Donald Trump nominated former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott for the new commissioner of the parent agency Customs and Border Protection (CBP), seeking the return of one of the most ardent defenders of the border policies from his first administration. Scott, a career official who was promoted by the Trump administration to the top Border Patrol post in 2020 and would require Senate confirmation to now lead CBP, has previously been described by the Los Angeles Times as having “enthusiastically embraced then-President Trump’s policies.” Scott is a close ally of incoming “border czar” Tom Homan and is likely to closely align the office with his mass deportation agenda.
“He’s well known” within the Trump world, remarked Gil Kerlikowske, CBP commissioner under former President Obama. “He does know these issues and obviously is trusted by the administration.”
Scott’s nomination means Trump would have an eager acolyte and would probably face little to no internal pushback when it comes to reinstating policies from his first term that prioritized cruelty over effective border management, including the family separation policy, which Scott defended and at one point even claimed didn’t exist, despite clear evidence that it did. Violence, corruption, and the toxic culture have also plagued the agency for years. CBP has been described as perhaps the most corrupt federal law enforcement agency in the nation. In just one example, a 2021 report from House Committee on Oversight and Reform investigation found Scott was a member of a violent, secret Facebook group where current and former agents mocked the deaths of migrant children and shared a doctored photo “depicting then-President Trump raping a Member of Congress.”
SCOTT DEFENDED TRUMP’S FAMILY SEPARATION POLICY, INCLUDING CLAIMING IT DIDN’T EVEN EXIST
Following the retirement of then-Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost after more than two decades at the agency, the Trump administration named Scott, then-acting Deputy Chief, to the top post. Scott, who had previously served as the Chief Patrol Agent for the San Diego Sector before his promotion by Trump, had been a Border Patrol employee since 1992. During Trump’s first term, he appeared on right-wing television programming to publicly defend him from widespread backlash over the cruel and traumatic family separation policy, which ultimately ripped 5,500 wailing children from the arms of loved ones. During one Fox News appearance, Scott stated that a family separation policy didn’t even exist.
“I’m trying to be polite,” Scott claimed during a June 2018 appearance on The Ingraham Angle. “It’s actually very frustrating and it’s extremely insulting. So a lot of it’s just flat-out lies. So the family separation being a policy is a lie. We’re leveraging the prosecution, the tools that we’ve had in place for years, we’re leveraging them better than before.” What’s actually “very frustrating” and “extremely insulting” is claiming that this memo didn’t exist, because it did and was signed into place by Trump’s then-Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen.
During that same time period, Scott also tried to deflect criticism by claiming that some children separated under the policy that he claimed didn’t exist weren’t even children at all. “People get the picture in their head that it’s the kid who lives next door to you and it’s not,” Scott stated. “Some of these kids are hardened adults.” According to 2018 figures of children separated under the official implementation of family separation (remember that many others were separated during a “piloting” of the policy beginning in 2017), more than 1,000 of the 2,600 kids ripped from their families during this time were under ten. 103 were under the age of five. “Lawyers and medical providers who have visited the Rio Grande Valley shelters described play rooms of crying preschool aged children in emotional crisis,” The Guardian reported at the time.
SCOTT WAS A MEMBER OF A SECRETIVE FACEBOOK GROUP WHERE MEMBERS SHARED VIOLENT CONTENT
Provost’s abrupt retirement from Border Patrol came not too long after shocking investigative findings that she had been a member of “I’m 10-15,” a secret Facebook group named after Border Patrol code for “alien in custody” and where current and former border officers shared racist and violent content, including posts mocking the 2019 death of a teen boy named Carlos Gregorio Hernández Vásquez while in Border Patrol custody, as well as a faked image of then-President Trump sexually assaulting Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But as a subsequent Congressional inquiry by House Democrats later found, Scott was also an “I’m 10-15” member, and, like Provost, “failed to report” activity in the group.
“In one exchange, group members responded with indifference and wisecracks to the post of a news story about a 16-year-old Guatemalan migrant who died in May while in custody at a Border Patrol station in Weslaco, Texas,” ProPublica reported in 2019. “One member posted a GIF of Elmo with the quote, ‘Oh well.’ Another responded with an image and the words ‘If he dies, he dies.’” Officials had claimed that agents had been checking in on the boy after falling ill with fever under custody, but surveillance footage made public later that year showed that no one checked in on him while he was dying. It was a cellmate, another child, who found him and asked for help.
