A new year, and the corruption busts keep coming. Wednesday was a busy day when it came to arrest ing CBP officers. In Yuma, Arizona, a 41-year-old CBPO and his wife were arrested on bribery charges after allowing 600,000 fake ecstasy pills to be smuggled through his inspection lane during what turned out to be a sting operation.
Nearly 2,000 miles away, a Brownsville CBPO was busted for allowing unauthorized immigrants to be smuggled into the country, along with more than 30 pounds of cocaine to be smuggled into the country through his lane.
And earlier in the month, a former Border Patrol Agent stationed in Arizona, Jose Luis Sanchez, was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison for taking bribes to smuggled marijuana into the country (press release after the jump) while Salomon Ruiz, 34, and Leonel Morales, 30, cousins who were both Border Patrol agents, pleaded guilty in separate hearings to accepting bribes from drug smugglers to guide loads of cocaine into the country. They were arrested in December in Texas.
With the violence in Mexico, particularly in border cities like Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana, the pressure seems greater than ever to find a corruptible border agent. The Department of Homeland Security may have met its hiring goals with patrol agents, but have they met their goals with internal affairs agents is another question.
