Speaker 1: M hm. You know, introducing a podcast is a little
Speaker 1: bit like Megan Love. It's not it's not at all.
Speaker 1: I'm so sorry. I'm Robert Evans failing to introduce my
Speaker 1: podcast yet again. It's behind the bastards, it's about terrible people.
Speaker 1: I'm so sorry everyone. I was. I was trying to
Speaker 1: open with my folksy wisdom, but I have none, and
Speaker 1: I've got now I've botched the start of this episode.
Speaker 1: Here to attempt to take away some of my shame
Speaker 1: is Caitlin Duranti. Caitlin, how are you doing today? Oh?
Speaker 1: You know, I'm just barely keeping it together at any moment.
Speaker 1: But otherwise, think of any similarities between introducing a podcast
Speaker 1: and making love? Well, let me think about that. Um oh,
Speaker 1: I have one at home? One, I have one, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: The audio levels can go up until the audio levels
Speaker 1: can go up and down. That's a good similarity, So
Speaker 1: very much. Sure. Maybe an entire episode, not just introducing
Speaker 1: an episode, but in an entire episode, I think you
Speaker 1: could draw some parallels between because you've got you know,
Speaker 1: there's like the intro is sort of like the four play,
Speaker 1: and then you've got you know, usually a big climactic
Speaker 1: finish to the episode. Well, there you go, everybody, if
Speaker 1: you were we figured it out. You wanted to compare
Speaker 1: a random episode of my podcast about bad people to
Speaker 1: making love, Caitlyn Durranty has kind of made it easier maybe, Caitlin,
Speaker 1: how are you doing today? All right? Um, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm just you're in your closet recording and you're in
Speaker 1: your closet. I'm looking at your luggage right now. Nice luggage.
Speaker 1: I see you go with the hard shell. Thank you. Yes,
Speaker 1: it is a really nice closet. If I remember from
Speaker 1: the photos you sent me like it's it's a very
Speaker 1: good sized closet. It truly is. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: You want to hear a little story about me, Caitlin
Speaker 1: some an narcissist? Okay, So you know I travel a
Speaker 1: lot to Caitlin, and I have refused my entire traveling
Speaker 1: life to have like a hard shelled rolly suitcase, even
Speaker 1: though they're much more comfortable to use at the airport
Speaker 1: than a backpack, because as a young man with an
Speaker 1: indestructible spine, I was like, only stupid old people use
Speaker 1: the rollie backpacks. I'm gonna be I'm gonna be a
Speaker 1: young adventurer forever and I just get to wear a backpack,
Speaker 1: and now I just hurt myself every time I go
Speaker 1: to the airport out of pride. And that's why men
Speaker 1: shouldn't be allowed to hold political office. I couldn't agree
Speaker 1: with you more. Um, yeah, you mean you you carry
Speaker 1: around one of those like big backpacking, big old, big
Speaker 1: old backpacking backpack. Horrible, horrible. Sometimes they carry a Duffel
Speaker 1: bag even worse. That's absurd. Yeah, it's terrible idea, but
Speaker 1: you know it does tie in with the theme of
Speaker 1: today's episode, because what do you do with What do
Speaker 1: you do with backpacks and Rowley suitcases, Caitlin, I mean
Speaker 1: you bring them with you to travel, You bring them
Speaker 1: with you to cross borders. Yeah, and today we're talking
Speaker 1: about the motherfucking me grat the border patrol. Oh boy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's been a long journey to starting the episode this week,
Speaker 1: but I think we got there nicely. Yeah. Sorry to
Speaker 1: everyone who's been Um, you know, this has been a
Speaker 1: little bit of a weird run of Behind the Bastards
Speaker 1: the Uprising episodes. Uh, we're still going to be doing
Speaker 1: the Dictators and grifters, you know, that are bread and butter.
Speaker 1: But um, I keep getting obsessed with different law enforcement agencies,
Speaker 1: particularly the ones you know, shooting at me. Uh. And
Speaker 1: so I started just kind of reading a bunch about
Speaker 1: customs and border patrol this last week or so, and
Speaker 1: I couldn't stop, And so I wrote a lot about
Speaker 1: them and how we're all going to talk about border
Speaker 1: patrol because Caitlin, did you know the border patrol kind
Speaker 1: of problematic. Wait a minute, what do you mean? Yeah,
Speaker 1: not nice dudes, as it turns out, Um, and have
Speaker 1: kind of been dicks for like a hundred something years,
Speaker 1: or like a hundred years. They've been dicks for a
Speaker 1: long time, very close to a hundred years. Six years,
Speaker 1: all right, yeah, which you know, they still have time
Speaker 1: to change. You know, a lot of people have their best,
Speaker 1: their best, you know, their second act after age ninety six. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I would just say that applies to a large number
Speaker 1: of people. A lot of tortoises, at least a lot
Speaker 1: of tortoises go on to do very cool things after
Speaker 1: age Yeah. Trees as well, there's a lot of old
Speaker 1: trees that are border patrol could be like a sequoia. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I don't know how likely. I think that is.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna talk about We're gonna talk about Lamiger
Speaker 1: today because they're terrible, and I don't think most people
Speaker 1: know how terrible they are. And their terribility is important
Speaker 1: because it is tighten with a lot of horrible things
Speaker 1: about this country and the very concept of whiteness. So
Speaker 1: how are you feeling about that, Caitlin? You know, I
Speaker 1: don't feel good about it. I really don't. That's good
Speaker 1: because my cunning plan has been to blame you personally
Speaker 1: for all of the historical crimes of the U. S.
Speaker 1: Border Patrol. Well, I did invent them. You you you
Speaker 1: launched the Immigration Act of nineteen twenty four. That's Caitlin Durantis.
Speaker 1: That's resume. Yeah. I didn't want that to be my legacy,
Speaker 1: but here we are. Yeah. A lot of people don't
Speaker 1: know this, but you used to be all of Congress
Speaker 1: in the early nineteen twenties. Yeah. Yeah, I mean pretty
Speaker 1: impressive when you think of yeah, no, it really is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Congress Durante, Yeah you were instead of Caitlin, you were
Speaker 1: Congress Tournto. Just true. If we're gonna talk about the
Speaker 1: border patrol, we've got to talk about the border. And
Speaker 1: given that the territory we currently know as like Texas,
Speaker 1: New Mexico, Arizona, and even Mexico is all land that
Speaker 1: was stolen from indigenous people. This is not like a
Speaker 1: case where there's a lot of good guys to choose from.
Speaker 1: If you're talking about like conflicts over the US Mexican border,
Speaker 1: you're talking about like a bunch of different states that
Speaker 1: kind of sucked fighting each other for land that wasn't
Speaker 1: their Like that that that's the whole that's the whole deal, right, Um. So,
Speaker 1: the US Mexican War of eighteen forty eight is the
Speaker 1: conflict that gained our nation most of the modern Southwest. UM.
Speaker 1: It was a naked war of imperialist aggression against another
Speaker 1: nation that brutally subjugated indigenous people's um. One can argue
Speaker 1: that Mexico was like a broadly better country than the
Speaker 1: US at this point since it didn't allow slavery, But
Speaker 1: both countries not not great to anyone any like indigenous
Speaker 1: peoples or whatever, just just just bad, bad, bad governments.
