BP Union – Del Rio

Local 2366 Membership Meeting
Friday, September 29, 2023, at 6 pm
801 Kings Way, Del Rio, Texas 78840

Meeting topics
-Overtime pay cap update
-NDAA legislation
-Safety and health issues
-HtW mileage waivers
-ULP/Grievance updates
-Control period calculation issues
-National swap program update

If you cannot attend the meeting, we will continue to publish the latest news on the website.

The NBPC recently filed a grievance with the agency over its failure to properly train the workforce regarding the new pursuit policy. The union has many opinions about the new policy, but even if we agreed with every piece of it, the agency simply did not provide any semblance of training to ensure that agents know how to stay within policy.

CBP set a hard date of May 1, 2023, to implement the policy and decided to use Microsoft Teams to hold training sessions for the workforce, scheduled across 528 sessions held nine times a day across all three shifts. However, when the union flagged problems with the policy in January 2023, the agency delayed the training by five weeks and reduced the total number of training sessions to 222.

And then, just a day before the policy was supposed to go into effect, the agency postponed the implementation date until June 1, 2023, and added 40 more training sessions. However, by May 15, 2023, over 500 Border Patrol agents, including over 100 senior-level managers and supervisors assigned to U.S. Border Patrol Headquarters, had not yet attended the training.

The Teams sessions included little more than an instructor pressing play on a pre-recorded video of someone reading PowerPoint slides to the students, followed by Q&A sessions that created more Qs than answer As.

Unfortunately, students either had language from the policy read to them verbatim instead of being provided with examples and context, or they were told to contact their local Office of Chief Counsel for guidance. However, perhaps even more reckless was the agency’s failure to ensure that sectors had informed agents of the restricted areas in their areas of responsibility (AOR).

The policy requires sectors to determine and publish to the workforce a list of all restricted areas in their AOR, including maps, so they know which areas the agency has determined are too unsafe for a pursuit to take place. However, we know of only two sectors that have done this so far: El Paso and Tucson. The rest of the sectors became out of compliance on July 1, 2023.

There is still plenty of work to do with this new policy, so we will post updates as they become available.

In June, Local 2366 announced we had signed an MOU with Del Rio Sector implementing an in-sector job swap program.

This week, we met with Sector to finalize some of the details regarding the information that needs to be collected, the process that will be followed, and everyone’s roles and responsibilities.

If everything goes to plan, the first announcement should open up near the end of August. We will provide more updates as they become available.

You can access a copy of the MOU on Local 2366’s mobile app (go to the Agreements and Policy Section) or download a PDF copy here.

In August 2021, the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC) learned that CBP was sending reports containing employee medical information to hundreds of managers and supervisors, among others in USBP, OFO, AMO, and other components, who did not have a need to know the employees’ medical information.

A CBP office created a daily Hospitalized Employee Report and disseminated it far and wide across CBP, containing employee names and a day-by-day breakdown of their status in the hospital, including medical procedures performed, vitals, and more, until the employee was released or passed away. This report was sent to approximately 165 recipients daily, regardless of the sick employee’s component. For example, the report contained information about Border Patrol agents (BPA), yet leadership within OFO, AMO, OFO’s Budget Director, and leadership at LESC, among many others, received private medical information about BPAs

As the NBPC continued to investigate, we discovered that not only was this report being sent to the field, but stations were required to submit an SIR or ESR when an employee was hospitalized due to COVID-19, and these were all sent to their respective distribution lists. We discovered that USBP maintained an SIR distribution list that went to over 450 USBP employees, who could all see employee medical information contained within the SIRs and ESRs.

The union filed a union-initiated grievance alleging violations of the Rehabilitation Act, the Privacy Act, and the Federal Employees Compensation Act.  As a remedy, we insisted that the agency stop collecting and distributing this information to people without an official need to know and that the impacted employees be notified of the disclosure, among others. CBP indicated they stopped collecting and disseminating this information via this report, SIRs, and ESRs. However, despite this, CBP’s Privacy Officer inexplicably determined that the employees who received this medical information did indeed have a need to know of the information and that the impacted employees should not be notified.

The NBPC believed this was nonsense, so we filed for arbitration and settled the matter with the agency last week. CBP agreed to notify each of the impacted employees that their medical information was collected and disseminated and the information contained within the hospitalization report within 60 days of the effective date of the agreement.

If you receive this notification and have questions, please contact a local union steward, or reach out to us here.