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Corruption at the Gates
Series Explores Lure of Money, Prestige Among U.S. Border Agents
 Part I: Blood ties and drug money, Sept. 12, 2002.
Part II: Prestige payoffs for agents, Sept. 13, 2002.
Texas-Mexico border
Map: Erik Dunham, NPR Online
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U.S. Customs Service internal affairs special agent Jim Frankson on the banks of the Rio Grande.
Photo: Marisa Peñaloza, NPR News
"He told us during debriefings he was actually addicted, got a thrill from seizures. He craved it. That later developed into a situation where he was willing to take money -- at least $80,000 from an informant for a couple of crossings of marijuana in this very spot that we’re standing."
Frankson, on the corruption case of former Customs Service agent Ramon Torrez.
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Eagle Pass, Texas is a major border crossing and the closest crossing to the major city of San Antonio.
Map: Erik Dunham, NPR Online
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Dr. Howard Campbell, cultural anthropologist at the University of Texas-El Paso
Photo: Marisa Peñaloza, NPR News
"There are these dense social networks of people who may have half their families living in Juarez, half their families living in El Paso. And that doesn’t change when they take on a job with the Border Patrol or Immigration or Customs... This creates a situation of tremendous pressure and temptation."
Campbell, on the blood ties that span the Texas-Mexico border.
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Fabens, Texas is a major border crossing point.
Map: Erik Dunham, NPR Online
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Kenneth Cates, Special Agent in Charge of Internal Affairs for the Southwest region, U.S. Customs Service
Photo: Marisa Peñaloza, NPR News
"The Mexican trafficking organizations are very efficient... it's a very easy step for them to then say, 'Now, not only do we need you to let these human beings across, we need to let this van come across. And you don't need to know what’s in there, it doesn’t need to be looked at. And we’ll put some money in your pocket for that as well.'"
Campbell, on the blood ties that span the Texas-Mexico border.
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Sept. 12-13, 2002 -- In a two-part series for All Things Considered, NPR's John Burnett examines the culture of drug money and corruption along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The conventional wisdom is that it's the Mexican officials who are corrupt. But some officials believe the culture of drugs and pay-offs has thoroughly permeated both sides of the international border.
The potential for corruption is obvious: Along the southwest border, U.S. federal employees guard the gateways into the richest illegal drug market and the biggest undocumented labor pool in the world. Federal investigators believe that there is a systemic and ongoing problem of corruption among officers for the three agencies in charge of patrolling the U.S. border with Mexico -- the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the Customs Service, and the Border Patrol.
In recent years, officers from all three of these agencies have been prosecuted and jailed for allowing illegal drugs and immigrants to cross the border into the United States in return for bribes, sex and other rewards. Records from INS and the Customs Service show that both agencies combined open an average of 53 new corruption cases a year involving drug or alien smuggling and bribery. And those are only the most high-profile cases, because there are limited resources to investigate every allegation.
Officials from Treasury Department, which supervises the Customs Service, and Justice Department, which is in charge of the INS and the Border Patrol, say they’re both trying to do more to root out dirty agents -- but they are catching only a fraction of them.
Several veteran field investigators tell NPR they believe the vast majority of these federal employees are honest, hard working and doing a difficult job. But, as one investigator says, one dirty agent working on the inside can do a great deal of harm.
In the last decade, the size of the federal workforce along the Mexican border has tripled. Nearly 15,000 inspectors and agents are stationed on the southwest divide. Officials say the federal hiring boom in the 1990s resulted in sloppy background checks. One El Paso police official describes the situation not as bad apples, but bad barrels.
There are concerns that young, inexperienced agents -- some with inadequate background checks and insufficient supervision -- were assigned to this corruption-rich environment. "The drug cartels are constantly testing for weak US agents," Burnett reports, "and finding them."
The lure of quick cash is sometimes too hard to resist, says Bill Gore, FBI Special Agent in Charge of the agency's Public Corruption Task Force. "Government officials do not make a lot of money. So you have somebody who’s making $50,000 to $60,000 a year. An illegal organization comes along and offers him $10,000 to $15,000 for just waving a carload of drugs or aliens through in the normal course of business. It's a tremendous problem."
And in most cases, the crime is made even easier to commit because it is a crime of omission. A corrupt immigration inspector at a U.S. port of entry simply does nothing but look the other way.
"You’re God on the line," says Mario Ramirez, an INS inspector who worked on the border crossing at Eagle Pass, Texas for nearly nine years, and now works as a special anti-corruption agent. "All you've got to do is wave somebody through, and nobody’s going to know."
The border culture is also part of the problem. "In America, it’s a war -- the drug war," Burnett reports. "In Mexico, it’s a game -- the smuggling game, And one that is played in the open." Burnett reports that drugs are relatively easy to get in Mexican border cities, but getting it across the border to the United States is the difficult part. Unless, of course, you have a contact within one of the U.S. border agencies willing to look the other way.
Easy money is an obvious factor. But Burnett reports that along the border, blood ties can be a factor, too. "(Border agents) may live half their life on one side and half their life on the other," Howard Campbell, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Texas-El Paso, tells Burnett. "And these people are faced with enormous temptations from the people they come into contact with in their everyday lives."
Besides money, there is prestige. In one high-profile case, a Customs Service agent won accolades for leading a task force that seized more than 100 tons of marijuana over four years. But a two-year investigation revealed that the agent conspired with a drug trafficker to arrange for some drug shipments to be seized while other, more lucrative shipments made it safely into the United States.
"The anti-drug agent and the drug smuggler -- who called each other compadre -- each got what they wanted," Burnett reports. The smuggler earned fabulous profits, and the agent won awards and the respect of his peers.
Federal agencies have cracked down on the corruption problem, with varying degrees of success. But Customs Service Special Agent Jim Frankson tell Burnett corruption is entrenched on the southern border. "Any Border Patrol agent that works this area, any inspector that works at the port... has the ability to manipulate and take advantage of the system," he says.
America's new "war on terrorism" adds a national security dimension to the problem -- a corrupt agent may never know what's in the car or truck he waves across the border.
 Browse more NPR stories by John Burnett.
Other Resources
• Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services
• U.S. Customs Service
• University of Texas at El Paso
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