Part Two: The U.S. Border Patrol Is A Nightmare That Never Ends

the end of this digression. Hello, Caitlin Duranty, guest for today's episode. How are you doing? Uh well? I would be doing better if you would pronounce my last name correctly. Speaking of mispronunciation, Durante Durant, I think we've all learned a lesson about maybe not judging each other, because it's impossible to ever know how words are supposed to be say. He thinks Ariana Grande's name is Arianna grand So you know, Sophie, even give me guff about that one for a while,

as it deserves m. Well, now I'm sad. Don't be sad. Robert if this is part two. If we didn't get to pick on a white man at the beginning of an episode, then like, what's the point? Yeah, this is this is a whole episode about I don't know, let's let's let's pass the Bechdel test right now, Sophie. Oh, Caitlin, I I really enjoying the bluish shirt you're wearing right now. Oh my gosh, well, I'm so glad you brought it up, because, um it's it's a Paddington shirt that says migration is

not a crime, which is relevant to today's episode. Wow, it really is relevant today's episode. That. But then I said Paddington and that that I was like, are we gendering padding in right now because that Huntington is a non binary a sexual icon. Yes, yes, yes, yes, So I kind of passed it back to this. Okay, Robert, you want to post your show behind the bastards right now because I don't actually know if we passed the

Bechdel test there. But you know what test we did pass is the writing for many hours about the border patrol test. Yes, which is a more important test, I think, so, uh, you know this one. We're splitting up a little bit weirdly over the course of two weeks, because my entire life and schedule has been continually thrown into casts. So I do apologize for this one being done a little

bit differently than others are done. On December six, two th 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 Niry Call. Both were Kecchi Maya and they lived most of their lives in the Alta are A pause region of Guatemala. Starving in 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 streptococcle infection. DHS maintains that they conducted an initial screening and that there was no evidence of health issues and 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, Augustine, were members of the Choose People, another Mayan group who came from the Huahoaitanango region of Guatemala. 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 Alama Gordo. He started to show symptoms of sickness on the twenty four He was taken to the hospital, where he was tested for the cold, but not for influence zone, which he had. He was given medicine that could not help him and sent back to jail, where he died on Christmas Eve, two thousand eighteen. Ye good, good times. That's awful. Yeah, it's real bad. The deaths of Gomez and Jacqueline were briefly very big

news in the United States. It was believed that the two were the first child immigrant deaths in border patrol custody since two thousand ten. In two thousand nineteen, though, it was revealed that another child, Darylyn Cordova, val of El Salvador had actually died back in September two eighteen

under similar circumstances. 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, I have to also what colorful language you used in terms of the corpses or at the top of an iceberg. I mean, yeah, you know, I I think if you're gonna talk about dead kids, you should do it with a little bit of panas pizzas, panas um. Alright, I'm keep going, all right, so let's talk about the border

patrol and um in in Central America. We're gonna talk about UM something I don't think a lot of people know about because usually, as a rule, when we talk about how bad the Border Patrol is. We talk about like how mean they are to people who come up to the border. Um, but we don't talk about what a lot of Border patrol guys did uh in the countries that these people are fleeing from before people started

fleeing from those countries. So this is gonna be fun. Okay, I'm gonna it's gonna be a good time for everybody. Uh So. John P. Longan was a U. S Border Patrol agent in the nineteen forties and fifties. He worked near the Mexican border, close to where both Jacqueline and Gomez crossed over. Most sources you find on the matter will note that he had a reputation for violence, but this was not at all uncommon among the men of

the Border Patrol, nor is it uncommon now. During operation went back when the Border Patrol reformed itself into a paramilitary force to wage war on Mexican immigrants, long End run the Patrols ran the Patrol's equivalent of a military intelligence service. Long AND's base was an unmarked building near Alameda. He and his men interrogated, captured migrants, extracted 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 considered torture. Long End was good at his job, and his performance in Operation Went 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 Venezuela, 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 frame this

program as training law enforcement. The reality, though, is that long End 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 End 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.

