US-MEXICO BORDER — As journalists and politicians endlessly dissect the current situation on the southwest border, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is dealing with a crisis all its own: a spike in suicides among agency staff.
The issue was first widely publicized in December of 2022 when three Border Patrol agents died by suicide within a month. The agency has been keeping internal tabs since 2007: in that 17-year span, there have been 149 reported deaths, with a spike of 15 in 2008 and 14 in 2022 out of a workforce of around 20,000 Border Patrol agents and 60,000 total employees.
These higher suicide rates appear to be correlated with higher numbers of apprehensions along the border — and their associated waves of violence, suffering and death. Widespread criticism of the Biden administration’s border security policies has resulted in intense scrutiny from both ends of the political bell curve.
CBP families, agents and whistleblowers agree: the job is not easy. A study tracking deaths of law enforcement officers more generally found that life expectancy for those in the line of duty is age 66, 12 years lower than the general population. “Working long hours and responding to high-stress situations, our men and women in green and blue are being pushed to their breaking point every single day,” Congressman Tony Gonzales wrote in a press release.
In 2022, Gonzales — who represents the Big Bend — introduced the Taking Action to Prevent Suicide (TAPS) Act alongside fellow Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar, calling for an anti-suicide task force to identify strengths and weaknesses in the agency’s response to the crisis. (The bill never made it out of committee.)
The two representatives wanted to boost what they perceived were positive first steps. “Recent appropriations have led to the hiring of additional mental health clinicians at CBP. However, there is still a shortage of mental health support, education, and destigmatization at the agency,” he wrote.
In May of 2023, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) published a report, presented to the heads of CBP and ICE, that pinned the blame on overwork — as well as “poor public image” and “violence or threats of violence.”
While the number of agents has remained relatively stable, migrant encounters along the border have ballooned 143% since 2019. 2022 saw a record 800 recorded migrant deaths; the agency also estimates a 303% increase in “gotaways,” or migrants that were detected but never caught.
The result is demoralizing. Half the respondents to the report’s survey said they had been asked to take on extra duties and nearly a quarter struggled with “work-life balance.” Twenty percent said they felt that they were unable to perform their “primary law enforcement duties” as a result of the extra work.
Thirteen percent confessed they were struggling with their mental health. “Officers are getting burned out,” one agent commented. “We need more staff and better shifts that allow for more time off with families. Divorce rates and suicides are rampant in the agency. We want to feel like we are respected and not a cog in the machine that can be easily replaced.”
The department pushed back on some of the report’s findings, stressing, above all, that only about 16% of total CBP and ICE employees had actually submitted responses. They also outlined in more detail the resources available to employees, including peer-to-peer counseling, chaplaincy programs, and a suite of “mindfulness” and anti-suicide apps. “Leadership is concerned that the OIG’s draft report does not fulsomely recognize the extent of initiatives DHS has implemented to support its personnel,” the response reads.
The Big Bend Sentinel spoke with Border Patrol agents past and present for more insight into how the agency is succeeding — and falling short — in its efforts to support its employees’ mental health.
Battle buddies
As part of its “Shine a Light” initiative, CBP hired renowned “suicidologist” Kent Corso — an Iraq War-veteran turned psychologist turned world-renowned mental health consultant — to help illuminate the path. One of Corso’s initiatives included recording a podcast that collects stories from within the agency that humanizes the internal struggles many agents face.
Corso’s work highlights an important truth: there have been exponentially more than 149 people impacted by suicides at CBP since 2007. “I find myself waking up to a reality I never asked for, that my kids never asked for,” the anonymous widow of a Rio Grande Valley agent told Corso in a podcast interview. “He’s in peace, but we were left in pieces.”
The widow — referred to only as “Jane Doe” — said that confusion was a part of her complicated grieving process. Why hadn’t her husband of more than two decades confided in her about his internal struggle?
Landon Hutchens, spokesperson for Big Bend Sector Border Patrol, explained that the stressors of the job are inconceivable to civilians, even those closest to the agency. “There’s a higher threat for danger — your average civilian doesn’t worry about getting shot at by cartels,” he said. “Agents have to keep their heads on a swivel at all times.”
Migration to the United States is constantly shifting, too, perhaps making it even more difficult for agents to relate to others, even those who have hung up their green uniforms. In the popular imagination, migrants moving across the border are solo young men undertaking epic journeys through the desert — but the reality has changed so much in the past few years that this narrative is due for a rewrite.
Both agency data and data collected by advocacy groups suggest that migrants are dying at unprecedented rates in urban areas like downtown El Paso or suburban Sunland Park, New Mexico. Agents who might previously have spent most of their time in an office are now faced with the same reality as their grizzled colleagues in the field. “Sometimes you encounter deceased individuals and some pretty gruesome situations,” Hutchens said.
