Last Thursday, a full-scale battle raged in Mexico between cartel members and the Mexican military. While this fight took place hundreds of miles south of our border, the bloodshed continues to creep closer to the United States — and we’re not really prepared.
There’s just a small number of agents guarding all 2000 miles of our southwest border, and that pool grows smaller each year, with merely 16,500 U.S. Border Patrol agents currently protecting our country.
Of course, 16,500 may sound like a lot of agents. But border security is a 24-hour job, and agents take days off, while there’s also a layer of supervisory staff that do not actually patrol the border. Additionally, agents get sick or injured, taking them off the line, so the actual number of agents patrolling the border at any one time is well below 16,500. Meanwhile, to get an idea of how long the southern border is, imagine driving from Maine to Miami — now think of how many agents it would take to truly secure that massive stretch of land.
And tens of thousands of people and tons of narcotics come across the border each month. Each apprehension and drug seizure removes an agent from their current duties to handle the situation, stretching the staff even thinner.
So it’s little surprise that the Department of Homeland Security is on the cusp of a hiring crisis. In the 1990s, the United States border exploded with one-way human traffic. The Border Patrol responded by hiring thousands of new agents to fill their ranks. I was one of these agents, hired in 2000 to patrol the San Diego border. These thousands of employees, if still employed by the agencies, are eligible for retirement, depleting the already critically low numbers.
Through a 2017 executive order, President Trump called on the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection to “take all appropriate action to hire 5,000 additional Border Patrol agents, and all appropriate action to ensure that such agents enter on duty and are assigned to duty stations as soon as is practicable.” But the Border Patrol has only been able to hire 118 since the executive order was signed.
A Government Accountability Office report said, “although 328 Border Patrol agents entered on duty in the first half of the fiscal year 2018, 404 agents departed Border Patrol during this same period, resulting in a net loss of 76 agents.” It gets worse: this trend has been happening since 2013, with an average of 350 losses each year.
CBP simply cannot hire and retain agents.
According to GAO, hiring just one agent takes approximately 300 days, and that is if they pass the strict requirements. This past March, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a member of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight, Management, and Accountability, said, “These personnel shortages create national security risks. They slow the movement of commerce and put an additional strain on already overworked border enforcement workforce.”
Security Management interviewed me in July 2019 about our agents on the border suffering from “border burnout,” a term I coined and explained in the article:
It appears the Border Patrol is attempting to curb border burnout by offering a 5% retention bonus if agents agree to stay on for 12 months more. The bonuses can help, but more needs to happen.
We should implement a military to homeland security pipeline program.
Each year, 200,000 troops leave service and return to the civilian world, with countless thousands unable to gain immediate or any employment. Transitioning, or recently separated, troops typically retain current clearances, have passed a physical fitness battery, and have had a health exam within a year of separation. These are typically basic requirements for border patrol hiring and thus should be credited as meeting the needs for entry into the homeland security workforce.
This wouldn’t be unprecedented: The Department of Defense has used special programs such as Troops to Cops and Troops to Teachers to help recently separated and soon to be separated troops to continue their service.
Both programs identified troops that had a desire to continue service and provided them with a path to become police officers or teachers. A military to homeland security program will act similarly, identifying troops intending to depart service and providing a streamlined process to continued service within homeland security’s ranks, specifically a rapid path into the Border Patrol. This program not only offers troops another path to service and solves the hiring crisis, but also reduces veteran unemployment.
For years I have been helping separating troops and veterans enter the federal workforce, specifically discussing homeland security hiring. Many veterans I spoke to wanted to continue their service with homeland security but did not have any idea what careers were available to them. An expedited troops-to-CBP program can provide this guidance.
The program would not happen overnight and would require stakeholders from both sides of the aisle to sit down and make it work. They need to get it done: The men and women protecting our porous border need support now — and border security cannot wait.
Dr. Jason Piccolo (@DRJasonPiccolo) is a former Border Patrol agent, ICE special agent, and DHS supervisor. He is a former U.S. Army Captain (Operation Iraqi Freedom) and author of Unwavering: A Border Agent’s Journey.
