Ten House and Senate committee chairs request GAO audit of CBP Critical Incident Teams

On January 24, 2022, ten chairs of House and Senate committees and subcommittees jointly sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office requesting a comprehensive audit of U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s use of Border Patrol Critical Incident Teams (BPCITs) along the southwest border. The signatories were Bennie G. Thompson (House Homeland Security), Gary Peters (Senate HSGAC), Jerrold Nadler (House Judiciary), Richard Durbin (Senate Judiciary), Carolyn B. Maloney (House Oversight & Reform), Alex Padilla (Senate Judiciary Immigration Subcommittee), Nanette Diaz Barragán (House Homeland Security Border Security Subcommittee), Kyrsten Sinema (Senate HSGAC Government Operations Subcommittee), Zoe Lofgren (House Judiciary Immigration Subcommittee), and Jamie Raskin (House Oversight Civil Rights Subcommittee).

The letter cited a complaint from a civil rights organization (the Southern Border Communities Coalition, which had sent a 14-page letter to Congress in October 2021) alleging that CBP utilized Critical Incident Teams to investigate and cover up incidents involving potential CBP agent misconduct. The same day, the House Committees on Homeland Security and on Oversight and Reform jointly announced their own investigation into whether BPCITs had interfered in Border Patrol use-of-force investigations.

This is the load-bearing precipitating event for CBP Commissioner Chris Magnus’s May 2022 memorandum terminating the CITs.