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

Originally aired August 2020 Robert is joined by Caitlin Durante to discuss the U. S. Border Patrol. SOURCES: https://timeline.com/harlon-carter-nra-murder-2f8227f2434f https://timeline.com/harlon-carter-nra-murder-2f8227f2434f%C2%A0 https://theintercept.com/2019/01/12/border-patrol-history/ https://theintercept.com/2019/01/12/border-patrol-history/%C2%A0 https://www.texasobserver.org/texas-civil-rights-project-harrington-retire/ https://www.texasobserver.org/texas-civil-rights-project-harrington-retire/%C2%A0 https://www.amazon.com/Migra-History-Border-American-Crossroads/dp/0520266412 https://www.salon.com/2012/07/20/cruelty_on_the_border/ https://www.salon.com/2012/07/20/cruelty_on_the_border/%C2%A0 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/10/border-patrol-the-green-monster-112220 https://www.propublica.org/article/a-group-of-agents-rose-through-the-ranks-to-lead-the-border-patrol-theyre-leaving-it-in-crisis https://www.propublica.org/article/a-group-of-agents-rose-through-the-ranks-to-lead-the-border-patrol-theyre-leaving-it-in-crisis%C2%A0 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/15/us/border-patrol-culture.html https://books.google.com/books?id=mFQor2oScm0C&pg=PA29&dq=kicking+a+Mexican+male+who+was+handcuffed+and+lying+facedown+on+the+ground&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwinlJqK0r3fAhUSnFkKHdzJDD4Q6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=kicking%20a%20Mexican%20male%20who%20was%20handcuffed%20and%20lying%20facedown%20on%20the%20ground&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=mFQor2oScm0C&pg=PA29&dq=kicking+a+Mexican+male+who+was+handcuffed+and+lying+facedown+on+the+ground&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwinlJqK0r3fAhUSnFkKHdzJDD4Q6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=kicking%20a%20Mexican%20male%20who%20was%20handcuffed%20and%20lying%20facedown%20on%20the%20ground&f=false%C2%A0 See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Robert Evans?

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• 1:07Speaker 03

  Call Zone Media.

• 1:10Robert Evans?

  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 on 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.

• 1:48Robert Evans?

  You know, introducing a podcast is a little bit like making love.

• 1:54Robert Evans?

  It's not.

• 1:56Robert Evans?

  It's not at all. I'm so sorry. I'm Robert Evans, failing to introduce my podcast yet again. It's Behind the Bastards. It's about terrible people. I'm so sorry, everyone. I was, I was trying to open with my folksy wisdom, but I have none. And I've got, now I've botched the start of this episode. Here to attempt to take away some of my shame is Caitlin Duranty. Caitlin, how are you doing today?

• 2:22Speaker 04

  Oh, you know, I'm just barely keeping it together at any moment. But otherwise.

• 2:30Robert Evans?

  Caitlin, can you think of any similarities between introducing a podcast and making love?

• 2:35Speaker 04

  Well, let me think about that. Um.

• 2:40Speaker 03

  Oh, I have one. I have one. I have one. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The audio levels can go up and down.

• 2:46Robert Evans?

  The audio levels can go up and down. That's a good similarity, Sophie.

• 2:49Speaker 03

  Thank you very much.

• 2:50Speaker 04

  Sure. Maybe an entire ep- not just introducing an episode, but in an entire episode, I think you could draw some parallels between. Cause 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.

• 3:08Robert Evans?

  Well, there you go, everybody.

• 3:09Speaker 03

  We figured it out. We figured it out.

• 3:10Robert Evans?

  You wanted to compare a random episode of my podcast about bad people to Making Love. Caitlin Duranty has kinda made it easier? Maybe? Caitlin, how are you doing today?

• 3:22Speaker 04

  I'm all right. Um, you know, I'm just.

• 3:27Speaker 03

  You're in your closet recording.

• 3:29Speaker 04

  I'm in my closet.

• 3:30Robert Evans?

  You're in your closet. I'm looking at your luggage right now. Nice luggage. I see you go with the hard shell.

• 3:36Speaker 04

  Thank you. Yes.

• 3:38Speaker 03

  It is a really nice closet. If I remember from the photos you sent me, like it's a very good sized closet.

• 3:44Speaker 04

  It truly is. Thank you so much.

• 3:46Robert Evans?

  You want to hear a little story about me, Caitlin? Cause 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 roly suitcase, even though they're much more comfortable to use at the airport than a backpack. Because as a young man with an indestructible spine, I was like. Only stupid old people use the rolly backpacks. I'm gonna be, I'm gonna 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. And that's why men shouldn't be allowed to hold political office.

• 4:25Speaker 04

  I couldn't agree with you more. Yeah, you mean, you, you carry around one of those like big like backpacking luggage things just like on your back.

• 4:34Robert Evans?

  Wow, yeah. Horrible, horrible. Sometimes they carry a duffel bag, even worse.

• 4:39Speaker 04

  That's absurd.

• 4:40Robert Evans?

  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, what do you do with backpacks and rolly suitcases, Caitlin?

• 4:51Speaker 04

  I mean, you bring them with you to travel?

• 4:54Robert Evans?

  You bring them with you to cross?

• 4:57Speaker 04

  Borders?

• 4:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and today we're talking about la motherfucking migra, the border patrol.

• 5:03Speaker 04

  Oh, boy.

• 5:05Speaker 03

  Wow, Caitlin, I just wanna say, nice job.

• 5:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 5:08Speaker 04

  That was great.

• 5:08Speaker 03

  Thanks.

• 5:09Robert Evans?

  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, um, you know, this has been a little bit of a weird run of Behind the Bastards, the uprising episodes. We're still gonna be doing the dictators and grifters, you know, that are our bread and butter. But, um, I keep getting obsessed with different law enforcement agencies, particularly the ones, you know, shooting at me. Uh, and so I started just kinda reading a bunch about, uh, 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 gonna talk about border patrol. Cause Caitlin, did you know the border patrol kinda problematic?

• 5:50Speaker 04

  Wait a minute, what do you mean?

• 5:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, not nice dudes, uh, 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.

• 6:06Speaker 04

  Okay, I'm listening.

• 6:07Robert Evans?

  Ninety-six years.

• 6:08Speaker 04

  All right.

• 6:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Which, you know, they still have time to change. You know, a lot of people have their best, their best, you know, their second act after age ninety-six.

• 6:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, I would say that applies to a large number of people.

• 6:23Robert Evans?

  A lot of tortoises, at least.

• 6:26Robert Evans?

  A lot of tortoises go on to do very cool things after age 96.

• 6:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, trees as well. There's a lot of old trees that are doing really important things.

• 6:34Robert Evans?

  Border Patrol could be like a sequoia.

• 6:36Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 6:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah, but I don't know how likely I think that is. So we're gonna talk about, we're gonna 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?

• 7:01Speaker 04

  You know, I don't feel good about it. I really don't.

• 7:05Robert Evans?

  That's good, because my cunning plan has been to blame you personally for all of the historical crimes of the US Border Patrol.

• 7:11Speaker 04

  Well, I did.

• 7:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 7:14Speaker 04

  Invent them. No.

• 7:17Robert Evans?

  You, you, you launched the Immigration Act of 1924. That's Caitlin Durante's, that's on your resume.

• 7:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, I didn't want that to be my legacy, but here we are.

• 7:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, a lot of people don't know this, but you used to be all of Congress in the early 1920s.

• 7:33Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 7:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 7:35Speaker 04

  I mean, pretty impressive when you think about it.

• 7:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah, no, it really is. Yeah, Congress Durante.

• 7:39Speaker 03

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

• 7:43Speaker 04

  That's true.

• 7:44Robert Evans?

  If we're gonna 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 US 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, that's the whole, that's the whole deal, right?

• 8:12Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 8:12Robert Evans?

  Um, so the US 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 US at this point, since it didn't allow slavery, but both countries not, not great to anyone.

• 8:40Robert Evans?

  Any like indigenous peoples or whatever, just, just, just bad, bad, bad governments. So at the end of the US Mexican war, uh, the United States wound up occupying Mexico City and that nation was forced to cede 50% of its northern territory in the resulting treaty. And I think a lot of Americans who grew up kind of outside of the Southwest don't really have a clear idea of how much land, um, the United States got as a result of the US Mexican war, but we took a shitload of land from Mexico. It's fucking crazy how much of this country used to be Mexico, like up into Oklahoma.

• 9:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't have a good gauge on that because I, I grew up in Pennsylvania and that just wasn't something that they bothered to tell us in history class.

• 9:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we went on like most of the Southwest was kind of at one point or another, um, part of Mexico. Um, and so, yeah, we took about 50% of Mexico's northern territory and a new US Mexican border was redrawn along the Rio Grande from, um, 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. Uh, 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, the territories

• 10:08Robert Evans?

  in the Southwest that, you know, became Texas and some of the surrounding states. Um, and the decades after the US Mexican war are kind of best viewed as a gradual process of white people taking this land from non-white people. Some of it through purchase, some of it through like violent threats and intimidation, uh, 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 the, just like really getting your boots in it, you know?

• 10:39Speaker 04

  I mean, those are the main principles that the US was founded on, right? White people stealing land from non-white people and, uh, genociding them.

