Former BP Agent: Trump Is Right To Challenge DOJ Prosecutors

They're not priests. They're human, sort of, and often Leftists

Andrew Morrison

Former Border Patrol agent Andrew Morrison, author of East Into The Sunset and What Bridge Do You Work At? Or, Kids Are Cute; Therefore, Open Borders, was a long-time ally of VDARE.com.

His October 2 article on his new substack, cryptically titled AUSA (A What?), went straight to the heart of an emerging constitutional controversy: the epidemic refusal of prosecutors to act against Democrat officials (let alone AntiFa and street criminals). Only by wholesale firings has the Trump Administration been able to get former FBI chief James Comey and New York State Attorney General Letitia James indicted (Lindsey Halligan fires more prosecutors in key US attorney’s office, by Kirsten Holmes, CNN, October 17, 2025).

The Democrat/ Regime Media line, of course, is that prosecutors are austere priest-like figures, devoted to the purity of the law, being brutally chopped down on their own altars by trumpeting Trumpsters like so many Thomas A Beckets.

But Morrison’s experience with the Department of Justice’s Assistant United States Attorneys (AUSAs), who are supposed to prosecute the illegal aliens caught by the Border Patrol, suggests otherwise.

For one thing, AUSAs are human, sort of:

AUSAs hated immigration cases. They weren’t fun or “sexy”. Most of the cases were cut and dry. Does the alien have papers giving a legal right to be in the U.S.? No. Is the alien in the U.S.? His butt is in the defendant’s seat, so, yes. Guilty, next. The AUSAs preferred narcotics cases. They wanted to be part of Miami Vice.

(In fact, their preference may well indeed have meshed with implicit policy priorities in the dark years of the Bush Blight (roughly 1988-2016): drugs bad, but illegal immigration?…an “Act Of Love”).

Thus, Morrison writes:

When I got to the northern border, I served briefly on ICE’s Border Enforcement Security Task Force (BEST team). It was all focused on going after drugs coming across the border, and almost exclusively they worked with CBP Officers who located narcotics coming across one of the international bridges from Canada.

But there’s also ideology:

Unfortunately, for some ungodly reason, a lot of AUSAs appear to be of the leftist variety. In order to get a law degree, you have to spend more time in academia and maybe this allows more time for liberal indoctrination to occur.

One way or the other, the result is the stonewalling that the Trump Administration is obviously now experiencing:

One AUSA in particular was known for being a dead end. If your drug case was assigned to her, pretty much all the long hours of surveillance, the scanning of phone records, the interviewing of suspects etc… had been done for nothing. Rather than act like the government’s prosecutor, she would sit down with the Special Agents and act like a Defense Attorney demolishing their cases. Whatever info they had was never enough, she would ask for more evidence, more confessions etc… It was to the point that the ICE Special Agents had to wonder if she ever prosecuted a case at all. The best the Special Agents could hope for was some sort of plea agreement.

For whatever reason, there were fashionable causes and unfashionable causes:

I was sent to seminar on environmental law. I think the reason I wound up there was that if our boat patrol was out on the Niagara River or Lake Erie and spotted a vessel leaking oil, we had some idea of what to do (basically, call the Coast Guard and get the hell out of the way).

I remember one of the AUSAs speaking enthusiastically about how he prosecuted this multimillionaire who became wealthy by getting government contracts to dispose of asbestos. Now, there are all sorts of regulations about how you tear out asbestos and then what you did with the asbestos afterwards. This AUSA was bouncing up and down with the enthusiasm of a climate change fanatic totally convinced that he was putting away the worst kind of criminal.

One of the ways this criminal was able to get away with it was that he brought in “undocumented workers” (the AUSA’s words) to do the work. The illegal aliens didn’t know anything about what they were doing. They were told to rip out the asbestos and they did. They may have worn dust masks, but that was about it. With asbestos, you are supposed to cover your eyes too because the dust can cling to the moisture in your eyes.

The AUSA was enthusiastically bouncing along about which laws he was getting the guy on. I was waiting for him to say 8 USC 1324 for hiring illegal aliens. Maybe he did, but he didn’t mention it as he was so enthusiastic about all the other charges he had going.

Whether he did or didn’t, it sort of showed his priorities.

Importantly, Morrison notes this rarely-mentioned downside of illegal immigration:

If the millionaire environmental violator had tried hiring Americans, especially union workers, he would likely have gotten an earful about why things can’t be done the way he was doing things. The whole reason he was able to get away with what he was doing was because of his non-English speaking work staff. You would think that would be a good reason to hit the violator with that first.

Of another case, involving illegals caught at a job site, Morrison writes:

We, the Border Patrol, were hoping to prosecute the employer. As the senior AUSAs didn’t want to touch an immigration case, they assigned our case to a brand new AUSA, but the new guy did have a senior AUSA advising him. I remember sitting down in the Buffalo Patrol Agent in Charge’s (PAIC’s, and pronounced pack’s) office for a conference call with the AUSAs. As luck would have it, the senior AUSA advising was the Environmental Guy whose lecture I had previously heard.

Our Environmental Friend was started bad mouthing our case. Basically, he argued that we could not prove the employer “knowingly” hired illegal aliens. Of course, the illegal aliens themselves could be charged with being in the country unlawfully, but that was about it.

It seemed our BP case was falling apart when, much to my surprise, a seemingly soft-spoken line Agent who had been involved in the case blew a gasket. Much to the mortification of the PAIC, the line Agent proceeded to have a minor melt down. I won’t say he was screaming, but he was talking very loudly and passionately about all the hours of surveillance we had put in to catch these guys, and now, the AUSA was dispassionately tearing the whole thing up!

To our surprise, the environmental AUSA backed down and decided that there was perhaps something that could be looked into and prosecuted after all.

On such minor things are cases of law depended upon. If that line Agent hadn’t been asked to sit in on the call (which was likely) the whole thing would have been junked by the AUSAs.

So much for dispassionately looking at the rights and wrongs of a case.

Showing how persistent is this institutional bias against immigration enforcement, Morrison writes:

During Trump’s first term, I remember some of the ICE Special Agents bringing an alien smuggling case to one of the AUSAs. He told me that they had to have one on seven before a case could be brought. That means one person smuggling seven illegal aliens. When they found a case with seven illegal aliens, the same AUSA told them that now the number was 10.

Something like class prejudice also seems to play a role with AUSAs. As Morrison writes: “The majority of AUSAs…will never have actually put cuffs on a suspect or read suspects their rights…”

Thus one colleague’s story:

He got into a scuffle with an illegal alien and had to take the alien down hard.

Afterwards, he and his supervisor wanted to charge the alien with assault on a federal agent, 18 USC 111. The AUSA assigned to the case didn’t want to do it.

My colleague asked the AUSA, “What if he punched me in the face?” The AUSA responded, “That’s part of your job.” (I don’t seem to recall being told at the academy that one of my assigned duties was to serve as a punching bag for illegal aliens).

As I recall, my colleague said to the AUSA something along the lines of, “How about I come across the desk and punch you in the face?”

To which the AUSA responded, “Why, that would be assault!”

Morrison writes of Trump’s task:

This is turning around a huge bureaucracy that was left leaning (left listing). When a new AUSA is hired on, they will find old cases needing prosecution that they will have to get up to speed on, and then there are plenty of new cases to be prosecuted. A whole lot of those new cases are going to be immigration cases, precisely the kind of case a liberal AUSA would not want to touch.

I urge everyone to subscribe to Andrew Morrison’s substack. Like mine, it’s free (unless you’re feeling generous).