U.S. Customs and Border Protection this year is starting to send out key messages on immigration, trade, and other issues in Spanish-language releases as part of an effort to broaden its reach in the hemisphere — and all without any expansion of its budget.
“We’re the face of America,” said Jaime Ruiz, chief of the strategic media engagement branch under CBP’s Office of Public Affairs. “The goal is to make critical CBP information available to hard to reach audiences, regardless of their location: the U.S., Mexico or Central America, or Spain or Argentina.”
CBP is one of the world’s largest law enforcement organizations. On a typical day, its 60,000 employees will interact with up to 1.2 million visitors, inspect 67,000 cargo containers, and seize nearly 12,000 pounds of illicit drugs.
Ruiz took a proactive step to simplify all of these other daily tasks by providing travelers with information they could have used before arriving at America’s doorstep.
CBP’s Strategic Media Engagement Branch wanted to reach more travelers and shippers with news about trade, port of entry updates, and visa information to prevent both legitimate and illegitimate entrants from making the trip to the border only to get denied. They also wanted to get out regular warnings to drug cartels and human smugglers in South and Central America.
Ruiz said the idea had nothing to do with President Trump’s approach to immigration policy.
“There’s always been an interest. It’s not related to the White House. This is CBP trying to expand our messaging — knowing by our own experiences that that’s the audience that we interact with the most,” he said.
The agency started by setting a goal for its first year of taking on such a huge project with no additional staff to help. CBP issues as many as 1,200 press releases annually and decided to strive for issuing 20 percent of this year’s total news updates and tweets in Spanish from Oct. 1, 2017, through Sept. 30, 2018.
Ruiz’s team then selected the top 30 media markets for Spanish speakers and readers. A number of those cities were in the U.S., including Boston, Philadelphia, and Atlanta.
“Folks tend to think of those markets close to the border,” he said. “But you go to any gas station in Texas, Florida, California, you’re gonna see a stack of community newspapers. While you’re browsing radio stations, you’re always going to hear two, three, four, up to five radio stations in Spanish. We want this information to be available [for them].”
Even within CBP, one-third of employees have Spanish surnames, and many agents are fluent in it and rely on that knowledge to communicate with travelers who do not speak English.
Forty percent of the people CBP officers encounter speak Spanish or another language due to the U.S.’ proximity to 20 countries where Spanish is the official language.
“The Spanish language is pretty much embedded in what we do and what we are, so it was about time to pay attention to that. Spanish is also part of the [Latin American] culture,” Ruiz said. “The only thing that unites them is culture and language. They’re all different — [their] own history, cooking, traditions. Spanish language is like the backbone of Latin America, and we believe we can actually leverage that in the news releases. If we’re leveraging that news release, we’re getting a lot of coverage from media outlets in the past that would not cover us.”
The response in just the first seven months of the project has been “very, very positive,” said Ruiz.
“What we learned — just putting information into Spanish — we started getting phone calls from media we never heard of before and reporters and bloggers,” Ruiz added. “Calls from Mexico, Central America. ‘This a small village somewhere. I’m publishing your news release today, please send me more.’”
The messaging seeks to counter claims that human traffickers are known to make to people looking for a way to get to the U.S. For example, during the 2014 unaccompanied minors crisis at the Southwest border, CBP — as the first American officials interacting with the youth — learned about the abuse they were forced to endure while being smuggled.
UACs told them about being raped by smugglers, forced to carry 40-pound packs of marijuana in 100-degree conditions with no water available, and having to pay about $5,000 just to get trafficked in those conditions.
“We believed we had a responsibility because we were the first ones hearing all the stories of horror and people being killed by the train, the ‘beast,’ or many bad things happening. In the end, people made their own decisions, but we want them to have both sides of the coin,” he explained.
The Spanish releases have also allowed importers and exporters to stay abreast of CBP standards and changes to trade procedures.
One challenge with issuing press releases is the inability to track how many people the agency is reaching because some will hear messages on the radio, and others will just copy and paste press releases onto websites.
In light of that issue, CBP is focused on tracking its progress and judging the operation by how many releases and tweets it issues in both languages.
Judging from the numbers, it’s been a success. From Sunday, April 15, through Saturday, April 21 (the last full week), CBP issued a total of 52 press releases. One quarter of them were in Spanish, and 39 were in English, putting the agency above its 20 percent goal.
The agency will consider planning future similar initiatives, including French language releases for people traveling to the U.S. from Canada, where English and French are both official languages.
