CZM Rewind: The U.S. Border Patrol Is A Nightmare That Never Ends
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Hey, everyone. Robert Evans here. And we're doing a rerun episode because I need the time to get caught up. But I figured we'd do this week. We'd rerun two of our old episodes, cut out a bunch of extra ads and put them in as long single episodes and a couple of topics that are very important.

First off, we're going to be talking about the Department of Homeland Security, which as an organization is as bastardy a bastard as 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 making 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. Ew.

I'm so sorry, everyone. I was trying to open with my folksy wisdom, but I have none. And now I've botched the start of this episode. Here to attempt to take away some of my shame is Caitlin Durante. Caitlin, how are you doing today? Oh, you know, I'm just barely keeping it together at any moment. But otherwise...

Caitlin, can you think of any similarities between introducing a podcast and making love? Well, let me think about that. Um,

I have one, I have one, I have one. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. The audio levels can go up and down. The audio levels can go up and down. That's a good similarity, Sophie. Thank you, thank you very much. Sure. Maybe an entire episode, not just introducing an episode, but an entire episode, I think you could draw some parallels between. So you've got, you know, there's like the intro is sort of like the foreplay. And then you've got, you know, usually a big climactic finish to the episode. Yeah.

Well, there you go, everybody. We figured it out. We figured it out. You wanted to compare a random episode of my podcast about bad people to making love. Caitlin Durante has kind of made it easier, maybe. Caitlin, how are you doing today? I'm all right. You know, I'm just... You're in your closet recording. I'm in my closet. You're in your closet. I'm looking at your luggage right now. Nice luggage. I see you go with the hard shell. Thank you. Yes. Mm-hmm.

It is a really nice closet, if I remember from the photos you sent me. Like, it's a very good-sized closet. It truly is. Thank you so much. You want to hear a little story about me, Caitlin? Please. Because I'm a narcissist? Okay. So, you know, I travel a lot, too, Caitlin. And I have refused my entire traveling life to have, like, a hard-shelled rolly suitcase, even though they're much more comfortable to use at the airport than a backpack. Okay.

Because as a young man with an indestructible spine, I was like, only stupid old people use the rolly backpacks. I'm going to be a young adventurer forever, and I just get to wear a backpack. And now I just hurt myself every time I go to the airport out of pride. Yeah.

And that's why men shouldn't be allowed to hold political office. I couldn't agree with you more. Yeah. You mean you carry around one of those big backpacking luggage things? Yeah, big old backpacking backpack. Wow. Yeah. Horrible. Horrible. Sometimes they carry a duffel bag. Even worse. That's absurd. Yeah, it's a terrible idea.

But you know, it does tie in with the theme of today's episode. Because what do you do with backpacks and rolly suitcases, Caitlin? I mean, you bring them with you to travel? You bring them with you to cross...

Borders? Yeah, and today we're talking about La Motherfuckin' Migra, the Border Patrol. Oh boy. Wow. Caitlin, I just want to say, nice job. Yeah. That was great. Thanks. It's been a long journey to starting the episode this week, but I think we got there nicely.

Yeah, sorry to everyone who's been, you know, this has been a little bit of a weird run of Behind the Bastards, the uprising episodes. We're still going to be doing the dictators and grifters, you know, that are our bread and butter. But I keep getting obsessed with different law enforcement agencies, 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, Caitlin, did you know that Border Patrol is kind of problematic? Wait a minute. What do you mean? Yeah.

Yeah, not nice dudes, as it turns out. And have kind of been dicks for like a hundred something years. Or like a hundred years. They've been dicks for a long time. Very close to a hundred years. Okay, I'm listening. 96 years. All right. Yeah. Which, you know, they still have time to change. You know, a lot of people have their best, you know, their second act after age 96. Yeah, I would say that applies to a large number of people.

A lot of tortoises, at least. A lot of tortoises go on to do very cool things after age 96. Yeah, trees as well. There's a lot of old trees that are doing really important things. Border Patrol could be like a sequoia. Yeah, but I don't know how likely I think that is. So we're going to talk about La Migra today because they're terrible. And I don't think most people know how terrible they are. And their terribility is important because it is tied in with a lot of

horrible things about this country and the very concept of whiteness. So how are you feeling about that, Caitlin? You know, I don't feel good about it. I really don't. That's good, because my cunning plan has been to blame you personally for all of the historical crimes of the U.S. Border Patrol.

Well, I did invent them. You launched the Immigration Act of 1924. That's Caitlin Durante's. That's on your resume. Yeah, I didn't want that to be my legacy, but here we are. Yeah, a lot of people don't know this, but you used to be all of Congress in the early 1920s. Yeah. I mean, pretty impressive when you think about it. Yeah, no, it really is.

Yeah, Congress Durante. Yeah, instead of Caitlyn, you were Congress Durante.

That's true. If we're going to talk about the Border Patrol, we've got to talk about the border. And given that the territory we currently know as like Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and even Mexico is all land that was stolen from indigenous people. This is not like a case where there's a lot of good guys to choose from. If you're talking about like conflicts over the U.S.-Mexican border, you're talking about like a bunch of different states that kind of sucked fighting each other for land that wasn't theirs. Like that...

That's the whole deal, right? Yes. So the U.S.-Mexican War of 1846 to 1848 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 U.S. at this point, since it didn't allow slavery. But both countries, not great to anyone...

any like indigenous peoples or whatever, just, just, just bad, bad, bad governments. So at the end of the U S Mexican war, uh, the United States wound up occupying Mexico city. And that nation was forced to seed 50% 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 they

the United States got as a result of the U.S.-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. Yeah, I don't have a good gauge on that because I grew up in Pennsylvania and that just wasn't something that they bothered to tell us in history class. Yeah, we weren't like most of the Southwest was kind of at one point or another, but

Part of Mexico. And so, yeah, we took about 50% of Mexico's northern territory and a new U.S.-Mexican border was redrawn along the Rio Grande from the Gulf to El Paso and then along more or less an arbitrary line further west up the Pacific.

Now, this meant that a huge number of people who'd previously lived in Mexico and had been able to travel freely around territory that was all part of one nation now found themselves living in between two nations. This included roughly 180,000 members of indigenous tribes, as well as about 150,000 Mexicans. So these 300,000-ish non-white folks owned most of the land in, like, the territories in the Southwest that, you know, became Texas and some of the surrounding states.

And the decades after the U.S.-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 really getting your boots in it, you know? I mean, those are the main principles that the U.S. was founded on, right? White people stealing land from non-white people and genociding them. You're gosh darn right, Caitlin. You're gosh darn right. And that's why when I get up in the...

I'm just thinking of like a Folgers coffee commercial. You know, one of those old ones where it was like a cowboy getting up on the range, sipping a Folgers coffee, and then just like stepping into a pile of bones and just being like, ah, nothing like a nice morning walking barefoot through a pile of bones. The thing that I do every day as a cowboy. Yeah, why wasn't that their ad campaign for Folgers? Folgers will murder everybody. Coffee helps. Yeah.

Oh, I was drinking coffee and it went down the wrong hole, Caitlin. Oh, no. Wow. See, coffee can't be stopped from attempting genocide. Even coffee wants to murder. Coffee wants nothing but to murder.

