I’m on the U.S.-Canada border, and this bridge right behind me connects the two countries.
This is the border you don’t hear much about.
Dividing the U.S. and Canada, it’s the longest international land border in the world.
With attention focused on scenes like these down south,
another kind of crisis is unfolding up north -
with the same agency at the center.
And the latest people to call it out are its own officers.
Were you, as an officer with CBP, ordered to racially profile brown and Black people?
I've been specifically told,
"Stop that Black guy."
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, along with its law enforcement arm Border Patrol,
are facing a wave of accusations of racial profiling, harassment and discrimination.
Border Patrol can just go almost everywhere,
search people and just like harass them.
I was naive to think that something like this would never happen to me.
After an intense ride-along with Border Patrol on the U.S.-Mexico border,
I head to the Canadian border to investigate allegations against CBP.
I want to know, how did this agency become so powerful?
And can it be held accountable?
So I’m heading to meet a whistleblower right now.
He’s actually a current CBP officer who says racial profiling and discrimination
are big problems at the agency.
And so he’s suing.
This bridge is pretty much my office.
Johnny Grays is a co-plaintiff in a federal lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security,
which is CBP’s parent agency.
He’s joined in the lawsuit by the only other two Black officers
stationed here at Michigan’s Port Huron crossing.
How did you decide to bring forth this lawsuit against your employer,
the Department of Homeland Security?
These type of things need to be exposed.
The specific thing that we're raising in this lawsuit
is the extra scrutiny that's being given to, you know,
brown people, African Americans.
Johnny is a military veteran who did three tours in Iraq.
He’s been with CBP for almost 13 years.
Were you, as an officer with CBP, ordered to racially profile brown and Black people?
I've been specifically told,
"Stop that Black guy."
And you participated in that. How did that make you feel?
It's demoralizing anytime that, you know, you're asked to do something that you don't believe in.
Johnny says there’s one incident he particularly regrets.
He says he was ordered to pull over a Black family, all U.S. citizens, for secondary inspection.
He wasn’t told why.
Johnny asked the driver to roll down the car window.
He didn’t and instead, had his hand in the glove compartment.
So Johnny drew his gun and pointed it at him.
And his two young children were very traumatized by this.
They were upset and crying,
and they were saying, “Don't shoot my daddy.”
He was placed in handcuffs and placed in the back of our vehicle.
Later, Johnny found out that the man was in a rental car
and had been searching for the car’s key fob.
After that happened, I questioned why the family was pulled over,
and I was refused an answer. I was not given one.
And we were told that it was a good look.
So that was traumatizing for me because I have children.
As a father, you don't want to put your children through something like that.
Johnny told me that after he verbally complained to his supervisors
about discriminating against Black travelers,
he was stripped of his gun and placed on desk duty.
So you feel like you were retaliated against?
Absolutely, absolutely.
Jermaine Broderick is another plaintiff in the lawsuit.
As a CBP officer, how often did you see this type of racial profiling
against nonwhite travelers occur here?
Frequently.
Very frequently.
It happens too often.
They also allege a hostile work environment based on race.
Jermaine says he's personally experienced this.
Being from the island of Jamaica, my family has a restaurant here.
An officer stated, "You guys eat dogs," or "You guys want dogs to eat?"
I asked CBP to respond to the allegations in the lawsuit
and was told in an email that
CBP is the largest law enforcement agency in the country.
And for years, journalists and civil rights groups have criticized it for its lack of transparency.
I can't imagine it's an easy decision to become a whistleblower
and file a lawsuit against your employer, the federal government.
It wasn't that hard. It was actually the right thing to do, and that's the reason why I did it.
I don't think that it's an easy thing to do,
what we're doing,
but someone has to.
This border wasn't always patrolled like this.
In fact, you used to be able to drive to Canada without a passport.
But after 9/11, the U.S. immigration system dramatically changed.
In 2002, the Bush administration created the Department of Homeland Security,
which would encompass agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement,
CBP and Border Patrol.
With that, immigration and border crossings became critical national security issues.
Since 2003, CBP’s annual budget
has nearly tripled,
making it larger than the budgets of the FBI, DEA
and ATF combined.
And the reach of CBP and Border Patrol is vast.
Agents have the authority to operate within 100 miles of any U.S. external boundary.
That means they have jurisdiction over nearly two-thirds of the U.S. population,
which is about 200 million people.
It’s why CBP had the authority to dispatch an elite Border Patrol force known as BORTAC
to the streets of Portland at President Trump’s request,
and to fly surveillance drones over Minneapolis
and 14 other cities’ protests following the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
And at a recent pipeline protest in Minnesota,
a low-flying CBP helicopter descended on the crowd,
kicking up dust and debris.
Here in Michigan, CBP claims jurisdiction over the entire state,
which means Border Patrol agents roam the border and beyond with little oversight.
When you’re driving around your neighborhood, how often do you see Border Patrol cars?
Does your community have a lot of fear of —?
Yeah.
The number of Border Patrol agents
in this part of the country
has skyrocketed since 2000,
up by more than 1,000%.
That’s the largest increase anywhere in the U.S.
So then you have agents that are just roaming around in the neighborhoods,
just racially profiling community members.
Monica Andrade is an attorney with the ACLU of Michigan.
The organization’s lawyers worked for almost five years to gain access to CBP records,
which detailed more than 13,000 Border Patrol apprehensions in Michigan and parts of Ohio.
