Donald Trump’s agenda related to deportations and border security has unfolded rapidly in his second term, but the president has not had a permanent commissioner leading Customs and Border Protection. That changed on Wednesday when the Republican-led Senate confirmed Rodney Scott as the new CBP chief.
As The Guardian reported, his nomination was not without controversy.
Shortly before his confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee in April, James Wong, a former deputy assistant commissioner of CBP’s office of internal affairs, wrote to the committee’s top Democrat with ‘concern’ about Scott’s handling of the investigation into the 2010 death of Anastasio Hernández Rojas in San Diego, after he was beaten and tased by CBP agents who were preparing to deport him. As San Diego’s police department was investigating the death, a CBP critical incident team used a subpoena to obtain Hernández Rojas’s medical records, which Wong said Scott would have known about given his position at the time as a top border patrol official in the city.
In claims made to Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, Wong alleged that Scott “supervised” a “cover-up,” which the accuser considered a disqualifying abuse.
The matter was discussed at Scott’s confirmation hearing, and when asked directly if he’d acted “to interfere with the investigation of that case,” Scott testified, “Absolutely not.”
Wyden also seized on a ProPublica report from 2019 that showed Scott was part of a private Facebook group for border patrol officials that included offensive comments about, among others, Democratic members of Congress. During his confirmation hearing, he said “there was a very small group” of people from a larger whole that posted “inappropriate, offensive material.”
This was good enough to satisfy Senate Republicans. It did not impress Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. “It’s hard to imagine a worse, more unqualified, more dangerous choice to lead the CBP in this moment than Mr. Scott,” the New York Democrat said in floor remarks, delivered shortly before the confirmation vote. Schumer went on to describe the allegations against the nominee as “sick,” adding, “At a time when the Trump administration is snatching people off the streets, conducting military-style raids across America, and demonizing immigrants, Mr. Scott would be nothing more than a rubber stamp for some of Donald Trump’s nastiest, cruelest immigration policies.” His GOP colleagues were apparently unpersuaded: Every Senate Republican on the floor, including the alleged “moderates,” voted to confirm the president’s nominee. (Two Senate Republicans — Mississippi’s Cindy Hyde-Smith and Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville — missed the vote but supported confirmation.)
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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