We Secured the Border—but ‘We’re Not Done Yet’
Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott sat down with The American Conservative to discuss recent successes and long-term plans to protect Americans.
Few government agencies have been involved as deeply with the priorities of the Trump administration as U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which handles not only border security but also tariffs and trade regulations. CBP’s Commissioner Rodney Scott sat down with The American Conservative to discuss how the agency is approaching these priorities and what Americans should know about our country’s borders.
One of the things that we’ve seen from the Trump administration has been a pretty dramatic increase in the amount of tariffs that are charged. U.S. Customs and Border Protection has quite a bit to do with the administration and implementation of those tariffs. How has this impacted the operations here at CBP?
I think the most important piece that people need to understand is that the economic security of the United States is just as critical to national security as more traditional things they would think about, like border security or the military. Simply knowing who and what comes into this country is what U.S. Customs and Border Protection does. We’re already in the customs business of collecting the tariffs and imposing the tariffs.
We have two offices within CBP dedicated to this. The Office of Trade focuses on the regulation aspect. The Office of Trade Relations works with the brokers, the industry, if you will, to make sure the communication flows and the processes work smoothly. Both of those offices overlap with the Office of Field Operations, which is where the visible work takes place—the guys with the blue uniforms that are inspecting the cargo coming in and making sure it is what people say it is.
There were a lot of people out there yelling that the sky is falling, everything’s going to collapse, we’re not going to get mail in, the economy is going to tank. None of that happened, because you have a lot of professionals behind the scenes, making sure these things go forward, that they work smoothly. And Customs and Border Protection is one of the biggest gears in that machine. We work with Commerce, we work with the White House to make sure these things are ruled out. And I think we’re doing a pretty good job at it.
As a matter of fact, I was just looking at the numbers earlier, and there is $174 billion in increased revenue for the United States because of the tariffs. But I think that also misses the mark. That wasn’t the intent. The intent is to rebuild America and make sure that we can sustain America, the America we grew up in going forward, and that we bring industry and manufacturing back to America. We learned during Covid, we learned during the chip crisis, that we had exported too much of our capability, of our manufacturing, outside the U.S. We need to bring that back. We need to reestablish our own inherent ability to make things so that if we do have to go to war at some point in time, or if we have an adversary attack, we don’t have to rely on third parties to get the tools we need.
Have there been any particular national security concerns for CBP regarding customs? We’ve seen China, for example, shipping over illicit goods in disguise or doing pass-through operations in order to evade tariffs.
One of CBP’s primary missions is just knowing who and what is coming into the United States. And I argue that, outside of an academic environment, a political environment, or a media environment, you can’t separate out the threats. For CBP, whether it’s a nation-state that’s trying to sneak a commodity or people into the United States, or it’s a company trying to circumvent the tariffs by doing transshipments or by falsely labeling different commodities, we have to deal with all of that.
One big reason that we got rid of the de minimis exemption was because of identified threats coming into the United States that we could not effectively control without changing the entire infrastructure, without changing the process. E-commerce created this huge volume of imports that were below the de minimis threshold, which we didn’t really have the ability to inspect. We were getting behind the curve on that, which was dramatically increasing national security risk, and we addressed it by getting rid of the de minimis exemption. Now we have a lot more information coming to us where we can make informed decisions on which packages we open based on threats that we’ve identified, which in many cases are national security threats.
Between administrations we’ve seen some pretty dramatic changes at the Southwest border—we hit record highs on border encounters during the Biden administration, now we’re hitting record lows. What have been the most important changes between administrations, and how have those affected CBP operations?
Policy matters. The Trump administration believes in the rule of law and in consequences when you violate the law, and it doesn’t matter if it’s the immigration context or the customs aspect or the trade aspect we were just talking about. We believe in the laws that Congress passed. We believe in enforcing them.
The Biden administration was 100 percent focused on getting as many people into the country as they could, and they didn’t care about the impacts. We didn’t talk about national security. We weren’t allowed to. The Trump administration puts America first, securing America first.
