For our September+October issue, we investigated the Border Patrol’s sharp growth, its troubling record on civil liberties, its culture of impunity, and its role in shaping the current political moment—one that echoes the anti-immigrant fever that led to the agency’s creation a century ago. Read the whole package here.

In February, as the state of Texas went to court to defend itself from an “invasion,” and a far-right convoy calling itself “God’s army” hosted anti-immigrant rallies throughout the Southwest, Fox News repeatedly turned to one of Donald Trump’s trusted emissaries to explain to viewers what was happening at the US-Mexico border.

Over multiple appearances that month, Brandon Judd—the pugilistic president of the Border Patrol union and, according to the Wall Street Journal, someone who could have “an important administration role” in a future Trump White House—blasted President Joe Biden every chance he got.

“He is not going to listen to voices of reason,” Judd said on one show. “Everything he does is too little, too late,” he said in another. Biden has “never given any rationale for anything he does,” he added in a third. In a FoxNews.com op-ed, Judd wrote that “the agents who have worked under both Trump and Biden have experienced first-hand the competent, caring leadership of Trump and the deadly, disastrous ‘leadership’ of Joe Biden.”

A sampling of how fellow agents and colleagues described Judd to me goes like this: “a joke,” “a bobblehead with a badge,” a “used car salesman.”

It was quintessential Judd: combative, hyperbolic, and unabashedly political. On May 18, the 50-year-old stepped down as president of the National Border Patrol Council after a decade in power, having spearheaded the Border Patrol’s transformation from a largely nonpolitical backwater agency into one of the most influential, and divisive, law enforcement groups in the country. The union’s full-throated support for Trump’s immigration policies has inextricably tied the agency’s roughly 19,000 agents to MAGA politics, while Judd became a right-wing media darling and de facto spokesman for the agency. His tenure as union chief is key to understanding the politics of the border in the 2024 election—and the type of person who could wield power in a second Trump administration.

A dozen interviews with former agents and Trump administration officials reveal a complex picture of Judd and his legacy. While the Border Patrol union has become more powerful than ever, the agency has become notorious for recklessness, and rank-and-file agents are leaving en masse. Internally, Judd has a mixed reputation, at best. A sampling of how fellow agents and colleagues described him to me goes like this: “a joke,” “a bobblehead with a badge,” a “used car salesman.” “He is a political hack,” says retired Border Patrol agent Gil Maza, who runs the popular Instagram account OldPatrolHQ and says he receives up to 100 messages daily from current Border Patrol agents. “He is burning on all cylinders for a political future, a political position, or simply to be in the circuit after he retires as a contributor for Fox News or whatever.” (Judd would not answer many of my questions, but told me he is “happily retired and will not be returning to public life.” The National Border Patrol Council did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

Born in Arizona, Judd began his career as a field agent in California’s Imperial Valley in 1997. He served stints in Arizona and Maine and took on various leadership roles in the union before being elected its president. From 2015 to 2020, Judd worked in Montana, about an hour south of the Saskatchewan border. He retired from the Border Patrol in May 2023, but stayed on as union president.

Judd became part of Trump’s transition team, a close confidant to Miller, and a frequent presence at the White House.

The 2016 presidential election put Judd on the political map when, under his guidance, the union endorsed Trump—the first time in its history it had picked sides in a presidential campaign. It believed Trump would “embrace the ideas of rank-and-file Border Patrol agents rather than listening to the management yes-men who say whatever they are programmed to say,” according to a statement. The decision was presented as a collective choice, but it was ultimately made by Judd and the union’s 11-member executive board.

Just one week before the endorsement, Stephen Miller, the adviser who orchestrated Trump’s hardline immigration policies, told Breitbart News that Trump would “work closely, directly, and intimately with the National Border Patrol Council to develop a border policy for this nation.” That promise quickly became reality. Judd became part of Trump’s transition team, a close confidant to Miller, and a frequent presence at the White House. When Trump demanded Congress allocate $5.7 billion toward building a border wall, at the cost of a government shutdown, Judd aligned himself with Trump, even as Border Patrol agents worked without pay. (They were later paid back.) Judd’s position that border walls are an “absolute necessity” was all the more remarkable given that only a few years earlier, the union had opposed them. In a since-deleted FAQ posted in 2012, it asserted that border walls would be “wasting taxpayer money.”

Judd’s proximity to Trump was unprecedented. He stood by his side in January 2017 when Trump called for hiring thousands more Border Patrol agents. In an agency where chain of command is paramount, Judd’s influence underscored Trump’s willingness to flout norms. “He bet early on the Trump train and it paid off,” says Ron Vitiello, who served as Border Patrol chief in 2017 and whom Trump later nominated as head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “That changed his profile in the government.” (As recently as June of this year, Trump appeared to name-check Judd in the first presidential debate, noting the union endorsement and claiming, “We had the safest border in history.”)

“He became this sycophant for the president and Stephen Miller,” says a top Homeland Security official under Trump.

