Source: Immigration Impact
An internal memo from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) gave Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) a protected status that allows the agency to withhold all names of CBP employees in response to FOIA requests. Under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the public is allowed to request documents from a federal agency.
In 2014, a FOIA request found allegations of sexual, physical, and verbal abuse of children in CBP custody. Many investigations are left incomplete without any action taken against individual officials. If the names of these officers were protected, it would have been difficult to investigate the abuse.
Protecting CBP officers’ names will just make it even more difficult to make complaints. “Without greater insight into the activities of immigration enforcement agencies… we lose another layer of accountability and our government becomes that much more closed to us.”