CZM Rewind: The U.S. Border Patrol Is A Nightmare That Never Ends

we have ever discussed on this show. So here, please listen up to a series of episodes that have unfortunately only gotten more relevant as time has gone on. You know, introducing a podcast is a little bit like Megan Love. It's not it's not at all. I'm so sorry. I'm Robert Evans failing to introduce my podcast yet again. It's behind the bastards. It's about terrible people. I'm so sorry everyone.

I was. I was trying to open with my folksy wisdom, but I have none, and I now I've watched the start of this episode here to attempt to take away some of my shame. Is Caitlin Duranty. Caitlin, how are you doing today?

And now I just hurt myself every time I go to the airport out of pride. And that's why men shouldn't be allowed to hold political office.

particularly the ones you know, shooting at me. And so I started just kind of reading a bunch about customs and border patrol this last week or so, and I couldn't stop, and so I wrote a lot about them. And now we're all going to talk about border patrol because Kaitlin, did you know the border patrol kind of problematic?

like that. That's the whole that's the whole deal, right. So the US Mexican War of eighteen forty six eighteen forty eight is the conflict that gained our nation most of the modern Southwest. It was a naked war of imperialist aggression against another nation that brutally subjugated indigenous peoples. One can argue that Mexico was like a broadly better country than the US at this point, since it didn't allow slavery. But both countries not great to anyone any

like indigenous peoples or whatever. Just bad governments. So at the end of the US Mexican War, the United States wound up occupying Mexico City, and that nation was forced to seed fifty percent of its northern territory in the resulting treaty. And I think a lot of Americans who grow up kind of outside of the Southwest don't really have a clear idea of how much land the United States scott as a result of the US Mexican War.

But we took a shitload of land from Mexico. It's fucking crazy how much of this country used to be Mexico, Like up into Oklahoma.

found themselves living in between two nations. This included roughly one hundred and eighty thousand members of indigenous tribes, as well as about one hundred and fifty thousand Mexicans. So these three hundred thousandish non white folks owned most of the land, and like the territories in the Southwest that you know became Texas and some of the surrounding states.

In the decades after the US Mexican War are kind of best viewed as a gradual process of white people taking this land from non white people, some of it through purchase, some of it through like violent threats and intimidation, some of it as a result of the reservation system kicking indigenous people off of their ancestral land, and some of it through just like good old, you know, good old, good old fashioned genocide, Caitlin, just like that, just like

really getting your boots in it, you know.

who first settled in Texas with Stephen F. Austin. Now, it wasn't a popular decision for these three hundred families to settle in Texas, and the Comanches, Tunkawa's, Apaches, and Carnkawa's, who already resided in the area, got kind of angry and started murdering them. So Tumlinson ordered the formation of a roving defensive patrol. This patrol became the Texas Rangers.

But Tumlinson never got to see it formed, because he was almost immediately killed by Karankawa and huaco In indigenous people before he got off the ground.

paramilitary army. They acted as scouts for actual militias. They would swoop in and force Indigenous people out of their homes and onto reservations, but would also just burn their villages sometime and murder their women and children because you know whatever, Sometimes you come into the office and you want to do things different. I don't know.

from the American Crossroads book Migra quote. On June's twelfth, nineteen oh one, a Mexicano rancher named Gregorio Cortes stood at the gate of his home in Cairanes County, Texas. There he resisted arrest for a crime that he did not commit. The sheriff persisted, drew his gun and shot Gregorio's brother in the mouth. When he charged at the sheriff to protect Gregorio, Gregorio shot back and killed the sheriff, an act that was sure to bring the Texas Rangers

to his doorstep. When they came, Gregorio and his family, including his wounded brother, were gone. All that remained was the dead body of the sheriff. The news of Gregorio's deadly fiance quickly spread across southern Texas, and Yeah, for ten days, the Texas Rangers and posses, numbering up to three hundred men hunted for him. When they could not find him, they sought revenge by proxy, arresting, brutalizing, and murdering an unknown number of Mexicanos. So that's like how

the Texas Rangers kind of worked for a while. Is a Hispanic person commits a crime or a perceived crime, and if they can't catch him to murder him publicly, they just kill a bunch of other random Mexicans so that like people don't get up at e that's the that's the first border patrol. Horrible, pretty bad, Caitlin, pretty bad.

it's just better knife missiles. Right. That's that's all I'm gonna say.

exist until pretty recently. For most of American history, it was just like, well, yeah, you've got this big empty chunk of country, and eventually it becomes Mexico, and it's

nobody really gives a shit. Yeah, you see, all these communities had existed for forever, for hundreds of years in a lot of cases, and you know, they had family who would be up in Mexico or up in the United States, and it would have seemed like it would have seemed like madness to try to try to split these communities up based on an arbitrary borderline that nobody could even see. But yeah, in the nineteen twenties that

started to change. In nineteen twenty four, the Immigration Act was passed and the Immigration Act banned all immigration to the United States from Asia, and it massively reduced immigration in from the south from southern and eastern Europe. The goal of the Act was for the first time, to enshrine in law the federal government's preference for Nordic whites above non white people when it came to immigration, so basically set up a quota system. Yeah, yeah, have you

heard about this. This is when we decided that only one kind of white people were allowed in the country. This is the Italians aren't white enough law. But people used to really care about that, right in the nineteen twenty four Immigration Act, A big part of it was stopping Italians or as they would have called them, Italians, which it used to be I think more racist than it is and is now just a funny, old timeyway of making fun of Italians, which I'm always I'm always

in favor of Caitlin. How do you feel you know, you.

of layers of wrongness there to parse through. Is one of those things that looked very confusing to people who don't immediately recognize, Oh, these are the kind of racists who don't even think Italians count as white. It's very funny, but in the nineteen twenties, that was all of Congress, sure, and they were like, we got to pass a lot

to stop these Italians from coming in. So yeah, the Immigration Act in nineteen twenty four bans all Asian immigration and tries to restrict to only the right kind of white people. And the one real exception to this. The only kind of like non white folks who were allowed into the country under the Immigration Act without any kind

of restriction were Mexicans. And this is because of hardcore labor or lobbying by the agricultural industry, right, because like basically you had all these ranchers and farmers in Texas particularly and in the Southwest, where like our entire industry doesn't work without these people, so you have to let them in. So the nineteen twenty four Act does kind

of make an exception for that. It's very heavily based on race science, and in fact, like a big factor in what got the Act passed was a bunch of bogus studies conducted by the Eugenics Research Office at cold Spring Harbor that kind of provided intellectual justification for the law by arguing that the wrong kind of immigrants would leave the surges and violent crime and declines in IQ. No,

this is bad. This is bad. And the nineteen twenty four Immigration Act is what establishes the US Border Patrol for the very first time. So this fundamentally racist law, written by people who justified it explicitly with race like bad race science, is where the border patrol is initially established. So literally born in an orgy of racism. And in fact, the nineteen twenty four Immigration Act that established the border patrol was so nakedly racist that Adolph Hitler took inspiration

from it in nineteen Yeah it's bad. It's really bad, Caitlin. This is where borter patrol comes from. Oh no, yeah, it's not great. In nineteen twenty eight, Hitler wrote this, of the law, there is currently one state in which one can observe at least a week beginnings of a better conception. This is, of course, not Germany, but the American Union. The American Union categorically refuses the immigration of physically unhealthy elements and simply excludes the immigration of certain races.

mandated that the new Border Patrol be established quickly. The first version of the force was basically built overnight from May twenty eighth to July first, so rapidly that there was no time for the patrol to actually create any kind of qualification exam for its new recruits. The first wave of men to wear the service's green uniform were instead required to pass the Railway Mail Clerk Civil Service Exam,

which I'm sure is basically the same thing. Yeah. So as a result, and this is something we'll talk about in part two, this winds up being a long trend in the border patrol is every decision they make, they have to like immediately adopt it, and they never have time to train anybody to do the job that they're going to do, and everyone's just fine with this, and it persists for ninety six years.

I think, probably fine, probably learning about as much, right, true. So, yeah, the very first Border Patrol men were mostly mail clerks, and obviously mail clerks maybe aren't super meant to be tramping around the desert hunting people, and about a quarter of everyone in the Border Patrol quit in their first

month of the job. Turnover remained incredibly high for basically the whole history of the organization, but particularly its early years, and this made it kind of impossible for it to develop any kind of functional internal culture at the start. By nineteen twenty seven, the Border Patrol had been forced to hire inspectors who could not even pass civil service exams.

