As the Border Patrol and various other immigration enforcement agencies face increasingly low morale and a historically disastrous immigration crisis, the agency is now offering an additional $10,000 hiring bonus in an effort to recruit new agents.
Fox News reports that the bonus was announced in a notice released on Monday, which said that any new agents would be given $5,000 as a “recruitment incentive” after completing the academy, followed by another $5,000 if they are assigned to “hard-to-fill” areas in Texas and Arizona.
As a result of the Biden Administration’s open-borders policy, illegal immigration has reached record highs since Biden came to power. Every month since March has seen no less than 200,000 illegal alien encounters at the border – all the highest monthly totals in history – and there have been at least 500,000 “gotaways” since October.
The fact that border authorities are being deliberately ordered by the executive branch to mostly stand by and let illegals cross has led to a significant decline in agent morale, with many quitting out of frustration.
“The agents are upset. I’ve never seen agents so upset as I have under what is currently going on,” said Brandon Judd, head of the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC). “When you look at, first, how many agents are being pulled out of the field to do administrative duties, that’s one thing that’s really upsetting the agents, and then on top of that knowing that we’re going to have to face the health risk that we’ll be put under, having to hold people for a much longer period of time than we have in the past — yeah, that’s putting an immense amount of stress and pressure on the agents and morale continues to go down.”
Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) which oversees immigration, has been the cause of much anger from within the ranks of the Border Patrol and other agencies. While visiting agents on the border in February, Mayorkas was confronted by several agents who openly expressed their disdain for his performance as DHS Secretary; one agent visibly turned his back to Mayorkas, while another said that their area, Yuma County, was better off under President Donald Trump, since “everyone was doing their jobs” under his strict immigration approach.
Mayorkas himself eventually issued a statement that was devoid of specific solutions on how to address the low morale, instead simply saying that “it was a tough trip because we confronted a workforce…whose morale is struggling, is down, and that’s a responsibility I have to address.”