Border Patrol trains more chaplains as the job and polarizing immigration debate rattle agents

DANIA BEACH, Florida (AP) — As immigration remains a hotly contested priority for the Trump administration after playing a decisive role in the deeply polarized election, the Border Patrol agents tasked with enforcing many of its laws are wrestling with growing challenges on and off the job.

More are training to become chaplains to help their peers as they tackle security threats, including the powerful cartels that control much of the border dynamic, and witness growing suffering among migrants — all while policies in Washington keep shifting and public outrage targets them from all sides.

“The hardest thing is, people … don’t know what we do, and we’ve been called terrible names,” said Brandon Fredrick, a Buffalo, New York-based agent some of whose family members have resorted to name-calling.

Earlier this month, he served as a training academy instructor for Border Patrol chaplains, whose numbers have almost doubled in the last four years. It's an effort to help agents motivated by the desire to keep the U.S. borders safe cope with mounting distress before it leads to family dysfunction, addiction, even suicide.

During the latest academy, held at a Border Patrol station near Miami, Fredrick evaluated pairs of chaplains-in-training as they role-played checking on a fellow agent who hadn’t reported for work.

They discovered he’d been drowning in alcohol his angst at being deployed away from his family for the holidays at one of the border’s hotspots. The training scenario was achingly real for the South Florida-based agent role-playing the distressed one — he had struggled when relocated for 18 months to Del Rio, Texas, away from his two children — and also for Fredrick, who overcame alcoholism before becoming a chaplain.

Interacting with chaplains can reduce the agents' reluctance to express their emotional trials, Fredrick said.

“My mission every day is that there’s not a young agent Fredrick suffering alone,” he added. Fredrick, a Catholic, has been an agent for more than 15 years and worked tragic cases like a smuggling attempt where an Indian family froze to death at the Canada-U.S. border.

Unlike the police or military, which recruits faith leaders for help with everything from suicide prevention to dealing with the unrest after George Floyd’s murder, the Border Patrol trains mostly lay agents endorsed by their faith denominations to become chaplains.

After graduating, they join about 240 other chaplains and resume their regular jobs — but they’re constantly on call to provide largely confidential care for their 20,000 fellow agents’ well-being.

While most chaplains are Christian, Muslim and Jewish agents also have been trained recently. The chaplains don’t offer faith-specific worship and only bring up religion if the person they’re helping does first.

“I’m not there to convert or proselytize,” said academy instructor Jason Wilhite, an agent in Casa Grande, Arizona, and a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A chaplain since 2015, he was previously involved in the agency's nonreligious, mental health-focused peer support program after a fellow agent died in a car accident.

Agent Jesus Vasavilbaso decided to join the Border Patrol's peer support program after witnessing the trauma of repeatedly responding to calls from lost and dying migrants in the unforgiving desert southwest of Tucson, Arizona.

“Sometimes you go home and keep thinking you didn’t find them,” he said. “That’s why it’s so important we check on each other all the time.”

At the most recent chaplain academy, which lasted 2.5 weeks, the 15 chaplains-in-training — mostly from the Border Patrol, plus a few Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Land Management officers — practiced real-life scenarios, including responding to a deadly wreck involving agents and notifying a spouse their loved one died on the job.

Chris Day, a chaplain since 2017, evaluated trainees trying to comfort an agent who kept screaming that it was all his fault his partner was killed. In the training scenario, their car crashed as they chased someone crossing the border illegally.

Day praised the trainees' efforts to get the agent to talk, but advised them not to say, “'I understand.' Because you don’t.”

Later, Day told the class he had helped an agent who watched the smugglers he was chasing smash their car into a family, gravely injuring a toddler. He said the agent had “ugly cried" at the scene and kept repeating that his child was the same age, so Day took him aside briefly and followed up after.

“We hugged it out,” said Day, a Baptist with a Psalm verse tattooed on his right arm.

He also has helped the wife of an agent who killed himself, and prayed for migrants who request it. More than 100 migrants have died so far this year in New Mexico's desert, where Day is stationed.

