For more info, see “Armed agent demands to know how we got in room with open doors and other tales of the Border Patrol job fair.”
Christopher Mitchell attended the Customs and Border Patrol job fair at the Double Tree hotel on July 7 as an applicant. He spoke with the Bulletin in the hotel’s lobby.
In addition to being a third-party candidate for Congressional District 5, Mitchell said he was an electrical engineer looking to make a career switch, and wanted to join the Border Patrol to work on criminal investigations. He said he had transferable skills like critical thinking, project management and leadership, making him a good fit as an investigator.
“I would feel that this would be up my alley in terms of my convictions as a person, but also an interesting job to transition into pre-retirement,” Mitchell said.
He said he grew up in southern New Mexico and was deeply familiar with issues on the U.S.-Mexican border.
“For example, when I would go to El Paso, Texas, to go shopping or something like that, the interstate literally is right along the fence of the border as you’re driving into El Paso,” he said. “I mean, you could [almost] reach out from … your car and touch the fence from the interstate … literally, you would see immigrants going up over the fence … to get over into El Paso, Texas.”
I asked him if he had a sense of who those people were, and why they were jumping a fence next to an interstate.
“It was a quick journey for them to come over the border, work in the United States, and then maybe go back, even that night, because there is a station there on the border between Juarez and El Paso, Texas, where Americans and Mexican nationals can traverse,” he said. “I just understood it was more for an economic opportunity, to have a better job and so forth. But I have to emphasize that it was more temporary … they would come over to work, and then that night they go back home.”
I said it sounded like those were not the people he was interested in investigating for Border Patrol. Mitchell said investigations would be to stop crimes like human trafficking, smuggling, and fentanyl trafficking.
Given Mitchell’s Constitutionalist views, I thought it especially interesting to ask him for his take on the Trump administration invoking the Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged gang members without hearings.
He said he wasn’t familiar with that issue, but supported Congress addressing immigration issues instead of ignoring them.
I asked him about the killings of Good and Pretti, and if this was on his mind today as he was applying.
“I feel that it is wrong for civilians to interfere with ICE operations, and what I mean by that is protesting needs to be contained and simple,” he said.
I asked him if he’d watched the videos of the killings. He said he’d watched “snippets” on Fox News, his go-to station.
I asked him if he knew of the Colorado Springs family detained in the Dilley detention center who reported poor conditions including spoiled food and inadequate medical care.
“You know, actually, I would say that I need to educate myself more in some of these areas [and] be more aware,” Mitchell said.
Mitchell said that he hadn’t personally witnessed abuse by immigration enforcement, only through the media, which can be “biased.”
“I am for the Trump deportation policies,” he said. “However, obviously we need to rein in some bad actors in these organizations that are doing the deportation.”
We also had a brief discussion of the massive government data collection by federal immigration enforcement, and the privacy and Constitutional concerns this data collection raises. I asked him how he’d navigate these concerns working for Border Patrol.
Mitchell indicated he hadn’t quite worked that out yet.
“Today’s visit for me is totally exploratory,” he said.
In a follow up text, Mitchell said he decided not to apply.
“As an engineer, applying some critical thinking, it seems that their hiring practices overall could use some reform to better define the base criteria and the job categories,” he wrote. “The criteria for hiring is convoluted. And the categories are not well specified, verbally or in writing.”
He continued, “To make ICE and Border Patrol more mission effective, these people need to start with changes to hiring practices, improvement in candidate screening methods. I was not impressed with the event as a whole. It seemed ‘half baked’ as an attempt to recruit their way out of a bad situation. I support ICE and Border Patrol politically, however, I don’t support operating a critical organization in a sub-standard manner with little oversight.”