So as we discussed in our last episode of the Behind the Police miniseries that we just did, the Texas Rangers was kind of the first border patrol type force in the Southwest. And they began their history as a group, like a paramilitary organization to protect white settlers in Texas. They were formed by a local mayor named John Jackson Tumlinson, who was part of the old 300 white families who first settled in Texas with Stephen F. Austin. Now...

it wasn't a popular decision for these 300 families to settle in Texas. Uh, and the Comanches, Tonkawas, Apaches, and Karankawas who already resided in the area got kind of angry and started murdering them. Uh, so Tumlinson ordered the formation of a roving defensive patrol. Uh, this patrol became the Texas Rangers, but Tumlinson never got to see it formed because he was almost immediately killed by Karankawa and, uh, Huaco indigenous people before he got off the ground. Uh,

Well, that sounds like karma to me. Yeah, it sounds like it's fine. Like, a shame they didn't get more people. So...

The Rangers were kind of this country's first border patrol force, and the primary method of action for them was just, again, really just straight-up genocide. In the early days, they were like a 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. Yeah.

I don't know. Yeah, they also engaged in the murder and intimidation of Mexicans in border communities. And by the early 1900s, the indigenous folks had mostly been forced off of their land, and the Rangers had become a police force focused mainly on Mexicano communities on the border. The primary strategy was what's known to historians as revenge by proxy. And for an example of how that looked, I'm going to quote from the American Crossroads book, Migra. Quote,

On June 12, 1901, a Mexicano rancher named Gregorio Cortez stood at the gate of his home in Cajones 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 defiance quickly spread across southern Texas.

And yeah, for 10 days, the Texas Rangers and posses numbering up to 300 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 uppity. That's the first border patrol.

Horrible. Pretty bad, Caitlin. Pretty bad. Don't like it. I don't like it one bit. Okay, so you are on the record now about not being in favor of murdering random people as part of a fear-based system of law enforcement.

Yes, and I am happy to be on the record as taking that stance. That's a bold stance. That's a bold stance. I know. Gonna lose you some advertisers, Caitlin, especially our big advertiser, Raytheon. Yeah. When you really need a group of people intimidated by violence, there's no other option but Raytheon.

Raytheon. It's not even time. Let a robot do it. It's not even time for an ad break. You're just doing this for fun. That's a free one. Raytheon just had to lay off a lot of employees, Sophie, and I, for one, have a sense of loyalty, so I'm trying to help Raytheon out with some free ads. God.

So look, if you've got a couple billion extra dollars that you need to spend on missiles that are filled with knives in order to assassinate insurgent leaders in Yemen, look, don't go to Lockheed Martin. Go to Raytheon, okay? It's just better knife missiles, right? That's all I'm going to say. Mm-hmm.

Brave. I have a sense of loyalty. So for the first 20 years of the century, the U.S.-Mexican border was policed by a mix of Texas Rangers and local sheriffs. Such enforcement was always piecemeal with hundreds of miles of borderland operating basically autonomously as it had for generations. The idea that we would police our border didn't 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'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, to try to split these communities up based on an arbitrary borderline that nobody could even see. But,

Yeah, in the 1920s, that started to change. In 1924, 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 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 it basically set up a quota system. Yikes.

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? And the 1924 Immigration Act, a big part of it was stopping Italians, or as they would have called them, I-Talians, which used to be, I think, more racist than it is, and is now just a funny old-timey way of making fun of Italians, which I'm always...

I'm always in favor of Caitlin. How do you feel about Italians? You do know that my last name is Durante and that I am partly Italian. Yeah, so am I. That's why it's okay. Good. All right. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Are we white? How's that work? I have heard slightly varying things, but I think by and large, Italian people are considered white. Yes.

I was looking at a Nazi cartoon the other day because I do things like that for my mental health. And it was like, the point it was making is that like social justice advocates are always white and fascists are actually really diverse. And so like, it was a bunch of white people lecturing Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito. But because it was drawn by a fascist, they drew in Mussolini as a black man because they don't think Italians are white. So it's just like,

There were a lot of layers of wrongness there to parse through. It was 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 1920s, that was all of Congress.

Sure. And they were like, we got to pass a law to stop these Italians from coming in. So, yeah, the Immigration Act of 1924 bans all Asian immigration and tries to kind of 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 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 who were like,

Our entire industry doesn't work without these people. So you have to let them in. So the 1924 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 in violent crime and declines in IQ.

Yikes, don't like the sound of that. No, this is bad. This is bad. And the 1924 Immigration Act is what establishes the U.S. Border Patrol for the very first time. So this fundamentally racist law written by people who justified it explicitly with bad race science

is where the Border Patrol was initially established. So literally born in an orgy of racism. And in fact, the 1924 Immigration Act that established the Border Patrol was so nakedly racist that Adolf Hitler took inspiration from it. Yeah, it's bad. It's really bad, Caitlin.

This is where Border Patrol comes from. Oh, no. Yeah, it's not great. In 1928, Hitler wrote this of the law. There is currently one state in which one can observe at least a weak 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.

So wait, Hitler in the 20s took a look at what we were doing in the US and was like, I like the looks of that. Let me copy paste and do that. Yeah, that's exactly what happened. That's exactly what happened. Oh, dear. That's exactly. And he wrote extensively about how inspired he was by US immigration law, which was like the most racist in the world at the time.

Holy shit. You want to know something else cool, Caitlin? This is a neat story. You're going to love this. Please tell me the story. You know, El Paso, great town, solid tacos, a lot of immigration into El Paso, right? Always has been because it's the past, right? You know, that's just where it's located. Back in like the 20s and 30s,

When immigrants would come in, racist white people were so worried about how dirty they thought Mexicans were that they would mandate delousing baths for everybody who entered the country. And they would just douse them in pesticide. And the pesticide that they chose was Zyklon B. Wait, what is that? That's what they killed all the Jews with in the concentration camps. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. That's another thing the Nazis were like, oh, this seems like something we could modify a little bit to make better for us.

Isn't that cool? That's good stuff. It's not. Holy shit. It was super flammable and sometimes people burnt horribly to death. Good stuff. Yikes. On the border. Kind of always a nightmare. Kind of, if you study the history of the border, maybe the only reasonable conclusion is that borders are fundamentally toxic. And completely made up. They're just... Yeah, and total bullshit. Constructs of like...

usually racist ideology. They're just lines, racist lines we draw on a map that murder tons of people. It's awesome. It's really good. So yeah, the border patrol comes out of, is formed from a law that the Nazis look at and go, that's a good law, says we the Nazis. Sweet stuff, Caitlin. Yeah.

So because the Immigration Act was passed alongside a surge of racist nativist fear about those dastardly non-white immigrants, it mandated that the new Border Patrol be established quickly. The first version of the force was basically built overnight from May 28th to July 1st, 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. Uh-huh. 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 96 years. So the whole thing, every, like...

Decisions are made all willy nilly. People are brought in. Yeah. With no training. No training. Things are being implemented with basically no thought given to it. They're just like, here's what we decided and we're not going to take a second to examine this at all. We're just going to do it. Yeah. I mean, the current DHS secretary, Chad Wolf, uh, has no law enforcement experience, was never in the military. And I think went to college on like a tennis scholarship. Uh,

So it's great. It's cool how things are always exactly the same forever. Because, yeah, again, if people ever learn a single lesson from history, the world will explode. So we have to not do that. Anyway...

But there's also a conundrum there too, right? Because so much of history that gets taught, at least in schools, is so horribly whitewashed and revisionist that like, how can anyone learn anything from it? Yeah. Yeah. You know,

That's a good point, Caitlin. And that's why, as I see all these kids in the street who just aren't going to school anymore and are instead spending their nights dropkicking the doors of a federal courthouse to try to taunt the agents inside to attack them, I think probably fine.