The agency tried desperately to recruit military veterans and men with law enforcement experience, but the vast majority of their new hires were just unemployed men who lived in border towns. These were white, working class folks who'd had trouble keeping a job and were kind of desperate for a leg up and the regular income that a law enforcement career would allow, as well as kind of the respect in pride or respect that you would get as a member

of law enforcement. Right, Like they wanted some power. These were like, poor working class whites.

give a shit about that? Right, everyone is dying of diphtheria and the economy is permanently crashed. Please please stop, which I guess now we're back at so maybe that'll help.

the president anyway. So immigration from Mexico had not traditionally been a big, big political debate issue, right The wealthy agribusiness owners in Texas preferred simple immigration from Mexico, and they fought to ensure that Mexicans were not subject to the same harsh immigration restrictions as other immigrants. In the nineteen twenty four bill, one business owner put it simply, without the Mexicans, we would be done, which hasn't really changed,

you know. And it's like we'll talk about this a little bit later on, but it is this kind of one of the things that you I didn't even realize was a really problem when I was a young person, kind of dealing with the mix between outwardly hateful racists in the Southwest and nice people who don't realize they're racist. Is like the nice people, the outwardly hateful people are like, you know, the Trump type folks that you know, who want to build a wall and kick all the rapist Mexicans out.

being said there, which is like the commodification of non white bodies, which is like not cool. But we're going to talk more about that later because this is where that all starts in an organized way, which is awesome. So the white working class in text so obviously like these kind of these kind of landowners, the kind of aristocracy in Texas in this period, right, like the ranchers

and stuff. They were broadly like they wanted more Mexicans and they could never get enough because like they needed people to actually work their farms. But the white working class in Texas and the white working class even in rural areas, really had nursed like a growing hatred of Mexican people and had been for years. And this was based on a mix of like fear that Mexican immigrants would take their jobs, that was always like a core part of it, and also based on kind of like

good old fashioned racism. One labor union official in Texas at the time noted, quote, I hope they never let another Mexican come to the United States. The country would be a whole lot better off for the white laboring man if there weren't so many inwards and Mexicans. Oh yeah, Well, and this is one of those things if you're like kind of squaring yourself with the history of labor, you know, I'm a big fan of labor history, and I think

there's a lot of wonderful stuff there. You do have to square with the fact that, like a lot of those dudes who were right about a lot of important things were incredibly racist and hated non white people because they saw them as a threat to white working class people.

land of gentry who needed Mexican immigrants. But now that the border patrol existed post nineteen twenty four, the men in forceeing those laws were working class whites who really just hated Mexicans and they honestly didn't give a shit about the needs of farmers, and in fact, a lot of them saw kind of being able to police undocumented migrants as a way of kind of equalizing their level of social power with farmers, because like, you know, they

were poorer than these guys, they didn't have property, but now they had the ability to arrest these dudes workers, and like that gave them a level of power in their culture and a level of power of these people who had kind of previously been the bosses. And you know, kind of for a lot of these guys who became the first border patrol workers. These were obviously, these were white men, but there were men whose kind of sense of whiteness had been hanging on by a thread prior

to this, this opportunity coming around. And I'm going to quote again from the book Migra quote. Early officers may have lived in white neighborhoods, worshiped at white churches, and sent their children to white schools. But as salesman, chauffeurs, machinists, and cowpunchers, they had labored at the edges of whiteness in the borderland. The steady pay and everyday social authority

of US immigration law enforcement work dangled before them. The possibility of lifting themselves from a marginalized existence as what Neil Foley has examined as the white scourge of borderland communities. Policing Mexicans, in other words, presented officers with the opportunity to enter the region's primary economy and in the process

shore up their tentative claims upon whiteness. As immigration control was emerging as a critical site of simultaneously expanding the boundaries of whiteness while hardening the distinctions between whites and non whites. The project of enforcing immigration restrictions therefore placed border patrol officers at what police scholar David Bailey describes as the cutting edge of the state's knife in terms

of enforcing new boundaries between whites and non whites. So that is the border patrol in this period, the cutting edge of the state's knife, you know, cleaving the boundaries between white and non white people. The way to look at it, very picturesque.

of time. And the book Migra includes the story of one early officer patrol inspector Pete Torres, who was marked by a colleague for being Mexican. In response, he shot at the man's feet and yelled, I am not a Mexican, I am a Spanish American. Yeah. So this is like.

an aspect of what's going on here. And as a rule, one of the things that starts to happen in particularly around like the forties is kind of a growing Spanish or Mexican American community who are very pro immigration enforcement and pro like harsher immigration laws and laws against illlegal immigration. They start to solidify as a voting block in the Southwest in this period too, and they still are to

this day. It's a lot of people are like shocked when they see Hispanics for Trump and stuff, and there's actually pretty deep roots for a lot of that stuff. Yeah. So most early border patrol men though, we're white dudes, and it would probably be fair to call them white supremacists. And as the years went by, our government gave them increasing powers to exercise racism with stay of authority behind it.

From a write up in the Inner While the nineteen twenty four immigration law spared Mexico quota, a series of secondary laws, including one that made it a crime to enter the country outside of official ports of entry, gave border and customs agents on the spot discretion to decide who could enter the country legally. They had the power to turn what had been a routine, daily or seasonal event crossing the border to go to work into a

ritual of abuse. Hygienic inspections became more widespread and even more degrading. Migrants had their head shaped, and they were subjected to an increasingly arbitrary set of requirements at the discretion of patrollers, including literacy tests and entrance fees. The Patrol wasn't a large agency at first, just a few hundred men during its early years, and its reach along a two thousand mile line was limited, but over the years its reported brutality grew as the number of agents

that deployed increased. Border agents beat shot, and hung migrants with regularity. Two patrollers, former Texas rangers, tied the feet of one migrant and dragged him in and out of a river until he confessed to having entered the country illegally. Other patrollers were members of the resurgent Ku Klux Klan,

active in border towns from Texas to California. Yea, practically every other member of Elpaso's National Guard was in the klan, one military officer recalled, and many had joined the Border Patrol upon its establishment. So not great ideally, you know, if you ask me, we keep coming back to the KKK and how it repeatedly infiltrated law enforcement.

a right to receive phone calls. She fought to provide migrants with at least some version of the civil rights they lacked as non citizens. But before long, FDR was pressured by the agricultural industry to put the Border Patrol under the control of the Department of Justice. Now this might seem surprising at first, because like these rich farmers were the same folks who'd fought to ensure Mexican immigrants wouldn't be subject to quotas in the nineteen twenty four

immigration law. But there's a reason behind it. Because these folks had wanted these ranchers and stuff, had wanted Mexicans here to work their farms, but they hadn't wanted these people to actually stay in the United States lobbyist S. Parker Frizzell had told Congress in nineteen twenty six, the Mexican is a homer, like the pigeon he goes home to roost. And Frizell's promise had been that Mexicans weren't really immigrants, and thus they should be exempt from the

USA's white supremacist immigration laws. They were birds of passage, he argued, just hanging around for a little while to work. But by the turn of the decade, as we hit like start going into the nineteen thirties, Mexicans had started to settle all across the Southwest, buying homes and starting communities and places like Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. In nineteen hundred, only about one hundred thousand Mexican immigrants

had lived in the United States. By nineteen thirty, there were one and a half million Mexican immigrants this country. So this starts to freak out a lot of white agriculturists, right and it kind of you know, they had been they had been okay with these people coming into work. But at the end of the day, there were the same kind of white supremacists as the border patrol men.

They were just a little bit more refined, and once it started to look like these these Mexicans were coming in and actually going to be contributing and changing the demographics of the nation, they panicked. And the only thing they could really think of to do was give the border patrol more power to enforce how many Mexicans could

enter the country. And there was a real big like debate over this, right because you still needed at as these farmers, you still needed a certain minimum amount of migrants coming in every year in order to actually like

keep your farms working. And the guy who kind of figured out a solution to this problem with Senator Coleman Livingstone Bliee, was a white supremacist congressman who first took office in nineteen twenty five, and his solution was, rather than creating a system of quotas and caps that would have reduced manpower in American fields, he just wanted to criminalize unmonitored border crossing. So this is the very first time that it becomes illegal to cross the US Mexican

border without doing it at a border station. That's nineteen twenty nine. That law has passed. And I'm going to quote from an article in The Conversation explaining what happened here. According to Bliss's bill, unlawfully entering the country would be a misdemeanor, while unlawfully returning to the United States after deportation would be a felony. The idea was to force Mexican immigrants into an authorized and monitored stream that could be turned on and off at will at ports of entry.

