The Senate confirmed Rodney Scott as commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, giving President Donald Trump a permanent chief to lead the largest law enforcement organization in the country.
Scott was confirmed 51-46 on Wednesday afternoon, filling the post following a nearly five-month vacancy. In the party-line vote, all Democrats opposed Scott, who was nominated in early December.
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Scott returns for Trump’s second term
Scott is from Southern California and joined the Border Patrol in 1992. He rose through the ranks before being named antiterrorism adviser to the CBP commissioner after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He was then promoted to deputy executive director of the CBP Office of Anti-Terrorism.
Scott was named Border Patrol chief during Trump’s first term and remained in that post for several months after former President Joe Biden took office.
Scott told the Washington Examiner in October 2020 that his goal as leader of the 20,000-agent organization was to restore public trust in law enforcement after a turbulent few years of public scrutiny.
Former President Joe Biden let Scott go as Border Patrol chief in August 2021 after he came out against banning the term “illegal alien.”
After leaving the Border Patrol, the 29-year law enforcement veteran became a visiting fellow at the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation think tank in Austin, Texas.
Under the Biden administration, longtime employee Troy Miller ran CBP for most of the term.
Chris Magnus, previously police chief of Tucson, Arizona, was nominated in April 2021 but not confirmed until later that year. Magnus was forced out less than a year on the job and resigned in November 2022.
Partisan reaction to Scott’s nomination
CBP is an agency within the Department of Homeland Security with 60,000 employees. It is responsible for inspecting people and goods entering the United States by air, land, and sea at 328 ports of entry nationwide and interdicting goods and people attempting to enter between the ports of entry.
Under the Biden administration, more than 10.7 million people were encountered by CBP personnel while attempting to enter the country unlawfully, more in four years than any two-term administration, according to CBP statistics.
In recent months, monthly apprehensions of illegal immigrants have hit 60-year lows, with fewer than 11,000 people intercepted nationwide in May. The precipitous drop from the Biden-era border crisis of 100,000 to 250,000 arrests per month comes in the wake of Trump’s mountain of executive actions on immigration since January.
Given the changing landscape at the border, Republicans who questioned Scott during his April confirmation hearing pushed him to explain how he would run CBP to further reduce illegal immigration and drug smuggling from Mexico into the U.S.
“We’ll continue to build out the border wall system. We’ll continue to build out the technology, but we’ll also make sure that we work with the U.S. Attorney’s Office so that there are consequences to violating laws in the United States,” Scott said. “The biggest reason right now that we’re seeing that massive reduction is because people are held accountable for violating the law, and they’re quickly removed from the United States.”
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), the ranking member on the committee of jurisdiction, said Trump’s recent implementation of tariffs on foreign trading partners had incidentally pulled CBP’s Office of Field Operations, which inspects goods coming into the country, into the issue of trade and that Scott had no experience in that area.
“He has no experience with customs facilitation or enforcement. Mr. Trump, Donald Trump, is creating the biggest disruptions to the customs system that I’ve seen in my time in public service,” said Wyden.
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Finally, Wyden pointed to a 2019 ProPublica story that revealed that agents, including Scott, had been part of a private 9,500-member Facebook group that made offensive comments about Democratic lawmakers and immigrants in their custody.
“There were about 9,000 people that were members of that group. There was a very small group of people that posted inappropriate, offensive material. It was called out by other Border Patrol agents on that site, and it was investigated and they were held accountable,” said Scott.