How Breitbart Helped Cause a Port Shutdown
Even before Joe Biden won the presidency, anti-immigrant right-wing media group Breitbart was on the Border Patrol beat. They have extremely close ties with the Border Patrol's national union, the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC). The NBPC has a podcast where their members spend most of the show lamenting how Donald Trump didn't win the election, how much they love insurrection leaders like MTG and how they believe that every asylum seeker who enters the U.S. in between the port of entry should be treated as a criminal and thrown in jail...that podcast is produced by Breitbart.
This should not come as a surprise to anyone who follows immigration. Before Trump was kicked out of the White House, he renegotiated the NBPC's contract. At the time, union stewards (who are also agents) were allowed 18,000 hours to collectively work on union issues part-time while also patrolling the border. Under Trump's new contract, those hours were increased to 153,920 hours. Additionally, this created new full-time positions for 74 union stewards tripling their numbers while at the same time the agency has seen their staff numbers decrease. No longer did stewards have to work the line and patrol the border to get the great government pay and benefits, now they could work full-time on union issues and never have to put on their green uniforms.
So, if the numbers of agents have decreased while the numbers of union stewards has drastically increased, what could they be doing with all that time?
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