Going postal at the border
By John Barham

Running a fairly high fever with a sore throat and clogged ears after an all-night bus ride, I was not looking forward to hoofing it across the old Brownsville-Matamoros Bridge recently when returning from San Miguel to Brownsville. Also, I felt I would become even more ill while standing in line at the US Customs station, where I would be looking at the sneering face of Dick Cheney resting between two oversized photographs of George W. Bush and Condeleeza Rice. So, my wife, Alma, and I decided to splurge on a taxi with a border-crossing permit to take us over the new bridge at Los Tomates and directly to our Texas home.

However, neither of us anticipated encountering an obviously very edgy customs officer manning his post at Los Tomates, where, evidently very stressed, he gave no quarter to obstructed ear canals and nervously shouted demands in both Spanish and English concerning our citizenship.

After being ordered to get out of the taxi with our passports, while Alma, with a tone of desperation, was loudly proclaiming, “American citizens, American citizens!” we finally convinced the officer of our nationality. After an uneasy 15 minutes, we were, at last, allowed entry into the United States.

Having traveled the world through dictatorships, republics and monarchies and never having been treated in such a roughshod manner, I became particularly curious about the US Customs and Border Protection operation (CBP). I was concerned that there might be more than met the eye with the overwrought officer at Los Tomates.

Since 2003, CBP and its four major offices (Field Operations, Border Patrol, the CBP Air and Marine Division and Intelligence and Operations Coordination), have been under the control of the US Department of Homeland Security. Its many responsibilities include regulating and facilitating international trade, collecting import duties, interdicting terrorists and their weapons, apprehending illegal entrants, stemming the flow of illegal drugs and protecting American economic and agricultural interests. CBP has more than 40,000 employees working out of 317 US ports of entry and 14 pre-clearance locations in Canada, Ireland and the Caribbean.

In seeking to better understand what motivated the out-of-control behavior at Los Tomates, I was able to gain access to the results of a 2006 survey of federal employees by the US Office of Personnel Management. Of all federal agencies, CBP was last or near last in all indices measured, including job satisfaction, leadership, management knowledge, results-oriented performance and talent management. Certainly, these findings do not portend pleasant greetings for American citizens returning to the US.

Furthermore, the US Court of International Trade has cited CBP for improperly classifying material when it assigned unqualified chemists to testify before the court. Subsequently, it was brought out that those who were relied upon to testify were responsible for inaccurate lab reports and the destruction of evidence.

In the same vein, National Public Radio faulted CBP recently for the use of radiation-detecting equipment at ports of entry that was “…better at detecting kitty litter than dangerous weapons.” NPR’s correspondents reported that some ports of entry were so porous that Congressional investigators carrying simulated nuclear materials have entered the US unchallenged.

Not surprisingly, CBP has drawn Congressional criticism and some of the most barbed comments have come from Senator George Voinovich of Ohio, who has publicly questioned the effectiveness of CBP’s 16-week training program by stating, “For more than four years CBP hasn’t been able to identify the concrete steps to guarantee it has a skilled workforce in place to meet its mission.”

Colleen Kelley, president of the National Employees Union, seeking to spin Congressional ridicule in the opposite direction, asserts that Congress has dropped the ball: “Congress must show the public that it is serious about protecting the homeland by fully funding CBP staffing needs as stipulated in CBP’s own staffing model and extending law enforcement officer coverage to CBP officers.”

Writing last November in the publication Government Executive, Alyssa Rosenberg reiterated that CBP is confronted by massive challenges in sustaining the agency’s own self-confidence while assuring taxpayers that they are receiving their money’s worth in adequate protection in the control of cross-border traffic.

In her consultant’s study, One Face at the Border, Deborah Waller Myers has pointed out that CBP has a huge problem with “insufficient expertise,” meaning, for example, that there are oftentimes shifts at ports of entry lacking supervisors with immigration expertise. This suggests that CBP headquarters does not understand or value the responsibilities of employees who are performing daily the essential duties of safeguarding the border.

All of this brings us back to the anxious customs officer I encountered at Los Tomates, who was probably overworked and inadequately trained. Did the officer fear for his job that day? Did he have adequate supervision in the field? Whatever the answers and no matter how one slices it, it is clear that CBP is sorely lacking in direction and leadership.

In their book BorderGate: The Story Government Doesn’t Want You to Read, Darlene Fitzgerald and Peter Ferrara tell the story of Fitzgerald, who as a special customs investigator working along the southern border, encountered a tanker car loaded with 8,000 pounds of marijuana and 34 kilos of cocaine. From experience, Fitzgerald, thinking of the connection between illegal drugs and terrorist activity, reasoned that it would be a fairly simple matter to cram 10,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate with C-4 and a shaped charge in a tanker car and, after establishing the proper account, move the car virtually anywhere by telephone or internet. The result would be a traveling bomb with 10 times the destructive power that leveled the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

When Fitzgerald and other agents supporting her went to the top brass in their agency, they were paid no heed, ridiculed and eventually saw their careers ended. Subsequently, Fitzgerald and the other officers who backed her and were harassed out of the agency filed suit in federal court.

Certainly, Fitzgerald’s story is an extreme example of faulty leadership and deficient management. Nevertheless, it leads to asking just how deep an apparently flawed culture runs in the CBP bureaucracy.

While politicians in Washington pander to media sensationalism and, violating the sanctity of private property and the US Constitution, press forward with plans for a border wall, the federal agency that should be the first line of border defense seems to be in a state of confusion. Rather than duplicate the kind of structure that Ronald Reagan so eloquently demanded that Mikhail Gorbachev tear down, should not the time and effort needed to put CBP in proper operating order be expended before insulting our neighbor to the south and resorting to a Cold War relic?

John Barham, formerly a dean at the University of Texas at Brownsville, retired from the University of Missouri in 2006. He divides his time between Brownsville and San Miguel and frequently lectures in Mexico for the International Elderhostel program.