Long End 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 the Pieza,

or Operation clean Up. Within three months, this unit had conducted over eighty raids and multiple extra judicial 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 Wards and former border patrol agents like long End to train foreign police through CIA linked to 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 apprintices 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 and himself in nineteen fifty seven clearly to scribe what he thought he was doing at the border. We're fighting a war on a wide battle front, so that's good. So they're just

basically training kill squads. They're just telling people to murder people. Yeah, and they're they're pulling Border patrol guys off the line to do some of the training to be like, oh, you already are good at like tracking down these groups of people who are trying to facilitate movement of of migrants through the United States. You can use those skills to track down political activists, except that you know, since it's in a foreign country, you can just have them

brutally 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, um, 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. Oh, ge wiz, have ever been to Guatemala, Caitlin, I have not, rules. Yeah, yeah, I spent a lot of time there. It's a great country, beautiful, I uh,

completely dysfunctional government. Um. And you can see like signs of the horrible civil war. They're all over the place. Just like you cross the street and there'll just be a bunch of guys who are all missing arms and legs. Um. You'll be driving through the middle of nowhere and you'll see like businesses that have been like we're shot up decades ago with mortars and stuff, and it you know,

it's it all kind of descends from this. The the series of political conflicts that launch in this period of time, particularly in the early nineteen eighties, um, that are backed by the United States and supported enthusiastically by the Reagan government, and these kind of networks of right wing um murder crews that were trained up and sent out by the

CIA and and their buddies and groups like the Border Patrol. Um, this all starts now, and it's cool, it's great, and it's probably it's I mean, it's refugees from Yep, these conflicts that are seeking refuge in right up to today. And then then they get here and they're like, well, sorry, fuck you, We're either going to murder you or um be diligent and let you die in our custody, or send you back to this you know, war torn country

you're in. Yeah. If you listen to right wingers, they'll usually say something like, oh, they should go back to

their own country and fix its problems. And the reality is that, like, well, some of them tried to do that, and then we trained death squads to murder them and throw their bodies in rivers and stuff in the ocean, and um, that's why people are less willing to try to fix problems because they get killed and so did their children because of the guys that we hired and trained to kill them 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 um. Operation Lympiasa, which you know long and the Border Patrol guy orchestrated himself, was a major moment in the history of Guatemala's collapse to 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 Catchi and the Choose. 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, cooing 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 right up makes continues quote on June seventeenth, nineteen eighty two, Guatemalan soldiers under the command of Rio's mont entered the San Francisco Catalla estate immediately adjacent to yalm Bulock. The estate's owner, a military colonel, had fled because of guerilla 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. Alone 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, Yelling Block 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. And all told, one point five million people were displaced by the Guatemalan army scorched Earth campaign in nineteen one and nineteen eight too. Guatemala's Commissioned for Historical Clarification called the violent displacement in the Maya Choose Region and active genocide. Young Felipe Gomez Alazano's father.

He was the little kid, one of the little kids who died. Augustin Gomez Perez was a child of eleven during that execute. Yalla Ballocks villagers stayed away for fourteen years, returning only after the signing of the Piece Accords in So that's cool, mm hmm. What can you say? That's horrible? You can say that, like we're focusing on Guatemala right here, because it's uh one where there's a bit more documentation.

But like this ship happened in Al Salad or, it happened in a bunch of different parts of Latin and Central America UM, where you know, refugees come from all the time. Now, UM, it was, it was, it's still in a lot of ways going on today if you want to read about like Plan Colombia and stuff like, there's aspects of this that are very much still occurring, UM. And that the border patrol still winds up getting tied

up been from time to time. And that's great, good grief. Yeah, this is like the stuff that part of me that like is optimistic wants to believe that, oh, if people just knew this, like knew how this all, how how US policy and and in US UM plotting UH played into the tragedy being suffered by these people. Unlike the insecurity of these regions, they would have better attitudes towards you know, Guatemal immigration and whatnot into the United States.

