The US Border Patrol is facing the prospect of staff shortages in the thousands in the coming years amid inexplicably stringent testing of qualified applicants by companies contracted to conduct polygraph tests, a senior official from the National Border Patrol Council – the agency’s official union, has complained.
“We’re losing a lot of people, including those who have prior military service, who have active security clearances, and they fail a CBP polygraph,” NBPC vice president Jon Anfinsen told US media Saturday. “It doesn’t make any sense,” he added.
Customs and Border Patrol has required polygraph screening since 2012, with the measure designed to weed out undesirable candidates. Proponents of the polygraph have praised the practice, citing the danger to national security and public safety of hiring agents who have not been properly vetted.
However, opponents of polygraphs say they can be unreliable, are inadmissible in court, and cite laws banning their use by private companies for these and other reasons.
Customs and Border Patrol has been calling for the relaxation of admission rules since 2017 amid a surge of expected hiring. Media reported at the time that up to two-thirds of candidates applying to serve as border agents, including people who previously worked in government security jobs with top clearances, and former agents who left the Border Service but reapplied years later, were failing their polygraph tests, leaving literally thousands of jobs unfilled.
“We’ve got plenty of applicants. They just can’t get through the whole process,” Anfinsen said.
The CBP has assured that “the percentage of candidates who pass to the next phase of the pre-employment vetting has increased over the years due to our refining our polygraph exam to focus on our agency’s needs.” However, Anfinsen said that at the moment about 50 percent of candidates are still failing.
“We’re losing a lot of really great people because of this polygraph portion,” the union official complained, noting that rejected candidates go on to other jobs “where they’re not treated like a criminal during that portion of the hiring process.”
Former agent Tracy Anderson Torres, a veteran former agent with 11 years of service under her belt who left in 2015 but failed the polygraph while reapplying in 2018, told media that her examiners openly accused her of engaging in criminal activity, and telling her she’d failed the polygraph "bad; like, serial killer bad,” with her application scrapped, and no opportunity to appeal.
Anfinsen complained that he’s “never ever heard of an instance where a polygraph examiner was sanctioned for their behavior or anything like that,” with the end result being that “people just don’t get hired.”
The CBP spent over $7 million on polygraph services in 2021 and 2022, with the Capital Center for Credibility Assessment Corporation, a Virginia-based company run by former government employees, receiving most of this money.
Notwithstanding the ongoing crisis at the US's southern border, Border Patrol agent numbers have actually been dropping in recent years, from 19,740 in 2020 to 19,536 in 2021. That’s down from over 21,000 in the early 2010s. Anfinsen warned that about 13,000 employees of Customs and Border Patrol will be retiring in 2028, meaning massive shortages in staff if the polygraph rules aren’t fixed and fixed soon.
The US is facing the worst border crisis on its border with Mexico in living memory. Border encounters topped 2 million in 2022, an all-time high.
Former President Donald Trump, his allies, and other detractors of President Biden’s handling of the crisis have attacked the current administration for its decision to slash nearly a dozen immigration-related measures by its predecessor. The leaders of Mexico and Guatemala have also rapped Biden, accusing him of encouraging migrants and human smugglers with his rhetoric.
In his first weeks in office, Biden promised to end “harsh and extreme immigration enforcement,” and scrapped the ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy – which required those seeking asylum in the US to stay in Mexico until their immigration court dates. Biden also announced a stop to construction of Trump’s steel and concrete border wall in favor of a ‘smart’ border featuring biometrics, autonomous surveillance towers, iris scanning, DNA analysis and other high-tech equipment, and dangled the prospect of eventual citizenship for illegals already living in the United States. The border crisis has caused a surge in criminal activity in border communities, overwhelmed government and private agencies providing assistance to newcomers, and has been accompanied by a spike in criminal human and drug smuggling.
This week, House Republicans announced plans to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for his alleged mismanagement of the border crisis.