• 10:49Robert Evans?

  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's 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.

• 11:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, why wasn't that their ad campaign?

• 11:17Robert Evans?

  Folgers will murder everybody. Coffee helps.

• 11:30Robert Evans?

  Oh, I was drinking coffee and it went down the wrong hole, Caitlin.

• 11:32Speaker 04

  Oh, no. Wow.

• 11:33Robert Evans?

  See, coffee can't be stopped from attempting genocide.

• 11:38Speaker 04

  Even coffee wants to murder.

• 11:40Robert Evans?

  Coffee wants nothing but to murder. So as we discussed in our last episode of the Behind the Police mini series that we just did, the Texas Rangers was kind of the first Border Patrol type force in, you know, the Southwest. And they began their history as a, as a group, like a paramilitary organization to provide, 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. And the Comanches, Tonkawas, Apaches, and Karankawas, who already resided in the area, got kind of angry and started murdering them. So Tumlinson ordered the formation of a roving defensive patrol.

• 12:25Robert Evans?

  This patrol became the Texas Rangers, but Tumlinson never got to see it formed because he was almost immediately killed by Karankawa and Huaco indigenous people before he got off the ground.

• 12:36Speaker 04

  Well, that sounds like karma to me.

• 12:38Robert Evans?

  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. Cause you know, whatever, sometimes you come into the office and you want to do things different.

• 13:11Robert Evans?

  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 Cariness 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

• 13:54Robert Evans?

  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 posse's 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, that's the first Border Patrol.

• 14:37Speaker 04

  Horrible.

• 14:38Robert Evans?

  Pretty bad, Caitlin. Pretty bad.

• 14:41Speaker 04

  Don't like it. I don't like it one bit.

• 14:43Robert Evans?

  Okay, so you are, you are on the, 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.

• 14:56Speaker 04

  Yes, and I am, I am happy to be on the record as taking that stance.

• 15:01Robert Evans?

  That's a bold stance. That's a bold stance. Gonna lose you some advertisers, Caitlin, especially our big advertiser, Raytheon.

• 15:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:09Robert Evans?

  When you really need a group of people intimidated by violence, there's no other option but Raytheon. Raytheon.

• 15:16Speaker 04

  It's not even, it's not even time for an ad break. You're just doing this for fun.

• 15:21Robert Evans?

  I know. That's a, that's a free, 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. 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 gonna say.

• 15:47Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm. Brave.

• 15:49Robert Evans?

  I have a sense of loyalty. So, for the first 20 years of the century, the US-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. Like, 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 they had family who would be up in Mexico or up in the United

• 16:28Robert Evans?

  States, and it would have seemed like madness to try to split these communities up based on an arbitrary borderline that nobody could even see.

• 16:39Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:41Robert Evans?

  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, basically, set up a quota system.

• 17:07Speaker 04

  Yikes.

• 17:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah, have you heard about this? This is when we decided that only one kind of white people were allowed in the country.

• 17:15Speaker 04

  Um...

• 17:19Robert Evans?

  This is the Italians aren't white enough law.

• 17:22Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:23Robert Evans?

  But people used to really care about that, right? In the 1924 Immigration Act, a big part of it was stopping Italians, or as they would have called them, "I-Italians," which it 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?

• 17:46Speaker 04

  You do know that my last name is Durante and that I am partly Italian.

• 17:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so am I. That's why it's okay.

• 17:52Speaker 04

  Good. All right. Awesome.

• 17:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are we, are we white? How's that, how's that work?

• 17:59Speaker 04

  Uh, I have heard slightly varying things, but I think by and large, Italian people are considered white. Yes.

• 18:09Robert Evans?

  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. Uh, and fascists are actually, uh, really diverse. And so like, it was a bunch of white people lecturing Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito. Uh, but, 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's 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."

• 18:50Robert Evans?

  Um, it's very funny. But in the 1920s, that was all of Congress.

• 18:56Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 18:57Robert Evans?

  And they were like, "We gotta pass a law to stop these Italians from coming in." Um, so yeah, the Immigration Act in 1924 bans all Asian immigration and tries to kind of restrict to only the, 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, um, restriction, were, uh, were Mexicans. Um, and this is because of hardcore labor or lobbying by the, uh, 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." Um, so it did, the 20, 1924 Act does kind of make an exception for that.

• 19:42Robert Evans?

  Um, 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.

• 20:02Speaker 04

  Yikes, don't like this on to that.

• 20:04Robert Evans?

  No, this is bad. This is bad. And the 1924 Immigration Act is what establishes the US Border Patrol for the very first time. So this fundamentally racist law written by people who justified it explicitly with race, like, like, bad race science is where the Border Patrol is 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. In 19... Yeah, it's bad. It's really bad, Caitlin. This is where Border Patrol comes from.

• 20:42Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 20:43Robert Evans?

  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."

• 21:06Speaker 04

  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 in Nazi Germany."

• 21:21Robert Evans?

  That's exactly what happened. That's exactly what happened. Oh, dear. 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.

• 21:31Speaker 04

  Holy shit.

• 21:32Robert Evans?

  You want to know something else cool, Caitlin? This is a neat story. You're gonna love this.

• 21:36Speaker 04

  Please, tell me the story.

• 21:37Robert Evans?

  You know, El Paso, great town, solid tacos, a lot of immigration in El Paso, right? Always has been, because it's the pass, 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 de-lousing baths for everybody who entered the country. And they would just douse them in pesticide. And the pesticide that they chose was Zyklon B!

• 22:08Speaker 04

  Wait, what is that?

• 22:09Robert Evans?

  That's what they killed all the Jews with in the concentration camps. Yeah, 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.

• 22:22Speaker 04

  Holy shit.

• 22:23Robert Evans?

  It was super flammable and sometimes people burnt horribly to death. Good stuff on the border.

• 22:31Robert Evans?

  Kind of always a nightmare.

• 22:33Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 22:33Robert Evans?

  Kind of if you study the history of the border, maybe the only reasonable conclusion is that borders are fundamentally toxic. But.

• 22:41Speaker 04

  And completely made up. They're just.

• 22:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and total bullshit.

• 22:44Speaker 04

  Constructs of like horrible, usually racist ideology.

• 22:51Robert Evans?

  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 is formed from a law that the Nazis look at and go, "That's a good law," says we the Nazis. Um. Sweet stuff, Caitlin. Yeah. So because the 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.

• 23:30Robert Evans?

  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.

• 23:40Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 23:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So as a result, and this is something we'll talk about in part two, this 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.

• 24:00Speaker 04

  So the whole thing, every like decisions are made all willy nilly. People are brought in.

• 24:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 24:06Speaker 04

  With no training.

• 24:07Robert Evans?

  No training.

• 24:08Speaker 04

  Being implemented with.

• 24:09Robert Evans?

  Nobody knows what they're doing.

• 24:10Speaker 04

  No thought given to it. They're just like, here's what we decided and we're not gonna take a second to examine this at all. We're just gonna do it.

• 24:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I mean, the current DHS Secretary Chad Wolf has no law enforcement experience, was never in the military, and I think went to college on like a tennis scholarship. Um, so it's great. It's cool how things are always exactly the same forever.

• 24:38Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 24:39Robert Evans?

  Because, yeah, again, if people ever learn a single lesson from history, the world will explode. So we have to not do that. Um, anyway.

• 24:51Speaker 04

  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?

• 25:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. You know, that's a good point, Caitlin. And that's, 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 drop kicking the doors of a federal courthouse to try to taunt the agents inside to attack them. I think, probably fine.

• 25:29Robert Evans?

  Probably learning about as much, right?

• 25:31Speaker 04

  True.

• 25:33Robert Evans?

  So, um, 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.

• 26:16Robert Evans?

  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.

• 26:37Speaker 04

  Don't give anybody power. It never goes well.

• 26:41Robert Evans?

  No, especially not poor, white men in the country. 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?

• 27:09Speaker 04

  Right.

• 27:10Robert Evans?

  Everyone is dying of diphtheria and the economy has permanently crashed. Please, please stop. Which I guess now we're back at, so maybe that'll help.

• 27:20Speaker 04

  I mean, wow, the parallels.

• 27:22Robert Evans?

  I don't hear as many people giving a shit about the border these days. I'll say that much.

• 27:26Speaker 04

  That's true.

• 27:27Robert Evans?

  But maybe it's because nobody wants to come here anymore. We did it, Caitlin. We finally stopped it.

• 27:32Speaker 04

  Just turn the US into a disease-ridden hellhole.

• 27:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah. All it took was a runaway plague that we completely give up any hope of ever dealing with.

• 27:45Speaker 04

  Yay.

• 27:47Robert Evans?

  You know what? President Trump figured it out. Good for him.

• 27:51Speaker 04

  You know what President Trump didn't figure out?

• 27:55Robert Evans?

  Oh, um, the products and services that support this podcast? That's right. We keep them a secret from the president.

• 28:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:03Robert Evans?

  But if you listen in, it can be a secret that you and I share and hide at all costs from the administration.

• 28:13Robert Evans?

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• 29:13Robert Evans?

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• 29:53Robert Evans?

