- President Trump's border security plan includes adding 5,000 more Border Patrol agents to tackle issues at the southern border.
- The job of a Border Patrol agent involves both humanitarian work and law enforcement.
- Expanding the Border Patrol by 25% raises concerns about hiring agents quickly and potentially compromising safety.
- The previous hiring surge under President George W. Bush resulted in recruitment being aggressive and screening processes not being strong enough.
- Training for Border Patrol agents was significantly cut back during the surge, leading to issues with language skills and physical fitness.
- Corruption, excessive force, and misconduct became rampant as the ranks of Border Patrol agents grew.

- Border Patrol agents have been involved in various cases of misconduct, including alcohol-related arrests and lewd behavior at public events.
- Since 2005, 77 agents have been arrested or indicted for corruption, with some agents having ties to drug cartels.
- There have been instances of excessive use of force by Border Patrol agents, including shooting at individuals throwing rocks.
- Despite these issues, there are plans to hire 5,000 more Border Patrol agents, with concerns about lowering hiring standards.
- Recruitment ads should accurately portray the challenges and realities of the job.

- The Border Patrol is hiring individuals who are kind, physically fit, resistant to bribery and boredom, and willing to enforce controversial policies in a humane manner.
- The speaker sarcastically wishes luck to those who apply, excluding individuals who are not serious or committed to the job.

President Trump's border security plan includes adding 5,000 more Border Patrol agents to address issues at the southern border. However, concerns have been raised about the potential compromise of safety and the need to hire agents quickly. Previous hiring surges resulted in aggressive recruitment, weak screening processes, and reduced training, leading to issues with language skills, physical fitness, corruption, excessive force, and misconduct among Border Patrol agents. Despite these concerns, plans to hire more agents continue, with a focus on recruiting individuals who are physically fit, resistant to bribery and boredom, and willing to enforce controversial policies in a humane manner.

Donald Trump's plan to hire more Border Patrol agents could lead to more corruption and misconduct. If only their recruitment ads were designed to attract the most suitable applicants.

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-♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ The border, the boundary that is incredibly tough to smuggle a monkey across, I am told.

President Trump has famously made securing the border a key priority for his administration, most notably through his border wall.

Something which, as we've pointed out before, he himself inadvertently found a flaw in on the campaign trail.

If they ever get up there, they're in trouble.

And I know that sounds stupid, but to be fair, you haven't heard phase 6 of Donald Trump's border security plan, Go Get Me All the Ropes.

And while that wall idea has received a lot of coverage, it is by no means Trump's only border plan.

1 of his more benign sounding, but potentially no less dangerous ideas concerns the Border Patrol.

And first, let's be clear about who they are.

They are part of Customs and Border Protection.

They are not ICE, who you may know from immigration raids.

They're also not Customs officers, who you'll see at airports and border crossings, nor are they the Borders Patrol, a group of vigilantes who defend abandoned Borders bookstores from raccoons.

No, the border patrol are the people in green uniforms who literally patrol the boundaries of our country.

But Trump, in an executive order, has called for them to add 5,000 more to tackle the many problems that he sees on our southern border.

Let's stop the drugs and the crime from pouring into our country.

You can certainly have terrorists, you can certainly have Islamic terrorists, you can have anything coming across the border.

We're gonna have a strong, strong, strong border that people are gonna respect, and the drugs are not gonna be flowing across like gravy.

Now, that right there is what happens when Donald Trump starts a sentence feeling xenophobic and ends it feeling hungry.

We need to stop Mexicans coming in like hot fudge sundaes coming into my tummy.

3 scoops, whipped cream, no cherry, because I don't do fruit.

♪ -But for the record, Border Patrol agents do a lot more than just fights, drugs, crime, and gravy.

In recent years, the number of Mexicans apprehended crossing the border has dramatically dropped, and has now been surpassed by the sharp rise in migrants fleeing violence in Central America, for whom there is a legal process to seek asylum here.

Meaning that agencies' days can frequently include moments like this.

The Boche family take their first tentative steps into the United States of America.