“The smells and visuals stay with you forever,” Day said. “We have empathy for people coming across.”

Trying to comfort migrant children in their custody, including the thousands who cross the border alone, is also a wrenching task for agents.

At the academy, Trinidad Balderas, a father and medic in McAllen, Texas, and Yaira Santiago, a former schoolteacher who runs a Border Patrol migrant processing center at the other end of the southern border in San Diego, California, said they both seek to provide some calm in the chaos of the children's situation.

“One tries to give them support within the limits of what your work allows. I always have the biggest smile,” Santiago said.

Border Patrol assistant chief and chaplaincy program manager Spencer Hatch highlighted the need to maintain both the “hypervigilance” of law enforcement and the humanitarian instinct to empathize with migrants and fellow agents.

He also taught strategies to protect the agents’ families from “spillover trauma.” Divorces increase when agents are redeployed during migrant surges — some up to 9 times over 18 months during the record border crossings early in the Biden Administration.

Many agents’ children are scared to reveal their parent’s job — especially in border communities. They might be going to school with children of cartel members, or of undocumented migrants, or those who see the Border Patrol as “keeping people from living the American dream,” in Hatch’s words.

“That’s a really hard thing to deal with, as things tend to flip from one side to the other, and we’re still in the crossfire,” he added.

Hatch uses as a case study of moral injury, a 2021 incident in Del Rio where agents on horseback appeared in some viral photos to be whipping immigrants with their reins — which a federal investigation later determined hadn’t happened.

“For one picture to be taken out of context and to have the highest levels of government shaming those people, that was very disheartening. That hurt all of us,” Hatch said.

Dealing with that “dissonance” of enforcing immigration laws, including rescuing migrants, and hearing their jobs demonized by the public, is a major challenge, said Tucson-area chaplain Jimmy Stout. He was one of first four chaplains when the program was started through a grassroots effort at the southern border in the late 1990s.

“We go over this on day one,” Stout said. “Is what they’re doing meeting their personal standards?”

For the agents who got their chaplain pins last week, those standards now involve a higher calling, too.

Class speaker Matt Kiniery, a father of three who joined the Army after 9/11 and the Border Patrol in El Paso, Texas, in 2009, decided to become a chaplain after an on-duty car wreck so bad the doctor called his survival miraculous.

“‘The guy upstairs has got something for you.’ I took that to heart,” Kiniery said. Chaplains helped his wife Jeanna then, and the couple is now eager to support his new role.

“Even in moments of uncertainty, your presence is often enough,” the 6-foot-5 agent told the graduating class, before his voice broke. Several instructors in the audience wiped away tears.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife law enforcement agent is surrounded by his family following the Border Patrol Chaplain Academy graduation, Thursday, Nov. 21, 2024, in Dania Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier)

Border Patrol Agent Matthew A. Kiniery smiles as Chaplaincy program manager Spencer Hatch pins the chaplain pin on his uniform, Thursday, Nov. 21, 2024, in Dania Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier)

Border Patrol Chaplain pins are ready to be pinned during a Border Patrol Chaplain Academy graduation ceremony, Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2024, in Dania Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier)

Border Patrol Agent Trinidad Balderas looks at his new chaplain pin after graduating from the program, Thursday, Nov. 21, 2024, in Dania Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier)

The USBP chaplaincy program class listen to remarks during their graduation, Thursday, Nov. 21, 2024, in Dania Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier)

Border Patrol chaplain and instructor Jason Wilhite holds two Silent Partner cards he carries with him at all times showing two of his colleagues that died in the line of duty, Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2024, in Dania Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier)

U.S. Border Patrol agent Jesus Vasavilbaso, aided by a Black Hawk helicopter, searches for a group of migrants evading capture in the desert brush at the base of the Baboquivari Mountains, Thursday, Sept. 8, 2022, near Sasabe, Ariz. (AP Photo/Matt York, File)

