Mere months after one of the local agents described his office as a “black hole” with “no mission, no purpose,” the Port Angeles Border Patrol office may find itself equipped with expansive new power that will trump current federal laws in pursuit of a threat that does not appear to exist.

In August, Jose Romero, the supervising agent for the Port Angeles, Washington, office of the U.S. Border Patrol was busy with "damage control" when one of his agents — Christian Sanchez — made the simple observation that an office that had been bloated by a staff that had grown to 10 times its 2006 level found itself with very little to do. As Paul Gottlieb wrote on August 16 for the Penninsula Daily News:

Sanchez came forward last month at a gathering sponsored by the Advisory Committee on Transparency, an open-government group in Washington, D.C., claiming that the Port Angeles Border Patrol office was a “black hole” with “no mission, no purpose” for the more than 40 agents — 10 times the number it had in 2006 — who patrol Clallam and Jefferson counties.

He alleged that he and his fellow agents in Port Angeles had little relevant work to perform and sometimes passed time by simply driving around the Peninsula, what agents call the “Baja 500.”

He called the situation “a betrayal of taxpayers . . . It's shameful for me to admit that we, as men, have no purpose [in Port Angeles].

“I could not stop denying it to myself. There was no work to be done.”

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