Border Patrol chief resigns after 6 months

Former FBI official had clashed with union leaders.

The chief of the U.S. Border Patrol resigned Thursday after only six months on the job, one day after President Trump announced plans to ratchet up immigration enforcement and build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, officials said Thursday.

It was not immediately clear why Mark Morgan — a career FBI official who was the first outsider to lead the agency responsible for securing the U.S. borders — left the agency. His resignation is effective Tuesday, officials said.

But Morgan had clashed with the powerful Border Patrol union, which endorsed Trump for president and whose leaders were present at Trump’s announcement of his immigration crackdown at Department of Homeland Security headquarters Friday.

Gil Kerlikowske, former commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which oversees the Border Patrol, said in an interview that the union never supported Morgan for the job and appeared to be behind his departure.

“The union has been very vocal about someone from outside of the Border Patrol becoming the head of the Border Patrol,” Kerlikowske said.

“The union supported this candidate for president, and now very much appears to be directing things — which is absolutely unheard of in law enforcement.

The union used their influence to have him removed.”

A few weeks after Trump’s election, the conservative website Bretibart.com published an op-ed by the executive board of the National Border Patrol Council, which represents 16,500 agents. The piece was titled, “The chief Obama gave us is a disgrace.”

It criticized Morgan’s leadership of the agency, in part latching onto a statement he made to members of Congress that said he supported “comprehensive immigration reform.”

Morgan could not immediately be reached for comment.

Union spokesman Shaun Moran said he was under orders not to discuss the union’s role in Morgan’s departure. But responding to Kerlikowske’s comments, Moran said: “We supported President Trump because he was the only candidate who talked about taking action on border security.”

He accused Kerlikowske of rolling back enforcement operations and “preventing agents from doing their jobs.”

Morgan, 52, started his career as a Los Angeles police officer before ascending the ranks of the FBI. Kerlikowske chose him for the Border Patrol job, overlooking others who came up through the ranks, to change what is considered, even by law enforcement standards, to be an insular culture.

Morgan said in an interview last September that his first priority was to change the culture of the agency, which had for years faced allegations of an overly confrontational approach in its enforcement that resulted in multiple fatal shootings of illegal immigrants and a lack of accountability in investigating misconduct.

During his short tenure, Morgan enforced new useof-force policies in the agency’s training academy curriculum that encouraged recruits to turn to other strategies to defuse encounters that could get violent.