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The Trump administration has rehired a Department of Homeland Security doctor on a taxpayer-funded salary of $324,000, despite him still being investigated over sexual harassment and having admitted to workplace narcotic, alcohol, and gun-related wrongdoings.
Dr. Alexander Eastman, 51, was removed from his role as Acting Chief Medical Officer for Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in December 2024 after multiple whistleblower complaints and a CBP Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) investigation, to which he admitted drinking beer in a bar while armed.
He also “improperly” tried to procure narcotics through work, the OPR’s investigation documented, an incident for which he was investigated by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).
Eastman’s lawyer, Dan Schwager, told PunchUp that “the majority” of allegations investigated “were determined to be unfounded or unsubstantiated, and only two minor policy violations were found.”
The surgeon—who in 2015 advised an Obama White House task force over its Stop the Bleed campaign—was also investigated over multiple sexual harassment allegations leveled by female colleagues in a probe that remains ongoing. Eastman denies those claims.
The revelation of Eastman’s return to employment is a personnel headache for DHS under new Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, 48, picked by Donald Trump in March to replace Kristi Noem after the president fired the 54-year-old.
It is also the latest installment in a series of articles by PunchUp that have revealed the dysfunction at the heart of CBP’s medical office, which is seeking its fourth chief medical officer in five years, and has led whistleblowers to raise concerns that more child migrants will die in its care.
Top Border Patrol Doc’s Exit Raises Migrant Health Alarm
Do you know, or have you ever worked with Alexander Eastman? If so, contact Tom in complete confidence on the contact details at the top and bottom of this article.
While Eastman told colleagues at the time of his exit that he had been moved back into an unspecified job at DHS’s D.C. headquarters, a three-month PunchUp investigation has found that he was made to remain at home—on full pay—for almost a year.
In February 2025, RealClearInvestigations reported that Eastman earned $323,933 in 2024—$78,000 more than the $246,000 that will be paid to Mullin as Homeland Secretary. The surgeon was and remains the first and only DHS employee to earn more than $300,000 a year, and is among the top one percent of all federal workers.
(The federal government “has long had a ‘Doctors and Dentists’ pay scale to attract highly qualified physicians, including surgeons such as Dr. Eastman, who could easily make far more money in private practice,” Schwager said in a statement. “In 2022, a study found at least 100 federal employees on the Doctors and Dentists pay scale making more than $400,000 dollars per year at other agencies.”)
Schwager insisted his client had not been “suspended” by DHS, and had instead been placed on “investigative leave” for 10 months. Federal government policy, however, stipulates that an agency may place an employee on investigative leave only if keeping them at work could threaten the safety of other employees, compromise evidence, damage government property, or otherwise harm legitimate government interests.
Eastman was, though, Schwager confirmed, officially suspended over the gun and narcotics violations for seven days at the end of his investigative leave, before returning to work “in the normal course of personnel actions.”
Eastman’s “broad range of wrongdoing” and whistleblower outrage were highlighted in a letter sent last July to President Donald Trump by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal agency that acts as a watchdog for federal employees.
Yet last October, Eastman was brought back, without announcement, into the same job at DHS’s Office of Health Security that he had held since 2018 before he was moved on detail to CBP in the summer of 2023.
Sources say the physician is regarded as so “toxic” inside CBP that DHS bosses have slapped a gag on him—barring him from speaking to his former medical colleagues at America’s largest federal law enforcement agency, and them from speaking to him. Staff were briefed on the arrangement in an email, seen by PunchUp, around the time Eastman returned to work. Schwager did not address these claims.
An outraged DHS source told PunchUp: “Eastman’s inappropriate behavior and actions appear only to have effectively earned him a 10-month paid vacation and return to full duty.” Another said: “Eastman seems to get off on getting away with things after being caught, and always pushing the line, on everything.”