Probably learning about as much, right? True. So, yeah, the very first Border Patrol men were mostly male clerks. And obviously, male clerks maybe aren't super meant to be tromping 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 1927, 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 and 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.

Don't give anybody power. It never goes well. No, especially not poor white men in the country. Right. Yeah.

So immigration from Mexico into the United States had not traditionally been like a major subject of national political debate. People in Texas, you know, there were folks who cared about it, but like really on a national level, if you'd like run based on your plan to build a wall around Mexico, 99% of Americans have been like, what the fuck is your problem? Like, why do you give a shit about that? Everyone is dying of diphtheria and the economy is permanently crashed. Please, please stop. Um,

Which I guess now we're back at, so maybe that'll help. I mean, wow, the parallels. I don't hear as many people giving a shit about the border these days, I'll say that much. That's true. But maybe it's because nobody wants to come here anymore. We did it, Caitlin. We finally stopped it. Just turn the U.S. into a disease-ridden hellhole. All it took was a runaway plague that we completely give up any hope of ever dealing with.

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I came out because I literally had a contract ripped up in front of me. On a recent episode of Good Game with Sarah Spain, I spotlighted an inspiring out-athlete, pro golfer Mel Reid. I think everyone's story is different. I've been very lucky that I've got a very supportive family who literally don't care. It's a part of me. I'm certainly not ashamed of it. And I think that there should be more representation in it.

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The president. Anyway, so immigration from Mexico had not traditionally been a 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 1924 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 really problematic 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. Sure. They're easy to spot. Yeah. Yeah. And then you have this chunk of people who are like,

well, I hate what Trump's doing and I'm happy to have Mexicans here because they do great work and they're great at this and they're good at that. And it's this thing where especially you don't necessarily notice, especially as a young white person who's 18, 19, what's actually being said there, which is the commodification of non-white bodies, which is not cool at all.

Um, but we're going to talk more about that later because this is where that all starts in an organized way, which is awesome. Um,

So the white working class in Texas, so obviously like 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, they

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 my gosh. Yeah. 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. I mean, which that all stems from capitalism, more or less. Yes, absolutely. Any...

fairness or parity when it came to income and labor, people wouldn't have to be worried about other people. There wouldn't be this fear of like, who is my job in danger? Who's going to take my job? Because they're like a more just, just socialized economy would eliminate that fear. Absolutely. Yeah.

Yep. So the actual laws on the books in this period of time had been written largely by the rich landed gentry who needed Mexican immigrants. But now that the Border Patrol existed post-1924, the men enforcing 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 immigrants.

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 of

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 they were men whose kind of sense of whiteness had been hanging on by a thread prior to this opportunity coming around. And I'm going to quote again from the book Migra. Quote,

Early officers may have lived in white neighborhoods, worshipped at white churches, and sent their children to white schools, but as salesmen, chauffeurs, machinists, and cow punchers, they had labored at the edges of whiteness in the borderlands. The steady pay and everyday social authority of U.S. 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. Yeah, oof.

Now, this is made a lot more complicated by the fact that a chunk of the early Border Patrol were Mexican-American. And these guys, in a lot of cases, saw their ability, their career in law enforcement as a way of separating themselves from non-white people. The League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, specifically stated that Mexican-American association with colored races is what held them back from full acceptance by white society in this period 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...

We're seeing some internalized racism. Yeah, it's a complicated history here. And I'm not going to go into tremendous depth about this aspect of the history because I'm not at all the right person to do so. The right person to do so, in fact, is probably Kelly Little Hernandez, author of the book Migra, A History of the U.S. Border Patrol. She does talk about this in more depth, and I really recommend her book.

But you should know that's like an aspect of what's going on here. And as a rule, one of the things that starts to happen in particular around like the 40s is kind of a growing Spanish or Mexican-American community who are very pro-immigration enforcement and pro-harsher immigration laws and laws against illegal immigration. They start to solidify as a voting bloc 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 patrolmen, though, were 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 state authority behind it. From a write-up in The Intercept, quote,

While the 1924 immigration law spared Mexico a 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 heads shaved, 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 2,000-mile line was limited. But over the years, its reported brutality grew as the number of agents it 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.

Practically every other member of El Paso'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. Someone maybe ought to do something about that. Yeah.

So for its first 10 years of existence, the Border Patrol operated under the authority of the Department of Labor. And when FDR was elected, he appointed Frances Perkins to be secretary of labor. And she tried to curtail the violence of the Border Patrol and reform it. And this didn't really work out in the long run. She attempted to cut down on warrantless arrest. She mandated that detained migrants had a right to receive phone calls. She fought to provide migrants with at least some version of the civil rights they lacked as noncitizens.

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 1924 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 1926, the Mexican is a homer like the pigeon he goes home to roost.

And Frizzell'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 1930s, Mexicans had started to settle all across the Southwest, buying homes and starting communities in places like Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. In 1900, only about 100,000 Mexican immigrants had lived in the United States. By 1930, there were one and a half million Mexican immigrants in this country. So this starts to freak out a lot of white agriculturalists, right? And it kind of...

They had been okay with these people coming into work, but at the end of the day, they were the same kind of white supremacists as the border patrolmen. They were just a little bit more refined. And once it started to look like 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 debate over this, right? Because you still needed, as these farmers, you still needed a certain minimum amount of migrants coming in every year in order to actually keep your farms working.

And the guy who kind of figured out a solution to this problem was Senator Coleman Livingston Bleece. He was a white supremacist congressman who first took office in 1925. 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 U.S.-Mexican border without doing it at a border station. That's 1929 that law is passed. And I'm going to quote from an article in The Conversation explaining what happened here.

According to Blee'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 to 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 Bliese's bill, the Immigration Act of March 4th, 1929, 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 1930, the U.S. Attorney General reported prosecuting 7,000 cases of unlawful entry. By the end of the decade, U.S. attorneys had prosecuted more than 44,000 cases. Now, Bliese'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...

mostly nonviolent ethnic cleansing. Like, I don't even know if I'd say mostly nonviolent. It was used for ethnic cleansing. Throughout the 1930s, Mexicans made up at least 85% of all immigration prisoners. Sometimes, some years, they made up 99%. Three new prisons were built on the border to hold them all. And over the course of the decades, somewhere around 1 million Mexicans were deported from the United States. And,

And most of these people were U.S. citizens. Historian Francisco Balderrama argues that 60% of the million people who were deported were U.S. 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 30s 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. I just, the resources that get used and spent to like enforce these laws and build prisons and maintain the prison and just like all of that is

Costs so much time and is so much effort. Why? Like, it would be so much easier if we would just let immigrants come and then just let them live and be a part of the community. I mean, I know why. Because, yeah, racism. Yeah. Yeah. It's absurd. Yeah. The Border Patrol's pretty lame, Caitlin. You know, this is like, but like, this is what it is from the beginning. Like,

One of the first things the Border Patrol ever does is deport a million people, more than half of whom are U.S. citizens. And it just lies about what it's doing because it's from the beginning. Its job has never been to actually enforce the rule of law or even protect the border. Its job is to protect whiteness. Right. Yep.

So the very 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 1928, explained Stovall, 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 Stovall, who remembered that when he got to town that day, he saw a Mexicano come out from behind the bank of a drainage ditch and then duck back.

Stovall 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, Stovall fled.

I got in my car and got away from there, remembered Stovall, because it was in daylight about one o'clock. If I had pulled my gun and fired, there would have been 50 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 Mexicano. So this is...

