YUMA, Ariz. — One agent protested that he didn’t join the Border Patrol to look after children in custody. Another asked why a policy to make asylum-seekers wait in Mexico for court hearings wasn’t being used more. And one turned his back on the senior officials who had come to listen.
Unsurprisingly for anyone who’s been tracking migration along the United States’ southern border, the recent showdown happened in Yuma, Ariz., where encounters with migrants illegally crossing into the country from Mexico jumped more than 20-fold in December from a year earlier.
Discontent among the ranks is only one of the challenges Chris Magnus faces as the new leader of the United States’ largest law enforcement agency. Magnus, who was sworn in this month as commissioner of the Border Patrol’s parent agency, Customs and Border Protection, also faces persistent allegations that his agency is mistreating migrants, failing to recruit more women and is at the mercy of a broken asylum system.
Magnus might seem like an unconventional pick. When he was the police chief in Tucson, Ariz., he rejected federal grants to collaborate on border security with the agency he now leads and kept a distance from Border Patrol leaders in a region where thousands of agents are assigned.
In his first interview as commissioner, Magnus acknowledged morale problems and outlined some initial steps meant to fix them. He had no simple answer to address migration flows.
“There have always been periods of migrant surges into this country for different reasons, at different times,” he said last week. “But I don’t think anybody disputes that the numbers are high right now and that we have to work as many different strategies as possible to deal with those high numbers.”
Magnus noted the growing number of migrants from countries outside of Mexico and Central America, a trend that has been especially strong in Yuma.
Under a public health order known as Title 42 that was designed to limit spread of COVID-19, Mexico takes back migrants from the U.S. who are from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras or El Salvador and are denied a chance to seek asylum. Other nationalities are eligible for expulsion, but the U.S. often won’t fly them home due to the expense or strained diplomatic relations with their home countries. Instead, they are often quickly released in the U.S. to pursue asylum.
“There’s a lot of frustration,” said Rafael Rivera, president of the National Border Patrol Council Local 2595, a union that represents agents in the patrol’s Yuma sector, which has seen a huge increase in such migrants. “They feel like there’s no consequences, that we have an open border.”
The number of migrant encounters on the U.S.-Mexico border totaled nearly 154,000 in January, a 15 percent decline from December, following three months of increases, according to court records in a suit filed by the state of Texas challenging Biden administration immigration policy. Just over half of the people encountered were quickly expelled under the public health order.
In December, U.S. officials stopped Venezuelans at the border nearly 25,000 times, which was more than double September’s count and more than a hundred times the roughly 200 they made in December 2020. Venezuelans trailed only Mexicans in the number stopped at the U.S. border in December.
In the Yuma sector, which stretches from California’s Imperial Sand Dunes to western Arizona’s desert and rocky mountain ranges, Venezuelans were stopped nearly 10 times more than Mexicans in December. Colombians, Indians, Cubans and Haitians also outnumbered Mexicans.
Magnus told the AP that migration flows are “increasingly complex” and that the U.S. was “doing our best to build and take advantage of relationships with these different countries that migrants are coming from.”