Any immigrant who entered the United States outside of bounds of the stream would be a criminal, subject of fines, imprisonment, and ultimately deportation. But it was a crime designed to impact Mexican immigrants in particular. Neither the Western agricultural businessmen nor the restrictionists registered any objections. Congress passed Bleiz's bill the Immigration Act of March fourth, nineteen twenty nine, and dramatically altered the story of crime and punishment in the

United States with stunning precision. The criminalization of unauthorized entry caged thousands of Mexicans Mexico's birds of passage. By the end of nineteen thirty, the US Attorney General reported prosecuting seven thousand cases of unlawful entry. By the end of the decade, US attorneys had prosecuted more than forty four

thousand cases. Now Bleeze's law applied technically to like Canadians as well, but basically everyone prosecuted under it was Mexican, and it was mainly used as kind of a method of non mostly non violent ethnic cleansing. Like I don't even know if I I know if i'd say mostly non violent. It was used for ethnic cleansing. Throughout the nineteen thirties, Mexicans made up at least eighty five percent of all immigration prisoners. Sometimes some years they made up

ninety nine percent. Three new prisons were built on the border to hold them all, and over the course of the decades, somewhere around one million Mexicans were deported from the United States, and most these people were US citizens.

Historian Francisco Balderama argues that sixty percent of the million people who were deported were US citizens of Mexican descent, and border patrol forces would call what was happening here repatriation to make it seem voluntary, but what was really happening in the thirties was border patrol was just rounding up all of the Mexicans they could get and throwing them across the border and kind of accusing people of unlawful like crossing of the border basically as a justification

for kicking them out. So that's cool.

Its job is to protect whiteness, right yep. So the very the primary method of action for Border Patrol agents from the beginning up to now was violence. The force was always undermanned and underfunded, with a handful of officers responsible for thousands of miles of rugged terrain, there was little to no oversight and agents generally used violence at their discretion, as this anecdote from the book Migra Illustrates Quote one day in nineteen twenty eight, explained Stoveall, who

was a Border patrol agent. He was patrolling alone near San Elizario, Texas, when he decided to drive through town. San Elizario was this little Mexican town on the Rio Grande, said Stoveall, who remembered that when he got to town that day, he saw a mexicanyo come out from behind the bank of a drainage ditch and then duck back. Stoveall admitted to knowing the man, but stopped the car and asked him, what do you have there in your bosom?

The man reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out two bottles of beer and put them down on the bridge and broke them so he wouldn't have any evidence. Reflecting upon the incident, Stovall wondered, why didn't I pull out my gun and fire at that Mexican. I don't know, I don't know why. Instead of reaching for his gun, and firing. Stoveall fled. I got in my car and got away from there, remembered Stoveall, because it was in daylight,

about one o'clock. If I had pulled my gun and fired, there would have been fifty Mexicans around me that quick. According to Stovall, God spared his life that day by taking charge of his hands and preventing him from shooting

at the mexicanyo. So this is nineteen twenty eight and kind of a common additude, Like this border patrol agent approaches a guy who's got a legal alcohol and the dude breaks the bottles on him, and the man's lingering question that he's wondering for years afterwards is why didn't I shoot that man to death? Like?

patrol agents quote shot wetbacks in cold blood. So again not saying like, hey, we might have an accidental shooting and I need your support because like what we're doing is hard, and you know people are going to mess up. Is like, you know, my guys might murder some some Mexicans. You know, my guys are absolutely going to commit murder in cold blood, and I need you to like have my back, right. That's the Attorney General of the United States nineteen fifty forties. Cool stuff?

Now Carter was, by the time he became the head of the Border Patrol, a convicted murderer who Yeah, in nineteen thirty one, as a teenager, he'd shot a Mexican boy in the chest at point blank range with a twelve gage shotgun, and the two had been having an argument, and the Mexican boy had a knife, but he was not actively threatening Carter, and in fact, he'd laughed at the boy's gun because he just kind of seemed to think it was silly that they were having a fight

at all, and Carter shot him to death because he was angry for being laughed at. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to three years in prison, but he was let out after two owing to a technicality. So back in nineteen thirty one, by the way, you could shoot a man in the chest with a twelve gage and get three years. That's neat. Um.

It was more just like agents kind of going out and hunting people down and grabbing a couple of folks. This was an easy system for dumb, violent men to like figure out, you know, you're just kind of it's like hunting basically, and it appealed to the kind of folks who became Border Patrol agents. But starting in nineteen fifty, a young agent named Albert Quillen began to change things.

He was intelligent and ambitious, and when the chief supervisor of Border Patrol demanded that he and his colleagues increase apprehensions, Quillen began experimenting with bold new strategies. At five am on February eleventh, Quillan took a detail of twelve patrol men with two buses, one plane, one truck, and nine automobiles. The men drove out to a small station in real Hondo, Texas, and then split into two groups to clean as well

as possible certain section of illegal aliens. The plane acted as a spotter while the buses were used to quote Haull Wets to the border. One hundred people were apprehended in short order, and they were deported the next day. Quillan soon moved on with his force to a series of farms near Los Fresnos, Texas. They found five hundred and sixty one wets, which is again always the term they use for that. Do you understand where that term comes from?

or something like that. And then there was you could just cross the border right illegally, and that usually meant crossing the Rio Grande, which is a river, right, so you wind up wet on the other side of the river, so they call them wetbacks like that's that's still to this day a racist slang term for particularly Mexicans, be kind of all people of Hispanic descent. And a lot of Texas like you hear it a lot from raises there and the Border Patrol. It is their standard term

for these people. This is like on all of their professional documents and everything. This is what they call migrants. Yeah. So Quillan's forces catch five hundred and sixty one wets on their second day, and on their third day they catch two hundred and sixty four. On the fourth day they catch one hundred and thirty four. In less than a week, they captured and deported more than a thousand undocumented laborers. And this was like unprecedented. The Border Patrol

had never caught this many people this quickly. It was seen as an astonishing achievement by Quillan's superiors, and they began setting up other raids in imitation of his Border Patrol supervisors noted that these new task forces, as they started being called, we're quote pounding away on these wets cool dudes. Soon multiple task forces had been established throughout California and Texas, carrying out constant raids and netting huge

numbers of undocumented persons. On some single days, more than five thousand Mexican nationals would be apprehended and shipped to temporary to ten camps before being sent back across the border. Patrolman handed deportees notes that read quote, you have entered the United States illegally and in violation of the laws of your land and those of the United States. For this reason, you are being returned to your homeland. If you return again illegally, you will be arrested and punished

as provided by law. We understand that the life of a wet back is difficult. Wetbacks are unable to work for more than a few hours before they are apprehended and deported. Remember these words and transmit the news to your families and countrymen if you want to do them a favor. So that's fun. Yikes, nice letter there.

border patrol. So the border patrol would like pick up all these folks, huge numbers, thousands in a day sometimes and they would put them in these like temporary camps and then would take them into Mexico where the Mexican military would basically dump them in the middle of the country as far away from the border as possible, and these were generally places where there was no work and where these migrants had no family connections, and it was

just a horrible situation for most people. As a result of these new tactics, between nineteen fifty and nineteen fifty three, the number of Border Patrol apprehensions nearly doubled, from four hundred and sixty nine thousand to almost eight hundred and

forty thousand. This caused immediate problems for ranchers and farmers, who started to realize that the new legal powers they'd given the Border Patrol had vastly realigned the organization's power in a way that allowed the white supremacists too ran it to harm agribusiness by wiping out their workforce at stake was also a sort of cultural readjustment. Farmers and ranchers were used to occupying a position at the top of society, but now Border patrol men could exercise the

power of deportation again and take away their workers. And Texas border towns like Marfa, farmers hired armed guards, hired lookouts, and booby trapped farm gates in order to protect their workforce. There were gunfights with border patrol with these like white farmers trying to defend their workforce, and as the conflict between the farmers and border patrol grew uglier, white border town farmers suddenly found themselves facing off against the same

men who'd hunted their workers. The book Migra tells the story of D. C. Newton, whose family were border patrol farmers who posted guards to warn about raids. They went to sleep they want to sleep one night in nineteen fifty two and woke up to find that dozens of Border patrol agents had snuck in with their headlights off, and to surprise everyone sleeping in the farmhouse and adjacent quarters.

