Home Media Center News Releases

Washington, D.C.—The head of the union representing employees of the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) today called on Congress to provide those on the front lines of homeland security with the formal designation of law enforcement officer (LEO) for the roles they play in providing a key underpinning of the nation’s safety.

“Every day,” said President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), CBP Officers “face enormous physical challenges and constant stress, with job duties that regularly expose them to the threat of injury or death.”

It is “dangerous work with real and unrelenting hazards,” she said in testimony submitted to the House Government Reform Subcommittee on the Federal Workforce and Agency Organization. Kelley said the LEO designation should be extended to them “for their safety and for the sake of the public they serve.” The subcommittee was meeting to examine the role of federal employees in maintaining airport security.

LEO status, which is widespread among employees of federal law enforcement agencies, carries with it an option to retire at age 50 with 20 years of service. A bipartisan bill strongly supported by NTEU, H.R. 1002, would provide such status for CBP Officers.

NTEU has been leading the fight to extend LEO status to them not only because of the unfairness in denying it, given their extensive and everyday law enforcement officer duties, but because “the public interest is best served when these jobs are held by younger men and women capable of meeting the intense physical demands of such difficult work,” Kelley said.

On that subject, Kelley took CBP and its parent organization, the Department of Homeland Security, to task for not seeking to identify optimal staffing levels at the nation’s border crossing points, including international airports.

“This failure,” she said, “prevents CBP from performing work gap analyses, which could be used to justify budget and staffing requests.” She was particularly critical of the claimed reason why such analyses aren’t being made—namely, that in today’s tight budget environment, there wouldn’t be sufficient funding forthcoming to implement the staffing needs that would be identified.

“This is circular logic,” President Kelley said. “No additional resources will be provided unless and until CBP makes a case for the need—and the need is obvious to virtually everyone who looks at it, and most certainly to the frontline CBP employees who keep pointing out to their agency that crossing points are understaffed.”

This matter “cannot continue to go unaddressed without serious adverse consequences,” she said.

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing 150,000 employees in 30 agencies and departments, including some 15,000 in CBP