The Border Patrol trains more chaplains in the face of the immigration debate and the impact on agents

While immigration remains a hotly contested priority for President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration after playing a decisive role in the elections In the deeply polarized United States, Border Patrol agents charged with enforcing many of its laws face growing challenges both on the job and off.

More and more agents are training to become chaplains to assist their colleagues as they address security threats, including the powerful cartels that control much of the border dynamics, and witness growing suffering among migrants, all while policies in Washington continues to change and public outrage attacks them from all fronts.

“The hardest thing is that people … don’t know what we do, and we’ve been called terrible names,” said Brandon Fredrick, an agent based in Buffalo, New York, some of whose family members have resorted to name-calling.

Earlier this month, Frederick served as an instructor at a training academy for Border Patrol chaplains, whose numbers have nearly doubled in the past four years. It is an effort to help agents motivated by the desire to keep America’s borders secure confront growing distress before it leads to family dysfunction, addiction, even suicide.

Officers trained to address emotional distress

During the last academy, held at a Border Patrol station near Miami, Fredrick evaluated pairs of chaplains-in-training as they pretended to check on the status of a fellow agent who had not reported to work.

They discovered that he had been drowning his anguish over being deployed away from his family during the holidays in one of the border’s hot spots in alcohol. The training scenario was painfully real for the South Florida-based agent who played the distraught one, as he had struggled when he was relocated for 18 months to Del Rio, Texas, away from his two children, and also for Fredrick, who He overcame alcoholism before becoming a chaplain.

Interacting with chaplains can reduce officers’ reluctance to express emotional trials, Fredrick said.

“My mission every day is that there is no young agent Fredrick suffering alone,” he added. Fredrick, who is Catholic, has been a border agent for more than 15 years and worked on tragic cases such as a smuggling attempt where an Indian family froze to death on the Canada-United States border.

Confidential support, with a touch of faith

Unlike the police or military, which recruit religious leaders to help with everything from suicide prevention to handling unrest after the killing of George Floyd, the Border Patrol primarily trains secular agents endorsed by their religious denominations to become chaplains.

After graduating, they join about 240 other chaplains and resume their regular jobs, but are constantly available to provide largely confidential care for the well-being of their 20,000 colleagues.

Although the majority of chaplains are Christians, Muslim and Jewish officers have also recently been trained. Chaplains do not offer specific faith worship and only mention religion if the person they are helping does so first.

“I’m not there to convert or proselytize,” said academy instructor Jason Wilhite, an agent in Casa Grande, Arizona, and a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Wilhite, who has been a chaplain since 2015, previously participated in the agency’s non-religious peer support program after a fellow officer was killed in a car accident.

Agent Jesus Vasavilbaso decided to join the Border Patrol’s peer support program after witnessing the trauma of repeatedly responding to calls for lost and dying migrants in the unforgiving desert southwest of Tucson, Arizona.

“Sometimes you come home and still think you didn’t find them,” he said. “That’s why it’s so important that we check on each other all the time.”

Training to deal with deaths at the border

At the most recent chaplain academy, which lasted two and a half weeks, the 15 chaplains in training, primarily from the Border Patrol, plus some officers from the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land Management, practiced scenarios of the real life, including responding to a fatal accident involving officers and notifying a spouse that their loved one had died on the job.

Chris Day, a chaplain since 2017, evaluated trainees who were trying to comfort an officer who kept yelling that it was all his fault his partner had died. In the training scenario, their car crashed while they were chasing someone who was crossing the border illegally.

Day praised the trainees’ efforts to get the officer to talk, but advised them not to say, “‘I get it.’ Because they don’t.”

Day later told the class that he had helped an officer who saw the smugglers he was chasing crash their car into a family, seriously injuring a small child. He said the officer had “cried ugly” at the scene and kept repeating that his son was the same age, so Day took him aside briefly and followed him later.

“We hugged each other,” said Day, a Baptist with a verse from the Psalm tattooed on his right arm.

He has also helped the wife of an agent who committed suicide and has prayed for migrants who request it. More than 100 migrants have died so far this year in the New Mexico desert, where Day is stationed.

“The smells and the images stay with you forever,” Day said. “We have empathy for the people who cross.”

Combining vigilance with empathy on and off duty

try to console migrant children in their custodyincluding the thousands who cross the border alone, is also a harrowing task for agents.

At the academy, Trinidad Balderas, a father and doctor in McAllen, Texas, and Yaira Santiago, a former teacher who runs a Border Patrol migrant processing center on the other side of the southern border in San Diego, California, said they are both seeking provide some calm in the chaos of the children’s situation.

“You try to give them support within the limits of what your job allows. “I always have the biggest smile,” commented Santiago.

Border Patrol Deputy Director and Chaplaincy Program Manager Spencer Hatch highlighted the need to maintain both the “hypervigilance” of law enforcement and the humanitarian instinct to empathize with migrants and fellow agents.

He also taught strategies to protect officers’ families from “stroke trauma.” Divorces spike when agents are reassigned during waves of migrants, some as many as 9 times in 18 months during record border crossings early in President Joe Biden’s administration.

Many children of agents are afraid to reveal their parents’ work, especially in border communities. They may be going to school with children of cartel members, or undocumented migrants, or those who believe that the Border Patrol “prevents people from living the American dream,” in Hatch’s words.

“That’s a really difficult thing to deal with, as things tend to swing back and forth, and we’re still in the crossfire,” he added.

Hatch uses as a case study of moral injury a 2021 incident in Del Rio where officers on horseback appeared in some viral photos to appear to be whipping immigrants with their reins, which a federal investigation later determined had not happened.

“For a photo to be taken out of context and for those people to be shamed by the highest levels of government, that was very disheartening. That hurt us all,” Hatch said.

Struggling with moral standards and a higher calling

Dealing with that “dissonance” of enforcing immigration laws, including rescuing migrants, and hearing their jobs demonized by the public, is a major challenge, said Tucson area chaplain Jimmy Stout. He was one of the first four chaplains when the program was launched through a grassroots effort on the southern border in the late 1990s.

“We talked about this from day one,” Stout said. “Does what they are doing meet your personal standards?”

For officers who received their chaplain badges last week, those standards now also involve a higher calling.

Class speaker Matt Kiniery, a father of three who joined the military after 9/11 and the Border Patrol in El Paso, Texas, in 2009, decided to become a chaplain after an on-duty car accident so serious that The doctor noted that it was a miracle that he was alive.

“’The one upstairs has something for you.’ I took it seriously,” Kiniery said. The chaplains helped his wife Jeanna then, and the couple are now eager to support her new role.

“Even in times of uncertainty, your presence is often enough,” the agent told the graduating class, before his voice broke. Several instructors in the audience wiped away tears.

Connect with the Voice of America! Subscribe to our channels YouTube, WhatsApp and to newsletter. Turn on notifications and follow us on Facebook, x and instagram.