Border Patrol - Corruption and Ethics
Rise in border graft feared - Some think 6,000 additional patrol agents will make corruption problem worse
From The Houston Chronicle (online). By James Pinkerton, 06/17/07.
Border Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez first noticed the curious behavior of a longtime deputy last spring.
The Zapata County lawman wasn't coming to work very often. Then, he began wearing expensive clothing. More strangely, the deputy was spotted a few times in his unmarked car in border areas where narcotics traffickers were under surveillance. On Tuesday, the sheriff's suspicions seemed to be confirmed when ex-deputy Manuel Martinez, 43, was arrested by FBI agents on charges of extorting more than $20,000 in bribes from drug traffickers. Martinez, who took office in January as a justice of the peace, is also charged with passing on bribes to a county official and a building code inspector.
A spate of recent high-profile arrests not only have given border law officers a black eye, they are worried that corruption of lawmen is on the rise. Heightening that concern is the looming arrival — and potentially more corruption — of thousands of new law enforcement personnel on the border. ''You see a lot more of (the corruption) than before," said Gonzalez, whose office assisted in the FBI investigation of the three officials. ''If you look at it real closely, as time goes by, I guess everybody's morals and ethics are eroding away."
The arrests of the former deputy and two other Zapata County officials came a day after three Texas National Guardsmen — assigned to help Border Patrol agents with immigration control — were charged with smuggling 24 illegal immigrants in a van leased to the guard.
Also on Monday, a veteran Border Patrol agent was sentenced to 16 months in jail for transporting 11 illegal immigrants he picked up outside Laredo last July. In March, a U.S. Customs inspector was sentenced to 14 years in prison for taking bribes to allow drugs across a border bridge.
These recent cases were not isolated. The inspector general's office of the Homeland Security Department reported last week that 282 employees of Customs and Border Protection stationed on the Southwest border have been investigated for corruption since fiscal year 2004. And 52 of those cases were investigated so far this year, compared with 66 in all of last year. There were 151 cases in Texas in that time.
The Bush administration last year stepped up recruitment efforts to boost the U.S. Border Patrol to 18,000 agents by December 2008, an increase of nearly 6,000 agents. On Thursday, President Bush called for $4.4 billion in immediate funding for border security proposed in the pending immigration bill. ''The graft and corruption will increase," said Robert Lee Maril, a sociologist who spent two years researching a book on Border Patrol operations in South Texas.
DHS spokesman Russ Knocke, though declining to comment on the Texas Guard and Border Patrol cases, said corruption in federal agencies is ''really quite rare." ''Even the finest law enforcement agency in the world is not immune to the potential bad apple," he said.
A fast-growing agency
Experts say that heightened border security has allowed human trafficking organizations to greatly increase their smuggling fees. The criminal cartels that control narcotics and human smuggling have ''astronomical" amounts of money to use on bribes, Maril said.
''They're tightening up the border, so the criminal organizations are finding it a little bit more difficult to get across," said Maril, who chairs the sociology department at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C. ''So they're spending a little more to buy off Border Patrol agents and managers. It's just part of the overhead." Maril said the quick buildup in the agency may lead to further corruption. ''In this rush to graduate so many agents I think they have considerably lowered their standards, and I think that's going to come back to bite them," Maril said.
T.J. Bonner, head of the 11,000-member National Border Patrol union, predicts that stepped-up recruitment could result in less time to conduct thorough background investigations of new recruits. ''It's inevitable that we will see more of these cases, because the shortcuts are creating the perfect storm for corruption to flourish," said Bonner, a Border Patrol agent in San Diego. ''And from the standpoint of the men and women on the front lines — the overwhelming majority who are honest — it's a disaster because these corrupt individuals are our backup."
The impact of bribery
Knocke, the DHS spokesman, said the agency is on track to expand the current 13,500-agent Border Patrol force up to the 18,000 goal by late 2008.
''I can tell you we go to great lengths to ensure we are recruiting, hiring and training law enforcement professionals with the integrity and morality that Americans expect," Knocke said.
Don Clark, a security consultant who headed the Houston FBI office until 2000, said if the corruption isn't addressed now the problem will become more widespread. "Let's face it, these soldiers and Border Patrol agents, none of them get paid high-priced salaries," Clark said. ''Plus, they are waving money in their faces right and left." As an example, the U.S. Customs inspector who was sentenced in March pocketed $1 million in bribes.
Martinez, the ex-deputy, was jailed without bail until a June 20 detention hearing, U.S. court officials said. Attempts to contact his defense attorney were unsuccessful. Zapata County Judge Rosalva Guerra said Martinez was known in the small border community as a dedicated family man, as well as a veteran deputy before taking office as a justice of the peace. ''It was a sudden shock to all of us — we never expected this to happen," Guerra said.
Laredo defense lawyer Marcel Notzon, who is representing one of the Texas National Guard members charged with immigrant smuggling, said the chronic poverty along the border engenders corruption. ''In general, maybe it's because of the amount of money that's being offered, or that the economy is not as vibrant as it could be," he said.
New fear: infiltration
Notzon said his client, decorated Iraq war veteran Sgt. Julio Cesar Pacheco, will plead not guilty to federal charges that he was part of a ring that smuggled undocumented migrants from the border to San Antonio. ''I think the case was hastily put together," Notzon said.
Watching out for corruption is now part of the job description for federal law agencies, several officials said. ''We need to be ever vigilant on how smugglers will try and defeat any weakness in our defenses, including attempting to compromise law enforcement," said Alonzo Pena, who heads the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in Arizona.
The Zapata County sheriff fears cartel leaders are grooming members to join police agencies. ''The information we have is some of these cartels are trying to infiltrate local, state and federal law agencies on the border," Gonzalez said. ''They're trying to get some of their people to apply for jobs, so they will have control of operations on the border."
james.pinkerton@chron.com
Retrieved June 17, 2007 from http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/4896091.html