The Trump administration secretly disbanded an Obama-era task force that oversaw the Department of Homeland Security’s handling of southern border issues in what officials told the Washington Examiner could be an effort to make Customs and Border Protection more independent.
Top Trump appointees at DHS ordered, in a verbal proclamation, that the department’s 60-person Joint Task Force West be shut down. Sources at DHS, including people on the task force, said it was done verbally so as not to tip off lawmakers on Capitol Hill and national security advisers in the White House. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill were not informed, despite it being protocol to do so, according to a senior Senate aide and two DHS officials who all spoke on the condition of anonymity. White House and National Security Council officials did not respond to requests for comment.
A senior DHS official with firsthand knowledge of the action said DHS is “trying to get this done and kill it to where nobody has any knowledge and they can’t be held accountable for their actions.”
Mark Morgan, the senior official performing the duties of CBP commissioner, “hates this thing,” the official said. “This is them dissolving the last of the Obama administration’s footprint.”
JTFW was created by former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson in 2014 as a way for CBP, a 60,000-person law enforcement agency, to work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Coast Guard, as well as specialty offices at DHS headquarters, to share information more easily and respond collectively to border issues. CBP and ICE have similar responsibilities, but they lack an official channel to share information and avoid duplicating efforts. The task force was intended to serve as the point between all DHS agencies that work at the border.
Two weeks ago, employees of the San Antonio, Texas-based task force were informed their jobs would be over in six days, on Oct. 1. Task force leadership was not given a chance to consult with DHS in the decision and learned later that only agency heads at CBP, ICE, and the Coast Guard were allowed input as to whether the task force was a worthwhile endeavor.
Unbeknownst to the task force members, the decision to close it down has been a year in the making. DHS and CBP officials planned to make it look like the task force had been useless in streamlining the department’s approach, four officials said. A day after JTFW quietly closed on Oct. 1, the DHS Office of the Inspector General released a report that stated the task force was a waste of money and resources, giving the department reason to shut it down eventually even though it had already been secretly gutted.
DHS officials who have worked on the task force told the Washington Examiner that it was never given a chance from day one. Two sources named Morgan as the force behind the move to shut down the task force, adding that Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott advocated for closing down the task force because it would give federal agents on the border more power and less ease of movement.
Back in 2016, Morgan was appointed atop Border Patrol, just as the task force was coming to life. In mid-2019, after being fired by President Trump from Border Patrol in 2017, Morgan was brought back and put atop Border Patrol’s parent agency, CBP. Within months, the task force was in the process of being dismantled in closed-door meetings with top brass.
CBP and its component, Border Patrol, have wanted more control of the task force, the DHS officials said. This year, CBP, whose job it is to encounter and interdict migrants, drugs, and other contraband between ports of entry, has increasingly launched investigations into border issues, which is technically the responsibility of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations arm. The task force interfered with CBP’s desire to do more investigations despite them being outside of its wheelhouse.
“CBP, ICE, and the other entities, they haven’t liked these things since day one because they felt they took away some of their authorities, specifically command and control,” said one official. “They never wanted to see these things work.”
In February, DHS officials met to discuss the future of the joint task force. CBP, ICE, and Coast Guard leaders stated what they wanted to happen to JTFW, but task force officials were not included in the meeting. It was understood then that acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli, senior official performing the duties of deputy secretary, would make JTFW “go away,” a DHS official said.
At the tail end of the 2019 humanitarian crisis at the border last summer, when more than 1 million people were arrested for illegally entering the United States from Mexico, CBP and DHS were plotting how to get rid of the task force that should have been overseeing the government’s response but was ignored and soon to be destroyed by department leaders. By tying JTFW’s hands, DHS had reason to say the task force was not useful, as the OIG concluded in its report last week.
“That 2019 immigration crisis was a train wreck,” one official said. “They didn’t allow it to be handled out of JTF West. The department refused to even utilize [JTFW] for what it was meant to be. … Instead of truly having a unified, coordinated front, it was turmoil. … I’ve never seen a more messed up thing than what I saw in 2019 with the migration crisis.”
CBP meanwhile continues to build its own investigations agencies, despite this being outside of its congressionally mandated duties.
DHS and CBP did not respond to requests for comment or make available a document disbanding JTFW prior to publication.
In a statement shared with the Washington Examiner following publication, DHS press secretary Chase Jennings said the department has “matured other operational coordination mechanisms” in place of JTFW.
“Today, DHS uses these other mechanisms to execute integrated Departmental operations,” Jennings wrote in an email on Friday afternoon. “The coordination effort previously performed by JTF West and JTF Investigations are better serviced using other forums that are less resource intensive.”
The responsibilities of the task force have been fully moved to under CBP’s jurisdiction. Task force members were told in talking points to say DHS had created a new headquarters and come up with a structure to allow for the movement of information between agencies.
“Yea,” the official said, chuckling in between his words. “That doesn’t even exist.”