While the union maintained a modicum of political independence—in 2018, it endorsed three Senate Democrats whom it considered strong on border security—Judd supported virtually anything Trump wanted, says Andrew Meehan, a top official at the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration. “He became this sycophant for the president and Stephen Miller,” he says. “He sat on the sidelines and tried to create more opportunities for himself to be elevated and sit next to the president and deliver on nothing.”

As the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants ramped up, an embarrassing scandal put the agency and the union on the defensive. When ProPublica reported in 2019 that agents were posting racist and sexually offensive comments to a secret Facebook group, Judd minimized the story by saying “it was a very small number of people” and “those individuals must be held accountable.” (In the end, most of the agents involved received only light penalties and were allowed to remain in their posts, according to a congressional investigation.) Later, in 2021, after agents aggressively responded to Haitian migrants crossing the border near Del Rio, Texas—including a now-infamous image of an agent on horseback appearing to strike a migrant with his reins—a 511-page federal investigation concluded that while agents had not struck migrants, there were “failures at multiple levels,” including inappropriate language and lack of supervision. In response, Judd said the investigation was flawed because Biden administration officials had spoken out against the abuse. “Those investigators have no choice but to find wrongdoing,” he told NPR.

The agency has a toxic, undisciplined culture, according to a high-ranking Border Patrol agent who retired in 2022. He says agents often acted as if they were in a college fraternity. “They liked being recognized as military,” says the former agent. “But when it came to the discipline of their agents, the union would fight everything.”Another high-ranking former agent says the union resisted efforts to make the agency more accountable. “There are no fitness standards in the Border Patrol,” he says. “As management we wanted to enforce fitness standards. And the union fought that tooth and nail.” Instead, he and others say, Judd and other union leaders were obsessed with changing the rules so agents could show tattoos and have beards, which they believed would improve morale and recruitment. (Since the rule change in 2019, the bald Judd is often seen with a stubble beard, giving him the look of a scruffy Telly Savalas.)

Despite the looser grooming standards, agency morale has since plummeted, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General, former Border Patrol agents, and even Judd—who testified before Congress that, in 25 years, he had “never seen the morale lower.” A massive number of agents who were brought on during a hiring spree in the early 2000s are expected to retire soon. Amid a record level of migrants entering at the southern border—apprehensions have more than doubled since 2019—workloads have increased dramatically as staffing has stayed consistent, according to the inspector general. As the union predicted years ago, the border wall hasn’t deterred anyone, and immigration is once again one of the top issues on voters’ minds.

The same day the union endorsed Biden’s legislation, Trump posted that “only a fool, or a Radical Left Democrat, would vote for this horrendous Border Bill.”

So when in February a border bill that would have tightened asylum rules and beefed up enforcement came up for a vote in Congress, the Border Patrol union endorsed the legislation and Judd made impassioned appearances on Fox News promoting the bill. In a widely shared statement, he said that the bill would reduce ­illegal border crossings and that “while not perfect, the Border Act of 2024 is a step in the right direction.”

There was one major problem: Trump, who wanted to showcase border chaos as part of his reelection campaign. The same day the Border Patrol union endorsed the legislation, Trump posted on Truth Social that “only a fool, or a Radical Left Democrat, would vote for this horrendous Border Bill.”

The bill failed.

Within weeks, Judd was back at Trump’s side. He accompanied Trump to the southern border and alleged agents were “pissed” at Biden. He also made the dubious assertion that Trump’s opposition to the bill had “nothing to do with politics.” Trump “understands that if a bill were to be passed today, that there would be no appetite to pass a better bill when he’s in office,” Judd told Fox News in March from the State of the Union, where he was a guest of bill co-sponsor Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.).

Now, eight years after the union first endorsed Trump, many agents question the political turn the agency has taken. “As a law enforcement administration, employees at all times should be apolitical in nature,” says Rodolfo Karisch, who retired in 2019 as the chief patrol agent of the Rio Grande Valley. “It’s the mission of what we signed up for; good, bad, or indifferent, we have a job to carry out.”

Even Maza, a Trump supporter, laments the union’s endorsement of the former president. “I have good friends in the Border Patrol who are staunch and dedicated Democrats,” he says. “The union should not be involved in endorsing candidates because that does not adequately represent the agency.”

The union hasn’t yet endorsed Trump again, perhaps an indication of discontent over its embrace of right-wing politics. Or perhaps the union is just playing it safe, in case Democrats win the White House again. Still, it seems unlikely it will return to its nonpartisan roots. The executive vice president, Paul Perez, also an ardent Trump supporter, will fill the remainder of Judd’s term.

Meanwhile, Trump’s anti-immigrant stance has gotten even more extreme. On the stump, he has called immigrants “animals” and “not humans,” and promised to deport millions of them. Should he win, the Border Patrol—and perhaps Judd—will be on the front lines, carrying out his vision.

Read the rest of our Border Patrol investigation here.

Image credits: Adam Gray/Getty; Vadzim Mashkou/Shutterstock, Lev Radin/Shutterstock