Mexican drug cartels, squeezed by heightened US border defenses, are trying to regain an advantage by aggressively bribing and corrupting American officials, experts testified last Thursday at a hearing of the Ad Hoc Subcommittee on State, Local, and Private Sector Preparedness and Integration.

The purpose of the hearing, titled New Border War: Corruption of US Officials by Drug Cartels, was to review the efforts by drug trade organizations (DTOs) to infiltrate and corrupt federal, state, and local law enforcement in order to improve their ability to counter US border control measures.

At the hearing Kevin L. Perkins, Assistant Director, Criminal Investigative Division Federal Bureau of Investigation, outlined the FBI’s perspective on the issue.

“In the past two years alone,” Perkins said, “ our efforts have helped convict 1,600 federal, state, and local officials. We have another 3,200 public corruption cases pending, approximately 2,500 of which involve corruption of public officials. But more remains to be done. Because the interests at stake are so important and the magnitude of the problem so great, we have deployed approximately 700 agents to fight corruption around the country.”

Perkins cited one particular case he said highlighted the potential national security implications of public corruption along our nation's borders. In that case, an individual gained employment as a border inspector for the specific purpose of trafficking in drugs.

“Through our collaborative efforts and a year-long investigation,” he said, “ this former public official pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to import more than 1000 kilograms of marijuana into the United States and received more than $5 Million in bribe payments. This individual has since been sentenced to 22 years in prison.”

In another extensive undercover investigation described by Perkins, the FBI and its partners netted corrupt officials from 12 different federal, state, and local government agencies who allegedly used their positions to traffic in drugs. To date, 84 of those subjects have pled guilty to related charges.

Thomas M. Frost, Assistant Inspector General for Investigations, US Department of Homeland Security, explained that border related corruption is not limited to one DHS component, but, unfortunately, could involve employees and contractors from across DHS, from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) and others.

In Fiscal Year (FY) 2009, Frost said, the Office of Inspector General (OIG) received about 12,458 allegations of fraud and initiated over 1,085 investigations. Investigations resulted in 313 arrests, 293 indictments, 281 convictions and 59 administrative actions.

The corruption activities of drug trafficking organizations are not limited to those employees such as customs inspectors and border patrol officers, Frost commented. In addition ICE employees, including sworn law enforcement officers, have been targeted and recruited, as have TSA employees.

Frost identified several areas where continued improvement could help the department address employee corruption: employee suitability, monitoring and oversight; ongoing employee training, enforcing administrative Action; hotline allegations; and improved information and intelligence sharing.

James F. Tomsheck, Assistant Commisioner Office of Internal Affairs, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported that CBP had become a major target of drug cartels.

“There is a concerted effort on the part of transnational criminal organizations to infiltrate CBP through hiring initiatives and compromise our existing agents and officers” Tomsheck explained. “Since Oct. 1, 2004, 103 CBP law enforcement officers have been arrested or indicted on mission-critical corruption charges, including drug smuggling, alien smuggling, money laundering and conspiracy.”Drug cartels

To counter this very real threat, Tomsheck said, CBP has developed an operational strategy including background investigations and clearances, employee misconduct investigations, physical, informational, industrial, internal and operational security; and management inspections.