And then the part of me that that has been paying attention for the last several decades knows that like, no, actually UM people would share the murders of the folks and the destruction of these areas because UM Americans have been so thoroughly broken by propaganda that the people who are still on the right and still broadly pro American UM 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. It is this what a toxic mentality that we as Americans, or at least some of us have, because like, and this is I'm not about to say anything new or profound here, but the fact that, uh, you know, the white European settlers were escaping the same you know, kind of civil unrest or religious persecution or whatever it was the custom to fled their countries and uh then and then we settled here, uh by killing millions of indigenous people. And now we're like, well,

our borders are closed now sorry everyone. And it's like, how how can you live? How can these people live with the hypocrisy of that simple fact? Um? Because they there their ship anyway. Uh So most of these death squads, um, we're trained in the United States because like, hey, if you're gonna build a death squad for a foreign country, you don't want to like train it there. Um that's kind of gosh. Uh So you bring them into your country to train them there because you're you're you're you know,

you're good 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, are all throughout the 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 ship was the Los Fresnos, Texas Border Patrol facility. UM. It was an existing base, it was in a good location, UM, and the Border Patrol was perfectly happy to have Minstila over there to learn how to become murderous guerillas and then set off terrorist bombs in the middle of their own countries. UM, 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, incendiaries 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 used. 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 bombs you're going to make to kill people. Um. The the reality of the whole the whole program came out

during congressional investigations in the nineteen seventies. And I'm gonna 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 Albaresque 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 technical disposal technician. There's thrust of the instruction introduces trainees to commercially available materials and home laboratory techniques and the manufacture of explosives and incendiaries. Different types of explosive techniques and booby traps and their construction

and used 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 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 an unmarked snatch fans on the streets of Portland and it was Customs and Border Patrol who was

doing that. Um, they helped to train foreign police to do the exact same thing and much worse. Besides, that's fun, Like wanting to say, like what a fun thing? What? I don't know what else to say. It's just like this kind of litany of horrors 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. Um because the only real if you actually like 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. But maybe border borders are completely arbitrary and mean nothing. And why or why have we decided that they that crossing them is a crime. Yeah, yeah,

it's bad. And the kind of people who decide that, like they want to make their whole lives about punishing desperate people for the quote unquote crime of crossing the border. H our our our monsters, and when you start giving them guns and power, h they use it to enable genocides and political oppression abroad, and then inevitably do you

so back at home, 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 Crudeson 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 titles like Border Patrol sweeps of illegal aliens leave scores of children in jails. Um,

it sounds a little familiar. Uh The intercept summarizing his work notes patrollers he reported regularly engaged in beatings, murder, torture, and rape, including the rape of girls as youngest 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 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 when 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 agent said, would always break Once a confession was extracted. Children might be placed in foster care or left to language in

federal jails. Others were released into Mexico alone, far from their homes, forced to survive, according to public offenders, by garbage cans, grounging, 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 and 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.

I mean, wow, what kind of truly in human monster do you have to be to use to be yes and more specifically to use children as bait or to like snatch them first as just like I can't even form a sentence that is yeah, it's not great. I mean the sentence that that you said, like I got teary eyed with the mothers, the mothers broke first or

what yea horrible no, it's um. I don't know, you know, when I talk about how this all actually makes me feel, there's no way to do that without repeatedly urging other people to commit federal crimes um up to when including assaulted murder. So I'm just like gonna stop right there and continue talking about the border patrol instead, um, because

we shouldn't do that on a podcast. One tactic the border patrol came to a door was the locking of migrants and freezing cold rooms called heliara's or ice boxes. This goes back at least to the nineteen eighties. According to Crudzen, 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 Crudeson that agents commonly pushed illegals off cliffs so it would look

like an accident. Much of the agency's behavior wasn't distinguishable from that of a straight up gang. Agents with I n S. 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? I can't brave men and women of the Border Patrol. We're in the green. Oh my god, it's time for an advert so that I can go vomit. Yeah, you know who doesn't trade women for you can't even sports?

