Given the long-running and intense illegal immigration drama on the U.S-Mexico border, you might expect low morale for employees of Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Now the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General has documented it. For details, Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke with Acting Deputy IG for Audits, Kristen Bernard and from Audit Manager David Lu.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin And what you were looking at, I guess primarily was how well DHS management is handling CBP and ICE people, given what is going on. Let’s begin with a survey that you did. You got a big response from agents on the front lines. What did they tell you?

Kristen Bernard I just wanted to point out first, before we talk about the survey, that the survey was used in conjunction with our audit evidence. So David and his team did conduct over 30 site visits and they were able to meet with just actually over 200 CBP and ICE personnel and and really witness in person conditions on the border. We conducted the survey to just better understand the challenges associated with staffing. We received 9,300 responses from our survey, and it really just went a long way to confirm what we had witnessed as conditions along the border and just serve to confirm our other sources of evidence.

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Tom Temin Right. It’s probably basic, but we should establish the fact that because of the large numbers of migrants that have been coming and going and we’ve seen all this on cable TV endlessly, that is a workload for the federal employees there on the front lines. Correct?

Kristen Bernard Correct. That is correct.

Tom Temin All right. And so what did they tell you about their morale and how they feel about the job? Is there a real effect there from this surge of migration we’ve been witnessing?

Kristen Bernard That’s a good way to put it, because the health and the morale issues are are really the effect. That’s the cumulative effect of what we saw from the conditions, the operational conditions that they’re working in. We heard a lot about the burden of the unknown from going on details in some cases repeated details, in some cases not having advance notice when you would need to travel and just the duties that they were conducting when they were at different locations outside their duty station, oftentimes they were performing other duties that were different from their primary law enforcement duties. So I think all of these conditions combined just resulted in what we directly heard from them as low morale, stress, exhaustion, in many cases, fatigue. These were really common themes, both across the interviews that we conducted and overwhelming and our survey responses.

Tom Temin And what about the staffing levels relative to that level of workload? That’s an issue, too. One of the reasons, fair to say, that they are working, say, overtime or working, I don’t. Do they do two shifts in a row, that kind of thing, because there’s just not enough agents?

Kristen Bernard That’s correct. And I think we saw every possible combination. Let me first say that as the migrant encounters have increased, doubled in some cases, the staffing levels for both CBP and ICE had remained relatively flat. So what they’re doing is supplementing the searches with details from other DHS agencies and from other CBP and ICE locations.

Tom Temin So is the result that, as you said, sometimes people are detailed to fill out. Sometimes the people that were assigned to that job in the first place have to work overtime without choice. And that’s the range of options just to keep operations from getting too bad.

Kristen Bernard That’s correct. And we saw both mandatory details and or voluntary details and mandatory details.

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Tom Temin All right. And let me just ask this Is one of the elements contributing to the difficulty of the job, the fact that they’re not dealing with factory output, for example, or producing something at a high rate of speed. They are dealing with illegal, or they might be, human beings and they see children, they see families in distress. They see people fleeing horrible conditions in their own countries. I mean, these are not undifferentiated lumps coming by, but the fact that there’s human interaction, that must be a real stressor, I would think.

Kristen Bernard It certainly is. I think what we saw during the audit, definitely CBP and ICE are extremely committed. They’re committed to the mission and and they’re committed to to doing this work. But day in, day out, working overtime for prolonged periods, especially in a law enforcement environment. It takes a toll. And I think that’s where our studies come in. We were able to conduct some benchmarking across similar operational conditions and just confirm what those work stressors look like when you are working under high pressure, high stress environments day in and day out and dealing with those operational challenges.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Kristen Bernard, acting deputy IG for audits at the Homeland Security Department’s Office of Inspector General and David LU, audit manager. So this is an ongoing situation. Hopefully it won’t go on forever, but it is had its effect. What were your recommendations to Homeland security, David?

David Lu Thanks, Tom. So DHS is kind of like the first point of contact for those seeking to enter the country legally or illegally. And so we try to make three recommendations for a strategic staffing model. And after action reviews and better communication with the frontline staff. So in our first recommendation, we basically told them to look at a federally funded research and development center and try to get a complete full assessment of the staffing needs at the Southwest border so that we can find ways to strategically implement recommendations based on that assessment. Like you said they can’t continue to work in this high stress environment and kind of like these new higher levels of immigration and use these patchwork methods of detailing and overtime, they have to kind of figure out what can we do more holistically to address this situation. So that was the first recommendation. That one DHS non-concurred with. They felt like they have staffing models in place. They believe that it would be duplicative of their current efforts and that they also don’t have the funding needed to conduct this type of assessment.

Tom Temin Yeah, let me just press you on that point. In some agencies, they somehow are unable to hire enough people to fill their statutory and budgetary authority. Are they do they have greater headroom in the number of bodies they could have in those jobs? They just haven’t been able to get them in to stay.

David Lu So I believe the data that we looked at, the DHS like CBP and ICE specifically their authorized number, is they have hired pretty close to it every fiscal year that we looked at from ’19 to ’22. So but at the end of the day, you can keep hiring as many people, but that’s only part of the solution to kind of help manage the situation at the southwest border.

Tom Temin And there were a couple of other recommendations then beyond the the staffing.

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David Lu Yes, sir. So we because DHS started implementing the Southwest Border Coordination Center, the SBCC, that was fairly new in FY 22, they basically come in and they assess the situation and find ways to maneuver CBP and ICE personnel to kind of help decompress any situation or any capacity levels. Any time a Border Patrol station or facility is experiencing a huge surge in capacity and having capacity issues. So what we did recommend is, take a look at the after action reviews, things that they’re working on, because SBC are working on ways to kind of help make processing go faster, find ways to decompress faster and get guys on the ground like contracts and vehicles to move personnel. So that was a second recommendation.

Tom Temin And they concurred with that one.

David Lu Yes, they concur with that one. And the third one was basically just to find ways to communicate what they are doing with frontline personnel. I think that’s a really important aspect because guys who are dealing with this every single day, it’s helpful for them to kind of know what’s happening and how to move resources around. And my general purpose.

Tom Temin Right. Knowing management is aware of the situation and cares about it sometimes is not half the battle, but it sure is a contributor to improvement, probably, I would think.

David Lu That is correct.

Tom Temin So what happens now? This report is issued. It’s a pretty revealing report. I actually read most of it. And Congress must have an interest in this one, too, because ultimately the solution to whatever happens in immigration in this nation rests on Capitol Hill. They haven’t done much about it. Maybe they can’t do much about it, given the makeup of Congress, but it seems like this would have wider reading relevance than simply Homeland Security management.

Kristen Bernard That’s correct, Tom. And I think I think our key takeaway is certainly there’s a lot outside of DHS control, as you just described, but really, DHS just needs to better understand the current immigration environment. Of course, there will be fluctuations and changes in policy, but what we’re asking is that they be more strategic with their planning, their staffing planning and adjusting their operations so that they’re better positioned to address all of these issues that are affecting their law enforcement personnel.

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