The Border Patrol's Corruption Problem
SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Tex.—In the calm waters of the Texas Gulf Coast, Robert Hannan steered his boat toward what he thought was a crab trap. He found a corpse.
“There’s nothing that can help this person if it's a real body,” Hannan said in disbelief to the 911 dispatcher. “It's floating just like it would a body, but there’s no head.”
That grisly find would lead investigators first to an assassin from the powerful Gulf Cartel, and then to a U.S. Border Patrol agent who helped the killer move drugs and guns across the border.
Joel Luna is one of more than 140 Customs and Border Protection agents arrested or convicted on corruption charges in the past dozen years, according to an analysis by the Center for Investigative Reporting and The Texas Tribune. “Mr. Luna is not one bad apple,” said James Tomsheck, a former senior official at CBP. “He is part of a rate of corruption that exceeded that of any other U.S. federal law-enforcement agency.”
Though the number of corrupt agents represents less than 1 percent of CBP’s 44,000 sworn officers—the largest police force in the U.S.—“any amount is bad, and one person alone can do a lot of damage,” John Roth, the inspector general at the Department of Homeland Security, told The New York Times. “It doesn’t have to be widespread.”
Corrupt officials have given sensitive information to cartels, and wavedand thousands of undocumented immigrants through the border in exchange for millions of dollars in bribes. Many operate at official
