The Sex Criminals and Child Abusers of ICE and CBP

Edited by Sam Thielman

THERE'S A CRIMINAL culture tolerated within the Department of Homeland Security, the post-9/11 creation and bureaucratic parent of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). It has its roots in the century-long history of the abuse-ridden Border Patrol, and now it's metastasized to ICE. Their agents, kitted up like soldiers in warzones and wearing masks like criminals out for a score, kidnap and kill people in the name of enforcing civil—not criminal—law. As conspicuous as that criminal culture has become over the past year and a half, far less visible is its specific tolerance of sexual crime, including against children. 

A new report by the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, released today, pulls back the curtain on a stunning level of sexual criminal behavior within ICE and CBP. Out of 152 cases of identified immigration officials or contractors accused or convicted of criminal behavior, 131 of them, or 86.2 percent, were charged with sex offenses. Seventy-eight of them—51 percent of the entire cohort—"committed sex offenses against children—the single largest category on the list," the report states. Cases involving a CBP officer, the report finds, "are more likely to involve underage victims" than those of an ICE officer. Yet fully half of ICE officers accused or convicted of sex offenses (12 of 24) had a minor as their victim. 

And, again, these are just the agents known to be connected to such crimes. Indictments are rare. ICE and CBP officers who commit sex crimes are at the intersection of two different strains of impunity: the impunity typically extended to men for violence against women; and the impunity typically extended to officers of the law. 

The Ohio Immigrant Alliance called its report "The Worst of The Worst." It's obviously a jab at the Trump administration for saying that about the immigrants it targets—only 2 percent of whom, according to the TRAC database, face confinement or deportation based on allegations of criminal behavior. Here at FOREVER WARS, we can't help but also hear that phrase's Guantanamo heritage. "ICE isn't targeting the worst of the worst, ICE is the worst of the worst," Cardozo Law's Peter Moskowitz said during a Wednesday morning briefing on the report.

"Domestic violence, misogyny and racism by officers are not personal problems," the report states. "They are red flags – indicators that an officer has a fundamental disregard for rules, authority and social norms, and believes they can get away with breaking the law. An officer who strangles his partner may end up killing her; he will also strangle a detainee. … An officer who solicits sex from minors will abuse children in the communities he patrols." FOREVER WARS reviewed an embargoed copy ahead of today's release. 

Around 90 percent of the examined cases "were forms of gender-based and sexual violence – sexual abuse, child sexual abuse and domestic violence," the Ohio Immigrant Alliance finds. It uses the term "metastatic masculinity," coined by former Justice Department official Lisalyn Jacobs, to describe state power manifesting through toxic masculinity. Anyone who's had their life impacted by cancer can't help find that term bracing. I immediately thought of the recent stories of cops using Flock cameras not to read license plates but to stalk their exes. (That said, I see from Them that a lesbian cop has been accused of doing the same. Inclusivity win?)

"Many of these predators were only caught because brave women exposed them," the report emphasizes. "Immigrants, fellow agents, family members, and other victims broke the silence that the men, their employers, and institutions worked so hard to keep."

All this, the report finds, is accelerating. Nearly 25 percent of examined criminal offenses tied to ICE and CBP happened during the second presidency of Donald Trump. More occurred in 2026 (22 so far) than in 2025 (14). Both years outperformed the previous peak year of 2024 (11). Still, the fact that the previous peak occurred during Joe Biden's presidency testifies to Biden and the Democrats' unwillingness to confront ICE and CBP. 

Now, the Trump administration has shoveled an unprecedented amount of money—$145 billion since last summer—into DHS. ICE especially is staffing up—and equipping up—like never before. With their aggressive and lucrative recruitment push has come an indifference to discipline and lawfulness amongst recruits, as even former ICE officials have recognized. The report is itself a measurement of what ICE and CBP vetting tolerates. 

All this was highly predictable. In a valuable historical exhumation, the report points out that the landmark 1986 immigration reform, commonly understood on the right as Ronald Reagan's amnesty bill, also authorized a surge in border-agent hirings by 50 percent. That surge involved similarly lax vetting, prompting a Los Angeles Times story from 1993 to describe "lawbreaking and disorder" as widespread by the new hires at the border. 

More broadly, the report emphasizes that the Border Patrol, now a component of CBP, has a long history of impunity along the southern border. A recent letter to Congress cited in the report, sent in May by the Southern Border Communities Coalition, called attention to the Border Patrol's "top three leaders [who] have engaged in sexual misconduct without repercussions, including the current US Border Patrol Chief Michael Banks." (Banks has since resigned.) The Ohio Immigrant Alliance report observes that abuse close to the border, long tolerated but often obscure, is now visibly on display in towns and cities throughout the interior of the country. 

"It's as if the Border Patrol is passing on the cycle of abuse to its baby brother," said Lynn Tramonte, the Ohio Immigrant Alliance's executive director. "The tactics used now are not the tactics used when ICE was INS," its pre-9/11 incarnation (which was itself plenty brutal). 

The incidents of sexual violence and child abuse within ICE and CBP are stomach-churning—all the moreso because one of the few narratives DHS relies upon for what meager public support it retains is about combatting human trafficking. 

The aforementioned Border Patrol chief Banks resigned only after the conservative Washington Examiner revealed that Banks "bragged" to colleagues about his fondness for hiring prostitutes when taking trips to, um, Thailand and Colombia. In 2008, Oklahoma investigated ICE agent Jeffrey Short for two complaints of child sexual abuse—one of which was against his own child, the report says, "and allegedly took place in the ICE office"—yet ICE continued to employ him. Not until 2019, after Short had left the agency, was he finally charged with rape and other offenses. ICE once ran a deportation program for people convicted of sex crimes. It was called Operation Predator. One official running Operation Predator, Frank Figueroa, pleaded no contest to exposing himself to a 16-year old girl in an Orlando mall. The Border Patrol agent John Daly III moonlighted as the East Valley Serial Rapist. 

