Trump wants thousands more Border Patrol agents and the DHS inspector general is asking why
newsdepo.com
Despite the border being the most secure its been in decades following aggressive militarization during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, Donald Trump ran on a fake news campaign of “bad hombres” running amok. Ignoring the fact that tTrump wants thousands more Border Patrol agents and the DHS inspector general is asking why
Despite the border being the most secure its been in decades following aggressive militarization during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, Donald Trump ran on a fake news campaign of “bad hombres” running amok. Ignoring the fact that the feds already spend more on immigration enforcement than on all other law enforcement agencies combined, one of Trump’s first acts after his poorly-attended inauguration was to sign an executive order for 15,000 more immigration agents, part of this $3 billion mass deportation proposal. But according to Five Thirty Eight, “Border Patrol doesn’t know what to do with the thousands of agents Trump wants to hire”: In a memo to the leadership of the Homeland Security Department last week, the department’s inspector general said that it had “not established structure or rigorous process to determine needed staff and allocate them accordingly” and that neither of the agencies covering immigration enforcement and border security “could provide complete data to support the operational need or deployment strategies for the 15,000 additional agents and officers they were directed to hire.” For example, the memo says that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency responsible for hiring immigration agents, doesn’t collect enough information on employee workloads from field offices to determine the appropriate assignment of staff and resources to support each office. None of the agencies named immediately responded to requests for comment. As Five Thirty Eight notes, this isn’t the first time the inspector general has called bullshit on Trump’s plans. Another report from earlier this year stated that DHS attracts so many bad apples, that the administration would need to vet 1.2 million candidates in order to find enough qualified agents who will stick around. ”The report noted several challenges that the Border Patrol faces in hiring, including the requirement that applicants take a polygraph.” The administration has tried to loosen up those standards in order to aid hiring, but this could be worrisome, to say the least. Read more