  We're back. Oh my gosh. I for one love that Trump for America bought up all of our advertising space. When I think of president, I think of the president. Anyway, so immigration from Mexico had not traditionally been a big, big political debate issue, right? The wealthy agribusiness owners in Texas preferred simple immigration from Mexico, and they fought to ensure that Mexicans were not subject to the same harsh immigration restrictions as other immigrants in the 1924 bill. One business owner put it simply, "Without the Mexicans, we would be done."

• 30:32Robert Evans?

  Which hasn't really changed, you know? And it's like, we'll talk about this a little bit later on, but it is, it is this kind of, one of the things that you, I didn't even realize was like 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.

• 31:03Speaker 04

  Sure, they're easy to spot, yeah.

• 31:05Robert Evans?

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

• 31:44Robert Evans?

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

• 32:26Robert Evans?

  a whole lot better off for the white laboring man if there weren't so many inwards and Mexicans."

• 32:31Speaker 04

  Oh my gosh.

• 32:33Robert Evans?

  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. Um,

• 32:53Speaker 04

  I mean, which that all stems from capitalism, more or less.

• 32:59Robert Evans?

  Yes, absolutely.

• 32:59Speaker 04

  Where if there was any, um, 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? Um, because they're like a more just

• 33:24Speaker 04

  Just socialized economy would eliminate that fear.

• 33:28Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 33:30Robert Evans?

  Yep. So the, 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 undocumented migrants as a way of kind of equalizing their level of social power with farmers. Cause like, you know, they were poorer than these guys. They didn't have property, but now they had the ability to, to arrest these dudes workers. And like, that gave them a, a level of power in their culture and a level of power of these people who had kind of previously been

• 34:14Robert Evans?

  the bosses. Um, and you know, kind of for a lot of these guys who became the first Border Patrol workers, these were obviously, these were white men, but there were men whose kind of sense of whiteness had been hanging on by a thread prior to this, this opportunity coming around. And I'm going to quote again from the book MIGRA, quote, "Early officers may have lived in white neighborhoods, worshipped at white churches, and sent their children to white schools, but as salesmen, chauffeurs, machinists, and cowpunchers, they had labored at the edges of whiteness in the borderlands. The steady pay and everyday social authority of US immigration law enforcement work dangled before them the possibility of lifting themselves from a marginalized existence as what Neil Foley has examined as the white scourge of borderland communities. Policing Mexicans,

• 34:56Robert Evans?

  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."

• 35:27Robert Evans?

  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.

• 35:39Speaker 04

  Yeah. Oof.

• 35:41Robert Evans?

  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."

• 36:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so this is like...

• 36:25Speaker 04

  So we're seeing some internalized...

• 36:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Racism. It's a complicated history here. And I'm not going to, I'm not going to go into tremendous depth about this aspect of the history, because I'm just, 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 US 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

• 37:09Robert Evans?

  and pro-harsher immigration laws and laws against illegal immigration. They start to like 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, uh, most early border patrolmen, though, were, were white dudes. And it would probably be fair to call them white supremacists. Uh, 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

• 37:54Robert Evans?

  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 patrolers, 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 deployed increased. Border agents beat, shot, and hung migrants with regularity. Two patrolers, 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.

• 38:37Robert Evans?

  Other patrolers 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, if you ask me, we keep coming back to the KKK and how it repeatedly infiltrated law enforcement.

• 39:02Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:03Robert Evans?

  Someone maybe ought to do something about that.

• 39:08Robert Evans?

  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. Um, and this didn't really work out in the long run. Uh, she attempted to cut down on warrantless arrests. 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 non-citizens. Uh, but before long, FDR was pressured by the agricultural industry to put the Border Patrol under the control of the Department of Labor. 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. Right.

• 39:50Robert Evans?

  But there's a reason behind it because these folks had wanted these, you know, 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.

• 40:34Robert Evans?

  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, you know, they had been, they had been okay with these people coming in to work, but at the end of the day, there, there were the same kind of white supremacists as the, the Border Patrol men. They were just a little bit more refined. And once it started to look like these, these Mexicans were coming in and actually going to be contributing and changing the demographics of the nation, they panicked. And the only thing they could really think of to do was give the Border Patrol more power to enforce how many Mexicans could enter the country.

• 41:21Robert Evans?

  And there was a real big like debate over this, right? Because you, you still needed a cert, as, as these farmers, you still needed a certain minimum amount of, of, of migrants coming in every year in order to actually like keep your farms working. And the guy who kind of figured out a solution to this problem was Senator Coleman Livingston Blythe. 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 US Mexican border without doing it at a border station. That's 1929 that law is passed.

• 42:07Robert Evans?

  And I'm going to quote from an article in The Conversation explaining what happened here. According to Blaise'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 Blaise's bill, the Immigration Act of March 4, 1929, and dramatically altered the story of crime and punishment in the United States. With stunning precision, the criminalization of unauthorized entry

• 42:51Robert Evans?

  caged thousands of Mexicans Mexico's birds of passage. By the end of 1930, the US Attorney General reported prosecuting 7,000 cases of unlawful entry. By the end of the decade, US attorneys had prosecuted more than 44,000 cases. Now, Blaise's law applied technically to like Canadians as well, but basically everyone prosecuted under it was Mexican. And it was mainly used as kind of a method of non mostly 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.

• 43:35Robert Evans?

  And over the course of the decade, somewhere around 1 million Mexicans were deported from the United States. And most of these people were US citizens. Historian Francisco Baldorama argues that 60% of the million people who were deported were US citizens of Mexican descent. And Border Patrol forces would call the 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 for kicking them out.

• 44:14Robert Evans?

  So that's cool.

• 44:15Speaker 04

  I just, the, the resources that get used and spent to like enforce these laws and build prisons and maintain the prison and just like all, all of that 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.

• 44:51Robert Evans?

  Cause yeah, racism. Yeah. Yeah.

• 44:55Speaker 04

  It's absurd.

• 44:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, the Border Patrol's pretty lame, Caitlin. You know, this is like, but like this, 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 US 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.

• 45:20Speaker 04

  Right.

• 45:21Robert Evans?

  Yep. So, uh, the very, the primary method of action for Border Patrol agents, uh, from the beginning up to now, was violence. Um, the force was always undermanned and underfunded, uh, 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," explains 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

• 46:06Robert Evans?

  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, this is 1928 and kind of a common attitude, like this border patrol agent approaches a guy who's got illegal alcohol

• 46:50Robert Evans?

  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.

• 47:00Speaker 04

  What some people think justifies killing another person is something I will never comprehend.

• 47:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I don't think they thought they were people.

• 47:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, true.

• 47:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and it's, it's probably worth noting how common brutality was, uh, like, like open brutality was among US 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 US 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 gonna mess up. He's like, you know, my guys might murder some, some Mexicans. You know, my guys are absolutely going to commit murder in cold blood and I need you to like have my back.

• 47:55Speaker 04

  Right.

• 47:55Robert Evans?

  That's the Attorney General of the United States. 1954. Cool stuff.

• 48:03Speaker 04

  You know what else is cool stuff?

• 48:06Robert Evans?

  Uh, I don't, Sophie. I can't imagine what you're going for here. What is cool stuff?

• 48:12Speaker 04

  That's fine. Don't, that's fine. I'll just leave.

• 48:15Robert Evans?

  You know who isn't the, the Attorney General of the United States?

• 48:20Speaker 04

  Hopefully.

• 48:20Robert Evans?

  The products and services that support this podcast.

• 48:25Robert Evans?

  So racism's not good. You know who else isn't good? The head of the Border Patrol in the 1950s.

• 48:33Speaker 04

  Another good pivot. Nice.

• 48:34Robert Evans?

  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 Harland Carter. Now, Carter was, by the time he became the head of the Border Patrol, a convicted murderer.

• 48:50Robert Evans?

  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 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.

• 49:27Robert Evans?

  I love laws. Yeah.

• 49:31Speaker 04

  Our justice system is cool.

• 49:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he got rehabilitated. He went on to become the head of the Border Patrol. And also was the head of the NRA.

• 49:40Speaker 04

  Uh-oh.

• 49:41Robert Evans?

  Harland Carter's an interesting piece of shit. So throughout the 40s, apprehensions by the Border Patrol were kind of ad hoc and disorganized. And they were mostly the result of individual agents seeking out undocumented immigrants by catching them in transit. This meant that large numbers of people were almost never apprehended at a time. It was more just like agents kind of going out and hunting people down and grabbing a couple of folks. This was an easy system for dumb, violent men to like figure out. You know, you're just kind of, it's like hunting, basically. And it appealed to the kind of folks who became Border Patrol agents. But starting in 1950, a young agent named Albert Quillan 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,

• 50:24Robert Evans?

  Quillan began experimenting with bold new strategies. At 5:00 AM on February 11th, Quillan 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. Quillan 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 for the... Do you understand where that term comes from?

• 51:04Speaker 04

  I don't know that I actually know the source of it, no.

• 51:08Robert Evans?

  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, like, legal working rights to be like 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 called them wetbacks. Like, that's still, to this day, a racist slang term for particularly Mexicans, but kind of all people of 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.

• 51:52Robert Evans?

