U.S. Customs and Border Protection Policy Routinely Violates Stated Core Values

Abstract

Core values can provide important strategic functions in organizations. They can help to unify members around common goals, they can help to ensure culture evolves in a desirable manner, and they can provide guidance to individuals in the absence of input from leadership. For government organizations, such statements provide citizens and voters with information about how the agency behaves. The core values of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) are vigilance, service to country, and integrity. In this paper, I compare these values to policies such as invasive border searches, family separations, substandard conditions at detention centers, and failure to hold agents accountable for misconduct, among others. I find that such policies routinely and egregiously violate these core values. I offer several avenues for CBP leadership and for agents to pursue in order to resolve these problems.