Last year, button-pushers within the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP)'s DEI office tediously constructed and widely circulated a "Black Resistance" flyer that exalts anti-police political figures and promotes black nationalist ideas, according to the federal law enforcement agency's internal communications obtained by Townhall via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
Back in early December 2022, CBP's Privacy and Diversity Office (PDO) leadership placed a work order of "High" importance, instructing the federal agency's Printing, Graphics, and Distribution Branch to design an 8.5 x 11" flyer for Black History Month.
Though the flyer aptly features a photograph of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights leader is showcased alongside the likes of race hustler Colin Kaepernick. Near them is a picture of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), once accused of attempting to incite a Black Lives Matter mob to commit political violence. In the center is a word cloud that looks like it was slapped together with woke buzzwords taken off of TikTok, such as "Allies", "Social Justice", "#BlackLivesMatters" [sic], and "#ICan'tBreathe".
Also featured prominently are political slogans, such as "#BlackPower," a phrase which MLK "resolutely" opposed, worrying that it carried "connotations of violence and separatism", as well as "My Black is Beautiful," a saying that's supposed to instill a sense of pride in being black, as inspired by the politics of black nationalist Marcus Garvey.
To celebrate Black History Month, CBP distributed the flyer "along with information about the process for establishing the theme to advance the educational intent of Black History Month," a CBP spokesperson told Townhall. The poster spotlights names and historical references "representative of Black Resistance," the agency spokesperson added.
Each year, CBP follows thematic guidelines laid out by Black History Month's founders, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH). 2023's theme, as ASALH declared, was "Black Resistance in the Past, Present, and Future."
"African Americans have resisted historic and ongoing oppression, in all forms, especially the racial terrorism of lynching, racial pogroms, and police killings since our arrival upon these shores," reads ASALH's explanatory summary of last year's theme.
ASALH named Colin Kaepernick, Simone Biles, Jesse Owens, and Jackie Robinson in the same sentence as examples of industry trailblazers who "resisted the idea that they cannot or should not speak about political, cultural, or social issues."
For CBP's Black History Month initiative, the DEI officer assigned to oversee the project opted not to include Jesse Owens, who triumphed over racial discrimination at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin during the Nazi regime's reign and at home in a segregated America, or Jackie Robinson, who broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball and endured relentless abuse as a result.
Instead, the DEI officer chose to extol Kaepernick, who uses his platform to sow racial division, and Simone Biles, who quit the 2020 Tokyo Olympics to "focus on [her] mental health," later saying she was under pressure to overachieve as "a black woman."
"Black activist athletes have often suffered personal and economic consequences due to their stances, speech, and actions, but to them, it has been worth it to see changes," ASALH wrote, although Kaepernick had little to lose and everything to gain from seeking attention on the sidelines. (No one even noticed Kaepernick's first few "protests" against the national anthem, because the then-regressing San Francisco 49ers quarterback was benched and out of uniform at the time of his waning NFL career.)
"I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color," Kaepernick proclaimed. For his bravado, he was rewarded handsomely, securing an endorsement deal with Nike that made him the face of its "Believe in something, Even if it means sacrificing everything" campaign despite him not really "sacrificing" anything at all.
Kaepernick, having made millions off his time in the NFL, would go on to produce his own Netflix special, where he compared the NFL draft process to a slave auction. Actors acted out the analogy in the multi-millionaire's production. The slavery scene depicted white NFL scouts bidding on black NFL prospects, shackled in the football field-turned-plantation.
Another anachronism can be found in the DEI officer's decision to sequentially list Biles before Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy who was abducted, brutally beaten, and lynched in the Jim Crow-era South. Notably, ASALH, which the federal worker used as a reference, made no mention of Emmett Till in its paragraph on "lynchings and ongoing police violence against African Americans." Rather, the organization focused on "the murders of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor, and thousands of other Black women, men, and trans people..." as present-day calls for "resistance."
Furthermore, ASALH claimed that "societal and political forces" are escalating to "limit access to and exercise of the ballot, eliminate the teaching of Black history, and work to push us back into the 1890s," a thinly veiled jab at GOP-led election integrity efforts and Florida's legislation prohibiting the instruction of critical race theory in the state's schools.
(Per the Florida Department of Education's social studies requirements and standards, the African people's passage to America, slavery, and abolition are all mandated topics under the required instructional Florida statute as is the civil rights movement.)