1928 and kind of a common attitude like this border patrol agent approaches a guy who's got illegal 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 yeah cool stuff what some people think justifies killing another person is something I will never comprehend yeah I don't think they thought they were people

Yeah, true. Yeah. And it's probably worth noting how common brutality was like like open brutality was among U.S. law enforcement officials, even at like pretty high levels in politics at this time. In May of 1954, Herbert Brownell, the attorney general, Eisenhower's attorney general, gave a speech where he asked U.S. labor leaders for their support in the event that Border 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. He's like, you know, my guys might murder 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. 1954. Cool stuff. You know what else is cool stuff?

I don't, Sophie. I can't imagine what you're going for here. That's fine. What is cool stuff? That's fine. Don't... That's fine. I'll just leave. You know who isn't the Attorney General of the United States? Hopefully. The products and services that support this podcast. So...

Racism's not good. You know who else isn't good? The head of the Border Patrol in the 1950s. Another good pivot. Nice. Yeah, a great pivot. So the guy in charge of the Border Patrol as we turn into the 1950s is an outright monster by the name of Harlan Carter. Now, Carter was...

By the time he became the head of the Border Patrol, a convicted murderer. Yeah. In 1931, as a teenager, he'd shot a Mexican boy in the chest at point blank range with a 12 gauge 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 arguments.

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 1931, by the way, you could shoot a man in the chest with a 12-gauge and get three years. That's neat. I love laws. Yeah.

Our justice system is cool. Yeah, he got rehabilitated. He went on to become the head of the Border Patrol and also was the head of the NRA.

Uh-oh.

This was an easy system for dumb, violent men to, like, figure out. You know, you just kind of—it's like hunting, basically. And it appealed to the kind of folks who became Border Patrol agents. But starting in 1950, 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 5 a.m. on February 11th, Quillen took a detail of 12 patrolmen with two buses, one plane, one truck, and nine automobiles. The men drove out to a small station in Rio Hondo, Texas, and then split into two groups to clean as well as possible a certain section of illegal aliens. The plane acted as a spotter while the buses were used to, quote, haul wets to the border. A hundred people were apprehended in short order, and they were deported the next day.

Quillen soon moved on with his force to a series of farms near Los Fresnos, Texas. They found 561 wets, which is, again, always the term they use. Do you understand where that term comes from? I don't know that I actually know the source of it, no. Yeah, so basically the idea is that there were kind of two options for Mexicans at this time. There was the Bracero program, which was a program by which they could kind of enter the country quasi-legally and get legal working rights to be a laborer 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 still to this day a racist slang term for particularly Mexicans, but kind of all people of color.

Hispanic descent in a lot of Texas. Like, you hear it a lot from races 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. Jeez. So...

And this was, like, unprecedented. The Border Patrol had never caught this many people this quickly.

It was seen as an astonishing achievement by Quillen'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, were, quote, pounding away on these wets. Cool dudes. 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 5,000 Mexican nationals would be apprehended and shipped to temporary detention camps before being sent back across the border.

Patrolmen 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 wetback 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. Terrifying. Language. Also, you had said alien, that that was something that had been and still gets, like that language is still used. And it's just the most dehumanizing word to refer to simply someone who travels to another place.

And wants to stay there. It's pretty crazy because we don't use that word for, I don't know, us. I'm excited for when we have finally the big civil war that we're all planning to have and suddenly a shitload of

I'm not excited for the next civil war we have, but continue. Like, yeah, I'm, I'm excited for the people who treated Syrian refugees and treat Guatemalan and Honduran and Mexican refugees like shit. And I'm excited for them all to, I don't know, get gunned down by Canadian border guards. Um, as, as we deserve as a nation. I don't know. I'm angry all the time. Caitlin, sorry. That's not right. Uh, likewise. So am I. Yeah. Yeah.

Anyway, it'll be up to Canada to be racist then. And then eventually Alaska. And then the biosphere will die. So, you know, what won't die, Caitlin? Raytheon. Are you doing an unnecessary transition? Just do your podcast. Do your podcast. I know, I went off on a really sad rant. And so I decided to throw in a Raytheon ad because everybody likes thinking about Raytheon. So, back to...

The 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 1950 and 1953, the number of Border Patrol apprehensions nearly doubled, from 469,000 to almost 840,000.

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 who 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.

In 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 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 went to sleep one night in 1952 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 Newtons' 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 hide in the trees. When the Border Patrol men came up empty in their search, they went after the white folks who actually owned the farm. And I'm going to quote from the book Migranao.

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 in 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 wetbacks 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 inspector still led 53 apprehended workers away, saying, "'See how you handle your groves now.'"

Now, that's like a bad story and everything. But 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 when 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,

The Border Patrol threatened their household by reducing the farmers' 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 defend itself against the U.S. 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 aimed at the officers. Startled by the hostile 12-year-old boy, the officers left the property and returned on another day. So yeah,

this what's happening here is really complicated yeah right there's an important thing to remember here which is that even of the like white ranch farm owners who are maybe not in favor of their workforce being sent back to their country of origin they are still exploiting the

These migrant workers and, you know, probably not paying them well, probably not offering them, you know, good benefits.

Etc. And probably like keeping them in very primitive living situations, often like little more than a shack, often like, like, like kind of nightmarish situation. Like these guys did, these migrants often did live very similarly to slaves, right? It wasn't quite that bad, but it was bad. Um, and these, these farmers are like the border patrol agents want these migrants out because they're racist as fuck. Um,

And these farmers are also racist as fuck. They just want the migrants to stay because it because they can exploit the basis of their power. Exactly right. So again, no one to root for here other than like these migrants, but they seem to mostly get just fucked over by everybody. And that's 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 worse to round up thousands of people in cattle cars and buses and throw them back across the border for no good reason. Mm-hmm. But...

there's no one you should be rooting for here. But what's really interesting, what 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 1950s, 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...

So...

Yeah, because their lives being exploited farmhands in the U.S. is so much better. What? Oh, my gosh. Yeah, it's pretty cool how naturally that came to these farmers. Mm-hmm.

I like it. So the Border Patrol obviously didn't listen to the protests against them. They continued to, in their own words, pound away in the borderlands, raising apprehensions. The increased workload necessary necessitated more men in facilities. And in 1953, the Border Patrol attempted to hire 240 additional officers and made plans to build two new detention centers at the lower Rio Grande 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 patrolmen became a daily occurrence, and farmers in the lower Rio Grande lobbied their congressmen to deny the appropriation request necessary to fund the new men and facilities.

These farmers insisted they weren't lobbying for their own benefit, but were doing it for migrants who were victims of the patrol's cheap vindictiveness, a great hunger to rule or ruin, to control, to govern, anything to carry a point, reckless of the consequences to the poor workmen which they herd around as 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 appropriation request was denied. So like the protest of all these guys in Texas worked. The Border Patrol had to send its 240 men back home and cancel construction. According to the book Migra, quote,

One month after losing the supplemental appropriation, Chief Kelly announced the Border Patrol's withdrawal from the Rio Grande Valley to a new defense line 10 miles to the north of Kingsville, Falfurrias, and Hebronville. Rather than fight a losing battle in the lower Rio Grande Valley, the Border Patrol decided to pull out of the area because with limited forces, we can best control the wetback invasion at the line farther north.

It's one of those things, I guess, like, 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. Sure. Like if you replace that with Mexican nationals, that's not really what they're saying. Right. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, that puts you in a pretty tricky position. Yeah, I don't know.