  This is what they call migrants. Yeah. So, Quillan's forces catch 561 wets on their second day, and on their third day, they catch 264. On the fourth day, they catch 134. In less than a week, they captured and deported more than 1,000 undocumented laborers. And this was, like, unprecedented. The Border Patrol had never caught this many people this quickly. It was seen as an astonishing achievement by Quillan's superiors, and they began setting up other raids in imitation of his. Border Patrol supervisors noted that these new "task forces," as they started being called, were, quote, "pounding away on these wets." Cool dudes. Soon, multiple task forces had been established throughout California and Texas, carrying out constant raids and netting huge numbers of undocumented persons.

• 52:37Robert Evans?

  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.

• 53:12Speaker 03

  Yikes.

• 53:13Robert Evans?

  Nice letter there.

• 53:14Speaker 03

  Oh, terrifying.

• 53:15Speaker 04

  Language. Also, you had said, um, 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.

• 53:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 53:33Speaker 04

  Yeah. To refer to simply someone who travels to another place and wants to stay there.

• 53:42Robert Evans?

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

• 53:57Speaker 03

  I'm not excited for the next civil war we have, but continue.

• 54:01Robert Evans?

  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. I'm sorry. That's not right.

• 54:22Speaker 04

  Uh, likewise. So am I.

• 54:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Um, anyway, it'll be up to Canada to be racist then. And then eventually Alaska. And then the biosphere will die. Um, so, you know, what won't die, Caitlin?

• 54:38Speaker 04

  Um,

• 54:40Robert Evans?

  Raytheon.

• 54:41Speaker 03

  Are you doing an unnecessary transition? Just, just do your podcast. Do your podcast.

• 54:45Robert Evans?

  I know I went off on a really sad rant. Uh, 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

• 55:28Robert Evans?

  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 like white farmers trying to defend their workforce.

• 56:11Robert Evans?

  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 Miegrah 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 Newton's oldest son was faster, though, and he succeeded in warning the undocumented migrants staying on the farm, which gave them the time they needed to run like hell and 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

• 56:54Robert Evans?

  book Miegrah now. "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.'" His pajamas, my mother, 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 of border patrol inspectors still led 53 apprehended workers away, saying,

• 57:39Robert Evans?

  "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, "Newton's father believed that by taking away their workers, the damn Yankee border patrol were splitting up a household. As he explained it to his son, the South Texans protected their homes, their families, their property and their way of life from the border patrol raids. He was the master.

• 58:22Robert Evans?

  The Mexican illegals were equivalent to the black slaves and together they formed a household, a system of labor relations in a world of tightly bound intimacy and inequity. The border patrol threatened their household by reducing the 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 US border patrol. Newton's brother took the lesson to heart. When the border patrol raided on another night, he stood in the family driveway with a shotgun aimed at the officers. Startled by the hostile 12-year-old boy, the officers left the property and returned on another day."

• 58:58Robert Evans?

  What's happening here is really complicated. Yeah.

• 59:01Speaker 04

  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 these workers, these migrant workers. And, you know, probably not paying them well, probably not offering them, you know, good benefits, etc.

• 59:37Robert Evans?

  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. And these, these farmers are like the border patrol agents want these migrants out because they're racist as fuck. And these farmers are also racist as fuck. They just want the migrants to stay because it

• 1:00:07Speaker 04

  Because they can exploit them.

• 1:00:09Robert Evans?

  The basis of their power. Exactly.

• 1:00:10Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:00:11Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:00:21Robert Evans?

  Yep. So, yeah, it's important to remember that kind of the struggle between border patrol and these border farmers in Texas was a struggle between two different groups of white supremacists. And one group of white supremacists was broadly in the right, because I guess it's, it's worse to round up thousands of people in cattle cars and buses and throw them back across the border for no good reason.

• 1:00:44Robert Evans?

  But there's no one you should be rooting for here. But what's really interesting, what's 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 cruel, inhuman and outrageous practices trading in human misery. They began to argue that hiring Mexicans was an act of kindness by American ranchers. Mexican laborers deserved the chance to win a better life by working low-paid jobs as domestic servants and laborers.

• 1:01:27Robert Evans?

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

• 1:01:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, because their lives being exploited, farmhands in the US is so much better. What? Oh, my gosh.

• 1:01:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's pretty cool how naturally that came to these farmers. Uh, I like it. So, the Border Patrol obviously didn't listen to the protest against them. They continued to, in their own words, "pound away in the borderlands," raising apprehensions. The increased workload 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

• 1:02:31Robert Evans?

  Rio Grande lobbied their congressmen to deny the appropriation request necessary to fund the new men in facilities. These farmers insisted they weren't lobbying for their own benefit, but 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,

• 1:03:14Robert Evans?

  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, Falferias and Hebrunville. 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."

• 1:03:34Robert Evans?

  It's one of those things, I guess, I like, I always kind of debate when you've got like, something that is essentially a slur is a slur in an episode of like this, how often to say it. And it's one of those things where I kind of feel like cleaning up the Border Patrol's official statements in the matter would be, I don't know, making it seem like they were less of a naked force for white supremacy than they were. Like if you, if you, if you replace that with Mexican nationals, that's not really what they're saying. Yeah, I don't know.

• 1:04:04Speaker 04

  That's, yeah, I mean, that puts you in a pretty tricky position. Yeah, I don't know.

• 1:04:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they use it a lot. It's, 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 US as an invasion, and they sought to repel it with military force. As 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, these undocumented migrants as like an assault on, on white blood more than anything else. In 1953, with the rebellion of the Texas ranchers in full swing, Harland Carter, who's again, the murderer who became the head of the Border Patrol, sat down with two US generals to ask for their help. He wanted the military and the National Guard to assist the Border Patrol

• 1:04:55Robert Evans?

  in a nationwide purge of undocumented Mexican nationals called Operation Cloud Burst. 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 US troops. Part two, though, would be a containment operation, which would involve roadblocks on every major highway from the southwest to the interior of North America. These checkpoints would be used to search vehicles for illegal migrants around the clock. Part three was the mopping up phase, and this would involve a massive series of raids in northern locations, places far from

• 1:05:37Robert Evans?

  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 all on board with issuing that proclamation. But in the end, he kind of backed away.

• 1:06:22Robert Evans?

  And instead, he appointed a general, Joseph Swing, to be the new commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and was basically like, "We can't use soldiers for this because it's unconstitutional, but I'm going 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." Like, "Yeah, yeah, I still want a military operation to clear out these Hispanic people. I just can't use soldiers." So that's cool.

• 1:06:51Speaker 04

  Oh, good grief.

• 1:06:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:53Speaker 04

  The mental gymnastics that

• 1:06:56Robert Evans?

  What?

• 1:06:57Speaker 04

  That these people do to justify their horrible actions. Anyway, sorry, go ahead.

• 1:07:03Robert Evans?

  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 Quillan. 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.

• 1:07:28Speaker 04

  Jeez Louise.

• 1:07:30Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:08:07Speaker 04

  Yikes.

• 1:08:08Robert Evans?

  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 Alesian Park in Los Angeles into an open-air concentration camp. Um, yeah. That's neat. Go to Alesian Park.

• 1:08:38Speaker 04

  I've been there before, and I'll never go again.

• 1:08:42Robert Evans?

  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. Uh, 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 hell ships.

• 1:09:03Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 1:09:04Robert Evans?

  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 US government said, "We don't give a fuck." Um, and, 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 gonna quote again from the book Migra. "Between June 17th and July 26th, 1954, 2,827 of the 4,403 migrants apprehended by task, 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 brick yards were

• 1:09:46Robert Evans?

  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 on like raids in big Hollywood locations is because they were trying to make a point to these like these ranchers who

• 1:10:30Robert Evans?

  were still fighting them in South Texas. And the, the message was if we're willing to do this shit in fucking Hollywood, you'd better believe that one day we're gonna 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, we're the Border Patrol. And in the end, Operation Wetback was responsible for the deportations of somewhere between a quarter of a million at the low end and about 1.5 million people at the high end. And, you know, at the end of the day, yeah, it kind of ended in retreat by the Border Patrol. Part of this was that around the same time, the US government reformed the Bracero program, which allowed Mexican nationals to get legal working status in the US. And that became much more popular after this time.

• 1:11:13Robert Evans?

  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 gonna 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.

• 1:11:57Speaker 04

  Oh, yay. Can't wait to hear about it.

• 1:12:01Robert Evans?

  So how are you feeling?

• 1:12:03Speaker 04

  Um, I feel pretty terrible.

• 1:12:05Robert Evans?

  That's good. I love it when people feel terrible.

• 1:12:09Speaker 04

  Every, I'm always like, oh, I, 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.

• 1:12:23Robert Evans?

  Yes, and you were the one who picked this topic with a text message. LOL, I think the Border Patrol sounds fun.

• 1:12:32Speaker 03

  She did not.

• 1:12:33Robert Evans?

  There you are, Caitlin.

• 1:12:34Speaker 03

  She did not.

• 1:12:35Speaker 04

  That did never happen.

• 1:12:38Speaker 04

  Um, but yeah, I mean, it's good to be informed about these things. So I appreciate, um, learning and being further informed about it. Um, so I, yeah, thank you. Thank you for that.

• 1:12:52Robert Evans?

  Yep. You're welcome, Caitlin. Thank you for coming on.

• 1:12:56Speaker 03

  Is there a, a, a place as people might be able to find you, listen to you, ways to support your work?