“Chief Scott reported that the ‘I’m 10-15’ Facebook group enabled him to communicate with the workforce, share public information, and ‘know what the workforce is talking about,’” House Oversight Democrats said in their report. But he claimed that despite seeing “questionable content related to migrant arrest records,” he “did not think those instances rose to the level of reportable misconduct.” Scott’s membership alone sent a dangerous signal to their subordinates, with one agent telling investigators that Border Patrol officials were in the group, “then it must have been okay for him [Agent #1] to be in it.”
RESIGNATION FROM BORDER PATROL
Scott remained in his position following Trump’s loss in 2020 and President Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, subsequently throwing a fit over the new president’s memo ordering CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to stop using the offensive term “illegal alien” and instead replace it with “undocumented noncitizen.” Scott claimed that he was worried that “mandating the use of terms which are inconsistent with law has the potential to further erode public trust in our government institutions.”
But let’s recall that under Scott’s tenure, Border Patrol came under fire for promoting a “racist,” completely fictional video showing an actor portraying a murderous undocumented immigrant, journalist Jean Guerrero reported in 2020. “Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy at Yale University and author of How Fascism Works, said the video is in line with the tactics of fascist regimes, which ‘try to create immense fear around their standard targets, which are always immigrants, leftists, and minorities,’ he said. ‘It’s a monstrous piece of propaganda.’”
Scott shared the propaganda clip, which again was “completely fictitious, with actors and all,” from his Twitter page. But it’s not using an offensive and outdated term that risks eroding public trust, apparently. Scott left the federal government in August 2021, after finally being informed by the Biden administration that he had “the option to resign, retire or relocate,” a polite way of being asked to hit the road.
ALLEGED THREAT TO A FORMER AGENT AND ONGOING EXTREME AFFILIATIONS
Just weeks after leaving Border Patrol, Scott issued what a San Diego Superior Court judge described as a “classic” rape threat to Jenn Budd, a former senior Border Patrol agent turned immigrant rights advocate and whistleblower who has for years worked to expose corruption with the agency’s ranks. During a back and forth with Budd over Twitter, Scott claimed that he’d found no evidence to back her claims of a toxic culture within the Border Patrol (the “I’m 10-15” Facebook group proved her point exactly). “But I did find out a lot about you,” he continued. “Lean back, close your eyes and just enjoy the show.” Vice reported that the tweet “generated outrage on social media,” with Budd going to court to seek a restraining order against Scott.
In a court of law, Scott claimed that Budd had an “active imagination,” VICE reported. “That assertion met with disbelief from San Diego Superior Court Judge Robert Longstreth, who described Scott’s comment as a ‘classic’ rape threat.” Other Trump picks, such as Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth, also face allegations that would have likely sunk nominees put up by any other president.
Since being retired from the federal government, Scott has also been a member of Border911, a right-wing organization led by Homan and with dangerous ties to conspiracy theorists and right-wing extremists. The group has supported the falsehood about an “invasion” at the border, echoing the deadly white nationalist conspiracy theory that has been cited by numerous racist mass shooters. “Groups like Border 911 are not just spreading lies about the border; they’re deploying a political strategy to propel Trump back into the White House,” Melissa del Bosque reported during the 2024 election, saying former Trump officials like Homan and Scott were “holding events across the country, especially in swing states, to convince voters that the country is being invaded and that only Trump can save them.”
Scott’s willingness to use government resources to push the nativist lie that undocumented immigrants pose an existential threat and Trump’s ongoing efforts to convince the American people of the dehumanizing lie that being undocumented equals being a criminal are a dangerous combination. Trump and his allies push the criminality lie, of course, to minimize the political fallout of his mass family separations. U.S. citizens, particularly Americans of color, should also be concerned about an untethered Border Patrol. Roughly 200 million Americans live in the 100-mile zone where border agents can ask for your papers and “have some ability to circumvent the Fourth Amendment,” according to the American Civil Liberties Union. “Officers and agents have been under fire for rape, beatings, and unjust killings of immigrants and citizens,” Southern Border Communities Coalition’s Vicki B. Gaubeca wrote in 2018. “The lack of oversight and accountability has lead also to numerous cases of forgery and theft, human and drug smuggling and bribery, all of which undermines the trust given to them to carry a gun and badge.” We should all be paying attention.