Biden's border bungle unlikely to be fix with more agents

 American Update:

The Biden administration’s plea for more Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Border Patrol funding fails to address key problems facing the agency, according to a former border security leader.

The White House told Axios on Monday that Congress is failing to “do its job” by refusing to pass a border security bill that, among a host of other initiatives, would include $405 million in funding for the hire of 1,300 additional Border Patrol agents. But there is an increasing vacancy of Border Patrol staff under the Biden administration, even as CBP spends more money on recruiting incentives and lowers personnel standards; it is not so much a resource issue as it is a chronic problem with how the administration restricts Border Patrol agents from doing their jobs, Mark Morgan, senior visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and former commissioner of the CBP, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

It doesn’t matter if the administration can secure funding for new Border Patrol hires if it can’t even fill the vacant slots in the agency, Morgan told the DCNF.

“Just throwing more money and resources at it — it’s a red herring,” Morgan told the DCNF. “[Funding for] hiring 1,300 additional agents? That’s a joke. They won’t even realize that because right now, hiring is not keeping up with attrition. They’re in the hole. So to think that, what, miraculously they’re going to pass a bill that funds 1,300 more agents?”

“It’s all smoke and mirrors again,” Morgan told the DCNF. It’s like ‘Hey, we’re going to hire more Border Patrol agents,’ as if that’s the issue, and it’s not. It’s their policies that are the issue. If they went back to Trump-era policies, without any more Border Patrol agents, they’d be able to reverse this by 75%. It’s not a resource issue, period.”

The number of Border Patrol staff rose steadily during the former Trump administration, jumping from 16,534 personnel in 2018 to 16,806 in 2020, according to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG) report from January. When President Joe Biden took power in 2021 and took administrative control of agencies like DHS, the inverse occurred; the total number of Border Patrol personnel fell from 16,614 in 2021 to 16,234 in 2022.

The Biden administration is employing a variety of methods to incentivize people to apply for Border Patrol roles amid the recruiting crisis. CBP is offering new recruits a $20,000 bonus if they complete training and serve for three years and an additional $10,000 are willing to work at a “remote location.”

CBP has also turned to recruiting retired agents to fill the backlog of vacant spots. The agency has loosened uniform and grooming standards for existing agents, allowing them to display tattoos or various hairstyles, in a bid for retention.

Despite the incentives, Border Patrol agents are still leaving because the Biden administration and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under the leadership of Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas prevent them from enforcing security policies and doing the jobs they signed up for, Morgan told the DCNF. Under the Biden administration’s policies, roughly 7 million illegal immigrants have been encountered by Border Patrol since 2021, not including the number of “gotaways” — illegal migrants who entered the country without ever being encountered.

“This administration has completely transformed their law enforcement and national security mission to a mission of being a processing enterprise,” Morgan told the DCNF. “Every single day, 85% of the resources are pulled off the frontlines, relegated to perform the duties of a federal travel agency on those illegally entering, and they know that every single day, they’re handing operational control of our borders over the cartels for them to exploit to push drugs, criminals and national security threats into this country.”
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The Biden policy still looks like an open-border one that they do not have a plan to fix.  It looks like it will take the reelection of Donald Trump to fix the problem.  Completing the border fence would also help.