Border Patrol trains more chaplains as job and polarizing immigration debate leave agents in turmoil

DANIA BEACH, Fla. — Like immigration remains a hotly contested topic priority for the Trump administration after playing a decisive role in the deeply polarized electionsBorder Patrol agents charged with enforcing many of the laws are grappling with increasing challenges both on and off the job.

More people are being trained as chaplains to help their colleagues tackle security threats, including powerful cartels that exercise control a big part of the border dynamic, and watch it grow suffering among migrants – as policies in Washington continue to change and public outrage focuses on them from all sides.

“The hardest part is that people … don’t know what we’re doing, and we get yelled at terribly,” said Brandon Fredrick, a Buffalo, New York, officer whose relatives have sometimes resorted to name-calling.

Earlier this month, he served as an instructor for Border Patrol chaplains, whose numbers have nearly doubled in the past four years. It’s an effort to help agents motivated by a desire to keep America’s borders secure deal with the increasing need before it leads to family dysfunction, addiction and even suicide.

At the last academy, held at a Border Patrol station near Miami, Fredrick evaluated pairs of chaplains-in-training as they role-played checking for a fellow agent who had not reported to work.

They discovered that he had been drowned in alcohol and that he was afraid he would be deployed away from his family at one of the border hotspots during the holidays. The training scenario was painfully real for the South Florida-based officer playing the distressed role – he had fallen on hard times after moving to Del Rio, Texas, for 18 months, away from his two children – as well as for Fredrick, who battled alcoholism. conquered before he became a chaplain.

Interaction with chaplains can reduce officers’ reluctance to express their emotional travails, Fredrick said.

“It is my mission every day that no young Officer Fredrick suffers alone,” he added. Fredrick, a Catholic, has been a cop for more than fifteen years and has handled tragic cases, including a smuggling attempt involving an Indian family froze to death at the Canada-US border.

Unlike the police or military, who recruit faith leaders for help with everything prevention of suicide Unpleasant dealing with the unrest after The murder of George Floydthe Border Patrol primarily trains lay agents who are endorsed by their faiths to become chaplains.

After graduation, they join approximately 240 other chaplains and return to their regular jobs, but are constantly on call to provide largely confidential care for the well-being of their 20,000 fellow officers.

Although most chaplains are Christian, Muslim and Jewish officers, they have also been recently trained. The chaplains do not offer faith-specific worship and only bring up religion if the person they are helping does so first.

“I’m not here to proselytize or proselytize,” says academy instructor Jason Wilhite, a cop in Casa Grande, Arizona, and a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He has been a chaplain since 2015 and was previously involved in the agency’s non-religious, mental health-focused peer support program after a fellow officer was killed in a car crash.

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

“Sometimes you go home and keep thinking you didn’t find them,” he said. “That’s why it’s so important that we constantly check on each other.”

At the most recent chaplain academy, which lasted 2.5 weeks, the fifteen chaplains in training – mostly from the Border Patrol, plus a few officers from the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land Management – ​​practiced real-life scenarios, including responding to a fatal wreck involving officers and informing a spouse that their loved one died on the job.

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

Day praised the interns’ efforts to get the officer to talk, but advised them not to say, “I understand.” Because you don’t.”

Later, Day told the class that he helped an officer who saw the smugglers he was pursuing crashing their car into a family, seriously injuring a toddler. He said the officer at the scene “ugly cried” and kept repeating that his child was the same age, so Day took him aside and then continued.

“We figured it out,” said Day, a Baptist with a psalm verse tattooed on his right arm.