The US Senate on Wednesday confirmed Rodney Scott as commissioner of Customs and Border Protection (CBP), despite a former top official accusing him of orchestrating a "cover-up" over the death of a man detained while trying to enter the country from Mexico.
Scott was confirmed on a party-line vote, with 51 Republicans in favor and 46 Democrats opposed, along with three absences.
"I'm honored that the United States Senate has confirmed me, and I want to thank President [Donald] Trump and Secretary [Kristi] Noem for their trust and unwavering leadership," Scott said in a statement following the vote. "I started my career on the frontlines, and now I am ready to lead my CBP family with integrity and a clear mission to defend our sovereignty, enforce the law, and put America first."
He will take charge of one of the largest federal law enforcement agencies, which staffs ports of entry across the United States and also includes the border patrol, which he led from 2020 to 2021.
Border patrol agents have recently been seen on the streets of a Los Angeles suburb as part of Trump's campaign to arrest suspected undocumented immigrants. Massive protests have broken out in response, and CBP has publicly announced that it is using drones to monitor demonstrations in the region.
A critic of Joe Biden's immigration policies and supporter of Trump's desire to build a wall along the border with Mexico, Scott was nominated by Trump in December to lead CBP.
Shortly before his confirmation hearing before the Senate finance committee in April, James Wong, a former deputy assistant commissioner of CBP's office of internal affairs, wrote to the committee's top Democrat with "concern" about Scott's handling of the investigation into the 2010 death of Anastasio Hernández Rojas in San Diego, after he was beaten and tased by CBP agents who were preparing to deport him.
As San Diego's police department was investigating the death, a CBP critical incident team used a subpoena to obtain Hernández Rojas's medical records, which Wong said Scott would have known about given his position at the time as a top border patrol official in the city.
"The use of a CBP administrative subpoena for this purpose was blatantly unlawful, and anyone signing it should have known that," Wong wrote in a letter to the committee's Democratic ranking member, Ron Wyden.
"This was not an investigation, it was a cover-up - one Mr Scott supervised. This abuse of power disqualifies him from leading one of the largest law enforcement agencies in the country."
At the hearing, Scott described the subpoena as "information gathering" and a standard part of such investigations. Asked by the Republican finance committee chair, Mike Crapo, if he had acted "to interfere with the investigation of that case", Scott replied: "Absolutely not."
In 2021, a House oversight committee report found that Scott was a member of "I'm 10-15", a private Facebook group for border patrol agents in which participants insulted members of Congress and posted "racist and sexually violent content" directed at lawmakers.
Scott told the finance committee: "There were 9,000 people on that group. To say that a few that actually posted something inappropriate, were held accountable, and were disciplined are a reflection of everyone else on that group, I think, is just a [mischaracterization]."
When the committee convened again in May before voting to advance his nomination to the Senate floor, Wyden warned Scott would act as a loyalist for the president: "We don't need to question what Mr Scott would do if given a questionable order from Donald Trump, because we already know he has a history of covering up the truth when it benefits him in a willingness to enable Donald Trump's worst impulses to target American citizens exercising their constitutional rights."
Crapo said Scott "knows what policies make CBP effective, and I'm confident he will implement these policies as soon as he is confirmed".