The Newton's oldest son was faster, though, and he succeeded in warning the undocumented migrants staying on the farm, which gave them the time they needed to run like hell and height in the trees. When the border patrol men came up empty in their search, they went after the white folks who awk actually owned the farm. And I'm going to quote from book migrenow they entered Newton's parents bedroom and began shining the flashlights in my mother's eyes

and my father's eyes, telling them to get up. We're going to go out and find where your Mexicans are. With my father and his pajamas, his mother in a nightgown, and no one wearing any shoes, the officers forced the family out of the house while pushing physically pushing my mother in the back, pushing my father in the back, and demanding to know where the wet backs were. Most of the workers had fled, including Newton's nanny Lupe, for

whom the officers claimed to be searching. In particular, she had heard the arrival of the patrolmen and climbed out of the window on the second floor of the farmhouse, rolled down onto the roof of the garage, and run off to the southeast and was gone. Although the Newtons believed they had outsmarted the border patrol by alerting the migrants to the raid, the head border patrol inspectors still led fifty three apprehended workers away, saying, see how you

handle your groves. Now, now that's like a bad story and everything. What's interesting here is I guess how horrible Newton's family is here too, because the interview with him goes on and he makes it clear that he kind of when his dad explained to him what was happening with the Border Patrol. His dad compared the conflict to the Civil War, and the side that he identified with was not the good side. Quote. Newton's father believed that by taking away their workers, the damn Yankee Border Patrol

were splitting up a household. As he explained it to his son, the South Texans protected their homes, their families, their property, and their way of life from the Border patrol raids. He was the master. The Mexican illegals were equivalent to the black slaves, and together they formed a household a system of labor relations in a world of tightly bound intimacy and inequity. The Border Patrol threatened their household by reducing the farmer's control over Mexico's unsanctioned migrant workers.

So as the Southerners had rebelled against intrusions upon their labor relations and plantation lives, the Newton family had to defe itself against the US Border Patrol. Newton's brother took the lesson to heart. When the Border Patrol raided on another night, he stood in the family driveway with a shotgun named at the officers. Startled by the hostile twelve year old boy. The officers left the property and returned on another day. So yeah, this is what's happening here is really complicated.

not fun. Yep. So yeah, it's important to remember that kind of the struggle between border patrol and these border farmers in Texas was a struggle between two different groups of white supremacists, and one group of white supremacists was broadly in the right, because I guess it's it's worse to round up thousands of people in cattle cars and buses and throw them back across a border for no good reason. M but there's no one you should be

rooting for here. But what's really interesting I find fascinating about this whole conflict is that these racist plantation owning white border farmers wound up like fighting the border patrol by kind of co opting the language of social justice. Starting in the nineteen fifties, ranchers began to argue that

Mexican nationals were being unfairly targeted for deportations. They complained that the buses, planes, and trains used to take migrants away were cruel, in human and outrageous practices, trading in human misery. They began to argue that hiring Mexicans was an act of kindness by American ranchers. Mexican laborers deserved the chance to win a better life by working low

paid jobs as domestic servants and laborers. The Border Patrol was in fact actually fostering communism by sending these men and women back to the interior of Mexico, where they would no doubt live on in miserable poverty and join some leftist gorilla movement.

own words, pound away in the borderlands, raising apprehensions. The increased workload necessary necessitated more men in facilities, and in nineteen fifty three, the Border Patrol attempted to hire two hundred and forty additional officers and made plans to build two new detention centers at the lower Rio Grand Valley.

This enraged local farmers, and one quote threatened to arm his wetback laborers against the Border Patrol, threatening that there is liable to be a couple of dead Border patrolmen. Death threats against patrolman became a daily occurrence and farmers in the Lower Rio Grand lobbied their congressmen to deny the appropriation request necessary to fund the new men in facilities.

These farmers insisted they weren't lobbying for their own benefit, but we're doing it for migrants who were victor of the Patrol's cheap vindictiveness, a great hunger to ruler, ruin to control, to govern, anything to carry a point, reckless of the consequences to the poor workmen which they heard around us cattle. And they weren't wrong in this. The facility the Border Patrol wanted to build was essentially a

concentration camp. Eventually, Congress listened and the appropriations request was denied. So like the protest of all these guys in Texas worked, the Border Patrol had to send its two hundred and forty men back home and cancel construction. According to the book Migra Quote, one month after losing the supplemental appropriation, Chief Kelly announced the Border Patrols withdrawal from the Rio Grand Valley to a new defense line ten miles to

the north of Kingsville. Fall furious, and Hebronville rather than fight a losing battle in the Lower Rio Grand Valley. The Border Patrol decided to pull out of the area because with limited forces we can best control the wet back invasion as at the line farther north. It's one of those things, I guess I always kind of debate when you've got like something that is essentially a slur, or is a slur in an episode of like this, how often to say it? And it's one of those

things where I kind of feel like cleaning up. The Border Patrol's official statements in the matter would be, I don't know, making it seem like they were less of a naked force for white supremacy than they were, Like if you replace that with Mexican nationals, that's not really what they're saying, right, Yeah, I don't know.

more than anything else. In nineteen fifty three, with the rebellion of the Texas Ranchers in full swing, Harlan Carter, who's again the murderer who became the head of the Border Patrol, sat down with two US generals to ask for their help. He wanted the military and the National Guard to assist the Border Patrol in a nationwide purge

of undocumented Mexican nationals called Operation Cloudburst. The first step for this would be an anti infiltration campaign to seal the border with the help of twenty one hundred and eighty troops. Border Patrol would station soldiers at strategic locations and build several long fences to block areas of heavy traffic. This part of the operation is fairly standard, aside from

the presence of US troops. Part two, though, would be a containment operation, which would involve roadblocks on every major highway from the southwest to the interior of North America. These checkpoints would be used to search vehicles for illegal migrants around the clock. Part three was the mopping up phase, and this would involve a massive series of raids in northern locations, places far from the border, like San Francisco

where groups of migrants were believed to have gathered. Businesses and camps would be raided and the arrested migrants would be airlifted or sent by train to the interior of Mexico. Now again using the military. This was essentially he wanted to bring in the army to carry out a military action to purge the United States of Hispanic people. That's what the head of Border patrols trying to do here, and all of the military guys he talked to are like,

this sounds like a great idea. We'd love to help, but it's illegal, right possecomatadis means you can't use the army for shit like this. The only way around it is a presidential proclamation, and Dwight Eisenhower was actually initially all on board with issuing that proclamation, but in the end he kind of backed away and instead he appointed a General Joseph Swing to be the new Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and was basically like, we

can't use soldiers for this because it's unconstitutional. But I'm going a promoted general to be in charge of the i INS and you figure out a way to do the same thing with the resources Border Patrol has, like, yeah, yeah, I still want a military operation to clear out these Hispanic people. I just can't use soldiers.

All that most agents had on June ninth, nineteen fifty four, when the operation began, was a letter from General Swing ordering them to purge the nation by removing the huge number of Mexican nationals who were in this country in violation of the immigration laws. Always good to hear about a purge. Y. Yeah, So in its first day, California or in the first day of this operation, California and

Arizona agents apprehended nearly eleven thousand migrants. The flood of people only accelerated after that, and the sheer number of deportees overwhelmed the Border Patrol's capacity to hold or carry them. People were left in primitive exposed concentration camps for days. The Border Patrol turned a Lesion Park in Los Angeles into an open air concentration camp. Yeah, that's Nate, go to Alesian Park.

The Mexican government's capacity to take and transport all these people broke down almost immediately, and they were like, we need you to not send these people to us so quickly because we can't handle them. And the US government said, we don't give a fuck and kept just shotgunning people on over there, and the sheer scale of deportations began to fuck with American industry. But border patrol didn't really give a shit about this either. I'm going to quote

again from the book Migra. Between June seventeenth and July twenty sixth, nineteen fifty four, twenty eight hundred and twenty seven of the four thousand, four hundred and three migrants apprehended by the task force assigned to the Los Angeles area had worked in industry. After border patrol raids during the summer of nineteen fifty four, three Los Angeles brickyards were left without sufficient numbers of workers and temporarily closed

down their operations. Similarly, Border Patrol officers paid close attention to the hotel and restaurant business, which routinely hired undocumented Mexican immigrants as bus boys, kitchen help waiters, etc. Officers reported apprehending such workers at well known establishments such as the Biltmore Hotel, Beverly Hills Hotel, Hollywood, Roosevelt Hotel, Los

Angeles Athletic Club, and the Brown Derby. At times, the Border Patrol raids created moments of chaos at popular restaurants when migrants attempted to escape by running through the serving area. The raids were public and regularly drew significant attention from the press, and this was part of the point. The reason the Border Patrol focused so much on Los Angeles onlike raids in big Hollywood locations is because they were trying to make a point to these like these ranchers

who were still fighting them in South Texas. And the message was, if we're willing to do this shit in fucking Hollywood, you'd better believe that one day we're going to come to your ranch and fuck you up, right, Like if we'll do this to the Biltmore, we'll ruin you, Like we don't give a shit, we're the Border Patrol.