Within seconds, the border patrol are on them.

As we film, another 2 figures emerge, a mother and her daughter.

They're given blankets to protect them from the cold.

And that's kind of not what people expect when they think of the border.

In the Venn diagram of hardened drug dealers and people who need blankets, that middle section is pretty much just Linus.

The messy hair, the stripy shirt, the thumb sucking.

And he's high on his own supply all the time.

But the truth is, it is moments like that there that show how difficult the job of a border patrol agent can be, because in that moment, they are delivering aid and processing migrants, but later that same day, they may be chasing down drug traffickers.

So it's a mixture between humanitarian work and law enforcement, and not everyone can do it.

And that is what makes Trump's plan to expand the Border Patrol by 25% so concerning.

Because if you hire agents quickly and badly, it can actually leave us much less safe and have devastating consequences.

And the reason we know this is because we have been down this road before.

So tonight, I would like to talk to you about the last border patrol hiring surge, because it wasn't that long ago.

After the so-called bungling of intelligence leading up to 9-11, President George W.

Bush is determined to shore things up at the borders.

As part of that mandate, the border patrol expanded from 10,000 agents to 20,000.

The late 2000s saw a surge in Border Patrol agents that was matched only by the surge in the number of reality shows about people making cakes.

There were so many of those, you don't even know which 1 of them I made up.

It was, by the way, cake cucks, which I guarantee you will be in production sometime next week.

Now, to meet the surges ambitious targets, recruitment was aggressive, and the government advertised everywhere, even at 1 point doing this.

The Border Patrol spent 8.4 million dollars sponsoring this car, getting it detailed and staffing recruiting booths.

Putting the Border Patrol in such fine company as other actual NASCAR sponsors, Depends Underwear and Boudreaux's Butt Paste.

-♪ ♪ -♪ A product for, I assume, people who want their butt pasted closed.

They also ran slickly produced TV ads like this.

As a mobile law enforcement arm of the Department of Homeland Security, it is the job of the Border Patrol to prevent terrorists and terrorist weapons and all those who seek to do us harm from entering the United States.

You have to admit, they make that job look very exciting.

Although, in fairness, anything said in that tone of voice would be exciting.

I'm not sure he likes me as much as I like him.

♪ But the truth of their job is that most agents work alone, patrolling vast swaths of desert.

And while some days feature bursts of action, others can involve absolutely nothing, which can be challenging in and of itself.

It doesn't mean that it's never dangerous.

There are bandits out there, there are drug organizations out there.

What they're not really getting is preparation for the boring, non-risky reality of almost all of their career.

Boredom is a significant part of life as a border patrol agent, and they should probably train for it.

For every hour they spend in target practice, they should probably spend 10 hours watching Mozart in the Jungle.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

♪ -♪ Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

♪ But the big problem was that as they doubled in size, meeting and maintaining their hiring quotas meant that their screening process wasn't always as strong as it could have been.

It was only late in the surge that the CBP started giving applicants polygraph tests, something that most other federal law enforcement agencies do.

And to listen to James Tomshek, who headed internal affairs for CBP through most of the surge, their findings indicated they probably should have done that sooner.

The shocking discovery we found was that more than half of the persons who had cleared background investigations failed the polygraph examination.

The vast majority of them providing detailed descriptions of the criminal activity they had been involved in.

Over half of CBP's applicants who had cleared the highest level of background check were found unsuitable for service.

And some of what they confessed to was absolutely incredible.

1 applicant admitted to smoking marijuana 20,000 times in a ten-year period.

While another stated he had no independent recollection of the events that resulted in a blood-doused kitchen and was uncertain if he had committed any crime during his three-hour blackout.

Which, I'm gonna go ahead and say, Yes, you did commit a crime.

Or at the very least, you really fucked up a souffle.

And the problems didn't stop once the new agents were hired, because the training was also significantly cut back, and that caused real issues, as 1 trainer revealed, while, for some reason, being disguised as an asthmatic scarecrow.