It's an ad break products and services, and we're back. We're having a good time. So I n S agents were also caught supplying Mexican prostitutes to congressmen and judges in exchange for political favors. Over time, the Border Patrol found ways to get over their long standing conflicts with with Texan ranchers. In numerous cases, they worked out deals with ranch owners whereby they would hold off on immigration raids until right before payday, giving ranchers the use of

migrant bodies without the need to pay them. Border patrol men got to hunt and fitch for free on their ranches as payments. This is kind of how they worked out that that little set of disagreements, that little the uprising in Texas that had been sparked by it. They would exploit the labor and and then have an agreement with the Border Patrol and be like, okay, see them on this day, yeah, so that I don't have to pay the Oh my god's good, yeah crude sent that.

New York Times journalists even documented that one of the range the ranches Border Patrol worked out in arrangement with was owned by President Lyndon B. Johnson while he was president. Oh holy good stuff. Between nineteen eight five and nineteen ninety, federal agents gunned down twenty two migrants just in the

area around San Diego. The Intercept reports quote on April eighteen, nineteen eight six, for instance, patroller Edward Cole was beating fourteen year old Edwardo Carrillo Estrada on the U S side of the border's chain link fence when he stopped and shot at Wardo's younger brother, Humberto in the back. Humberto 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 and 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 nine three, the House Subcommittee on International Law, Immigration and Refugee held hearings on border patrol abuse,

and its transcript is a catalog of horrors. One former guard, Toney Heffner, at the I n S Detention Center in Port Isabel, Texas, reported that a young Salvadoran girl was forced to perform personal duties like dancing the Lambada for I n S officials. In two thousand eleven, Hefner published a memoir with more accusations of sexual abuse by as

Hefner Rights the ion S 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 board the Border Patrol run the gamut of abuse is 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 and I I S attention centers around the United States, Martinez said, seemed to be escalating throughout the border region. Okay, I have to talk through something here. So, in theory law and forcement is there

to prevent crime, stop crime, find criminals, et cetera. We know that that's barely what they do, right, but that's in theory the purpose of law enforcement, and so by by extension border patrol if it is for since it is for some reason illegal to you know, cross a border undocumented or without the proper documentation that is quote, 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 warrants things like human trafficking, murder, sexual assault, uh all manner of other horrible, horrible, unmentionable things like where I just it is the most

disgusting thing. I think the problem here that you're having is in thinking that the goal, the purposes ever to prevent crime UM, whereas the reality is the purpose is to UM is to protect it's to protect whiteness exactly, yes, yeah, and and it's to provide an outlet for UM for fascists in this country to do horrible violence on people UM in a way that is, rather than being disorganized and sort of being anti state and being something that

like causes disorder, being UM violence that they are allowed to carry out that UM that enforces the uh, the the kind of the state itself that like that like backs up the existence of the state. Um, like you have all these you have all these tremendously violent people, right, um, and you can do a couple of things to them. Um,

but they're there. Uh So either you you try to like deal with them and and de radicalize 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 to do horrible violence to large groups of people who have no political agency. Yes, that is exactly what it is. It's like people who are like, well, the general population thinks that, you know, being a member

of a hate group like the KKK is bad. So I'm going to do the same exact things that the KKK does, but it's being masked as a government agency. Like basically, this terror or terrorist organization, this hate group is protected and quote justified because it is a government agency. Even they're committing the same heinous acts in the name of under the guise of some kind of protection. But truly it's the like you said, protection of of whiteness

and criminalizing being not white. And that's been and that's the only way it ever will be as long as we have a border, um, and we consider there to be some sort of fundamental value in um, the sanctity of that border. Right, And that's good. I want to cry about it. Yeah, it's it's good to do that sometimes. Other times it's good to continue reading a podcast script, which I will now do, okay, because this is how I deal with problems. This is the only way that

