According to an internal report from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (USCBP), more than half of Border Patrol personnel may be terminated for failure to get the COVID-19 vaccine. This would leave just 8,000 officers on duty.
Per the document, 48 percent of agents have not yet registered their vaccination status. Of the 52 percent who have done so, 10 percent have registered as unvaccinated.
The report notes that “in the worst-case scenario, agents who have not reported their status have done so because they refuse to take the jab, and so they will be terminated (scenario 3). In that case, net attrition could exceed 11,523 agents, leaving a mere 8,013 border agents on patrol.”
Under this scenario, the Border Patrol would lose 59 percent of its workforce.
If the approximately 10,000 Border Patrol agents who have yet to register their vaccination status do not do so this week, they will be offered counseling, then suspension, then termination.
Vaccine reporting rates are higher for other areas of CBP, and the agency estimates that it will be able to hire between 1,100 and 1,657 Border Patrol agents in the coming year. But given those numbers, it will not be able to make up the difference for the personnel lost in the event of a vaccine attrition.
Mark Morgan, who served as the chief operating officer of CBP from 2019 to 2021, blasted the handling of the situation.
“So, an agency that is dealing with 1.7 million apprehensions, 400,000 got-aways, at that very moment, the same resources are going to be pulled away and distracted to deal with this mandate nonsense” he said, adding that “An illegal immigrant doesn’t get the vaccine and they’re released. A border patrol agent doesn’t get the vaccine and they’re removed. On what planet does that make sense?”
Federal employees have until November 22 to get vaccinated.
The news comes as the border situation continues to deteriorate under the Biden White House, often leaving states to pick up the slack in enforcing federal immigration law.
On Tuesday, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt announced that he’s teaming up with Texas to seek a preliminary injunction to make the federal government under Biden resume construction of the border wall.
This comes after Schmitt and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed the lawsuit last month, arguing that the halt of the wall’s construction by Biden redirected funds appropriated for the project, and in doing so violated the separation of powers and the Take Care clause of the Constitution.
The preliminary injunction seeks an immediate ruling to force the Biden administration to begin spending the $3.8 billion appropriated by Congress to the wall project.
“Central to the federal government’s immigration failures has been the Biden administration’s refusal to spend funds appropriated by Congress mandating the construction of a wall along the southwest border, and the Department of Homeland Security’s recent termination of contracts to perform work on construction projects to build the wall,” reads the request for an injunction.
“This is a completely avoidable problem and it lays completely at the feet of Joe Biden,” Schmitt said. “This is his crisis but if he’s not going to follow the law, we’re going to go to court and make sure he follows the law.”
The office of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) stated that the Biden White House has been clandestinely flying illegal aliens to Jacksonville, from where they are bused to other parts of the state.
“Over 70 air charter flights [on] jetliner airliners coming from the southwest border have landed at Jacksonville International Airport,” said Larry Keefe, DeSantis’s public safety czar. “On average, there’s 36 passengers on each of these flights. And that has been going on over the course of the summer through September.”
“We’re in a sad situation of trying to run an investigation. Who is facilitating this travel? How are they getting here? Who are the support people? Who are the sponsors?” Keefe asked.
The United States isn’t the only country grappling with migration. Shots were fired on the Polish border Monday as the country’s authorities sought to stop a group of 1,500 Middle Eastern migrants trying to enter the country en masse from Belarus.