We are disguising the face and voice of this veteran agent and training instructor because of fears of retaliation.

We went from a 20-week course to a 12-week course.

Well, they say the standards weren't lowered, but they were.

-♪♪ He sounds like Jesse Ventura after swallowing 1 of those novelty cow voice noisemakers.

And look, I know that it is really hard to pay attention to what robot Neil Young is saying there, but it is genuinely worth listening to where they cut corners.

The source told us Spanish language classes and physical training were cut back.

The person was so out of shape, I actually had to treat the trainee, and the bad guy got away.

Pretty much everybody gets through the academy.

They cut back on Spanish and physical training.

So the new standards affected agents' ability to talk to the people they caught, and their ability to catch the people they wanted to talk to.

Which seemed like pretty essential facets of their job.

It's like if the training program at SeaWorld left out putting on a wetsuit and systematically driving carnivorous whales insane.

Take them away, you're left with nothing else.

And consequently, as the ranks grew, corruption and excessive force skyrocketed.

And misconduct became such a problem that, at 1 point, the Border Patrol felt it needed to issue a memo about the fact their agents were averaging 2 alcohol-related arrests per week.

And some agents off-duty run-ins with the law were even more spectacular.

Tonight, 2 Border Patrol agents are on leave after a woman says they put on a lewd show during Cirque du Soleil, performing a sex act right in front of children.

The couple is suspected of being drunk and violent.

Now, now, I should tell you, 1 agent was found guilty of assaulting the woman who complained, but both denied that anything sexual was happening, and they were found not guilty of the sex act.

Presumably because they were at Cirque du Soleil, where everything looks like a sex act.

That is a bird person sex act, and I have absolutely no idea what's happening there, but I think it's the thing that Steve Bannon is supposed to be good at.

Since 2005, 77 agents were arrested or indicted for corruption.

And if you think about it, Border Patrol agents are particularly attractive to drug traffickers.

Remember, they often work on their own, patrolling the border, which, as 1 journalist points out, is a pretty potent recipe for trouble.

1 border patrol agent can undo an incredible amount of good that all the other border patrol agents do.

1 border patrol agent can wave in tons of drugs.

This is 1 of the only cases where someone saying a ton of drugs actually means a literal ton of drugs.

No, Kevin, you did not do a ton of drugs.

You took a Benadryl, you made out with a goldfish, and you passed out with your head in the dishwasher.

And look, let me give you just a taste of the kind of spectacular corruption involved.

Take Agent Joel Luna, who it turned out had a brother in the Gulf Cartel, and who was convicted of engaging in organized crime with some pretty striking evidence emerging during a house search.

Luna's commemorative Border Patrol badge, kilo and a half of cocaine, methamphetamine, a gun that's tied directly to the Gulf cartel.

It's hard to explain why your Border Patrol badge is in a safe with cocaine, money, and a cartel pistol.

I mean, the best I can do is, my badge had a drug problem that it couldn't bear to tell me about, so finally, it decided to shoot itself with a gun that we found on a case, planning to die surrounded by its money because its views on death resemble those of ancient Egyptians.

But even then, we are talking about a sentient police badge with an interest in Egyptology, so you're already banking on a pretty large suspension of disbelief there.

Oh, and you should know, Luna was hired during the last recruitment surge.

And CBP will tell you what they told us, that while some agents did disgrace the badge with corruption, the vast majority did not.

Although it is worth knowing that Tom Scheck, the internal affairs guy, believes the problem is much bigger than they imply.

He is part of a rate of corruption that exceeded that of any other U.S.

Okay, so it's less 1 bad apple than, oh, my God, that is a lot of bad apples.

Which, by the way, should really be the marketing theme for Red Delicious Apples.

Well, at least we got the red part right.

Red Delicious Apples theme playing ♪ -♪ Red Delicious Apples theme playing

♪ And it gets even worse, because remember, these agents have guns, and some have made very bad decisions.

And you may have seen coverage of some of the tragic incidents.

In a string of shootings by the Border Patrol that have stirred up emotions at the border, There's 1 case in particular that has become a rallying cry for justice.

