Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) and a bipartisan group of lawmakers held a press conference outside the Capitol yesterday to introduce a bill to address the high rates of suicide among agents within U.S. Custom and Border Protection.
Joining Gonzales were three Republican Congressmen; Reps. Mayra Flores (Texas), Nicole Malliotakis (N.Y.) and Monica De La Cruz (Texas); and four Democrats; Reps. Henry Cuellar (Texas), Susie Lee (Nev.), Darren Soto (Fla.) and Elissa Slotkin (Mich). Another member of the group was Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, the union that represents 18,000 border patrol agents across the United States.
They all spoke of their strong support for Gonzales’s bipartisan legislation, called “Taking Action to Prevent Suicides,” or the TAPS Act, which is intended to address the mental health impact unique to border patrol agents, especially in recent times as the agents are dealing with record numbers of illegal immigrants pouring over the southern border. The bill is modeled on a past effort at the Pentagon to address rising suicide rates and mental health issues in the military.
Over the past year, 14 custom and border patrol agents have lost their lives to suicide—three of those in November alone.
“Unfortunately, this is not a new issue,” Cuellar said. “Between 2007, when CBP began tracking the numbers, until Nov. 30, 2022, there’s been 149 suicides within the agency.”
But the rate has spiked.
ABC news reported that this year, the number of CBP suicides is the highest recorded in 13 years.
“These aren’t statistics,” Gonzales said. “These aren’t numbers on a paper. These are real people impacted. Their families have been turned upside down. And while in Washington, there’s a lot that divides us in policy that often drives us in a lot of different directions, there’s a lot of things that should unite us.”
“The fact that we have 14 agents that have committed suicide is a problem, and I look to Congress as the body that needs to solve that problem, and we need to do it in a manner that brings us all together,” he said.
Cuellar said the bill outlines funding for mental health professionals with specialized skills to serve CBP agents, either through the federal government or local communities. It also creates a curriculum designed to educate agents about the importance of mental health, starting early in their service, and their managers for appropriate crisis intervention.
Judd explained how changing the current CBP climate about mental health is critical, and that any legislation aimed to help this population must include language to address it.
Right now, Judd said, a stigma exists around the issue. If CBP agents come forward with a mental health issue, their law enforcement authority will be revoked. They lose their pay, their authority, and everyone they work with will know something is going on.
“Until we take out the fear of law enforcement coming forward and talking about mental health issues, they’re never going to do it,” he said.
Soto described the TAPS Act as a multi-agency, anti-suicide task force designed to assess the underlying factors that are leading to the high suicide rate among CBP officers. In 12 months, he said, the task force will submit a report, and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas will then develop a plan based on the determined recommendations.
Lawmakers were unanimous in their criticism of the current immigration system and the need for a bipartisan solution.
Lawmakers from both parties echoed the same perspective—that the U.S. immigration system is broken and the situation on the southern border is a crisis. Both of these facts greatly impact the mental health of CBP agents, they said.
Flores, the wife of a border patrol agent, criticized the Biden administration for creating the crisis at the southern border that makes for an extra stressful work environment.
“They feel abandoned by this administration,” she said. “Joe Biden has been on record stating that there are more important things. That’s a ridiculous statement, and it’s disrespectful to our border patrol agents.”
Malliotakis described what’s happening at the border as “absolutely tragic.”
Speaking of the CBP agents, she said, “They signed up with pride and passion to secure our nation’s borders, to protect the homeland, to protect American citizens, to protect the migrants that are traveling. And when they see what is happening—not just with the fentanyl that is streaming in and killing 100,000 Americans, but also seeing the tragedy of hundreds of migrants who have died on this perilous journey over the last year alone, seeing children who have either been abandoned or raped along the journey—it’s got to take a real toll on these officers who know that all of these things are preventable.”
Democrat Slotkin, a former CIA officer and Pentagon official who served three tours in Iraq, said, “There is no way that we can continue as a nation of immigrants to go on with our immigration system as broken as it is. And this idea that somehow we can either have border security or a humanitarian policy towards immigrants, that you must have either one or the other, is crap. You can have both.”
She stressed that bipartisan work on the issue is essential. Speaking of the coalition around her, she said, “I know we are willing to work with anyone on the right or the left in order to deal with that crisis.”
“Let’s show the American people that we can come together for this,” Flores said. “I think that is the message they have sent very clearly in this past election—they want us to work together to find real solutions.”
Lee reiterated the sentiment. “I think it’s most important for us to be able to show that this is not a Democrat or a Republican issue, that our broken immigration system needs and requires us to come together in a bipartisan manner,” she said. “We need to continue to remember that it is the men and women who are on the front lines who are enacting our policies, and those are the people we need to support.”
Gonzales closed the press conference with this statement: “To me, if we as lawmakers here in D.C. can’t come together on preventing people from killing themselves, what can we come to?”