A former U.S. federal agent tasked with investigating cartel-corrupted law enforcement on the Texas border will spend one year and one day in prison for falsifying investigations.
Wayne Ball, a former special agent with Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General received the sentence in Brownsville from U.S. District Judge Hilda Tagle. Ball, who was a career cop before joining the federal agency, pled guilty to the charge of conspiracy to falsify federal investigations in January 2013 and had been awaiting sentencing since.
As Breitbart Texas previously reported, Ball was part of a group of agents that had been tasked with investigating corruption within federal agents on the Texas border and under orders of their supervisor had falsified investigations by backdating the logs.
While Ball pled guilty to the charge, another agent fought the charges and lost. He is now serving a three year prison sentence.
The Texas border, particularly the Rio Grande Valley, is a main corridor used by drug and human smugglers trying to get their products to northern U.S. cities. While some of the smugglers use the river, others use the international bridges that connect Texas and the Mexican state of Tamaulipas.
As Breitbart Texas previously reported, in some cases border agents have fallen for cartel bribes in exchange for looking the other way, such as in the case of CBP officer Jose Luis Zavala who remains in federal custody. He was charged with taking bribes from a Mexican cartel in exchange for allowing them to smuggle more than 3,000 pounds of marijuana into the country through his inspection lane.