POGO and Partners Recommend More Civil Rights Oversight on Border

Dear Officer Wadhia:

We write as Southwest-border-based advocates, immigrants’ rights groups, and law-enforcement-accountability organizations to encourage you to create and staff a permanent Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) presence at the Southwest border. One or more local CRCL border offices with Compliance staff are necessary to better understand, oversee, and improve DHS’s massive border operations.

We have experienced how much an issue of concern can be advanced by CRCL staff coming to the border for first-hand engagement. Understandably, however, those visits currently require extensive planning and happen much less regularly than is optimal. We believe you and your headquarters would benefit substantively and experience improved efficiency if staff could respond more quickly (and cost-effectively) to border incidents and stakeholder concerns, as well as build additional relationships over time in border communities.

Establishing one or more Compliance field offices at the border would reduce the expense and logistical challenges of your important onsite work. And vital preventive efforts by CRCL to protect civil rights and civil liberties — measures often facilitated by interacting with DHS personnel in the field — would become more accessible and better routinized. In addition, deploying permanent staff to the border would assist CRCL in alleviating the enormous burdens placed at times on advocates alone to monitor tense situations involving DHS’s own operations and/or relationships with other law enforcement agencies such as state police or military personnel.

CRCL’s most recent annual report makes clear how significant a portion of your workload involves Customs and Border Protection’s Southwest border operations. Indeed, all DHS enforcement components have significant presence at the border, as do your oversight colleagues at the Office of Inspector General (OIG) and the Offices of Professional Responsibility (OPR). Yet, CRCL is concentrated in Washington, DC. Establishing regular conduits of information from CRCL staff at the border is a win-win proposition for advancing the office’s mission, deepening and broadening relationships with core border stakeholders, and reducing the burdens of distant CRCL work travel.

We are convinced that CRCL has greater oversight and accountability value to add by basing some of its Compliance staff at the Southwest border. You have a different posture toward, and perception from, the DHS workforce than OIG and the OPRs, with opportunities to further CRCL objectives without regularly implicating adversarial discipline protocols. Being based in part at the border would expand CRCL’s ability to leverage its impact on the ways border enforcement is conducted on a daily basis.

We appreciate your consideration of our suggestion and would be pleased to discuss it further. Please contact Zoe Martens, Advocacy Coordinator, Kino Border Initiative, at [email protected], and Katherine Hawkins, Senior Legal Analyst, Project On Government Oversight, at [email protected].