One portion of Border Patrol application process making it difficult to hire new agents

U.S. Border Patrol is reportedly having difficulty finding new agents to replace outgoing retirees — even as the Biden administration is shattering all-time records for border crossings — and the reason why is reportedly entirely self-made.

The simple problem, according to National Border Patrol Council vice president Jon Anfinsen, is that applicants are failing their polygraph test left and right.

“We’re losing a lot of really great people because of this polygraph portion,” he told Fox News this week.

But they’re not failing the test because they’re lying, Anfinsen argues. They’re failing the test because there’s something wrong with the test itself.

This is made clear by simply looking at the data. In 2017, “65% of CBP applicants who took a polygraph failed, compared to 36% in the Drug Enforcement Agency, and fewer than 35% in both the U.S. Secret Service and FBI,” according to Fox News.

That’s a big difference, and it’s causing a big problem.

“We’re losing a lot of people, including those who have prior military service, who have active security clearances. … It doesn’t make any sense,” Anfinsen said.

Instead, eligible agents are just seeking work elsewhere.

“They’ll go any other place where they’re not treated like a criminal during that portion of the hiring process,” he explained.

That’s exactly what happened to Tracy Anderson Torres, a former Border Patrol agent who signed up in 2004, years before the polygraph requirement was instituted.

“She was a canine handler, border community liaison agent, and spearheaded a youth program. The mother of four left in 2015 when juggling childcare duties became too much to handle,” according to Fox News.

“It was either going to be, you know, my career or my family. So I chose to essentially give up my career,” she said, adding that she left in good standing and was told she could always return to her old job.

However, when Torres tried to return in 2018, she came up against the new polygraph test requirement, and all hell broke loose.

“Her first polygraph lasted about four hours and came back inconclusive, she said. So she had to drive 300 miles to a second exam location to try again. Torres said she was shaken up from the moment she walked into the interview room and was berated for holding a cup of McDonald’s coffee — even though no one warned her she wasn’t supposed to drink caffeine before the test,” Fox News notes.

“It was downhill from there. [The examiner] started accusing me of all kinds of things,” she said, from using her husband’s prescription medication with wine to relax, to skimming narcotics after drug busts.

After the conclusion of the test, the examiner told her she’d “failed bad; like, serial killer bad.”

“Nearly two weeks later, CBP’s human resources department informed Torres that her offer of employment had been withdrawn and that there was no appeals process,” according to Fox News.

“It was one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had. He was literally the end all to my career, to me coming back to something that I was good at,” Torres said.

This apparently impossible polygraph test is preventing the agency from meeting its staffing goals. Recall that back in 2017, then-President Donald Trump ordered the agency to hire 5,000 more agents. Yet five years later, only 99 additional agents have been added.

(Source: Fox News)

All this comes amid the worst border crisis in American history.

In December, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents encountered 251,487 illegal aliens. That’s the most encounters ever recorded in a single month in American history.

Combined with the equally high number of encounters reported in October and November — which marked the beginning of the fiscal year — the agency is now on track to have over 2.87 million illegal alien encounters this year alone.

Similarly, according to reporter Bill Melugin, “38 terror watchlist” suspects have been arrested at the border since this fiscal year began. Also according to him, there have been a total of 1.2 million “known gotaways” since President Joe Biden assumed office.

“The last several months have been around 70,000 per month, per CBP sources. And those are only the *known* gotaways,” he reported Friday.

Vivek Saxena

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