Time for Democrats to Consider a Little Union Busting
Our National Security Is At Stake
I fully realize the heresy implied by today’s headline. I truly believe that unions are the path to economic salvation for Americans if for no other reason than nobody else has the kind of national infrastructure it takes to really make change.
The AFL-CIO (or some variation thereof) is a sleeping giant. I can only hope somebody wakes them up to the reality that union building means more than organizing workplaces. People in this country want unions to exist. Younger workers in the new economy / retail environments are begging to be organized.
But… here’s the big BUT.
Democrats need to demand the disbandment of the National Border Control Council. If we are to have humane immigration reform anytime in the near future, that union has got to go. And there’s a legal way to do it.
Some background: The influencers who keep our country from having an honest conversation all work for or with one entity: the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC).
It’s a “labor union” established in 1967 representing roughly 18,000 agents and support staff of the United States Border Patrol. I use the quote marks because its actions have rarely benefited its membership unless they were tied to a very right wing agenda.
The organization spent the last five years promoting the Trump agenda because it meshed with their worldview. Like almost everybody who does business with the former President, they got burned, as this agent speaking to a reporter from the Intercept admitted,
As for the union, the agent said the NBPC is now reaping what it sowed. “In politics, when you play hard, you fall hard,” he said. Rattling off a list of areas in which he believed the union failed in its core mission, including obtaining overtime pay that was the subject of litigation under Obama, the agent said the NBPC needs to reassess its approach “because the way they’ve been doing it for the past four years is pretty shameful.”
“What exactly did Border Patrol agents receive under Donald Trump?” the agent asked. “We didn’t get anything. We didn’t get extra funding. We didn’t get our overtime pay back,” he said. “We took all these hits for this guy and we got nothing — we got a border wall while we’re suffering a manpower shortage across the nation. That’s what we got.”
What the union has done is to promote an organizational culture based on otherizing the people who approach our borders. Make no mistake here; on an operational level, management and labor are united in purpose.
An investigation including two inspector general reports by the nonpartisan watchdog Project On Government Oversight (POGO) shows that serious misconduct is prevalent within Customs and Border Protection, with agency leaders at all levels shielding officers and agents from facing accountability for their actions for years.
The ethos of being above the law extends to the way employees are treated throughout the Department of Homeland Security, which includes the Border Patrol. A survey of federal employees in all 36 federal agencies on job satisfaction in the aughts found DHS (which includes CBP) was last or near to last in every category. And it appears things haven’t gotten much better.
An unpublished draft report by the inspector general obtained by POGO, found that more than 10,000 employees at the law enforcement components within DHS have experienced sexual harassment or misconduct.
Of the nearly 250 cases where DHS paid out monetary settlements to employees who filed sexual harassment complaints, DHS failed to investigate the alleged perpetrators and took no disciplinary action in the vast majority of them. Given these findings, it’s no wonder that about half of surveyed CBP employees do not believe officials at all levels are held accountable for their conduct.
Meanwhile, agents are allowed to carry out physical abuse and harassment without consequence. Under both Democratic and Republican presidents the enforcers of the United States immigration system have violated the basic human rights of asylum seekers and refugees.
Who says so?
Human Rights First has submitted evidence to the U.N’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) / Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants highlighting illegal U.S. practices that violate the human rights of migrants and asylum seekers who have been and remain blocked from fair access to the U.S. asylum system and often returned to grave dangers
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, U.S. immigration detention facilities continue to be plagued by inhumane conditions, including overuse of solitary confinement and sexual assault. Short-term custody cells and facilities run by CBP along the U.S. border allow adults and unaccompanied children to be subject to abuse, harassment, and mistreatment.
Amnesty International says “The intensity, scale and scope of the abuses against people seeking asylum are truly sickening. Congress and US law enforcement agencies must conduct prompt, thorough and impartial investigations to hold the government accountable and ensure this never happens again.”
I could go on and on and on quoting from the reporting that’s been done about a system of border enforcement that violates every tenant of justice as Americans understand it.
The Border Patrol and its associated agencies get away with this conduct because the people approaching the southern border of the United States have been cast as lower than untouchables.
