[Phone]
[Sirens]
A nude and decapitated body
pulled from the waters off South Padre Island.
We collected evidence from the tire shop,
fingerprints were there in the hands
Phone
I'm here with your husband...
He's their first suspect...
Why?
It's hard to explain why your
border patrol badge is with cocaine, money,
and a cartel pistol.
A Border Patrol agent is being charged
with capital murder associated with the Gulf Cartel.
He was on our team...
we've very concerned about that.
He is not one bad apple.
He is part of a raid
of corruption that exceeded that of
any other US federal law enforcement agency.
Beginning today, the United States of America
gets back it's borders.
[Police scanner]
Walls don't really do you any good
if you can hire somebody to wave you through it.
It was during the height of Spring Break.
South Padre Island!
Beautiful, warm, and sandy.
When we got the call through our dispatcher,
I was on patrol.
His neck, where his head was cut off,
was at the surface of the water.
His arms were sticking out like this.
We grabbed him by the arms
and pulled him out.
Then the legs, of course, came out.
The hands were there,
the fingerprints were there on the hands.
We ran them through the machine,
and lo and behold
we do get an identification on the body.
The victim is Francisco Palacios Paz
also known as Franky.
[Seagulls]
A Honduran immigrant.
Frankie worked at the tire shop
in Edinburg, Texas.
[Seagulls]
We identified people that were co-workers.
To our surprise, you know, most of them say,
"He went to Spring Break."
[Seagulls]
We collected evidence from the tire shop.
We discovered blood stains and blood spatters
on the walls.
More than likely it was Franky
that had beed killed there.
We collected cell phone records.
There was one text message,
what it read was that Franky,
he's gonna snitch.
He's a damn traitor,
he's going to finger you,
identify you at any moment.
So that established for us a motive.
These two brothers emerged,
Eduardo Luna and Fernando Luna.
Well, Fernando Luna was not at the tire shop.
Fernando was in Mexico.
By the grace of God that day
he was coming back into the United States.
When he did cross at customs
they ran his name,
and lo and behold the warrant pops up...
and they tell us that there's a
second person with him identified as Joel Luna.
Joel Luna was the third brother,
the middle brother of the Luna's.
When we found out he was a border patrol agent,
this whole scenario now has changed.
In the last dozen years, more than 130
Customs and Border Protection Officials have been
arrested, charged, or convicted of corruption.
Mexican drug mafias annually send between
19 and 29 billion dollars in proceeds from
the United States to Mexico.
There is a huge incentive
to work with cartels because of the money.
Obviously, he's brothers to them.
Is he involved?
He was involved in laundering money
to convert it into legitimate money to provide homes
for his brothers.
[Police Scanner]
We have a search warrant for his house,
and his mother in law's house.
We end up finding a safe, a black safe.
Joel Luna was standing outside.
Joel had bought it with his own credit card.
We opened it in our office.
We found 89,000 dollars in cash...
Joel Luna's commemorative Border Patrol badge,
a kilo and a half of cocaine, methamphetamine.
Had the tray to cut the drugs
and the baggies to resell,
the scale to weigh it, the spoons
prices on ammo, prices on who owed what.
They found this gun...
A gun that's tied directly to the gulf cartel,
it says gulf cartel on it.
It has this word, this phrase on it
that says "pajaro".
Pajaro is a bird.
El pajaro was the name of Eduardo Luna,
the brother of Joel Luna.
Eduardo Luna, el Pajaro, was a Sicario
Sicario is a Spanish word for assassin.
Well, when you get to a certain stage...
your bosses make gifts.
It's hard to explain that away.
It's hard to explain why your Border Patrol
badge is in a safe with cocaine, money, and
a cartel pistol.
[Birds]
Joel Luna graduates from high school,
immediately goes into the United States military, serves
serves our country in Iraq.
All of this time, he's away from what
his brothers have become.
He just always wanted to be close
to his dad and his mom.
So he was looking for something more local.
[Police Scanner]
[Phone ringing]
Please leave your message.
"As of right now, your husband has been detained."
I'm like, "What do you mean he's been detained?"
He's like, "He's one of the first suspects."
Why?
I just...
Joel was someone who made a mistake.
The mistake he made was giving his brothers shelter,
brothers who he had been separated from.
It's not every day that a border patrol agent
gets tried for cartel violence,
but this is the story of border patrol corruption.
Mr Luna is not one bad apple,
he is part of a raid of corruption that exceeded that of
any other US federal law enforcement agency.
Beginning today, the United States of America
gets back its borders.
Our order calls for the hiring
of another 5,000 border patrol officers.
The risk is that you do
exactly what we did last time...
We'll increase the number of Border Patrol
officers by an additional 6,000.
We dramatically ramped up border patrol agents.
You gotta hire people quickly, they cut corners.
There was a real spike in border patrol corruption.
On average, more than one agent has been arrested
every month for the past 11 years, frequently
for drug or human trafficking.
It's doubled its size in 10 years...
I think we're starting to see some problems as a result
of that.
Transnational criminal organizations are doing
all they can to infiltrate CBP, through our
hiring initiatives.
I spent 8 years in a senior leadership position
at CBP, attempting to sound the alarm and
put in place reforms.
The nation's largest law enforcement agency
is trying to reform itself.
Congress to require that new employees
pass a lie detector test.
About 60-something percent of the people who take
that test don't pass it.
They make admissions to things that
make them ineligible to hold a federal position or as
a law enforcement officer in border patrol.
So not all of that attrition is bad.
But right now, we're losing people faster
than we can hire them, and part of the reason is
polygraph.
We need to have a hiring system
including polygraph that actually brings in people faster
than the rate that we lose them.
One of the things that's under consideration
now is moving from what they call a law enforcement
test, which tests a complete version of your
history, to a test that is specifically designed
to see if you are susceptible to corruption,
and it's also a shorter test.
That is a polygraph test designed to
test analysts for the intelligence community, not
for frontline law enforcement officers.
They're doing a 180 from what has been recommended
to fix the problem and going down the road
in the opposite direction.
They go to work everyday, and maybe they don't
make a lot of arrests that day, maybe they
don't make any seizures, but they know
that when they're on that line and they are watching
and protecting, that it matters.
So having more agents is going to help us.
We are definitely growing.
We are currently doing an
active recruitment campaign.
[Sirens]
[Marching band music]
[Music]
This was a criminal enterprise,
and their enterprise was to import drugs.
They had the intel because one of the brothers
was a US Border Patrol Agent.
When the murder occurred, Joel was
at his home in San Juan, getting ready for work.
Joel was working when his brother,
Eduardo, was driving the body of
Franklin Palacios Paz to the island.
I made it a point to set the safe
in front of the jury everyday.
And the jury just looked at it.
[Music]
The sicario, the assassin,
Eduardo took life without parole.
And Fernando, the one who turned state's witness,
he was deported.
A former border patrol agent at the center
of a murder trial faced a judge this morning.
[Music]
Joel was acquitted of capital murder and murder.
He was found guilty of the two counts of
engaging in organized criminal activity.
I like telling the jury...
If you aid and abet, then you're just as guilty
as the guy who pulled the trigger.
One border patrol agent can undo
an incredible amount of good that all the other
border patrol agents do.
And it occurred to me...
Walls don't really do you any good
if you can hire somebody to wave you through it.
[Seagulls]