And in the end, Operation Wetback was responsible for the deportations of somewhere between a quarter of a million at the low end and about one point five million people at the high end, and at the end of the day, yeah, it kind of ended in retreat by the Border Patrol.

Part of this was that around the same time, the US government reformed the Brassero program, which allowed Mexican nationals to get legal working status in the US, and that became much more popular after this time, So a lot of these these ranchers and farmers started making sure that their workers kind of went through a legal path to gain working status in the United States. And some of it was just that, like there was blowback to this program.

It wasn't very popular all of the massive public raids, and kind of as a result, border patrol apprehensions plummeted. The next year, in nineteen fifty five, the task forces that had once captured thousands of migrants in a day were disbanded and demobilized, and for a little while it seemed as if the Border Patrol had gone into hibernation.

Of course, that Caitlin was not the case, and in Part two, we're going to talk about the fact that we haven't even talked about any of the worst shit that the Border Patrol gets up to in this episode, because that's how much worse it gets.

differently than others are done. On December sixth, twenty eighteen, seven year old Jacqueline Call crossed the US Mexico border near a place called Antelope Wells, New Mexico. She was with her father, twenty nine year old Nary Call. Both were Kekchi Maya, and they'd lived most of their life lives in the Alta Vera Paz region of Guatemala. Starving and desperate, she and her family turned themselves into the

border Patrol. When Jacqueline was taken into their custody, she was already beginning to show signs of illness what would turn out to have been a streptococcal infection. DHS maintains that they conducted an initial screening and that there was no evidence of health issues in the little girl. Jacqueline was placed on a border patrol bus feverish and vomiting from severe dehydration. Eight hours after being taken into custody, she began to suffer seizures. She died the next day.

Gomez Alonzo, age eight, crossed the Aos Mexico border sometime around December eighteenth. He and his father, Augustin, were members of the Chuj people, another Mayan group who came from the Juahuitenango region of Guatemala. Gomez spent six days in border patrol custody, shuttled around from New Mexico to El Paso, and then back to New Mexico to be interned in an attention facility named near Alamagordo. He started to show

symptoms of sickness. On the twenty fourth, he was taken to the hospital, where he was tested for the cold, but not for influenza, which he had. He was given medicine that could not help him and sent back to jail, where he died on Christmas Eve, twenty eighteen. No, yep, good, good times.

The Trump administration received a lot of blame, both for covering this death up to try to influence the midterm elections and for their failure to push DHS to take any meaningful action to stop kids from dying at the border. Three dead children is a tragedy, but their little corpses are actually just the top of an iceberg of dead people, many of them Guatemalan, that we can lay at the feet of border patrol agents and you might be surprised

to learn how that whole situation came about. You want to hear about this, Caitlin.

before people started fleeing from those countries. So this is gonna be fun, Okay, It's gonna be good time for everybody.

is it uncommon now. During Operation wet Back, when the Border Patrol reformed itself into a paramilitary force to wage war on Mexican immigrants, Longan run The Patrols ran the Patrol's equivalent of a military intelligence service. Longan's base was an unmarked building near Alameda. He and his men interrogated, captured migrants, extrapped into information, and used it to find

and capture other groups of migrants. Few of the men who endured these interrogations ever spoke about it, but a lot of what happened in those cells probably verged on what we'd consider torture. Long End was good at his job, and his performance and Operation wet Back earned him a transfer to the State Department's Public Safety Program. Now, this was in reality a CIA operation geared at providing counterinsurgency

training and advice to Allied nations combating Communist insurgencies. The CIA hand picked a number of Border Patrol agents to travel to places like the Zezuela, Thailand, the Dominican Republic in Guatemala. They particularly liked recruiting guys like long End because they were likely to speak Spanish. Now, the way the State Department framed this program was training law enforcement. So uh yeah, the State Department framed this program as

training law enforcement. The reality, though, is that Longan and his fellow Border patrolmen were sent over to places like Guatemala to create and train death squads during Operation Went Back. Border patrol administrators had described their work as fighting back against an invasion. In Guatemala, where long En arrived in nineteen sixty five, he was finally able to wage a real war using real weapons. I'm going to quote now

from an article in The Nation. Quote. Longan taught local intelligence and police agencies how to create death squads to target political activists, deploying tactics that he had earlier used to capture migrants on the border. He arrived in Guatemala in late nineteen sixty five, where he put into place a paramilitary unit that early the next year would execute what he called Operation Limpieza, or Operation and clean Up.

Within three months, this unit had conducted over eighty raids and multiple extrajudicial assassinations, including an action that, over the course of four days, captured, tortured, and executed more than thirty prominent Left opposition leaders. The military dumped their bodies into the sea, while the government denied any knowledge of

their whereabouts. According to Stuart Schrader in his up forthcoming Badges Without Borders, how global counterinsurgency transformed American policing, It was common practice during the Cold wartis and former Border Patrol agents like long End to train foreign police through

CIA linked public safety programs. Since they were more likely to speak Spanish than agents from other branches of law enforcement in countries like El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, they did the dirty work that Reagan's envoys said needed doing.

Until the early nineteen seventies, the United States, according to a nineteen seventy four Los Angeles Times report, was flying its Latin American Death Squad apprentices up to the Border Patrol Academy in Los Fresnos, Texas to receive training from CIA instructors and the design, manufacture, and potential use of bombs and incendiary devices. Long End himself in nineteen fifty seven clearly describe what he thought he was doing at

the border. We're fighting a war on a wide battle front, so that's good.

murdered by death squads. And these guys are happy to do it because they want to be murdering people anyway. They just can't quite usually murder people, you know, at the border. I mean they do it a lot anyway, but like they have to be a little bit careful. But you don't have to be careful at all in Guatemala. So that's great.

You'll be driving through the middle of nowhere and you'll see like businesses that have been like were shot up decades ago with mortars and stuff, and it you know,

it all kind of descends from this. The series of political conflicts that launch in this period of time, particularly in the early nineteen eighties, that are backed by the United States and supported enthusiastically by the Reagan government, and these kind of networks of right wing murder crews that were trained up and sent out by the CIA and their buddies and groups like the Border Patrol. This all starts now, and it's cool, it's great, and.

and their children when they attempt to fight for economic justice. Oops, it's good. It's really good, is what I'm getting at. So Operation Limpieza, which you know Longen the Border Patrol guy orchestrated himself, was a major moment in the history of Guatemala's collapse into a nightmare. The military intelligence system he helped to build would eventually eliminate tens of thousands of leftist, activist sympathizers and random people mistaken for either

More than two hundred thousand people were massacred openly. Tens of thousands more were tortured in this way. The brave men of the Border Patrol wound up at both sides of a tragedy. The genocide they trained right wing Guatemalan militants to execute fell heavily on various Maya peoples of the region, including the Kecchi in the Jews. The right wing dictator who helped to organize much of this violence

was General Afrain Rios Mont. He rose to power in nineteen eighty one and nineteen eighty two, cooping his way into command with the help of his good friends. The US Ronald Reagan described him as a man of great integrity who was totally dedicated to democracy. The nation's ride up makes it continues quote. On June seventeenth, nineteen eighty two, Guatemalan soldiers under the command of Rios Mont entered the

San Francisco Catalyst State immediately adjacent to Yallam Bulock. The estate's owner, a military colonel, had fled because of guerrilla activity in the area. Soldiers went house by house, rounding up workers in their families whom they accused of supporting the guerrillas. They separated children from their parents and killed them by slashing their stomachs or smashing their heads against poles. Women were raped and then burned alive. The soldiers killed

them in with bullets or by beheading. After a day of slaughter, three hundred and fifty people were dead. A lone survivor made his way into Mexico, where Guatemalan anthropologist and Jesuit priest Ricardo Fala interviewed him. The San Francisco massacre was highlighted in Guatemala's nineteen ninety nine Truth Commission report. After the massacre, Yellum Biloc residents fled along with thousands of others, leaving the border corridor between Guatemala and Mexico

completely depopulated. As government troops raised their villages, some were captured and killed by the army as they fled. Others ended up in refugee camps or dispersed throughout Mexico's southern states. Still others continued on to the United States, beginning the Great Movement of Guatemalans to El Norte. All told, one point five million people were displaced by the Guatemalan armies

scorched Earth campaign in nineteen eighty one. In nineteen eighty two, Guatemala's Commission for Historical Clarification called the violent displacement in the Maya Cheus region an active genocide. Young Felipe Gomez Alazano's father. He was the little kid, one of the little kids who died. Augustine Gomez Perez was a child of eleven during that execute. Y'all Unblock's villagers stayed away for fourteen years, returning only after the signing of the

Peace Accords in nineteen ninety six. So that's cool, m.