PunchUp was alerted to Eastman’s return to full-time employment by DHS sources angered by my previous Daily Beast reporting, which revealed that CBP continues to employ one Border Patrol agent despite his exposure as a bigoted online troll.
Critics say Eastman’s renewed employment is another side of the coin, with senior DHS and CBP staff able to behave inappropriately with virtually “zero consequences,” according to one whistleblower.
In a sharply worded filing to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel watchdog, the whistleblowers accused CBP’s OPR of producing an investigation that “lack[s] credibility, consistency, and completeness.” They warned that the handling of the case could deter other employees from reporting wrongdoing again.
“Eastman regularly told colleagues at CBP that he was best friends with the head of OPR and used that friendship to receive confidential information about whistleblowers and their sworn testimony,” one whistleblower told PunchUp, alleging that “he then targeted them for retribution, with CBP senior leadership looking the other way.”
The White House referred questions about Eastman to DHS. A DHS spokesperson told PunchUp that the agency and CBP were “committed to upholding the highest standards of professional conduct, adding that “the overwhelming majority of employees perform their duties with honor and distinction, working tirelessly every day to keep our country safe.”
They added: “DHS and CBP take seriously and thoroughly investigate alleged or potential misconduct, on or off duty. The Department ensures that appropriate investigatory, corrective, and disciplinary action is taken based on the conclusion of those investigations, including coordination with other law enforcement agencies.”
Friends in High Places
During Eastman’s previous stint at the Office of Health Security, former colleagues said he boasted that he was a personal friend and the physician of then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, a Biden appointee. Eastman also claimed to provide operational and personal medical support and care to Mayorkas, the sources told PunchUp.
It is unclear whether Eastman has been providing the same professional and personal medical care to Noem and now Mullin as he claimed to have provided to Mayorkas. While his lawyer did not address this point, he did confirm Eastman’s close professional relationship with Mayorkas.
Schwager also confirmed Eastman was sent to Minneapolis in January to assist with Trump’s Operation Metro Surge mass deportation drive, which led that month to the deaths of protesters Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, both 37.
There, Eastman worked at the controversial Whipple ICE field office and immigration detention center, which has been described by critics as “unsafe ” and “inhumane.”
Schwager said Eastman’s responsibilities at Whipple were not related to the health of detained migrants.
The much-criticized facility, though, is a far cry from the $1.8 million, five-bedroom house Eastman owns in Dallas, Texas. He shares the 3,850-square-foot property with his surgeon wife, Amy, 47, whom he married in 2011, according to publicly available records. They also show Eastman is a registered Democrat and has held a hunting and fishing license since 2002.
Violated CBP Policy & State Law
In its report, CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility found that Eastman violated agency policy and state law by consuming alcohol while carrying his work firearm in Tucson, Arizona, in January 2024. The whistleblower response further claims OPR concluded that, in a similar incident at a D.C. bar in or around September 2023, “a violation appears likely” based on the evidence, a characterization later echoed in the U.S. Office of Special Counsel’s letter to Trump.
Eastman admitted that he had consumed alcohol during the Tucson work trip. His lawyer, however, said the episode involved only an inadvertent “single sip” of beer in a hotel lobby, denied the D.C. allegation, and disputed any suggestion Eastman’s conduct was “habitual.”
Schwager said that stripping a law enforcement official of his firearm and taking him out of service for “the only substantiated charge of a single sip of beer while armed” would have been “unprecedented to the best of our understanding and wildly inconsistent with the disciplinary guidelines for such a violation.”
One DHS whistleblower told PunchUp, “As a medical officer not working in law enforcement, Eastman shouldn’t even have had a gun at all. But Eastman is widely known to always carry a firearm wherever he goes, regardless of his duty status.”
The whistleblowers’ letter to the OSC, furthermore, noted that Eastman kept his credentials and weapon, and was later given an automatic rifle by his employer despite the seriousness of the findings against him.
