This will make your stomach turn…
A top government watchdog alerted President Trump and Congress that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has endangered the public for nearly a decade by failing to comply with a federal law requiring that the agency collect DNA samples from detained migrants.
The U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) said CBP’s “noncompliance with the law has allowed subjects subsequently accused of violent crimes, including homicide and sexual assault, to elude detection even when detained multiple times by CBP or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).”
The OSC told the White House that it was taking the “strongest possible step” to “rebuke the agency’s failure to comply with the law,” as well as its “unreasonable” attempts to defend its own conduct.
Under the law, CBP was required to collect DNA from individuals in its custody, to be run against FBI violent-crimes databases.
One “troubling” case noted in the letter involved a suspect in a 2009 Denver homicide who had “several interactions” with law enforcement, including two arrests.
CBP’s behavior constituted an “unacceptable dereliction of the agency’s law enforcement mandate,” Special Counsel Henry J. Kerner wrote.
“It is disturbing that this would occur even once, let alone routinely, for approximately a decade,” he added. “Many cold cases might have been solved — and victims of violent crimes granted closure — by now if CBP had complied with its obligations under the law.”
