The number of U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents who have committed suicide so far this year has nearly surpassed the total number who will take their own lives in 2023. Exhausted agents say the crisis at the closed southern border is taking a toll.
At least seven CBP officers have committed suicide this year, just one fewer than last year’s eight. Former CBP “suicidologist” Dr. Kent Corso told The Washington Post there are still more than four months until 2024.
There were eight suicides in 2020 and 11 in 2021. ABC News previously reportedCorso, who retired from CBP in May, said 15 officers died by suicide in 2022, making it CBP’s deadliest year yet.
CBP has 60,000 employees, including about 19,000 Border Patrol agents.
The licensed clinical psychologist and certified behavior analyst, who joined CBP in 2021, said there is no single main reason for the disastrous spike, but that extra stress in the workplace is making the situation worse.
“Police officers see a lot of death and experience a lot of loss, emergency responders are exposed to many more potentially traumatic events than the general population and, frankly, all police officers are at high risk for suicide,” said Corso, who is also a military veteran.
“It’s inaccurate to attribute this to one single factor, but it’s certainly a combination of factors, including the rapid tempo of the operations. We’re seeing migration patterns that we’ve never seen before in history. So the whole nature of the world is changing and that’s certainly part of it,” he added.
Since January 2021, under the Biden-Harris administration, more than 8 million migrants have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. According to federal data.
Border Patrol agents, who make up a third of CBP’s workforce, told The Washington Post that morale and mental health have declined under the new administration.
“We’re finding more bodies in one night than we used to find in a year, and no one talks about it,” one investigator said.
“We know seeing dead bodies has an effect on our agents. We had a suicide last week while on patrol and we believe there have been at least two suicides in the past month,” the agent added.
“When people ask me if I’m OK after finding another body, I usually just laugh and say that I feel dead inside and just live my days on the border. It’s sad because it’s true. I don’t feel the same emotions about things like that anymore, and that’s not very healthy.”
A second agent who recently decided to retire said he did so because he and his fellow agents had “lost” their “purpose.”
A third official lamented that “Bada” patrols of the past, which focused on stopping people from crossing the border, are now being forced to allow illegal immigrants into the country in large numbers through the efforts of “Uber drivers and babysitters in name only.”
“Our jobs are meaningless. There are men and women who live for this job, and to take that identity away from them is stressful,” the agent said.
Chris Klemm, former chief of the Yuma Border Patrol station, echoed that sentiment.
“When you’re a service-oriented organization or individual and you join an agency like the Border Patrol that’s service-oriented and mission-oriented … and then all of a sudden your values and your reputation are demonized and denigrated and your sense of purpose is taken away from you by the highest level of an agency or organization like the president, and when you combine that with other elements of your life … it just opens the door to the demons that you’ve been fighting domestically,” said Clem, who worked with Corso.
Clem said he would hesitate to “attribute the suicides solely to the Biden administration’s border crisis,” but agreed that this was an “aggravating factor” because “they felt they had lost purpose.”
CBP did not respond to The Washington Post’s request for comment.
Meanwhile, Border Patrol agents bring that stress home with them, which can be “draining” for families, said the wife of a Border Patrol agent.
“I asked my husband point blank, ‘Hey, can you tell me a little bit more about this suicide? I’m not asking you personally, but can you explain to me why this job is so bad that suicides are so common?'” she recalled one conversation.
“And he would always say to me, ‘Look, you can’t really say it’s the work itself, can you? It’s true that everybody has a life and everybody has their problems, but you add this work to the mix and then you add this craziness to the mix and it really is a big deal.'”
Corso said he has helped implement new programs to “de-stigmatize” the issue by encouraging more dialogue between investigators and their superiors, but that it’s important to continue the work even as things appear to be improving.
“This is really just the beginning. We can’t be complacent and it’s certainly unrealistic to expect we can get to zero because we’ve never seen a population or organization get to zero. But we can’t let our guard down. I think that’s one of the most important things,” he said.