Now it was, it's still in a lot of ways going on today if you want to read about like Plan Columbia and stuff like, there's aspects of this that are very much still occurring, and that the border patrol still ends up getting tied up and from time to time, and that's great.

and whatnot into the United States. And then the part of me that has been paying attention for the last several decades knows that like, no, actually people would cheer the murders of the folks and the destruction of these areas because Americans have been so thoroughly broken by propaganda that the people who are still on the right and still broadly pro American can't be convinced by any reason that any amount of murder or violence is not justified by the fact that America is cool as hell.

our borders are closed now. Sorry everyone, And it's like, how can you live? How can these people live with the hypocrisy of that simple fact.

at training death squads. So the facility where they actually trained a lot of these death squads, and again not just in Guatemala, but for places like Columbia and El Salvador all throughout fucking world. The place where they would like take these men to teach them how to be terrorists, how to make bombs and all this shit was the

Los Fresnos, Texas Border Patrol facility. It was an existing base, it was in a good location, and the Border Patrol was perfectly happy to have minsilt over there to learn how to become murderous gorillas and then set off terrorist bombs in the middle of their own countries because they were like that sounds like a thing the border patrol should be involved with. Now. The Technical Investigations course that was given to foreign police there was taught by CIA instructors.

It lasted for weeks and it included curriculum like terrorist concepts, terrorist devices, fabrication and functioning of devices and provides, triggering devices and scendiaries, and assassination weapons, a discussion of various weapons which may be used by the assassin. And when you read it like that, you can kind of trick yourself into thinking it might not be like it might be a reasonable thing for cops to learn. Right, of course, cops might need to learn about terrorist concepts and the

kind of weapons assassins use. But these were not just informational courses. They were instructed. So the police who attended, we're just learning, Oh, here's weapons that assassins sometimes use. They were learning, like, if you're going to assassinate somebody, here's a variety of different weapons that you can use to assassinate people. And we're just learning, like, here's different

ways terrorists build triggers for bombs. They were learning, here's how to build triggers for the bobs you're going to make to kill people. The reality of the whole The whole program came out during congressional investigations in the nineteen seventies. And I'm going to quote now from a book titled Instruments Instruments of state Craft, US Guerrilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and counter Terrorism, which is available for in full for free

online right now. Quote. During congressional investigations led by Senator James Alboresque in nineteen seventy three, eight officials admitted that the Los Fresno sessions, what the press would call the Bomb School, offered lessons not in bomb disposal, but in bomb making. The course is not designed to nor does it prepare the student to be a bomb or explosive

disposal technician. The thrust of the instruction introduces trainees to commercially available materials and home laboratory techniques in the manufacture of explosives and incendiaries. Different types of explosive techniques and booby traps and their construction and use by terrorists are demonstrated. And again, all these classes were taught at a border patrol facility. And while the main instructors were CIA agents, it was not just the convenient location that made the

ad agency use Los Fresnos. The Border Patrol had always had within it the seeds of a national secret police force. Decades before CBP agents were operating in unmarked snatch fans on the streets of Portland and it was Customs and Border Patrol who was doing that. They helped to train foreign police to do the exact same thing and much worse. Besides, that's fun, Like I carry, I keep like wanting to say, like, ah, what a fun thing. What I don't know what else

to say. It's just like this kind of litany of ours that we've all just kind of blithely funded our entire lives, even though a great deal of information exists on how bad this agency has always been. Because the only real if you actually get into it as we are today, the only real conclusion is that like, oh, maybe when you have people whose job it is to police the border, they're they're they're just going to be

the worst people. And and maybe you shouldn't police the border at all because this happened.

which is what's happening now. So when it comes to government agencies that Americans, particularly liberals, rage against, customs and Border Patrol has spent most of its history kind of

sliding under the mainstream radar. But liberals who only started paying attention to the agency after Trump took office might be surprised to know that NYT Report or New York Times reporter John Crudsen won a Pulitzer Prize in nineteen eighty for a series of articles about the Border Patrol whose titles would not look at all out of place in twenty twenty, titles like Border Patrol sweeps of illegal aliens leave scores of children in jails a little familiar.

The intercept summarizing his work notes patrollers he reported regularly engaged in beating's, murder, torture, and rape, including the rape of girls as young as twelve Some patrollers ran their own in house outlaw vigilante groups. Others maintained ties with groups like the Clan. Border patrol agents also used the children of migrants, either as bait or as pressure. A

pressure tactic to force confessions. When coming upon a family, agents tried to apprehend the youngest member first, with the idea that relatives would give themselves up so as not to be separated. It may sound cruel, one patroller said,

but it often worked. Separating migrant families was not official government policy in the years Crudsen was reporting on abuses, but left to their own devices, Border patrol agents regularly took children from parents, threatening that they would be separated forever unless one of them confessed that they had entered the country illegally. Mothers, especially an, agents said, would always break. Once a confession was extracted, children might be placed in

foster care or left to languish in federal jails. Others were released into Mexico alone, far from their homes, forced to survive, according to public defenders, by garbage can scrounging, living on rooftops, and whatever. Ten year old Sylvia Alvarado separated from her grandmother as they crossed into Texas was kept in a small cinder block cell for more than

three months. In California, thirteen year old Julia Perez, threatened with being arrested in denied food, broke down and told her investigator that she was Mexican, even though she was a US citizen. The Border Patrol released Perez into Mexico with no money or way to contact her US family. Such cruelties weren't one offs, but part of a pattern encouraged and committed by officers up the chain of command.

The violence was both gratuitive and systemic, including stress techniques later associated with the war in Iraq.

at least to the nineteen eighties. According to Krudsen, agents would tell prisoners in this place, you have no rights. Since these people had committed no crime beyond crossing a line in the dirt, their detention serve no real purpose beyond cruelty. Cruelty was the point. Border Patrol agents throughout the seventies, eighties, and nineties were repeatedly documented torturing migrants. A popular method was handcuffing them to squad cars and then making them run alongside the video as it half

dragged them to the border. Outright murder was common as well. One patrol agent told Krudsen that agents commonly pushed illegals off cliffs so it would look like an accident. Much of the agency's behavior was indistinguishable from that of a straight up Gang. Agents with ins Border Patrol's parent agency at the time were caught trading Mexican women to the Los Angeles Rams in exchange for season tickets. What yes, the thing that happened.

for free on their ranches as payments. This is kind of how they they worked out that that little set of disagreements, that little UH. The the uprising in Texas that had been sparked by a lot of.

The Intercept reports quote on April eighteenth, nineteen eighty six, For instance, patroller Edward Cole was beating fourteen year old Eduardo Corrillo Estrada on the US side of the border's Chain League fence when he stopped and shot Eduardo's younger brother, Humberto in the back. Umberto was standing on the other side of the fence on Mexican soil. A court ruled that Cole, who had previous incidents of shooting through the fence at Mexicans, had reason to fear for his life

from Humberto and used justifiable force. Such abuses persisted through the nineteen nineties and two thousands. In nineteen ninety three, the House Subcommittee on International Law, immigran and Refugees held hearings on border patrol abuse, and its transcript is a catalog of horrors. One former guard, Tourney Hefner, at the Ions Detention Center in Port Isabel, Texas, reported that a young Salvadoran girl was forced to perform personal duties like

dancing the Lombarda for IONS officials. In twenty eleven, Hefter published a memoir with more accusations of sexual abuse by as Hefner writes, the Ions brass Roberto Martinez, who worked with the San Diego based US Mexico Border program for the American Friends Service Committee, testified that human and civil rights violations by the Border Patrol run the gamut of

abuses imaginable, from rape to murder. Agents regularly seized original birth certificates in green cards from Latino citizens, leaving the victim with the financial burden of having to go through a lengthy process of applying for a new document. Rapes and sexual abuse in Ions attention centers around the United States Martinez said, seemed to be escalating throughout the border region.

a crime according to ridiculous standards, right. And I also understand in theory the concept of like punishing things that are actual crime. That makes sense to me as long

as it's done responsibly, which it never is. The idea of seeing crossing a border without the proper documentation and deciding that the punishment for that crime, I'm warrants things like human trafficking, murder, sexual assault, all manner of other horrible, horrible, unmentionable things like where I just it is the most disgusting thing.