“Dr. Eastman’s career has included pioneering the placement of highly trained medical personnel, like trauma surgeons, in high-risk operational law enforcement positions, such as traveling with SWAT teams,” Stacey Evans, a second lawyer representing Eastman, told PunchUp. “As part of those field missions, Dr. Eastman has been trained and embedded as a reserve police officer, for example. So regular carrying of firearms is part of the job as he knows it.”
The OPR’s report also found Eastman in breach of CBP policy for writing and signing an unauthorized narcotics policy as part of an attempt to procure fentanyl lollipops for a 2023 United Nations mission in New York City. This was purportedly to allow for the treatment of any CBP staffers present on the assignment.
Sources told PunchUp that some CBP medical staff had questioned the basis for the trip as a whole, saying it did not fall within the chief medical officer’s established duties.
Separate whistleblower filings alleged OPR had also previously investigated earlier narcotics incidents involving Eastman in 2020 and 2021, including attempts to obtain fentanyl, morphine, and ketamine.
Schwager said Eastman’s duties included obtaining pharmaceuticals for certain DHS medical operations. He confirmed that previous investigations into narcotics had been undertaken but said that OPR had not found any wrongdoing by Eastman, and that the investigation instead focused on an unnamed “teammate.” When asked who the teammate was, Schwager said, “I will not be providing names of non-consenting people to be dragged into this mess.”
“Dr. Eastman believes… that the OPR investigations and the Department’s handling of this matter and the malicious leaks about him have been grossly unfair to him, not the purported whistleblowers,” Schwager told PunchUp. “Still, Dr. Eastman has cooperated completely and has refrained from leaks or attacks on complainants except as appropriate when he is asked to respond to their allegations.”
CBP medical whistleblowers also submitted protected disclosures to Congress in February 2024 that alleged Eastman had “frequently spoken lewdly about women” in work and public settings and that this formed a “hostile” workplace environment.
A Dallas Morning News investigation last April separately reported that at least 12 people had either filed workplace complaints against Eastman or shared detailed accounts of inappropriate behavior. These complaints also related to his previous employment at the University of Texas Southwestern (UTSW) and to his service as a reserve officer with the Dallas Police Department (DPD), a role he continued to hold while at CBP and DHS.
Allegations described in the paper ranged from flirty text messages that escalated into unwelcome touching and hugging at UTSW, to what one Dallas police officer said was a sexual relationship with Eastman while he was married, during which she said he reveled in having sex with her in public places.
While he worked at DHS, Eastman’s colleagues told the Morning News that the surgeon had remarked during one D.C. bar happy hour that he would end up going home with “one of” three female contractors. The same people said they also heard him boast about sleeping with multiple women, and that female staff regularly warned one another about his behavior.
Evans told PunchUp that “a lot of time had passed” since the article was published, and that no incident described in the paper’s reporting “was ever found to amount to sexual harassment.” A spokeswoman for the Dallas Police Department did not address PunchUp’s questions about sexual misconduct allegations relating to his time on the force.
DHS has previously acknowledged an ongoing “personnel matter” involving Eastman—believed to relate to sexual harassment claims—but not its scope or outcome. It did not address the matter in its response to PunchUp. Eastman denies all of the sexual harassment allegations leveled against him, and Schwager said his client would not relitigate the News article, while acknowledging the DHS investigation remained ongoing.
Schwager added that, throughout the complaints process, Eastman had “cooperated with every official inquiry or investigation,” “admitted where he has been in error,” and “accepted responsibility where he unintentionally engaged in minor policy violations.”
Gangster Memes
Around the same time he was placed on investigative leave, Eastman began posting ‘inspirational’ memes on Facebook about not giving up in the face of adversity.
He also reposted ones featuring Al Capone, the infamous U.S. Prohibition-era gangster who was eventually brought down not for his worst crimes but for his tax affairs.
They included one which reads, “If I needed you and you weren’t there I will never need you again,” to which Eastman added: “Amen to this.”