Wednesday, May 12, 2021 | 2 a.m.
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Two details jumped out when police last week announced the arrest of a retired Border Patrol agent in Sierra Vista Ariz., on sexual assault charges.
The attacks occurred 20-plus years ago, and the man, John Daly III, was accused of being a “serial rapist.”
It was shocking — because of those details.
But it also followed a familiar pattern. Over the 24 years I’ve covered or observed the U.S. Border Patrol as a journalist, agents have been arrested for serious crimes at a regular pace. Crimes of corruption have probably been the most common category, but sex crimes arrests have also occurred regularly.
I covered the agency back in the years when Daly is accused of committing this series of rapes, 1998-2000. Looking back in our archives just for those years, among the arrests of agents I covered were:
• An agent based in Cochise County who forced a migrant woman to strip naked, handcuffed her and forced her to perform oral sex.
• Another agent, based in Santa Cruz County, who drove a migrant woman to a remote area and sexually assaulted her.
These two cases fit in one of three main categories of victims of sex crimes by agents, said Jenn Budd. She’s a former agent in San Diego who has turned into an outspoken critic of the agency, especially on issues of sexual misconduct. She says she was raped by a fellow cadet when at the Border Patrol academy in the mid-1990s.
While migrants are one category of victims, the others are fellow employees, and civilians living wherever agents may be, Budd said. Daly’s alleged victims would fit into the latter category.
“Something’s wrong with the system,” Budd said. “This is not out of the ordinary. This is completely ordinary.”
The U.S. Border Patrol has developed a routine when an agent is arrested. It’s had to.
When the Border Patrol’s parent agency, Customs and Border Protection, heard of Daly’s arrest, it put out a statement as always, hitting the points these statements usually do:
CBP does not tolerate corruption or abuse within our ranks, and we cooperate fully with all criminal or administrative investigations of alleged misconduct by any of our current or former personnel. It is important to note that CBP stresses honor and integrity in every aspect of our mission, and the overwhelming majority of CBP employees and officers perform their duties with honor and distinction, working tirelessly every day to keep our country safe. Given the pending investigation, all inquiries are being referred to the Mesa Police Department.
The phrase “overwhelming majority of CBP employees” increasingly irritates me. It should not be surprising or worth mentioning that most agents don’t commit sex crimes. It should be expected and almost universally true that they don’t.
And yet, move forward to more recent years, and you see the pattern continue.
In 2017, Homeland Security Investigations arrested agent Paul Adams for sexually abusing his own children. He killed himself in jail.
In 2019, Tucson police arrested a Border Patrol agent, Steven Holmes, on accusations he sexually assaulted three women while off duty. He’s still awaiting trial.
Also in 2019, a Pima County grand jury indicted Gustavo Zamora on charges he sexually assaulted a female fellow agent. He’s still awaiting trial.
In 2020, an agent living in Sierra Vista, Dana Thornhill, was accused of sexual assault on a child. He barricaded himself from officers in a church for hours before being arrested.
Beyond all those cases, perhaps the most alarming one of all happened in 2018 near Laredo, Texas. Border Patrol agent Juan David Ortiz was arrested on charges of killing four women, all local sex workers, and attacking a fifth.
So, of course most agents aren’t sex criminals. It must infuriate the good agents to be regularly associated with these other ones.
But the upstanding ones wouldn’t have much cause for concern if there weren’t so many bad ones. And they’re accused of victimizing not just the vulnerable women crossing the border between ports of entry, but also co-workers and regular residents in places like Tucson.
Daly began work as an agent in November 1999 and retired as a supervisory agent stationed in Douglas shortly after he reached 20 years service, in December 2019.
He was identified as a suspect because departments received funding to go through backlogged sexual assault kits. Mesa police said in a press release that they identified Daly as a suspect in February and learned that he lived near each of the places where the rapes occurred — in Mesa, Gilbert and Bisbee — at the times they occurred. In April, DNA linked Daly to two of the sexual assaults in Mesa and Gilbert, Mesa police said.
Though plenty of cases, like the one against Daly, come to light, more allegations of sexual assault are lodged against agents than we hear about, Budd noted. It’s harder for the agency to bury them in bureaucracy when another agency — like Mesa, Tucson or Sierra Vista police — makes the case.
“There’s a lot of cases that just go away,” she said. “It’s a problem when they get caught by other agencies.”
If the Border Patrol is like society at large, more cases occur than are ever reported. There is certainly opportunity in the remote locations worked by agents, where they encounter vulnerable people.
It’s worrying to imagine a man accused of being a budding serial rapist joining an agency where he has such opportunity. If he did do it, what are the chances he stopped?
I asked Customs and Border Protection’s public affairs office, “What, if anything, is CBP doing to follow up on his arrest and find out whether he committed any (more) sexual assaults or related misconduct during his career in Border Patrol?”
They didn’t answer that question. All they were authorized to say was in that unreassuring statement emphasizing that most agents aren’t rapists.
Tim Steller is a columnist for The Arizona Daily Star.