It's to protect whiteness exactly, Yes, yeah, And it's to provide an outlet for for fascists in this country to do horrible violence on people in a way that is, rather than being disorganized and sort of being anti state and being something that like causes disorder, being violence that they are allowed to carry out, that that enforces the uh, the kind of the state itself that like that like

backs up the existence of the state. Right, Like you have all these you have all these tremendously violent people, right, and you can do a couple of things to them, but they're there. So either you you try to like deal with them and deradicalize them and make them less dangerous, you kill them, or as we do, you give them guns and make them unaccountable and allow them to do horrible violence to large groups of people who have no political agency.

kind of protection. But truly it is the like you said, protection of whiteness and criminalizing being not white.

of thing happened all the time. You know, we have documentation about Maria Contreras's case, but this is maybe even a daily matter, and it's something that continues to this day in dark and terrifying corners of the border where such things are not documented most of the time, but which we all pay for. Throughout all of this, the border patrol and i ins were sort of the red headed step chat to federal agencies with law enforcement powers.

They were barely funded because, if you can imagine this,

illegal immigration was not something people cared about. So for most of these period, this period, while all of the horrible things we've been talking about have been happening, border patrol has basically no money and very few agents considering like what it's supposed to be watching in its purview, it's just kind of a place where we keep all of our most violent law enforcement officers and they don't have the money to do much, but nobody's watching them,

so they can carry out horrific acts of violence. And that's the border patrol and really ins too for the most part. Yeah, states probably had you know not. Probably border states had debates on the matter of illegal immigration. It was certainly like, you know, a political issue in Texas,

in New Mexico and stuff. But random people in random Americans and Duluth or you know, Wichita or bubble fuck Montana or whatever didn't really care about the border right eighties and nineties, it was not a big vote getter for most to that period of time. Now, at the start of the Clinton administration, there were only about four thousand border patrol agents watching both Canada and Mexico, which is not a lot if you think about how big both of those borders are.

trying to cross the border. Illegal immigration by the end of the nineteen nineties is a major national political issue in the Border Patrol more than doubles under Clinton. In the year two thousand, our nation's peak year for illegal immigration, border patrol agents apprehended one point six million people. This, though, was just a fraction of the total that got through.

Border Patrol agents were unhappy about the fact that most undocumented migrants were still getting through the border, and that the many rules and that there were many rules in place to stop them from you know, doing Operation Wetback type stuff and basically carrying out an ethnic cleansing to get rid of non white people from border areas. From an article in Politico quote quote. Near the top of the Border Patrol's list of complaints was the policy known

internally as KARP or the catch and release policy. By the end of the Clinton administration, eighty percent of people who were caught and released with a notice who appeared a deportation hearing never showed up in court. But despite millions of border crossings, the Border Patrol had the financing in two thousand and one for just sixty detainees a

day across the entire country. They could turn themselves in and have a high confidence that they wouldn't be returned to their home countries, recalls Michael Cherdoff, who would go on to become President George W. Bush's second Secretary of Homeland Security. Mostly, agents just asked border violators for their names and then did a cursory background check before returning them to Mexico or releasing them into the United States.

Sometimes they ran fingerprints, sometimes they didn't. In June nineteen ninety nine, agents captured one of the FBI's ten most wanted fugitives, a rapist and serial killer named Angel Maturino Racindez aka the Railway Killer, and unknowingly released him back into Mexico, whereupon Rascindez promptly sneaked back into the United States and murdered four more people before being apprehended by

Texas rangers. So the story of the Railway Killer was of course used to justify the need for more funding to the Border Patrol. What the whole story really illustrates is that even when the Border Patrol had occasional chances to actually protect Americans by apprehending people, they were as likely to fuck up as anything, because most of them were shit ass incompetent in anything besides doing violence. So nine to eleven happens. You remember nine to eleven, I remember,

It's good. You're not supposed to forget it.

Kids at my suburban Texas high school were certain that al Qaida was going to be sending people to shoot up our school because, like Plano, Texas was real high on fucking Osama bin Laden's hit list.

But also like you know, a bunch of guys had worked together to ram planes into the Pentagon and destroy two skyscrapers in New York City. People were really to believe a lot of terrible things were possible. And because the border, you know, right wing pundits had been convincing everybody that the border was this dangerous and unmonitored place for so long. People were like, oh, my god, of

course the terrorists will try there. They never did, but you know they still might any day now, Caitlin, any day Al Kaita's got out. Finally get a squad up there. Nobody will notice all of the anyway. Whatever. So yeah, Tom Ridge, the former governor of Pennsylvania, was made President. Bush's homeland securities are Now this was before the Department of Homeland Security existed. That came about in like November

of two thousand and two. But as soon as like nine to eleven is a thing, Bush is like, ah, we got to have somebody whose job is to think about safety for the country, which like, there were already a bunch of people doing that and it hadn't helped. But anyway, whatever, So Tom Ridge is like is made the czar of Homeland Security, and he made border control one of his priorities. He realized pretty much immediately that the border patrol was going to be issue for him.

Robert Bonner, who worked with Ridge and later became the first head of Customs and Border Patrol, told Politico quote, within the ions structure, they were the poor stepchild. That was how most ofs viewed them at every level. They weren't appreciated and weren't viewed with respect, and that created

this defensiveness and insolerity within the Border Patrol. There was a lot of debate about what to do with the organization and whether or not to just take all the different groups that handled various border related things and merged

them into one border agency. But that would have meant several different cabinet secretaries would have each lost tiny amounts of power and money because you know, you have this group that's like, you know, your job is to look for war criminals who might have like accidentally gotten citizenship or green cards. You have this other group. His job is to like, you know, handle customs enforcement. You know,

you have the Border Patrol. You have like the group that's job is to go around and look for people who might be violating immigration law. You have all these different groups that are like under different sort of people's purview, and putting them all in one like organized border patrol that does everything would have meant that all of the different cabinet secretaries lost a little bit of money in power. So they all vetoed that idea in unison. No no, no, no,

fuck that shit. Instead, the decision was made to dissolve i INS and put the Border Patrol under the purview of the new Customs and Border Patrol, which would itself be part of the brand new Department of Homeland Security. The final nail in Ins's coffin was the fact that the agency had approved visas for two of the nine to eleven hijackers after nine eleven. So this is kind of what like, yeah, that's the that's the wrong time

to do that. Somebody probably should have gotten on the phone immediately after that and been like, hey, you we should run these names, like just make sure we're not going to embarrass everybody, but they did. And when the news kind of came out that i INS had approved visas for two of the people who had just carried out the biggest terrorist attack in the US history, the Bush administration was really not happy with IONS, and that kind of that kind of spelled their doom, and in fact,

in they dissolved the agency. No one from the White House even thought to call the INS commissioner and tell him. I'm going to quote again from Politico's article, i INS was such a broken bureaucracy that it would be the single agency in the entire US government to receive the

ultimate death penalty. After nine to eleven, in the wide ranging bureaucratic reorganization that led to the Department of Homeland Security, i INS was completely disbanded, its responsibilities removed from the Justice Department, and its duties reassigned among three new DHS agencies, Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE, Citizenship and Immigration Services CIS, and Customs and Border Protection CBP in the newly created DHS would be a reality in less than a year. So that's the situation.

many of whom are actually American citizens. That's just how it's it's important, you know, yeah, so uh from Politico quote weeks before the new agency officially launched on March first two thousand and three, he invited all of the Border Patrols twenty sector chiefs to Washington to discuss the transition. They all arrived in DC in full dress, green uniforms, shoes polished brass, buttons gleaming. As Bonner walked into the room,

everyone stood and snapped to attention. The new Commissioner began his remark, simply, the Border Patrol will remain green. The room erupted in applause and cheers. They're proud of the green. They were very proud of that uniform, Bonner recalls today. They were concerned about losing that identity.

In two thousand and four, the faith based organization No More Deaths started leading gallant leaving gallon jugs of water out near cop and footpaths and the desperate hope that it might stop a few people from dying horribly in the desert. They soon noticed that their water bottles were being slashed open. No More Death set up hidden cameras they found in every case border Patrol agents destroying water

caches almost with visible glee. You can see one of these videos for yourself and the PBS documentary Need to Know. Salon dot COM's description is quite good. Quote. Three Border Patrol agents, two men and a woman are walking along a migrant trail and approaching half a dozen one gallon jugs of water. The female agent stops in front of the containers and begins to kick them with force down a ravine. The bottles crash against rocks, bursting open. She's smiling.

