Story of a rogue agent clouds efforts to ease border control expansion

BROWNSVILLE, Texas — Joel Luna was just the kind of job candidate the Border Patrol covets. He grew up on both sides of the border, in Mexico and South Texas. He participated in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps in high school and served in the Army, seeing combat in Iraq.

Luna joined the agency as part of a hiring surge under the George W. Bush administration, patrolling a rural area about 100 miles north of Mexico. But six years later, his decorated career came to a shocking end: He was arrested and charged with helping send illegal weapons to Mexico and ship drugs into the United States. He was convicted in January and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Now, as President Donald Trump plans a similar hiring surge at the Border Patrol, Luna's case is casting a large shadow. The president wants to make 5,000 new hires, under a streamlined process that critics fear could open a door to other rogue agents like Luna.

[A big problem on the U.S. border: Corrupt agents]

Agency officials, some members of Congress and the Border Patrol union say the current process has made it too hard to hire agents. It typically takes more than a year to vet candidates and get them on the job.

At the center of this notoriously slow and stringent process — which Customs and Border Protection, the patrol's parent agency, put in place after a number of corruption cases — is a mandatory polygraph test. Officials are considering changing the test, and in some cases the agency would simply waive it.

"CBP has a big problem in not being able to hire agents because of the polygraph test," said Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., who has sponsored the legislation to make hiring agents easier and faster. "I'm not saying that we should get rid of the polygraph, but we want to make sure the process isn't an overall detriment to good candidates."

Three weeks ago, the agency began using a different lie detector test that takes less time than the current one and asks fewer questions. And legislation moving through Congress would grant the agency the authority to waive the polygraph for some former law enforcement officers and military veterans.

Top officials said the changes would allow the agency, which is losing agents faster than it can replace them, to compete for qualified candidates with other law enforcement agencies more effectively without sacrificing standards. Applicants would still undergo a background check in addition to the shorter polygraph test, officials said.

"No one wants corrupt agents inside the Border Patrol," said Jayson Ahern, a former acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection. "What CBP is proposing is a sensible way to weed out corruption but speed up the hiring."

But some current and former Department of Homeland Security officials said the proposed changes could expose the agency to corrupt individuals who could use their position to help drug cartels or human smugglers. Border Patrol agents work largely by themselves in isolated areas and are routinely targeted by criminal organizations.

"It could put CBP at significant risk," said John Roth, the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general. "While it may sound reasonable to say you could waive requirements from former military personnel because they have passed a polygraph, Border Patrol agents work in a different environment that is not as controlled as the military."

Roth said the agency needed to identify other ways to make hiring "more efficient without sacrificing integrity and effectiveness."

James Tomsheck, a former head of the agency's internal affairs division who helped design the original polygraph tests, said the new exam would not be useful in weeding out applicants with drug problems or ties to cartels. It is "designed for the intelligence community, not law enforcement professionals," he said.

Luna did not take a polygraph test before he joined the Border Patrol in 2009. It did not become mandatory until President Barack Obama signed the Anti-Border Corruption Act into law in January 2011, and was not required of all agents until 2013.

The law was prompted by problems the agency had in screening candidates during the Bush-era hiring surge. As the number of Border Patrol agents doubled between 2001 and 2009, from nearly 10,000 to more than 20,000, dozens of agents were eventually arrested and charged in corruption cases, according to government documents and court records.

[A backpack, a Coke bottle and fake cocaine: How a Border Patrol agent got arrested for smuggling]

Among the most notorious is Luna. He worked out of a border checkpoint in Hebbronville, about an hour and a half north of McAllen, patrolling the area to catch drug and human smugglers.

Across the Rio Grande in Mexico, Luna's brothers Fernando and Eduardo were engaged in the very activity he was sworn to stop: drug trafficking and gun running for the Gulf Cartel, according to court records and interviews with local law enforcement officials.

Luna's ties to his brothers' activities seemed to go unnoticed by his superiors at the Border Patrol until the local authorities pulled a headless body out of Laguna Madre, on the western coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

The body was eventually identified as that of Jose Francisco Palacios Paz. Paz, a Honduran immigrant, worked in a tire shop in McAllen that Luna's brothers owned. The brothers had fled the fighting between the Gulf Cartel and a rival cartel just across the river in Reynosa, Mexico, and moved in with Luna.

Local law enforcement officials said Paz had been killed because Fernando and Eduardo Luna had thought he was going to expose their drug-trafficking operations. His blood was found at the tire shop.

Eduardo Luna, the youngest brother, was arrested at the tire shop. Fernando, the oldest brother, was arrested coming back from Mexico. In the white Chevy pickup with him was his brother Joel.

Omar Lucio, the sheriff of Cameron County, said his investigators had determined that Joel Luna was not at the tire shop when his brothers lured Paz there and killed him. "But he knew about the murder and all the other stuff that they were involved in," Lucio said.

The most damning piece of evidence tying Luna to the activities of his brothers was a safe found at his mother-in-law's house. In it were Luna's commemorative Border Patrol badge, passwords for his work station, paperwork for his credit union account and medical excuse paperwork.

Investigators also discovered nearly $90,000 in cash, a kilogram of cocaine and methamphetamine. In addition, they found a ledger with drug sales and several firearms, Lucio said. Also in the safe, he said, was a handgun that belonged to Eduardo Luna with Cartel del Golfo, or Gulf Cartel, engraved on it. Investigators said the gun had been used to kill Paz.

Luna, who denied that he owned the safe or had known what was inside, was arrested at the Border Patrol checkpoint where he worked. Shortly before the trial, Fernando Luna made a deal with prosecutors and agreed to testify against his siblings.

A Cameron County jury found Joel Luna guilty of engaging in organized criminal activity. He was acquitted of the murder.

Last year, a report by a Homeland Security advisory panel found that corrupt border agents "pose a national security threat." It called for more aggressive measures to root them out, including increasing the number of internal investigators, because the department was inadequately staffed.

But Tomsheck, the former Customs and Border Protection official, said the agency seemed to be doing the opposite in its efforts to meet Trump's hiring goals.

"The measures they are proposing weaken a screening process that already has shortcomings," he said. "They're just asking for more Joel Lunas."