On adjacent chartreuse walls of Henry Leo’s office hang a grade-school butterfly drawing by his now-adult daughter and a large photograph of a human skull. A few feet to the right of the skull are other photos from Leo’s earlier years in the U.S. Border Patrol, before he became agent-in-charge of the Harlingen station in south Texas: He poses in front of his first big drug bust, which he remembers weighing more than 400 pounds. Similar shots line the hallways throughout the station. Clench-jawed agents mug for the camera with stacked plastic-wrapped bundles, how amateur fishermen might grin with their prize-winning catch.
Down the hall in a meeting space resembling a well-lit elementary school cafeteria are four large wooden chairs engraved with names — memorial to four Harlingen-based agents who died while on the job. He says a Harlingen agent also died by suicide two years ago.
“Divorce rates are high, suicide rates are high,” Leo says. He cites long hours, time away from family, “violence on officers, yes, but also on victims,” as having harmful psychological effects. “My daughters are 23 and 20, and they remind me I’ve missed five or six birthdays,” he says.
This week in May has attracted widespread negative attention on Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector, where Harlingen is located. Four days earlier, on May 20, 16-year-old Carlos Hernandez Vásquez died of the flu in Border Patrol custody 20 miles away at Weslaco Station. The day after that, the sector’s Central Processing Center in McAllen — just 40 miles west — closed all migrant intake due to flu outbreak. Vásquez had been transferred from the McAllen processing center to Weslaco hours before his death.
But Leo argues Border Patrol is misunderstood.
“I’m a parent. A human. Anybody dying, in custody or not in custody, that’s bad,” Leo says. “What I take exception with is when it is portrayed by some in the media that the Border Patrol has something to do with it.”
Down the hall in a meeting space resembling a well-lit elementary school cafeteria are four large wooden chairs engraved with names — memorial to four Harlingen-based agents who died while on the job. He says a Harlingen agent also died by suicide two years ago.
“Divorce rates are high, suicide rates are high,” Leo says. He cites long hours, time away from family, “violence on officers, yes, but also on victims,” as having harmful psychological effects. “My daughters are 23 and 20, and they remind me I’ve missed five or six birthdays,” he says.
This week in May has attracted widespread negative attention on Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector, where Harlingen is located. Four days earlier, on May 20, 16-year-old Carlos Hernandez Vásquez died of the flu in Border Patrol custody 20 miles away at Weslaco Station. The day after that, the sector’s Central Processing Center in McAllen — just 40 miles west — closed all migrant intake due to flu outbreak. Vásquez had been transferred from the McAllen processing center to Weslaco hours before his death.
But Leo argues Border Patrol is misunderstood.
“I’m a parent. A human. Anybody dying, in custody or not in custody, that’s bad,” Leo says. “What I take exception with is when it is portrayed by some in the media that the Border Patrol has something to do with it.”
He argues national news media casts unfair blame on his agency for the deaths of 11 people in Border Patrol custody in 2019, six at the time of this interview. Leo says the people they detain often arrive severely ill, and that medical care provided by Border Patrol or other agencies arrives just too late.
A few weeks later, in July, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General — the internal watchdog over Border Patrol’s overarching agency — released a report detailing squalid conditions in Rio Grande Valley Sector detention centers, writing “overcrowding and prolonged detention represent an immediate risk to the health and safety” of detainees and agents. “Unfortunately, people have died, but it's not because we’ve withheld any medical treatment or care for them,” he says. “It happens. People die every day in the U.S.” |