Tracking the growing number of U.S. CBP agents charged with smuggling drugs and migrants across the southern border

Following the most recent news reports, I put together a map to document the systemic nature of corruption at the U.S./Mexico border involving our country's largest law enforcement agency

A screenshot of an interactive graphic I made, with help from AI, to track federal cases against CBP agents involving drugs and human smuggling (linked below).

More U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents have been charged for smuggling drugs and migrants across the southern border, including a few who have been convicted.

One of them was Emanuel Isac Celedon, sentenced last month to 10 years in prison for using his post at a Laredo, Texas, port of entry to help Cartel del Noreste.

“His criminal conduct stands in stark contrast to the heroic work the men and women of CBP are doing every day to keep our border and ports secure,” U.S. Attorney Nicholas J. Ganjei said in a statement.

It’s also a lot more common than Ganjei and many other public officials care to acknowledge — even though a 2014 Department of Homeland Security report said that “the risk of systemic corruption and potential scandal” within CBP, the largest law enforcement agency in the country, is an “enormous vulnerability” due to a lack of investigators within the federal government (more on that report below).

The media coverage has also been limited to piecemeal installments about each individual case, largely ignoring the systemic nature of the problem.

So I put together this interactive map to track ongoing cases involving U.S. CBP agents who face drug trafficking and human smuggling charges, as well as past cases that have resulted in convictions.

The data was compiled manually by me, and the coding was generated by Claude.ai. It’s in kind of a beta mode at the moment, but it’s a start. My plan is to update it intermittently.

It includes the two Border Patrol agents who were charged earlier this month with allowing undocumented migrants through the San Ysidro Port of Entry in San Diego.

It also includes the case I’ve been writing about since last summer involving two Border Patrol agents who are accused of allowing drugs into the U.S. through their lanes at the Otay Mesa and Tecate ports of entry in San Diego. Their trial, which has already been pushed back once, is currently scheduled for July.

Here are a couple media reports, plus the aforementioned 2014 report, that do paint a more comprehensive picture of corruption within CBP:

In 2020, the Intercept reported on the work of James Tomsheck, who spent part of his career investigating CBP corruption:

Through that work, Tomsheck eventually came to believe that between 5 and 10 percent of CBP’s workforce was either actively or formerly engaged in some form of corruption; other senior officials estimated that the figure could be as high as 20 percent, which in an agency as large as CBP would translate to more than 10,000 individuals.

In 2015, Texas Observer reported:

Accounts of corruption have multiplied: In Arizona, a Border Patrol agent was caught on police video loading a bale of marijuana into his patrol vehicle; another agent in Texas was caught waving loads of drugs through the international port of entry for a cartel; and in California, a Border Patrol agent smuggled immigrants across the border for money.

Earlier in 2015, the CBP Integrity Advisory Panel released a report that said “the true levels of corruption within CBP are not known.” It also said:

Over the past decade, the number of allegations of corruption involving CBP employees, both Border Patrol Agents and CBP Officers at the ports of entry, may be increasing as has the public perception, through the media, of increasingly pervasive corruption within CBP’s ranks. Moreover, there is data indicating that arrests for corruption of CBP personnel far exceed, on a per capita basis, such arrests at other federal law enforcement agencies.