National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd cited the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory as part of an interview on Fox News where he slammed the Biden administration’s southern border policy.
Chances are nothing will happen to the guy. He should get in trouble, not because went on a major network to criticize his superior (that’s what Trump did to people), but because he espoused a point of view central to racist ideologies that run counter to American values.
The border patrol and its union are the major source for disparaging information about immigrants. Their mantra holds that civilization as we know it will end if we as a country do anything other than throw people in jail for daring to seek a better life (Ukrainians and other whites excepted) is the major obstacle to any legislation on the topic.
How to stop all this? As of this moment, Republicans have Democrats over a barrel on the subject of immigration. Claims of an invasion and lawless hordes crossing the southern border are being made so often (and rarely challenged) are driving the narrative.
People are being made to be afraid of something that does not exist, so afraid that they’ll support whatever level of armament and surveillance fearmongers say is needed. And they’re sure as hell not going to vote for Democrats, because “everybody knows” it’s Joe Biden’s fault.
Rather than hiding behind meaningless rhetoric, and half heartedly responding to every Republican assault on the truth, Democrats would be wise to seize the day. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
As ex-Border Patrol agent and reform advocate Jenn Budd says:
Instead of running to the border and repeating the constant drumbeats of the Border Patrol Union who encouraged policies that separated families and committed horrendous atrocities on asylum seeking families, Democrats should be proudly standing before television cameras denouncing these abominations. They should point out that today's immigration crisis was created by the last four years of Trump policies.
There are years worth of asylum seekers waiting on the other side of that ugly wall because of Trump's MPP and because he improperly used Title 42 to shutter the asylum system. If Trump had won, he would have continued Title 42 indefinitely even though he does not believe Covid is deadly. Being that he lost, it's created quite a nice little booby trap for the Democrats, because now they have four years worth of asylum seekers waiting to be heard. Talk about kicking the can down the road.
There’s another nugget in Budd’s latest posting that would seem to open the window of opportunity toward defanging the Border Patrol.
The Border Patrol union is illegal under 5 USC 7112 (b)(6) since Trump designated them a security agency.
Here’s some background, via Southern Border.org:
In 2020, former President Trump reclassified the Border Patrol and its mother agency CBP as a “security agency.” This is the same designation given to agencies like the Secret Service and FBI, but unlike in those agencies, the Border Patrol Union stayed in place. Across the federal government, employees of security agencies do not have access to collective bargaining rights because of the sensitive nature of their positions and the potential for abuse of power. The fact that the Border Patrol Union is still in place raises red flags.
Trump’s reclassification of the agency was aimed at making CBP exempt from the Office of Personnel Management’s disclosure policy. What this does is further insulate the agency from fulfilling Freedom of Information requests by automatically redacting the name and position of any CPB employees.
According to Irvin McCullough, national security analyst with the Government Accountability Project, the designation will result in less transparency:
“It puts their employees in the same category as FBI agents,” he continued. “The problems we’ve seen out of our immigration agencies over the past few years show that we need more transparency, not less. Why is there such a rush to restrict this information from the public? Given their track record, the burden is on them to explain exactly why they need these restrictions.”
The Border Patrol Council is an affiliate of the American Federation of Government Employees, and, through that larger organization, a member of the AFL-CIO.
Membership by sort-of-union groups representing entities whose tasks include harming workers has always been a touchy subject in organized labor.
The fact is that the advances this country made during the civil rights era were made possible by unionists who decided to be on the right side of history. Now it’s time to do what Walter Reuther, then-president of the United Auto Workers union did: tie the struggle for fair immigration to the aims of the union movement.
I realize squashing (which could be done by executive order) the Border Patrol’s little charade of a union won’t look good in some circles, but the consequences of doing nothing (handing power to the GOP) will be much greater for labor and immigrant rights. What we have right now is nothing but cruelty that encourages illegal behavior because there is no other way.
We can have a humane asylum system and security at the same time. A robust and large asylum system is absolutely an integral part of national security. We don’t need a bunch of small minded people running the show at the border.
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com