An apprehension means being stopped or questioned by an agent,
and it may or may not lead to an arrest.
The ACLU even uncovered “complexion codes”
used by Border Patrol to record the skin tone
of those arrested.
Over 96% of people arrested
had these complexions,
and less than 4% arrested had light complexions.
And nearly half of Border Patrol apprehensions in Michigan began with a law enforcement stop,
like this incident, where state police officers pulled over a Latino man who was a lawful resident.
The dashcam video shows that the two officers were about to let the man go,
but instead brought a third officer to the scene
because he happened to be with a Border Patrol agent.
In the end, the man who was pulled over
was never issued a ticket.
And the records show that only 1.3% of Border Patrol arrests in this region
even involved someone attempting to enter the U.S. illegally.
So it sounds like Border Patrol is now doing ICE’s bidding, then, in these communities.
They're not doing their job, for sure.
In recent years, Border Patrol agents have apprehended people of color outside of a Goodwill,
at a gas station
and even after picking up their child from school.
In one case, the agent said he initially apprehended a family
because they “appeared to be of Central American origin.”
And in Montana, a Border Patrol agent detained two American citizens outside a grocery store
– 35 miles from the Canadian border.
Ma’am, the reason I asked you for your ID is because I came in here
and I saw that you guys are speaking Spanish,
which is very unheard of up here.
The women sued, and during an internal CBP investigation into the incident,
a Border Patrol supervisor admitted that agents in that region
do in fact profile people speaking Spanish.
Comedian Mohanad Elshieky experienced Border Patrol harassment firsthand
in an incident that garnered national attention.
He’s even joked about it in his stand-up routines, like this one:
I’ve lived in the states for five years now, and I think I
need to speak to a manager.
[audience laughter]
Mohanad moved from Libya to Portland, Oregon, on a student visa in 2014.
Because it was too dangerous to return to war-torn Libya,
he applied for asylum in the U.S.
It was granted in 2018.
Three months later, he was riding a Greyhound bus that stopped at a depot in Spokane, Washington,
which is about 90 miles from Canada.
That’s when he noticed Border Patrol agents board the bus.
I would have never guessed
that these were Border Patrol agents
just because I was like, we're not at the border.
When they got to me, the agent was like, “Do you have an ID on you?”
And I was like, “Yeah, I have my driver's license.”
He read my name, and then he was like, “Where are you from?”
I was like, “I'm from Libya.” And then he was like,
“Do you have a passport on you?”
Border Patrol did not ask all of the passengers on the bus for their identification or anything.
They asked people who are like,
who you thought might be Hispanic.
The agents told Mohanad to step off the bus.
They examined his work permit and driver's license
– documents that proved he was in the U.S. legally.
He was like, “I don't know, these kind of look fake to me.”
No matter what I said he was like, “Yeah, yeah, illegals say that all the time.”
Mohanad heard another agent on a phone call confirm his paperwork was in the system.
But the agent detaining him kept saying there was no record of his asylum.
Mohanad says he believes that the agent was lying to intimidate him.
I was frustrated. I was scared obviously.
You can tell from, like, their body language and stuff like that,
that they've already decided that you're guilty of something.
After about 20 minutes, Mohanad said the agents handed back his documents
and told him he was free to go.
When you got on the bus, you tweeted, “To be honest, I have never felt as terrible as I did today.
I've never imagined that I would have to go through this.”
And you lived in war-torn Libya, so that's quite the statement.
As much as like,
the terrible things that happened in Libya to me, it was to be expected.
The reason it was worse in the U.S. is because it wasn't to be expected.
Going through the process of asylum and getting that granted
felt, like, extremely safe and finally, like at home,
and then you just have that be taken away from you.
And that just feels so terrible.
In 2019, the year Mohanad was detained,
Border Patrol agents arrested 71 people at that same bus depot in Spokane.
Border Patrol at the time released a statement
defending the agents’ actions,
saying Mohanad should have been carrying his asylum papers with him.
Mohanad eventually filed a lawsuit against the government,
and in April of 2021, he received a $35,000 settlement.
It’s unclear if the agents were ever disciplined.
What's your message to Border Patrol after all of this?
Stop harassing immigrants. Stop harassing people.
And maybe try and help people who are coming across the border
and trying to find a better life.
Two days after Mohanad filed his lawsuit,
Greyhound announced it would no longer allow Border Patrol agents
to board their buses without a warrant.
It’s a small victory, but critics say change needs to come from inside the agency itself.
How much hope do you have for any sort of meaningful reform within CBP and Border Patrol?
Based on the data that we have, I'm not feeling as hopeful.
The agency has amassed a disturbing record of abuse and misconduct
and really has a deep-rooted culture of impunity.
So what do you hope comes out of this lawsuit?
What I hope
is for change.
Hopefully the change that could be sparked here can make changes wherever,
especially within law enforcement.
This country's made up of all different types of people, immigrants and things like that.
These issues that we're dealing with, let's deal with them now and make them a thing of the past.
Hey everyone, thanks for watching,
and make sure you check out our entire series
on U.S. border agents.
I went on a ride-along with Border Patrol
on the Texas/Mexico border,
and I also interviewed a former border patrol agent who is very critical of the agency.
Don’t forget to like, follow and subscribe to AJ+
and let me know in the comments what you thought of this series.