More than 12 percent of the identified 152 ICE and CBP officers were charged with or convicted of domestic violence. An ICE agent named Samuel Saxon's history of abuse resulted in "strangulation and broken bones." A jury convicted CBP's Ronald Burgos-Aviles of murdering his ex-girlfriend and their child. A Border Patrol officer named Paul Douglas Adams raped his daughters for years and even posted videos of his criminal activity online. (Elsewhere, you can read about how Adams confessed his crimes to his Mormon bishop, who consulted the LDS church—and was told to do nothing about it.) I think you'll understand if I don't continue listing examples. 

Many cases of sexual assault and child abuse inside DHS happened on the job. Nearly 45 percent of the examined cases, 68 out of 152, involved misconduct deriving from positions of authority. Cases involve stalking, sexually assaulting detainees in custody, forcing women to undress under claims of lawful searches, sexual harassment of women agents or other employees, and other degenerate offenses. 

Where there's metastatic masculinity and sexual predation upon children, you'll often find a connection to Jeffrey Epstein. CBP was no exception, as first detailed by The Guardian's Julia Carrie Wong. At least six CBP officials had ties to Epstein. "Epstein emailed and texted with CBP officers, invited them to his island, visited with them at the airport, and frequently sought to determine who was going to be on duty when he was traveling through [St. Thomas], the released files show," Wong reported in February. As she noted, no CBP agents have been charged with Epstein-related offenses. I suppose that's no surprise given who the president is. 

While not directly related to child abuse and sexual assault within DHS, Ohio Immigrant Alliance makes an essential and frustratingly overlooked observation. Immigration law is a civil and not criminal offense. It is like tax law or contract law. There is no other circumstance where a violation of civil law results in the loss of someone's life. [The IRS in fact has a special explicitly criminal division that’s allowed to carry guns, called IRS-CI. (Dick Wolf, I have a pitch for you.)—Sam] You know I have to point out that this is yet another instance where 9/11 gave a civil violation the air of a national-security emergency. 

"The only way to end ICE killings is to take their guns and ban them from enforcing civil laws on our streets," Lauren Bonds of the National Police Accountability Project tells the report. "Civil laws should be enforced in courtrooms and office buildings, not on U.S. streets with deadly force." 

IN MARCH, FOREVER WARS brought you the story of Brandon Siguenza, a Minneapolis teacher whom ICE tried to turn into an informant. Siguenza's experience suggested a larger apparatus of official investigation into civil-society networks not engaged in criminal activity and outraged by ICE. Sure enough, on Thursday, the New York Times reported that while CBP and ICE were engaged in Operation Metro Surge this winter, DHS used administrative subpoenas to get business records from the Sunrise Movement—thank the PATRIOT Act for that!—and investigated my old union, the Communications Workers of America. 

"Undercover agents spied on protesters and organizers at meetings held online, as well as in libraries, parks and churches, taking down not only what they said, but also their names and sometimes license plate numbers. The undercover agents also infiltrated group chats on Signal, listening as activists discussed coming demonstrations and their political opinions," report the Times' Alan Feuer and Ernesto Lodoño. They explicitly connect these investigations to NPSM-7 and—surprising for the Times, frankly—commendably reference COINTELPRO. 

SO I CAN REVEAL that I'm a talking head in a Netflix documentary series—the forthcoming 25th anniversary of 9/11 edition of Turning Point: Generation 9/11, out on Sept. 2. The trailer dropped yesterday, and while I'm not on camera in the footage they chose, I am a voice-over. Hear me say, of the attack: "Like the skies had rained fire, and who knows what could happen next." Check it out: 

THE WASHINGTON POST reported last week that the CIA didn't really believe in the authenticity of the alleged Iranian threat to Air Force One that led to Trump sneaking off it and letting the reporters and staff aboard be a decoy. It's a commendable scoop, but one that committed an all-time lede-burying. The real lede of the piece was that Israel fed Trump bullshit in an attempt to get him to keep bombing Iran. Or, as the Post gingerly puts it many paragraphs down in the story: "Some U.S. intelligence officials saw Israel’s sharing of the warning about threats to Trump’s life as designed less to inform than to influence the president’s decision-making and U.S. policy in the region, a current and a former U.S. official said." 

NOW TRUMP IS threatening to bomb Oman – a Trumpian version of U.S. political interference in Oman, now that Oman is involved in managing the Strait of Hormuz, that this newsletter has been predicting. 

NOT SINCE DONALD RUMSFELD rolled his eyes at troops' concerns about being insufficiently armored in Iraq can I recall such a propagandistic dismissal of servicemembers' ordeals as Adm. Brad Cooper in this Wall Street Journal op-ed. As in the Iraq War, it has fallen to the families of the much-deployed sailors of the USS Abraham Lincoln to report the toll their Iran War deployment has taken not only on the fitness of the ship, but on their mental health. The Lincoln is finally returning to port—and while the Pentagon will surely deny it, the family members' pressure clearly helped compel that—but Cooper's disgrace persists. This is a pattern for the U.S. Central Command leader. 

MATT BORS is back like he never left—with a new series of Toxic Avenger! This time, the goated political cartoonist turned comics writer pairs with the excellent artist Felipe Sobriero for Toxic Avenger vs. Noxious Offender, whose first issue drops October 7—but because of the dysfunctional way the comics market operates, you should right now let the friendly staff of your local comics shop know that you want it! You can do all that through League of Comic Geeks' store-finder and preorder function!