By John Davis
Near the remote U.S. Customs and Border Protection outpost in St. Juste, Maine, stands a small apple orchard. Each spring, as the sun’s rays finally help the soil revive from a deep winter slumber, the apple trees sprout blossoms, which in the fall become the delectable fruit. And, as in the cliché, the apples don’t fall from far from the trees. Similarly, the legacy of the CBP officer who planted the orchard years ago doesn’t fall far from his agency roots.
“My dad had a passion for apples and his apple orchard,” said CBP Officer Kevin MacCallum, the oldest son of CBP Officer Kenneth MacCallum, who died in the line of duty Nov. 26, 2021. “He would always send us pictures of him with his apple harvest.”
That orchard paid off in bushels of apples. The fruit was welcome in the hard-scrabble, working class MacCallum household – buoyed when Kenneth MacCallum joined CBP in 2004 at the age of 40 after immigrating from Canada years before and starting his own trucking business. CBP offered Kenneth more job security and a better life for his family overall.
But Kenneth MacCallum’s legacy wasn’t just limited to the orchard he planted; as mentioned, his oldest son Kevin became a CBP officer himself, and two other sons, Scott and Kyle, joined Border Patrol.
“Whenever he put his mind to something, he was incredibly passionate about it, and he gave that to every one of us [sons],” said Scott MacCallum, a Border Patrol agent who is part of the horse patrol unit in Douglas, Arizona, referring not only to his father’s love of the apple orchard, but his attitude toward his life and his work for CBP that he passed down to his sons. “He was just the role model of what a dad should be.”
Scott pointed out how his dad’s love of his work and of CBP made it easy for him to follow in his father’s footsteps.
“It made it an easy choice for me to think, like him, that I could have this stable work and serve my country and be able to raise a family, the same as he brought us up,” Scott said.
Kyle MacCallum is a Border Patrol agent on the Tucson, Arizona, Border Patrol Search, Trauma, and Rescue team – an elite group of agents who provide specialized law enforcement, search and rescue operations, as well as specialized training for other law enforcement officers. He described his dad as a quiet but friendly man, known for his one-liners.
“He had a super dry sense of humor,” laughed Kyle as he remembered his father. “He would be sitting quietly in the corner while people were talking, and he would just drop a hilarious comment into the conversation and quip, ‘What? What’s so funny?’”
He also credited his dad for making it easy for him also to join CBP.
“When he joined CBP in 2004, I was just a kid,” Kyle said, becoming quickly fascinated with his dad’s new agency. He knew very early in life he wanted a job where he was in the great outdoors and not chained to a desk. Border Patrol was an obvious choice for him. “The idea of doing a job where I absolutely did not have to be in an office was the best thing to me.”
And he hopes his dad would be proud of all of his sons’ service now.
“I do things that I know would make him proud,” not out of a sense of duty but just because that’s how Kenneth MacCallum raised his boys, Kyle said.
Kevin remembers when his dad got sick with COVID-19 in the fall of 2021. The disease was ravaging the country; in fact, CBP had a record number of people lost in the line of duty at the height of the epidemic in 2020 and 2021.
“It was really a shock to us,” Kevin said about his father’s COVID-19 diagnosis. “We weren’t really that worried about COVID, because we’re all in fairly good shape and take care of ourselves. Dad was in some of the best shape he’d ever been in. He was quite healthy.”
Kenneth and his wife would travel to a second home in Florida for a visit, but Kenneth’s health would quickly deteriorate, and his wife eventually took him to a hospital. A short time later, Kenneth would end up on a ventilator for nearly 40 days and never recovered.
“We never talked to him again after that,” Kevin said, his voice trembling as he recalled the bitter time.
The experience prompted Kevin to become part of CBP’s peer support, helping those who face devastating life experiences themselves.
“In peer support, when we’re talking about it, real stories really help drive the point home,” he said. “Everybody at some point has something going on, some sort of time when they reached a crisis in their life, when their resilience is not keeping up. I learned how important it is to be somebody to talk to.”
Scott also becomes emotional when recalling these darkest days for the MacCallums while he saw his dad dying from COVID-19 – a horrifying time for many other CBP families as well.
“It made it worse to see it go on for so long,” Scott’s voice halting as he remembered that October and November of 2021. “He was a strong-willed man who fought with everything he had.”
Kyle visited his father in the hospital and witnessed for himself just how devastating it all was. His voice also quaked when recalling those days when he and his brothers rotated in and out for visits.
“I was out there with my oldest brother when he died,” Kyle said, realizing the nature of his job as a Border Patrol agent working along the Arizona-Mexico border was putting him just as much at risk. “We were pretty busy, with a lot of field encounters and processing.”
Choking back tears again, Scott said his father passed along a strong work ethic that he tries to emulate every day along the border. “We have a job to do, and we’re driven to do it,” Scott said.
The legacy planted by Kenneth MacCallum might not be the last in this proud line of service to the country. Kevin said his daughter Alexa – Kenneth’s oldest grandchild born around the time Kevin graduated from the CBP officer academy in Georgia and was especially close to her grandfather – wants to be the next to join CBP.
“Right now, she’s a sophomore in high school, and when you ask her what she wants to do, she says she wants to be a CBP officer,” Kevin said. “I think it would be great for her to step into that kind of role.”
Kyle and Scott echoed those sentiments as they would be proud to see their sons and daughters follow in this CBP tradition in the MacCallum family, or whatever path they choose to follow.
“I’ve had a positive experience in my service that if they see my service as intriguing to them, I would obviously encourage them to seek that out,” Scott said of his 7-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter.
“I would love to see him do something involving the outdoors, such as I do with Border Patrol search and rescue,” Kyle said as he rocked his infant son. “If that’s what he wanted to do.”
And after that, who knows where the next apples from the MacCallum family tree of service will fall.
