August 13, 2024
Under a $45 million settlement, Customs and Border Protection agreed to adjust a practice that some employees say has instilled a culture of shame and perpetuated a fear of retaliation.
When Roberta Gabaldon was ready to share news of her pregnancy with her colleagues at Customs and Border Protection in 2015, she brought in pink and blue doughnuts with a sign that read: “Pink and blue. Pink and blue. Somebody’s pregnant, guess who?”
But her palpable excitement, particularly after a miscarriage months earlier, quickly dissipated.
“My boss came into my office and he’s like: ‘You have to leave. You have to get a note about your pregnancy, and you have to go on light duty,’” Ms. Gabaldon, an agriculture specialist in the El Paso office, recalled, describing how she was told she needed to be reassigned to a post with fewer responsibilities regardless of whether she or her doctor believed it was necessary.
Her experience reflects that of hundreds of female employees at the agency who have filed suit against Customs and Border Protection, saying that since at least 2016, they were denied equal treatment once they disclosed they were expecting. No matter the physical demands of their jobs, many were transferred to another post, typically centered on administrative or secretarial work and usually unrelated to what skills they had developed in their existing roles. The policy, they say, hurt their opportunities for advancement, and others add that they weathered pay cuts because light duty meant no more overtime.
But under a $45 million settlement reached on Monday, Customs and Border Protection agreed to adjust a practice that some employees say has instilled a culture of shame and perpetuated a fear of retaliation as women try to hide their pregnancies at work for as long as possible.
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A lawyer who represented Ms. Gabaldon, Joseph M. Sellers, a partner with the Washington-based firm Cohen Milstein, said women shared remarkably similar accounts of how the agency displayed a persistent skepticism toward the ability of pregnant officers to do their jobs.
“We want pregnant employees to be in our work force in this country,” Mr. Sellers said. “We ought to create the work environment and expectations to ensure that will happen.”
Mr. Sellers, along with the law firm Gilbert Employment Law, interviewed about half of the plaintiffs. Some 90 percent of the women who joined the lawsuit still work at C.B.P.
Read Transfers and Pay Cuts: Pregnant Officers Accuse Border Agency of Discrimination.