And all that really means is you empower the law enforcement officers to just go do their jobs. Overnight, as soon as there was a consequence for illegally entering the United States and we weren’t just releasing people, that flow reduced.
Almost overnight we were able to take 400 CBP officers away from doing administrative immigration processing and put them back where they’re supposed to be, doing inspections of the people and things coming into the United States, so we could identify all those other threats. Those cascading effects of simply enforcing the law and making sure that there’s a consequence in place if somebody violates the law deter a massive amount of illegal activity.
Now we have more time to focus on what is coming in legitimately, identify the fentanyl, identify transshipment, identify all the threats to the country coming in, and respond much more appropriately. And we’re not done yet.
We’ve made massive improvements in the last nine months, but you’re going to see the border security improving even more as we build out the smart border wall, as we continue to roll out non-intrusive inspection equipment, and as we update some of our targeting systems within CBP to make sure that when an agent or officer is pointed at something that’s a threat we can mitigate it quickly.
One of the big changes that we’ve seen for CBP as part of this administration has been a major increase in funding and support through the One Big Beautiful Bill. What are the most important changes that CBP is looking to implement in response to that?
Personnel and long-term infrastructure.
There was a significant plus-up for both Border Patrol and the field operations and personnel, because at the end of the day, “technology” just aims a human being at something. Technology doesn’t find fentanyl, technology doesn’t interview an individual and find out that they have terrorist intent, versus coming to the United States as a tourist. It takes a human being to do that. So we got to plus-up in personnel. But a lot of the infrastructure, a lot of the money is also for the smart border wall system, new aircraft, and then some additional technology at the ports of entry.
Let me explain why that is so important as well. I think people miss all the time that the wall is an actual investment designed by frontline Border Patrol agents for a specific reason. We proved this concept out in San Diego back in the ’90s, and it’s gotten way better since then. In the 12 mile section where we tested it and proved it, it allowed us to dramatically, dramatically improve border security, from where we believed we had no control and we couldn’t even tell you how many people crossed, to where we were at about 96 to 98 percent effective. We saw everything, and we caught 98 percent of it (today, I would say we’re catching about 99 percent of border crossings).
But almost more importantly, we were able to pull 150 agents out of that area and reassign them to other areas where we didn’t have that infrastructure to do interviews, to actually go take down boats that were landing on the coast, or to do other things that technology could not do. That was a $28 million return on the investment every year, year over year, for the life cycle of that section of border wall.
And what we’re building now is actually more high tech and better than what we have built out there. As we expand that out, the American taxpayer is getting a direct, immediate return on their investment by having the most expensive resource we have, which is human beings, having them focus on things only human beings can do. One or two agents can cover significantly more of the border than they did before. We can also shift more of our money into the ports of entry, where we have non-intrusive inspection technology, which again is allowing the officers to do the things only officers can do. We’re using technology to filter out the clutter, if you will, and expedite the flow of legitimate legal trade and travel so that our economy continues to rebound.
I know that CBP has had some recruitment and retention problems in the past. How are you seeing those metrics change? I imagine the Trump administration’s actual support for border enforcement has done wonders for morale here at the agency.
It’s amazing what messaging does. When you are torn down and kicked and insulted constantly in the public, recruiting drops off. But right now, we have more recruits coming in then we have seats in the academy. Every one of our academy seats is full. We’re expanding our academy. We’re doing fantastic, and I give a lot of that credit to the administration for telling law enforcement “we have your back. If you go do your job, if you enforce the laws that Congress asked you to enforce, we have your back.”
That simple message has resonated across the whole country, because now our biggest challenge is convincing people to come to CBP instead of ICE or FBI or DEA, because people want a mission. CBP’s mission is fantastic. It’s amazing. So we’re not having any recruitment problems right now.
