Over half of the applicants currently seeking to become Border Patrol agents have failed the polygraph test issued by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), leading to speculation that perhaps the high rate of failure is by design.
According to Just The News, National Border Patrol Council (NBPC) president Brandon Judd said that as many as two-thirds of applicants to the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) are failing the lie detector test, even after passing lie detector tests in applications for previous jobs.
“They’re failing an awful lot of qualified candidates,” said Judd on Friday. “And the reason why we know that they’re failing them is because these individuals have already passed other polygraph tests, or they fail ours and then they go pass a state polygraph test.”
Judd then claimed that the high rate of failure could be a deliberate effort to weaken border enforcement efforts by drastically reducing the number of new agents.
“We are losing out on a lot of applicants because they don’t want the number of border patrol agents,” Judd explained. “They do not want to ensure that we have enough for patrol agents. Everything that this administration is doing – they are undermining the mission of the Border Patrol. And the reason that they’re doing it is because we have activists that are running law enforcement right now. … And those activists, they do not want the Border Patrol. They do not want law enforcement to succeed. It’s all about defunding police. It’s all about open borders.”
Members of Congress have also addressed the new pattern, with Congressman Austin Scott (R-Ga.) also appearing to hint at the possibility of intentional failing for many applicants.
“About two-thirds of the applicants for Border Patrol are being taken out because of a lie detector test, a lie detector test that there has got to be significant problems with,” said Scott, a member of the House Intelligence Committee. “I know people who have cleared every lie detector test that they’ve ever been through that didn’t pass the one that Homeland Security has given them.”
In March, several members of Congress re-introduced the Anti-Border Corruption Improvement Act, a bill first introduced in 2017 that, among other things, would waive the polygraph requirement for qualified officers who have already passed polygraph tests for previous occupations. As a proposed amendment to the Anti-Border Corruption Act of 2010, it was most recently re-introduced by Congressmen Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), and Congresswoman Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa).