Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Hey everyone, Robert Evans here, and we're doing a rerun
Speaker 2: episode because I need the time to get caught up.
Speaker 2: But I figured we do this week. We rerun two
Speaker 2: of our old episodes, cut out a bunch of extra
Speaker 2: ads and put them in as long single episodes, and
Speaker 2: a couple of topics that are very important. First off,
Speaker 2: we're going to be talking about the Department of Homeland Security,
Speaker 2: which as an organization is as bastardy a bastard as
Speaker 2: we have ever discussed on this show. So here, please
Speaker 2: listen up to a series of episodes that have unfortunately
Speaker 2: only gotten more relevant as time has gone on. You know,
Speaker 2: introducing a podcast is a little bit like Megan Love.
Speaker 2: It's not it's not at all. I'm so sorry. I'm
Speaker 2: Robert Evans failing to introduce my podcast yet again. It's
Speaker 2: behind the bastards. It's about terrible people. I'm so sorry everyone.
Speaker 2: I was. I was trying to open with my folksy wisdom,
Speaker 2: but I have none, and I now I've watched the
Speaker 2: start of this episode here to attempt to take away
Speaker 2: some of my shame. Is Caitlin Duranty. Caitlin, how are
Speaker 2: you doing today?
Speaker 3: Oh? You know, I'm just barely keeping it together at
Speaker 3: any moment, but otherwise.
Speaker 2: Caitlyn, Okay, think of any similarities between introducing a podcast
Speaker 2: and making love?
Speaker 3: Well, let me think about that. Oh, I have one,
Speaker 3: I have one. I have one. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: The audio levels can go up and down.
Speaker 2: The audio levels can go up and down.
Speaker 1: That's a good similarity, thank you very much.
Speaker 3: Sure, maybe an entire episod, not just introducing an episode,
Speaker 3: but in an entire episode. I think you could draw
Speaker 3: some parallels between because you've got you know, there's like
Speaker 3: the intro is sort of like the foreplay, and then
Speaker 3: you've got, you know, usually a big climax. Dick finished
Speaker 3: to the episode.
Speaker 2: Well, there you go, everybody.
Speaker 1: If we figured it out, we figured it out.
Speaker 2: You wanted to compare a random episode of my podcast
Speaker 2: about bad people to making love, Caitlin Duranty has kind
Speaker 2: of made it easier. Maybe, Caitlin, how are you doing today?
Speaker 3: I'm all right, you know, I'm just.
Speaker 1: You're in your closet recording.
Speaker 3: I'm in my.
Speaker 2: Cloth, you're in your closet. I'm looking at your luggage
Speaker 2: right now. Nice luggage. I see you go with the
Speaker 2: hard shell.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 1: Yes, it is a really nice closet, if I remember
Speaker 1: from the photos you sent me like it's a very
Speaker 1: good sized closet.
Speaker 3: It truly is. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2: You want to hear a little story about me, Caitlin, please,
Speaker 2: I'm a narcissist. Okay, so you know I travel a
Speaker 2: lot too, Caitlin, and I have refused my entire traveling
Speaker 2: life to have like a hard shelled roly suitcase, even
Speaker 2: though they're much more comfortable to use at the airport
Speaker 2: than a backpack, because as a young man with an
Speaker 2: indestructible spine, I was like, only stupid old people use
Speaker 2: the rollly backpacks. I'm gonna be. I'm gonna be a
Speaker 2: young adventurer forever and I just get to wear a backpack.
Speaker 2: And now I just hurt myself every time I go
Speaker 2: to the airport out of pride. And that's why men
Speaker 2: shouldn't be allowed to hold political office.
Speaker 3: I couldn't agree with you more. Yeah, you mean you
Speaker 3: you carry around one of those like big like backpacking.
Speaker 2: Yeah, big old, big old, Yeah, horrible, horrible. Sometimes they
Speaker 2: carry a duffel bag even worse.
Speaker 3: That's absurd.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a terrible idea. But you know, it does
Speaker 2: tie in with the theme of today's episode, because what
Speaker 2: do you do with what do you do with backpacks
Speaker 2: and rollly suitcases, Caitlin.
Speaker 3: I mean you bring them with you to travel.
Speaker 2: You bring them with you to cross borders. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: today we're talking about the motherfucking migrat the border patrol.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, I just want to say, nice job.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thats It's been a long journey to starting the
Speaker 2: episode this week, but I think we got there nicely. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Sorry to everyone who's been you know, this has been
Speaker 2: a little bit of a weird run of Behind the
Speaker 2: Bastards the Uprising episodes. We're still going to be doing
Speaker 2: the dictators and grifters, you know, that are bread and butter.
Speaker 2: But I keep getting obsessed with different law enforcement agencies,
Speaker 2: particularly the ones you know, shooting at me. And so
Speaker 2: I started just kind of reading a bunch about customs
Speaker 2: and border patrol this last week or so, and I
Speaker 2: couldn't stop, and so I wrote a lot about them.
Speaker 2: And now we're all going to talk about border patrol
Speaker 2: because Kaitlin, did you know the border patrol kind of problematic?
Speaker 3: Wait a minute, what do you mean?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Not nice dudes, as it turns out, and have
Speaker 2: kind of been dicks for like a hundred something years
Speaker 2: or like one hundred years. They've been dicks for a
Speaker 2: long time, very close to one hundred years.
Speaker 3: Okay, ninety six years, all.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, which you know, they still have time to change.
Speaker 2: You know, a lot of people have their best, you know,
Speaker 2: their second act after age ninety six.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I would say that applies to a large number
Speaker 3: of people.
Speaker 2: A lot of tortoises, at least a lot of tortoises
Speaker 2: go on to do very cool things after age ninety six.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Trees as well. There's a lot of old trees that.
Speaker 2: Are recent border patrol could be like a sequoia mm hmm, yeah,
Speaker 2: but I don't know how likely I think that is.
Speaker 2: So we're going to talk about We're going to talk
Speaker 2: about lemigra today because they're terrible, and I don't think
Speaker 2: most people know how terrible they are. And their terribility
Speaker 2: is important because it is tied in with a lot
Speaker 2: of horrible things about this country and the very concept
Speaker 2: of whiteness. So how are you feeling about that, Caitlin?
Speaker 3: You know, I don't feel good about it, I really don't.
Speaker 2: That's good because my cunning plan has been to blame
Speaker 2: you personally for all of the historical crimes of the
Speaker 2: US border patrol.
Speaker 3: Well, I did, yeh invent them.
Speaker 2: You you launched the Immigration Act of nineteen twenty four.
Speaker 2: That's Caitlin Doranty's that's a sorry resume. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I didn't want that to be my legacy. But here
Speaker 3: we are.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: A lot of people don't know this, but you used
Speaker 2: to be all of Congress in the early nineteen twenties.
Speaker 3: M Yeah, yeah, I mean pretty impressive when you think
Speaker 3: of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, it really is. Yeah, Congress Dorante.
Speaker 1: Yeah you were. You were instead of Caitlyn, you were
Speaker 1: Congress Dorante.
Speaker 3: That's true.
Speaker 2: If we're going to talk about the border patrol, we've
Speaker 2: got to talk about the border. And given that the
Speaker 2: territory we currently know as like Texas, New Mexico, Arizona,
Speaker 2: and even Mexico is all land that was stolen from
Speaker 2: indigenous people, this is not like a case where there's
Speaker 2: a lot of good guys to choose from. If you're
Speaker 2: talking about like conflicts over the US Mexican border, you're
Speaker 2: talking about like a bunch of different states that kind
Speaker 2: of sucked fighting each other for land that wasn't theirs
Speaker 2: like that. That's the whole that's the whole deal, right.
Speaker 2: So the US Mexican War of eighteen forty six eighteen
Speaker 2: forty eight is the conflict that gained our nation most
Speaker 2: of the modern Southwest. It was a naked war of
Speaker 2: imperialist aggression against another nation that brutally subjugated indigenous peoples.
Speaker 2: One can argue that Mexico was like a broadly better
Speaker 2: country than the US at this point, since it didn't
Speaker 2: allow slavery. But both countries not great to anyone any
Speaker 2: like indigenous peoples or whatever. Just bad governments. So at
Speaker 2: the end of the US Mexican War, the United States
Speaker 2: wound up occupying Mexico City, and that nation was forced
Speaker 2: to seed fifty percent of its northern territory in the
Speaker 2: resulting treaty. And I think a lot of Americans who
Speaker 2: grow up kind of outside of the Southwest don't really
Speaker 2: have a clear idea of how much land the United
Speaker 2: States scott as a result of the US Mexican War.
Speaker 2: But we took a shitload of land from Mexico. It's
Speaker 2: fucking crazy how much of this country used to be Mexico,
Speaker 2: Like up into Oklahoma.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't have a good gauge on that because
Speaker 3: I grew up in Pennsylvania and that just wasn't something
Speaker 3: that they bothered to tell us in history class.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we were, like most of the Southwest was kind of,
Speaker 2: at one point or another part of Mexico. And so, yeah,
Speaker 2: we took about fifty percent of Mexico's northern territory, and
Speaker 2: a new US Mexican border was redrawn along the Rio
Speaker 2: Grande from the Gulf to El Paso and then along
Speaker 2: more or less an arbitrary line further west up the Pacific. Now,
Speaker 2: this meant that a huge number of people who'd previously
Speaker 2: lived in Mexico and had been able to travel freely
Speaker 2: around territory that was all part of one nation now
Speaker 2: found themselves living in between two nations. This included roughly
Speaker 2: one hundred and eighty thousand members of indigenous tribes, as
Speaker 2: well as about one hundred and fifty thousand Mexicans. So
Speaker 2: these three hundred thousandish non white folks owned most of
Speaker 2: the land, and like the territories in the Southwest that
Speaker 2: you know became Texas and some of the surrounding states.
Speaker 2: In the decades after the US Mexican War are kind
Speaker 2: of best viewed as a gradual process of white people
Speaker 2: taking this land from non white people, some of it
Speaker 2: through purchase, some of it through like violent threats and intimidation,
Speaker 2: some of it as a result of the reservation system
Speaker 2: kicking indigenous people off of their ancestral land, and some
Speaker 2: of it through just like good old, you know, good old,
Speaker 2: good old fashioned genocide, Caitlin, just like that, just like
Speaker 2: really getting your boots in it, you know.
Speaker 3: I mean, those are the main principles that the US
Speaker 3: was founded on, right, white people stealing land from non
Speaker 3: white people and genociding them.
Speaker 2: Your gosh darn right, Caitlin, Your gosh darn right. And
Speaker 2: that's why when I get up in the I'm just
Speaker 2: thinking of like a Folger's coffee commercial, you know, one
Speaker 2: of those old ones where was like a cowboy getting
Speaker 2: up on the range, sipping a Folger's coffee and then
Speaker 2: just like stepping into a pile of and just being like, ah,
Speaker 2: nothing like a nice morning walking barthrop through a pile
Speaker 2: of bones, the thing that I do every day as
Speaker 2: a cowboy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, why wasn't that their ad campaign for folders.
Speaker 2: Folgers, Well, murder everybody. Coffee helps.
Speaker 3: Oh.
Speaker 2: I was drinking coffee and it went down the wrong hole, Caitlin.
Speaker 1: Oh.
Speaker 2: Now, see, coffee can't be stopped from attempting genocide.
Speaker 3: Even coffee wants to murder.
Speaker 2: Coffee wants nothing but to murder. So, as we discussed
Speaker 2: in our last episode of the Behind the Police mini
Speaker 2: series that we just did, the Texas Rangers was kind
Speaker 2: of the first border patrol type force in you know,
Speaker 2: the Southwest, and they began their history as as a
Speaker 2: group like a paramilitary organization to protect white settlers in Texas.
Speaker 2: They were formed by a local mayor named John Jackson Tumlinson,
Speaker 2: who was part of the old three hundred white families
Speaker 2: who first settled in Texas with Stephen F. Austin. Now,
Speaker 2: it wasn't a popular decision for these three hundred families
Speaker 2: to settle in Texas, and the Comanches, Tunkawa's, Apaches, and Carnkawa's,
Speaker 2: who already resided in the area, got kind of angry
Speaker 2: and started murdering them. So Tumlinson ordered the formation of
Speaker 2: a roving defensive patrol. This patrol became the Texas Rangers.
Speaker 2: But Tumlinson never got to see it formed, because he
Speaker 2: was almost immediately killed by Karankawa and huaco In indigenous
Speaker 2: people before he got off the ground.
Speaker 3: Well, it sounds like karma to me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it sounds like it's fine. Like a shame they
Speaker 2: didn't get more people. So the Rangers were kind of
Speaker 2: this country's first border patrol force, and the primary method
Speaker 2: of action for them was just again really just straight
Speaker 2: up genocide. In the early days, there were like a
Speaker 2: paramilitary army. They acted as scouts for actual militias. They
Speaker 2: would swoop in and force Indigenous people out of their
Speaker 2: homes and onto reservations, but would also just burn their
Speaker 2: villages sometime and murder their women and children because you
Speaker 2: know whatever, Sometimes you come into the office and you
Speaker 2: want to do things different. I don't know.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: They also engaged in the murder and intimidation of Mexicans
Speaker 2: in border communities, and by the early nineteen hundreds, the
Speaker 2: indigenous folks had mostly been forced off of their land
Speaker 2: and the Rangers had become a police force focused mainly
Speaker 2: on Mexicano Mexicano communities on the border. The primary strategy
Speaker 2: was known to historians as revenge by proxy, and for
Speaker 2: an example, of how that looked. I'm going to quote
Speaker 2: from the American Crossroads book Migra quote. On June's twelfth,
Speaker 2: nineteen oh one, a Mexicano rancher named Gregorio Cortes stood
Speaker 2: at the gate of his home in Cairanes County, Texas.
Speaker 2: There he resisted arrest for a crime that he did
Speaker 2: not commit. The sheriff persisted, drew his gun and shot
Speaker 2: Gregorio's brother in the mouth. When he charged at the
Speaker 2: sheriff to protect Gregorio, Gregorio shot back and killed the sheriff,
Speaker 2: an act that was sure to bring the Texas Rangers
Speaker 2: to his doorstep. When they came, Gregorio and his family,
Speaker 2: including his wounded brother, were gone. All that remained was
Speaker 2: the dead body of the sheriff. The news of Gregorio's
Speaker 2: deadly fiance quickly spread across southern Texas, and Yeah, for
Speaker 2: ten days, the Texas Rangers and posses, numbering up to
Speaker 2: three hundred men hunted for him. When they could not
Speaker 2: find him, they sought revenge by proxy, arresting, brutalizing, and
Speaker 2: murdering an unknown number of Mexicanos. So that's like how
Speaker 2: the Texas Rangers kind of worked for a while. Is
Speaker 2: a Hispanic person commits a crime or a perceived crime,
Speaker 2: and if they can't catch him to murder him publicly,
Speaker 2: they just kill a bunch of other random Mexicans so
Speaker 2: that like people don't get up at e that's the
Speaker 2: that's the first border patrol. Horrible, pretty bad, Caitlin, pretty bad.
Speaker 3: Don't like it. I don't like it one bit.
Speaker 2: Okay, so you are you are on the You are
Speaker 2: on the record now about not being in favor of
Speaker 2: murdering random people as part of a fear based system
Speaker 2: of law enforcement.
Speaker 3: Yes, and I am. I am happy to be on
Speaker 3: the record.
Speaker 2: Of state dance. That's a bold stances. Some advertisers, Caitlin,
Speaker 2: especially our big advertiser, Raytheon. Yeah, when you really need
Speaker 2: a group of people intimidated by violence, there's no other
Speaker 2: option but Ratheon Raytheon.
Speaker 1: It's not even robot, it's not even time for an
Speaker 1: ad break. You're just doing this. I know.
Speaker 2: That's a that's a free that's a free one. Raytheon
Speaker 2: just had to lay off a lot of employees. Sophie
Speaker 2: and I, for one, have a sense of loyalty, so
Speaker 2: I'm trying to help Raytheon out with some free ads.
Speaker 2: So look, if you've got a couple billion extra dollars
Speaker 2: that you need to spend on missiles that are filled
Speaker 2: with knives in order to assassinate, you know, insurgent leaders
Speaker 2: in Yemen. Look, don't go to Lockheed Martin, go to Raitheon. Okay, there,
Speaker 2: it's just better knife missiles. Right. That's that's all I'm
Speaker 2: gonna say.
Speaker 3: Mm hmm.
Speaker 2: I have a sense of loyalty. So for the first
Speaker 2: twenty years of the century, the US Mexican border was
Speaker 2: policed by a mix of Texas rangers and like local sheriffs.
Speaker 2: Such enforcement was always piecemeal, with hundreds of miles of
Speaker 2: borderland operating basically autonomously, as it had for generations. Like
Speaker 2: the idea that we would police our border like didn't
Speaker 2: exist until pretty recently. For most of American history, it
Speaker 2: was just like, well, yeah, you've got this big empty
Speaker 2: chunk of country, and eventually it becomes Mexico, and it's
Speaker 2: nobody really gives a shit. Yeah, you see, all these
Speaker 2: communities had existed for forever, for hundreds of years in
Speaker 2: a lot of cases, and you know, they had family
Speaker 2: who would be up in Mexico or up in the
Speaker 2: United States, and it would have seemed like it would
Speaker 2: have seemed like madness to try to try to split
Speaker 2: these communities up based on an arbitrary borderline that nobody
Speaker 2: could even see. But yeah, in the nineteen twenties that
Speaker 2: started to change. In nineteen twenty four, the Immigration Act
Speaker 2: was passed and the Immigration Act banned all immigration to
Speaker 2: the United States from Asia, and it massively reduced immigration
Speaker 2: in from the south from southern and eastern Europe. The
Speaker 2: goal of the Act was for the first time, to
Speaker 2: enshrine in law the federal government's preference for Nordic whites
Speaker 2: above non white people when it came to immigration, so
Speaker 2: basically set up a quota system. Yeah, yeah, have you
Speaker 2: heard about this. This is when we decided that only
Speaker 2: one kind of white people were allowed in the country.
Speaker 2: This is the Italians aren't white enough law. But people
Speaker 2: used to really care about that, right in the nineteen
Speaker 2: twenty four Immigration Act, A big part of it was
Speaker 2: stopping Italians or as they would have called them, Italians,
Speaker 2: which it used to be I think more racist than
Speaker 2: it is and is now just a funny, old timeyway
Speaker 2: of making fun of Italians, which I'm always I'm always
Speaker 2: in favor of Caitlin. How do you feel you know, you.
Speaker 3: Do know that my last name is Derante and that
Speaker 3: I am I partly Italian?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so am I? That's why it's okay, good?
Speaker 3: All right?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah? Yeah? Are we are we white? How's that?
Speaker 2: How's that work?
