At country festival and rodeo, border agency seeks more agents
FLORENCE, Ariz. — The beer was flowing and music was blaring in the middle of the Arizona desert when Ric Kindle approached a group of Border Patrol agents and customs officers out to recruit new hires.
This was no average job fair. This was Country Thunder, one of the nation’s largest country music festivals, where U.S. Customs and Border Protection set up a booth in front of a popup casino and near the merchandise tent as part of an effort to recruit thousands of new agents and officers.
Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of the Border Patrol and the office that oversees customs officers, has been hiring for several years and now may need to fill an additional 5,000 positions within the Border Patrol that President Donald Trump ordered under his plan to bolster border security. Both the Border Patrol and customs officers were at the festival.
Kindle, 24, said he’d be applying to the Border Patrol as soon as he got home at the end of the four-day festival. He said he’s wanted to get into law enforcement ever since a local police officer took him on a ride-along when he was a teenager who skipped school and lacked motivation.
“I don’t care what form of force it is, I just kind of want to make a difference,” said Kindle, a Phoenix-area resident who works as a fast-food cook. He was volunteering for a nonprofit that raises money for families of first responders who are hurt or killed on the job.
The presence of border agents and customs officers at the country festival is part of an aggressive recruitment effort to seek out prospective employees. Customs and Border Protection has been showing up at bull-riding competitions, Big 10 and Big 12 sports tournaments, job fairs and country music fests like the one last month in Florence, southeast of Phoenix.
“We do recruiting at pretty much anywhere we have an opportunity to show up. It could be something as small as a community event at a local park,” said Border Patrol spokesman Vicente Paco, who handed out brochures to festivalgoers.
The recruiting comes as the agency is having a difficult time finding enough agents.
Prospective hires need to relocate to remote locations like the small town of Ajo, near the U.S.-Mexico border, and the southern Texas city of Harlingen. They also must get through a comprehensive vetting process that involves passing a lie-detector test in which applicants are asked about things like drug use and past criminal activity.
Customs and Border Protection also has had a hard time filling positions within its Office of Field Operations, which manages ports of entries and international arrivals at airports.
The Associated Press reported in January that about two-thirds of Customs and Border Protection applicants fail the required polygraph exam, more than double the average rate of applicants at eight law enforcement agencies that provided data to the AP. Customs and Border Protection officials have since pegged the failure rate at about 75 percent.
The agency has struggled to find enough customs officers since announcing an expansion effort in 2014. It said it was allocating 170 new jobs in Arizona, most of which would be assigned in Nogales, the state’s busiest area for border crossings. As of April 1, the agency has filled 72 percent of those positions in the state.
The Border Patrol, meanwhile, has about than 20,000 agents nationwide, a vastly larger number than it had in the 1990s but still smaller than a couple of years ago. The agency has lost agents to attrition and has a hiring rate of less than 1 percent.