Yeah, they use it a lot. Exactly. The Border Patrol are cool guys, and we're about to hear it used again in another big way. So the men of the Border Patrol did see the immigration of Mexicans into the U.S. as an invasion, and they sought to repel it with military force. That's kind of that language above, right? Referring to it as a defensive line and stuff. Like, they're defending whiteness again, and they see the encroachment of these...

undocumented migrants as like an assault on white blood more than anything else. In 1953, 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 U.S. 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 2,180 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 U.S. 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 patrol is 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? Posse comitatus 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 ordered

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,

Like, we can't use soldiers for this because it's unconstitutional, but I'm going to promote a general to be in charge of the INS and you figure out a way to do the same thing with the resources Border Patrol has. Yeah, yeah. I still want a military operation to clear out these Hispanic people. I just can't use soldiers. So that's cool. Oh, good grief.

Yeah. The mental gymnastics that these people do to justify their horrible actions. Anyway, sorry. Go ahead. Yeah, it's pretty great. I don't know. So one month after joining INS, General Swing announces that he's going to be leading the Border Patrol in a new paramilitary campaign based on the tactics pioneered by Albert Quillen. The new operation is given the name Operation Wetback.

Again, that's the Border Patrol's official name for it. That's what all these guys call it. That's what it's written up in the documents and stuff. Jeez Louise. Yeah, they just didn't have a fuck to give on this matter.

So, true to form, Border Patrol was only given four weeks to prepare for what would become the largest operation in their history. The plan was to engage in an unprecedented sweep, deporting hundreds of thousands of people. No one received any training or specialized equipment to actually do this, though. All that most agents had on June 9th, 1954, 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.

Yikes. Yeah. So in its first day, California and or in the first day of this operation, California and Arizona agents apprehended nearly 11,000 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 Elysian Park in Los Angeles into an open air concentration camp. Yeah, yeah.

That's neat. Go to Elysian Park. I've been there before and I'll never go again. A lot of the men who were interned there, men and women, got sick and sometimes died of sunstroke because there was no care given to their health and it can get very hot down there. 25% of all deportees were transported by boats, many of which were so cramped and filthy that their occupants later compared them to slave ships or penal hellships.

So that's great. The Mexican government's capacity to take and transport all these people broke down almost immediately. And they were like, we need you to to not send these people to us so quickly because we can't handle them. And the U.S. 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 17th and July 26th, 1954, 2,827 of the 4,403 migrants apprehended by the task force assigned to the Los Angeles area had worked in industry. After Border Patrol raids during the summer of 1954, 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 busboys, 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, unlike raids in big Hollywood locations, is because they were trying to make a point to 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. Right.

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 1.5 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 U.S. government reformed the Bracero program, which allowed Mexican nationals to get legal working status in the U.S., 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 1955.

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. Oh, yay. Can't wait to hear about it. So how are you feeling, Caitlin?

I feel pretty terrible. That's good. I love it when people feel terrible. I'm always like, oh, I can't wait to be a guest on Behind the Bastards. And then every time I do it, I'm like, oh, yes, I'm reminded by how horrible people have been to each other. Yes. And you were the one who picked this topic with a text message. LOL. I think the Border Patrol sounds fun.

There you are, Caitlin. She did not. That did never happen. But yeah, I mean, it's good to be informed about these things. So I appreciate learning and being further informed about it. So yeah, thank you. Thank you for that.

Yep. You're welcome, Caitlin. Thank you for coming on. Is there a place people might be able to find you, listen to you, ways to support your work?

Well, there certainly are places to do that. Starting with, you can follow me personally on Twitter and Instagram at Caitlin Durante. You can also check out my podcast right here on this network. It's called The Bechdel Cast. I co-host it with Jamie Loftus. And we talk about the representation of women in film and just film in general, examining it through an intersectional feminist lens. So,

So that is what we do. And you can check it out wherever you find podcasts. Are you doing any screenwriting classes right now? Oh, yes. Yes, I am. Thank you so much for bringing that up. I also teach screenwriting on account of a master's degree in screenwriting that I absolutely hate to mention or ever mention.

just bring up, but it does allow me to teach online classes. So if that's of any interest to anyone, go to my website, caitlyndurante.com slash classes. And I usually have new sections coming up, starting soon at any given point. And if you want to learn from me,

I don't teach screenwriting, but I do teach screamwriting, which is where you sit down with a pencil and paper and I scream at you and then eventually you give me money to go away. That sounds very educational. Yeah, we all have to have an extra couple of grits. So either pay Caitlin for an actual service or pay me to abuse you. Either way... Don't love that as a line. I don't know.

You know what, Sophie? Look, everybody, look, you gotta be mean to the audience, Sophie. You gotta really kick their ass. I love our fans. I don't know about you. I love them. I appreciate them. And I appreciate you, Robert. So, kindness. Is there any way in which you think that closing out a podcast is similar to making love? Just to bring things full circle. Wow, good question. Here's how closing a podcast is like making love.

Both of them are inherently disappointing. And that's the end of the episode. You can follow Robert and I, right? Okay, on Twitter. You can follow us at BastardsBot on Twitter and Instagram. We have a TeePublic store. That's it. Bye. Bye. Bye. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left.

In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie.

In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today.

I came out because I literally had a contract ripped up in front of me. On a recent episode of Good Game with Sarah Spain, I spotlighted an inspiring out athlete, pro golfer Mel Reid. I think everyone's story is different. I've been very lucky that I've got a very supportive family who literally don't care. It's a part of me. I'm certainly not ashamed of it. And I think that there should be more representation in it.

To hear this and more on identity, inclusivity, and the power of being seen, listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain, an iHeart Women's Sports production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by Novartis, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports Network. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation.

To most people, I'm the girl behind VoiceOver, the movement that exploded in 2024. VoiceOver is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be.

These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships.

I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. No.

Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A lot of times the big economic forces we hear about on the news show up in our lives in small ways.

Three or four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding. But the price has gone up, so now I only buy one. The demand curve in action. And that's just one of the things we'll be covering on Everybody's Business from Bloomberg Businessweek. I'm Max Chavkin.

And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. Every Friday, we will be diving into the biggest stories in business, taking a look at what's going on, why it matters, and how it shows up in our everyday lives. But guests like Businessweek editor Brad Stone, sports reporter Randall Williams, and consumer spending expert Amanda Mull will take you inside the boardrooms, the backrooms, even the signal chats that make our economy tick. Hey, I want to learn about VeChain. I want to buy some blockchain or whatever it is that they're doing.

So listen to Everybody's Business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello world, but specifically Australia. This is Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards. And I just wanted my Australian listeners in particular to know that I stood up for you against Caitlin's cruelty just a minute ago.

She pronounced the name of your greatest city, Melbourne. Melbourne. Like a savage. Yeah, he said Melbourne. And then... Yeah. Okay, well, what about the people who live in Sydney or other cities in Australia? There's one city in Australia. Its name is Melbourne, and that's the end of this digression. Okay.

Hello, Caitlin Durante, guest for today's episode. How are you doing? Well, I would be doing better if you would pronounce my last name correctly. Speaking of mispronunciation. Durante. Okay.

Caitlin Durante. 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 said. Yeah, he thinks Ariana Grande's name is Ariana Grande, so... You know, Sophie, you've been giving me guff about that one for a while. As it deserves. Mm-hmm. Well, now I'm sad. Don't be sad, Robert. This is part two of our episodes. 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 a whole episode about, I don't know. It's part two of our Border Patrol series. Let's pass the Bechdel test right now, Sophie. Oh, Caitlin, I'm really enjoying the bluish shirt you're wearing right now.

