,
8 tweets,
3 min read
Read on Twitter
Hi all, we wrote about the mental health crisis at US Customs & Border Protection. Context: There are 328 ports of entry in the US. Most border officers sign up to work at very different places than the southern border. Think sleepy port town on the Canadian border, for example.
There is an extreme border agent shortage. Now officers from other ports are being forced to relocate to the southern border. They leave their families behind with a few days' notice, or they lose their jobs. They arrive to work mandatory double shifts in the concentration camps.
As we've heard, these are horrible places. They are keeping thousands of desperate people in enclosed pens. There are a lot of sick kids. Mumps, scabies, influenza. The officers are freaked out about getting sick themselves, according to their union president.
We've heard a lot about border officers doing and saying horrible things, including this important @propublica investigation this week.
And nothing compares to the humanitarian crisis being inflicted on the migrants themselves. But for some officers, this is another type of nightmare, on top of an already notoriously understaffed agency.
At US Customs & Border Protection, at least 100 officers have died by suicide between 2007 and 2018, per CBP's own numbers. They won't release year-by-year numbers, but this story began with a federal request for more money for EAP, a mental health portal: qz.com/1656790/inside… 
The union president for CBP gets a phone call when an officer dies by suicide. He says he's noticed an unsettling uptick in those phone calls, beginning about two years ago. “It started to look like, whoa, there’s a problem here.”
His union also represents employees of 32 other US federal agencies. “I’m sure that there are people who commit suicide in other agencies,” he said, but “the only suicides I’ve been made aware of are those at CBP.” This is a problem, and everyone, including CBP, knows it.