• 1:13:05Speaker 04

  Well, there certainly are places to do that, starting with, um, 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, uh, the representation of women in film and just film in general, examining it through an intersectional feminist lens. So that is what we do. And you can, uh, yeah, check that out wherever you find podcasts.

• 1:13:40Speaker 03

  Are you doing any screenwriting classes right now?

• 1:13:42Speaker 04

  Oh, I, yes, yes, I am. Thank you so much for bringing that up. I also teach screenwriting, um, on account of a master's degree in screenwriting that I absolutely hate to mention or ever just bring up, but, um, it does allow me to teach online classes. So if that's of any interest to anyone, um, go to my website, CaitlinDurante.com/classes and, uh, I usually have new sections coming up, starting soon at any given point. So.

• 1:14:16Robert Evans?

  And if you want to learn from me, I don't teach screenwriting, but I do teach scream writing, 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.

• 1:14:29Speaker 04

  That's, sounds very educational.

• 1:14:32Speaker 03

  Sounds like what I do.

• 1:14:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we all have to have an extra couple of grifts.

• 1:14:38Robert Evans?

  So either pay Caitlin for an actual service or pay me to abuse you. Um, either way.

• 1:14:46Speaker 03

  Don't love that as a line.

• 1:14:48Robert Evans?

  You know what, Sophie, look, everybody, look, you gotta, you gotta be mean to the audience, Sophie. You gotta, you gotta really kick their ass.

• 1:14:56Speaker 03

  I don't know about you. I love them. I appreciate them. Uh, and I appreciate you, Robert. So kindness.

• 1:15:04Speaker 04

  Is there any way in which you think that like closing out a podcast is similar to making love, just to bring things full circle?

• 1:15:13Speaker 03

  Wow, good question.

• 1:15:14Robert Evans?

  Here's how closing a podcast is like making love. Both of them are inherently disappointing and, uh.

• 1:15:26Speaker 03

  You can follow Robert and I, right? Okay. On Twitter, you can follow us at Bastard Spot on Twitter and Instagram. We have a T public store. Uh, that's it. Bye.

• 1:15:38Robert Evans?

  Bye.

• 1:15:44Robert Evans?

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• 1:17:22Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:17:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, I said Melbourne and then, but then, okay, well, what about the people who live in Sydney or, or other cities in Australia?

• 1:17:54Robert Evans?

  There's one city in Australia, its name is Melbourne, and that's the end of this digression. Hello, Caitlin Durante, guest for today's episode. How are you doing?

• 1:18:03Speaker 04

  Uh, well, I would be doing better if you would pronounce my last name correctly. Speaking of mispronunciation.

• 1:18:11Speaker 03

  Durante. Caitlin Durante.

• 1:18:13Speaker 04

  Durante.

• 1:18:14Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:18:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, he thinks Ariana Grande's name is Ariana Grand, so.

• 1:18:24Robert Evans?

  You know, Sophie, you've been giving me guff about that one for a while.

• 1:18:27Speaker 03

  As it deserves.

• 1:18:29Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:30Robert Evans?

  Well, now I'm sad.

• 1:18:33Speaker 03

  Don't be sad, Robert.

• 1:18:35Robert Evans?

  This is part two of our episodes.

• 1:18:37Speaker 03

  If we didn't get to pick on a white man at the beginning of an episode, then like, what's the point?

• 1:18:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, this is, this is a whole episode about. I don't know.

• 1:18:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:18:48Robert Evans?

  It's part two of our Border Patrol series.

• 1:18:50Speaker 04

  Let's pass the Bechtel test right now, Sophie.

• 1:18:52Speaker 03

  Oh, oh, Caitlin, I I'm really enjoying the bluish shirt you're wearing right now.

• 1:18:57Speaker 04

  Oh, my gosh. Well, I'm so glad you brought it up because um you it's it's a Paddington shirt that says migration is not a crime, which is relevant to today's episode.

• 1:19:10Speaker 03

  Oh, wow. It really is relevant to today's episode that we're recording.

• 1:19:15Speaker 04

  But then I said Paddington and that that messed up the Bechtel test.

• 1:19:18Speaker 03

  I was like, are we gendering Paddington right now? Because that didn't.

• 1:19:21Speaker 04

  Paddington is a non-binary, asexual icon.

• 1:19:25Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, yes, yes. So I kind of passed the Bechtel test. Okay, Robert, do you want to go host your show Behind the Bastards right now?

• 1:19:31Robert Evans?

  Because I don't actually know if we passed the Bechtel test there, but you know what test we did pass is the writing for many hours about the Border Patrol test.

• 1:19:42Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:19:43Robert Evans?

  Which is a more important test, I think.

• 1:19:48Robert Evans?

  So, uh, you know, this one, we're splitting up a little bit weirdly, uh, over the course of two weeks because, uh, my entire life and schedule has been, uh, 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 US-Mexico border near a place called Antelope Wells, New Mexico. She was with her father, 29-year-old Neri Call. Both were Quechua 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.

• 1:20:33Robert Evans?

  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 eight, 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 Huahuetanango 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 named near Alamagordo. He started to show symptoms of sickness on the 24th.

• 1:21:16Robert Evans?

  He was taken to the hospital, where he was tested for the cold, but not for influenza, which he had. He was given medicine that could not help him and sent back to jail, where he died on Christmas Eve, 2018.

• 1:21:26Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 1:21:28Robert Evans?

  Yep. Good, good times.

• 1:21:31Speaker 04

  That's awful.

• 1:21:32Robert Evans?

  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 2019, though, it was revealed that another child, Darilyn Cordova Val 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?

• 1:22:17Robert Evans?

  Caitlin? You excited?

• 1:22:19Speaker 04

  I have to. Also, what colorful language you used in terms of the corpses are the top of an iceberg? I mean, wow.

• 1:22:29Robert Evans?

  You know, I, I think if you're going to talk about dead kids, you should do it with a little bit of panaz, pizzazz, banash.

• 1:22:38Speaker 04

  Um, all right, I'm ready, I'm, uh, keep going.

• 1:22:41Robert Evans?

  All right, so let's talk about the Border Patrol and in Central America. We're gonna 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 the countries that these people are fleeing from before people started fleeing from those countries. So this is gonna be fun.

• 1:23:09Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:23:10Robert Evans?

  It's gonna be, it's gonna be a good time for everybody. So John P. Longan was a US 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.

• 1:23:52Robert Evans?

  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. Longan 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. So, uh, yeah, the State Department framed this program as training law enforcement.

• 1:24:37Robert Evans?

  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 'Operación Limpieza,' or 'Operation Cleanup.'

• 1:25:20Robert Evans?

  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 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 envoy said needed doing. Until the early 1970s, the United States, according to a 1974 Los Angeles Times report,

• 1:26:05Robert Evans?

  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. Longan 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.

• 1:26:26Speaker 04

  So they're just basically training kill squads. They're just training people to murder people.

• 1:26:33Robert Evans?

  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, like, 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, um, you know, at the border. I mean, they do it a lot anyway, but like they have to be a little bit careful, but you don't have to be careful at all in Guatemala. So that's great.

• 1:27:10Speaker 04

  Oh gee whiz.

• 1:27:13Robert Evans?

  Have you ever been to Guatemala, Caitlin?

• 1:27:15Speaker 04

  I have not. Have you?

• 1:27:16Robert Evans?

  It rules. Yeah. Yeah. I spent a lot of time there. It's a great country, beautiful place, uh, completely dysfunctional government. Um, and you can see like signs of the horrible civil war there all over the place, just like you'll cross the street and there'll just be a bunch of guys who are all missing arms and legs. 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, it, it all kind of descends from this, the, the series of political conflicts that launch in this period of time, particularly in the early 1980s, um, that are backed by the United States and supported enthusiastically by the Reagan government.

• 1:27:54Robert Evans?

  And these kind of, uh, networks of right wing, um, murder crews that were trained up and sent out by the CIA and, and their buddies in groups like the border patrol. Um, this all starts now and it's cool. It's great.

• 1:28:08Speaker 04

  And it's prob, it's, I mean, it's refugees from

• 1:28:12Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 1:28:12Speaker 04

  these conflicts that are seeking refuge in

• 1:28:15Robert Evans?

  Right up to the today.

• 1:28:16Speaker 04

  US. And, and then they get here and they're like, well, sorry, fuck you. We're either going to murder you or, um, be negligent and let you die in our custody or send you back to this, you know,

• 1:28:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:33Speaker 04

  war torn country you're in.

• 1:28:36Robert Evans?

  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, in rivers and stuff, um, in the ocean and, um, 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.

• 1:29:06Speaker 04

  Oops.

• 1:29:07Robert Evans?

  It's good. It's really good is what I'm getting at. So, um, Operation Limpieza, which, you know, Longen, the Border Patrol guy orchestrated himself was a major moment in the history of Guatemala's collapse into a nightmare. The military intelligence system he helped to build would eventually eliminate tens of thousands of leftist 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 Kechi and the Chuj. The right-wing dictator who helped to organize much of this violence was General Afrain Riosmont.

• 1:29:51Robert Evans?

