Some U.S. border patrol agents are so frustrated with Biden’s border policies that they are considering early retirement, while other disgruntled agents are buying unofficial coins that say “U.S. Welcome Patrol.” W/ @kristinacooke and @micarosenberg:https://t.co/CkG0m0cqJc
— Ted Hesson (@tedhesson) May 14, 2021
Maybe it’s just me, but having the most authoritarian-crazed, anti-migrant individuals remove themselves from the Border Patrol sounds like a *good* thing?
… Interviews with a dozen current and former agents highlight growing dissatisfaction among some rank and file members of the agency over Biden’s swift reversal of some of former President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies. Since Biden took office, border apprehensions have risen sharply.
Some of that frustration is coalescing into opposition to Biden’s pick to lead the border patrol’s parent agency, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The nominee is Tucson Police Chief Chris Magnus, who still needs to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
The discontent was partly reflected in an unusual memo from the acting Border Patrol chief last month, who objected to a new directive to stop using the term ‘alien’ when referring to migrants, saying it would hurt agents’ morale.
The interviews provide an anecdotal snapshot of the mood within border patrol and, as such, do not represent the views of all agents. One agent who spoke to Reuters on the condition of anonymity said “there are always going to be changes” between presidential administrations and that agents are “used to it.”
But any internal strife could complicate plans Magnus may have to implement and reshape border and asylum policy. Criticism from even a small number of agents could also bolster Republican efforts to use concerns over illegal immigration to rally supporters ahead of the 2022 congressional elections…
Discontent in the ranks has already led some agents to consider early retirement, six of them said. Voluntary retirements within border patrol are set to outpace last year if they continue at the current rate, according to agency data.
Rosemarie Pepperdine, a border patrol agent working in Casa Grande, Arizona, is one of those who said she was considering taking early retirement.
“We have so many people coming across, and then we’re out there killing ourselves to catch them, rescue them or whatever it is, and then they’re being released,” she said. “Why even bother?”
Asked about the agents’ frustration, a Biden administration official said the president’s approach was rooted in solutions and effective management…
Some people don’t want ‘effective management’! They wanna beat up aliens, like they were comic-book superheroes…
This is akin to doing a story about Trump supporters in midwestern diners. The children held in cages story fell apart pretty quickly so this is the new angle.
— Lucille (@Delilah399) May 14, 2021
The White nationalist BP is upset because they now have to follow the law and actually do their job. Job was never to cage people it was to enforce immigration law in which asylum is legal and a process needs to be followed. The act of dehumanizing others is addictive to them.
— El Gato Negro (@eptresist) May 14, 2021
Probably should have mentioned she is Union president representing the agents as well. https://t.co/YQ4Izt79F4
— Jon Nevins (@NevinsJ) May 15, 2021
Suzanne
Don’t let the door hit’cha where the good Lord split’cha.
Cacti
So they’re sad that they can’t be all sadistic and rapey anymore?
Oh well.
dmsilev
Poor whiny snowflakes. Not as much fun doing the job now, is it?
geg6
Fuck these fucking Nazis. Child torturers and molesters. Fuck them sideways with a rusty chainsaw.
lol chikinburd
Main worry might be if we end up having a de-Baathification-type problem with them. They’d be good watch-list candidates, I’d think.
Chief Oshkosh
@Suzanne: HA! That’s exactly what comes to mind.
sdhays
So, they’re upset that they’re having to actually catch people again?
Kay
Replacements can apply here
Betty
@lol chikinburd: I was thinking that. They will want to join police departments or become prison guards.
Baud
A lot of feds left under Trump. I don’t remember it being an issue anyone worried about.
Craig
Fuck ’em
Gin & Tonic
Let them all fucking quit, I don’t care. Nothing has moved my daughter in law’s application one inch anyway, and it’s approaching two years now.
Cmorenc
Disgruntled border patrol agents happy under trump will be ideally placed to spin up illegal immigrant horror stories to promote to not just fox but the bothsider wing of the media
Baud
@Kay:
I believe the big perk for law enforcement is full retirement after 20 years instead of 30.
Suzanne
I’d put Dr. Scott Warren in charge of ICE rather than Magnus, but I’m sure anyone nominated by Biden is a solid pick.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
Gestapo agents consider early retirement – film at eleven
Villago Delenda Est
ICE is the 21st Century American Gestapo. If their fascist members are disgruntled, too fucking bad.
Kay
@Baud:
I think we should hire people who don’t whine and complain so much. Can we just stipulate that everyone thinks their own job is difficult? Everyone.
I never would have established “Homeland Security” – I think it’s a bloated money pit packed to the gills with Right wing nuts and yet here I am contributing to paying these people. I literally just made the payment. Sometimes I don’t get what I want. Often. It’s unfair.
MomSense
Fuckem
RandomMonster
Seems like Biden should make a priority of decapitating the current leadership of the border and put in people who get the solution.