Speaker 1: So the end of the West Mexican War, the United
Speaker 1: States wound up occupying Mexico City, and that nation was
Speaker 1: forced to seed fifty of its northern territory and the
Speaker 1: resulting treaty, and I think a lot of Americans who
Speaker 1: grew up kind of outside of the Southwest. I don't
Speaker 1: really have a clear idea of how much land UM
Speaker 1: the United States got as a result of the US
Speaker 1: Mexican War, but we took a shipload of land from Mexico.
Speaker 1: It's fucking crazy how much of this country used to
Speaker 1: be Mexico, like up into Oklahoma. Yeah. I don't have
Speaker 1: a good gauge on that because I grew up in
Speaker 1: Pennsylvania and that just wasn't something that they bothered to
Speaker 1: tell us in history class. Yeah, we went like most
Speaker 1: of the Southwest was kind of, at one point or
Speaker 1: another um part of Mexico. UM. And so, yeah, we
Speaker 1: took about fifty of Mexico's northern territory, and a new
Speaker 1: US Mexican border was redrawn along the Rio Grand from
Speaker 1: um the Gulf to El Paso and then along more
Speaker 1: or less an arbitrary line further west up the Pacific. Now,
Speaker 1: this meant that a huge number of people who had
Speaker 1: previously lived in Mexico and had been able to travel
Speaker 1: freely around territory that was all part of one nation
Speaker 1: now found themselves living in between two nations. Uh. This
Speaker 1: included roughly a hundred and eighty thousand members of indigenous
Speaker 1: tribes as well as about a hundred and fifty thousand Mexicans.
Speaker 1: So these three hundred thousandish non white folks owned most
Speaker 1: of the land, and like the territories in the Southwest
Speaker 1: that you know became Texas and some of the surrounding states, um,
Speaker 1: and the decades after the US Mexican War are kind
Speaker 1: of best viewed as a gradual process of white people
Speaker 1: taking this land from non white people, some of it
Speaker 1: through purchase, some of it through like violent threats and intimidation, uh,
Speaker 1: some of it as a results of the reservation system
Speaker 1: kicking indigenous people off of their ancestral land, and some
Speaker 1: of it through just like good old you know, good old,
Speaker 1: good old fashioned genocide, Caitlin, just like that, just like
Speaker 1: really getting your boots in it, you know. I mean,
Speaker 1: those are the main principles that the US was founded on, right,
Speaker 1: white people stealing end from non white people and genociding them.
Speaker 1: You gosh darn right, Caitlin, your gosh darn right. And
Speaker 1: that's why when I get up in the I'm just
Speaker 1: thinking of like a Folger's coffee commercial, you know, one
Speaker 1: of those old ones who was like a cowboy getting
Speaker 1: up on the range sipping a Folger's coffee and then
Speaker 1: just like stepping into a pile of bones and just
Speaker 1: being like, ah, nothing like a nice morning walking barethrop
Speaker 1: through a pile of bones, the thing that I do
Speaker 1: every day as a cowboy. Yeah. Why wasn't that their
Speaker 1: ad campaign for Folgers, Well, murder everybody coffee helps. Oh
Speaker 1: I was drinking coffee and it went down the wrong hole, Caitlin. See,
Speaker 1: coffee can't be stopped from attempting genocide. Even coffee wants
Speaker 1: to murder. A coffee wants nothing but to murder. So,
Speaker 1: as we discussed in our last episod Zoe of the
Speaker 1: Behind the Police mini series that we just did, the
Speaker 1: Texas Rangers was kind of the first border patrol type
Speaker 1: force UH in you know, the southwest UH And they
Speaker 1: began their history as a as a group like a
Speaker 1: paramilitary organization to provide to protect white settlers in Texas.
Speaker 1: They were formed by a local mayor named John Jackson Tomlinson,
Speaker 1: who was part of the old three hundred White families
Speaker 1: who first settled in Texas with Stephen F. Austin. Now,
Speaker 1: it wasn't a popular decision for these three hundred families
Speaker 1: to settle in Texas, and the Comanches, Tangkawa's, Apaches, and
Speaker 1: Karankawas who already resided in the area got kind of
Speaker 1: angry and started murdering them. So Tomlinson ordered the formation
Speaker 1: of a roving defensive patrol. This patrol became the Texas Rangers,
Speaker 1: but Tumlinson never got to see it formed because he
Speaker 1: was almost immediately killed by karen Kawa and huako In
Speaker 1: indigenous people before he got off the ground. Um, well,
Speaker 1: it sounds like karma to me. Yeah, it sounds like
Speaker 1: it's fine. Like a shame they didn't get more people.
Speaker 1: So the Rangers were kind of this country first border
Speaker 1: patrol force, and the primary method of action for them
Speaker 1: was just again really just straight up genocide. In the
Speaker 1: early days, they were like a paramilitary army. They acted
Speaker 1: as scouts for actual militias. They would swoop in and
Speaker 1: force Indigenous people out of their homes and under reservations,
Speaker 1: but would also just burn their villages sometime and murder
Speaker 1: their women and children. Because you know. Whatever do you
Speaker 1: Sometimes you coming to the office and you want to
Speaker 1: do things different. Um, I don't know. Yeah. They also
Speaker 1: engaged in the murder and intimidation of Mexicans and border communities,
Speaker 1: and by the early nineteen hundreds of the indigenous folks
Speaker 1: had mostly been forced off of their land, and the
Speaker 1: Rangers have become a police force focused mainly on Mexicano
Speaker 1: Mexicano communities on the border. The primary strategy was what's
Speaker 1: known to historians as revenge by proxy. And for an
Speaker 1: example of how that looked, I'm gonna quote from the
Speaker 1: American Crossroads book Migra quote. On June's twelfth, nineteen o one,
Speaker 1: and Mexicano rancher named Gregorio Cortez stood at the gate
Speaker 1: of his home in Kirness County, Texas. There he was
Speaker 1: us to arrest for a crime that he did not commit.
Speaker 1: The sheriff persisted, drew his gun and shot Gregorio's brother
Speaker 1: in the mouth. When he charged at the sheriff to
Speaker 1: protect Gregorio, Gregorios shot back and killed the sheriff, an
Speaker 1: act that was sure to bring the Texas Rangers to
Speaker 1: his doorstep. When they came, Gregorio and his family including
Speaker 1: his wounded brother, were gone. All that remained was the
Speaker 1: dead body of the sheriff. The news of Gregorio's deadly
Speaker 1: defiance quickly spread across southern Texas. UM and Yeah, for
Speaker 1: ten days, the Texas Rangers and posse's numbering up to
Speaker 1: three men hunted for him. When they could not find him,
Speaker 1: they sought revenge by proxy, arresting, brutalizing, and murdering an
Speaker 1: unknown number of Mexican yos. So that's like how the
Speaker 1: Texas Rangers kind of worked for a while. Is Hispanic
Speaker 1: person commits a crime or a perceived crime, and if
Speaker 1: they can't catch him to murder him publicly, they just
Speaker 1: kill a bunch of other random Mexicans so that like
Speaker 1: people don't get up at it. That's the that's the
Speaker 1: first border patrol. Horrible, pretty bad, Caitlin, pretty bad. Don't
Speaker 1: like it. I don't like it one bit. Okay, So
Speaker 1: you are you are on them. You are on the
Speaker 1: record now about not being in favor of murdering random
Speaker 1: people um as part of a fear based a system
Speaker 1: of law enforcement. Yes, and I am. I am happy
Speaker 1: to be on the record. State it's a bold stance.
Speaker 1: That's a bold stance to lose your Some advertisers, Caitlin especially,
Speaker 1: are big advertiser Raytheon. When you really need a group
Speaker 1: of people intimidated by violence, there's no other option but
Speaker 1: Raytheon a robot ad brick. You're just doing. I know,
Speaker 1: that's a that's a free that's a free one. Raytheon
Speaker 1: just had to lay off a lot of employees, Sophie
Speaker 1: and I for one to have a sense of loyalty.
Speaker 1: So I'm trying to help Raytheon out with some free ads.
Speaker 1: So look, if you've got a couple of billion extra
Speaker 1: dollars that you need to spend on missiles that are
Speaker 1: filled with knives in order to assassinate, you know, insurgent
Speaker 1: leaders in Yemen, Um, look, don't go to Lockheed Martin,
Speaker 1: go to Raytheon. Okay there, it's just better knife missiles. Right.
Speaker 1: That's that's all I'm gonna say. I have a sense
Speaker 1: of loyalty. So for the first twenty years of the century,
Speaker 1: the US Mexican border was policed by a mix of
Speaker 1: Texas rangers and like local sheriffs. UH. Such enforcement was
Speaker 1: always piecemeal, with hundreds of miles of borderland operating basically
Speaker 1: autonomously as it had for generations. Like the idea that
Speaker 1: we would police our border like didn't exist until pretty recently.
Speaker 1: For most of American history, it was just like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: you've got this big empty chunk of country and eventually
Speaker 1: it becomes Mexico and it's nobody's nobody really gives a ship. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You see, all these communities had existed for forever, for
Speaker 1: hundreds of years in a lot of cases, and you know,
Speaker 1: they had family who would be up in Mexico or
Speaker 1: up in the United States, and it would have seemed like, um,
Speaker 1: it would have seemed like madness to try to, uh,
Speaker 1: to try to split these communities up based on an
Speaker 1: arbitrary border line that nobody could even see. Um. But yeah,
Speaker 1: in the nineteen twenties that started to change. In nine
Speaker 1: twenty four, the Immigration Act was passed and the Immigration
Speaker 1: Act banned all immigration to the United States from Asia,
Speaker 1: and it massively reduced immigration in from the Southern from
Speaker 1: Southern and Eastern Europe. The goal of the Act was
Speaker 1: for the first time to enshrine in law the federal
Speaker 1: government's preference for Nordic whites above non white people when
Speaker 1: it came to immigration. So basically set up a quota system. Ye. Yeah,
Speaker 1: have you heard about this? This is when we decided
Speaker 1: that only one kind of white people were allowed in
Speaker 1: the country. Um, this is the Italians aren't white enough law.
Speaker 1: But people used to really care about that right in
Speaker 1: the Immigration Act. A big part of it was stopping
Speaker 1: Italians or as they would have called them, Italians, uh,
Speaker 1: which it used to be I think more racist than
Speaker 1: it is and is now just a funny, old timy
Speaker 1: way of making fun of Italians, which I'm always I'm
Speaker 1: always in favor of Caitlin. How do you feel? You know?
Speaker 1: You do know that my last name is Durante and
Speaker 1: the Diana I partly Italian? Yeah, so am I that's
Speaker 1: why it's okay? Good? All right? Yeah? Yeah? Yeah? Are
Speaker 1: we are? Are we white? How's that? How's that work? Uh?
Speaker 1: I have heard slightly varying things, but I think by
Speaker 1: and large Italian people are considered white. Yes. I was
Speaker 1: looking at a Nazi cartoon the other day because I
Speaker 1: do things like that for my mental health, and it
Speaker 1: was like the point it was making is that like
Speaker 1: social justice advocates are always white, uh, and fascists are
Speaker 1: actually really diverse and so like it was a bunch
Speaker 1: of white people lecturing Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirahito. But but
Speaker 1: because it was drawn by a fascist, they drew in
Speaker 1: Mussolini as a black man because they don't think Italians
Speaker 1: are white. So it's just like there were a lot
Speaker 1: of layers of wrongness there to pass through. It was
Speaker 1: one of those things that looked very confusing to people
Speaker 1: who don't immediately recognize, Oh, these are the kind of
Speaker 1: racists who don't even think Italians count as white. Um,
Speaker 1: it's very funny. But in the nineteen twenties that was
Speaker 1: all of Congress, sure, and they were like, we gotta
Speaker 1: pass a lot to stop these Italians from coming in. Um. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: the Immigration Act in nineteen bands all Asian immigration and
Speaker 1: tries to kind of restrict to only the right kind
Speaker 1: of white people. And the one real exception to this
Speaker 1: the only kind of like non white folks who were
Speaker 1: allowed into the country under the Immigration Act without any
Speaker 1: kind of um restriction, where we're Mexicans. Um. And this
Speaker 1: is because of hardcore labor or lobbying by the agricultural industry, right,
Speaker 1: because like basically you had all these ranchers and farmers
Speaker 1: in Texas particularly and in the Southwest, who are like,
Speaker 1: our entire industry doesn't work without these people, so you
Speaker 1: have to let them in. UM. So the Act does
Speaker 1: kind of make an exception for that. Um. It's very
Speaker 1: heavily based on race science. And in fact, a big
Speaker 1: factor in what got the Act passed was a bunch
Speaker 1: of bogus studies conducted by the Eugenics Research Office at
Speaker 1: cold Spring Harbor that kind of provided intellectual justification for
Speaker 1: the law by arguing that the wrong kind of immigrants
Speaker 1: would leave the surges and violent crime and declines in
Speaker 1: i Q. Um, No, this is bad. This is bad.
Speaker 1: And the nineteen four Immigration Act is what establishes the
Speaker 1: US Border Patrol for the very first time. So this,
Speaker 1: this fundamentally racist law written by people who justified it
Speaker 1: explicitly with race like like bad, race science is where
Speaker 1: the border patrol is initially established. So literally born in
Speaker 1: an orgy of racism. Uh. And in fact, the the
Speaker 1: nineteen Immigration Act that established the Border Patrol was so
Speaker 1: nakedly racist that Adolf Hitler took inspiration from it. Uh
Speaker 1: in nineteen Yeah, it's bad, It's really bad, Caitlin. This
Speaker 1: is where border patrol comes from. Oh yeah, it's not great.
Speaker 1: Um in n Hitler wrote this of the law, there
Speaker 1: is currently one state in which one can observe at
Speaker 1: least a week beginnings of a better conception. This is,
Speaker 1: of course, not Germany, but the American Union. The American
Speaker 1: Union Union categorically refuses the immigration if physically unhealthy elements
Speaker 1: and simply excludes the immigration of certain races. So Hitler
Speaker 1: in the twenties took a look at what we were
Speaker 1: doing in the US and was like, I like the
Speaker 1: looks of that. Let me be copy paste and do that.
Speaker 1: That's exactly what happened. That's exactly what happened. That's exactly
Speaker 1: And he wrote extensively about how inspired he was by
Speaker 1: US immigration law, which was like the most racist in
Speaker 1: the world at the time. Holy ship, you want to
Speaker 1: know something else, cool, Caitlin, this is a neat story.
Speaker 1: You're gonna love this. Please see the you know, El Paso,
Speaker 1: great town, solid Tacos. A lot of immigration in Del
Speaker 1: Paso right always has been because it's it's the pass right,
Speaker 1: you know, that's just where it's located. Back in like
Speaker 1: the twenties and thirties, when immigrants would come in. Racist
Speaker 1: white people were so worried about how dirty they thought
Speaker 1: Mexicans were that they would mandate de lousing bats for
Speaker 1: everybody who entered the country, and they would just douse
Speaker 1: them in uh pesticide. And the pesticide that they chose
Speaker 1: was zyklon. B Wait what is that? That's what they
Speaker 1: killed all the Jews with. And the yeah, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: another thing. The Nazis were like, oh, this seems like
Speaker 1: something we could modify a little bit to make better
Speaker 1: for us. That's good stuff. It's not. It was super
Speaker 1: flammable and sometimes people burnt horribly to death. Good stuff
Speaker 1: on the border kind of always a nightmare, kind of
Speaker 1: If you study the history of the border, maybe the
Speaker 1: only reasonable conclusion is that borders are fundamentally toxic, but
Speaker 1: and completely made up. They're just yeah, total of like
Speaker 1: horrible usually racist ideology. They're just lines, racist lines we
Speaker 1: draw on a map that murder tons of people. It's awesome,
Speaker 1: it's really good. So yeah, the border patrol comes out
Speaker 1: of is formed from a law that the Nazis look
Speaker 1: at and go, that's a good law, says we the Nazis.
Speaker 1: Um sweet stuff, Caitlin. So because the the Immigration Act
Speaker 1: has passed alongside a surge of racist nativist fear about
Speaker 1: those dastardly non white immigrants. It mandated that the new
Speaker 1: Border Patrol be established quickly. The first version of the
Speaker 1: force was basically built overnight from July one, so rapidly
Speaker 1: that there was no time for the Patrol to actually
Speaker 1: create any kind of qualification exam for its new recruits.
Speaker 1: The first wave of men to where the services green
Speaker 1: uniform were instead required to pass the railway mail clerk
Speaker 1: civil service exam, which I'm sure is basically the same thing. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So as a result, and this is something we'll talk
Speaker 1: about in part two, this this winds up being a
Speaker 1: long trend in the Border Patrol is every decision they
Speaker 1: make they have to like immediately adopt it, and they
Speaker 1: never have time to train anybody to do the job
Speaker 1: that they're going to do, and everyone's just fine with this,
Speaker 1: and it persists for ninety six years. So the whole thing,
Speaker 1: every like decisions are made all willy nilly people are
Speaker 1: brought in with no training, no training implemented, with no
Speaker 1: thought given to it. They're just like, here's what we decided,
Speaker 1: and we're not going to take a second, to examine
Speaker 1: this at all, We're just going to do it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, the current DHS Secretary Chad Wolf, has no
Speaker 1: law enforcement experience, was never in the military, and I
Speaker 1: think went to college on like a tennis scholarship. Um.
Speaker 1: So it's great and it's cool how things are always
Speaker 1: exactly the same forever because yeah, again, if people ever
Speaker 1: learn a single lesson from history, the world will explode.
Speaker 1: So we have to not do that, um anyway. But
Speaker 1: there's also a conundrum there too, right, because so much
Speaker 1: of history that gets taught, at least in schools is
Speaker 1: so horribly whitewashed and revisionists that like, how can anyone
Speaker 1: learn anything from it? Yeah? Yeah, you know, that's a
Speaker 1: good point, Caitlin. And that's that's why as I see
Speaker 1: all these kids in the street who just aren't going
Speaker 1: to school anymore and are instead spending their nights drop
Speaker 1: kicking the doors of a federal courthouse to try to
Speaker 1: taunt the agents inside to attack them, I think it's
Speaker 1: probably fine, probably learning about as much, right. So, um yeah,
Speaker 1: the very first border patrolmen were mostly male clerks, and
Speaker 1: obviously mail clerks maybe aren't super meant to be tromping
Speaker 1: around the desert hunting people, and about a quarter of
Speaker 1: everyone in the Border Patrol quit in their first month
Speaker 1: of the job. Turnover remained incredibly high for basically the
Speaker 1: whole history of the organization, but particularly it's early years,
Speaker 1: and this made it kind of impossible for it to
Speaker 1: develop any kind of functional internal culture. At the start,
Speaker 1: by the Border Patrol had been forced to hire inspectors
Speaker 1: who could not even pass civil service exams. The agency
Speaker 1: tried desperately to recruit military veterans and men with law
Speaker 1: enforcement experience, but the vast majority of their new hires
Speaker 1: were just unemployed men who lived in border towns. These
Speaker 1: were white, working class folks who had trouble keeping a job,
Speaker 1: and we're kind of desperate for a leg up and
Speaker 1: the regular income that a law enforcement career would allow,
Speaker 1: as well as kind of the respect in pride or
Speaker 1: respect that you would get as a member of law enforcement. Right,
Speaker 1: Like they wanted some power. These were like poor working
Speaker 1: class whites. Don't give anybody power. It never goes well, No,
Speaker 1: especially not poor white men in the country. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So immigration from Mexico into the United States had not
Speaker 1: traditionally been like a major subject of national political debate.
Speaker 1: People in Texas, you know, there were folks who cared
Speaker 1: about it, but like, really, on a national level, if
Speaker 1: you'd like run based on your plan to build a
Speaker 1: wall around Mexico, Americans have been like, what the fund
Speaker 1: is your probable? Like, why do you give a shit
Speaker 1: about that? Everyone is dying of diphtheria and the economy
Speaker 1: is permanently crashed. Please please stop? Um, which I guess
Speaker 1: now we're back at so maybe that'll help. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't hear as many people giving a shit about
Speaker 1: the border these days, I'll say that much. But maybe
Speaker 1: it's because nobody wants to come here anymore. We did it, Caitlin,
Speaker 1: We finally stopped it. Just turn the US into a
Speaker 1: disease written Hell, all it took was a runaway plague
Speaker 1: that we completely give up any hope of every dealing with.
Speaker 1: You know what, President Trump figured it out, Good for him.
Speaker 1: Do you know what President Trump didn't figure out? Oh? Um,
Speaker 1: the products and services that support this podcast. That's right.
Speaker 1: We keep them a secret from the president. Um, but
Speaker 1: if you listen in, it can be a secret that
Speaker 1: you and I share and hide at all costs from
Speaker 1: the administration, we're back. Oh my gosh, I for one
Speaker 1: love that Trump for America bought up all of our
Speaker 1: advertising space. Um. When I think of President, I think
Speaker 1: of the president anyway. Uh. So immigration from Mexico had
Speaker 1: not traditionally been a big, big political debate issue, right. Uh.
Speaker 1: The wealthy agribusiness owners in Texas preferred simple immigration from Mexico. Uh,
Speaker 1: and they fought to ensure that Mexicans were not subject
Speaker 1: to the same harsh immigration restrictions as other immigrants. In
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenty four bill, one business owner put it simply,
Speaker 1: without the Mexicans, we would be done. Um, which hasn't
Speaker 1: really changed, you know. And it's like we'll talk about
Speaker 1: this a little bit later on, but it is. It
Speaker 1: is this kind of one of the things that you
Speaker 1: I didn't even realize was like really problematic when I
Speaker 1: was a young person kind of dealing with. Um. The
Speaker 1: mix between outwardly hateful racists in the Southwest, UM and
Speaker 1: nice people who don't realize they're racist. Is like the
Speaker 1: nice people the outwardly hateful people are like you know,
Speaker 1: the Trump type folks that you know who want to
Speaker 1: build a wall and kick all the rapists Mexicans out. Sure,
Speaker 1: they're easy to spot, yeah yeah, And then you have
Speaker 1: this chunk of people who are like, well, I hate
Speaker 1: what Trump's doing, and like I'm happy to have Mexicans
Speaker 1: here because you know, they do great work and you
Speaker 1: know they're they're they're great at this, and they're good
Speaker 1: at that, and they're good at and it's this thing
Speaker 1: where like especially like you know, you don't necessarily notice,
Speaker 1: especially as like a young white person was the eighteen
Speaker 1: nineteen like what what what's actually being said there? Which
Speaker 1: is like the commodification of of non white bodies, um,
Speaker 1: which is like not not cool. Um. But we're going
Speaker 1: to talk more about that later because this is where
Speaker 1: that all starts in an organized way, which is awesome. Um.
Speaker 1: So uh. The white working class and texts, so obviously
Speaker 1: like these kind of these kind of landowners, the kind
Speaker 1: of aristocracy in Texas in this period, right like the
Speaker 1: ranchers and stuff. They were broadly like they wanted more
Speaker 1: Mexicans and they could never get enough because like they
Speaker 1: needed people to to actually work their farms. But the
Speaker 1: white working class in Texas and the white working class
Speaker 1: even in rural areas really had nursed like a growing
Speaker 1: hatred of Mexican people and had been for years. And
Speaker 1: this was based on a mix of like fear that
Speaker 1: Mexican immigrants would take their jobs that was always like
Speaker 1: a core part of it um and also based on
Speaker 1: kind of like good old fashioned racism. One labor union
Speaker 1: official in Texas at the time noted, quote, I hope
Speaker 1: they never let another Mexican come to the United States.
Speaker 1: The country would be a whole lot better off for
Speaker 1: the white laboring man if there weren't so many inwards
Speaker 1: and Mexicans. And then, yeah, well, and this is one
Speaker 1: of those things if you're like kind of squaring yourself
Speaker 1: with the history of labor. You know, I'm a big
Speaker 1: fan of labor history, and I think there's a lot
Speaker 1: of wonderful stuff there. You do have to square with
Speaker 1: the fact that like a lot of those dudes who
Speaker 1: were right about a lot of important things were incredibly
Speaker 1: racist and hated non white people because they saw them
Speaker 1: as a threat to white working class people. Um well,
Speaker 1: I mean, which that all stems from capitalism more or less.
Speaker 1: There was any um fairness or parody when it came
Speaker 1: to income and labor. People wouldn't have to be worried
Speaker 1: about other people. There wouldn't be this fear of like,
Speaker 1: who is my job in danger? Who's going to take
Speaker 1: my job? Um, because they're like a more just just
Speaker 1: socialized economy would eliminate that fear absolutely. Yeah. So, the
Speaker 1: the actual laws on the books in this period of
Speaker 1: time had been written largely by the rich landed gentry
Speaker 1: who needed Mexican immigrants. But now that the border patrol
Speaker 1: existed post the men enforcing those laws were working class
Speaker 1: whites who really just hated Mexicans and they honestly didn't
Speaker 1: give a shit about the needs of farmers. And in fact,
Speaker 1: a lot of them saw kind of being able to
Speaker 1: police undocumented migrants as a way of kind of equalizing
Speaker 1: their level of social power with farmers, because like, you know,
Speaker 1: they were poor or than these guys. They didn't have property,
Speaker 1: but now they had the ability to to arrest these
Speaker 1: dudes workers, and like that gave them a level of
Speaker 1: power in their culture and a level of power of
Speaker 1: these people who had kind of previously been the bosses um.
Speaker 1: And you know, kind of for a lot of these
Speaker 1: guys who became the first border patrol workers, these were
Speaker 1: obviously these were white men but there were men whose
Speaker 1: kind of sense of whiteness had been hanging on by
Speaker 1: a thread prior to this, this opportunity coming around, and
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote again from the book Migra quote. Early
Speaker 1: officers may have lived in white neighborhoods, worshipped at white churches,
Speaker 1: and sent their children to white schools. But a salesman, chauffeurs, machinists,
Speaker 1: and cow punchers, they had labored at the edges of
Speaker 1: whiteness in the borderlands. The steady pay and everyday social
Speaker 1: authority of US immigration law enforcement work dangled before them
Speaker 1: the possibility of lifting themselves from a marginalized existence as
Speaker 1: what Neil Foley has examined as the white scourge of
Speaker 1: borderland communities. Policing Mexicans, in other words, presented officers with
Speaker 1: the opportunity to enter the region's primary economy and in
Speaker 1: the process shore up their tentative claims upon whiteness. As
Speaker 1: immigration control was emerging as a critical site of simultaneously
Speaker 1: expanding the boundaries of whiteness while hardening the distinctions between
Speaker 1: whites and non whites. The project of enforcing immigration restrictions
Speaker 1: therefore placed border patrol officers and what police scholar David
Speaker 1: Bailey describes as the cutting edge of the state eats
Speaker 1: knife in terms of enforcing new boundaries between whites and
Speaker 1: non whites. So that is the border patrol in this period,
Speaker 1: the cutting edge of the states knife, you know, cleaving
Speaker 1: the boundaries between white and non white people. It's a
Speaker 1: way to look at it, very picturesque. Yeah. Now this
Speaker 1: has made a lot more complicated by the fact that
Speaker 1: a chunk of the early border patrol were Mexican American
Speaker 1: UM and these guys in a lot of cases saw
Speaker 1: their ability their career in law enforcement as a way
Speaker 1: of separating themselves from non white people. The League of
Speaker 1: United Latin American Citizens or LULAC, specifically stated that Mexican
Speaker 1: American association with colored races is what held them back
Speaker 1: from full acceptance by white society in this period of time.
Speaker 1: Um And the book Migra includes the story of one
Speaker 1: early officer patrol, inspector Pete Torres, who was marked by
Speaker 1: a colleague for being Mexican. In response, he shot at
Speaker 1: the man's feet and yelled, I am not a Mexican,
Speaker 1: I am a Spanish American. Um. Yeah, So this is like, yeah, internalized. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a complicated history here. UM. And I I'm not
Speaker 1: going to, Um, I'm not going to go into tremendous
Speaker 1: depth about this aspect of the history because I'm just
Speaker 1: I'm not at all the right person to do so.
Speaker 1: The right person to do so, in fact, is probably
Speaker 1: Kelly Kelly Little Hernandez, author of the book migra Um
Speaker 1: History of the U. S. Border Patrol. She does talk
Speaker 1: about this in in more depth, and I really recommend
Speaker 1: her book. Um, but you should know that's like an
Speaker 1: aspect of what's going on here and and and as
Speaker 1: a rule, one of the things that starts to happen
Speaker 1: in particular around like the forties is kind of a
Speaker 1: growing Spanish or Mexican American community who are very pro
Speaker 1: immigration enforcement um and pro like harsher immigration laws and
Speaker 1: laws against the legal immigration. They start to like solidify
Speaker 1: as a voting block in the Southwest in this period too,
Speaker 1: and they still are to this day. It's. Um, a
Speaker 1: lot of people are like shocked and they see Hispanics
Speaker 1: for Trump and stuff, and there's actually pretty deep roots
Speaker 1: for a lot of that stuff. Um. Yeah. So uh,
Speaker 1: most early border patrol men, though we were white dudes,
Speaker 1: and it would probably be fair to call them white supremacists.
Speaker 1: And as the years went by, our government gave them
Speaker 1: increasing powers to exercise racism with state of authority behind it.
Speaker 1: From a right up in the intercept quote. While the
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty four immigration law spared Mexico quota, a series
Speaker 1: of secondary laws, including one that made it a crime
Speaker 1: to enter the country outside of official ports of entry,
Speaker 1: gave border and customs agents on the spot discretion to
Speaker 1: decide who could enter the country legally. They had the
Speaker 1: power to turn what had been a routine, daily or
Speaker 1: seasonal event crossing the border to go to work into
Speaker 1: a ritual of abuse. Hygienic inspections became more widespread and
Speaker 1: even more degrading. Migrants had their head shaped and they
Speaker 1: were subjected to an increasingly arbitrary set of requirements at
Speaker 1: the discretion of patrollers, including literacy tests and entrance fees.
Speaker 1: The Patrol wasn't a large agency at first, just a
Speaker 1: few hundred men during its early years, and it's reached
Speaker 1: along a two thousand mile line was limited, but over
Speaker 1: the years it's reported brutality grew as the number of
Speaker 1: agents that deployed increased. Border agents beat, shot, and hung
Speaker 1: migrants with regularity. Two patrollers, former Texas rangers, tied the
Speaker 1: feet of one migrant and dragged him in and out
Speaker 1: of a river until he confessed to having entered the
Speaker 1: country illegally. Other patrollers were members of the resurgent Ku
Speaker 1: Klux Klan, active in border towns from Texas to California.
Speaker 1: Practically every other member of El Paso's National Guard was
Speaker 1: then the clan. One military officer recalled, and many had
Speaker 1: joined the Border Patrol upon its establishment. So not great ideally,
Speaker 1: you know, if you if you ask me, we keep
Speaker 1: coming back to the k k K and how it
Speaker 1: repeatedly infiltrated law enforcement. Someone maybe how to do something
Speaker 1: about that. So for its first ten years of existence,
Speaker 1: the Border Patrol operated under the authority of the Department
Speaker 1: of Labor, and when FDR was elected, he appointed Francis
Speaker 1: Perkins to be Secretary of Labor and she tried to
Speaker 1: curtail the violence of the Border Patrol and reform it
Speaker 1: um and this didn't really work out in the long run.
Speaker 1: She attempted to cut down and warrantless arrest. She mandated
Speaker 1: that detained migrants had a right to receive phone calls.
Speaker 1: She fought to provide migrants with at least some version
Speaker 1: of the civil rights they lacked as non citizens. But
Speaker 1: before long FDR was pressured by the agricultural industry to
Speaker 1: put the border patrol under the control of the Department
Speaker 1: of Justice. Uh. Now, this might seem surprising at first,
Speaker 1: because like, these rich farmers were the same folks who
Speaker 1: had fought to ensure Mexican immigrants wouldn't be subject to
Speaker 1: quotas in the nineteen four immigration law. But there's a
Speaker 1: reason behind it, because these folks had wanted these you know,
Speaker 1: ranchers and stuff, had wanted Mexicans here to work their farms,
Speaker 1: but they hadn't wanted these people to actually stay in
Speaker 1: the United States. Lobbyist S. Parker Frazel had told Congress
Speaker 1: in nineteen the Mexican is a homer, like the pigeon
Speaker 1: he goes home to roost. And Frizelle's promise had been
Speaker 1: that Mexicans weren't really immigrants, and thus they should be
Speaker 1: exempt from the USA's white supremacist immigration laws. They were
Speaker 1: birds of passage, he argued, just hanging around for a
Speaker 1: little while to work. But by the turn of the decade.
Speaker 1: As we hit like start going into the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 1: Mexicans had started to settle all across the Southwest, buying
Speaker 1: homes and starting communities and places like Texas, New Mexico, Arizona,
Speaker 1: and California. Uh. In nineteen hundred, only about a hundred
Speaker 1: thousand Mexican immigrants had lived in the United States. By
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty, there were one and a half million Mexican
Speaker 1: immigrants in this country. Um. So this starts to freak
Speaker 1: out a lot of white agriculturalists, right Um. And it
Speaker 1: it kind of you know, they had been they had
Speaker 1: been okay with these people coming into work, but at
Speaker 1: the end of the day there there were the same
Speaker 1: kind of white supremacists as the border patrol men. They
Speaker 1: were just a little bit more refined. And once it
Speaker 1: started to look like these these Mexicans were coming in
Speaker 1: and actually going to be contributing and changing the demographics
Speaker 1: of the nation, they panicked. Um. And the only thing
Speaker 1: they could really think of to do was give the
Speaker 1: border patrol more power to enforce how many Mexicans could
Speaker 1: enter the country. Um. And there was a real big
Speaker 1: like debate over this, right um, because uh, you you
Speaker 1: still needed a certain as as these farmers, you still
Speaker 1: needed a certain minimum amount of of of migrants coming
Speaker 1: in every year in order to actually like keep your
Speaker 1: farms working. Um. And the guy who kind of figured
Speaker 1: out a solution to this problem with Senator Coleman Livingston Blie.
Speaker 1: He was a white supremacist congressman who first took office
Speaker 1: in nine and his solution was, rather than creating a
Speaker 1: system of quotas and caps that would have reduced manpower
Speaker 1: in American fields, he just wanted to criminalize unmonitored border crossing. Um.
Speaker 1: So this is the very first time that it becomes
Speaker 1: illegal to cross the US Mexican border without doing it
Speaker 1: at a border station. Um. That's nineteen twenty nine. That
Speaker 1: law has passed. Um. And I'm gonna quote from an
Speaker 1: article in the Conversation explaining what happened here. According to
Speaker 1: Blize's bill, unlawfully entering the country would be a misdemeanor,
Speaker 1: while unlawfully returning to the United States after deportation would
Speaker 1: be a felony. The idea was to force Mexican immigrants
Speaker 1: into an author rised and monitored stream that could be
Speaker 1: turned on and off at will at ports of entry.
Speaker 1: Any immigrant who entered the United States outside of bounds
Speaker 1: of the stream would be a criminal subject defines imprisonment
Speaker 1: and ultimately deportation. But it was a crime designed to
Speaker 1: impact Mexican immigrants in particular. Neither the Western agricultural businessmen
Speaker 1: nor the restrictionists registered any objections. Congress passed Blizes Bill
Speaker 1: the Immigration Act of March fourth, ninety nine, and dramatically
Speaker 1: altered the story of crime and punishment in the United
Speaker 1: States with stunning precision. The criminalization of unauthorized entry caged
Speaker 1: thousands of Mexicans Mexico's birds of passage. By the end
Speaker 1: of nineteen thirty, the U. S. Attorney General reported prosecuting
Speaker 1: seven thousand cases of unlawful entry. By the end of
Speaker 1: the decade, US attorneys had prosecuted more than forty four
Speaker 1: thousand cases. Now Blazes law applied technically to like Canadians
Speaker 1: as well, but basically everyone prosecuted under it was Mexican,
Speaker 1: and it was mainly used as kind of a method
Speaker 1: of non mostly non violent ethnic cleansing. Like I don't
Speaker 1: even if I know if i'd say mostly non violent.
Speaker 1: It was used for ethnic cleansing throughout the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 1: Mexicans made up at least eighty five percent of all
Speaker 1: immigration prisoners. Sometimes some years they made up three new
Speaker 1: prisons were built on the border to hold them all,
Speaker 1: and over the course of the decades, somewhere around one
Speaker 1: million Mexicans were deported from the United States, and most
Speaker 1: of these people were US citizens. Historian Francisco Balderama argues
Speaker 1: that sixt of the million people who were deported were
Speaker 1: US citizens of Mexican descent. Um and border patrol forces
Speaker 1: would call the what was happening here repatriation to make
Speaker 1: it seem voluntary, But what was really happening in the
Speaker 1: thirties was border patrol was just rounding up all of
Speaker 1: the Mexicans they could get and throwing them across the
Speaker 1: border and kind of accusing people of unlawful like crossing
Speaker 1: of the border basically as a justification for for kicking
Speaker 1: them out. Um, so that's cool. I just the resources
Speaker 1: that get used and spent to uh like, enforce these
Speaker 1: laws and build prisons and maintain the prison and just
Speaker 1: like all all of that costs so much time and
Speaker 1: is so much effort. Why, like it would be so
Speaker 1: much easier if we would just let immigrants come and
Speaker 1: then just let them live and be a part of
Speaker 1: the community. I mean, I know why because racism. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's absurd. Yeah, the border patrols pretty lame. You know,
Speaker 1: this is like that. But like this, this is what
Speaker 1: it is from the beginning, Like one of the first
Speaker 1: things the Border Patrol ever does is to port a
Speaker 1: million people, more than half of whom are US citizens. Um.
Speaker 1: And it just lies about what it's doing because it's
Speaker 1: from the beginning. It's job has never been to actually
Speaker 1: enforce the rule of law or even protect the border.
Speaker 1: Its job is to protect whiteness, right yep, souh the
Speaker 1: very The primary method of action for Border Patrol agents
Speaker 1: from the beginning up to now was violence. Um. The
Speaker 1: force was always undermanned and underfunded. With a handful of
Speaker 1: officers responsible for thousands of miles of rugged terrain, there
Speaker 1: was little to no oversight, and agents generally used violence
Speaker 1: at their discretion. As this anecdote from the book Migra
Speaker 1: Illustrates Quote one Day in nineteen explains Stovall, who was
Speaker 1: a Border Patrol agent. He was patrolling alone near San Elizario, Texas,
Speaker 1: when he decided to drive through town Santa Lazario was
Speaker 1: this little Mexican town on the Rio Grand, said stove All,
Speaker 1: who remembered that when he got to town that day,
Speaker 1: he saw a Mexicano come out from behind the bank
Speaker 1: of a drainage ditch and then duck back. Stove All
Speaker 1: admitted to knowing the man, but stopped the car and
Speaker 1: asked him, what do you have there in your bosom?
Speaker 1: The man reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out
Speaker 1: two bottles of beer and put them down on the
Speaker 1: bridge and broke them so he wouldn't have any evidence.
Speaker 1: Reflecting upon the incident, stove All wondered, why didn't I
Speaker 1: pull out my gun and fire at that Mexican. I
Speaker 1: don't know. I don't know why. Instead of reaching his
Speaker 1: gun and firing, stove All fled. I got in my
Speaker 1: car and got away from there, remembered stove All, because
Speaker 1: it was in daylight, about one o'clock. If I had
Speaker 1: pulled my gun and fired, there would have been fifty
Speaker 1: Mexicans around me that quick. According to stove All, God
Speaker 1: spared his life that day by taking charge of his
Speaker 1: hands and preventing him from shooting at the Mexican. You know,
Speaker 1: so this is this is nineteen and kind of a
Speaker 1: common addit like this border patrol agent approaches a guy
Speaker 1: who's got a legal alcohol and the dude breaks the
Speaker 1: bottles on him, and the man's lingering question that he's
Speaker 1: wondering for years afterwards is why didn't I shoot that
Speaker 1: man to death? Like, yeah, some people think justifies killing
Speaker 1: another person is something I will never comprehend. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't think they thought they were people. Um, yeah, and
Speaker 1: it's it's probably worth noting how common brutality was, like
Speaker 1: like open brutality was among US law enforcement officials, um,
Speaker 1: even at like pretty high levels in politics at this time.
Speaker 1: In May of nineteen fifty four, Herbert Brownell, the Attorney
Speaker 1: General UH Eisenhower's Attorney General, gave a speech where he
Speaker 1: asked US labor leaders for their support and the event
Speaker 1: that border patrol agents quote shot wet backs in cold blood.
Speaker 1: So again not saying like, hey, we might have an
Speaker 1: accidental shooting and I need your support because like what
Speaker 1: we're doing is hard and you know, people are gonna
Speaker 1: mess up. He's like, you know, my guys might murder
Speaker 1: some some Mexicans. You know, my guys are absolutely going
Speaker 1: to commit murder in cold blood, and I need you
Speaker 1: to like have my back, right. That's the Attorney General
Speaker 1: of the United States. Cool stuff? You know what else
Speaker 1: is cool stuff? Uh? Don't, Sophie. I can't imagine what
Speaker 1: you're going for here. That's fine, that's fine. I'll just leave.
Speaker 1: You know who isn't the the Attorney General of the
Speaker 1: United States. Hopefully the products and services that with this podcast.
Speaker 1: So racism's not good. You know who else isn't good?
Speaker 1: The head of the Border Patrol in the nineteen fifties. Uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: a great pivot. So the guy in charge of the
Speaker 1: Border Patrol as we turned into the nineteen fifties is
Speaker 1: an outright monster by the name of Harlan Carter. Now
Speaker 1: Carter was, by the time he became the head of
Speaker 1: the Border Patrol, a convicted murderer. Yeah, in nineteen thirty one,
Speaker 1: is a teenager. He'd shot a Mexican boy in the
Speaker 1: chest at point blank range with a twelve gage shotgun,
Speaker 1: and the two had been having an argument, and the
Speaker 1: Mexican boy had a knife, but he was not actively
Speaker 1: threatening Carter, and in fact, he'd laughed at the boy's
Speaker 1: gun because he just kind of seemed to think it
Speaker 1: was silly that they were having a fight at all,
Speaker 1: and Carter shot him to death because he was angry
Speaker 1: for being laughed at. He was convicted of murder and
Speaker 1: sentenced to three years in prison, but he was led
Speaker 1: out after two owing to a technicality. So in nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty one, by the way, you could shoot a man
Speaker 1: in the chest with a twelve gage and get three years.
Speaker 1: But that's neat. Um. I love laws, Yeah, just so
Speaker 1: our justice system is cool. Yeah, he got rehabilitated. He
Speaker 1: went on to become the head of the Border Patrol
Speaker 1: and also was the head of the n R A. Oh,
Speaker 1: Harlan Carter is an interesting piece of shit. Um. So,
Speaker 1: throughout the forties, apprehensions by the Border Patrol we're kind
Speaker 1: of ad hawc and disorganized, and they were mostly the
Speaker 1: result of individual agents seeking out undocumented immigrants by catching
Speaker 1: them in transit. This meant that large numbers of people
Speaker 1: were almost never apprehended at a time. It was more
Speaker 1: just like agents kind of going out and hunting people
Speaker 1: down and grabbing a couple of folks. This was an
Speaker 1: easy system for dumb violent men to like figure out,
Speaker 1: you know, you just kind of it's like hunting basically
Speaker 1: um and it appealed to the kind of folks who
Speaker 1: became Border patrol agents. But starting in nineteen fifty, a
Speaker 1: young agent named Albert Quillan began to change things. He wasn't,
Speaker 1: telligent and ambitious, and when the chief supervisor of Border
Speaker 1: Patrol demanded that he and his colleagues increase apprehensions, Quillan
Speaker 1: began experimenting with bold new strategies. At five am on
Speaker 1: February eleven, Quillan took a detail of twelve patrol men
Speaker 1: with two buses, one plane, one truck, and nine automobiles.
