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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>Quick reminder for the younger readers: Customs and Border Patrol has doubled in size in the last 25 years, relative to the size of the population, and in my lifetime has increased the number of agents by 500%.

I'm no fan of the CBP but this seems like a flimsy objection. There's no reason to believe why their staffing levels will grow linearly with population. They're tasked with protecting the border, so we'd expect their staffing levels to grow linearly with the amount of border that needs protecting. If there's more stuff coming in (eg. aliexpress shipments from china), or more border crossings (legal or otherwise), we'd expect their numbers to grow faster relative to population.

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The job description of the CBP has expanded way beyond protection the border and customs. For instance, they were deployed to Portland and have been featured patrolling interior cities under the auspices of catching domestic drug trade. They have become also a domestic police force at the convenience of the executive branch.

The justification for that is they have jurisdiction everywhere within 200mi or so of a land OR SEA border.

Portland may not feel close to the sea, but it is.

The authority they claimed for their deployment was 40 U.S. Code § 1315, protection of "federal property and persons", not anything customs and border related. The law providing the authorization was part of one of the many knee-jerk post 9/11 bills.

"Needs protecting" is a policy choice. Mexicans used to just come and go. Then, as an economic policy choice, we decided to close up the border, now migrants only want to come and not leave.

There are not "more border crossings" today, there are fewer. The Border Patrol is massive and bloated but the peak border interdiction rates of the 80s and 90s remain the records.

As in today 2023 yes they are going down. That is because Title 42 is being used again. However according to this article last year was a record high.

"In fiscal year 2022, federal officials along the southern border stopped migrants over 2.3 million times, a record high."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jan-6-arrests-new-accusations-s...

There are all kinds of ways to set misleading records if you don't correct for population growth.

But you mislead in your post by leaving that out?

Could you please provide evidence that population growth adjusted this number to under a record high? Until then I am going to actual believe the real numbers and not how you feel.

> There are not "more border crossings" today, there are fewer.

less than uh, 2010 maybe. there were less than a million mexican nationals in the US in 1970. there has been an unprecedented explosion in migration from latam in the last three decades, to the point that latinos are on track to become the largest ethnic group in the US.

> grow linearly with the amount of border that needs protecting.

Have the geographic borders changed in the last 25 years?

If you read the next sentence you'd see they addressed that.

> If there's more stuff coming in (eg. aliexpress shipments from china), or more border crossings (legal or otherwise), we'd expect their numbers to grow faster relative to population.

Thinking of every inbound package as "extending the amount of border" is mission creep nonsense IMO - it's propaganda mostly for the benefit of legislators holding the purse strings.

Regardless, it doesn't justify the extensive CBP expansion outside of mailrooms.

> Thinking of every inbound package as "extending the amount of border" is mission creep nonsense IMO - it's propaganda mostly for the benefit of legislators holding the purse strings.

How is it mission creep? Isn't inspecting inbound packages (ie. "customs") literally part of "Customs and Border Protection"?

>Regardless, it doesn't justify the extensive CBP expansion outside of mailrooms.

There are many other plausible reasons for expanding CBP outside of mailrooms, eg. war on drugs, illegal immigration, terrorists, etc.

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