Honus
“We have so many people coming across, and then we’re out there killing ourselves to catch them, rescue them or whatever it is, and then they’re being released,” she said. “Why even bother?”
no kidding. Somehow I don’t feel in a lot of danger because ICE may be understaffed. Seems just last week I was reading about business owners whining about a shortage of workers in the US.
Kay
@Honus:
Good to know she’s clear on the mission there. I can tell the tens of millions we’re spending on training is really sticking.
She doesn’t know what her job is. She may well retire without ever having any idea what she was supposed to be doing. She also doesn’t know who she works for. It wasn’t Donald Trump! Wrong answer.
Mike in NC
I guess these slacker agents wanted Fat Bastard’s vanity wall built so they could goof off and not do the jobs they were hired to do.
bbleh
Oh noes! Some Fascist-adjacent Republican might say something bad, and then Republicans would repeat it, and then where would we be? Better not do anything then.
I really hope the Biden people are getting rid of as many Dems who are afraid of their own shadows as they are of Brownshirts in ICE.
Mike in NC
Pretty sure I’ve seen Rosemarie Pepperdine in a few horror movies.
Ken
I just drove from St. Louis to Chicago, returning from a family visit. I heard a radio ad for a plumbing company in Litchfield (population around 7000, county population around 30,000) with two positions, starting salary $60,000 per year, 401K, health plan, $5000 signing bonus.
OK, relatively skilled labor. But then near Chicago I heard an ad for a battery factory, second and third shift equipment operators and assemblers, multiple positions, starting salary $50,000 per year, 401K, health plan, $1000 signing bonus.
This is what the Burger Lord franchise owner is competing with, when he offers $10.50 an hour and a 25% employee discount on junior fries.
Benw
@Kay: in defense of the training instructors, she’s probably really dumb.
Speaking about people crossing the Rio Grande, this could only have happened in the 80’s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTizYn3-QN0
Yowza
Kay
Sad story, about the boy. Jackson is 18. He’s left home and is trying to “raise money for schooling”. Not sure what that means.
Reading what his father said it really was prudent to contact the FBI. The son was afraid his father was going to do “something big”, which was a completely justified fear. He could have been preventing an Oklahoma City.
debbie
@sdhays:
I remember hearing one complain about changing diapers.
karen marie
The article makes it seem like many BP agents are unhappy but they interviewed only a dozen current and former?
How many did they have to talk to before they found that dozen?
I am sick to death of sympathetic stories about fuckwits who think they should be allowed to dictate the terms of their employment.
The Moar You Know
Fire them all and ban them permanently from government employment.
They work for the president and the people, not the other way around.
Ken
Someone write this down in case (God forbid) we someday have a Republican administration again. Six discontented workers out of about 20,000 means the entire agency is falling apart and the administration’s policies are complete failures.
(Meanwhile, some of us in the real world work for companies where HR would love to achieve a .03% employee dissatisfaction rate….)
Suzanne
@karen marie:
Concur.
If you don’t like the job, then quit. :::shrug:::
Reminds me of social conservatives blathering on and on about the free market who now claim they’re being canceled when they don’t get the job they wanted or they get de-platformed. Hey, fuckers, it wasn’t the Left who supported giving so much power to corporations. But now they have it, and it was totally okay with you…. until you found yourself on the receiving end of that spiky, acid-tipped dick. Very small violins.
hueyplong
These people weren’t drafted.
They can quit and take jobs in Nebraska and South Dakota meat packing plants.
scav
Clearly they’ve tattooed ICE on their little hearts and it’s no lie told.
Add a voice to the fuckem choir.
Hoppie
So is this the week we’re supposed to complain about shortages of low-wage job-seekers, or the week we’re supposed to complain about undocumented immigrants? I get so confused…
Another Scott
@bbleh: The press is really good at filtering that stuff just the right way to help the GQP – it’s what they do.
FTFNYT, example #981390:
Grr…
Cheers,
Scott.
Calouste
@Ken: I see ads for Amazon offering a $500 signing bonus, and delivery and warehousing isn’t skilled work like plumbing.
Geminid
I was checking out the Twitter account of Democratic Representative Veronica Escobar (El Paso) to see if she had anything to say about this story (Escobar is pretty knowledgable about border matters). She did not comment on this news, but did comment on and link to a Pro Publica story about an ICE counterterrorism unit that in 2018-19 detained and interrogated numerous immigration activists and attorneys in El Paso and San Diego. They were not concerned with terrorism but were trying to intimidate the administration’s opponents. Pro Publica released this article May 14.
matt the somewhat reasonable
I mean, if they self-purge then that’s great.
Kay
Glenn Greenwald just spends all day on Fox News now. I don’t understand the (remote) backdrops either. Is he on a yacht?
sdhays
@Suzanne: Funny how THESE people should get to dictate the US policy, but people who are trying not to go back to the poverty wages they were working for before the pandemic began are whiny degenerate low-life lazy losers.
