The U.S. Border Patrol released an internal report on Thursday that absolves their officers of legal wrongdoing in their response to the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde. It also acknowledges their personnel were not equipped to deal with the situation and includes recommendations for their officers to be more prepared in the future.
376 officers waited over an hour to confront the gunman as children from inside the building dialed 911 and reported victims who were injured and deceased. 188 of the 376 responding law enforcement officers were border patrol agents.
The CBP report states that the training and curriculum provided to the officers did not prepare their officers to deal with an active shooter.
“The current training and curriculum did not include the proper application of National Incident Management System (NIMS) or Incident Command System (ICS) protocols and did not prepare them for a number of factors, including the need to address an active shooter behind a locked door.”
The report includes several recommendations for improving the agency’s response to mass violence. This includes ensuring that CBP personnel are working within their authority, and ensuring that the laws and policies are in place to allow them to respond to non-federal mass violence incidents. It also recommends that CBP’s active shooter training be revised to “align with continually emerging best practices.”
The report states that the CBP officers were not found to have violated the law in their response to the shooting.
The report was released just days before the pretrial hearings of the only two law enforcement officers being charged in the shooting that saw 19 children and two teachers killed. Former school chief of police Pete Arredondo and former school officer Adrian Gonzales are set to appear for their pretrial on Monday afternoon.