  He rose to power in 1981 to 1982, cooing his way into command with the help of his good friends, the US. Ronald Reagan described him as "a man of great integrity who was totally dedicated to democracy." The nation's write-up makes, continues, quote, "On June 17, 1982, Guatemalan soldiers under the command of Riosmont entered the San Francisco Catalyst State immediately adjacent to Yalumbaloc. 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

• 1:30:34Robert Evans?

  killed them in 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 Falla interviewed him. The San Francisco massacre was highlighted in Guatemala's 1999 Truth Commission report. After the massacre, Yalumbaloc 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.

• 1:31:13Robert Evans?

  In 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 Mayachuz region "an act of genocide." Young Felipe Gomez Alazano's father, he was the little kid, one of the little kids who died. Augusto Gomez Perez was a child of 11 during that execute. Yalumbalox villagers stayed away for 14 years, returning only after the signing of the peace accords in 1996. So, that's cool.

• 1:31:44Speaker 04

  Hmm. What can you say besides, that's horrible?

• 1:31:49Robert Evans?

  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 Colombia 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 from time to time, and that's great.

• 1:32:22Speaker 04

  Oh, good grief. Yeah.

• 1:32:27Robert Evans?

  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 US policy and, and, and US

• 1:32:40Robert Evans?

  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. And then the part of me that, 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

• 1:33:08Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:33:27Speaker 04

  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 the fact that, uh, you know, the white European settlers were escaping the same, you know, kind of civil unrest or religious persecution or whatever it was that caused them to fled their countries. And, uh, then, and then we settled here, uh, by killing millions of indigenous people. And now we're like, well, our borders are closed now. Uh,

• 1:34:10Speaker 04

  sorry, everyone. And it's like, how, how can you live? How can these people live with the hypocrisy of that simple fact?

• 1:34:20Robert Evans?

  Um, because they, they're, they're shit. Anyway.

• 1:34:23Speaker 04

  They're shit.

• 1:34:24Robert Evans?

  Uh, so most of these death squads, um, were trained in the United States because like, hey, if you're gonna build a death squad for a foreign country, you don't wanna like, train it there. Um, that's kinda gauche. Uh, so you bring them into your country to train them there because you, you, you, you, you know, you, you're good at training death squads. So the, 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, or all throughout fucking, uh, world. The place where they would like, take these men to teach them how to be terrorists, uh, how to make bombs and all this shit, uh, was the Los Fresnos, Texas Border Patrol Facility. Um, it was an existing base. It was in a good location.

• 1:35:05Robert Evans?

  Um, and the Border Patrol was perfectly happy to have men still over there to learn how to become murderous guerrillas and then set off terrorist bombs in the middle of their own countries. Um, cause 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. Uh, it lasted for 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?

• 1:35:48Robert Evans?

  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. And we're just learning like, here's different ways terrorists build triggers for bombs. They were learning, here's how to build triggers for the bombs you're going to make to kill people. Um, the, the reality of the, uh, the whole, the whole program came out during congressional investigations in the 1970s. And I'm going to quote now from a book titled Instruments, Instruments of Statecraft, US Guerrilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism, which is available for, in full, for free online right now.

• 1:36:32Robert Evans?

  Quote, "During congressional investigations led by Senator James Albaresque, uh, in 1973, eight officials admitted that the Los Fresnos sessions, what the press would call the bomb school, offered lessons not in bomb disposal, but in bomb making. The course is not designed to, nor does it prepare the student to be a bomber explosive techni- disposal technician. The rest of the instruction introduces trainees to commercially available materials and home laboratory techniques and the manufacture of explosives and incendiaries. Different types of explosive techniques and booby traps and their construction and use by terrorists are demonstrated." And again, all these classes were taught at a border patrol facility. And while the main instructors were CIA agents, it was not just the convenient location that made the ad, uh, agency use Los Fresnos.

• 1:37:14Robert Evans?

  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, um, they helped to train foreign police to do the exact same thing and much worse. Besides, that's fun. Like, I keep, I keep, like, wanting to say, like, ah, what a fun thing. What a, because I don't know what else to say. It's just like this Right. Kind of litany of horrors that we've all just kind of blithely funded our entire lives, even though a great deal of information exists on how bad this agency has always been. Um, because the only real, if you actually like, get into it as we are today, the only

• 1:37:55Robert Evans?

  real conclusion is that like, oh, maybe when you have, um, people whose job it is to police the border, they're, they're, they're just going to be the worst people and, and maybe you shouldn't police the border at all, uh, because this happened.

• 1:38:08Speaker 04

  Maybe borders are completely arbitrary and mean nothing. And why are, why have we decided that they, that crossing them is a crime?

• 1:38:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, it's bad. And the kind of people who decide that like, they want to make their whole lives about punishing desperate people for the quote unquote crime of crossing a 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

• 1:39:04Robert Evans?

  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. Titles like "Border Patrol Sweeps of Illegal Aliens Leave Scores of Children in Jails."

• 1:39:18Robert Evans?

  That sounds a little familiar. The Intercept, summarizing his work, notes, "Patrolers," he reported, "regularly engaged in beatings, murder, torture, and rape, including the rape of girls as young as 12. Some patrolers 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 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 patroler 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,

• 1:40:01Robert Evans?

  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 cinder block cell for more than three months. In California, thirteen-year-old Julia Perez, threatened with being arrested and denied food, broke down and told her investigator that she was Mexican, even though she was a US citizen. The Border Patrol released Perez into Mexico with no money or way to contact her US family.

• 1:40:45Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:40:57Speaker 04

  I mean, wow.

• 1:41:00Speaker 04

  What kind of truly inhuman monster do you have to be? To join the Border Patrol? To be, yes. And more specifically, to use children as bait? Or to snatch them first? As, just, like, I can't even form a sentence. That is...

• 1:41:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's not great.

• 1:41:27Speaker 03

  I mean, the sentence that you said, like, I got teary-eyed, the mothers broke first? Or what? Oh, yeah, that was horrible.

• 1:41:38Robert Evans?

  No, it's, um, I don't know. You know, when I talk about how this all actually makes me feel, there's no way to do that without repeatedly urging other people to commit federal crimes,

• 1:41:51Robert Evans?

  up to and including assault and murder. So I'm just, like, gonna stop right there and continue talking about the Border Patrol instead. Because we shouldn't do that on a podcast. One tactic the Border Patrol came to a door was the locking of migrants in freezing cold rooms, called hileras, or iceboxes. This goes back at least to the 1980s, according to Krudson. 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. Border Patrol agents throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s were repeatedly documented torturing migrants. A popular method was handcuffing them to squad cars and then making them run alongside the video as it half dragged them to the border.

• 1:42:35Robert Evans?

  Outright murder was common as well. One patrol agent told Crudson that agents commonly pushed illegals off cliffs so it would look like an accident. Much of the agency's behavior wasn't distinguishable from that of a straight up gang. Agents with INS, Border Patrol's parent agency at the time, were caught trading Mexican women to the Los Angeles Rams in exchange for season tickets.

• 1:42:56Speaker 03

  What?

• 1:42:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's the thing that happened.

• 1:42:59Speaker 03

  Ohhh.

• 1:43:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:01Speaker 03

  I can't.

• 1:43:05Robert Evans?

  Brave men and women of the Border Patrol. We're in the green.

• 1:43:10Speaker 03

  Oh my god, it's time for an ad break so that I can go vomit.

• 1:43:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you know who doesn't trade women for...

• 1:43:18Speaker 03

  You can't even do it.

• 1:43:20Robert Evans?

  Sports tickets.

• 1:43:21Speaker 03

  Vomit, vomit, it's an ad break.

• 1:43:23Speaker 04

  Products.

• 1:43:25Robert Evans?

  And services.

• 1:43:29Robert Evans?

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• 1:44:29Robert Evans?

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• 1:45:06Robert Evans?

  And we're back. Oh, we're having a good time.

• 1:45:12Robert Evans?

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

• 1:45:49Speaker 04

  They would exploit the labor and then have an agreement with the Border Patrol and be like, okay, seize them on this day.

• 1:45:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:56Speaker 04

  So that I don't have to pay them. Oh, my God.

• 1:45:58Robert Evans?

  It's good. Yeah, Cruden, that New York Times journalist, even documented that one of the ranches Border Patrol worked at an arrangement with was owned by President Lyndon B. Johnson while he was president.

• 1:46:10Speaker 04

  Oh, holy shit.

• 1:46:13Robert Evans?

  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 18, 1986, for instance, patroler Edward Cole was beating 14-year-old Eduardo Carrillo Estrada on the US side of the border's chain link fence when he stopped and shot Eduardo's younger brother Humberto in the back. Humberto was standing on the other side of the fence on Mexican soil. A court ruled that Cole, who had previous incidents of shooting through the fence at Mexicans, had reason to fear for his life from Humberto and used justify." 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.

• 1:46:58Robert Evans?

  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 lambada 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 US-Mexico border program for the American Friends Service Committee, testified that "human and civil rights violations by the Border Patrol run the gamut of abuses imaginable, from rape to murder. Agents regularly seized original birth certificates 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.

• 1:47:40Robert Evans?

  Rapes and sexual abuse in INS detention centers around the United States," Martinez said, "seem to be escalating throughout the border region."

• 1:47:47Speaker 04

  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 extension, Border Patrol, if it is, since it is for some reason illegal to, you know, cross a border undocumented or without the proper documentation, that is, quote, "a crime," according to ridiculous standards, right?