Oh my gosh. Well, I'm so glad you brought it up because it's a Paddington shirt that says migration is not a crime, which is relevant to today's episode. Oh, wow. It really is relevant to today's episode that we're recording. It is, but then I said Paddington and that messed up the Bechdel test. I was like, are we gendering Paddington right now? Paddington is a non-binary asexual icon. Yes, yes, yes, yes.

So, kind of passed the Bechdel test. Okay, Robert, do you want to host your show behind the bastards right now? 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...

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 chaos. So I do apologize for this one being done a little bit differently than others are done.

On December 6th, 2018, seven-year-old Jacqueline Call crossed the U.S.-Mexico border near a place called Antelope Wells, New Mexico. She was with her father, 29-year-old Neri Call. Both were Kekchi Maya, and they'd lived most of their lives in the Alta Verapaz 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 Alonso, age 8, crossed the AOS Mexico border sometime around December 18th. He and his father, Augustin, were members of the Chuj people, another Mayan group who came from the Huehuetenango 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 a detention facility near Alamogordo. He started to show symptoms of sickness on the 24th. He was taken to the hospital, where he was tested for the cold, but not for...

which he had. He was given medicine that could not help him and sent back to jail where he died on Christmas Eve, 2018. Oh no. Yep. 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 2010. In 2010,

In 2019, though, it was revealed that another child, Darylyn Cordova-Vall of El Salvador, had actually died back in September 2018 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, you excited? I guess I have to. Also, what colorful language you used in terms of the corpses are at the top of an iceberg. I mean, wow. Yeah, you know, I think if you're going to talk about dead kids, you should do it with a little bit of panaz, pizzazz, panache. All right, I'm ready. Keep going.

All right. So let's talk about the Border Patrol and in Central America. We're going to talk about 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. But we don't talk about what a lot of Border Patrol guys did in...

in the countries that these people are fleeing from before people started fleeing from those countries. So this is going to be fun. Okay. This is going to be, this is going to be a good time for everybody. Uh,

So, John P. Longan was a U.S. Border Patrol agent in the 1940s and 50s. 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 Wetback, when the Border Patrol reformed itself into a paramilitary force to wage war on Mexican immigrants, Longan 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, 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'd consider torture. Longin was good at his job, and his performance in Operation Wetback 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 handpicked a number of Border Patrol agents to travel to places like Venezuela, Thailand, the Dominican Republic, and Guatemala. They particularly liked recruiting guys like Longan because they were likely to speak Spanish. Now, the way the State Department framed this program was training law enforcement agents.

So, 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 Wetback, Border Patrol administrators had described their work as fighting back against an invasion. In Guatemala, where Longan arrived in 1965, 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 1965, where he put into place a paramilitary unit that, early the next year, would execute what he called Operation Limpieza, or Operation Cleanup. Within three months, this unit had conducted over

80 raids and multiple extrajudicial assassinations, including an action that, over the course of four days, captured, tortured, and executed more than 30 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 War to send former Border Patrol agents, like Longan, 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 1970s, the United States, according to a 1974 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 in the design, manufacture, and potential use of bombs and incendiary devices.

Longin himself, in 1957, clearly described what he thought he was doing at the border. We're fighting a war on a wide battlefront. So that's good. So they're just basically training kill squads. They're just training people to murder people.

People. Yeah. And 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 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, 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. Yeah.

Oh, gee whiz. Have you ever been to Guatemala, Caitlin? I have not. Have you? It rules. Yeah, I spent a lot of time there. It's a great country, beautiful place, completely dysfunctional government. And you can see signs of the horrible civil war there all over the place. You'll cross the street and there'll just be a bunch of guys who are all missing arms and legs everywhere.

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 1980s that are backed by the United States and supported enthusiastically by the Reagan government. And these kind of networks of right wing people,

murder crews that were trained up and sent out by the CIA and their buddies in groups like the Border Patrol. This all starts now, and it's cool. It's great. And it's probably... I mean, it's refugees from...

Yep. These conflicts that are seeking refuge in... Right up to today. ...the U.S. And then they get here and they're like, well, sorry, fuck you. We're either going to murder you or be negligent and let you die in our custody or send you back to this 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 and the ocean. And that's why people are less willing to try to fix problems because they get killed. And so do 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. Yeah.

It's really good is what I'm getting at. So Operation Limpieza, which, you know, Longan, 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 activists, sympathizers and random people mistaken for either. More than 200,000 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 Kekchi and the Chuj.

The right-wing dictator who helped to organize much of this violence was General Afrain Rios Montt. He rose to power in 1981 and 1982, cooing his way into command with the help of his good friends, the U.S. Ronald Reagan described him as a man of great integrity who was totally dedicated to democracy. The nation's write-up continues, quote,

On June 17th, 1982, Guatemalan soldiers under the command of Rios Montt entered the San Francisco cattle estate immediately adjacent to Yalamboloc. The estate's owner, a military colonel, had fled because of guerrilla activity in the area. Soldiers went house by house rounding up workers and 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 the men with bullets or by beheading. After a day of slaughter, 350 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 1999 Truth Commission report.

After the massacre, Yalambaloc residents fled along with thousands of others, leaving the border corridor between Guatemala and Mexico completely depopulated as government troops razed 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, 1.5 million people were displaced by the Guatemalan Army's scorched earth campaign in 1981 and 1982. Guatemala's Commission for Historical Clarification called the violent displacement in the Mayachuj region an act of genocide. Young Felipe Gomez Alazano's father, he was one of the little kids who died. Augustin Gomez Perez was a child of 11 during that execute. Yalambaloc's villagers stayed away for 14 years, returning only after the signing of the peace accords in 1996.

So that's cool. What can you say besides that's horrible? You can say that like we're focusing on Guatemala right here because it's one where there's a bit more documentation. But like this should happen in El Salvador. It happened in a bunch of different parts of Latin and Central America where, you know,

refugees come from all the time now. It was, 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 winds up getting tied up and from time to time. And that's great. Oh, good grief.

Yeah, I... 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 U.S. policy and U.S. plotting played into the tragedy being suffered by these people and, like, the insecurity of these regions, they would have better attitudes towards, you know, Guatemalan migration and whatnot into the United States. Yeah.

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. It is this, oh, 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

But the fact that, you know, the white European settlers were escaping the same, you know, kind of civil unrest or religious persecution or whatever it was that caused them to fled their countries was,

And then we settled here by killing millions of indigenous people. And now we're like, well, 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? Because they're shit. Anyway. They're shit. So most of these death squads...

We're trained in the United States because, like, hey, if you're going to build a death squad for a foreign country, you don't want to, like, train it there. That's kind of gauche. So you bring them into your country to train them there because 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 Colombia and El Salvador, all throughout fucking...

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 men over there to learn how to become murderous guerrillas 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 four weeks, and it included curriculum like terrorist concepts, terrorist devices, fabrication and functioning of devices, improvised 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...

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 weren't 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. They were 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.

The reality of the whole program came out during congressional investigations in the 1970s. And I'm going to quote now from a book titled Instruments of Statecraft, U.S. Guerrilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and Counterterrorism, which is available in full for free online right now.

Quote,

Thank you.

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 in unmarked snatch vans 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. I keep wanting to say, like, ah, what a fun thing. 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. Yeah.