One of the agents watching her smiles as well, seeming to take real pleasure in the spectacle. He says something under his breath, and the word tonk is clearly audible. Do you know what tonk means?

that's good. All those new officers had to be trained up quick, and this did not lead time for rigorous vetting and background checking that other federal agents go through. Border Patrol agents today still have the least average years of experience of any federal law enforcement agency. They also have the lowest standards for new recruits. This may have something to do with the fact that Border Patrol agents are involved in more fatal shootings than any other federal

law enforcement agency. Yeah, you know, probably. It's not like any federal lawenforcement agency is good about giving us numbers about how many people they shoot, but probably they kill more than any of the others.

admit to as many problems. When they were questioned by Congress about all of the murder, it's yeah, wow again under Obama, it's pretty much impossible. No, I just like, yeah, Like, we're not even really gonna get into the Trump years in this two parter because that's like a whole nother thing to start talking about. Yeah, like most of this that we're talking about today, I mean it's Reagan Bush Senior, Clinton Bush Junior, and Obama, Right, those are the guys

that this is happening under. Those are the guys funding this right enthusiastically. All of the politicians that everybody thinks are fine now because Trump is such a such a dick anyway. Yeah, it's pretty much impossible to exaggerate how bad Border patrol ISNT. Was like, I'm gonna guess that most of our listeners come from a broad position that like Feds are not good, which is fine and accurate.

But even among that company, like even if you're like, oh, federal agents are pretty much all bad, it's shocking how bad the agents of the CBP are. It's like, it's staggering how shitty they particularly become in the aughts. And I'm going to quote from Salon again. There was the Miami CBP officer who used his law enforcement status to bypass airport security and personally smuggle cocaine and heroin into Miami.

There was the green uniformed agent in Yuma, Arizona, who was caught smuggling seven hundred pounds of marijuana across the border in his green and white Border patrol truck. The brand new twenty six year old border patrol agent who joined a drug smuggling operation to distribute more than a

thousand kilograms of marijuana in Del Rio, Texas. The thirty two year old border patrol agent whose wife would tip him off on which buses filled with illegal immigrants to let through his checkpoint on I thirty five in Laredo, Texas. Some cases were more obvious than others, like the new Border Patrol agent who took an unusual interest in maps of the agency's sensors along the border and was arrested just seven months into the job after he sold smugglers

those maps fifty five hundred dollars. In November two thousand and seven, CBP official Thomas Winkowski wrote an agency wide memo citing numerous incidents or, as he called them, disturbing events, saying that the leadership was concerned about the increase in the number of employee arrests. The memo, never made public, but obtained by the Miami Herald, reminded officers and agents, it is our responsibility to uphold the laws, not break

the law now. Right around that time, internal CBP investigations uncovered that the agency had, in dozens of cases, hired members of Mexican drug cartels and gangs like MS thirteen to be agents. They'd also hired at least one serial killer, Juan David Ortiz, who murdered five women during his time as an intelligence analyst for the agency. He is also suspected of kidnapping a woman. We'll never really know the exact extent of his crimes, and in that regard he

fits in with another border patrol veteran Esteban Manzanares. It is possible that Estebon Manzanares was not a serial killer. He hasn't been convicted of any murders, but he was caught abducting three migrant women, a mother and her two teenage daughters. He attempted to bury one alive, and he raped another. And yeah, earlier this year, in appeals court ruled that his victims could not sue the federal government as Mensinares was not acting in his official capacity as

a border patrol agent when he assaulted those women. Sure, he arrested them during his duties as a border patrol agent, and he took them to a border patrol processing facility before taking them to a gated compound to assault them, but he wasn't acting as a border patrol agent.

who are trying to immigrate legally. Now, yeah, that's good, mama, it's pretty cool. It's pretty cool. What a problem this was. Yeah, so and again, all of these legal immigrants make a mockery of everyone trying to immigrate illegally. The data shows that during this period, this like fucking seven year period, an average of one border patrol agent per day almost was arrested for serious crimes like ranging from like rape and sexual assault to attempted murder to you know, drug smuggling.

Like every day a border patrol agent basically was getting arrested during these years. But that's not making a mockery of life, right, law enforcement or whatever. Yeah, yeah, Now, there were a number of reasons why things got so bad in border patrol. We've talked about some of them, just sort of like the inherent racist nature of the existence of the Border patrol. But there are also just sort of some some reasons that you would describe as

kind of broadly bureaucratic. There were a bunch of bureaucratic reasons why it happened to right, kind of outside of the inherent, you know, problems of policing a border. For one point, like, they were increasing the size of the Border Patrol faster than any law enforcement agency had ever been increased, and that meant bringing in a shitload of people who weren't qualified. They had all of this money, and they did not have enough people who could actually

responsibly do the job. So they were just throwing people in chairs and giving them guns and badges. Now, the issues of hiring a bunch of people for an agency based on assaulting non white people and giving them, you know, broad powers, were compounded by structural problems within the like the way the border patrol was set up. Most border patrol men are agents. This differs from special agents, which

are the cool dudes like Fox Molder. Everyone who becomes a FED wants to be Special agents can both arrest people and investigate crimes. Agents only have arresting powers. They cannot investigate crimes now. Because CBP is seen as the shittiest federal law enforcement agency, the dumping ground for all of the violent assholes, our government doesn't like to make

them special agents. According to Politico Quote. In many ways, the difference between the two is CBP's original sin, a seemingly minor technical distinction made in the harried heat of DHS creation a decade ago, that would allow hundreds of cases of corruption in CBP's Office of Field Operations and use of force abuses in the Border Patrol offestor for years. The problem was that no one at CBP received what's

known as eighteen eleven authority. When DHS was set up, ICE was given exclusive eighteen eleven authority to conduct investigations in the border region. CBP was only given so called eighteen oh one authority, a lesser classification that allowed border patrol agents and customs officers to make arrests an enforced federal law, but not in investigate. They could be cops

but not detectives. This didn't particularly matter, and the daily performance of CBP's duties the borders were patrolled to the ports of entry watched except that CBP was legally prohibited from policing its own workforce. Yeah, and it's again one of these things. Every single person who's ever been involved in running the CBP agrees, like, yeah, this is a real big problem because it means that they're even less accountable than other law enforcement agencies because those ones are

barely accountable and those ones are barely accountable. But like, even when Border Patrol agents commit a crime that other border patrol agents think is horrible, like they can't investigate.

DC based law enforcement think tank. The PERF investigated sixty seven cases of lethal force by Border Patrol agents. They found, among other things, cases of agents firing at fleeing vehicles. The report concluded too many cases do not appear to meet the test of objective reasonableness with regard to the use of deadly force. The PERF report advised, among other things, that agents should not use lethal force on unarmed drivers

or rock throwers. The agency rejected this out of hand, with the head of Border Patrols saying in an interview, I've known agents who have almost died from being rocked along the border, and I think it was completely ridiculous that they wanted that prohibition. I should note here that no Border Patrol officer has ever been killed by Iraq. I can't really find evidence of one being seriously injured

by Iraq either. What I can find is that in twenty fourteen, CBP leadership estimated a full twenty percent of their force was corrupt. Attempse at reform were made in the last two years of the Obama administration, and in twenty sixteen it looked like things might finally be headed in a less murdery direction. But then Donald Trump became the president, and here we are a presidential administration filled

with literal Nazis. Was handed a vast, heavily armed force of sociopaths and rapists who just spent the last two years being told that they had to rape and murder less, and then all of a sudden they were told, whatever you want to do is find just get these brown

people out of the United States. And that's kind of where things stand today with the Border Patrol as sort of the turning into the official armed wing of the racist right, with these CVP and BORTAC units set up using Border patrol men being sent into American cities to police dissent because they're the most dedicated and least accountable

and most violent law enforcement officers the country has. And yeah, there's a lot more I could and should get into about where things are at the moment with Border Patrol, But this is it took me this long just to get us up to the fucking Trump administration.

Mexican boy that he murdered was named Raymond Cassiano. And there's actually a really good song about the Border Patrol and about Raymond Casiano by a band I quite like called Drive By Truckers, And there's a line in it

about Harlan Carter. You know, this former head of the Border Patrol who goes on by the way to become the head of the NRA and is like one of the guys in charge of the NRA when it turns into the NRA we all know today from the organization that was like, oh, people should learn how to shoot accurately so they can hunt deer, right, like the NRA used to just be like a normal, pretty normal thing, and then it turns into this crazy thing that it

is today, this quasei military or not quasi military, but like this explicitly fascist organization urging political violence. Anyway, Harlan Carter is the guy behind that too.

of men who become border patrol agents. He had the makings of a leader of a certain kind of men who need to feel the worlds against him, out to get him if it can, men who's trigger pull their fingers, of men who'd rather fight than win united in a revolution, like in mind and like in skin. Yeah, yeah, it's a good song.

talk about the representation of women in film. A yeah, check check, check it all out, check it all out.