Border Patrol may loosen lie-detector hiring requirement

SAN DIEGO -- The Border Patrol's parent agency would exempt many veterans and law-enforcement officers from a hiring requirement to take a lie-detector test under a proposal to satisfy President Donald Trump's order to add 5,000 agents, according to a memo released by the agents' union.

The memo by Kevin McAleenan, acting Customs and Border Protection commissioner, calls the polygraph a "significant deterrent and point of failure" for applicants and a recruiting disadvantage against the separate Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, which is under Trump's orders to hire 10,000 people and does not require lie detectors.

The Associated Press reported in January about two-thirds of job applicants fail CBP's polygraph, more than double the average rate of law-enforcement agencies that provided data under open-records requests.

Those failures are a major reason the Border Patrol recently fell below 20,000 agents for the first time since 2009. Many applicants have complained they are subjected to unusually long and hostile interrogations.

The undated memo lays out a plan for the agency to build a force of 26,370 agents in five years.

McAleenan said CBP also is considering a six-month experiment with an alternative polygraph test that takes less time.

Any waiver may require congressional approval due to a 2010 law that introduced the requirement in an effort to root out corruption and misconduct after an earlier hiring surge. McAleenan's memo is addressed to the Homeland Security Department deputy secretary for approval, suggesting the Trump administration may not back the plan.

CBP officials did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

The National Border Patrol Council, which represents Border Patrol agents, received the memo Tuesday and has been working closely with the agency to execute Trump's plan, said Shawn Moran, a union vice president.

He called the changes to the polygraph "a more commonsense approach" and said current failure rates are "ridiculous."

"Obviously we want to get the best candidates. We want to make sure that we have stringent background checks, but when it comes to the polygraph, that thing, I think, has been far too excessive in weeding out potentially good candidates," Moran said.

The memo said the Border Patrol gets 60,000 to 75,000 applications a year and has hired an average of 529 candidates during each of the last four years, which translates to a hiring rate of less than 1 percent. It has lost an average of 904 agents a year through attrition, lowering its workforce to 19,627 in January.

The acting commissioner estimated that the Border Patrol would need to hire 2,729 agents a year to hit Trump's target in five years, accounting for attrition.

The hiring plan would cost $328 million during the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30 and $1.9 billion the following year. McAleenan said the changes would need to take effect within six months for maximum effect.

The proposed waivers would exempt state and local law enforcement officers in good standing who have successfully completed a polygraph with their employers. Federal law enforcement officers who have passed a more rigorous background investigation would also be exempt, and the number of military and veterans who can skip the test would be expanded.

Taking a polygraph became a hiring requirement at CBP after the hiring surge led to more agents getting arrested for misconduct. James Tomsheck has said that when he was CBP's chief of internal affairs from 2006 to 2014, about 30 applicants admitted during the lie-detector test that they were sent by drug cartels. One said he killed his infant son.

A panel of law enforcement experts appointed during President Barack Obama's administration last year called CBP's polygraph "an important integrity tool" in hiring and recommended employees be periodically tested, as the FBI does. It called corruption "the Achilles' heel of border agencies."

Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly testified in Congress last month that he did not think the Border Patrol or ICE would hit hiring targets "within the next couple of years."

"We will add to the ranks of the ICE and border protection people as fast as we can, but we will not lower standards and we will not lower training," he said.