“It’s hard to participate in something like that and not develop a love for the people, for the culture,” Whetten said. “He loved being there. It was a great experi- ence, and he was a stand-up dude.” Whetten said Judd reconnected with him by phone not long after receiving his nomination, expressing excitement about returning to Chile. Yet Whetten, who lived in Mexico as a child and has dual Mexican-U.S. citizenship, acknowledged that Judd espoused “a harder line” than he has on illegal immigration. He offers Judd the benefit of the doubt, figuring Judd was “representing people whose lives are liter- ally on the line, on the border dealing with this.” It’s a generous interpretation, although one not shared by Judd’s critics. They see in Judd’s actions the machinations of a shame- less arriviste, whose ambitions likely stretch beyond the U.S. Embassy in Santiago. According to various accounts, Judd began his Border Patrol career in 1997 in California and spent a good portion of it stationed in southern Arizona, with stops in Montana and Maine along the way. He was involved with the union early on, elected to leadership positions at union locals for El Centro and Tucson. In those days, Judd operated in a somewhat more bipartisan manner. As executive vice president of the Tucson local in 2008, Judd joined the local’s endorsement of a Democrat running for Cochise County sheriff against Republican incumbent Larry Dever. The union felt Dever had botched the investigation into the shooting of a migrant by an agent, resulting in a second- degree murder charge that ultimately didn’t stick. Two years later, Judd stood alongside Republican Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer as she announced her signing of Arizona’s bigoted anti-immigrant Senate Bill 1070, though he later tossed water on her assertion that most illegal immigrants were part of the drug trade. The “vast majority of those whom we arrest are not smuggling drugs,” he told the Associated Press. Judd was elected president of the national union in 2013. His reign was less than universally adored. Gil Maza, a retired Trump supporter and 27-year Border Patrol veteran, felt Judd sold out the rank- and-file in 2014 by supporting the Border Patrol Agent Pay Reform Act, which changed the way in which overtime pay for agents was handled. At the time, Judd said that though agents could lose as much as $6,400 per year in the new system, “in the end, it will prove to be a boon for border security.” “The union did not fight for us,” said Maza, who was never a dues-paying member. “Or if they did, it wasn’t a very hard effort.” Maza also disapproved of Judd’s “pursuit of political influence,” which culminated in the union’s endorsement of Trump against Hillary Clinton in 2016. The endorsement — the first of a presidential candidate in the union’s history — was rife with hyperbole and hero worship, lauding Trump as someone who “doesn’t fear the media, who doesn’t embrace political correctness, who doesn’t need the money,” among other over-the-top plaudits. Maza said there was “grumbling” about why a union “that represents agents from every political standpoint” was endorsing anybody at all. “A lot of people felt like, ‘Why is this union endorsing one candidate?’” Maza said, “when in the whole structure of the Border Patrol, you have Republicans and Democrats, you have independents, you have libertarians.” As was perhaps the point, the endorse- ment propelled Judd into Trump’s powerful orbit. He became a frequent White House visitor during Trump’s first term, often touting Trump’s line even when it was arguably at odds with the Border Patrol’s priorities. Judd enthusias- tically supported Trump’s proposed border wall, despite his agency’s historic opposi- tion. He also backed a partial shutdown of the government in 2018 over Trump’s demand for border-wall funding, even though it meant agents would have to work in the interim without pay. Judd’s sycophancy paid off in spades. Trump heaped praise upon him, and Judd was sometimes credited with the removal or replacement of key immigration officials during Trump’s first presidency. In 2019, the Washington Post revealed that Trump had directly intervened in contract negoti- ations between the Border Patrol union and government officials, resulting in a new agreement that “significantly increased the number of union officials allowed to collect a government salary without performing patrol duties.” The article quoted unnamed sources who said that then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen would sometimes come to the Oval Office to discover the presi- dent in conversation with Judd or having just ended one. Whenever officials were critical of Judd, Trump would reply that Judd “was the first guy who endorsed me.” All that flattery was Judd’s part of a political quid pro quo. PUCKER UP When Trump lost his reelection bid in 2020, Judd lost his avenue to self- advancement. By that time, his transfor- mation into anti-immigrant ideologue was complete. But that hard-right xenophobic streak had apparently been there for years, if just better concealed. In 2014, as the Obama administration dealt with an unprecedented wave of unac- companied minors crossing the southern border, the Border Patrol union tweeted about “new annual job rating areas,” which included “babysitting,” “diaper changing” and “burrito wrapping.” The tweet was deleted, but Judd defended it as not racist because agents were being pulled from patrol “to babysit, clean cells, change diapers” and “actually making burritos.” When a DACA recipient spoke briefly at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Judd’s union issued a press release accusing Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton of “flaunting the breaking of our nation’s immigration laws” and endan- gering agents. That year, the union endorsed the congressional bid of ethi- cally-challenged Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, donating $3,000 to his failed campaign bid from its short-lived Border Patrol Council political action committee. In 2018, when Border Patrol agents were filmed destroying water jugs left in the desert for migrants, Judd claimed before a congressional committee that doing so was “a humanitarian effort” — “If that water heats up in the desert, it’s actu- ally a lot more dangerous to drink” than “if you don’t have that water at all,” he claimed. That explanation, as one might suspect, was bullshit. As head of the Border Patrol union, Brandon Judd sucked up to Trump. Now he’s set to become ambassador to Chile. >> p 16 Brandon Judd began his Border Patrol career in 1997 in California and spent a good portion of it stationed in southern Arizona. (Rebecca Noble/Getty Images)