Because the only real... If you actually get into it, as we are today, the only real conclusion is that, oh, maybe when you have people whose job it is to police the border, they're just going to be the worst people. And maybe you shouldn't police the border at all because this happened. Maybe borders are completely arbitrary and mean nothing. And 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 they want to make their whole lives about punishing desperate people for the quote-unquote crime of crossing the border are monsters. And when you start giving them guns and power, they use it to enable genocides and political oppression abroad and then inevitably do 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 reporter or New York Times reporter John Crudson won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for a series of articles about the Border Patrol whose titles would not look at all out of place in 2020. The

Titles like Border Patrol Sweeps of Illegal Aliens Leave Scores of Children in Jails. That sounds a little familiar. The Intercept, summarizing his work, notes, "...patrollers," he reported, "...regularly engaged in beatings, murder, torture, and rape, including the rape of girls as young as 12. Some patrollers ran their own in-house outlaw vigilante groups. Others maintained ties with groups like the Klan."

Border Patrol agents also used the children of migrants, either as bait or as 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 Crudson 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 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 cinderblock cell for more than three months. In California, 13-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

even though she was a U.S. citizen. The Border Patrol released Perez into Mexico with no money or way to contact her U.S. 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 gratuitous and systemic, including stress techniques later associated with the war in Iraq. Wow. What kind of truly inhuman monster do you have to be to use... To join the Border Patrol? To be, yes...

And more specifically, to use children as bait or to snatch them first as just... I can't even form a sentence. That is... Yeah, it's not great. God.

I mean, the sentence that you said, like, I got teary-eyed, the mothers broke first or what? Oh, yeah, that was horrible. No, it's, 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. Yeah.

up to and including assault and 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 adore was the locking of migrants in freezing cold rooms called hillyeras or iceboxes. This goes back at least to the 1980s, according to Crudson. 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 served no real purpose beyond cruelty. Cruelty was the point.

Oh.

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? Yeah, that's the thing that happened. Oh, wow.

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INS 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 longstanding conflicts 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 fish for free on their ranches as payment. So this is kind of how they worked out that little set of disagreements, the uprising in Texas that had been sparked by a lot of this. So they would exploit the labor...

and then have an agreement with the border patrol and be like, okay, seize them on this day. Yeah. So that I don't have to pay. Oh my God. It's good. Yeah. Uh, Crudson, that New York times journalist even documented that one of the range, the ranches border patrol worked at an arrangement with was owned by president Lyndon B. Johnson while he was president. Oh,

Oh, holy shit. Good stuff. Between 1985 and 1990, federal agents gunned down 22 migrants just in the area around San Diego. The Intercept reports, quote, on April 18th, 1986, for instance, patroller Edward Cole was beating 14-year-old Eduardo Carrillo Estrada on the U.S. side of the border's chain link fence when he stopped and shot Eduardo's younger brother, Humberto, in the

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 at Mexicans, had reason to fear for his life from Humberto and use justifiable force.

Such abuses persisted through the 1990s and 2000s. In 1993, the House Subcommittee on International Law, Immigration, and Refugees held hearings on Border Patrol abuse, and its transcript is a catalog of horrors. One former guard, Attorney Hefner, at the INS Detention Center in Port Isabel, Texas, reported that a young Salvadoran girl was forced to perform personal duties like dancing the lumbada for INS officials.

In 2011, Hefner published a memoir with more accusations of sexual abuse by, as Hefner writes, the INS brass. Roberto Martinez, who worked with the San Diego-based U.S.-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 and 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 INS detention 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 enforcement is there to...

Prevent crime, stop crime, find criminals, etc. 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 it, since it is for some reason illegal to, you know, cross a border undocumented or without the proper documentation, you know,

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, 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 purpose is ever to prevent crime, whereas the reality is the purpose is to protect whiteness.

Exactly. Yes. Yeah. 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, uh, rather than being disorganized and sort of, uh, uh, 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, uh,

the, the kind of the, the state itself that like, that like backs up the existence of the state. Um, right. 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 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 terrorist organization, this hate group is...

Protected and quote justified because it is a government agency. Yeah. Even though they're committing the same heinous acts in the name of under the guise of some kind of protection. But truly it is the like you said protection of whiteness and criminalizing being not white. Yeah. And that's the that's the only way it's ever been. Yeah.

And that's the only way it ever will be as long as we have a border and we consider there to be some sort of fundamental value in the sanctity of that border. Right. And that's good. I want to cry about it.

Yeah, it's good to do that sometimes. Other times, it's good to continue reading a podcast script. Yes. 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 the people helps. Yeah, that's a way that you can describe this is informing the people. I don't know. You know...

Wow.

This sort 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 INS were sort of the redheaded stepchild of 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 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 and 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. 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 and New Mexico and stuff. But random people in Duluth, random Americans in Duluth or, you know, Wichita or Bumblefuck, Montana or whatever,

didn't really care about the border, right? The 80s and 90s, 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 4,000 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. They're many miles long. Yeah, they're pretty big. In 1993, NAFTA became a thing, the North American Free Trade thingamajigger, and illegal immigration grew by leaps and bounds alongside right-wing fear-mongering 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 shitload more people are trying to cross the border. Illegal immigration by the end of the 1990s is a major national political issue. And the Border Patrol more than doubles under Clinton. In the year 2000, our nation's peak year for illegal immigration, Border Patrol agents apprehended 1.6 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 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 nonwhite people from border areas.

From an article in Politico, quote, quote,

But despite millions of border crossings, the Border Patrol had the financing in 2001 for just 60 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 Chertoff, 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 1999, agents captured one of the FBI's 10 most wanted fugitives, a rapist and serial killer named Angel Maturino Resendiz, a.k.a. the Railway Killer, and unassigned.

unknowingly released him back into Mexico, whereupon Resendez 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 9-11 happens. You remember 9-11? I remember. It's good. You're not supposed to forget it.

Now, 9-11 happens, and if you were alive and cognizant at the time, you might remember that basically everybody and their grandma was obsessed with the imminent possibility that Al-Qaeda might drive a regiment of terrorist nuclear tanks or whatever across the Texas border. As someone who lived in Texas at the time, there were a bunch of people freaking out about how terrorist hit squads were going to be making their way up through the border. Kids at my suburban Texas high school were certain that Al-Qaeda 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. Wait, did they think they were going to like go to Mexico first and then cross the border? Is that what they thought? It didn't, it didn't really scan a lot. I mean, I'll say this. I think that, uh, it's maybe not talked about enough. The degree to which guys like John Milneus and movies like red Dawn prepared everybody to believe the bullshit, the Bush administration said about how terrorists were going to be sneaking through the border. Um,

But like, yeah, whatever. 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 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-Qaeda's gonna 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 Security Czar. Now, this was before the Department of Homeland Security existed. That came about in, like, November of 2002. But as soon as, like, 9-11 is a thing, Bush is like, oh, 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. 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 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 INS structure, they were the poor stepchild. That was how most of INS viewed them at every level. They weren't appreciated and weren't viewed with respect, and that created this defensiveness and insularity 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 job is to look for war criminals who might have, like, accidentally gotten citizenship or green cards. You have this other group whose 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 and power so they all vetoed that idea in unison no no no no fuck that shit

Instead, the decision was made to dissolve 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 9-11 hijackers after 9-11. So this is kind of what like, yeah, that's the wrong time to do that. Yeah.

Somebody probably should have gotten on the phone immediately after that and been like, hey, we should run these names. Just make sure we're not going to embarrass everybody. But they did.

And when the news kind of came out that INS had approved visas for two of the people who had just carried out the biggest terrorist attack in the U.S. history, the Bush administration was really not happy with INS. And that kind of spelled their doom. And in fact, when 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. Yeah.

