This past January, I was surprised to finally see the U.S Border Patrol begin to address a long-standing, rarely acknowledged crisis: employee suicides. One hundred and fifty CBP agents and employees have died by suicide since 2015, with 14 in 2022 alone.
To combat this problem, the agency hired its first “suicidologist,” who launched an awareness campaign. And it introduced a new Support Canine Program, which gives agents access to therapy dogs.
But neither of these efforts address the underlying problem of why agents are taking their own lives. As a survivor of a suicide attempt and former Border Patrol agent myself, I have an answer: It’s the culture of cruelty the agency fosters — a culture that excoriates anyone who appears vulnerable or weak.
Maybe you’re an agent who finds the harsh, often inhumane tactics of the job distressing. Or maybe you’ve been traumatized on the job, and you reach out for help. Either way, you’re punished.
Apologists for the agency would have you believe that the surge in migration is responsible for these suicides. If Biden hadn’t allowed so many migrants to enter the country, agents would encounter less tragedy and so suffer less. Sadly, though, we encounter the loss of human life in the field whether migration is surging or not.
I served between 1995 and 2001, when crossing rates were much lower, and I still have flashbacks about some of these deaths. Yet when I spoke up about how I was feeling, my managers called me “weak” and said I couldn’t “hack it.”
CBP’s own tactics — its lack of humanity — cause much of the trauma we experience on the job.
Like most agents who join the Border Patrol, I was proud to serve my country. As a rookie at the academy, I believed in the message of “Honor First,” a slogan meaning that we honored our nation and each other, treating others with respect and dignity.
I quickly learned that “others” often don’t include the migrants we encounter. We are trained to treat “these people” — as our superiors call them — harshly. We’re ordered to mock and yell at migrant children, throw rotten food at asylum seekers, cram them into filthy cells kept so cold they get sick, and destroy the documents they need for asylum hearings.
Those who worked under the Obama and Trump administrations alike threw children in cages after separating them from their parents. We do this in the name of deterrence; treat people badly enough, the thinking goes, and they won’t try to come back. But dehumanization always takes a toll on the dehumanizer.
And the cruelty doesn’t work. Neither poor treatment, nor dangerous conditions sway people who are truly desperate. They will come despite the barbed wire and floating blockades. They will come despite walls. And the longer we fail to acknowledge this reality, the more tragedy both migrants and agents will experience.
There’s also a culture of silence within the agency. It’s no surprise that CBP doesn’t recognize suicides by agents currently serving on our agent memorial site. When it reports numbers, it doesn’t count those of us who attempt suicide or those who succeed after leaving.
When I served, it was clearly understood that asking for mental health care was considered weak and could get us fired. Instead, we self-medicate or let our trauma out in other, destructive ways. I believe this why we’ve seen increased corruption, assault, sexual assault, and domestic abuse from agents.
Over my six-year tenure, we lost one supervisor to an intentional opioid overdose and another to self-immolation. Others used their duty weapons to end their lives, often just before they were arrested for charges of corruption and violence.
Like me, some colleagues attempted killing themselves after leaving the agency. We are haunted by our actions and our inaction. After years with PTSD the pain simply becomes too much.
If the Border Patrol, its union and conservative media genuinely cared about agents, they would passionately argue for more migrants to be processed at ports of entry — and seek reforms to make that happen. Instead, they’re exploiting our pain for their own political ends.
I am happy that the agency is at least starting to talk more openly about mental health. But no amount of dog petting will decrease agent suicides. To do that, we must change how we train Border Patrol agents for the realities of the job. It’s not catching “bad guys” or treating ordinary people like criminals. It’s about treating everyone we meet with “Honor First.”
Yes, agents must be prepared to see death on the job. But I hope we can end the failed deterrence strategies that kill migrants in the first place.
Jenn Budd is an analyst, activist and former senior Border Patrol qgent in San Diego. She is the author of the memoir “Against the Wall.”