As a media liaison, Hutchens was also astutely aware of how outsiders’ perceptions could have on agents’ well being and self-esteem. “I think something that’s underreported on is the compassion of your average agent,” he said. “They’re enforcing our immigration laws, which is critical. But I see a tremendous amount of humanitarian compassion … every agent I know carries a lunchbox with extra food and water they end up giving out to migrants.”
Women and unaccompanied children have also been crossing the border in higher numbers, tugging on the heartstrings of people in the agency with families of their own. “We spend a lot of time away from our families,” explained Assistant Chief Patrol Agent Jaime Castillo. “We’re passionate about our jobs. It can be consuming — you spend a lot of time thinking about work, even when you’re gone.”
While they don’t see the same volume of apprehensions as their colleagues up and downriver, Border Patrol agents in the Big Bend Sector perhaps understand isolation better than anyone else.
Agents clock in for at least 50 hours a week, often in remote areas where cell phone service is limited. Many live in agency housing, cut off from the convenience and comforts of home that transplants to the region sorely miss. To counteract the bad press, CBP has been experimenting with recruitment bonuses in its most remote locations — Presidio has been flagged as particularly “hard-to-fill” and now advertises a $30,000 bonus for new agents.
Richard Barragan, acting special operations supervisor for Big Bend Sector Strategic Communications, said that he had been personally impacted by the agency’s mental health crisis.
During his time at the remote port town of Santa Teresa, New Mexico, the station was devastated by three deaths in the space of a year. One day, he came to the grisly realization that he had been routinely parking next to a patrol vehicle that had been the site of a colleague’s death by suicide.
Barragan said that he lived by a simple motto: “Be the One.” The term was popularized within the agency by a social media campaign including YouTube and Instagram posts that encourage agents to reach out to each other.
In one video, former agent Vincent Vargas asks agents to think back to their academy training in the “battle buddy” system, used to keep tabs on their colleagues in physically dangerous situations. “Look to the left and right of you,” he said. “If any of your brothers and sisters are struggling, please reach out to them — be a battle buddy for them.”
Barragan said that he’d taken the message to heart. “It was a call to action — basically to bring suicidal ideation to the forefront and to remove the stigma of talking about it,” he said. “We do internalize a lot of these feelings, and it does help to talk to someone.”
Both Barragan and Castillo said that they had both taken part in — and benefited from — the agency’s resiliency training which teaches agents the skills they need to perform in an intensely stressful job. “The training came at a critical point in my personal and professional career,” Castillo said. “It turned me around and flipped the switch.”
In the Big Bend Sector, support programs take a number of forms: peer-to-peer counseling, chaplain support, resources for the families of those who pass away in the line of duty. Local agents also have access to canine support animals, meditation and even yoga classes.
Numbers show that the programs are taking off. DHS reports that there are 12,278 supervisors trained in suicide prevention and awareness, with plans to grow these stats and the scope of their education. In 2022, CBP chaplains sat for 66,000 sessions — 6,000 more sessions than the agency has employees.
Castillo says that every effort — whether it’s counseling for grieving family members or a few minutes with a furry friend — can make all the difference. “CBP has done a great job of letting us know that they truly care about us,” he said.
“I felt like I had been on the wrong side of history”
Despite the insistence by top brass that the agency’s suicide crisis is the result of external factors, former Senior Patrol Agent Jenn Budd says the organization itself shares the blame.
Budd — an outspoken critic of the agency and author of Against the Wall, which discusses her own suicide attempt — says that a culture of internal intimidation, corruption and fear has been causing rampant mental health issues for decades, long before the Border Patrol started tracking data or talking openly about these problems.
“The culture of the Border Patrol is that if you can’t handle it, then you’re not tough enough. You’re not BP material. You don’t bleed green,” she said. “In order to admit that they have a suicide problem, they have to admit that they have a cultural problem.”
She calls herself a part of the “old patrol,” referring to those who served as Border Patrol agents before 9/11, when the Department of Homeland Security was created and the agency was tucked under its umbrella.
For Budd, the difference between the “old patrol” and “new patrol” is cultural as much as it is financial — the “old patrol” embodied macho Western cowboy stereotypes and lack of funding, with agents sometimes having to walk their patrols after they ran out of gas.
The “new patrol,” on the other hand, has been deeply influenced by the Iraq War, both in mindset and billions of dollars in Homeland Security funding. “They see it as a combat zone — they see migrants as possible military threats,” she said, pointing to the popular use of the word “invasion” by conservative politicians and commentators.
Budd said that she felt all that money pumped into combat technology came at a moral cost. A great deal of her work was physical, hiking up to 16 hours a day. Outside of specially-trained details, she says that much of the “new patrol” does their work from behind a screen, steering drones and monitoring sensors. “They don’t develop any kind of sympathy from walking behind these people,” she said. “We sat with their bodies. We went through their pockets. We saw their tattoos.”
