SAN DIEGO — Seven of nine U.S. Border Patrol sectors along the U.S.-Mexico border operated "homegrown" teams to investigate critical incidents with no oversight from Border Patrol headquarters, including the San Diego Sector, which created the first such unauthorized unit more than 35 years ago, according to a report released this month by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

The Southern Border Communities Coalition, which first shed light on such units in a 2021 letter to Congress that described them as "cover-up teams" and "shadow police," said the new report "points to widespread and ongoing abuse of power at the nation's largest law enforcement agency."

The coalition said the GAO report validates concerns it raised that the critical incident teams — which were disbanded in 2022 — were used to shield Border Patrol and its employees from criminal and civil liability when agents used deadly force or were otherwise involved in critical incidents, such as those that resulted in serious injuries or deaths.

The report itself — based largely on interviews with Border Patrol officials and a review of incident reports written by the units — lacks any sweeping allegations of misconduct or cover-ups, focusing more on the role the teams played in gathering evidence for civil liability claims.

The report also lacks many specifics, but it confirms for the first time the allegations of the widespread use of such units and offers the first government accounting of how the units generally operated. It also documents how the units were sometimes involved in witness interviews and evidence collection that likely should have been conducted only by criminal investigators. The only agencies with legal authority to investigate such incidents for potential criminal liability are the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General and U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Office of Professional Responsibility.

"Border Patrol never had the authority to investigate and yet it appears to have inserted itself in every criminal investigation between 2010 and 2022," said Andrea Guerrero, executive director of Alliance San Diego, a Southern Border Communities Coalition member, citing the report's findings.

Though the report only covers the activities of the secretive units dating back to 2010, it found the first such unit was created in 1987 in the San Diego Sector. A second unit followed in 1996 in the El Paso Sector, and the El Centro Sector created its own critical incident team in 2001. Four other units followed suit between 2002 and 2005 in sectors in Arizona and Texas.

CBP, Border Patrol's parent agency, disbanded the sector-specific critical incident teams in 2022 and shifted the duties they had claimed to CBP's Office of Professional Responsibility, a separate arm of the agency created in 2016 to investigate serious misconduct and potential criminality by CBP personnel. The GAO report found that when the sector units were first disbanded, the Office of Professional Responsibility, which is largely made up of former CBP personnel, lacked the resources it needed to investigate all critical incidents.

The Office of Professional Responsibility has since beefed up its operations, nearly doubling its investigator workforce, but questions remain about the office's independence, especially because more than half of those new hires are former Border Patrol agents, according to the report.

The Southern Border Communities Coalition, a group dedicated to protecting the rights of migrants and border residents, said that in light of the report's findings, it was calling "for an end to all current and future incarnations of (critical incident teams) to ensure the integrity and independence of criminal investigations."

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