PASO DEL AGUILA, Texas – Border Patrol isn’t hiring agents fast enough to replace thousands of future retirees, and current and former employees say overly aggressive and irresponsible polygraph examiners are disqualifying more than half of qualified applicants.
“We are losing a lot of people, including those who have prior military service, who have active security clearances and don’t pass a CBP polygraph,” Jon Anfinsen, vice president of the National Border Patrol Council, told Fox News. “It does not make any sense”.
According to a 2017 Associated Press article, 65% of CBP applicants who took a polygraph failed, compared to 36% at the Drug Enforcement Agency and less than 35% at both the US Secret Service. as in the FBI. Neither agency provided updated failure rates when asked by Fox News.
(Ramiro Vargas/Fox News Digital)
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Polygraph or lie detector tests are generally inadmissible in court cases, and federal law prohibits most private companies from using them to test employees. But passing the polygraph has been mandatory for prospective Customs and Border Protection agents for the past decade.
The failure rates are staggering.
About two-thirds of CBP applicants who take a polygraph fail, The Associated Press reported in 2017. The FBI and Secret Service failure rates were about half, according to the same report.
That means that, statistically, applicants seeking to join the agency responsible for protecting the president can more easily pass a polygraph requirement than those seeking to protect the border.
Neither agency provided Fox News with more recent statistics. In a statement, CBP opposed comparing agencies due to potential discrepancies in “standards and tests” and data collection.
“The percentage of candidates moving on to the next phase of pre-employment screening has increased over the years as we have refined our polygraph examination to focus on the needs of our agency,” the statement read in part.
A US Border Patrol agent stands on a cliff looking for migrants who crossed the US-Mexico border wall near the town of Sasabe, Arizona on January 23, 2022.
(Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
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But Anfinsen said CBP’s failure rate is now closer to 50%, still well above averages for other federal and local law enforcement agencies. Rejected candidates often get jobs with other agencies, such as the Texas Department of Public Safety, she said.
“They will go anywhere else where they are not treated like criminals during that part of the hiring process,” Anfinsen said. “We’re losing a lot of really great people because of this part of the polygraph.”
Tracy Anderson Torres began her Border Patrol career in 2004, long before polygraph exams were required. She was a dog trainer, border community liaison officer and head of a youth program. The mother-of-four left in 2015 when juggling childcare duties became too much to handle.
“It was going to be, you know, my career or my family,” he said. “So I essentially chose to give up my career.”
Torres said she left in good standing and was told she could always return to the agency, but when she tried to do just that in 2018, there was a new application requirement.
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His first polygraph took about four hours and was inconclusive, he said. So he had to drive 300 miles to a second exam site to try again. Ella Torres said she was in shock from the moment she walked into the interview room and was reprimanded for holding a McDonald’s coffee cup, even though no one warned her not to drink caffeine before the test.
“It went downhill from there,” Torres said. The examiner “started accusing me of all sorts of things.”
He asked her about her family, so she told him about her kids and how crazy life could get.
“And he said, ‘Oh, so you use your husband’s prescription medicine with wine to calm you down?'” she recalled, adding that the examiner also accused her of stealing narcotics after the drug busts.
After the instructor disengaged the sensors, he allegedly told Torres that she “missed badly; like a bad serial killer.”
Nearly two weeks later, CBP’s human resources department informed Torres that his job offer had been withdrawn and there was no appeal process.
“It was one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had,” Torres said. “He was literally the end of my career, for me to go back to something I was good at.”
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At the same time that CBP is firing applicants like Torres onto the streets, the agency is not meeting its hiring goals. In 2017, then-President Trump ordered Border Patrol to hire 5,000 new agents. As of the 2021 fiscal year, there were an additional 99 agents working for CBP.
“We have a lot of applicants,” Anfinsen told Fox News as he stood by the Rio Grande as a group of migrants prepared to cross into the US. “They just can’t go through the whole process.”
Meanwhile, CBP’s spending on polygraph exams has increased sevenfold since 2014. The Capital Center for Credibility Assessment Corporation receives the most federal money for polygraph exam services, and CBP is its number one client, according to federal contract records.
In the most recent fiscal year, CBP paid CCCAC $7.64 million, primarily for polygraph examination services.
Staff shortages and a continuing surge of immigrants across the southern border have made morale “non-existent,” Anfinsen said.
“It’s been like that for a while,” he said. “Every time there’s a change in management, things get better, then they get worse. And this is the worst thing that’s ever happened.”
About 13,000 employees across CBP, not just Border Patrol, are expected to retire in 2028, Anfinsen said.
“We have to replace them somehow, but if we can’t even meet our annual hiring goals, we don’t stand a chance,” he said.
Anfinsen would like to see the polygraph more tailored to career-specific behaviors, rather than focusing on applicants’ entire lives. He also believes that there should be more control over the examiners.
Jon Anfinsen, vice president of the Border Patrol union, says about half of prospective employees fail the required polygraph.
(Hannah Ray Lambert/Fox News Digital)
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“We have never heard of a case where a polygraph examiner has been penalized for their behavior or anything like that,” he said. “People just don’t get hired.”
Ironically, Torres said he now works under a contract with CBP, conducting background investigations on people trying to get hired by the agency.
“I have my security clearance,” he said. “But I’m not good enough to be a Border Patrol agent. It just doesn’t make any sense.”
Ramiro Vargas contributed to the attached video.
