Top border official over El Paso area reassigned

The highest-ranking immigration official in the troubled El Paso region of the southwest border, where hundreds of children were reportedly held for weeks without enough food or the ability to bathe, has been temporarily removed from his job amid growing criticism over health and safety conditions for migrants there.

Aaron Hull, a veteran border official who became the sector chief in El Paso in 2017, will be moved to Detroit on Monday, where he will oversee operations along the much slower and less contentious Canadian border, according to a statement from the agency.

Officials with the Border Patrol’s parent agency, Customs and Border Protection, said Hull’s transfer was part of a routine shuffle of multiple senior staff members and that Hull’s new assignment was considered temporary.

But several officials at both the Border Patrol and the Department of Homeland Security said

Hull’s departure had been long in the works and followed a period of intense scrutiny of his management of the El Paso sector. Hull did not respond to requests to be interviewed.

The job of overseeing the El Paso region could be considered one of the most difficult within the Border Patrol. Of the agency’s nine enforcement areas along the southwest border, the El Paso region — which stretches from New Mexico into West Texas — has seen the largest increase in unauthorized crossings since last year. “Family unit” apprehensions of migrants who are caught with a relative rose 1,759 percent in the last fiscal year.

Under Hull, the El Paso sector was the first to begin conducting widespread family separations with the goal of deterring migrant families from traveling to the United States. Customs and Border Protection piloted the initiative in El Paso during the summer of 2017, roughly a year before the Trump administration publicly announced a nationwide zero tolerance border prosecution policy that resulted in widespread family separations.

Agents in the El Paso region said that they had been sounding the alarm for some time about conditions in the Border Patrol station in Clint, where hundreds of migrant children were being held, as well as about other facilities in the El Paso sector where conditions were deteriorating. The agents said their concerns were largely ignored.

NBC News, which first reported the news about the sector chief’s transfer, obtained a draft report prepared in May by the DHS Office of Inspector General detailing “dangerous overcrowding” at two other facilities overseen by Hull in the El Paso sector — the El Paso Border Patrol Station 1 and the Paso Del Norte Border Patrol Station.

Though the agency did not refer to it as such, Hull’s move to Detroit was widely viewed as a demotion.

Hull will go from overseeing the work of more than 2,000 agents in El Paso to about 400 in Detroit. Though it is the busiest region of the northern border, only about 2,000 people were apprehended in Detroit during the last fiscal year, compared with 31,000 in El Paso.