WASHINGTON — The Biden administration will disband secret teams within the US Border Patrol at the end of September after their role in internal investigations came under scrutiny earlier this year.
The “critical incident teams,” which have existed for decades, have multiple responsibilities, including gathering evidence for the Office of Professional Responsibility of Customs and Border Protection, which handles most investigations of agent misconduct. The teams’ involvement in those investigations raised questions about how responsible such investigations might be if the Border Patrol were sometimes investigating themselves.
The teams’ elimination was announced Friday in a memo from Customs and Border Protection. The decision, according to the memo from Chris Magnus, the agency’s commissioner, was made “to ensure that our agency achieves the highest levels of accountability.”
mr. Magnus, a former police chief, joined late last year with a reputation for changing police operations to restore public confidence. The disbanding of the teams — which have operated with little to no public awareness for decades — is one of his first major policy changes at the Border Patrol, which has long been criticized for lack of accountability.
In a statement Friday, the Southern Border Communities Coalition, a California-based advocacy group that had called for the disbanding of the teams, said: “It is not an easy feat to change a long-standing and problematic practice within the agency, and the commissioner has an important step.”
A coalition member, Andrea Guerrero, spent more than a year investigating the teams after seeing mentions of them in documents related to a 2010 case that killed a 42-year-old Mexican man who was tied up. , beaten and shocked with a Taser by Border Patrol agents after he was caught illegally entering the country.
Earlier this year, DailyExpertNews reported on the increase in deaths from high-speed chases involving Border Patrol vehicles. Local police reports related to some of the chases revealed the involvement of critical incident teams in investigating them, although these teams were never mentioned in customs and border protection statements about the incidents.
Customs and Border Protection defended the teams at the time, but pressure from Congress and outside groups mounted. And Democratic lawmakers asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate incidents involving critical incident teams dating back to 2010.
“Today’s announcement is a clear recognition that these unregulated and unsupervised critical incident teams are more of an obligation than an asset to the mission of protecting our borders and upholding the rule of law,” Representative Carolyn Maloney, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said in a statement.
Ms. Maloney and Representative Bennie Thompson, the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, have requested documents from Customs and Border Protection regarding the teams.
“While this is a positive move,” said Mr. Thompson, “it remains critical that CBP provide Congress with full accounts of the authorities and actions of these teams, including possible misconduct.”
The agency defines a critical incident as “any incident involving CBP personnel that results in, is intended, or is likely to result in serious bodily injury or death; a use of force; or widespread media coverage.”
All evidence collection and processing from the scene of an incident will ultimately be done by officials of the Office of Professional Responsibility, Mr Magnus’ memo said. The surveillance office will also work with the forensics and scientific arm of Customs and Border Protection to create a governance structure for crime scene processing.
According to the memo, even if the teams are phased out, Border Patrol agents will continue to collect evidence of border seizures, such as drugs in a storehouse, and evidence related to internal investigations and potential liability claims, such as damage to private property incurred during agents operations.