Speaker 3: Uh? I have heard slightly varying things, but I think
Speaker 3: by in law, large Italian people are considered white.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 2: I was looking at a Nazi cartoon the other day
Speaker 2: because I do things like that for my mental health,
Speaker 2: and it was like, the point it was making is
Speaker 2: that like, social justice advocates are always white, and fascists
Speaker 2: are actually really diverse, and so like it was a
Speaker 2: bunch of white people lecturing Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohido, but
Speaker 2: because it was drawn by a fascist, they drew in
Speaker 2: Mussolini as a black man because they don't think Italians
Speaker 2: are white. So it's just like there were a lot
Speaker 2: of layers of wrongness there to parse through. Is one
Speaker 2: of those things that looked very confusing to people who
Speaker 2: don't immediately recognize, Oh, these are the kind of racists
Speaker 2: who don't even think Italians count as white. It's very funny,
Speaker 2: but in the nineteen twenties, that was all of Congress, sure,
Speaker 2: and they were like, we got to pass a lot
Speaker 2: to stop these Italians from coming in. So yeah, the
Speaker 2: Immigration Act in nineteen twenty four bans all Asian immigration
Speaker 2: and tries to restrict to only the right kind of
Speaker 2: white people. And the one real exception to this. The
Speaker 2: only kind of like non white folks who were allowed
Speaker 2: into the country under the Immigration Act without any kind
Speaker 2: of restriction were Mexicans. And this is because of hardcore
Speaker 2: labor or lobbying by the agricultural industry, right, because like
Speaker 2: basically you had all these ranchers and farmers in Texas
Speaker 2: particularly and in the Southwest, where like our entire industry
Speaker 2: doesn't work without these people, so you have to let
Speaker 2: them in. So the nineteen twenty four Act does kind
Speaker 2: of make an exception for that. It's very heavily based
Speaker 2: on race science, and in fact, like a big factor
Speaker 2: in what got the Act passed was a bunch of
Speaker 2: bogus studies conducted by the Eugenics Research Office at cold
Speaker 2: Spring Harbor that kind of provided intellectual justification for the
Speaker 2: law by arguing that the wrong kind of immigrants would
Speaker 2: leave the surges and violent crime and declines in IQ. No,
Speaker 2: this is bad. This is bad. And the nineteen twenty
Speaker 2: four Immigration Act is what establishes the US Border Patrol
Speaker 2: for the very first time. So this fundamentally racist law,
Speaker 2: written by people who justified it explicitly with race like
Speaker 2: bad race science, is where the border patrol is initially established.
Speaker 2: So literally born in an orgy of racism. And in fact,
Speaker 2: the nineteen twenty four Immigration Act that established the border
Speaker 2: patrol was so nakedly racist that Adolph Hitler took inspiration
Speaker 2: from it in nineteen Yeah it's bad. It's really bad, Caitlin.
Speaker 2: This is where borter patrol comes from. Oh no, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's not great. In nineteen twenty eight, Hitler wrote this,
Speaker 2: of the law, there is currently one state in which
Speaker 2: one can observe at least a week beginnings of a
Speaker 2: better conception. This is, of course, not Germany, but the
Speaker 2: American Union. The American Union categorically refuses the immigration of
Speaker 2: physically unhealthy elements and simply excludes the immigration of certain races.
Speaker 3: So wait, Hitler in the twenties took a look at
Speaker 3: what we were doing in the US and was like,
Speaker 3: I like the looks of that. Let me copy paste
Speaker 3: and do that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly what happened. That's exactly what happened. That's exactly.
Speaker 2: And he wrote extensively about how inspired he was by
Speaker 2: US immigration law, which was like the most racist in
Speaker 2: the world at the time. Holy shit, you want to
Speaker 2: know something else, Cool, Caitlin, this is a neat story.
Speaker 2: You're gonna love this.
Speaker 3: Please tell me the story.
Speaker 2: You know, El Paso, great town, solid tacos. A lot
Speaker 2: of immigration in Del Passo, right, always has been because
Speaker 2: it's the pass right, you know, that's just where it's located.
Speaker 2: Back in like the twenties and thirties, when immigrants would
Speaker 2: come in, racist white people were so worried about how
Speaker 2: dirty they thought Mexicans were that they would mandate delousing
Speaker 2: bats for everybody who entered the country, and they would
Speaker 2: just douse them in pesticide, and the pesticide that they
Speaker 2: chose with zyklon.
Speaker 3: B Wait, what is that?
Speaker 2: That's what they killed all the Jews with and the
Speaker 2: good yeah wow, yeah, that's another thing. The Nazis were like, Oh,
Speaker 2: this seems like something we could modify a little bit
Speaker 2: to make better for us. That's good stuff.
Speaker 3: It's not really shit.
Speaker 2: It was super flammable and sometimes people burned horribly to death.
Speaker 2: Good stuff on the border kind of always a nightmare,
Speaker 2: kind of If you study the history of the border,
Speaker 2: maybe the only reasonable conclusion is that borders are fundamentally
Speaker 2: toxic but.
Speaker 3: And completely made up. They're just yeah, and totalitye of
Speaker 3: like horrible usually racist ideology.
Speaker 2: They're just lines, racist lines we draw on a map
Speaker 2: that murder tons of people. It's awesome, it's really good. So, yeah,
Speaker 2: the Border Patrol comes out of is formed from a
Speaker 2: law that the Nazis look at and go, that's a
Speaker 2: good law, says we the Nazis. Sweet stuff, Caitlin. Yeah. So,
Speaker 2: because the Immigration Act was passed alongside a surge of
Speaker 2: racist nativist fear about those dastardly non white immigrants, it
Speaker 2: mandated that the new Border Patrol be established quickly. The
Speaker 2: first version of the force was basically built overnight from
Speaker 2: May twenty eighth to July first, so rapidly that there
Speaker 2: was no time for the patrol to actually create any
Speaker 2: kind of qualification exam for its new recruits. The first
Speaker 2: wave of men to wear the service's green uniform were
Speaker 2: instead required to pass the Railway Mail Clerk Civil Service Exam,
Speaker 2: which I'm sure is basically the same thing. Yeah. So
Speaker 2: as a result, and this is something we'll talk about
Speaker 2: in part two, this winds up being a long trend
Speaker 2: in the border patrol is every decision they make, they
Speaker 2: have to like immediately adopt it, and they never have
Speaker 2: time to train anybody to do the job that they're
Speaker 2: going to do, and everyone's just fine with this, and
Speaker 2: it persists for ninety six years.
Speaker 3: So the whole thing every like decisions are made all
Speaker 3: willy nilly people are brought in yeah, with no training,
Speaker 3: no training implemented, with nobody no thought given to it.
Speaker 3: They're just like, here's what we decided, and we're not
Speaker 3: going to take a second to examine this at all.
Speaker 3: We're just going to do it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, the current DHS Secretary Chad Wolfe, has
Speaker 2: no law enforcement experience, was never in the military, and
Speaker 2: I think went to college on like a tennis scholarship.
Speaker 2: So it's great, it's cool how things are always exactly
Speaker 2: the same forever.
Speaker 3: Hmmm.
Speaker 2: Because yeah, again, if people ever learn a single lesson
Speaker 2: from history, the world will explode. So we have to
Speaker 2: not do that anyway.
Speaker 3: But there's also a conundrum there too, right, because so
Speaker 3: much of history that gets taught, at least in schools
Speaker 3: is so horribly whitewashed, and revisionists that like, how can
Speaker 3: anyone learn anything from it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you know, that's a good point, Caitlin. And
Speaker 2: that's why as I see all these kids in the
Speaker 2: street who just aren't going to school anymore and are
Speaker 2: instead spending their nights dropkicking the doors of a federal
Speaker 2: courthouse to try to taunt the agents inside to attack them,
Speaker 2: I think, probably fine, probably learning about as much, right, true. So, yeah,
Speaker 2: the very first Border Patrol men were mostly mail clerks,
Speaker 2: and obviously mail clerks maybe aren't super meant to be
Speaker 2: tramping around the desert hunting people, and about a quarter
Speaker 2: of everyone in the Border Patrol quit in their first
Speaker 2: month of the job. Turnover remained incredibly high for basically
Speaker 2: the whole history of the organization, but particularly its early years,
Speaker 2: and this made it kind of impossible for it to
Speaker 2: develop any kind of functional internal culture at the start.
Speaker 2: By nineteen twenty seven, the Border Patrol had been forced
Speaker 2: to hire inspectors who could not even pass civil service exams.
Speaker 2: The agency tried desperately to recruit military veterans and men
Speaker 2: with law enforcement experience, but the vast majority of their
Speaker 2: new hires were just unemployed men who lived in border towns.
Speaker 2: These were white, working class folks who'd had trouble keeping
Speaker 2: a job and were kind of desperate for a leg
Speaker 2: up and the regular income that a law enforcement career
Speaker 2: would allow, as well as kind of the respect in
Speaker 2: pride or respect that you would get as a member
Speaker 2: of law enforcement. Right, Like they wanted some power. These
Speaker 2: were like, poor working class whites.
Speaker 3: Don't give anybody power. It never goes well.
Speaker 2: No, especially not poor white men in the country. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so immigration from Mexico into the United States had not
Speaker 2: traditionally been like a major subject of national political debate.
Speaker 2: People in Texas, you know, there were folks who cared
Speaker 2: about it, but like, really, on a national level, if
Speaker 2: you'd like run based on your plan to build a
Speaker 2: wall around Mexico, ninety nine percent of Americans had been like,
Speaker 2: what the fuck is your problem? Like, why do you
Speaker 2: give a shit about that? Right, everyone is dying of
Speaker 2: diphtheria and the economy is permanently crashed. Please please stop,
Speaker 2: which I guess now we're back at so maybe that'll help.
Speaker 3: I mean, wow, the parent I don't hear.
Speaker 2: As many people giving a shit about the border these days.
Speaker 2: I'll say that much.
Speaker 3: That's true.
Speaker 2: Maybe it's because nobody wants to come here anymore. We
Speaker 2: did it, Caitlin, We finally stopped it.
Speaker 3: Just turn the US into a disease uh ridden hellhole.
Speaker 2: All it took was a runaway plague that we completely
Speaker 2: give up any hope of ever dealing with. Yeah, you
Speaker 2: know what, President Trump figured it out. Good for him.
Speaker 1: You know what President Trump didn't figure out.
Speaker 2: Oh, the products and services that support this podcast, that's right.
Speaker 2: We keep them a secret from the president. Yeah, but
Speaker 2: if you listen in, it can be a secret that
Speaker 2: you and I share and hide at all costs from
Speaker 2: the administration. We're back. Oh my gosh, I for one
Speaker 2: love that Trump for America bought up all of our
Speaker 2: advertising space. When I think of President, I think of
Speaker 2: the president anyway. So immigration from Mexico had not traditionally
Speaker 2: been a big, big political debate issue, right The wealthy
Speaker 2: agribusiness owners in Texas preferred simple immigration from Mexico, and
Speaker 2: they fought to ensure that Mexicans were not subject to
Speaker 2: the same harsh immigration restrictions as other immigrants. In the
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty four bill, one business owner put it simply,
Speaker 2: without the Mexicans, we would be done, which hasn't really changed,
Speaker 2: you know. And it's like we'll talk about this a
Speaker 2: little bit later on, but it is this kind of
Speaker 2: one of the things that you I didn't even realize
Speaker 2: was a really problem when I was a young person,
Speaker 2: kind of dealing with the mix between outwardly hateful racists
Speaker 2: in the Southwest and nice people who don't realize they're racist.
Speaker 2: Is like the nice people, the outwardly hateful people are like,
Speaker 2: you know, the Trump type folks that you know, who
Speaker 2: want to build a wall and kick all the rapist
Speaker 2: Mexicans out.
Speaker 3: Sure, they're easy to spot, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And then you have this chunk of people who
Speaker 2: are like, well, I hate what Trump's doing, and like
Speaker 2: I'm happy to have Mexicans here because you know, they
Speaker 2: they do great work, and you know, they're they're they're
Speaker 2: great at this, and they're good at that, and they're
Speaker 2: good at And it's this thing where like, especially like
Speaker 2: you know, you don't necessarily notice, especially as like a
Speaker 2: young white person is eighteen nineteen, like what what's actually
Speaker 2: being said there, which is like the commodification of non
Speaker 2: white bodies, which is like not cool. But we're going
Speaker 2: to talk more about that later because this is where
Speaker 2: that all starts in an organized way, which is awesome.
Speaker 2: So the white working class in text so obviously like
Speaker 2: these kind of these kind of landowners, the kind of
Speaker 2: aristocracy in Texas in this period, right, like the ranchers
Speaker 2: and stuff. They were broadly like they wanted more Mexicans
Speaker 2: and they could never get enough because like they needed
Speaker 2: people to actually work their farms. But the white working
Speaker 2: class in Texas and the white working class even in
Speaker 2: rural areas, really had nursed like a growing hatred of
Speaker 2: Mexican people and had been for years. And this was
Speaker 2: based on a mix of like fear that Mexican immigrants
Speaker 2: would take their jobs, that was always like a core
Speaker 2: part of it, and also based on kind of like
Speaker 2: good old fashioned racism. One labor union official in Texas
Speaker 2: at the time noted, quote, I hope they never let
Speaker 2: another Mexican come to the United States. The country would
Speaker 2: be a whole lot better off for the white laboring
Speaker 2: man if there weren't so many inwards and Mexicans. Oh yeah, Well,
Speaker 2: and this is one of those things if you're like
Speaker 2: kind of squaring yourself with the history of labor, you know,
Speaker 2: I'm a big fan of labor history, and I think
Speaker 2: there's a lot of wonderful stuff there. You do have
Speaker 2: to square with the fact that, like a lot of
Speaker 2: those dudes who were right about a lot of important
Speaker 2: things were incredibly racist and hated non white people because
Speaker 2: they saw them as a threat to white working class people.
Speaker 3: I mean, which that all stems from capitalism more or less.
Speaker 3: Where was any fairness or parody when it came to
Speaker 3: income and labor. People wouldn't have to be worried about
Speaker 3: other people. There wouldn't be this fear of like, who
Speaker 3: is my job in danger? Who's going to take my job?
Speaker 3: Because they're like a more just just socialized economy would
Speaker 3: eliminate that fear absolutely.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So the actual laws on the books in this
Speaker 2: period of time had been written largely by the rich
Speaker 2: land of gentry who needed Mexican immigrants. But now that
Speaker 2: the border patrol existed post nineteen twenty four, the men
Speaker 2: in forceeing those laws were working class whites who really
Speaker 2: just hated Mexicans and they honestly didn't give a shit
Speaker 2: about the needs of farmers, and in fact, a lot
Speaker 2: of them saw kind of being able to police undocumented
Speaker 2: migrants as a way of kind of equalizing their level
Speaker 2: of social power with farmers, because like, you know, they
Speaker 2: were poorer than these guys, they didn't have property, but
Speaker 2: now they had the ability to arrest these dudes workers,
Speaker 2: and like that gave them a level of power in
Speaker 2: their culture and a level of power of these people
Speaker 2: who had kind of previously been the bosses. And you know,
Speaker 2: kind of for a lot of these guys who became
Speaker 2: the first border patrol workers. These were obviously, these were
Speaker 2: white men, but there were men whose kind of sense
Speaker 2: of whiteness had been hanging on by a thread prior
Speaker 2: to this, this opportunity coming around. And I'm going to
Speaker 2: quote again from the book Migra quote. Early officers may
Speaker 2: have lived in white neighborhoods, worshiped at white churches, and
Speaker 2: sent their children to white schools. But as salesman, chauffeurs, machinists,
Speaker 2: and cowpunchers, they had labored at the edges of whiteness
Speaker 2: in the borderland. The steady pay and everyday social authority
Speaker 2: of US immigration law enforcement work dangled before them. The
Speaker 2: possibility of lifting themselves from a marginalized existence as what
Speaker 2: Neil Foley has examined as the white scourge of borderland communities.
Speaker 2: Policing Mexicans, in other words, presented officers with the opportunity
Speaker 2: to enter the region's primary economy and in the process
Speaker 2: shore up their tentative claims upon whiteness. As immigration control
Speaker 2: was emerging as a critical site of simultaneously expanding the
Speaker 2: boundaries of whiteness while hardening the distinctions between whites and
Speaker 2: non whites. The project of enforcing immigration restrictions therefore placed
Speaker 2: border patrol officers at what police scholar David Bailey describes
Speaker 2: as the cutting edge of the state's knife in terms
Speaker 2: of enforcing new boundaries between whites and non whites. So
Speaker 2: that is the border patrol in this period, the cutting
Speaker 2: edge of the state's knife, you know, cleaving the boundaries
Speaker 2: between white and non white people. The way to look
Speaker 2: at it, very picturesque.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now this has made a lot more complicated by the
Speaker 2: fact that a chunk of the early border patrol were
Speaker 2: Mexican American and these guys in a lot of cases
Speaker 2: saw their ability their career in law enforcement as a
Speaker 2: way of separating themselves from non white people. The League
Speaker 2: of United Latin American Citizens or LULAC, specifically stated that
Speaker 2: Mexican American association with colored races is what held them
Speaker 2: back from full acceptance by white society in this period
Speaker 2: of time. And the book Migra includes the story of
Speaker 2: one early officer patrol inspector Pete Torres, who was marked
Speaker 2: by a colleague for being Mexican. In response, he shot
Speaker 2: at the man's feet and yelled, I am not a Mexican,
Speaker 2: I am a Spanish American. Yeah. So this is like.
Speaker 3: Internalized.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a complicated history here, and I'm not going
Speaker 2: to I'm not going to go into tremendous depth about
Speaker 2: this aspect of the history because I'm just I'm not
Speaker 2: at all the right person to do so. The right
Speaker 2: person to do so, in fact, is probably Kelly Little Hernandez,
Speaker 2: author of the book Migra, History of the US Border Patrol.
Speaker 2: She does talk about this in more depth, and I
Speaker 2: really recommend her book. But you should know that's like
Speaker 2: an aspect of what's going on here. And as a rule,
Speaker 2: one of the things that starts to happen in particularly
Speaker 2: around like the forties is kind of a growing Spanish
Speaker 2: or Mexican American community who are very pro immigration enforcement
Speaker 2: and pro like harsher immigration laws and laws against illlegal immigration.
Speaker 2: They start to solidify as a voting block in the
Speaker 2: Southwest in this period too, and they still are to
Speaker 2: this day. It's a lot of people are like shocked
Speaker 2: when they see Hispanics for Trump and stuff, and there's
Speaker 2: actually pretty deep roots for a lot of that stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So most early border patrol men though, we're white dudes,
Speaker 2: and it would probably be fair to call them white supremacists.
Speaker 2: And as the years went by, our government gave them
Speaker 2: increasing powers to exercise racism with stay of authority behind it.
Speaker 2: From a write up in the Inner While the nineteen
Speaker 2: twenty four immigration law spared Mexico quota, a series of
Speaker 2: secondary laws, including one that made it a crime to
Speaker 2: enter the country outside of official ports of entry, gave
Speaker 2: border and customs agents on the spot discretion to decide
Speaker 2: who could enter the country legally. They had the power
Speaker 2: to turn what had been a routine, daily or seasonal
Speaker 2: event crossing the border to go to work into a
Speaker 2: ritual of abuse. Hygienic inspections became more widespread and even
Speaker 2: more degrading. Migrants had their head shaped, and they were
Speaker 2: subjected to an increasingly arbitrary set of requirements at the
Speaker 2: discretion of patrollers, including literacy tests and entrance fees. The
Speaker 2: Patrol wasn't a large agency at first, just a few
Speaker 2: hundred men during its early years, and its reach along
Speaker 2: a two thousand mile line was limited, but over the
Speaker 2: years its reported brutality grew as the number of agents
Speaker 2: that deployed increased. Border agents beat shot, and hung migrants
Speaker 2: with regularity. Two patrollers, former Texas rangers, tied the feet
Speaker 2: of one migrant and dragged him in and out of
Speaker 2: a river until he confessed to having entered the country illegally.
Speaker 2: Other patrollers were members of the resurgent Ku Klux Klan,
Speaker 2: active in border towns from Texas to California. Yea, practically
Speaker 2: every other member of Elpaso's National Guard was in the klan,
Speaker 2: one military officer recalled, and many had joined the Border
Speaker 2: Patrol upon its establishment. So not great ideally, you know,
Speaker 2: if you ask me, we keep coming back to the
Speaker 2: KKK and how it repeatedly infiltrated law enforcement.
Speaker 1: M M.
Speaker 2: Someone maybe ought to do something about that. So for
Speaker 2: its first ten years of existence, the Border Patrol operated
Speaker 2: under the authority of the Department of Labor, and when
Speaker 2: FDR was elected, he appointed Francis Perkins to be Secretary
Speaker 2: of Labor, and she tried to curtail the violence of
Speaker 2: the Border Patrol and reform it, and this didn't really
Speaker 2: work out in the long run. She attempted to cut
Speaker 2: down a warrantless arrests. She mandated that detained migrants had
Speaker 2: a right to receive phone calls. She fought to provide
Speaker 2: migrants with at least some version of the civil rights
Speaker 2: they lacked as non citizens. But before long, FDR was
Speaker 2: pressured by the agricultural industry to put the Border Patrol
Speaker 2: under the control of the Department of Justice. Now this
Speaker 2: might seem surprising at first, because like these rich farmers
Speaker 2: were the same folks who'd fought to ensure Mexican immigrants
Speaker 2: wouldn't be subject to quotas in the nineteen twenty four
Speaker 2: immigration law. But there's a reason behind it. Because these
Speaker 2: folks had wanted these ranchers and stuff, had wanted Mexicans
Speaker 2: here to work their farms, but they hadn't wanted these
Speaker 2: people to actually stay in the United States lobbyist S.
Speaker 2: Parker Frizzell had told Congress in nineteen twenty six, the
Speaker 2: Mexican is a homer, like the pigeon he goes home
Speaker 2: to roost. And Frizell's promise had been that Mexicans weren't
Speaker 2: really immigrants, and thus they should be exempt from the
Speaker 2: USA's white supremacist immigration laws. They were birds of passage,
Speaker 2: he argued, just hanging around for a little while to work.
Speaker 2: But by the turn of the decade, as we hit
Speaker 2: like start going into the nineteen thirties, Mexicans had started
Speaker 2: to settle all across the Southwest, buying homes and starting
Speaker 2: communities and places like Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.
Speaker 2: In nineteen hundred, only about one hundred thousand Mexican immigrants
Speaker 2: had lived in the United States. By nineteen thirty, there
Speaker 2: were one and a half million Mexican immigrants this country.
Speaker 2: So this starts to freak out a lot of white agriculturists,
Speaker 2: right and it kind of you know, they had been
Speaker 2: they had been okay with these people coming into work.
Speaker 2: But at the end of the day, there were the
Speaker 2: same kind of white supremacists as the border patrol men.
Speaker 2: They were just a little bit more refined, and once
Speaker 2: it started to look like these these Mexicans were coming
Speaker 2: in and actually going to be contributing and changing the
Speaker 2: demographics of the nation, they panicked. And the only thing
Speaker 2: they could really think of to do was give the
Speaker 2: border patrol more power to enforce how many Mexicans could
Speaker 2: enter the country. And there was a real big like
Speaker 2: debate over this, right because you still needed at as
Speaker 2: these farmers, you still needed a certain minimum amount of
Speaker 2: migrants coming in every year in order to actually like
Speaker 2: keep your farms working. And the guy who kind of
Speaker 2: figured out a solution to this problem with Senator Coleman
Speaker 2: Livingstone Bliee, was a white supremacist congressman who first took
Speaker 2: office in nineteen twenty five, and his solution was, rather
Speaker 2: than creating a system of quotas and caps that would
Speaker 2: have reduced manpower in American fields, he just wanted to
Speaker 2: criminalize unmonitored border crossing. So this is the very first
Speaker 2: time that it becomes illegal to cross the US Mexican
Speaker 2: border without doing it at a border station. That's nineteen
Speaker 2: twenty nine. That law has passed. And I'm going to
Speaker 2: quote from an article in The Conversation explaining what happened here.
Speaker 2: According to Bliss's bill, unlawfully entering the country would be
Speaker 2: a misdemeanor, while unlawfully returning to the United States after
Speaker 2: deportation would be a felony. The idea was to force
Speaker 2: Mexican immigrants into an authorized and monitored stream that could
Speaker 2: be turned on and off at will at ports of entry.
Speaker 2: Any immigrant who entered the United States outside of bounds
Speaker 2: of the stream would be a criminal, subject of fines, imprisonment,
Speaker 2: and ultimately deportation. But it was a crime designed to
Speaker 2: impact Mexican immigrants in particular. Neither the Western agricultural businessmen
Speaker 2: nor the restrictionists registered any objections. Congress passed Bleiz's bill
Speaker 2: the Immigration Act of March fourth, nineteen twenty nine, and
Speaker 2: dramatically altered the story of crime and punishment in the
Speaker 2: United States with stunning precision. The criminalization of unauthorized entry
Speaker 2: caged thousands of Mexicans Mexico's birds of passage. By the
Speaker 2: end of nineteen thirty, the US Attorney General reported prosecuting
Speaker 2: seven thousand cases of unlawful entry. By the end of
Speaker 2: the decade, US attorneys had prosecuted more than forty four
Speaker 2: thousand cases. Now Bleeze's law applied technically to like Canadians
Speaker 2: as well, but basically everyone prosecuted under it was Mexican,
Speaker 2: and it was mainly used as kind of a method
Speaker 2: of non mostly non violent ethnic cleansing. Like I don't
Speaker 2: even know if I I know if i'd say mostly
Speaker 2: non violent. It was used for ethnic cleansing. Throughout the
Speaker 2: nineteen thirties, Mexicans made up at least eighty five percent
Speaker 2: of all immigration prisoners. Sometimes some years they made up
Speaker 2: ninety nine percent. Three new prisons were built on the
Speaker 2: border to hold them all, and over the course of
Speaker 2: the decades, somewhere around one million Mexicans were deported from
Speaker 2: the United States, and most these people were US citizens.
Speaker 2: Historian Francisco Balderama argues that sixty percent of the million
Speaker 2: people who were deported were US citizens of Mexican descent,
Speaker 2: and border patrol forces would call what was happening here
Speaker 2: repatriation to make it seem voluntary, but what was really
Speaker 2: happening in the thirties was border patrol was just rounding
Speaker 2: up all of the Mexicans they could get and throwing
Speaker 2: them across the border and kind of accusing people of
Speaker 2: unlawful like crossing of the border basically as a justification
Speaker 2: for kicking them out. So that's cool.
Speaker 3: I just the resources that get used and spent to
Speaker 3: enforce these laws and build prisons and maintain the prison
Speaker 3: and just like all of that cost so much time
Speaker 3: and is so much effort. Why, like it would be
Speaker 3: so much easier if we would just let immigrants come
Speaker 3: and then just let them live and be a part
Speaker 3: of the community.
Speaker 2: I mean, I know why, Because yeah, racism, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's absurd. Yeah, the Border Patrol's pretty lame, okaylin you
Speaker 2: know this is like that, But like this, this is
Speaker 2: what it is from the beginning, Like one of the
Speaker 2: first things the Border Patrol ever does is to port
Speaker 2: a million people, more than half of whom are US citizens.
Speaker 2: And it just lies about what it's doing because it's
Speaker 2: from the beginning, its job has never been to actually
Speaker 2: enforce the rule of law or even protect the border.
Speaker 2: Its job is to protect whiteness, right yep. So the
Speaker 2: very the primary method of action for Border Patrol agents
Speaker 2: from the beginning up to now was violence. The force
Speaker 2: was always undermanned and underfunded, with a handful of officers
Speaker 2: responsible for thousands of miles of rugged terrain, there was
Speaker 2: little to no oversight and agents generally used violence at
Speaker 2: their discretion, as this anecdote from the book Migra Illustrates
Speaker 2: Quote one day in nineteen twenty eight, explained Stoveall, who
Speaker 2: was a Border patrol agent. He was patrolling alone near
Speaker 2: San Elizario, Texas, when he decided to drive through town.
Speaker 2: San Elizario was this little Mexican town on the Rio Grande,
Speaker 2: said Stoveall, who remembered that when he got to town
Speaker 2: that day, he saw a mexicanyo come out from behind
Speaker 2: the bank of a drainage ditch and then duck back.
Speaker 2: Stoveall admitted to knowing the man, but stopped the car
Speaker 2: and asked him, what do you have there in your bosom?
Speaker 2: The man reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out
Speaker 2: two bottles of beer and put them down on the
Speaker 2: bridge and broke them so he wouldn't have any evidence.
Speaker 2: Reflecting upon the incident, Stovall wondered, why didn't I pull
Speaker 2: out my gun and fire at that Mexican. I don't know,
Speaker 2: I don't know why. Instead of reaching for his gun,
Speaker 2: and firing. Stoveall fled. I got in my car and
Speaker 2: got away from there, remembered Stoveall, because it was in daylight,
Speaker 2: about one o'clock. If I had pulled my gun and fired,
Speaker 2: there would have been fifty Mexicans around me that quick.
Speaker 2: According to Stovall, God spared his life that day by
Speaker 2: taking charge of his hands and preventing him from shooting
Speaker 2: at the mexicanyo. So this is nineteen twenty eight and
Speaker 2: kind of a common additude, Like this border patrol agent
Speaker 2: approaches a guy who's got a legal alcohol and the
Speaker 2: dude breaks the bottles on him, and the man's lingering
Speaker 2: question that he's wondering for years afterwards is why didn't
Speaker 2: I shoot that man to death? Like?
Speaker 3: Yeah, what some people think justifies killing another person is
Speaker 3: something I will never comprehend.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't think they thought they were people, true. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And it's probably worth noting how common brutality was, like
Speaker 2: open brutality was among US law enforcement officials, even at
Speaker 2: like pretty high levels in politics at this time. In
Speaker 2: May of nineteen fifty four, Herbert Brownell, the Attorney General,
Speaker 2: Eisenhower's attorney General, gave a speech where he asked US
Speaker 2: labor leaders for their support in the event that Border
Speaker 2: patrol agents quote shot wetbacks in cold blood. So again
Speaker 2: not saying like, hey, we might have an accidental shooting
Speaker 2: and I need your support because like what we're doing
Speaker 2: is hard, and you know people are going to mess up.
Speaker 2: Is like, you know, my guys might murder some some Mexicans.
Speaker 2: You know, my guys are absolutely going to commit murder
Speaker 2: in cold blood, and I need you to like have
Speaker 2: my back, right. That's the Attorney General of the United
Speaker 2: States nineteen fifty forties. Cool stuff?
Speaker 1: You know what else is cool stuff?
Speaker 2: Don't, Sophie. I can't imagine what you're going for here.
Speaker 2: What is cool stuff?
Speaker 1: That's fine? Don't that's fine. I'll just leave.
Speaker 2: You know who isn't the Attorney General of the United States,
Speaker 2: hopefully the products and services that support this podcast. So
Speaker 2: racism's not good. You know who else isn't good? The
Speaker 2: head of the Border Patrol in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 3: Pivot.
Speaker 2: Nice, yeah, a great pivot. So the guy in charge
Speaker 2: of the Border Patrol as we turn into the nineteen
Speaker 2: fifties is an outright monster by the name of Harlan Carter.
Speaker 2: Now Carter was, by the time he became the head
Speaker 2: of the Border Patrol, a convicted murderer who Yeah, in
Speaker 2: nineteen thirty one, as a teenager, he'd shot a Mexican
Speaker 2: boy in the chest at point blank range with a
Speaker 2: twelve gage shotgun, and the two had been having an argument,
Speaker 2: and the Mexican boy had a knife, but he was
Speaker 2: not actively threatening Carter, and in fact, he'd laughed at
Speaker 2: the boy's gun because he just kind of seemed to
Speaker 2: think it was silly that they were having a fight
Speaker 2: at all, and Carter shot him to death because he
Speaker 2: was angry for being laughed at. He was convicted of
Speaker 2: murder and sentenced to three years in prison, but he
Speaker 2: was let out after two owing to a technicality. So
Speaker 2: back in nineteen thirty one, by the way, you could
Speaker 2: shoot a man in the chest with a twelve gage
Speaker 2: and get three years. That's neat. Um.
Speaker 3: I love laws, Yeah, just so our justice system is cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he got rehabilitated. He went on to become the
Speaker 2: head of the Border Patrol and also was the head
Speaker 2: of the NRA. Uh Oh, Harlan Carter's an interest piece
Speaker 2: of shit. So throughout the forties, apprehensions by the Border
Speaker 2: Patrol were kind of ad hoc and disorganized, and they
Speaker 2: were mostly the result of individual agents seeking out undocumented
Speaker 2: immigrants by catching them in transit. This meant that large
Speaker 2: numbers of people were almost never apprehended at a time.
Speaker 2: It was more just like agents kind of going out
Speaker 2: and hunting people down and grabbing a couple of folks.
Speaker 2: This was an easy system for dumb, violent men to
Speaker 2: like figure out, you know, you're just kind of it's
Speaker 2: like hunting basically, and it appealed to the kind of
Speaker 2: folks who became Border Patrol agents. But starting in nineteen fifty,
Speaker 2: a young agent named Albert Quillen began to change things.
Speaker 2: He was intelligent and ambitious, and when the chief supervisor
Speaker 2: of Border Patrol demanded that he and his colleagues increase apprehensions,
Speaker 2: Quillen began experimenting with bold new strategies. At five am
Speaker 2: on February eleventh, Quillan took a detail of twelve patrol
Speaker 2: men with two buses, one plane, one truck, and nine automobiles.
Speaker 2: The men drove out to a small station in real Hondo, Texas,
Speaker 2: and then split into two groups to clean as well
Speaker 2: as possible certain section of illegal aliens. The plane acted
Speaker 2: as a spotter while the buses were used to quote
Speaker 2: Haull Wets to the border. One hundred people were apprehended
Speaker 2: in short order, and they were deported the next day.
Speaker 2: Quillan soon moved on with his force to a series
Speaker 2: of farms near Los Fresnos, Texas. They found five hundred
Speaker 2: and sixty one wets, which is again always the term
Speaker 2: they use for that. Do you understand where that term
Speaker 2: comes from?
Speaker 3: I don't know that I actually know the source of it. No.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So basically the idea is that there were kind
Speaker 2: of two two options for Mexicans at this time. There
Speaker 2: was the Bracero program, which was a program by which
Speaker 2: they could kind of enter the country quasi legally and
Speaker 2: get like legal working rights to be like a laborer
Speaker 2: or something like that. And then there was you could
Speaker 2: just cross the border right illegally, and that usually meant
Speaker 2: crossing the Rio Grande, which is a river, right, so
Speaker 2: you wind up wet on the other side of the river,
Speaker 2: so they call them wetbacks like that's that's still to
Speaker 2: this day a racist slang term for particularly Mexicans, be
Speaker 2: kind of all people of Hispanic descent. And a lot
Speaker 2: of Texas like you hear it a lot from raises
Speaker 2: there and the Border Patrol. It is their standard term
Speaker 2: for these people. This is like on all of their
Speaker 2: professional documents and everything. This is what they call migrants. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So Quillan's forces catch five hundred and sixty one wets
Speaker 2: on their second day, and on their third day they
Speaker 2: catch two hundred and sixty four. On the fourth day
Speaker 2: they catch one hundred and thirty four. In less than
Speaker 2: a week, they captured and deported more than a thousand
Speaker 2: undocumented laborers. And this was like unprecedented. The Border Patrol
Speaker 2: had never caught this many people this quickly. It was
Speaker 2: seen as an astonishing achievement by Quillan's superiors, and they
Speaker 2: began setting up other raids in imitation of his Border
Speaker 2: Patrol supervisors noted that these new task forces, as they
Speaker 2: started being called, we're quote pounding away on these wets
Speaker 2: cool dudes. Soon multiple task forces had been established throughout
Speaker 2: California and Texas, carrying out constant raids and netting huge
Speaker 2: numbers of undocumented persons. On some single days, more than
Speaker 2: five thousand Mexican nationals would be apprehended and shipped to
Speaker 2: temporary to ten camps before being sent back across the border.
Speaker 2: Patrolman handed deportees notes that read quote, you have entered
Speaker 2: the United States illegally and in violation of the laws
Speaker 2: of your land and those of the United States. For
Speaker 2: this reason, you are being returned to your homeland. If
Speaker 2: you return again illegally, you will be arrested and punished
Speaker 2: as provided by law. We understand that the life of
Speaker 2: a wet back is difficult. Wetbacks are unable to work
Speaker 2: for more than a few hours before they are apprehended
Speaker 2: and deported. Remember these words and transmit the news to
Speaker 2: your families and countrymen if you want to do them
Speaker 2: a favor. So that's fun. Yikes, nice letter there.
Speaker 3: Oh, terrifying language. Also, you had said alien that that
Speaker 3: was something that had been and still gets like. That
Speaker 3: language is still used and it's just the most dehumanizing word. Yeah,
Speaker 3: to you'll refer to simply someone who travels to another
Speaker 3: place and wants to stay there.
Speaker 2: It's pretty crazy because we don't use that word for uh,
Speaker 2: I don't know us. I'm I'm excited for when we
Speaker 2: have finally the big civil war that we're we're all
Speaker 2: planning to have and suddenly a shipload of.
Speaker 1: But continue like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm I'm excited for the people who treated Syrian
Speaker 2: refugees and treat Guatemalan and Honduran and Mexican refugees like shit,
Speaker 2: and I'm excited for them all to I don't know,
Speaker 2: get gutten down by Canadian border guards as we deserve
Speaker 2: as a nation. I don't know. I'm angry all the time, Kitlyn,
Speaker 2: I'm sorry.
Speaker 3: That's not right likewise, so am I.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Anyway, it'll be up to Canada to be racist
Speaker 2: then and then eventually Alaska and then the biosphere will die.
Speaker 2: So you know what won't die, Caitlin, are.
Speaker 1: You doing necessary transous? Do your podcast? Do your podcast?
Speaker 2: I know I went off on a really sad rant,
Speaker 2: and so I decided to throw in a raytheon ad
Speaker 2: because everybody likes thinking about raytheon. So back to the
Speaker 2: border patrol. So the border patrol would like pick up
Speaker 2: all these folks, huge numbers, thousands in a day sometimes
Speaker 2: and they would put them in these like temporary camps
Speaker 2: and then would take them into Mexico where the Mexican
Speaker 2: military would basically dump them in the middle of the
Speaker 2: country as far away from the border as possible, and
Speaker 2: these were generally places where there was no work and
Speaker 2: where these migrants had no family connections, and it was
Speaker 2: just a horrible situation for most people. As a result
Speaker 2: of these new tactics, between nineteen fifty and nineteen fifty three,
Speaker 2: the number of Border Patrol apprehensions nearly doubled, from four
Speaker 2: hundred and sixty nine thousand to almost eight hundred and
Speaker 2: forty thousand. This caused immediate problems for ranchers and farmers,
Speaker 2: who started to realize that the new legal powers they'd
Speaker 2: given the Border Patrol had vastly realigned the organization's power
Speaker 2: in a way that allowed the white supremacists too ran
Speaker 2: it to harm agribusiness by wiping out their workforce at
Speaker 2: stake was also a sort of cultural readjustment. Farmers and
Speaker 2: ranchers were used to occupying a position at the top
Speaker 2: of society, but now Border patrol men could exercise the
Speaker 2: power of deportation again and take away their workers. And
Speaker 2: Texas border towns like Marfa, farmers hired armed guards, hired lookouts,
Speaker 2: and booby trapped farm gates in order to protect their workforce.
Speaker 2: There were gunfights with border patrol with these like white
Speaker 2: farmers trying to defend their workforce, and as the conflict
Speaker 2: between the farmers and border patrol grew uglier, white border
Speaker 2: town farmers suddenly found themselves facing off against the same
Speaker 2: men who'd hunted their workers. The book Migra tells the
Speaker 2: story of D. C. Newton, whose family were border patrol
Speaker 2: farmers who posted guards to warn about raids. They went
Speaker 2: to sleep they want to sleep one night in nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty two and woke up to find that dozens of
Speaker 2: Border patrol agents had snuck in with their headlights off,
Speaker 2: and to surprise everyone sleeping in the farmhouse and adjacent quarters.
Speaker 2: The Newton's oldest son was faster, though, and he succeeded
Speaker 2: in warning the undocumented migrants staying on the farm, which
Speaker 2: gave them the time they needed to run like hell
Speaker 2: and height in the trees. When the border patrol men
Speaker 2: came up empty in their search, they went after the
Speaker 2: white folks who awk actually owned the farm. And I'm
Speaker 2: going to quote from book migrenow they entered Newton's parents
Speaker 2: bedroom and began shining the flashlights in my mother's eyes
Speaker 2: and my father's eyes, telling them to get up. We're
Speaker 2: going to go out and find where your Mexicans are.
Speaker 2: With my father and his pajamas, his mother in a nightgown,
Speaker 2: and no one wearing any shoes, the officers forced the
Speaker 2: family out of the house while pushing physically pushing my
Speaker 2: mother in the back, pushing my father in the back,
Speaker 2: and demanding to know where the wet backs were. Most
Speaker 2: of the workers had fled, including Newton's nanny Lupe, for
Speaker 2: whom the officers claimed to be searching. In particular, she
Speaker 2: had heard the arrival of the patrolmen and climbed out
Speaker 2: of the window on the second floor of the farmhouse,
Speaker 2: rolled down onto the roof of the garage, and run
Speaker 2: off to the southeast and was gone. Although the Newtons
Speaker 2: believed they had outsmarted the border patrol by alerting the
Speaker 2: migrants to the raid, the head border patrol inspectors still
Speaker 2: led fifty three apprehended workers away, saying, see how you
Speaker 2: handle your groves. Now, now that's like a bad story
Speaker 2: and everything. What's interesting here is I guess how horrible
Speaker 2: Newton's family is here too, because the interview with him
Speaker 2: goes on and he makes it clear that he kind
Speaker 2: of when his dad explained to him what was happening
Speaker 2: with the Border Patrol. His dad compared the conflict to
Speaker 2: the Civil War, and the side that he identified with
Speaker 2: was not the good side. Quote. Newton's father believed that
Speaker 2: by taking away their workers, the damn Yankee Border Patrol
Speaker 2: were splitting up a household. As he explained it to
Speaker 2: his son, the South Texans protected their homes, their families,
Speaker 2: their property, and their way of life from the Border
Speaker 2: patrol raids. He was the master. The Mexican illegals were
Speaker 2: equivalent to the black slaves, and together they formed a
Speaker 2: household a system of labor relations in a world of
Speaker 2: tightly bound intimacy and inequity. The Border Patrol threatened their
Speaker 2: household by reducing the farmer's control over Mexico's unsanctioned migrant workers.
Speaker 2: So as the Southerners had rebelled against intrusions upon their
Speaker 2: labor relations and plantation lives, the Newton family had to
Speaker 2: defe itself against the US Border Patrol. Newton's brother took
Speaker 2: the lesson to heart. When the Border Patrol raided on
Speaker 2: another night, he stood in the family driveway with a
Speaker 2: shotgun named at the officers. Startled by the hostile twelve
Speaker 2: year old boy. The officers left the property and returned
Speaker 2: on another day. So yeah, this is what's happening here
Speaker 2: is really complicated.
Speaker 3: Yeah right. There's an important thing to remember here, which
Speaker 3: is that even of the like white ranch farm owners
Speaker 3: who are maybe not in favor of their workforce being
Speaker 3: sent back to their country of origin, they are still
Speaker 3: exploiting these workers, these migrant workers, and you know, probably
Speaker 3: not paying them well, probably not offering them you know,
Speaker 3: good benefits, except.
Speaker 2: And probably like keeping them in very primitive living situations,
Speaker 2: often like little more than a shack, often like like
Speaker 2: kind of nightmares situa like these guys did. These migrants
Speaker 2: often did live very similarly to slaves. Right, it wasn't
Speaker 2: quite that bad, but it was bad. And these these
Speaker 2: farmers are like the border patrol agents want these migrants
Speaker 2: out because they're racist as fuck, and these farmers are
Speaker 2: also racist as fuck. They just want the migrants to
Speaker 2: stay because.
Speaker 3: It because they can exploit the basis of.
Speaker 2: Their power exactly right. So again, no one to root
Speaker 2: for here other than like these migrants, but they seem
Speaker 2: to mostly get just fucked over by everybody, and that's
Speaker 2: not fun. Yep. So yeah, it's important to remember that
Speaker 2: kind of the struggle between border patrol and these border
Speaker 2: farmers in Texas was a struggle between two different groups
Speaker 2: of white supremacists, and one group of white supremacists was
Speaker 2: broadly in the right, because I guess it's it's worse
Speaker 2: to round up thousands of people in cattle cars and
Speaker 2: buses and throw them back across a border for no
Speaker 2: good reason. M but there's no one you should be
Speaker 2: rooting for here. But what's really interesting I find fascinating
Speaker 2: about this whole conflict is that these racist plantation owning
Speaker 2: white border farmers wound up like fighting the border patrol
Speaker 2: by kind of co opting the language of social justice.
Speaker 2: Starting in the nineteen fifties, ranchers began to argue that
Speaker 2: Mexican nationals were being unfairly targeted for deportations. They complained
Speaker 2: that the buses, planes, and trains used to take migrants
Speaker 2: away were cruel, in human and outrageous practices, trading in
Speaker 2: human misery. They began to argue that hiring Mexicans was
Speaker 2: an act of kindness by American ranchers. Mexican laborers deserved
Speaker 2: the chance to win a better life by working low
Speaker 2: paid jobs as domestic servants and laborers. The Border Patrol
Speaker 2: was in fact actually fostering communism by sending these men
Speaker 2: and women back to the interior of Mexico, where they
Speaker 2: would no doubt live on in miserable poverty and join
Speaker 2: some leftist gorilla movement.
Speaker 3: So yeah, because they're lies being exploited farm hands in
Speaker 3: the US was so much better. What, Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's pretty cool. How naturally that came to these farmers.
Speaker 2: I like it. So the Border Patrol obviously didn't listen
Speaker 2: to the protests against them. They continued to, in their
Speaker 2: own words, pound away in the borderlands, raising apprehensions. The
Speaker 2: increased workload necessary necessitated more men in facilities, and in
Speaker 2: nineteen fifty three, the Border Patrol attempted to hire two
Speaker 2: hundred and forty additional officers and made plans to build
Speaker 2: two new detention centers at the lower Rio Grand Valley.
Speaker 2: This enraged local farmers, and one quote threatened to arm
Speaker 2: his wetback laborers against the Border Patrol, threatening that there
Speaker 2: is liable to be a couple of dead Border patrolmen.
Speaker 2: Death threats against patrolman became a daily occurrence and farmers
Speaker 2: in the Lower Rio Grand lobbied their congressmen to deny
Speaker 2: the appropriation request necessary to fund the new men in facilities.
Speaker 2: These farmers insisted they weren't lobbying for their own benefit,
Speaker 2: but we're doing it for migrants who were victor of
Speaker 2: the Patrol's cheap vindictiveness, a great hunger to ruler, ruin
Speaker 2: to control, to govern, anything to carry a point, reckless
Speaker 2: of the consequences to the poor workmen which they heard
Speaker 2: around us cattle. And they weren't wrong in this. The
Speaker 2: facility the Border Patrol wanted to build was essentially a
Speaker 2: concentration camp. Eventually, Congress listened and the appropriations request was denied.
Speaker 2: So like the protest of all these guys in Texas worked,
Speaker 2: the Border Patrol had to send its two hundred and
Speaker 2: forty men back home and cancel construction. According to the
Speaker 2: book Migra Quote, one month after losing the supplemental appropriation,
Speaker 2: Chief Kelly announced the Border Patrols withdrawal from the Rio
Speaker 2: Grand Valley to a new defense line ten miles to
Speaker 2: the north of Kingsville. Fall furious, and Hebronville rather than
Speaker 2: fight a losing battle in the Lower Rio Grand Valley.
Speaker 2: The Border Patrol decided to pull out of the area
Speaker 2: because with limited forces we can best control the wet
Speaker 2: back invasion as at the line farther north. It's one
Speaker 2: of those things, I guess I always kind of debate
Speaker 2: when you've got like something that is essentially a slur,
Speaker 2: or is a slur in an episode of like this,
Speaker 2: how often to say it? And it's one of those
Speaker 2: things where I kind of feel like cleaning up. The
Speaker 2: Border Patrol's official statements in the matter would be, I
Speaker 2: don't know, making it seem like they were less of
Speaker 2: a naked force for white supremacy than they were, Like
Speaker 2: if you replace that with Mexican nationals, that's not really
Speaker 2: what they're saying, right, Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 3: That's yeah. I mean that puts you in a pretty
Speaker 3: tricky position. Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they use it a lots. It's the Border Patrol
Speaker 2: are cool guys, And we're about to hear it used
Speaker 2: again in another big way. So the men of the
Speaker 2: Border Patrol did see the immigration of Mexicans into the
Speaker 2: US as an invasion, and they sought to repel it
Speaker 2: with military force. As kind of that language above, right,
Speaker 2: referring to it as a defensive line and stuff like
Speaker 2: they're defending whiteness again, and they see the encroachment of
Speaker 2: these undocumented migrants as like an assault on white blood
Speaker 2: more than anything else. In nineteen fifty three, with the
Speaker 2: rebellion of the Texas Ranchers in full swing, Harlan Carter,
Speaker 2: who's again the murderer who became the head of the
Speaker 2: Border Patrol, sat down with two US generals to ask
Speaker 2: for their help. He wanted the military and the National
Speaker 2: Guard to assist the Border Patrol in a nationwide purge
Speaker 2: of undocumented Mexican nationals called Operation Cloudburst. The first step
Speaker 2: for this would be an anti infiltration campaign to seal
Speaker 2: the border with the help of twenty one hundred and
Speaker 2: eighty troops. Border Patrol would station soldiers at strategic locations
Speaker 2: and build several long fences to block areas of heavy traffic.
Speaker 2: This part of the operation is fairly standard, aside from
Speaker 2: the presence of US troops. Part two, though, would be
Speaker 2: a containment operation, which would involve roadblocks on every major
Speaker 2: highway from the southwest to the interior of North America.
Speaker 2: These checkpoints would be used to search vehicles for illegal
Speaker 2: migrants around the clock. Part three was the mopping up phase,
Speaker 2: and this would involve a massive series of raids in
Speaker 2: northern locations, places far from the border, like San Francisco
Speaker 2: where groups of migrants were believed to have gathered. Businesses
Speaker 2: and camps would be raided and the arrested migrants would
Speaker 2: be airlifted or sent by train to the interior of Mexico.
Speaker 2: Now again using the military. This was essentially he wanted
Speaker 2: to bring in the army to carry out a military
Speaker 2: action to purge the United States of Hispanic people. That's
Speaker 2: what the head of Border patrols trying to do here,
Speaker 2: and all of the military guys he talked to are like,
Speaker 2: this sounds like a great idea. We'd love to help,
Speaker 2: but it's illegal, right possecomatadis means you can't use the
Speaker 2: army for shit like this. The only way around it
Speaker 2: is a presidential proclamation, and Dwight Eisenhower was actually initially
Speaker 2: all on board with issuing that proclamation, but in the
Speaker 2: end he kind of backed away and instead he appointed
Speaker 2: a General Joseph Swing to be the new Commissioner of
Speaker 2: the Immigration and Naturalization Service and was basically like, we
Speaker 2: can't use soldiers for this because it's unconstitutional. But I'm
Speaker 2: going a promoted general to be in charge of the
Speaker 2: i INS and you figure out a way to do
Speaker 2: the same thing with the resources Border Patrol has, like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: I still want a military operation to clear out these
Speaker 2: Hispanic people. I just can't use soldiers.
Speaker 3: So that's good grief. Yeah, the mental gymnastics that what, yeah,
Speaker 3: that these people do to justify their horrible actions. Anyway, sorry,
Speaker 3: go ahead.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's pretty great. I don't know. So one month
Speaker 2: after joining i INS, General Swing announces that he's going
Speaker 2: to be leading the Border Patrol in a new paramilitary
Speaker 2: campaign based on the tactics pioneered by Albert Quillen. The
Speaker 2: new operation is given the name Operation Wetback Again. That's
Speaker 2: the Border Patrol's official name for it. That's what all
Speaker 2: these guys call it. That's what it's written up in
Speaker 2: the documents and stuff.
Speaker 3: She's Louise.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they just didn't have a fuck to give on
Speaker 2: this matter. So true to form, Border Patrol was only
Speaker 2: given four weeks to prepare for what would become the
Speaker 2: largest operation in their history. The plan was to engage
Speaker 2: in an unprecedented deporting hundreds of thousands of people. No
Speaker 2: one received any training or specialized equipment to actually do this, though.
Speaker 2: All that most agents had on June ninth, nineteen fifty four,
Speaker 2: when the operation began, was a letter from General Swing
Speaker 2: ordering them to purge the nation by removing the huge
Speaker 2: number of Mexican nationals who were in this country in
Speaker 2: violation of the immigration laws. Always good to hear about
Speaker 2: a purge. Y. Yeah, So in its first day, California
Speaker 2: or in the first day of this operation, California and
Speaker 2: Arizona agents apprehended nearly eleven thousand migrants. The flood of
Speaker 2: people only accelerated after that, and the sheer number of
Speaker 2: deportees overwhelmed the Border Patrol's capacity to hold or carry them.
Speaker 2: People were left in primitive exposed concentration camps for days.
Speaker 2: The Border Patrol turned a Lesion Park in Los Angeles
Speaker 2: into an open air concentration camp. Yeah, that's Nate, go
Speaker 2: to Alesian Park.
Speaker 3: I've been there before and I'll never go again.
Speaker 2: A lot of the men who were in turn there,
Speaker 2: men and women, got sick and sometimes died of sunstroke
Speaker 2: because there was no care given to their health. And
Speaker 2: it can get very hot down there. Twenty five percent
Speaker 2: of all deportees were transported by boats, many of which
Speaker 2: were so cramped and filthy that their occupants later compared
Speaker 2: them to slave ships or penal hell ships. So that's great.
Speaker 2: The Mexican government's capacity to take and transport all these
Speaker 2: people broke down almost immediately, and they were like, we
Speaker 2: need you to not send these people to us so
Speaker 2: quickly because we can't handle them. And the US government said,
Speaker 2: we don't give a fuck and kept just shotgunning people
Speaker 2: on over there, and the sheer scale of deportations began
Speaker 2: to fuck with American industry. But border patrol didn't really
Speaker 2: give a shit about this either. I'm going to quote
Speaker 2: again from the book Migra. Between June seventeenth and July
Speaker 2: twenty sixth, nineteen fifty four, twenty eight hundred and twenty
Speaker 2: seven of the four thousand, four hundred and three migrants
Speaker 2: apprehended by the task force assigned to the Los Angeles
Speaker 2: area had worked in industry. After border patrol raids during
Speaker 2: the summer of nineteen fifty four, three Los Angeles brickyards
Speaker 2: were left without sufficient numbers of workers and temporarily closed
Speaker 2: down their operations. Similarly, Border Patrol officers paid close attention
Speaker 2: to the hotel and restaurant business, which routinely hired undocumented
Speaker 2: Mexican immigrants as bus boys, kitchen help waiters, etc. Officers
Speaker 2: reported apprehending such workers at well known establishments such as
Speaker 2: the Biltmore Hotel, Beverly Hills Hotel, Hollywood, Roosevelt Hotel, Los
Speaker 2: Angeles Athletic Club, and the Brown Derby. At times, the
Speaker 2: Border Patrol raids created moments of chaos at popular restaurants
Speaker 2: when migrants attempted to escape by running through the serving area.
Speaker 2: The raids were public and regularly drew significant attention from
Speaker 2: the press, and this was part of the point. The
Speaker 2: reason the Border Patrol focused so much on Los Angeles
Speaker 2: onlike raids in big Hollywood locations is because they were
Speaker 2: trying to make a point to these like these ranchers
Speaker 2: who were still fighting them in South Texas. And the
Speaker 2: message was, if we're willing to do this shit in
Speaker 2: fucking Hollywood, you'd better believe that one day we're going
Speaker 2: to come to your ranch and fuck you up, right,
Speaker 2: Like if we'll do this to the Biltmore, we'll ruin you,
Speaker 2: Like we don't give a shit, we're the Border Patrol.