Despite the generation gap, she was there for what she thinks is the first fallen domino in today’s border crisis: the building of the wall.
As a new recruit, she worked out of Campo Station in the remote mountains of Southern California. The wall reached her sector in 1996, not long after she joined, transforming from a simple barbed wire fence to a massive barrier funneling people through treacherous terrain. Slowly, she started to realize how shifting government policy was making her daily working reality more difficult to stomach.
It was having an impact on her fellow agents, too. “As you spend time with the bodies you start to understand what’s really going on,” she said. “I would see guys falling apart, hardened guys falling apart. What they don’t realize is that the federal government is making them do the dirty work.”
Budd uses the wall as a metaphor for both the state of immigration and the state of her heart. She says that she’s been building internal walls of her own since she was a child trying to survive an abusive family life. Once she donned her Border Patrol uniform, she began taking on other people’s pain — male coworkers seemed more comfortable expressing their anguish to a female agent, fantasizing about suicide, confiding addictions to alcohol, sex, gambling. “What I’d do is just eat it all up and throw it over my wall,” she said.
One day, Budd was cruising alongside the wall in a patrol vehicle when someone from the other side launched a human head into the sky, landing on her windshield. She took it as the first of many signs that it might be time to leave.
She had long been suspicious of corruption in the agency — she was raped by a fellow agent during her time in the academy. He faced no consequences; leadership simply sent him to another station. Budd chucked that shame and trauma over her wall too, not even confiding to her wife what had happened until years later.
Budd finally left after she started investigating a higher-up she suspected of smuggling drugs and was harassed and threatened to the point that she hung up her uniform for good.
What she had seen and experienced in the agency stuck with her, particularly an encounter with a migrant with whom she shared water and cigarettes while they waited for transport. “You’re a good person,” the man said. “I want you to think about what you’re doing.”
She responded with anger at the time — anger that took years to unpack.
In 2015, Budd attempted suicide, having felt tortured by the experience for well over a decade. “I felt like I had been on the wrong side of history, and I didn’t know that I could overcome that,” she said. “I felt like I just needed to end my life and be done with it.”
After an extended hospital stay and years of therapy and medication, Budd has channeled her traumatic experiences in Border Patrol into advocacy work, challenging the agency and its union’s official narratives.
She says that — like her younger self — most people who join Border Patrol do so because they want to serve their country. More often than not, they aren’t aware of the reality of the border and its political history before they join.
With time, she’s come to fear that a percentage of agents join because the barriers to entry are low and predators face few consequences. Budd was featured in the Project on Government Oversight’s report on sexual misconduct and abuse, which revealed that just under half of people who reported sexual abuse in agencies within DHS say they faced professional retaliation as a result.
Crimes committed by CBP employees against migrants have made headlines in recent years, from an investigation into whether mounted agents whipped Haitian migrants to a serial killer who claimed the lives of four sex workers. Whether or not agents who commit crimes on a national stage are guilty as charged, Budd says it’s mentally devastating to try to enforce the law among people very publicly breaking it. “It’s a mindf––k,” she said.
With time, she’s been able to dismantle her own walls. “I mean, there’s a lot of things I loved about the Border Patrol, and I’m really proud of a lot of things I did — I’ve saved a lot of lives, but at the same time I’m ashamed of that organization,” she said. “Both things can be true at the same time.”
For a handful of local Border Patrol agents, Father Mike Wallens of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Marfa serves the function of a chaplain but is not a part of the official CBP chaplaincy program. He asked to take part in the agency’s resiliency training himself to better understand the resources — and potential gaps — that are offered to the rank and file.
Wallens did not share Budd’s overall pessimism about the agency, but did agree that CBP’s protocol and culture might prevent some in crisis from reaching out for fear that they might be ostracized or pushed out of their jobs.
He treats his sessions with agents like religious confessions, a sort of spiritual HIPAA agreement that ensures he is not required to disclose what agents share with him to their supervisors.
Wallens is a Dallas transplant but has made a niche for himself in the borderlands by fostering connections between the Border Patrol, the local faithful, and the migrants and asylum seekers passing through the Big Bend. He echoed sector leadership in saying that the extreme remoteness of the area carries a psychological weight and encourages agents to throw themselves into community volunteer work to combat feelings of isolation.
He says that the agents who come to him wrestle with the same moral dilemmas that pushed Budd to attempt to end her life: a gap between policy and morality. “The agents out here, I will say, are filled with compassion. They’re put in a position where they have to wrestle with what their heart says versus what the policy says,” he explained. “Because of those compassionate hearts, it’s easier to get wounded.”
This story is part of a series on mental health in the Big Bend funded by the Presidio Community Fund.