Border Patrol instructor and Chaplain Christopher Day directs a session at the Border Patrol Chaplain Academy, Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2024, in Dania Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier)

Border Patrol specialist Mitchell Holmes, left, listens to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Regional Law Enforcement agent Kevin Shinn, during a Chaplain Academy training session, Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2024, in Dania Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier)

Border Patrol Chaplaincy program manager Spencer Hatch teaches during the Border Patrol Chaplain Academy class, Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2024, in Dania Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier)

Federal Wildlife Officer Cody Smith and Border Patrol processing coordinator Yaira Santiago listen to Border Patrol agent Andry Fernandez during a training scenario where they practice their new chaplain skills, Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2024, in Dania Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier)

Border Patrol specialist Mitchell Holmes listens to instructor and chaplain Myrna Gonzalez during a training session, Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2024, in Dania Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier)

Border Patrol processing coordinator Yaira Santiago listens to Federal Wildlife officer Cody Smith during a scenario training session, Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2024, in Dania Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier)

Border Patrol specialist Mitchell Holmes, right, and Fish and Wildlife Regional Law Enforcement agent Kevin Shinn, use skills they learned in the Border Patrol Chaplaincy academy during a training session, Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2024, in Dania Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier)

JERUSALEM (AP) — For many across the Middle East, the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire came as a relief: the first major sign of progress in the region since war began more than a year ago.

But for Palestinians in Gaza and families of hostages held in the territory, the news appeared only to inaugurate a newer, grimmer period of the conflict there. For them, it marked yet another missed opportunity to end fighting that has stretched on for nearly 14 months.

Palestinians had hoped that any ceasefire deal with Hezbollah would include a truce in Gaza as well. The families of people kidnapped when Hamas-led militants stormed southern Israel in October 2023, meanwhile, wanted part of the agreement to include returning their loved ones. Instead, the ceasefire was confined only to the fighting in Lebanon.

“We feel this is a missed opportunity to tie in the hostages in this agreement that was signed today,” said Ruby Chen, whose son, Itay Chen, was taken hostage from an Israeli military base and has been declared dead.

As much as they were intertwined, the two wars have been very different. In Lebanon, Israel said its aim was to drive Hezbollah back from the countries’ shared border and end the militant group's barrages into northern Israel. The ceasefire that took effect Wednesday is intended to do that.

In Gaza, Israel’s goals are more sweeping. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been resolute in insisting that Hamas must be completely destroyed and Israel must retain lasting control over parts of the territory. Months of talks have failed to get Netanyahu to back down from those demands — or to convince Hamas to release hostages under those terms.

For Palestinians in Gaza, that means continuing misery under an Israeli campaign that has demolished much of the territory and driven almost the entire population from their homes. Hundreds of thousands are going hungry while living in squalid tent cities as the second winter of the war brings cold rains and flooding.

”They agree to a ceasefire in one place and not in the other? Have mercy on the children, the elderly and the women,” said Ahlam Abu Shalabi, living in tent in central Gaza. “Now it is winter, and all the people are drowning.”

The war between Israel and Hamas began on Oct. 7, 2023, when militants attacked Israel from Gaza, killing around 1,200 people and taking some 250 hostage. Israel’s retaliatory offensive has rained devastation on the Palestinian territory, killing over 44,000 people, according to local health officials. The officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and fighters in their count, say over half of the dead are women and children.

Hezbollah began firing into Israel a day after Hamas' attack in solidarity with the Palestinian militant group. The two sides have exchanged near-daily barrages since. Moving thousands of troops to its northern border, Israel ramped up bombardment of southern Lebanon and launched a ground invasion there two months ago, killing many of Hezbollah’s leaders.

Palestinians now fear Israel’s military can return its full focus to Gaza — a point that Netanyahu made as he announced the ceasefire in Lebanon on Tuesday.

“The pressure will be more on Gaza,” said Mamdouh Younis, a displaced man in a central Gaza tent camp. Netanyahu, he said, can now exploit the fact that “Gaza has become alone, far from all the arenas that were supporting it, especially the Lebanon front.”

