WASHINGTON -- Five days after his inauguration, President Donald Trump ordered the Department of Homeland Security to add 5,000 Border Patrol agents to a staff of roughly 20,000. But instead of gaining agents, the Border Patrol has been losing them.
A Government Accountability Office report last week found that attrition has outstripped improvements in recruiting and hiring.
Rep. Filemon Vela, a Texas Democrat, requested the report along with three other representatives and two senators.
The Border Patrol, part of Customs and Border Protection and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, more than doubled its recruitment budget from $432,775 in fiscal 2015 to $1,019,182 in 2016 and $1,019,940 in 2017. The bolstered recruitment efforts were effective. Applications increased and training sped up.
Improvements cut the average time from a job announcement closing to deployment of an agent from 628 days to 274 days. In the first half of 2018, the Border Patrol hired nearly double the number of agents it brought on over the same period in 2017.
But it wasn't enough to keep up with departures.
In 2017, the Border Patrol posted a net loss of nearly 400 agents.
That left staffing at almost 7,000 below Trump's target.
Customs and Border Protection officials say that low pay -- the starting salary is $52,583 -- and postings in remote, undesirable locations make retention hard.
Unemployment is also at a 10-year low. That also makes it harder to recruit and retain agents, said Doris Meissner, a former Immigration and Naturalization Service director who now works at the Migration Policy Institute.
Customs and Border Protection faces competition from other branches of the federal government. Last year, 39 percent of Border Patrol agents who quit left to go work for another federal agency.
Trump's 2019 budget request would have provided $211 million to hire 750 more Border Patrol agents. The latest funding bill from the Senate Appropriations Committee provides enough for half that many new agents. Last year, Congress rejected funding for any additional agents, with lawmakers noting that the agency was already well below its authorized staffing levels and hadn't been able to fill existing vacancies.
Ali Noorani, executive director of the immigrant advocacy group National Immigration Forum, said the administration's push for more border agents is a "strategy of throwing more money at the problem, and is not a good use of taxpayer dollars."
Some Republicans have drafted bills aimed at boosting the number of agents.
Rep. Will Hurd, a Texas Republican, introduced a bill in May with Vela to make it easier for Border Patrol agents to collect overtime.
"We already have dangerous manpower shortages at the border; we cannot afford such high turnover as well," said Rep. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., who is co-sponsoring the measure. "Fixing these compensation concerns will address one of the problems causing lack of retention of these highly qualified individuals."
Last year, Vela and another Texas Democrat, Rep. Henry Cuellar of Laredo, co-sponsored a bill that would make it easier for Customs and Border Protection to hire law enforcement and military veterans by letting them waive the requirement to pass a polygraph test.
The bill passed the House, but stalled in the Senate.
A Section on 07/07/2018