"[W]e can only rely on our capacity to resist," ASALH proclaimed.
CBP files - FOIA response t... by mia.cathell
As Townhall previously reported, the flyer was disbursed agency-wide and accompanied by CBP Commissioner Troy Miller's message commemorating Black History Month. An email sent from the agency prodded personnel to "participate in local Diversity and Inclusion Program Committee activities at headquarters and various field offices in honor of National Black History Month."
The work order also indicated that the "Black Resistance"-themed graphic would be used for a "promo pic" on CBPnet, the private network accessed exclusively by CBP employees and administered by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
A source at CBP's Baltimore Field Office told Townhall that the flyer was printed out and posted to a bulletin board inside the building, causing quite a stir among the employees there due to its "divisive" nature and rhetorical tone. "BLM hates us, so does Maxine Waters. Kaepernick hates us. They're anti-police advocates against the nation's largest police agency," the source said.
In 2021, the global Black Lives Matter organization said that CBP, "like other law enforcement agencies," is "rooted in white supremacy and a history of slave-catching." BLM's declaration was issued in the aftermath of the left-wing media disinformation campaign falsely accusing mounted U.S. Border Patrol agents of whipping Haitians who were illegally crossing into Del Rio, Texas. BLM peddled that false narrative, later known as the WhipGate hoax, in a statement claiming Border Patrol perpetrated "anti-black violence" against the illegal aliens.
"When we say #DefundThePolice, we mean all the police, including U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), who are demonstrating their slave-catching roots, riding horseback, and beating Haitian asylum-seekers with whips," BLM wrote.
As for Maxine Waters, ahead of the verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial, the Democrat lawmaker directed BLM activists to "stay in the streets" and "get more confrontational" if the ex-Minneapolis police officer was found not guilty of murdering George Floyd.
"This is just another attempt by a federal agency to show how woke it is," one Border Patrol agent, referring to the Black Lives Matter-inspired flyer, told Townhall. "The office that made this is also responsible for responding to FOIA requests, so I would rather they not spend time making flyers like this and instead work on not taking six months to respond to a FOIA request."
Indeed, the FOIA Division is nested within CBP's Privacy and Diversity Office (PDO); the PDO has dual functionality split between handling FOIA requests and enforcing DEI practices in its federal workforce. In February 2023, Townhall submitted a public records request seeking access to CBP documents discussing the design and dissemination of its "Black Resistance" flyer. It, then, took the agency's FOIA-processing department a year to locate these records created by its own DEI-fused counterpart.
The "releasable" records were heavily redacted, pursuant to subsections of Title 5 U.S.C. § 552 that pertain to the disclosure of personnel files, which "would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy," production of law enforcement records, and revealing investigative/prosecutorial procedures. Two pages were withheld altogether because of inter- or intra-agency memorandums "that would not be available by law to a party other than an agency in litigation with the agency."
"CBP has considered the foreseeable harm standard when reviewing the record set and has applied the FOIA exemptions as required by the statute and the Attorney General's guidance," the agency's FOIA Divison told Townhall via a final response letter.
The redactions include censoring the names of those DEI officers involved in the flyer's creation.
CBP's PDO, whose tagline is "Diversity Makes Us Stronger," has what are called "local Special Emphasis Program Committees (SEPCs)," formerly known as "Diversity and Inclusion Program Committees (DIPCs)," but the overt DEI branding was dropped in the past year. PDO staff helps these DEI committees, comprised of CBP employee volunteers, execute the agency's Diversity and Inclusion Management Plan, as well as fulfill its "affirmative employment obligations" through DEI programming, such as "cultural education," and by attracting "underrepresented minority communities" to apply for employment positions within CBP.
According to the agency's five-year strategic plan for expanding DEI efforts through FY 2026, "Diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility are essential elements in achieving CBP's mission, living its values, and realizing its vision as an agency. Increasing workforce diversity will improve the quality of decisions made by CBP employees..." The agency's DEIA mission statement says, "CBP protects our borders, the American people, and economic prosperity by [...] making DEIA a cornerstone of all that we do."
In preparation for its strategic planning, CBP completed an "equity assessment" of its workforce demographics and touted seeing "improvements in the demographic representation" of female and black employees in high-paying senior management positions.
For National Women's History Month this March, the theme is celebrating "Women Who Advocate for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion," and for Women's Equality Day on August 26, the agency's DEI office will urge CBP employees to "Embrace Equity."