INS 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 9-11 in the wide-ranging bureaucratic reorganization that led to the Department of Homeland Security. 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, 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 DEA head. His first and most pressing decision was whether or not to change the agency's famous green uniform, which is obviously more important than, like...

The rapes, the trading of women for sports tickets and stuff. Why is that the first order of business? Why are there any orders of business? Look, Caitlin, these brave men of the Border Patrol who only occasionally commit mass rape and sex trafficking that includes sex trafficking of 12 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 that uniform is not going to change.

you know, they have to be presentable. That's the most, that's the most important thing. Most important thing is that they, 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, let's them torture all those people and throw kids into, into, to 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,

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. Ew. Who cares about your green uniform? Oh, the Border Patrol cares. Like, fuck off and... Fucking losers. Fucking nerds. See, this is why... What the fuck? As I've always said, and Sophie can back me up on this, Caitlin, you would be a terrible head of the Border Patrol. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Because I don't respect the green...

Well, I don't even, I don't wear green, but it's because I hate the Celtics. So I couldn't have a job either. Okay.

Yeah, 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, hey, hey, you know who else is whore? No, no, no. And services.

And we're back. That Celtics dig, I just would like to denote that I will keep doing that and also high prop. I don't understand who the Celtics are. Celtics, I don't understand any of this. This is all Sophie's fault. If you love that team, send your death threats to Sophie. Yeah, if you love that team, just unfollow me.

Because we will never be friends. Also, I don't know who they are. Once again, high prop. Soccer? If you don't give a shit about any sports teams in existence, tennis maybe? Follow me.

Except for soccer. Soccer is allowed. Soccer is cool. Soccer is the only sport I respect. No, soccer is definitely not allowed. What? Soccer is allowed. There is one sport allowed in my ideal world, and it's that game they play in Afghanistan where they all ride around on horseback with a goat head and people get killed sometimes because they... Yeah, that's a good game. You just fully Roberted this entire thing. Anyways, follow Caitlin on Twitter and Instagram. She's a great follow. Continue with your...

And go to Afghanistan to play sports. Anyway, they were not particularly concerned, the Border Patrol, with making any changes to reduce the number of migrants killed by Border Patrol agents. Since 2003, Border Patrol agents have killed at least 97 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 Sonoran Desert. In 2004, the faith-based organization No More Deaths started leaving gallon jugs of water out near common footpaths in 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 in the PBS documentary Need to Know. Salon.com's description is quite good. Quote,

Do you know what tonk means?

I don't. So we talked about wetback in episode one and how that was the border patrol's kind of old term for particularly Mexican immigrants because of the river they have to cross. Tonk is the new slur that the border patrol uses for undocumented 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 the word tonk is like their standard term for migrants. And it's a term because of what it sounds like when they beat these people with flashlights. Well, okay.

Let me just process that. New slurs were, 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 9,000 to a 21,000 person army, the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country. There are actual armies smaller than the Border Patrol and less well equipped. They're the largest law enforcement agency in the country now. So that's good.

Hmm.

Yeah, you know, probably. It's not like any federal law 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.

Wow. What a workaround. Under Obama.

It's pretty much impossible. No, I just... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

We're not even really going to get into the Trump years in this two-parter because that's a whole other thing to start talking about. Most of this that we're talking about today, it's Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, Bush Jr., and Obama. Those are the guys that this is happening under. Those are the guys funding this enthusiastically. All of the politicians that everybody thinks are fine now because Trump is such a dick are

Anyway, yeah, it's pretty much impossible to exaggerate how bad Border Patrol is and was. I'm going to guess that most of our listeners come from a broad position that feds are not good, which is fine and accurate. But even among that company, 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...

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 700 pounds of marijuana across the border in his green and white Border Patrol truck.

The brand new 26 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 32 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-35 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 for $5,500.

In November 2007, 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-13 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, but he's not sure if he's

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 Esteban 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. Uh,

And yeah, earlier this year, an appeals court ruled that his victims could not sue the federal government as Manzanares 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. Oh, wow. The mental gymnastics that people do...

Just legal ones. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Now, the good news is that a few bad apples like Manzanares 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, 400,000 a year. As President Obama said in 2011, the presence of so many illegal immigrants make a mockery of all those who are trying to immigrate legally.

Now, yeah, that's good. Obama? It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool what a problem this was. Yeah, so... And again, all...

all of these legally immigrants make a mockery of everyone trying to immigrate illegally. The, 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 the, these years, but that's not, that's not making a mockery of like, right. 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 write kind of outside of the inherent, you know, problems of, of policing a border. Yeah.

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. Yeah.

Now, the issues of hiring a bunch of people for an agency based on assaulting non-white people and giving them broad powers were compounded by structural problems within 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 Mulder 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,

The problem was that no one at CBP received what's known as 1811 authority. When DHS was set up, ICE was given exclusive 1811 authority to conduct investigations in the border region. CBP was only given so-called 1801 authority, a lesser classification that allowed Border Patrol agents and customs officers to make arrests and enforce federal law but not investigate. They could be cops but not detectives.

This didn't particularly matter in the daily performance of CBP's duties. The boarders were patrolled, the ports of entry watched, except that CBP was legally prohibited from policing its own workforce. Hmm.

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. And 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. Wow. Oh, accountability. Holy crap. Yeah. Yeah.

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. It's bleak. That is very bleak.

By 2012, the problems in Border Patrol were obvious enough that they spilled out into the public's fear. The Arizona Republic conducted an investigation which showed that agents had killed at least 42 people, 13 of whom were citizens, since 2005. In 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 PERF investigated 67 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 Patrol 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

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 a rock either. What I can find is that, in 2014, CBP leadership estimated a full 20% of their force was corrupt. Attempts at reform were made in the last two years of the Obama administration, and in 2016, 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 fine. 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 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 BORTACs.

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, yeah, I guess that's another podcast.

Yeah, it's another kind of podcast, and I guess if I'm going to leave somewhere, or are in this somewhere, I probably...

It would probably be good to end by talking again about Harlan Carter for just a little bit. Do you remember Harlan Carter? He was the former Border Patrol head who was in charge during Operation Wetback and who was a convicted murderer. In 1931, he shot a Mexican boy in the chest. So yeah, the young...

Mexican boy that he murdered was named Raymond Casiano. 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 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'd want to get a drink with. And there's a couple lines about him in this song, Raymond Cassiano, which is named after the guy that Harlan Carter killed.

And it's a song really about not just Harlan Carter, but about the kind 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 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 want to, you want to plug your pluggables? 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 and Instagram at Caitlin Durante. And you can check out my podcast on this network called The Bechdelcast. So, you know, that little conversation that Sophie and I had at the beginning was a reference to that. We talk about the representation of women in film. Yeah, check it all out.

Check it all out. And you can follow Robert on Twitter at I Write OK. You can follow this podcast on Twitter and Instagram at Bastards Pod. You can now email us at BehindTheBastards at iHeartMedia.com and you can buy merch at our TeePublic store. You can also buy merch from Caitlin and Jamie's TeePublic store, which has some of my absolute favorite items in the entire planet. Feminist icon. How's that for a plug?

That was great. Thank you, Sophie. Speaking of feminist icons, you know who else is a feminist icon? I can't wait to see who you say. Oh, dear God. Caitlin Durante. Oh, thank you. All right. This ended very, very, very, very warmly. Thank you. That's the episode. Bye, guys. That is the motherfucking episode. Bye.

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

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