Border agency kicks off courtesy training

Customs and border officials at U.S. ports of entry will receive more training on how to be professional and courteous under a program being launched in response to some "isolated incidents of rude and hostile conduct," Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Robert Bonner said Thursday.

Union representatives, however, immediately blasted the program as being misdirected and not addressing the concerns raised in a survey released this week reporting that front-line border personnel do not have the tools, training and resources they need to protect the country from potential terrorists.

"We can be professional and courteous while at the same time aggressively perform our counterterrorism task," Bonner said during a press conference announcing theCBP Professionalism Initiative.

CBP has more than 41,000 employees, but the initiative only applies to the 20,000 or so officers working at the ports of entry, such as airports and official land crossings, Bonner said.

As part of the initiative, CBP review teams will travel the country to observe primary and secondary border screening operations to make sure that front-line officers are using their discretion appropriately.

The initiative establishes a code of conduct and a professionalism training course for affected personnel. CBP is also restructuring its procedures for complaint-tracking, creating a permanent professionalism board to oversee the initiative and deploying passenger service representatives to selected ports to answer concerns from the public.

According to Bonner, CBP has experienced "relatively few incidents" where officers treated people coming into the United States in a rude or hostile manner. Port-of-entry officers will continue to have the ability to exercise discretion in preventing people who they feel are suspect from entering the country. He also claimed that CBP stops a potential terrorist from entering the country "almost every other day."

"We're starting a new agency. We're building the traditions of this agency," Bonner said. "And one of those traditions at the ports of entry is going to be courtesy and professionalism."

Officials with the American Federation of Government Employees union said the initiative does not address the most pressing issues facing CBP officers.

"They're more worried about the professional smile… than they are about helping people do their job," said Charles Showalter, president of AFGE's National Immigration and Naturalization Service Council, which represents port-of-entry officers. "What they're doing is working very hard at facilitating commerce and tourism and making the officers at the border become meeters and greeters as opposed to enforcing the laws that we are hired to protect." He fears the professionalism initiative will only contribute to low morale.

CBP officers should have pay and benefits equal to law enforcement officers, Showalter said, adding CBP officers processed more than 500 million people at ports of entry last year.

A majority of the 500 CBP officials surveyed earlier this month by AFGE's National Border Patrol Council and National Homeland Security Council said they were demoralized and not getting the full support they need to protect the country.

"This whole initiative troubles me … It's just such a typical bureaucratic response," said T.J. Bonner, president of AFGE's National Border Patrol Council. "You have a few officers who are discourteous, so you launch this giant program that's going to suck resources away from your fundamental mission in order to address a very, very small percentage of people."

He added: "They're not listening to the agents who are saying they are not getting enough training in terrorism."

CBP denounced the union's survey as not representative of the full workforce and riddled with leading questions.

T.J. Bonner, who is not related to Commissioner Bonner, said the survey was representative. He added that the union was so confident in the results that it was willing toconduct it again with a list of employees provided by CBP.