Families for Freedom

WASHINGTON — The highest-ranking official at U.S. Customs and Border Protection is retiring. Deputy Commissioner David Aguilar says he will be leaving the federal law enforcement agency at the end of March. He had spent more than 30 years with the Border Patrol when he became deputy commissioner of Customs and Border Protection in 2010.

In the wake of Barack Obama’s re-election and as the winds of immigration reform increasingly blow across the political landscape, the mantra of “border security” is becoming louder in some quarters. In late January, for example, the so-called “Gang of Eight”—a bipartisan group of U.S. senators—announced its proposal. It insists upon “success in securing the border” before any “path to citizenship” be opened for the millions of unauthorized immigrants already present in the United States. Among its champions, border security is assumed to be an unadulterated good—or at least the price “we” have to pay for “our” collective wellbeing. That price is costly for both the benighted “us”—the federal government has spent more than $200 billion dollars (in 2012 dollars) on immigration and boundary policing since 1986—and the menacing “them,” thousands of whom have perished in the borderlands since the mid-1990s.

U.S. Border Patrol agents who arrest immigrants in New York State get rewards like $100 Home Depot gift cards, extra vacations and cash bonuses, a new report found.

Some agents got as much as $2,500 a year each.