• 1:48:29Speaker 04

  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 is the most disgusting thing.

• 1:49:13Robert Evans?

  I, 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, is to protect, it's to protect whiteness.

• 1:49:28Speaker 04

  Exactly. Yes.

• 1:49:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And, and it's to provide an outlet for, for fascists in this country to do horrible violence on people in a way that is, rather than being disorganized and sort of being anti-state and being something that like causes disorder, being violence that they are allowed to carry out that, that enforces the, the, the kind of the, the state itself that like, that like backs up the existence of the state.

• 1:50:00Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:50:01Robert Evans?

  Like you have all these, you have all these tremendously violent people, right? And you can do a couple of things to them, but they're there. So either you, you try to like deal with them and, and de-radicalize them and make them less dangerous, you kill them. Or as we do, you give them guns and make them unaccountable and allow them to, to do horrible violence to large groups of people who have no political agency.

• 1:50:27Speaker 04

  Yes, that is exactly what it is. People who are like, well, the general population thinks that, you know, being a member of a hate group like the KKK is bad. So I'm going to do the same exact things that the KKK does, but it's being masked as a government agency. Like basically this terror terrorist organization, this hate group is protected and quote justified because it is a government agency, even though they're committing the same heinous acts in the name of.

• 1:51:10Speaker 04

  Under the guise of some kind of protection, but truly it is the, like you said, protection of of whiteness and criminalizing being not white.

• 1:51:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and that's the, that's the only way it's ever been.

• 1:51:28Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:51:40Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:51:41Robert Evans?

  And that's good.

• 1:51:43Speaker 04

  I want to cry about it.

• 1:51:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's, it's good to do that sometimes. Other times, it's good to continue reading a podcast script.

• 1:51:50Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:51:51Robert Evans?

  Which I will now do.

• 1:51:52Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:51:53Robert Evans?

  Because this is how I deal with problems. This is the only way that I deal with problems is by reading podcast scripts.

• 1:52:02Speaker 04

  I mean, informing, informing the, the, the people helps.

• 1:52:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's, that's a way that you can describe this is informing the people. I don't know, you know, um, in 1979, Maria Contreras, nine months pregnant, crossed back into the United States from Mexico legally after shopping for food. Border Patrol agents found this suspicious and they tortured her to try to get her to reveal information about undocumented migrants. She died under interrogation, leaving six children behind. 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.

• 1:52:49Robert Evans?

  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 these period, this period, while all of the horrible things we've been talking about have been happening, Border Patrol has Basically no money and very few agents considering like what it's supposed to be watching in its purview. It's just kind of a place where we keep all of our most violent law enforcement officers and they don't have the money to do much, but nobody's watching them. So they can carry out horrific acts of violence and that's the border patrol and really INS too, for the most part. Yeah. Border states probably had, you know, not

• 1:53:34Robert Evans?

  probably, border states had debates on the matter of illegal immigration. It was certainly like, you know, a political issue in Texas and in 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? Eighties and nineties, it was not a big vote getter for most of that period of time. Now, at the start of the Clinton administration, there were only about 4,000 border patrol agents watching both Canada and Mexico, which is not a lot if you think about how big both of those borders are.

• 1:54:05Speaker 04

  They're many miles long.

• 1:54:07Robert Evans?

  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

• 1:54:50Robert Evans?

  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 non-white people from border areas. From an article in Politico, quote, "Near the top of the border patrol's list of complaints was the policy known internally as CARP or catch- The catch and release policy. By the end of the Clinton administration, 80% of people who were caught and released with a notice to appear to deportation hearing never showed up in court. But despite millions of border crossings, the Border Patrol had the financing in 2001 for just 60 detainees a day across the entire country.

• 1:55:34Robert Evans?

  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 Materino Resendez, aka The Railway Killer, and 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

• 1:56:19Robert Evans?

  more funding to the Border Patrol.

• 1:56:21Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:56:22Robert Evans?

  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?

• 1:56:39Speaker 04

  I remember.

• 1:56:40Robert Evans?

  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 Plano, Texas was real high on fucking Osama bin Laden's hit list.

• 1:57:13Speaker 04

  Wait, did they think they were going to go to Mexico first and then cross the border? Is that what they thought?

• 1:57:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it didn't really scan a lot. I mean, I'll say this, I think that it's maybe not talked about enough, the degree to which guys like John Milne is- 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. 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,

• 1:58:01Robert Evans?

  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,

• 1:58:40Robert Evans?

  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 handle various border-related things and merge them into one border agency. But that would have meant several

• 1:59:22Robert Evans?

  different cabinet secretaries would have each lost tiny amounts of power and money because, you know, you have this group that's like, you know, your job is to look for war criminals who might have like, accidentally gotten citizenship or green cards. You have this other group, his job is to like, you know, handle customs enforcement." You know, you have the Border Patrol. You have like, uh, 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

• 2:00:05Robert Evans?

  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. Um, so this is kind of what like, yeah, that's the, that's the wrong time to do that.

• 2:00:27Robert Evans?

  Somebody probably should have like gotten on the phone immediately after that and been like, hey, we should run these names. Like just make sure we're not going to embarrass everybody, but they did. 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 US history, the Bush administration was really not happy with INS. And that kind of, that kind of spelled their doom. Uh, and in fact, when they dissolved the agency, no one from the White House even thought to call the INS Commissioner and tell him.

• 2:01:02Robert Evans?

  I'm going to quote again from Politico's article. INS was such a broken bureaucracy that it would be the single agency in the entire US government to receive the ultimate death penalty after 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.

• 2:01:41Robert Evans?

  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 and the training of women for sports tickets and stuff.

• 2:02:01Speaker 04

  Why is that the first order of business? Why are there any orders of business?

• 2:02:05Robert Evans?

  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's not going to change.

• 2:02:21Speaker 04

  You know, they have to be presentable. That's the most important thing.

• 2:02:28Robert Evans?

  The most important thing is that they get to still feel like they're part of the part of the old Border Patrol that they love. You know, the old Border Patrol that lets them torture all those people and throw kids into dank freezing cells for months on end, many of whom are actually American citizens. That's just how it's important, you know? Yeah. So, from Politico, quote, "Weeks before the new agency officially launched on March 1, 2003, he invited all of the Border Patrol's 20 sector chiefs to Washington to discuss the transition. They all arrived in DC in full dress green uniforms, shoes polished, brass buttons gleaming. As Bonner walked into the room, everyone stood and snapped to attention.

• 2:03:10Robert Evans?

  The new commissioner began his remarks simply, 'The Border Patrol will remain green.' The room erupted in applause and cheers. 'They're proud of the green. They were very proud of that uniform,' Bonner recalls today. 'They were concerned about losing that identity.'"

• 2:03:23Speaker 04

  Ew. Who cares about your green uniform?

• 2:03:29Robert Evans?

  Oh, the Border Patrol cares.

• 2:03:31Speaker 04

  Fuck off and... Fucking losers.

• 2:03:34Robert Evans?

  See, this is why, as I've always said, and Sophie can back me up on this, Caitlin, you would be a terrible head of the Border Patrol.

• 2:03:43Speaker 04

  Because I don't respect the green.

• 2:03:47Robert Evans?

  Exactly.

• 2:03:47Speaker 03

  Well, I don't even, I don't, I don't wear green, but it's because I hate the Celtics.

• 2:03:53Speaker 03

  So I couldn't have a job either.

• 2:03:54Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:03:55Robert Evans?

  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.

• 2:04:04Speaker 04

  Oh, my God, can we just go to an ad break? Jesus Christ.

• 2:04:07Robert Evans?

  Speaking of the Celtics, you know who else supports this podcast?

• 2:04:12Speaker 03

  Hey, hey, hey, you know who else is hor- no, no, no.

• 2:04:17Speaker 04

  And services.

• 2:04:20Robert Evans?

  And we're back.

• 2:04:22Speaker 03

  That, that, that Celtics dig, I just would like to, to denote that I will keep doing that. And also, high prop.

• 2:04:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's, I don't understand who the Celtics are. Celtics, I don't understand any of this. This is all Sophie's fault.

• 2:04:36Speaker 03

  My sworn enemies.

• 2:04:38Robert Evans?

  If you love that team, send your death threats to Sophie.

• 2:04:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, if you love that, if you love that team, just don't follow me. Because we will never be friends. Also, also, once again, high prop.

• 2:04:48Robert Evans?

  Soccer?

• 2:04:49Speaker 04

  If you, if you don't give a shit about any sports teams in existence.

• 2:04:55Robert Evans?

  Tennis, maybe?

• 2:04:56Speaker 04

  Follow me.

• 2:04:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:04:58Speaker 04

  Except for soccer. Soccer is allowed. Soccer's cool. Soccer's the only sport I respect.

• 2:05:02Robert Evans?

  Soccer's definitely not allowed.

• 2:05:04Speaker 04

  What?

• 2:05:04Speaker 03

  Soccer, soccer's allowed.

• 2:05:05Robert Evans?

  There is, there is one sport allowed in my ideal world, and it's that, that game they play in Afghanistan where they all ride around on horseback with a goat head and people get killed sometimes because they, it's, it's, yeah.

