Interim Critical Incident Response Guidance

Maintaining the public’s trust is vital to our mission. CBP continually evaluates and improves upon its policies, practices, and procedures with a focus on maintaining accountability and transparency, and to ensure they are consistent with the law.  To that end, the Office of Professional Responsibility’s Assistant Commissioner and the U.S. Border Patrol Chief issued a joint message to the workforce to ensure a consistent standard and a unified command and control structure for the critical incident teams. This is an important step to reinforce the importance of OPR’s independent oversight role and to clearly articulate that USBP critical incident teams will only respond to critical incidents under OPR’s direct command and control, and documented in accordance with OPR standards.