trump’s sick obsession with “taped-up women” being brought illegally across the Mexican border is so odd, even by his “standards,” that it’s drawn media attention. So much so that an assistant Border Patrol chief emailed all agents an urgent request for information (RFI) that would back up trump’s claim:
But two weeks after Trump had started talking about tape-gagged women — when a January 17 Washington Post article had questioned the claim — a top Border Patrol official had to email agents to ask if they had “any information” that the claim was actually true.
The email, shown to Vox by a source within Border Patrol, was sent as a “request for information” by an assistant Border Patrol chief, apparently on behalf of the office of Customs and Border Protection commissioner Kevin McAleenan (referred to internally as “C-1”). It asked agents to reply within less than two hours with “any information (in any format)” regarding claims of tape-gagged women — and even linked to the Post article “for further info.”
[…] The text of the email, whose subject line was “Quick Turnaround: RFI taped-up women smuggled into the U.S.,” is as follows:
All,
We require your assistance on a quick turnaround for C-1.
Please forward any information that you may have (in any format) regarding claims “that traffickers tie up and silence women with tape before illegally driving them through the desert from Mexico to the United States in the backs of cars and windowless vans.” Reference the news article below for further info.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/01/17/trumps-stories-taped-up-women-smuggled-into-us-are-divorced-reality-experts-say/?utm_term=.aa7fc9337070
We require this information to be submitted to BPHQG2 by 1200 EST.
V/R,
Armando Sianez — Acting Assistant Chief
US Border Patrol Headquarters
Requests for information to the field usually aren’t made to get information backing up particular claims — much less claims being made by the president, and much less claims the president had been making for, at that point, two weeks. The implication of the email is that — after CBP had already been asked for evidence by the Post and declined comment— high-level border officials didn’t have any evidence they could point to to prove that Trump was telling the truth.
The article stipulates that trump might have heard this claim from some briefing that wasn’t public. But with history as a guide, Captain Obvious says that trump’s claim about women with duct tape over their mouths is a fevered fantasy that he pulled steaming raw out of his ass.
In other CBP news, even if Congress authorizes hiring additional agents, they’re having trouble filling the vacancies they already have:
The Border Patrol gained a total of 120 agents in 2018, the first net gain in five years.
But the agency has come nowhere close to adding more than 2,700 agents annually, the rate that Kevin McAleenan, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, has said is necessary to meet Trump’s mandated 26,370 border agents by the end of 2021.
[…] Since 2015, CBP officers have been required to work overtime and sent on temporary assignments to “critically understaffed” points on the southwest border, Tony Reardon, president of the union representing about 30,000 CBP officers, told the House Homeland Security Committee on Thursday.
[…] Today, Customs and Border Protection — the Border Patrol’s parent agency — has more than 3,000 job vacancies, according to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office.
The article also notes that the entry-level pay for a border agent is $52,583 a year, and points out that “ICE doesn’t require the lie detector test, pays its agents more and places most of them in cities, not at isolated posts along the border.” If CBP is having trouble finding people to do the scutwork, Twitter has a suggestion:
Seconded! 😂