• 2:05:17Speaker 03

  You just, you just fully Roberted this entire thing. Anyways, follow Caitlin on Twitter and Instagram. She's a great follow. Continue with your podcast.

• 2:05:24Robert Evans?

  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 leading gallon, 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 deaths set up hidden cameras. They found, in every case, Border Patrol agents destroying water caches, almost with visible glee.

• 2:06:09Robert Evans?

  You can see one of these videos for yourself in the PBS documentary Need to Know. Salon.com's description is quite good. Quote, "Three Border Patrol agents, two men and a woman, are walking along a migrant trail and approaching a half, half a dozen one gallon jugs of water. The female agent stops in front of the containers and begins to kick them with force down a ravine. The bottles crash against rocks, bursting open. She's smiling. One of the agents watching her smiles as well, seeming to take real pleasure in the spectacle. He says something under his breath, and the word 'tonk' is clearly audible." Do you know what tonk means?

• 2:06:40Speaker 04

  I don't.

• 2:06:42Robert Evans?

  So we talked about wetback in episode one and how that was the Border Patrol's kind of old term for, for particularly Mexican immigrants because of the river they have to cross. Tonk is a new, 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.

• 2:07:00Speaker 04

  Oh my god.

• 2:07:04Robert Evans?

  You'll hear this if, in any article you read about the modern Border Patrol, that they, the word tonk is like their, their standard term for, for migrants. And it's a term because of what it sounds like when they beat these people with flashlights.

• 2:07:16Speaker 04

  Well, hmm, okay. Let me just process that.

• 2:07:23Robert Evans?

  New slurs were of course, of course, far from the only changes to hit Border Patrol during the Bush years. By the time President Obama took office, the Border Patrol had gone from an underfunded force of about 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. Uh, they're the largest law enforcement agency in the country now. Um, so that's good. All those new officers had to be trained up quick, and this did not leave time for rigorous vetting and background checking that other federal agents go through. Border Patrol agents today still have the least average years of experience of any federal law enforcement agency. They also have the lowest standards for new recruits. This may have something to do with the fact that Border Patrol agents are involved in

• 2:08:08Robert Evans?

  more fatal shootings than any other federal law enforcement agency. Uh, yeah, you know, probably. Uh, 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.

• 2:08:22Speaker 04

  Okay, I believe it.

• 2:08:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, one senior DHS official even admitted to Politico, quote, "The agency has created a culture that says, if you throw a rock at me, you're going to get shot." Between 2005 and 2012, roughly one CBP officer was arrested for misconduct every single day. During President Obama's first term, things got so bad that DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano ordered the CBP to change its institutional definition of the word corruption, so they wouldn't have to admit to as many problems when they were questioned by Congress about all of the murders.

• 2:08:56Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 2:08:56Robert Evans?

  Again, under Obama. Under Obama.

• 2:09:02Robert Evans?

  It's pretty much impossible.

• 2:09:04Speaker 04

  No, I just, uh, yeah.

• 2:09:08Robert Evans?

  Like, we're not even really gonna get into the Trump years in this two-parter, because that's like a whole nother thing to start talking about. Yeah, like, most of this that we're talking about today, I mean, it's Reagan, uh, Bush Senior, Clinton, Bush Junior, and Obama, right? Those are the guys that this is happening under. Those are the guys funding this, right? Enthusiastically, all of the politicians that everybody thinks are fine now because Trump is such a dick. Anyway, um, yeah, it's pretty much impossible to exaggerate how bad Border Patrol is and was. Uh, like, I'm gonna guess that most of our listeners come from a broad position that, like, feds are not good, um, which is fine and accurate, but even among that company,

• 2:09:53Robert Evans?

  like, even if you're like, oh, federal agents are pretty much all bad, it's shocking how bad the agents of the CBP are. Like, it's, like, it's staggering how shitty they particularly become in the aughts. Uh, and I'm gonna 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 1,000 kilograms of marijuana in Del Rio, Texas." The 32-year-old Border Patrol agent whose wife would tip him off on which buses

• 2:10:37Robert Evans?

  filled with illegal immigrants to let through his checkpoint on I-35 in La Radio, 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 censors 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

• 2:11:21Robert Evans?

  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. 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. 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

• 2:12:06Robert Evans?

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

• 2:12:20Speaker 04

  Oh, wow. The mental gymnastics that people do.

• 2:12:26Robert Evans?

  Just legal ones.

• 2:12:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, okay.

• 2:12:30Robert Evans?

  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.

• 2:13:01Speaker 04

  Obama.

• 2:13:04Robert Evans?

  It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool what a problem this was. Yeah, so, and again, all of these illegal 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, um, to, you know, drug smuggling, like every day a border patrol agent basically was getting arrested during the, the, these years. But that's not, that's not making a mockery of like-

• 2:13:39Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 2:13:40Robert Evans?

  Law enforcement or whatever. Yeah.

• 2:13:44Robert Evans?

  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, of the, the existence of the border patrol. Um, but there are also just sort of some, um, some reasons that you would describe as kind of broadly, uh, bureaucratic. There were a bunch of bureaucratic reasons why it happened too, right? Kind of outside of the inherent, you know, problems of, of policing a border. Um, for one point, like they were increasing the size of the border patrol faster than any law enforcement agency had ever been increased. Um, and that meant bringing in a shitload of people who weren't qualified. They had all of this money and they did not have enough people who could actually responsibly

• 2:14:28Robert Evans?

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

• 2:15:13Robert Evans?

  According to Politico, quote, "In many ways, the difference between the two is CBP's original sin, a seemingly minor technical distinction made in the harried heat of DHS creation a decade ago that would allow hundreds of cases of corruption in CBP's Office of Field Operations and use of force abuses in the Border Patrol defester for years. 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.

• 2:15:55Robert Evans?

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

• 2:16:20Speaker 04

  And those ones are barely accountable.

• 2:16:22Robert Evans?

  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.

• 2:16:33Speaker 04

  Wow. No accountability. Holy crap.

• 2:16:38Robert Evans?

  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.

• 2:16:47Speaker 04

  That is bleak. That is very bleak.

• 2:16:51Robert Evans?

  By 2012, uh, 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 DC-based law enforcement think tank. The P E R F 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 P E R F report advised,

• 2:17:34Robert Evans?

  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 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

• 2:18:17Robert Evans?

  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 racist right, 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

• 2:18:56Robert Evans?

  more I could and should get into about where things are at the moment with Border Patrol, but this is, it took me this long just to get us up to the fucking Trump administration.

• 2:19:09Speaker 04

  Right. And yeah, we're not even at the, you know, the whole, the frenzy around, "Build the wall," and just like, yuck. Yeah. Yeah. So...

• 2:19:23Speaker 04

  Guess that's another podcast.

• 2:19:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's another kind of podcast. And I guess if I'm gonna lead leave somewhere I or 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 the former Border Patrol head who was in charge during Operation Wetback and who was a convicted murderer? He in 1931, he shot a Mexican boy in the chest. So yeah, the the young Mexican boy that he murdered was named Raymond Cassiano. And there's actually a really good song about the Border Patrol and about Raymond Cassiano by a band I quite like called Drive By Truckers. And there's a there's a line in it about Harlan Carter, you know, this former head

• 2:20:11Robert Evans?

  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.

• 2:20:42Speaker 03

  So not somebody we'd want to get a drink with.

• 2:20:45Robert Evans?

  Not somebody you'd want to get a drink with. And there's, there's a couple of lines about him in this song, Raymond Cassiano, which is named after the guy that Harlan Carter killed. And it's, it's a song, you know, 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 worlds 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.

• 2:21:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:21:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's a good song.

• 2:21:22Speaker 04

  Mm hmm. I'll give it a listen.

• 2:21:24Robert Evans?

  So Caitlin, you wanna, you wanna plug your pluggables?

• 2:21:28Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 2:21:30Speaker 04

  Well, thank you for enlightening me with this information. A lot of it I did not know. So I appreciate now knowing. Depressing and upsetting though it may be, it's good to be informed. You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Caitlin Durante and you can check out my podcast on this network called The Bechdel Cast. 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.

• 2:22:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, check it all out.

• 2:22:15Robert Evans?

  Check it all out.

• 2:22:17Speaker 03

  And you can follow Robert on Twitter at I Write OK. You can follow this podcast on Twitter at Instagram at BastardsPod. You can now email us at [email protected]. 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.

• 2:22:41Speaker 04

  Feminist icon.

• 2:22:42Speaker 03

  How's that for a plug?

• 2:22:45Speaker 04

  That was great. Thank you, Sophie.

• 2:22:46Robert Evans?

  Feminist icons. You know who else is a feminist icon?

• 2:22:50Speaker 04

  I can't wait to see who you say.

• 2:22:51Speaker 03

  Dear God.

• 2:22:52Robert Evans?

  Caitlin Durante.

• 2:22:54Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 2:22:56Robert Evans?

  All right.

• 2:22:57Speaker 03

  This ended very, very, very, very warmly.

• 2:23:02Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 2:23:02Speaker 03

  That's the episode. Bye, guys.

• 2:23:04Robert Evans?

  That is the motherfucking episode.

• 2:23:06Speaker 04

  Bye.

• 2:23:10Speaker 03

  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/behindthebastards.

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