I deal with problems is by reading podcast scripts. I mean informing Informing the people helps. Yeah, that's that's a way that you can describe this as informing the people. I don't know, you know. UM. In nineteen seventy nine, Maria Contreris, nine months pregnant, crossed back into the United States from Mexico legally after shopping for food. Border patrol agents found the suspicious and they tortured her to try to get her to reveal information about undocumented migrants. She

died under interrogation, leaving six children behind. UM. This sort of thing happened all the time. You know, we have documentation about Maria Contreriss case, but this is maybe even a daily matter, and it's something that continues to this day. UM, 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 n S were sort of the redheaded

step child 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 periods, this period, while all of the horrible things we've been talking about have been happening, border control has basically no money, um 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 um, but nobody's watching them,

so they can carry out horrific acts of violence. And that's the Border Patrol and really I n s too. UM. For the most part, Yeah, border 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 Deluth, random Americans in 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 of 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 UM, which is not a lot if you think

about how big both of those borders are. There are many miles long. Yeah, they're pretty big. In n NAFTA became a thing, the North American free trade thing of the jigger UH, and illegal immigration grew by leaps and bounds alongside right wing fearmongering about illegal immigration. The border patrol more than doubled in size by the turn of

the millennium. So this is like the first thing that really leads to a massive surge in the border patrol is NAFTA becomes a thing, and suddenly a shipload more people are trying to cross the border. UH. Illegal immigration, by the end of the nineteen nineties is a major national political issue. In the border patrol more than doubles under Clinton. UH. In the year two thousand, our nation's peak year for illegal immigration, border patrol agents apprehended one

point six million people UH. 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 uh 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 CARP or catch, 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 a court. But despite millions of border crossings, the Border Patrol had the financing in two thousand 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 require riccalls. Michael Cherdoff, who would go on to become President George W. Bush's second 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 nine, agents captured one of the FBI's ten most wanted fugitives, a rapist and serial killer named Angel Maturino Rascinde's a k a. 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 funk up as anything, because most of them were shitass, incompetent, and anything besides doing violence. So nine eleven happens. Do you remember nine eleven? I remember? It's good. You're not supposed to forget it. Now. Nine eleven happens.

And if you were alive in Cognizant at the time, you might remember that basically everybody in their grandma was obsessed with the imminent possibility that al Qaeda might drive a regiment of terrorist nuclear hanks or whatever across the Texas border. As someone who lived in Texas at the time, where a bunch of people freaking out about how like terrorists hit squads we're gonna be making their way up

through the border. Kids at my like suburban Texas high school, We're certain that al Qaeda was going to be sending people to shoot up our school because like plane Oh, Texas was real high on fucking Osama bin Laden's Hitlas. What did they think they were going to like go to Mexico first and then cross the border? What they

think It didn't It didn't really scan a lot. I mean, I'll say this, I think that it's maybe not talked about enough that agree to which guys like John Milnius and movies like Red Dawn prepared everybody to believe the bullshit the Bush administration said about how terrorists we're gonna be sneaking through the border. Um, but like yeah, whatever, Um it was very dumb. It was a very dumb time. 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 willing 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 and unmonitored place for so long. People were like, oh my god, of course the terrorists will try there. They never did, um but you know they still might any day, now, Caitlin, any day al kaas finally get a squad up there.

Nobody will notice all of the anyway whatever. Uh 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 um but as soon as like nine eleven is a thing, Bushes like, we gotta 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. And but anyway, whatever, um 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 an is shoe for him. Robert Bonner, who worked with Ridge and later became the first head of Customs and Border Patrol, told Politico quote, within the I n S structure, they were the poor step child. That was how most of ions viewed them at every level.

They weren't appreciated and weren't viewed with respect, and that created this defensiveness and in celerity 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 merge 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 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 as 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 perview 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 and power. So they all vetoed that idea

in unison no no, no, no, funk that ship. Um. Instead, the decision was made to dissolve I n S 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 ion SS coffin was the fact that the agency had approved visas for two of the nine eleven hijackers after nine eleven UM. So this is kind of what like, yeah,

that's the that's the wrong time to do that. Somebody probably should have like gotten on the phone immediately after that and been like, hey, we should run these names, like just make sure we're not going to embarrass everybody, But they did um. And when the news kind of came out that ion S 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 ion S UM and that kind

of that kind of spelled their doom. Uh And in fact, we they dissolved the agency. No one from the White House even thought to call the I n S commissioner and tell him, um, yeah, I'm gonna quote again from Politico's article, I and S was such a broken bureaucracy that it would be the single agency in the entire U. S.

Government to receive the ultimate death penalty. After nine eleven, in the wide arranging bureaucratic reorganization that led to the Department of Homeland Security, I and S was completely disbanded, its responsibilities removed from the Justice Department, and it's duties reassigned among three new DHS agencies, Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE, Citizenship and Immigration Services c i S, and Customs and Border Protection CBP. And the newly created DHS would be

a reality in less than a year. So that's the situation um now. The man tasked with creating the CBP was Robert Bonner, a federal judge and a former d E A head. His most first and most pressing decision was whether or not to change the agency's famous Green Unit form, which is obviously more important than like the rape training of women for sports tickets and stuff. Why

is that the first order of business? Why are the orders These brave men of the Border Patrol who only occasionally commit mass rape and sex trafficking that includes sex trafficking of twelve year olds and only occasionally torture pregnant women to death. Those brave men have a lot of pride in their uniform, and they want to know that uniform is not going to change. You know. They have

to be presentable. That's the most that's important thing. The most important thing is that they get to still feel like they're part of the part of the old Border Patrol that they love, you know, the old Border Patrol. But let some torture all those people and throw kids into into dank, freezing cells for months on end, 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.

But for the new agency officially launched on March first, two thousand three, he invited all of the Border Patrols twenties sector chiefs to Washington to discuss the transition. They all arrived in d C 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 remarks, 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. Who cares about your green uniform? The Border Patrol caressers. See this is why, as as I've always said, uh and so if you can back me up on this, Caitlin, you would be a terrible head of the Border Patrol m because I don't respect the green exactly. Well, I don't even understand,

but it's because I hate the Celtics. So I and happy see Sophie, you'd be bad at this too, because as a Border Patrol agent, you should be trading kidnapped women to the Celtics in exchange for season tickets. Oh my god, can we just go to an ad break? Jesus Christ, speaking of the Celtics. You know who else supports this podcast? Hey? You know who else is whore No no predace and services. And we're back that that Celtics. Dig I just would like to denote that I will

keep doing that and also high prop. Yeah, it's that I don't understand who the Celtics are Celtics. I don't understand any of this. This is also because if you love that team, if you love that team, send your death threats to Sophie. Yeah, if you love that if you love that team, just don't follow me because we will never be friends. Also because I don't know who they are. If you if you don't give a ship about sports teams in existence tenness, follow me. Yeah, except

for soccer. Soccer is allowed. Soccer's cool. Soccer is the only sport. Soccer is definitely not allowed. What soccer soccer is there is. There is one sport allowed in my ideal world, and it's that that game they play in Afghanistan where they all ride around on horseback with a goat head and people get killed sometimes because they it's it's yeah, you just fully Robert died this entire thing. Anyways, followed Caitlin on Twitter. On Instagram, She's a great follow

continue with your go to Afghanistan to play sports anyway. Uh. They were not particularly concerned the border patrol with making any changes to reduce the number of migrants killed by border patrol agents. Since two thousand three, border patrol agents have killed at least ninety seven people. Six of those people were children. They've also taken repeated action to stop other people from saving lives. As summers grew more brutal, more and more migrants started dying in the Sonora and desert.

In two thousand four, the faith based organization No More Deaths leading gallant leaving gallon jugs of water out in near common 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 a half half a dozen one gallon jugs of water. The female agent stops in front of the containers and begins to kick them with forced down a ravine. The bottles crash against rocks, bursting open. She's smiling. One of the agents watching her smiles as well, seemed

to take real pleasure in the spectacle. He says something under his breath, and the word talk is clearly audible. Do you know what talk means? I don't. So we talked about wet back in episode one and how that was the Border Patrols kind of old term for for particularly Mexican immigrants because of the river they have to cross. Talk is new the new slur that the Border patrol uses for a documented immigrants, and it comes from the sound that a flashlight makes when you hit someone in

the head. Oh my god, you'll hear this if in any article you read about the modern border Patrol, that that they the word talk is like their their standard term for for migrants, and it's a term because of what it sounds like when they beat these people with flashlights. Well mm hmm, okay, let me just process that. New slurs were, of course, of course, far from the only

changes to hit border patrol during the Bush years. By the time President Obama took office, the Border Patrol had gone from an underfunded force of about nine thousand to a twenty one person army. The largest federal law enforcement agency in the country. Um, there are actual armies smaller than the Border Patrol and less well equipped. Uh. They're the largest law enforcement agency in the country now, Um,

so that's good. All those new officers had to be trained up quick, and this did not leave 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. Uh. Yeah, you know. Probably. It's not like any federal LA enforcement agency is good about giving us numbers about how many people they shoot. But probably they kill more than any of the others. Okay, I believe it. Yeah. One senior DHS official even admitted to Politico quote, the agency has created a culture that says, if you throw a rock at me, you're going to

get shot. Between two thousand and five and two thousand twelve, roughly one CBP officer was arrested for misconduct every single day during President Obama's first term. Things got so bad that DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano ordered the CBP to change its institutional definition of the word corruption so they wouldn't have to admit to as many problems When they were questioned by Congress about all of the murders. It's yeah,

again under Obama, it's pretty much impossible. No, I just like, uh yeah, Like we're not even really going to get into the Trump years in this two parter because that's like a whole another thing to start talking about. Yeah, like most of this that we're talking about today, I mean it's Reagan, uh Bush Senior, Clinton Bush Jr. 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 they're fine now because Trump is such a such a dick anyway. Um, yeah, it's pretty much impossible to exaggerate how bad border patrol isn't was like, I'm gonna guess that most of our listeners come from a broad position that like Feds are not good, um,

which is mine 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 CBPR. Like it's like, it's it's staggering, how shitty they they particularly become in the odds. Uh. And I'm gonna quote from Salon again. There was my 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 dred 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 and del Rio, Texas. The thirty two year old border patrol agent whose wife would tip him off on which buses filled with illegal immigrants uh 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 and months into the job

after he sold smugglers those maps for dollars. In November two thousand 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 m S thirteen to be agents. They had 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 has also suspected of kidnapping a woman.

Will never really know the exact extent of his crimes, and in that regard he fits in with another Border Patrol veteran Estebon Manzanares. It is possible that Estebon Manzanares was not a serial killer. He hasn't been convicted of any murder, 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. Uh and yeah.

Earlier this year, in appeals court ruled that his victims could not sue the federal government as Menzonaras 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. He wasn't acting as a border patrol agent. Oh wow,

the mental gymnastics people do just legal ones. Yeah okay, yeah. Now. The good news is that a few bad apples like man Sinara's and Ortiz, and also all of the thousands of agents who got arrested on a nearly daily basis for seven straight years, didn't stop the orchard from detaining more migrants than ever before during the Obama years. DHS deported more undocumented migrants than ever four of the year.

As President Obama said in two thousand eleven, the presence of so many illegal immigrants make a mockery of all those who are trying to immigrate legally. Now, yeah, that's good to Obama. It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool. What a problem this was. Yeah, so and again, all of these legally immigrants make a mockery of everyone trying to

immigrate illegally. The the data shows that during this period, that's 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 um too, you know, drug smuggling. Like every day a border patrol agent basically was getting arrested during these years. But that's not that's not making a mockery

of 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 of like the inherent racist nature of of the the existence of the border patrol um. But there are also just sort of some um uh, some reasons that you would describe as kind of broadly, uh, bureaucratic. There were a bunch of bureaucratic reasons why it happened to write kind of outside of the inherent you know, problems of policing

a border. Um. For one point, like they were increasing the size of the border patrol faster than any law enforcement agency had ever been increased. UM, and that meant bringing in a shiplet of people who weren't qualified. Um. They had all of this money and they did not have enough people who could actually responsibly do the jobs. They were just throwing people in shares and giving them

guns and badges. Um. Now, the issues of hiring a bunch of people for an agency based on assaulting non white people, um and giving them you know, broad powers were compounded by structural problems within the board, like the way the border patrol was set up. Most border patrol men are agents. UM. This differs from special agents, which are the cool dudes like Fox molder that 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 CBPS original sin, a seemingly minor technical distinction made in the harried heat of DHS creation a decade ago that would allow hundreds of caraces of corruption in CBP's Office of Field Operations and use of force abuses in the patrol border patrol to fester 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 o one authority, a lesser classification that allowed border patrol agents and customs officers to make arrests and enforced federal law, but not investigate. They could be cops but not detectives. This didn't particularly matter in

the daily performance of CBPS 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 like 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, no accountability, Holy crap. Um. Yeah, other law enforcement agencies look at Border Patrol and go Jesus Christ, those people are unaccountable when they commit acts of unspeakable violence. That is bleak. That's bleak, very bleak. By two thousand and twelve, the problems in Border Patrol were obvious enough

that they spilled out into the public sphere. The Arizona Republic conducted an investigation which showed that agents had killed at least forty two people, thirteen of whom were citizens, since two thousand five, and none of these killings was any agent known to have faced consequences of any kind. Congressional pressure forced the agency to submit to an investigation by the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington, d c.

Based law enforcement think tank. The p e r F 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 pr F 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 Patrol saying in an interview, I have 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 a rock, and I can't really find evidence of one being seriously injured by Iraq either. What I can find is that in two thousand fourteen, CBP

leadership estimated a full of their force was corrupt. Attempts at reform were made in the last two years of the Obama administration, and in two thousand 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 the racist right. Uh, with these CBP and bor tech units set up using Border patrol men being sent into American cities to police dissent because they're the most dedicated, in least accountable, and most violent law enforcement officers the country has um 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, right, and

yeah we're not even at the you know, the whole the frenzy around Yeah, build the wall, and just like yeah, yeah, yeah, So I guess that's another podcast. Yeah, it's another kind of podcast. And I guess if I'm gonna leads leaves somewhere or or in this somewhere. I probably it would probably be good to end by talking again about Harlan Carter. Um for just a little bit. You remember Harlan Carter.

He was the former Border Patrol head it was in charge during Operation wet Back, and who was a convicted murderer. He in N one he shot a Mexican boy in the chest. Uh so yeah, the the young uh 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 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 n r A. And it's like one of the guys in charge of the n r A when it turns into the n r A 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 n r used to just be like a normal, pretty normal thing, and then it turns into this crazy thing that it is today is quasi military or not quasi military, but like this explicitly fascist organization urging political violence anyway, Harlan Carter is the guy behind that too. So not somebody we'd want to get a drink with, not somebody you would want to get a drink with. And there's there's a couple of lines about him in this song Ray in Casiana, which

is named after the guy that Um, Harlan Carter killed. UM, and it's it's a song yeah, really about not just Harlan Carter, but about the kind of men who become border patrol agents. Um. He had the makings of a leader of a certain kind of men who need to feel the world's against him, out to get him if it can, men whose 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. I'll give it a listen. So Caitlin, you wanna you wanna plug your plug doubles. Sure well, thank you for for enlightening me with this information. A lot of it I did not know, UM, so I I appreciate now knowing UM depressing and upsetting, though it may be. It's good to be informed. Um. You can follow me on Twitter, UM and Instagram at Caitlin Darante, and you can check out my podcast on this network called the

Bechtel Cast. So you know, that little conversation that Sophie and I had at the beginning was a reference to that. We talked about the representation of women in film. A M. Yeah, check check, check it all out, check it all out. And you can follow Robert on Twitter at I right, okay, you can follow this podcast on Twitter, at Instagram at Bastard's Pod. You can now email us at behind the Bastards at iHeart media dot com. And you can buy

merch at our TA Public store. You can also buy merch from Caitlin and Jamie's TA Public Store, which has some of my absolute favorite items in the entire planet. How's that for a plug? Great? Thank you, Sophie. Feminist icons. You know who else is a feminist icon? I can't wait to see who? Thank you? All right? This end also, very very very very warmly thank you. That's that's the episode by guys. Episode m M