Speaker 2: And in the end, Operation Wetback was responsible for the
Speaker 2: deportations of somewhere between a quarter of a million at
Speaker 2: the low end and about one point five million people
Speaker 2: at the high end, and at the end of the day, yeah,
Speaker 2: it kind of ended in retreat by the Border Patrol.
Speaker 2: Part of this was that around the same time, the
Speaker 2: US government reformed the Brassero program, which allowed Mexican nationals
Speaker 2: to get legal working status in the US, and that
Speaker 2: became much more popular after this time, So a lot
Speaker 2: of these these ranchers and farmers started making sure that
Speaker 2: their workers kind of went through a legal path to
Speaker 2: gain working status in the United States. And some of
Speaker 2: it was just that, like there was blowback to this program.
Speaker 2: It wasn't very popular all of the massive public raids,
Speaker 2: and kind of as a result, border patrol apprehensions plummeted.
Speaker 2: The next year, in nineteen fifty five, the task forces
Speaker 2: that had once captured thousands of migrants in a day
Speaker 2: were disbanded and demobilized, and for a little while it
Speaker 2: seemed as if the Border Patrol had gone into hibernation.
Speaker 2: Of course, that Caitlin was not the case, and in
Speaker 2: Part two, we're going to talk about the fact that
Speaker 2: we haven't even talked about any of the worst shit
Speaker 2: that the Border Patrol gets up to in this episode,
Speaker 2: because that's how much worse it gets.
Speaker 3: Oh, they can't wait to hear about it.
Speaker 2: So how are you feeling?
Speaker 3: I feel pretty terrible.
Speaker 2: That's good. I love it when people feel terrible.
Speaker 3: I'm always like, oh, I can't wait to be a
Speaker 3: guest on Behind the Bastards, And then every time I
Speaker 3: do it, I'm like, oh, yes, I'm reminded by how
Speaker 3: horrible people have been to each other.
Speaker 2: Yes, and you were the one who picked this topic
Speaker 2: with a text message. Lol. I think the Border Patrol
Speaker 2: sounds fund.
Speaker 3: That did never happen. But yeah, I mean it's good
Speaker 3: to be informed about these things, so I appreciate learning
Speaker 3: and being further informed about it. So yeah, thank you,
Speaker 3: thank you for that.
Speaker 2: Yep, you're welcome, Caitlin, Thank you for coming on.
Speaker 1: Is there a place as people might be able to
Speaker 1: find you, listen to you, ways to support your work?
Speaker 3: Why? There certainly are places to do that, starting with
Speaker 3: You can follow me personally on Twitter and Instagram at
Speaker 3: Caitlin Durante. You can also check out my podcast right
Speaker 3: here on this network. It's called The Bechdel Cast. I
Speaker 3: co host it with Jamie Loftus, and we talk about
Speaker 3: the representation of women in film and just film in general,
Speaker 3: examining it through an intersectional feminist lens. So that is
Speaker 3: what we do, and you can, yeah, check out.
Speaker 1: Podcast screenwriting classes right now.
Speaker 3: Oh yes, I am, thank you so much for bringing
Speaker 3: that up. I also teach screenwriting on account of a
Speaker 3: master's degree in screenwriting that I absolutely hate to mention
Speaker 3: or ever just bring up, but it does allow me
Speaker 3: to teach online classes. So if that's of any interest
Speaker 3: to anyone, go to my website Caitlinderante dot com slash
Speaker 3: classes and I usually have news sections coming up starting
Speaker 3: soon at any given point.
Speaker 2: And if you want to learn from me, I don't
Speaker 2: teach screenwriting, but I do teach screenwriting, which is where
Speaker 2: you sit down with a pencil and paper and I
Speaker 2: scream at you and then eventually you give me money
Speaker 2: to go away.
Speaker 3: That sounds very educational.
Speaker 2: We all have to have an extra couple, so either
Speaker 2: pay Caitlin for an actual service or pay me to
Speaker 2: abuse you.
Speaker 1: Either way, don't love that as an You know what Sophie.
Speaker 2: Look everybody, look, you gotta. You gotta be mean to
Speaker 2: the audience, Sophie, you gotta.
Speaker 1: I don't know about who. I love them, I appreciate them,
Speaker 1: and I appreciate you, Robert, so kindness.
Speaker 3: Is there any way in which you think that, like
Speaker 3: closing out a podcast is similar to making love just
Speaker 3: to bring things full service? Wow? Good question.
Speaker 2: Here's how closing a podcast is like making love. Both
Speaker 2: of them are inherently disappointing.
Speaker 1: And you can, Robert and I write, okay on Twitter.
Speaker 1: You can follow us at Bastards Fought on Twitter and Instagram.
Speaker 1: We have a tea public store. Uh that's it, Bye.
Speaker 2: Bye, hello world, but specifically Australia. This is Robert Evans
Speaker 2: hosted Behind the Bastards, and I just wanted my Australian
Speaker 2: listeners in particular to know that I stood up for
Speaker 2: you against Caitlin's cruelty. Just a minute ago, she pronounced
Speaker 2: the name of your greatest city, Melbourne, Melbourne. I guess, savage, Yeah.
Speaker 3: I said Melbourne. And then okay, well, what about the
Speaker 3: people who live in Sydney or other cities in Australia.
Speaker 2: One city in Australia, its name is Melbourne, and that's
Speaker 2: the end of this digression. Hello, Caitlyn Duranty, guest for
Speaker 2: today's episode. How are you doing?
Speaker 1: Ah?
Speaker 3: Well, I would be doing better if you would pronounce
Speaker 3: my last name correctly.
Speaker 1: Speaking of mispronunciation, donte Caitlin.
Speaker 2: Yes, I think we've all learned a lesson about maybe
Speaker 2: not judging each other, because it's impossible to ever know
Speaker 2: how words are supposed to be said.
Speaker 3: He thinks.
Speaker 1: Ariana Grande's name is Ariana grand So you.
Speaker 2: Know, Sophie, you've been giving me guff about that one.
Speaker 1: For a while, as it deserves mm hmm.
Speaker 2: Well now I'm sad.
Speaker 1: Don't be sad, Robert.
Speaker 2: This is part two.
Speaker 1: If we get to pick on a white man at
Speaker 1: the beginning of an episode, then like, what's the point?
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is this is a whole episode about I
Speaker 2: don't know.
Speaker 3: Series. Let's pass the Bechdel test right now, Sophie.
Speaker 1: Oh, Caitlin, I I'm really enjoying the bluish shirt you're
Speaker 1: wearing right now.
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh. Well, I'm so glad you brought it
Speaker 3: up because it's it's a Paddington shirt that says migration
Speaker 3: is not a crime, which is relevant to today's episode.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, it really is relevant today's episode.
Speaker 3: That But then I said Paddington and that that I
Speaker 3: was like.
Speaker 1: Are we just during Paddington right now because.
Speaker 3: Heddington is a non binary asexual icon.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, yes, yes, so I kind of passed the
Speaker 1: backl Thats okay, Robert, you want to ass your show
Speaker 1: behind the bastards right now because.
Speaker 2: I don't actually know if we passed the Bechdel test there.
Speaker 2: But you know what test we did pass is the
Speaker 2: writing for many hours about the border patrol test. Yes,
Speaker 2: which is a more important test, I think. So you
Speaker 2: know this one we're splitting up a little bit weirdly
Speaker 2: over the course of two weeks because my entire life
Speaker 2: and schedule has been continually thrown into chaos. So I
Speaker 2: do apologize for this one being done a little bit
Speaker 2: differently than others are done. On December sixth, twenty eighteen,
Speaker 2: seven year old Jacqueline Call crossed the US Mexico border
Speaker 2: near a place called Antelope Wells, New Mexico. She was
Speaker 2: with her father, twenty nine year old Nary Call. Both
Speaker 2: were Kekchi Maya, and they'd lived most of their life
Speaker 2: lives in the Alta Vera Paz region of Guatemala. Starving
Speaker 2: and desperate, she and her family turned themselves into the
Speaker 2: border Patrol. When Jacqueline was taken into their custody, she
Speaker 2: was already beginning to show signs of illness what would
Speaker 2: turn out to have been a streptococcal infection. DHS maintains
Speaker 2: that they conducted an initial screening and that there was
Speaker 2: no evidence of health issues in the little girl. Jacqueline
Speaker 2: was placed on a border patrol bus feverish and vomiting
Speaker 2: from severe dehydration. Eight hours after being taken into custody,
Speaker 2: she began to suffer seizures. She died the next day.
Speaker 2: Gomez Alonzo, age eight, crossed the Aos Mexico border sometime
Speaker 2: around December eighteenth. He and his father, Augustin, were members
Speaker 2: of the Chuj people, another Mayan group who came from
Speaker 2: the Juahuitenango region of Guatemala. Gomez spent six days in
Speaker 2: border patrol custody, shuttled around from New Mexico to El Paso,
Speaker 2: and then back to New Mexico to be interned in
Speaker 2: an attention facility named near Alamagordo. He started to show
Speaker 2: symptoms of sickness. On the twenty fourth, he was taken
Speaker 2: to the hospital, where he was tested for the cold,
Speaker 2: but not for influenza, which he had. He was given
Speaker 2: medicine that could not help him and sent back to jail,
Speaker 2: where he died on Christmas Eve, twenty eighteen. No, yep, good,
Speaker 2: good times.
Speaker 3: That's awful.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's real bad. The deaths of Gomez and Jacqueline
Speaker 2: were briefly very big news in the United States. It
Speaker 2: was believed that the two were the first child immigrant
Speaker 2: deaths in border patrol custody since twenty ten. In twenty nineteen, though,
Speaker 2: it was revealed that another child, Darylyn Cordovaval of l Salvador,
Speaker 2: had actually died back in September twenty eighteen under similar circumstances.
Speaker 2: The Trump administration received a lot of blame, both for
Speaker 2: covering this death up to try to influence the midterm
Speaker 2: elections and for their failure to push DHS to take
Speaker 2: any meaningful action to stop kids from dying at the border.
Speaker 2: Three dead children is a tragedy, but their little corpses
Speaker 2: are actually just the top of an iceberg of dead people,
Speaker 2: many of them Guatemalan, that we can lay at the
Speaker 2: feet of border patrol agents and you might be surprised
Speaker 2: to learn how that whole situation came about. You want
Speaker 2: to hear about this, Caitlin.
Speaker 3: So I have to also what colorful language you used
Speaker 3: in terms of the corpses or at the top of
Speaker 3: an iceberg.
Speaker 2: I mean, well, yeah, you know, I think if you're
Speaker 2: gonna talk about dead kids, you should do it with
Speaker 2: a little bit of panazz, pizaz panash.
Speaker 3: All right, I'm ready, I'm keep going.
Speaker 2: All right, So let's talk about the border patrol and
Speaker 2: in Central America. We're gonna talk about something I don't
Speaker 2: think a lot of people know about because usually, as
Speaker 2: a rule, when we talk about how bad the border
Speaker 2: patrol is, we talk about like how mean they are
Speaker 2: to people who come up to the border. But we
Speaker 2: don't talk about what a lot of border patrol guys
Speaker 2: did in the countries that these people are fleeing from
Speaker 2: before people started fleeing from those countries. So this is
Speaker 2: gonna be fun, Okay, It's gonna be good time for everybody.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 2: John P. Longan was a US Border patrol agent in
Speaker 2: the nineteen forties and fifties. He worked near the Mexican border,
Speaker 2: close to where both Jacqueline and Gomez crossed over. Most
Speaker 2: sources you find on the manner will note that he
Speaker 2: had a reputation for violence, but this was not at
Speaker 2: all uncommon among the men of the Border Patrol, nor
Speaker 2: is it uncommon now. During Operation wet Back, when the
Speaker 2: Border Patrol reformed itself into a paramilitary force to wage
Speaker 2: war on Mexican immigrants, Longan run The Patrols ran the
Speaker 2: Patrol's equivalent of a military intelligence service. Longan's base was
Speaker 2: an unmarked building near Alameda. He and his men interrogated,
Speaker 2: captured migrants, extrapped into information, and used it to find
Speaker 2: and capture other groups of migrants. Few of the men
Speaker 2: who endured these interrogations ever spoke about it, but a
Speaker 2: lot of what happened in those cells probably verged on
Speaker 2: what we'd consider torture. Long End was good at his job,
Speaker 2: and his performance and Operation wet Back earned him a
Speaker 2: transfer to the State Department's Public Safety Program. Now, this
Speaker 2: was in reality a CIA operation geared at providing counterinsurgency
Speaker 2: training and advice to Allied nations combating Communist insurgencies. The
Speaker 2: CIA hand picked a number of Border Patrol agents to
Speaker 2: travel to places like the Zezuela, Thailand, the Dominican Republic
Speaker 2: in Guatemala. They particularly liked recruiting guys like long End
Speaker 2: because they were likely to speak Spanish. Now, the way
Speaker 2: the State Department framed this program was training law enforcement.
Speaker 2: So uh yeah, the State Department framed this program as
Speaker 2: training law enforcement. The reality, though, is that Longan and
Speaker 2: his fellow Border patrolmen were sent over to places like
Speaker 2: Guatemala to create and train death squads during Operation Went Back.
Speaker 2: Border patrol administrators had described their work as fighting back
Speaker 2: against an invasion. In Guatemala, where long En arrived in
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty five, he was finally able to wage a
Speaker 2: real war using real weapons. I'm going to quote now
Speaker 2: from an article in The Nation. Quote. Longan taught local
Speaker 2: intelligence and police agencies how to create death squads to
Speaker 2: target political activists, deploying tactics that he had earlier used
Speaker 2: to capture migrants on the border. He arrived in Guatemala
Speaker 2: in late nineteen sixty five, where he put into place
Speaker 2: a paramilitary unit that early the next year would execute
Speaker 2: what he called Operation Limpieza, or Operation and clean Up.
Speaker 2: Within three months, this unit had conducted over eighty raids
Speaker 2: and multiple extrajudicial assassinations, including an action that, over the
Speaker 2: course of four days, captured, tortured, and executed more than
Speaker 2: thirty prominent Left opposition leaders. The military dumped their bodies
Speaker 2: into the sea, while the government denied any knowledge of
Speaker 2: their whereabouts. According to Stuart Schrader in his up forthcoming
Speaker 2: Badges Without Borders, how global counterinsurgency transformed American policing, It
Speaker 2: was common practice during the Cold wartis and former Border
Speaker 2: Patrol agents like long End to train foreign police through
Speaker 2: CIA linked public safety programs. Since they were more likely
Speaker 2: to speak Spanish than agents from other branches of law
Speaker 2: enforcement in countries like El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, they
Speaker 2: did the dirty work that Reagan's envoys said needed doing.
Speaker 2: Until the early nineteen seventies, the United States, according to
Speaker 2: a nineteen seventy four Los Angeles Times report, was flying
Speaker 2: its Latin American Death Squad apprentices up to the Border
Speaker 2: Patrol Academy in Los Fresnos, Texas to receive training from
Speaker 2: CIA instructors and the design, manufacture, and potential use of
Speaker 2: bombs and incendiary devices. Long End himself in nineteen fifty
Speaker 2: seven clearly describe what he thought he was doing at
Speaker 2: the border. We're fighting a war on a wide battle front,
Speaker 2: so that's good.
Speaker 3: So they're just basically training kill squads. They're just telling
Speaker 3: people to murder people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they're they're pulling border patrol guys off the
Speaker 2: line to do some of the training to be like, oh,
Speaker 2: you already are good at like tracking down these groups
Speaker 2: of people who are trying to facilitate movement of migrants
Speaker 2: through the United States. You can use those skills to
Speaker 2: track down political activists, except that, you know, since it's
Speaker 2: in a foreign country, you can just have them brutally
Speaker 2: murdered by death squads. And these guys are happy to
Speaker 2: do it because they want to be murdering people anyway.
Speaker 2: They just can't quite usually murder people, you know, at
Speaker 2: the border. I mean they do it a lot anyway,
Speaker 2: but like they have to be a little bit careful.
Speaker 2: But you don't have to be careful at all in Guatemala.
Speaker 2: So that's great.
Speaker 3: Oh, gie, Whiz, have you ever.
Speaker 2: Been to Guatemala, Caitlin, I have not, rules. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: I spent a lot of time there. It's a great country,
Speaker 2: beautiful place, completely dysfunctional government, and you can see like
Speaker 2: signs of the horrible Civil war there all over the place.
Speaker 2: Just like you'll cross the street and there'll just be
Speaker 2: a bunch of guys who are all missing arms and legs.
Speaker 2: You'll be driving through the middle of nowhere and you'll
Speaker 2: see like businesses that have been like were shot up
Speaker 2: decades ago with mortars and stuff, and it you know,
Speaker 2: it all kind of descends from this. The series of
Speaker 2: political conflicts that launch in this period of time, particularly
Speaker 2: in the early nineteen eighties, that are backed by the
Speaker 2: United States and supported enthusiastically by the Reagan government, and
Speaker 2: these kind of networks of right wing murder crews that
Speaker 2: were trained up and sent out by the CIA and
Speaker 2: their buddies and groups like the Border Patrol. This all
Speaker 2: starts now, and it's cool, it's great, and.
Speaker 3: It's probably it's I mean, it's refugees from yep, these
Speaker 3: conflicts that are seeking refuge in right up to the
Speaker 3: today US and then and then they get here and
Speaker 3: they're like, well, sorry, fuck, you were either going to
Speaker 3: murder you or the peligeon and let you die in
Speaker 3: our custody or send you back to this you know,
Speaker 3: war torn country. You're in.
Speaker 2: Yeah. If you listen to right wingers, they'll usually say
Speaker 2: something like, oh, they should go back to their own
Speaker 2: country and fix its problems. And the reality is that, like, well,
Speaker 2: some of them tried to do that, and then we
Speaker 2: trained death squads to murder them and throw their bodies
Speaker 2: in rivers and stuff in the ocean. And that's why
Speaker 2: people are less willing to try to fix problems because
Speaker 2: they get killed, and so did their children because of
Speaker 2: the guys that we hired and trained to kill them
Speaker 2: and their children when they attempt to fight for economic justice. Oops,
Speaker 2: it's good. It's really good, is what I'm getting at.
Speaker 2: So Operation Limpieza, which you know Longen the Border Patrol
Speaker 2: guy orchestrated himself, was a major moment in the history
Speaker 2: of Guatemala's collapse into a nightmare. The military intelligence system
Speaker 2: he helped to build would eventually eliminate tens of thousands
Speaker 2: of leftist, activist sympathizers and random people mistaken for either
Speaker 2: More than two hundred thousand people were massacred openly. Tens
Speaker 2: of thousands more were tortured in this way. The brave
Speaker 2: men of the Border Patrol wound up at both sides
Speaker 2: of a tragedy. The genocide they trained right wing Guatemalan
Speaker 2: militants to execute fell heavily on various Maya peoples of
Speaker 2: the region, including the Kecchi in the Jews. The right
Speaker 2: wing dictator who helped to organize much of this violence
Speaker 2: was General Afrain Rios Mont. He rose to power in
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty one and nineteen eighty two, cooping his way
Speaker 2: into command with the help of his good friends. The
Speaker 2: US Ronald Reagan described him as a man of great
Speaker 2: integrity who was totally dedicated to democracy. The nation's ride
Speaker 2: up makes it continues quote. On June seventeenth, nineteen eighty two,
Speaker 2: Guatemalan soldiers under the command of Rios Mont entered the
Speaker 2: San Francisco Catalyst State immediately adjacent to Yallam Bulock. The
Speaker 2: estate's owner, a military colonel, had fled because of guerrilla
Speaker 2: activity in the area. Soldiers went house by house, rounding
Speaker 2: up workers in their families whom they accused of supporting
Speaker 2: the guerrillas. They separated children from their parents and killed
Speaker 2: them by slashing their stomachs or smashing their heads against poles.
Speaker 2: Women were raped and then burned alive. The soldiers killed
Speaker 2: them in with bullets or by beheading. After a day
Speaker 2: of slaughter, three hundred and fifty people were dead. A
Speaker 2: lone survivor made his way into Mexico, where Guatemalan anthropologist
Speaker 2: and Jesuit priest Ricardo Fala interviewed him. The San Francisco
Speaker 2: massacre was highlighted in Guatemala's nineteen ninety nine Truth Commission report.
Speaker 2: After the massacre, Yellum Biloc residents fled along with thousands
Speaker 2: of others, leaving the border corridor between Guatemala and Mexico
Speaker 2: completely depopulated. As government troops raised their villages, some were
Speaker 2: captured and killed by the army as they fled. Others
Speaker 2: ended up in refugee camps or dispersed throughout Mexico's southern states.
Speaker 2: Still others continued on to the United States, beginning the
Speaker 2: Great Movement of Guatemalans to El Norte. All told, one
Speaker 2: point five million people were displaced by the Guatemalan armies
Speaker 2: scorched Earth campaign in nineteen eighty one. In nineteen eighty two,
Speaker 2: Guatemala's Commission for Historical Clarification called the violent displacement in
Speaker 2: the Maya Cheus region an active genocide. Young Felipe Gomez
Speaker 2: Alazano's father. He was the little kid, one of the
Speaker 2: little kids who died. Augustine Gomez Perez was a child
Speaker 2: of eleven during that execute. Y'all Unblock's villagers stayed away
Speaker 2: for fourteen years, returning only after the signing of the
Speaker 2: Peace Accords in nineteen ninety six. So that's cool, m.
Speaker 3: What can you say science that's horrible.
Speaker 2: You can say that, Like, we're focusing on Guatemala right
Speaker 2: here because it's one where there's a bit more documentation,
Speaker 2: but like, this shit happened in Al Salad, or it
Speaker 2: happened in a bunch of different parts of Latin in
Speaker 2: Central America where you know, refugees come from all the time.
Speaker 2: Now it was, it's still in a lot of ways
Speaker 2: going on today if you want to read about like
Speaker 2: Plan Columbia and stuff like, there's aspects of this that
Speaker 2: are very much still occurring, and that the border patrol
Speaker 2: still ends up getting tied up and from time to time,
Speaker 2: and that's great.
Speaker 3: Good grief.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is like the stuff that part of me
Speaker 2: that like is optimistic wants to believe that, oh if
Speaker 2: people just knew this, like knew how this all, how
Speaker 2: US policy and US plotting played into the tragedy being
Speaker 2: suffered by these people, and like the insecurity of these regions,
Speaker 2: they would have better attitudes towards you know, Guatemal immigration
Speaker 2: and whatnot into the United States. And then the part
Speaker 2: of me that has been paying attention for the last
Speaker 2: several decades knows that like, no, actually people would cheer
Speaker 2: the murders of the folks and the destruction of these
Speaker 2: areas because Americans have been so thoroughly broken by propaganda
Speaker 2: that the people who are still on the right and
Speaker 2: still broadly pro American can't be convinced by any reason
Speaker 2: that any amount of murder or violence is not justified
Speaker 2: by the fact that America is cool as hell.
Speaker 3: It is this what a toxic mentality that we as Americans,
Speaker 3: or at least some of us have, because like, and
Speaker 3: this is I'm not about to say anything new or
Speaker 3: profound here, but the fact that you know, the white
Speaker 3: European settlers were escaping the same you know, kind of
Speaker 3: civil unrest or religious persecution or whatever it was the
Speaker 3: coust them to flood their countries, and then we settled
Speaker 3: here by killing millions of indigenous people, and now we're like, well,
Speaker 3: our borders are closed now. Sorry everyone, And it's like,
Speaker 3: how can you live? How can these people live with
Speaker 3: the hypocrisy of that simple fact.
Speaker 2: Because they're they're ship anyway. Uh So, most of these
Speaker 2: death squads were trained in the United States because like, hey,
Speaker 2: if you're gonna build a death squad for a foreign country,
Speaker 2: you don't want to like train it there. That's kind
Speaker 2: of ghosh. Uh So you bring them into your country
Speaker 2: to train them there because you're you know, you're good
Speaker 2: at training death squads. So the facility where they actually
Speaker 2: trained a lot of these death squads, and again not
Speaker 2: just in Guatemala, but for places like Columbia and El
Speaker 2: Salvador all throughout fucking world. The place where they would
Speaker 2: like take these men to teach them how to be terrorists,
Speaker 2: how to make bombs and all this shit was the
Speaker 2: Los Fresnos, Texas Border Patrol facility. It was an existing base,
Speaker 2: it was in a good location, and the Border Patrol
Speaker 2: was perfectly happy to have minsilt over there to learn
Speaker 2: how to become murderous gorillas and then set off terrorist
Speaker 2: bombs in the middle of their own countries because they
Speaker 2: were like that sounds like a thing the border patrol
Speaker 2: should be involved with. Now. The Technical Investigations course that
Speaker 2: was given to foreign police there was taught by CIA instructors.
Speaker 2: It lasted for weeks and it included curriculum like terrorist concepts,
Speaker 2: terrorist devices, fabrication and functioning of devices and provides, triggering
Speaker 2: devices and scendiaries, and assassination weapons, a discussion of various
Speaker 2: weapons which may be used by the assassin. And when
Speaker 2: you read it like that, you can kind of trick
Speaker 2: yourself into thinking it might not be like it might
Speaker 2: be a reasonable thing for cops to learn. Right, of course,
Speaker 2: cops might need to learn about terrorist concepts and the
Speaker 2: kind of weapons assassins use. But these were not just
Speaker 2: informational courses. They were instructed. So the police who attended,
Speaker 2: we're just learning, Oh, here's weapons that assassins sometimes use.
Speaker 2: They were learning, like, if you're going to assassinate somebody,
Speaker 2: here's a variety of different weapons that you can use
Speaker 2: to assassinate people. And we're just learning, like, here's different
Speaker 2: ways terrorists build triggers for bombs. They were learning, here's
Speaker 2: how to build triggers for the bobs you're going to
Speaker 2: make to kill people. The reality of the whole The
Speaker 2: whole program came out during congressional investigations in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 2: And I'm going to quote now from a book titled
Speaker 2: Instruments Instruments of state Craft, US Guerrilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and
Speaker 2: counter Terrorism, which is available for in full for free
Speaker 2: online right now. Quote. During congressional investigations led by Senator
Speaker 2: James Alboresque in nineteen seventy three, eight officials admitted that
Speaker 2: the Los Fresno sessions, what the press would call the
Speaker 2: Bomb School, offered lessons not in bomb disposal, but in
Speaker 2: bomb making. The course is not designed to nor does
Speaker 2: it prepare the student to be a bomb or explosive
Speaker 2: disposal technician. The thrust of the instruction introduces trainees to
Speaker 2: commercially available materials and home laboratory techniques in the manufacture
Speaker 2: of explosives and incendiaries. Different types of explosive techniques and
Speaker 2: booby traps and their construction and use by terrorists are demonstrated.
Speaker 2: And again, all these classes were taught at a border
Speaker 2: patrol facility. And while the main instructors were CIA agents,
Speaker 2: it was not just the convenient location that made the
Speaker 2: ad agency use Los Fresnos. The Border Patrol had always
Speaker 2: had within it the seeds of a national secret police force.
Speaker 2: Decades before CBP agents were operating in unmarked snatch fans
Speaker 2: on the streets of Portland and it was Customs and
Speaker 2: Border Patrol who was doing that. They helped to train
Speaker 2: foreign police to do the exact same thing and much worse. Besides,
Speaker 2: that's fun, Like I carry, I keep like wanting to say, like, ah,
Speaker 2: what a fun thing. What I don't know what else
Speaker 2: to say. It's just like this kind of litany of
Speaker 2: ours that we've all just kind of blithely funded our
Speaker 2: entire lives, even though a great deal of information exists
Speaker 2: on how bad this agency has always been. Because the
Speaker 2: only real if you actually get into it as we
Speaker 2: are today, the only real conclusion is that like, oh,
Speaker 2: maybe when you have people whose job it is to
Speaker 2: police the border, they're they're they're just going to be
Speaker 2: the worst people. And and maybe you shouldn't police the
Speaker 2: border at all because this happened.
Speaker 3: But borders are completely arbitrary and mean nothing, And why
Speaker 3: or why have we decided that they that cross them
Speaker 3: is a crime.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's bad. And the kind of people who
Speaker 2: decide that they want to make their whole lives about
Speaker 2: punishing desperate people for the quote unquote crime of crossing
Speaker 2: a border are monsters, and when you start giving them
Speaker 2: guns in power, they use it to enable genocides and
Speaker 2: political oppression abroad and then inevitably do so back at home,
Speaker 2: which is what's happening now. So when it comes to
Speaker 2: government agencies that Americans, particularly liberals, rage against, customs and
Speaker 2: Border Patrol has spent most of its history kind of
Speaker 2: sliding under the mainstream radar. But liberals who only started
Speaker 2: paying attention to the agency after Trump took office might
Speaker 2: be surprised to know that NYT Report or New York
Speaker 2: Times reporter John Crudsen won a Pulitzer Prize in nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty for a series of articles about the Border Patrol
Speaker 2: whose titles would not look at all out of place
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty, titles like Border Patrol sweeps of illegal
Speaker 2: aliens leave scores of children in jails a little familiar.
Speaker 2: The intercept summarizing his work notes patrollers he reported regularly
Speaker 2: engaged in beating's, murder, torture, and rape, including the rape
Speaker 2: of girls as young as twelve Some patrollers ran their
Speaker 2: own in house outlaw vigilante groups. Others maintained ties with
Speaker 2: groups like the Clan. Border patrol agents also used the
Speaker 2: children of migrants, either as bait or as pressure. A
Speaker 2: pressure tactic to force confessions. When coming upon a family,
Speaker 2: agents tried to apprehend the youngest member first, with the
Speaker 2: idea that relatives would give themselves up so as not
Speaker 2: to be separated. It may sound cruel, one patroller said,
Speaker 2: but it often worked. Separating migrant families was not official
Speaker 2: government policy in the years Crudsen was reporting on abuses,
Speaker 2: but left to their own devices, Border patrol agents regularly
Speaker 2: took children from parents, threatening that they would be separated
Speaker 2: forever unless one of them confessed that they had entered
Speaker 2: the country illegally. Mothers, especially an, agents said, would always break.
Speaker 2: Once a confession was extracted, children might be placed in
Speaker 2: foster care or left to languish in federal jails. Others
Speaker 2: were released into Mexico alone, far from their homes, forced
Speaker 2: to survive, according to public defenders, by garbage can scrounging,
Speaker 2: living on rooftops, and whatever. Ten year old Sylvia Alvarado
Speaker 2: separated from her grandmother as they crossed into Texas was
Speaker 2: kept in a small cinder block cell for more than
Speaker 2: three months. In California, thirteen year old Julia Perez, threatened
Speaker 2: with being arrested in denied food, broke down and told
Speaker 2: her investigator that she was Mexican, even though she was
Speaker 2: a US citizen. The Border Patrol released Perez into Mexico
Speaker 2: with no money or way to contact her US family.
Speaker 2: Such cruelties weren't one offs, but part of a pattern
Speaker 2: encouraged and committed by officers up the chain of command.
Speaker 2: The violence was both gratuitive and systemic, including stress techniques
Speaker 2: later associated with the war in Iraq.
Speaker 1: I mean, wow, what.
Speaker 3: Kind of truly inhuman monster do you have to be
Speaker 3: to use to be yes, and more specifically to use
Speaker 3: children as bait or to like snatch them first as
Speaker 3: just like I can't even form a sentence.
Speaker 2: That is Yeah, it's not great.
Speaker 1: I mean the sentence that you said, like I got
Speaker 1: teary eyed with the mother, Yes, the mothers broke first
Speaker 1: or whatnot? Yeah? That was yeah, horrible.
Speaker 2: No, it's I don't know, you know, when I talk
Speaker 2: about how this all actually makes me feel, there's no
Speaker 2: way to do that without repeatedly urging other people to
Speaker 2: commit federal crimes up to when including assault and murder.
Speaker 2: So I'm just like gonna stop right there and continue
Speaker 2: talking about the Border Patrol instead, because we shouldn't do
Speaker 2: that on a podcast. One tactic the Border Patrol came
Speaker 2: to a door was the locking of migrants in freezing
Speaker 2: cold rooms called hellieras or ice boxes. This goes back
Speaker 2: at least to the nineteen eighties. According to Krudsen, agents
Speaker 2: would tell prisoners in this place, you have no rights.
Speaker 2: Since these people had committed no crime beyond crossing a
Speaker 2: line in the dirt, their detention serve no real purpose
Speaker 2: beyond cruelty. Cruelty was the point. Border Patrol agents throughout
Speaker 2: the seventies, eighties, and nineties were repeatedly documented torturing migrants.
Speaker 2: A popular method was handcuffing them to squad cars and
Speaker 2: then making them run alongside the video as it half
Speaker 2: dragged them to the border. Outright murder was common as well.
Speaker 2: One patrol agent told Krudsen that agents commonly pushed illegals
Speaker 2: off cliffs so it would look like an accident. Much
Speaker 2: of the agency's behavior was indistinguishable from that of a
Speaker 2: straight up Gang. Agents with ins Border Patrol's parent agency
Speaker 2: at the time were caught trading Mexican women to the
Speaker 2: Los Angeles Rams in exchange for season tickets. What yes,
Speaker 2: the thing that happened.
Speaker 3: I can't.
Speaker 2: Brave men and women of the Border Patrol. We're in
Speaker 2: the green.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, it's time for an AD break so
Speaker 1: that I can go vomit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know who doesn't trade women for it?
Speaker 1: Vomit. It's an AD break.
Speaker 2: Products and services and we're back. We're having a good time.
Speaker 3: Jeez, so.
Speaker 2: I n S agents were also caught supplying Mexican prostitutes
Speaker 2: to congressmen and judges in exchange for political favors. Over time,
Speaker 2: the Border Patrol found ways to get over their long
Speaker 2: standing conflicts with UH with Texan ranchers. In numerous cases,
Speaker 2: they worked out deals with ranch owners whereby they would
Speaker 2: hold off on immigration raids until right before payday, giving
Speaker 2: ranchers the use of migrant bodies without the need to
Speaker 2: pay them. Border patrol men got to hunt and fish
Speaker 2: for free on their ranches as payments. This is kind
Speaker 2: of how they they worked out that that little set
Speaker 2: of disagreements, that little UH. The the uprising in Texas
Speaker 2: that had been sparked by a lot of.
Speaker 3: The labor and then have an agreement with the border
Speaker 3: patrol and like, okay, seize them on this day.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so that.
Speaker 3: I don't have to pay all My god, it's good.
Speaker 2: Yeah crudzen. That New York Times journalist even documented that
Speaker 2: one of the rangers the Ranch's border patrol worked at
Speaker 2: an arrangement with was owned by President Lyndon B. Johnson
Speaker 2: while he was president. Oh holy shit, good stuff. Between
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty five and nineteen ninety, federal agents gunned down
Speaker 2: twenty two migrants just in the area around San Diego.
Speaker 2: The Intercept reports quote on April eighteenth, nineteen eighty six,
Speaker 2: For instance, patroller Edward Cole was beating fourteen year old
Speaker 2: Eduardo Corrillo Estrada on the US side of the border's
Speaker 2: Chain League fence when he stopped and shot Eduardo's younger brother,
Speaker 2: Humberto in the back. Umberto was standing on the other
Speaker 2: side of the fence on Mexican soil. A court ruled
Speaker 2: that Cole, who had previous incidents of shooting through the
Speaker 2: fence at Mexicans, had reason to fear for his life
Speaker 2: from Humberto and used justifiable force. Such abuses persisted through
Speaker 2: the nineteen nineties and two thousands. In nineteen ninety three,
Speaker 2: the House Subcommittee on International Law, immigran and Refugees held
Speaker 2: hearings on border patrol abuse, and its transcript is a
Speaker 2: catalog of horrors. One former guard, Tourney Hefner, at the
Speaker 2: Ions Detention Center in Port Isabel, Texas, reported that a
Speaker 2: young Salvadoran girl was forced to perform personal duties like
Speaker 2: dancing the Lombarda for IONS officials. In twenty eleven, Hefter
Speaker 2: published a memoir with more accusations of sexual abuse by
Speaker 2: as Hefner writes, the Ions brass Roberto Martinez, who worked
Speaker 2: with the San Diego based US Mexico Border program for
Speaker 2: the American Friends Service Committee, testified that human and civil
Speaker 2: rights violations by the Border Patrol run the gamut of
Speaker 2: abuses imaginable, from rape to murder. Agents regularly seized original
Speaker 2: birth certificates in green cards from Latino citizens, leaving the
Speaker 2: victim with the financial burden of having to go through
Speaker 2: a lengthy process of applying for a new document. Rapes
Speaker 2: and sexual abuse in Ions attention centers around the United
Speaker 2: States Martinez said, seemed to be escalating throughout the border region.
Speaker 3: Okay, I have to talk through something here. So, in theory,
Speaker 3: law enforcement is there to prevent crime, stop crime, find criminals,
Speaker 3: et cetera. We know that that's barely what they do, right,
Speaker 3: But that's in theory the purpose of law enforcement. And
Speaker 3: so by extension border patrol if it is since it
Speaker 3: is for some reason illegal to you know, cross a
Speaker 3: border undocumented or without the proper documentation, that is quote
Speaker 3: a crime according to ridiculous standards, right. And I also
Speaker 3: understand in theory the concept of like punishing things that
Speaker 3: are actual crime. That makes sense to me as long
Speaker 3: as it's done responsibly, which it never is. The idea
Speaker 3: of seeing crossing a border without the proper documentation and
Speaker 3: deciding that the punishment for that crime, I'm warrants things
Speaker 3: like human trafficking, murder, sexual assault, all manner of other horrible, horrible,
Speaker 3: unmentionable things like where I just it is the most
Speaker 3: disgusting thing.
