempt to divert attention away from the real issue on the border. He said he has personally spoken to CBP and ICE agents.
“They uniformly say that the biggest problem is not a lack of personnel. It is the policies of the Biden administration and that they got rid of the remain-in-Mexico policy,” Grothman said.
Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) agreed. He took issue with the idea that more people would correct the problems at the border.
“Less people crossing the border illegally, that would help, wouldn’t it?” Perry said. “The solution is not to hire more people.”