Israeli troops are already engaged in fierce fighting in Gaza’s north, where a two-month offensive has cut off most aid and caused experts to warn a famine may be underway. Strikes all over the territory regularly kill dozens.

In signing onto the ceasefire deal, Hezbollah reversed its long-held position that it wouldn’t stop its barrages across the border unless Israel ends the war in Gaza.

“This could have a psychological impact, as it will further entrench the understanding that Palestinians in Gaza are alone in resisting against their occupiers,” said Tariq Kenney Shawa, a U.S. policy fellow at Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian think tank.

It also leaves Hamas — its capabilities already severely damaged by Israel’s offensive — to fight alone. Hamas official Osama Hamdan appeared to accept Hezbollah’s new position in an interview Monday.

“Any announcement of a ceasefire is welcome. Hezbollah has stood by our people and made significant sacrifices,” Hamdan told the Lebanese broadcaster Al-Mayadeen, which is seen as politically allied with Hezbollah.

Khalil Sayegh, a Palestinian analyst, said the ceasefire could make Hamas even less popular in Gaza, by proving the failure of its gambit that its attack on Israel would rally other militant groups to the fight.

“It’s a moment where we can see the Hamas messaging become weaker and weaker, as they struggle to justify their strategy to the public,” said Sayegh.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday that the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire could help force Hamas to the negotiating table because it would show the group that the “cavalry is not on the way.”

But Hamas experts predicted that it would only dig in both on the battlefield and in talks. Hamas has insisted it will only release all the hostages in return for a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

“I expect Hamas will continue using guerrilla warfare to confront Israeli forces in Gaza as long as they remain,” said Shawa.

Dozens of Israelis thronged a major highway in Tel Aviv on Tuesday night, protesting for the return of the hostages as the country waited to hear if a ceasefire in Lebanon had been agreed.

Around 100 people taken hostage are still held in Gaza, at least a third of whom are believed to be dead. Most of the other hostages seized by Hamas were released during a ceasefire last year.

Ricardo Grichener, the uncle of 23-year-old hostage Omer Wenkert, said the ceasefire with Hezbollah showed how the Israeli government was openly disregarding the hostages.

Even though Israel has inflicted greater damage on Hamas in Gaza than on Hezbollah in Lebanon, he said “the decision to postpone a deal in Gaza and release the hostages is not based on the same military success criteria.”

The most recent effort to wind down the war stalled in October. U.S. President Joe Biden said Tuesday he would begin a renewed push, but his administration is now in its waning days after the reelection of former President Donald Trump.

“This ceasefire doesn’t concern our hostages. I believe that Netanyahu forgot about them, and he just wants to keep fighting in Gaza,” said Ifat Kalderon, clutching a photo of her cousin, Ofer Kalderon, who is a hostage and a father to four.

“Ofer yesterday had his 54th birthday. His second birthday in Gaza,” she said. “It’s unbelievable that he’s still there.”

This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Ruby Chen's first name.

Sivan, mother of Israeli soldier, Sergeant Dolev Malca, was killed during Israel's ground operation in the Gaza Strip, screams as she salutes her son during his funeral in Shlomi, northern Israel, on the border with Lebanon, Sunday, March 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)

People walk past a sign reading in Hebrew and English "Bring them home now" in reference of the of hostages held in the Gaza Strip by the Hamas militant group, in Haifa, Israel, Tuesday, Nov. 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)

Israelis and Palestinian citizens of Israel protest Israel's military operations in the Gaza Strip, in Umm al-Fahm, Israel, Friday, Nov. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)

Storm clouds loom over the tents occupied by displaced Palestinians on the beach front in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip, Tuesday Nov. 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

A Palestinian secures his tent as storm clouds loom over a camp for displaced Palestinians on the beach front in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip, Tuesday Nov. 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

Tents occupied by displaced Palestinians are seen at the beach in Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip, Tuesday Nov. 26, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)