Speaker 2: I think the problem here that you're having is in
Speaker 2: thinking that the goal, the purpose is ever to prevent crime,
Speaker 2: whereas the reality is the purpose is to is to protect.
Speaker 2: It's to protect whiteness exactly, Yes, yeah, And it's to
Speaker 2: provide an outlet for for fascists in this country to
Speaker 2: do horrible violence on people in a way that is,
Speaker 2: rather than being disorganized and sort of being anti state
Speaker 2: and being something that like causes disorder, being violence that
Speaker 2: they are allowed to carry out, that that enforces the uh,
Speaker 2: the kind of the state itself that like that like
Speaker 2: backs up the existence of the state. Right, Like you
Speaker 2: have all these you have all these tremendously violent people, right,
Speaker 2: and you can do a couple of things to them,
Speaker 2: but they're there. So either you you try to like
Speaker 2: deal with them and deradicalize them and make them less dangerous,
Speaker 2: you kill them, or as we do, you give them
Speaker 2: guns and make them unaccountable and allow them to do
Speaker 2: horrible violence to large groups of people who have no
Speaker 2: political agency.
Speaker 3: Yes, that is exactly what it is. Like people who
Speaker 3: are like, well, the general population thinks that, you know,
Speaker 3: being a member of a hate group like the KKK
Speaker 3: is bad. So I'm going to do the same exact
Speaker 3: things that the KKK does, but it's being masked as
Speaker 3: a government agency. Like basically, this terror terrors organization, this
Speaker 3: hate group is protected and quote justified because it is
Speaker 3: a government agency, even though they're committing the same heinous
Speaker 3: acts in the name of under the guise of some
Speaker 3: kind of protection. But truly it is the like you said,
Speaker 3: protection of whiteness and criminalizing being not white.
Speaker 2: And that's the that's the only way it's ever been,
Speaker 2: and that's the only way it ever will be, as
Speaker 2: long as we have a border and we consider there
Speaker 2: to be some sort of fundamental value in the sanctity
Speaker 2: of that border. Right, And that's good.
Speaker 3: I want to cry about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's good to do that sometimes. Other times
Speaker 2: it's good to continue reading a podcast script, which I
Speaker 2: will now do, okay, because this is how I deal
Speaker 2: with problems. This is the only way that I deal
Speaker 2: with problems is by reading podcast scripts.
Speaker 3: I mean informing the people helps.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a way that you can describe this as
Speaker 2: informing the people. I don't know, you know. In nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy nine, Maria Contreras, nine months pregnant, crossed back into
Speaker 2: the United States from Mexico legally after shopping for food.
Speaker 2: Border patrol agents found the suspicious and they tortured her
Speaker 2: to try to get her to reveal information about undocumented migrants.
Speaker 2: She died under interrogation, leaving six children behind. This sort
Speaker 2: of thing happened all the time. You know, we have
Speaker 2: documentation about Maria Contreras's case, but this is maybe even
Speaker 2: a daily matter, and it's something that continues to this
Speaker 2: day in dark and terrifying corners of the border where
Speaker 2: such things are not documented most of the time, but
Speaker 2: which we all pay for. Throughout all of this, the
Speaker 2: border patrol and i ins were sort of the red
Speaker 2: headed step chat to federal agencies with law enforcement powers.
Speaker 2: They were barely funded because, if you can imagine this,
Speaker 2: illegal immigration was not something people cared about. So for
Speaker 2: most of these period, this period, while all of the
Speaker 2: horrible things we've been talking about have been happening, border
Speaker 2: patrol has basically no money and very few agents considering
Speaker 2: like what it's supposed to be watching in its purview,
Speaker 2: it's just kind of a place where we keep all
Speaker 2: of our most violent law enforcement officers and they don't
Speaker 2: have the money to do much, but nobody's watching them,
Speaker 2: so they can carry out horrific acts of violence. And
Speaker 2: that's the border patrol and really ins too for the
Speaker 2: most part. Yeah, states probably had you know not. Probably
Speaker 2: border states had debates on the matter of illegal immigration.
Speaker 2: It was certainly like, you know, a political issue in Texas,
Speaker 2: in New Mexico and stuff. But random people in random
Speaker 2: Americans and Duluth or you know, Wichita or bubble fuck
Speaker 2: Montana or whatever didn't really care about the border right
Speaker 2: eighties and nineties, it was not a big vote getter
Speaker 2: for most to that period of time. Now, at the
Speaker 2: start of the Clinton administration, there were only about four
Speaker 2: thousand border patrol agents watching both Canada and Mexico, which
Speaker 2: is not a lot if you think about how big
Speaker 2: both of those borders are.
Speaker 3: There are many miles long.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're pretty big. In nineteen ninety three, NAFTA became
Speaker 2: a thing, the North American free trade thing of a jigger,
Speaker 2: and illegal immigration grew by leaps and bounds alongside right
Speaker 2: wing fear mongering about illegal immigration. The border patrol more
Speaker 2: than doubled in size by the turn of the millennium.
Speaker 2: So this is like the first thing that really leads
Speaker 2: to a massive surge in the border patrol is NAFTA
Speaker 2: becomes a thing, and suddenly a shitload more people are
Speaker 2: trying to cross the border. Illegal immigration by the end
Speaker 2: of the nineteen nineties is a major national political issue
Speaker 2: in the Border Patrol more than doubles under Clinton. In
Speaker 2: the year two thousand, our nation's peak year for illegal immigration,
Speaker 2: border patrol agents apprehended one point six million people. This, though,
Speaker 2: was just a fraction of the total that got through.
Speaker 2: Border Patrol agents were unhappy about the fact that most
Speaker 2: undocumented migrants were still getting through the border, and that
Speaker 2: the many rules and that there were many rules in
Speaker 2: place to stop them from you know, doing Operation Wetback
Speaker 2: type stuff and basically carrying out an ethnic cleansing to
Speaker 2: get rid of non white people from border areas. From
Speaker 2: an article in Politico quote quote. Near the top of
Speaker 2: the Border Patrol's list of complaints was the policy known
Speaker 2: internally as KARP or the catch and release policy. By
Speaker 2: the end of the Clinton administration, eighty percent of people
Speaker 2: who were caught and released with a notice who appeared
Speaker 2: a deportation hearing never showed up in court. But despite
Speaker 2: millions of border crossings, the Border Patrol had the financing
Speaker 2: in two thousand and one for just sixty detainees a
Speaker 2: day across the entire country. They could turn themselves in
Speaker 2: and have a high confidence that they wouldn't be returned
Speaker 2: to their home countries, recalls Michael Cherdoff, who would go
Speaker 2: on to become President George W. Bush's second Secretary of
Speaker 2: Homeland Security. Mostly, agents just asked border violators for their
Speaker 2: names and then did a cursory background check before returning
Speaker 2: them to Mexico or releasing them into the United States.
Speaker 2: Sometimes they ran fingerprints, sometimes they didn't. In June nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety nine, agents captured one of the FBI's ten most
Speaker 2: wanted fugitives, a rapist and serial killer named Angel Maturino
Speaker 2: Racindez aka the Railway Killer, and unknowingly released him back
Speaker 2: into Mexico, whereupon Rascindez promptly sneaked back into the United
Speaker 2: States and murdered four more people before being apprehended by
Speaker 2: Texas rangers. So the story of the Railway Killer was
Speaker 2: of course used to justify the need for more funding
Speaker 2: to the Border Patrol. What the whole story really illustrates
Speaker 2: is that even when the Border Patrol had occasional chances
Speaker 2: to actually protect Americans by apprehending people, they were as
Speaker 2: likely to fuck up as anything, because most of them
Speaker 2: were shit ass incompetent in anything besides doing violence. So
Speaker 2: nine to eleven happens. You remember nine to eleven, I remember,
Speaker 2: It's good. You're not supposed to forget it.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: Nine to eleven happens. And if you were alive and
Speaker 2: cognizant at the time, you might remember that. Basically everybody
Speaker 2: in their grandma was obsessed with the imminent possibility that
Speaker 2: al Qaeda might drive a regiment of terrorist nuclear tanks
Speaker 2: or whatever across the Texas border. As someone who lived
Speaker 2: in Texas at the time, we were a bunch of
Speaker 2: people freaking out about how, like terrorist hit squads we're
Speaker 2: going to be making their way up through the border.
Speaker 2: Kids at my suburban Texas high school were certain that
Speaker 2: al Qaida was going to be sending people to shoot
Speaker 2: up our school because, like Plano, Texas was real high
Speaker 2: on fucking Osama bin Laden's hit list.
Speaker 3: Wait, did they think they were going to like go
Speaker 3: to Mexico first and then cross the border?
Speaker 1: Is?
Speaker 2: Yeah, what they thought? It didn't really scan a lot.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'll say this, I think that it's maybe
Speaker 2: not talked about enough that agree to which guys like
Speaker 2: John Milnius and movies like Red Dawn prepared everybody to
Speaker 2: believe the bullshit the Bush administration said about how terrorists
Speaker 2: we're going to be sneaking through the border, but like, yeah, whatever,
Speaker 2: it was very dumb. It was a very dumb time.
Speaker 2: But also like you know, a bunch of guys had
Speaker 2: worked together to ram planes into the Pentagon and destroy
Speaker 2: two skyscrapers in New York City. People were really to
Speaker 2: believe a lot of terrible things were possible. And because
Speaker 2: the border, you know, right wing pundits had been convincing
Speaker 2: everybody that the border was this dangerous and unmonitored place
Speaker 2: for so long. People were like, oh, my god, of
Speaker 2: course the terrorists will try there. They never did, but
Speaker 2: you know they still might any day now, Caitlin, any
Speaker 2: day Al Kaita's got out. Finally get a squad up there.
Speaker 2: Nobody will notice all of the anyway. Whatever. So yeah,
Speaker 2: Tom Ridge, the former governor of Pennsylvania, was made President.
Speaker 2: Bush's homeland securities are Now this was before the Department
Speaker 2: of Homeland Security existed. That came about in like November
Speaker 2: of two thousand and two. But as soon as like
Speaker 2: nine to eleven is a thing, Bush is like, ah,
Speaker 2: we got to have somebody whose job is to think
Speaker 2: about safety for the country, which like, there were already
Speaker 2: a bunch of people doing that and it hadn't helped.
Speaker 2: But anyway, whatever, So Tom Ridge is like is made
Speaker 2: the czar of Homeland Security, and he made border control
Speaker 2: one of his priorities. He realized pretty much immediately that
Speaker 2: the border patrol was going to be issue for him.
Speaker 2: Robert Bonner, who worked with Ridge and later became the
Speaker 2: first head of Customs and Border Patrol, told Politico quote,
Speaker 2: within the ions structure, they were the poor stepchild. That
Speaker 2: was how most ofs viewed them at every level. They
Speaker 2: weren't appreciated and weren't viewed with respect, and that created
Speaker 2: this defensiveness and insolerity within the Border Patrol. There was
Speaker 2: a lot of debate about what to do with the
Speaker 2: organization and whether or not to just take all the
Speaker 2: different groups that handled various border related things and merged
Speaker 2: them into one border agency. But that would have meant
Speaker 2: several different cabinet secretaries would have each lost tiny amounts
Speaker 2: of power and money because you know, you have this
Speaker 2: group that's like, you know, your job is to look
Speaker 2: for war criminals who might have like accidentally gotten citizenship
Speaker 2: or green cards. You have this other group. His job
Speaker 2: is to like, you know, handle customs enforcement. You know,
Speaker 2: you have the Border Patrol. You have like the group
Speaker 2: that's job is to go around and look for people
Speaker 2: who might be violating immigration law. You have all these
Speaker 2: different groups that are like under different sort of people's purview,
Speaker 2: and putting them all in one like organized border patrol
Speaker 2: that does everything would have meant that all of the
Speaker 2: different cabinet secretaries lost a little bit of money in power.
Speaker 2: So they all vetoed that idea in unison. No no, no, no,
Speaker 2: fuck that shit. Instead, the decision was made to dissolve
Speaker 2: i INS and put the Border Patrol under the purview
Speaker 2: of the new Customs and Border Patrol, which would itself
Speaker 2: be part of the brand new Department of Homeland Security.
Speaker 2: The final nail in Ins's coffin was the fact that
Speaker 2: the agency had approved visas for two of the nine
Speaker 2: to eleven hijackers after nine eleven. So this is kind
Speaker 2: of what like, yeah, that's the that's the wrong time
Speaker 2: to do that. Somebody probably should have gotten on the
Speaker 2: phone immediately after that and been like, hey, you we
Speaker 2: should run these names, like just make sure we're not
Speaker 2: going to embarrass everybody, but they did. And when the
Speaker 2: news kind of came out that i INS had approved
Speaker 2: visas for two of the people who had just carried
Speaker 2: out the biggest terrorist attack in the US history, the
Speaker 2: Bush administration was really not happy with IONS, and that
Speaker 2: kind of that kind of spelled their doom, and in fact,
Speaker 2: in they dissolved the agency. No one from the White
Speaker 2: House even thought to call the INS commissioner and tell him.
Speaker 2: I'm going to quote again from Politico's article, i INS
Speaker 2: was such a broken bureaucracy that it would be the
Speaker 2: single agency in the entire US government to receive the
Speaker 2: ultimate death penalty. After nine to eleven, in the wide
Speaker 2: ranging bureaucratic reorganization that led to the Department of Homeland Security,
Speaker 2: i INS was completely disbanded, its responsibilities removed from the
Speaker 2: Justice Department, and its duties reassigned among three new DHS agencies,
Speaker 2: Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE, Citizenship and Immigration Services CIS,
Speaker 2: and Customs and Border Protection CBP in the newly created
Speaker 2: DHS would be a reality in less than a year.
Speaker 2: So that's the situation.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: The man tasked with creating the CBP was Robert Bonner,
Speaker 2: a federal judge and a former DEA head. His first
Speaker 2: and most pressing decision was whether or not to change
Speaker 2: the agency's famous green union, which is obviously more important
Speaker 2: than like the rapes, the right trading of women for
Speaker 2: sports tickets and stuff.
Speaker 3: Why is that the first order of business? Why are
Speaker 3: they us?
Speaker 2: Look, Caitlin, These brave men of the Border Patrol who
Speaker 2: only occasionally commit mass rape and sex trafficking that includes
Speaker 2: sex trafficking of twelve year olds, and only occasionally torture
Speaker 2: pregnant women to death. Those brave men have a lot
Speaker 2: of pride in their uniform, and they want to know
Speaker 2: that that uniform is not going to change.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: They have to be presentable. That's the most That's the
Speaker 3: most important thing.
Speaker 2: The most important thing is that they they get to
Speaker 2: still feel like they're part of the part of the
Speaker 2: old Border Patrol that they love. You know, the old
Speaker 2: Border Patrol. Let them torture all those people and throw
Speaker 2: kids into into t dank, freezing cells for months on end,
Speaker 2: many of whom are actually American citizens. That's just how
Speaker 2: it's it's important, you know, yeah, so uh from Politico
Speaker 2: quote weeks before the new agency officially launched on March
Speaker 2: first two thousand and three, he invited all of the
Speaker 2: Border Patrols twenty sector chiefs to Washington to discuss the transition.
Speaker 2: They all arrived in DC in full dress, green uniforms,
Speaker 2: shoes polished brass, buttons gleaming. As Bonner walked into the room,
Speaker 2: everyone stood and snapped to attention. The new Commissioner began
Speaker 2: his remark, simply, the Border Patrol will remain green. The
Speaker 2: room erupted in applause and cheers. They're proud of the green.
Speaker 2: They were very proud of that uniform, Bonner recalls today.
Speaker 2: They were concerned about losing that identity.
Speaker 3: Eh, who cares about your green uniform?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 2: The Border Patrol cares.
Speaker 1: Fuck off and fucking losers.
Speaker 2: See this is why, as I've always said, uh and
Speaker 2: so if you can back me up on this, Caitlin,
Speaker 2: you would be a terrible head of the Border.
Speaker 3: Patrol because I don't respect the green exactly.
Speaker 1: Well, I don't even I don't wear green. But it's
Speaker 1: because I hate the Celtics. I can't have Aby there.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: See, Sophie, you'd be bad at this too, because as
Speaker 2: a Border Patrol agent, you should be trading kidnapped women
Speaker 2: to the Celtics in exchange for season tickets.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, can we just go to an ad break,
Speaker 1: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2: Speaking of the Celtics, you know who else supports this podcast?
Speaker 3: Hey?
Speaker 1: You know who else is?
Speaker 3: Who?
Speaker 1: Nope, nope, nope, and we're back that that that Celtics.
Speaker 1: Dig I just would like to denote that. I will
Speaker 1: keep doing that and also high prop.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's that I don't understand who the Celtics are Celtics.
Speaker 2: I don't understand any of this. This is all Sophie.
Speaker 2: If you love that team, if you love that team,
Speaker 2: send your death threats to Sophie.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you love that if you love that team,
Speaker 1: just unfollow me because we will never be friends.
Speaker 3: Also, I don't know.
Speaker 1: Who they.
Speaker 3: If you, if you don't give a ship about sports
Speaker 3: teams in existence tennis, follow me.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Except for soccer, Soccer is allowed. Soccer's cool. Soccer is
Speaker 3: the only sport.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 2: Soccer is definitely not allowed.
Speaker 1: What soccer soccer is allowed.
Speaker 3: There is.
Speaker 2: There is one sport allowed in my ideal world, and
Speaker 2: it's that that game they play in Afghanistan where they
Speaker 2: all ride around on horseback with a goat head and
Speaker 2: people get killed sometimes because they it's it's yeah, you.
Speaker 1: Just fully Robert died this entire thing. Anyway, it's follow
Speaker 1: Caitlin on Twitter on Instagram. She's a great follow.
Speaker 2: Continue with your podcast Afghanistan to play sports anyway. They
Speaker 2: were not particularly concerned the Border Patrol with making any
Speaker 2: changes to reduce the number of migrants killed by border
Speaker 2: patrol agents. Since two thousand and three, border Patrol agents
Speaker 2: have killed at least ninety seven people. Six of those
Speaker 2: people were children. They've also taken repeated action to stop
Speaker 2: other people from saving lives. As summers grew more brutal,
Speaker 2: more and more migrants started dying in the Sonoran Desert.
Speaker 2: In two thousand and four, the faith based organization No
Speaker 2: More Deaths started leading gallant leaving gallon jugs of water
Speaker 2: out near cop and footpaths and the desperate hope that
Speaker 2: it might stop a few people from dying horribly in
Speaker 2: the desert. They soon noticed that their water bottles were
Speaker 2: being slashed open. No More Death set up hidden cameras
Speaker 2: they found in every case border Patrol agents destroying water
Speaker 2: caches almost with visible glee. You can see one of
Speaker 2: these videos for yourself and the PBS documentary Need to Know.