Returning to the situation at the border, border crossings have plummeted, and it is much more secure. Are there any notable trends that the public should be aware of? Any particular risks, or any interesting trends in statistics like the country of origin for border encounters, that would be worth highlighting?
I can think of several, but I want to tie it all the way back, because I think people miss how important this is. The cartels need illegal immigration to lower their cost and risk of smuggling higher-value commodities into the United States. When I say higher-value commodities, people immediately think about narcotics, and that’s not wrong. Fentanyl, narcotics, these are things they are going to lose when we seize them. We burn them and destroy them, and they go away. But with illegal immigration, the person gets deported and the cartel can establish a market to try to get them back. They see human beings as a kind of renewable resource.
What we saw in the Biden administration is a lot of people came across the border and stood there and waited to be arrested because the Biden administration created this process where they were going to get caught and released. That reduced the cartels’ need to spend any money on marketing. The Biden administration marketed on behalf of the cartels.
Why do the cartels need the illegal aliens? It’s not for the money they pay. They script how many people cross the border at a time and where, very strategically, to wipe out the law enforcement resources in the area, so that anybody that was willing to pay more to not be fingerprinted and photographed, to not get caught, or any high value commodities—again, narcotics, but also endangered wildlife (we’ve caught tiger cubs and monkeys, all kinds of endangered species being smuggled across)—anything people will pay a lot of money to smuggle, the cartel holds until they push across all the illegal aliens. Then we’re busy, and they can bring over the higher-value things that they don’t want to risk being captured. By dramatically reducing the flow of illegal immigration, we took that away from them. They’re having to go out and actually spend money now to market and try to convince people to cross the border illegally to create that distraction.
That message went out globally. So right now we’re back to what I would call old-school norms on the border, where the majority of people we’re arresting are from the country of Mexico. The exotics, the countries with a very high threat for terrorism around the world, have all dropped off. They’re hardly on my report at all anymore. It’s shifted dramatically; during the Biden administration, every single day, there were people from about 150 different countries that were pouring across the Southwest border. Right now they’re only coming from about three or four and our agents are there catching them.
How have the cartels responded to these new trends in border security? The secure border has to be much more difficult for them to navigate, but I’m sure that they have ways of getting around that. What are the notable ways you’ve seen organized crime respond, and what has CBP been doing to counter those operations?
This isn’t our first time with this. We’re seeing what we predicted.
We made some informed predictions based on our experience before. Throughout history, there have been surges where we’ve actually kind of secured the border a little bit better, and we’ve seen things adjust. Trump 45 is a good example. We drove down illegal immigration in a way we had never done before. We started building out the border wall. We saw things change.
First and foremost, I would challenge you to go back over the last four years during the Biden administration and find any time you saw or heard anything about a sophisticated tunnel being discovered across the border. The cartel didn’t have to spend that kind of money or effort. They just walked across. So we believe that they’ll go back and they’ll try these other proven techniques from the past, like the sophisticated tunnels. We’re prepared. We have very well-educated and very well-informed task forces in specific locations. We have technology that we’ve not had in the past, but we’re going to address that threat. I won’t get into it too much more, but that is being actively worked on.
We know that they’ll push into the maritime environment, and they’ll start coming up the coast of California and the Gulf. Right now, we’ve worked with the U.S. Coast Guard and the Department of War to deploy maritime vessels and maritime resources in a way we have never done before. So what you’re seeing on the land border is a big deal, but we didn’t just stop there. We’re already leveraging all the lessons we learned before, and we’re adjusting.
We’ve seen increases in drone activity, not just watching what we do, but actually flying across with narcotics. We’re also watching what’s going on in Mexico that’s not getting reported on a lot publicly. The Mexican cartels have weaponized drones, and they’re literally using them against each other, the Mexican police, and the Mexican military. Their use of violence to commit crime has gone through the roof, mostly in Mexico, but just south of some of our stations, especially in Texas, in Laredo and Rio Grande Valley, those agents are actually hearing the weapons fire. The firefights are going on all the time. We’ve had stray .50-caliber rounds come north into the United States.