The shooting of a 16-year-old boy named Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez.

They say their agents were threatened by somebody throwing rocks on this side of the fence.

But standing here, The first thing you ask yourself is could a 16-year-old boy really threaten somebody standing on top of what's at least a 20-foot cliff and on the other side of that fence?

I mean, yeah, that does seem pretty unlikely.

And to explain why, tune in next week when our main story will be gravity, arch-nemesis to the concept of up.

Now, so you know, that case is still in the courts, and agents can sometimes feel threatened by rock throwers.

But it is worth pointing out that a report which looked at 25 cases where Border Patrol agents shot people who'd thrown rocks, concluded that too many cases do not appear to meet the test of objective reasonableness with regard to the use of deadly force, which I believe is kind of law enforcement legalese for, Holy shit, you shot some people you should not have fucking shot at.

Oh, and there is 1 more thing about the agent in that fence shooting that will not surprise you.

He was 1 of those persons hired by, the Border Patrol during the surge.

And yet, despite all of these warning signs, we are about to embark upon another ambitious Border Patrol hiring surge.

And CBP will tell you not to worry about that.

That in recent years, they've improved hiring and made reforms.

For instance, they've slightly increased transparency and given agents more non-lethal weapons like pepper spray guns, as well as rewriting their use of force rule book to, and I quote, prohibits the shooting of suspects fleeing the scene who do not pose a threat to themselves or others.

And look, that is great, although it does seem to be 1 of those rules that you shouldn't have had to write down.

If you went to a zoo, and there were a giant sign that said, please don't finger the armadillos, You would wonder what the fuck had happened before that sign went up.

--WOMAN CHEERS, APPLAUSE AND WHOOPING-- But the problem is, many other reforms have not been made, and it is hard to believe that they will be now that President Gravy Drugs is in charge.

In fact, Worryingly, there has already been talk that hiring standards might drop again with suggestions like a shorter polygraph or removing parts of the entrance exam.

And most frustratingly of all, there may be no reason for us to take this risk because a report from the Inspector General for Homeland Security questions whether we even need 5,000 more Border Patrol agents, and yet Trump seems determined to do this anyway.

There is a fairly good chance he only said 5,000 because someone told him 5 bazillion is not a real number.

And look, whatever your feelings about the laws the Border Patrol have been given to enforce, and I have plenty of feelings on that, you do want the best possible people enforcing them.

Because if you don't, as we have seen, bad things happen.

This is a story about the danger of not learning from your mistakes.

And for the sake of absolutely everybody, people on both sides of the border and the good Border Patrol agents just trying to do a difficult job well, if we are going to hire all these new people, the very least we can do

And 1 tiny step would be to have recruitment ads that show potential agents what the job is really like.

We protect America, and we're hiring again.

So if you're looking for an exciting, heart-pounding adventure, maybe go skydiving or try parkour or do whatever the fuck this is.

But the Border Patrol may not be for you, because a lot of the time, the job looks less like this and more like this.

Just you, the desert, and nothing for miles around.

This is a job that can combine hours of boredom with sudden bursts of action.

And about that action, it definitely can involve people entering illegally or drug smugglers.

But a surprising amount of the time, it involves desperate migrants for whom you're the first point of contact in a system ill-equipped to cater to their needs.

This job is not for everyone, and that's why this time, we're not advertising with NASCAR.

Instead, we're recruiting with this sweet-ass Honda Odyssey, a practical car for reasonable, methodical people.

Please Make sure you read the entirety of its nuanced text before making any decisions.

And some of it's in Spanish, because it would be really useful if you could speak that.

But just to be clear, if you wanna fuck at Cirque du Soleil, this is not the job for you.

Have you ever, and I mean ever, considered having sexual relations at a performance of exotically dressed Canadian acrobats?

The point is, if you're kind, physically fit, impervious to bribery or boredom, and you want to serve your country by enforcing a controversial and ever-changing set of policies in the most humane way possible, then give us a call.

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