What could the difference be?
Amir Khalid
@Another Scott:
One of the many peeves I keep as pets is misidentification of the active voice as the passive. Yes, I get what she’s saying: The NYT is reporting that Palestinians are dying, yet tiptoeing past the fact that Israeli forces are actively killing them. Yes, that is an outrage. Yes, The NYT‘s pro-Israel bias is all too evident. But if you want to deploy the “weasely passive voice” attack, you’d better be damn sure the sentence you are criticising is indeed in the passive voice. Otherwise you undermine your own credibility. Grammatical correctness is not trivial.
Matt McIrvin
@Amir Khalid: The Language Log blog has been complaining about this kind of thing for decades to no apparent effect.
Geminid
@Geminid: Born in 1969, Veronica Escobar first worked in politics as communications director for El Paso Mayor Raymond Caballero. After the liberal Caballero was defeated in 2003, Escobar and contemporaries Susie Byrd, Steve Ortega, and Beto O’Rourke created an informal alliance to bring forward looking governance to their city. They all went on to public office and were called “The Progressives.” Escobar was the powerful County Judge of El Paso until she succeeded Beto O’Rourke as Congresswoman, another talented member of the Democrats’ Class of 2018.
Geminid
@Kay: Greenwald takes a break from Fox News every now and then to appear on the Jimmy Dore Show.
Soprano2
It’s amazing, they’re mad because people who are seeking asylum are being released into the U.S. instead of being kept in Mexico! We went back to the policy of 4 years ago, so they’re mad. I guess they think their only job is to throw people out of the U.S. Fuck ’em.
Amir Khalid
@Geminid:
Ah, Jimmy Dore. One of Cenk Uygur’s Bernista Pundit Army.
JanieM
@Amir Khalid:
I’m so glad you’re here to say this.
ETA: From a comment made on the Crooked Timber blog some years ago:
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
the Green Party got .26 of 1 percent in the election. It was their worst showing…. ever. Literally.
all the collective screaming and shouting by the haters on their little internet shows and twitter feeds and it amounted to a big fat bupkis.
talk about impotence.
dm
Maybe someone should tell them that “US Welcome Patrol” should be part of their job description. On the obverse side they can put:
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me”
Steeplejack
* DVR Alert *
Run Lola Run (1998) coming up on TCM at 2:00 a.m. EDT. “A woman (Franka Potente) finds out she has only 20 minutes to save her lover from being killed by a local criminal.” Trailer here.
Mary G
These challenge coins are a stupid tribalism that needs to go. You see right-wing bozos on Zoom with giant racks and frames of them.
James E Powell
@Geminid:
Has he been on Joe Rogan? I understand that’s where people go when they’ve really gone ’round the bend.
lafcolleen
@Geminid: I know someone this happened to. she’s an immigration attorney traveling to Mexico with her family – she was going for work but went early for a vacation. she and her daughter were traveling separately from her husband. She was stopped just over the border at the request of the US and kept for over 24 hours with her daughter in a freezing cell. Her husband couldn’t get the child released to her. They also refused to give her her medications. just a grotesque mockery all around.
Zanamu
There is a huge difference in experiences when I travel abroad alone, and when my husband, an Iranian-born US citizen travels alone or with me. Last time I entered the US on a solo trip (9/19), I don’t think I encountered a human, and was basically waved through. My husband, on a separate trip (entering the US in 8/19) was detained in Germany for several hours for the crime of having been in Iran for too long – a term apparently defined as “more than 6 weeks.” Other Iranians were separated from their US-born children in the same incident. Oddly, not a single Nebraska Congresscritter was interested in this issue, but that 2am phone call from Germany led to an absolutely terrifying morning, in which I was powerless to assist my spouse, beyond contacting our family attorney. We have rarely been treated with even the most basic of courtesies when travelling together – we are well rid of any ICE personnel who are aggrieved that they are no longer to torture/maltreat people crossing the border. So sad that they aren’t allowed to abuse people as openly as in the past.
Lacuna Synecdoche
Reuters via Anne Laurie @ Top:
What does he think calling migrants aliens does for immigrants morale?
lowtechcyclist
Everybody, one, two, three:
Fuck. Their. Feelings.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
@James E Powell:
Mike G
objected to a new directive to stop using the term ‘alien’ when referring to migrants, saying it would hurt agents’ morale.
WTF? Snowflakes getting all pouty because they can’t use a magic word?
J R in WV
@geg6:
You’ve been reading my old comments, haven’t you?!?!??
I’m trying to get a little bit away from using the rusty chainsaw imagery too often, but in this case, I think you’ve got to let people know where you really stand!
Well put, Geg6, and I agree with you totally about ICE, Border Patrol, etc. NO question, these folks are mostly stone cold fascists in every way. There are people in these agencies who are human beings, but by far the majority are Nazis with all the cold hate that includes.