So we’re having planning meetings now asking: How do we address that? Because we know the violence is going to increase. They’re not just going to go home. They want to keep making money. We’re cutting into their bottom line, and they’re going to get frustrated. But we’re prepared. That’s a big reason we’ve deployed a lot of the Department of War resources with us to help—not just the deployment and high-profile things, but the planning pieces, to determine what tools, what techniques we need to be putting on the border to make sure that we lock this down and keep America safe going forward.
Speaking of Mexico, what cooperation does CBP have with Mexico? Is the Mexican government cooperative? What kinds of cooperation with the Mexican government would you like to see going forward?
To stay on the safe side, you could replace Mexico with any country and I would always want the cooperation to be better, the information sharing to be better, and the integrated operations to be better. With Mexico, they’re tenfold better right now than they were the last four years. Mexico is actually stepping up and helping us. They’re doing joint patrols with us, where you have U.S. law enforcement on the U.S. side of the border, Mexican law enforcement on the south side, working in tandem. We’re sharing information and we’re working together a lot better than ever before.
I’m not going to say it’s perfect, I’m not going to say I want more; I’ll save those conversations for one-on-ones with the Department of State and with Mexico. But I think that’s an important part too. Those conversations are ongoing. As long as we’re in the room talking and we’re working towards making things better, I think we’re heading in the right direction, and we are.
Speaking of cooperation, another development we’ve seen in the Trump administration’s border efforts is declaring National Defense Areas along the border, which allows the use of Department of War assets in border protection. Do you think that’s been an effective measure? Is that something you’d like to see more of? Or do you think there’s a different approach that can more effectively utilize DoW assets for border security?
I think it’s very, very effective. Every other country sees an invading force from the outside coming in as a national security risk, but for whatever reason, we had decided in this country that it was purely a matter for law enforcement. The National Defense Areas give us a mixed area. They’re all attached to a military base, but it allows the military to do basically what they would do on any military base in the United States, help secure the perimeter. It’s been a huge force multiplier for us.
But I also want to highlight that there was no time during my career as a border patrol agent before I became commissioner, a little over 29 years, that we weren’t working with the military on the border in different ways. Different administrations allowed different levels of cooperation and deployments. I would argue that right now is better than it’s ever been. Part of that is, without getting too far in the weeds, I have a call six days a week where I’m talking with counterparts over at the Department of War and many other organizations. These are calls where we ask, How are things going? What’s working? What’s not working, and how can we make it better?
Those types of integrated calls were driven by the White House, and while we’ve always spoken before, we haven’t to this extent.
I also wanted to ask a more topical question. This summer, we saw a couple of Chinese researchers who were arrested for carrying a fungus that could have done significant harm to America’s agricultural industry. Is there a particular risk of further Chinese agro-terrorism or other, similar threats? What’s CBP’s approach to countering those?
I’m actually really glad you brought that up, because it’s one of the other issues that we talk about that just doesn’t get a lot of attention.
We have an entire agricultural inspection capability. Within this organization, we have agricultural specialists that are targeting specifically those types of things. We have another component that’s called the Laboratory of Scientific Services. Think of it as like the CSI for this type of stuff. We work directly with the Department of Agriculture, and we’re looking for invasive species, for certain seeds, even the pallets that other commodities come in on are inspected for bugs or borers or even spiders that don’t belong here in the United States.
That’s going on every day. While we look for fentanyl, while we look for Chinese terrorists coming into the United States, or Iranians, or whatever the threat might be that day, it’s an ongoing operation. Thank you for bringing it up, because so many people, including myself, sometimes forget to highlight it. But that’s a critical piece, and that goes back to the economic security of the United States. Could you imagine wiping out the wheat industry? This is a huge part of what we do that goes unnoticed a lot.
This interview has been edited for conciseness and clarity.
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