Speaker 2: Salon dot COM's description is quite good. Quote. Three Border
Speaker 2: Patrol agents, two men and a woman are walking along
Speaker 2: a migrant trail and approaching half a dozen one gallon
Speaker 2: jugs of water. The female agent stops in front of
Speaker 2: the containers and begins to kick them with force down
Speaker 2: a ravine. The bottles crash against rocks, bursting open. She's smiling.
Speaker 2: One of the agents watching her smiles as well, seeming
Speaker 2: to take real pleasure in the spectacle. He says something
Speaker 2: under his breath, and the word tonk is clearly audible.
Speaker 2: Do you know what tonk means?
Speaker 3: I don't.
Speaker 2: So we talked about wetback in episode one and how
Speaker 2: that was the Border Patrol's old term for particularly Mexican immigrants,
Speaker 2: because of the river they have to cross. Tonk is
Speaker 2: new the new slur that the Border Patrol uses for
Speaker 2: a documented immigrants, and it comes from the sound that
Speaker 2: a flashlight makes when you hit someone in the head.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, you'll hear.
Speaker 2: This if in any article you read about the modern
Speaker 2: Border Patrol that they the word tonk is like their
Speaker 2: standard term for migrants, and it's a term because of
Speaker 2: what it sounds like when they beat these people with flashlights.
Speaker 3: Well, m okay, let me just process that.
Speaker 2: New slurs were. Of course, of course, far from the
Speaker 2: only changes to hit Border Patrol during the Bush years.
Speaker 2: By the time President Obama took office, the Border Patrol
Speaker 2: had gone from an underfunded force of about nine thousand
Speaker 2: to a twenty one thousand person army, the largest federal
Speaker 2: law enforcement agency in the country. There are actual armies
Speaker 2: smaller than the Border Patrol and less well equipped. They're
Speaker 2: the largest law enforcement agency in the country now, so
Speaker 2: that's good. All those new officers had to be trained
Speaker 2: up quick, and this did not lead time for rigorous
Speaker 2: vetting and background checking that other federal agents go through.
Speaker 2: Border Patrol agents today still have the least average years
Speaker 2: of experience of any federal law enforcement agency. They also
Speaker 2: have the lowest standards for new recruits. This may have
Speaker 2: something to do with the fact that Border Patrol agents
Speaker 2: are involved in more fatal shootings than any other federal
Speaker 2: law enforcement agency. Yeah, you know, probably. It's not like
Speaker 2: any federal lawenforcement agency is good about giving us numbers
Speaker 2: about how many people they shoot, but probably they kill
Speaker 2: more than any of the others.
Speaker 3: Okay, I believe it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. One senior DHS official even admitted to Politico quote,
Speaker 2: the agency has created a culture that says, if you
Speaker 2: throw a rock at me, you're going to get shot.
Speaker 2: Between two thousand and five and twenty twelve, roughly one
Speaker 2: CBP officer was arrested for misconduct every single day. During
Speaker 2: President Obama's first term. Things got so bad that DHS
Speaker 2: Secretary Janet Napolitano ordered the CBP to change its institutional
Speaker 2: definition of the word corruption so they wouldn't have to
Speaker 2: admit to as many problems. When they were questioned by
Speaker 2: Congress about all of the murder, it's yeah, wow again
Speaker 2: under Obama, it's pretty much impossible. No, I just like, yeah, Like,
Speaker 2: we're not even really gonna get into the Trump years
Speaker 2: in this two parter because that's like a whole nother
Speaker 2: thing to start talking about. Yeah, like most of this
Speaker 2: that we're talking about today, I mean it's Reagan Bush Senior,
Speaker 2: Clinton Bush Junior, and Obama, Right, those are the guys
Speaker 2: that this is happening under. Those are the guys funding
Speaker 2: this right enthusiastically. All of the politicians that everybody thinks
Speaker 2: are fine now because Trump is such a such a
Speaker 2: dick anyway. Yeah, it's pretty much impossible to exaggerate how
Speaker 2: bad Border patrol ISNT. Was like, I'm gonna guess that
Speaker 2: most of our listeners come from a broad position that
Speaker 2: like Feds are not good, which is fine and accurate.
Speaker 2: But even among that company, like even if you're like, oh,
Speaker 2: federal agents are pretty much all bad, it's shocking how
Speaker 2: bad the agents of the CBP are. It's like, it's
Speaker 2: staggering how shitty they particularly become in the aughts. And
Speaker 2: I'm going to quote from Salon again. There was the
Speaker 2: Miami CBP officer who used his law enforcement status to
Speaker 2: bypass airport security and personally smuggle cocaine and heroin into Miami.
Speaker 2: There was the green uniformed agent in Yuma, Arizona, who
Speaker 2: was caught smuggling seven hundred pounds of marijuana across the
Speaker 2: border in his green and white Border patrol truck. The
Speaker 2: brand new twenty six year old border patrol agent who
Speaker 2: joined a drug smuggling operation to distribute more than a
Speaker 2: thousand kilograms of marijuana in Del Rio, Texas. The thirty
Speaker 2: two year old border patrol agent whose wife would tip
Speaker 2: him off on which buses filled with illegal immigrants to
Speaker 2: let through his checkpoint on I thirty five in Laredo, Texas.
Speaker 2: Some cases were more obvious than others, like the new
Speaker 2: Border Patrol agent who took an unusual interest in maps
Speaker 2: of the agency's sensors along the border and was arrested
Speaker 2: just seven months into the job after he sold smugglers
Speaker 2: those maps fifty five hundred dollars. In November two thousand
Speaker 2: and seven, CBP official Thomas Winkowski wrote an agency wide
Speaker 2: memo citing numerous incidents or, as he called them, disturbing events,
Speaker 2: saying that the leadership was concerned about the increase in
Speaker 2: the number of employee arrests. The memo, never made public,
Speaker 2: but obtained by the Miami Herald, reminded officers and agents,
Speaker 2: it is our responsibility to uphold the laws, not break
Speaker 2: the law now. Right around that time, internal CBP investigations
Speaker 2: uncovered that the agency had, in dozens of cases, hired
Speaker 2: members of Mexican drug cartels and gangs like MS thirteen
Speaker 2: to be agents. They'd also hired at least one serial killer,
Speaker 2: Juan David Ortiz, who murdered five women during his time
Speaker 2: as an intelligence analyst for the agency. He is also
Speaker 2: suspected of kidnapping a woman. We'll never really know the
Speaker 2: exact extent of his crimes, and in that regard he
Speaker 2: fits in with another border patrol veteran Esteban Manzanares. It
Speaker 2: is possible that Estebon Manzanares was not a serial killer.
Speaker 2: He hasn't been convicted of any murders, but he was
Speaker 2: caught abducting three migrant women, a mother and her two
Speaker 2: teenage daughters. He attempted to bury one alive, and he
Speaker 2: raped another. And yeah, earlier this year, in appeals court
Speaker 2: ruled that his victims could not sue the federal government
Speaker 2: as Mensinares was not acting in his official capacity as
Speaker 2: a border patrol agent when he assaulted those women. Sure,
Speaker 2: he arrested them during his duties as a border patrol agent,
Speaker 2: and he took them to a border patrol processing facility
Speaker 2: before taking them to a gated compound to assault them,
Speaker 2: but he wasn't acting as a border patrol agent.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, the mental gymnastics as people do.
Speaker 2: Just legal ones.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, the good news is that a few bad apples
Speaker 2: like Manzanares and Arties, and also all of the thousands
Speaker 2: of agents who got arrested on an early daily basis
Speaker 2: for seven straight years didn't stop the orchard from detaining
Speaker 2: more migrants than ever before. During the Obama years, DHS
Speaker 2: deported more undocumented migrants than ever four hundred thousand a year.
Speaker 2: As President Obama said in twenty eleven, the presence of
Speaker 2: so many illegal immigrants make a mockery of all those
Speaker 2: who are trying to immigrate legally. Now, yeah, that's good, mama,
Speaker 2: it's pretty cool. It's pretty cool. What a problem this was. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so and again, all of these legal immigrants make a
Speaker 2: mockery of everyone trying to immigrate illegally. The data shows
Speaker 2: that during this period, this like fucking seven year period,
Speaker 2: an average of one border patrol agent per day almost
Speaker 2: was arrested for serious crimes like ranging from like rape
Speaker 2: and sexual assault to attempted murder to you know, drug smuggling.
Speaker 2: Like every day a border patrol agent basically was getting
Speaker 2: arrested during these years. But that's not making a mockery
Speaker 2: of life, right, law enforcement or whatever. Yeah, yeah, Now,
Speaker 2: there were a number of reasons why things got so
Speaker 2: bad in border patrol. We've talked about some of them,
Speaker 2: just sort of like the inherent racist nature of the
Speaker 2: existence of the Border patrol. But there are also just
Speaker 2: sort of some some reasons that you would describe as
Speaker 2: kind of broadly bureaucratic. There were a bunch of bureaucratic
Speaker 2: reasons why it happened to right, kind of outside of
Speaker 2: the inherent, you know, problems of policing a border. For
Speaker 2: one point, like, they were increasing the size of the
Speaker 2: Border Patrol faster than any law enforcement agency had ever
Speaker 2: been increased, and that meant bringing in a shitload of
Speaker 2: people who weren't qualified. They had all of this money,
Speaker 2: and they did not have enough people who could actually
Speaker 2: responsibly do the job. So they were just throwing people
Speaker 2: in chairs and giving them guns and badges. Now, the
Speaker 2: issues of hiring a bunch of people for an agency
Speaker 2: based on assaulting non white people and giving them, you know,
Speaker 2: broad powers, were compounded by structural problems within the like
Speaker 2: the way the border patrol was set up. Most border
Speaker 2: patrol men are agents. This differs from special agents, which
Speaker 2: are the cool dudes like Fox Molder. Everyone who becomes
Speaker 2: a FED wants to be Special agents can both arrest
Speaker 2: people and investigate crimes. Agents only have arresting powers. They
Speaker 2: cannot investigate crimes now. Because CBP is seen as the
Speaker 2: shittiest federal law enforcement agency, the dumping ground for all
Speaker 2: of the violent assholes, our government doesn't like to make
Speaker 2: them special agents. According to Politico Quote. In many ways,
Speaker 2: the difference between the two is CBP's original sin, a
Speaker 2: seemingly minor technical distinction made in the harried heat of
Speaker 2: DHS creation a decade ago, that would allow hundreds of
Speaker 2: cases of corruption in CBP's Office of Field Operations and
Speaker 2: use of force abuses in the Border Patrol offestor for years.
Speaker 2: The problem was that no one at CBP received what's
Speaker 2: known as eighteen eleven authority. When DHS was set up,
Speaker 2: ICE was given exclusive eighteen eleven authority to conduct investigations
Speaker 2: in the border region. CBP was only given so called
Speaker 2: eighteen oh one authority, a lesser classification that allowed border
Speaker 2: patrol agents and customs officers to make arrests an enforced
Speaker 2: federal law, but not in investigate. They could be cops
Speaker 2: but not detectives. This didn't particularly matter, and the daily
Speaker 2: performance of CBP's duties the borders were patrolled to the
Speaker 2: ports of entry watched except that CBP was legally prohibited
Speaker 2: from policing its own workforce. Yeah, and it's again one
Speaker 2: of these things. Every single person who's ever been involved
Speaker 2: in running the CBP agrees, like, yeah, this is a
Speaker 2: real big problem because it means that they're even less
Speaker 2: accountable than other law enforcement agencies because those ones are
Speaker 2: barely accountable and those ones are barely accountable. But like,
Speaker 2: even when Border Patrol agents commit a crime that other
Speaker 2: border patrol agents think is horrible, like they can't investigate.
Speaker 3: Wow, no accountability, Holy crap.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, other law enforcement agencies look at Border Patrol
Speaker 2: and go Jesus Christ, those people are unaccountable when they
Speaker 2: commit acts of unspeakable violence.
Speaker 3: That is bleak. That's bleak, very bleak.
Speaker 2: By twenty twelve, the problems in Border Patrol were obvious
Speaker 2: enough that they spilled out into the public's fear. The
Speaker 2: Arizona a Public conducted an investigation which showed that agents
Speaker 2: had killed at least forty two people, thirteen of whom
Speaker 2: were citizens, since two thousand and five. In none of
Speaker 2: these killings was any agent known to effaced consequences of
Speaker 2: any kind. Congressional pressure forced the agency to submit to
Speaker 2: an investigation by the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington,
Speaker 2: DC based law enforcement think tank. The PERF investigated sixty
Speaker 2: seven cases of lethal force by Border Patrol agents. They found,
Speaker 2: among other things, cases of agents firing at fleeing vehicles.
Speaker 2: The report concluded too many cases do not appear to
Speaker 2: meet the test of objective reasonableness with regard to the
Speaker 2: use of deadly force. The PERF report advised, among other things,
Speaker 2: that agents should not use lethal force on unarmed drivers
Speaker 2: or rock throwers. The agency rejected this out of hand,
Speaker 2: with the head of Border Patrols saying in an interview,
Speaker 2: I've known agents who have almost died from being rocked
Speaker 2: along the border, and I think it was completely ridiculous
Speaker 2: that they wanted that prohibition. I should note here that
Speaker 2: no Border Patrol officer has ever been killed by Iraq.
Speaker 2: I can't really find evidence of one being seriously injured
Speaker 2: by Iraq either. What I can find is that in
Speaker 2: twenty fourteen, CBP leadership estimated a full twenty percent of
Speaker 2: their force was corrupt. Attempse at reform were made in
Speaker 2: the last two years of the Obama administration, and in
Speaker 2: twenty sixteen it looked like things might finally be headed
Speaker 2: in a less murdery direction. But then Donald Trump became
Speaker 2: the president, and here we are a presidential administration filled
Speaker 2: with literal Nazis. Was handed a vast, heavily armed force
Speaker 2: of sociopaths and rapists who just spent the last two
Speaker 2: years being told that they had to rape and murder less,
Speaker 2: and then all of a sudden they were told, whatever
Speaker 2: you want to do is find just get these brown
Speaker 2: people out of the United States. And that's kind of
Speaker 2: where things stand today with the Border Patrol as sort
Speaker 2: of the turning into the official armed wing of the
Speaker 2: racist right, with these CVP and BORTAC units set up
Speaker 2: using Border patrol men being sent into American cities to
Speaker 2: police dissent because they're the most dedicated and least accountable
Speaker 2: and most violent law enforcement officers the country has. And yeah,
Speaker 2: there's a lot more I could and should get into
Speaker 2: about where things are at the moment with Border Patrol,
Speaker 2: But this is it took me this long just to
Speaker 2: get us up to the fucking Trump administration.
Speaker 3: Right, and yeah we're not even at the you know,
Speaker 3: the whole the frenzy around Yeah, build the wall and
Speaker 3: just like yack, yeah, yeah, so yeah, I guess that's
Speaker 3: another podcast.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's another kind of podcast. And I guess if
Speaker 2: I'm gonna lead leave somewhere or in this somewhere, I
Speaker 2: probably it would probably be good to end by talking
Speaker 2: again about Harlan Carter for just a little bit. Do
Speaker 2: you remember Harlan Carter. He was the former Border Patrol
Speaker 2: head it was in charge during Operation Wetback, and who
Speaker 2: was a convicted murderer in nineteen thirty one, he shot
Speaker 2: a Mexican boy in the chest. So yeah, the young
Speaker 2: Mexican boy that he murdered was named Raymond Cassiano. And
Speaker 2: there's actually a really good song about the Border Patrol
Speaker 2: and about Raymond Casiano by a band I quite like
Speaker 2: called Drive By Truckers, And there's a line in it
Speaker 2: about Harlan Carter. You know, this former head of the
Speaker 2: Border Patrol who goes on by the way to become
Speaker 2: the head of the NRA and is like one of
Speaker 2: the guys in charge of the NRA when it turns
Speaker 2: into the NRA we all know today from the organization
Speaker 2: that was like, oh, people should learn how to shoot
Speaker 2: accurately so they can hunt deer, right, like the NRA
Speaker 2: used to just be like a normal, pretty normal thing,
Speaker 2: and then it turns into this crazy thing that it
Speaker 2: is today, this quasei military or not quasi military, but
Speaker 2: like this explicitly fascist organization urging political violence. Anyway, Harlan
Speaker 2: Carter is the guy behind that too.
Speaker 1: So not somebody we'd want to get a drink.
Speaker 2: With, not somebody you'd want to get a drink with.
Speaker 2: And there's there's a couple of lines about him in
Speaker 2: this song Raymond Casiana, which is named after the guy
Speaker 2: that Harlan Carter killed, and it's it's a song yeah,
Speaker 2: really about not just Harlan Carter, but about the kind
Speaker 2: of men who become border patrol agents. He had the
Speaker 2: makings of a leader of a certain kind of men
Speaker 2: who need to feel the worlds against him, out to
Speaker 2: get him if it can, men who's trigger pull their fingers,
Speaker 2: of men who'd rather fight than win united in a revolution,
Speaker 2: like in mind and like in skin. Yeah, yeah, it's
Speaker 2: a good song.
Speaker 3: Mm hm, well good it a listen.
Speaker 2: So Caitlin, you wanna you wanna plug your pluggables?
Speaker 3: Sure well, thank you for enlightening me with this information.
Speaker 3: A lot of it I did not know, so I
Speaker 3: I appreciate now knowing depressing and upsetting though it may be,
Speaker 3: it's good to be informed. You can follow me on
Speaker 3: Twitter and Instagram at Caitlyn Dante, and you can check
Speaker 3: out my podcast on this network called The Bechdel Cast.
Speaker 3: So you know, that little conversation that Sophie and I
Speaker 3: had at the beginning was a reference to that. We
Speaker 3: talk about the representation of women in film. A yeah,
Speaker 3: check check, check it all out, check it all out.
Speaker 1: And you can follow Robert on Twitter at I Write Okay.
Speaker 1: You can follow this podcast on Twitter, at Instagram at
Speaker 1: Bastards Pod. You can now email us at Behind the
Speaker 1: Bastards at iHeartMedia dot com. And you can buy merch
Speaker 1: at our Tea Public Store. You can also buy merch
Speaker 1: from Caitlin and Jamie's Tea Public Store, which has some
Speaker 1: of my absolute favorite items in the entire planet.
Speaker 3: This diicon.
Speaker 1: How's that for a plug?
Speaker 3: That great? Thank you, Sophie.
Speaker 2: Feminist icons. You know who else is a feminist icon?
Speaker 3: I can't wait to see who? You say?
Speaker 2: Dear Caitlin Durante.
Speaker 3: Oh thank you, all right, I'll.
Speaker 1: Say very very very very warmly.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 1: That's the that's the episode Bye Guys.
Speaker 2: Episode.
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Speaker 1: Zonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the
Speaker 1: Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday
Speaker 1: and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash
Speaker 1: at Behind the Bastards