Speaker 1: The men drove out to a small station in Real Hondo, Texas,
Speaker 1: and then split into two groups to clean as well
Speaker 1: as possible a certain section of illegal aliens. The plane
Speaker 1: acted as a spotter while the buses were used to
Speaker 1: quote hall wets to the border. A hundred people were
Speaker 1: apprehended in short order, and they were deported the next day.
Speaker 1: Quillan soon moved on with his force to a series
Speaker 1: of farms near Los Fresnos, Texas. They found five hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty one wets, which is again always the term
Speaker 1: they used for that. Do you understand where that term
Speaker 1: comes from I don't know that I actually know the
Speaker 1: source of it. No. Yeah, So basically the idea is that, um,
Speaker 1: there were kind of tooth two options from Mexicans at
Speaker 1: this time. There was the Briscero program, which was a
Speaker 1: program by which they could kind of enter the country
Speaker 1: quasi legally and get like legal working rights to to
Speaker 1: be like a laborer or something like that. Um. And
Speaker 1: then there was you could just cross the border right
Speaker 1: illegally um. And that usually meant crossing the Rio grant
Speaker 1: which is a river, right, so you wind up wet
Speaker 1: on the other side of the river. So they called
Speaker 1: the wet backs like that. That's that's still to this
Speaker 1: day a racist slang term for particularly Mexicans, kind of
Speaker 1: all people of Hispanic descent, and a lot of Texas
Speaker 1: like you hear it a lot from raises there and
Speaker 1: the border patrol. It is their standard term for these people.
Speaker 1: This is like on all of their professional documents and everything.
Speaker 1: This is what they call migrants. Yeah. Um. So Quillan's
Speaker 1: forces catch five hundred and sixty one wets on their
Speaker 1: second day, and on their third day they catch two
Speaker 1: hundred sixty four. On the fourth day they catch a
Speaker 1: hundred and thirty four uh. In less than a week,
Speaker 1: they captured and deported more than a thousand undocumented laborers,
Speaker 1: and this was like unprecedented. The Border patrol had never
Speaker 1: caught this many people this quickly. Um It was seen
Speaker 1: as an astonishing achievement by Quillan superiors, and they began
Speaker 1: setting up other raids in imitation of his. Border Patrol
Speaker 1: supervisors noted that these new task forces as started being called,
Speaker 1: we're quote pounding away on these wets, cool dudes. Soon
Speaker 1: multiple task forces had been established throughout California and Texas,
Speaker 1: carrying out constant raids and netting huge numbers of undocumented persons.
Speaker 1: On some single days, more than five thousand Mexican nationals
Speaker 1: would be apprehended and shipped to temporary detention camps before
Speaker 1: being sent back across the border. Patrolmen handed deportees notes
Speaker 1: that read quote, you have entered the United States illegally
Speaker 1: and in violation of the laws of your land and
Speaker 1: those of the United States. For this reason, you're being
Speaker 1: returned to your homeland. If you return again illegally, you
Speaker 1: will be arrested and punished as provided by law. We
Speaker 1: understand that the life of a wet back is difficult.
Speaker 1: Wet Backs are unable to work for more than a
Speaker 1: few hours before they are apprehended and deported. Remember these
Speaker 1: words and transmit the news to your families and countrymen
Speaker 1: if you want to do them a favor. So that's fun, Yanks,
Speaker 1: nice letter there. Terrified language. Also, you had said alien
Speaker 1: that that was something that had been and still gets like.
Speaker 1: That language is still used and it's just the most
Speaker 1: dehumanizing word. Yeah, to refer to simply someone who travels
Speaker 1: to another place and wants to stay there. It's pretty
Speaker 1: crazy because we don't use that word for uh, I
Speaker 1: don't know us. I'm I'm excited for when we have
Speaker 1: finally the big civil war that we were all planning
Speaker 1: to have and suddenly a shipload of people but continued
Speaker 1: like yeah, I'm I'm excited for the people who treated
Speaker 1: Syrian refugees and treat Guatemalan and Honduran and Mexican refugees
Speaker 1: like ship and I'm excited for them all to I
Speaker 1: don't know, get gunned down by Canadian border guards, um
Speaker 1: as we deserve as a nation. I don't know, I'm
Speaker 1: angry all the time. Cab, I'm sorry that's not right likewise,
Speaker 1: am I yeah? Um? Anyway, it'll be up to Canada.
Speaker 1: We racist then and then eventually Alaska and then the
Speaker 1: biosphere will die. Um, so you know what won't die, Caitlin, Um,
Speaker 1: are you doing a necessary I know, I went off
Speaker 1: on a really sad rant. Uh, and so I decided
Speaker 1: to throw in a raytheon ad because everybody likes thinking
Speaker 1: about raytheon. So back to the border patrol. Um. So
Speaker 1: the border patrol would like pick up all these folks,
Speaker 1: huge numbers, thousands in a day sometimes and they would
Speaker 1: put them in these like temporary camps um and then
Speaker 1: would take them into Mexico, where the Mexican military would
Speaker 1: basically dump them in the middle of the country as
Speaker 1: far away from the border as possible. And these were
Speaker 1: generally places where there was no work and where these
Speaker 1: migrants had no family connections, and it was just a
Speaker 1: horrible situation for most people. As a result of these
Speaker 1: new tactics, between nineteen fifty and nineteen fifty three, the
Speaker 1: number of border patrol apprehensions nearly doubled, from four hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty nine thousand to almost eight hundred and forty thousand.
Speaker 1: This caused immediate problems for ranchers and farmers, who started
Speaker 1: to realize that the new legal powers they had given
Speaker 1: the Border Patrol had vastly realigned the organization's power in
Speaker 1: a way that allowed the white supremacists who ran it
Speaker 1: to harm agrabusiness by wiping out their workforce. At stake
Speaker 1: was also a sort of cultural readjustment. Farmers and ranchers
Speaker 1: were used to occupying a position at the top of society,
Speaker 1: but now Border patrol men could exercise the power of
Speaker 1: deportation again and take away their workers. And Texas border
Speaker 1: towns like Marfa farmers hired armed guards, hired lookouts, and
Speaker 1: booby trapped farm gates in order to protect their workforce.
Speaker 1: There were gunfights with border patrol um with these like
Speaker 1: white farmers trying to defend their workforce, and as the
Speaker 1: conflict between the farmers and border patrol grew uglier, white
Speaker 1: border town farmers suddenly found themselves facing off against the
Speaker 1: same men who had hunted their workers. The book Migra
Speaker 1: tells the story of D. C. Newton, whose family were
Speaker 1: border patrol farmers who posted guards to warn about raids
Speaker 1: they went to sleep. They want to sleep. One night
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty two and woke up to find that
Speaker 1: dozens of Border patrol agents had snuck in with their
Speaker 1: headlights off and to surprise everyone sleeping in the farmhouse
Speaker 1: and adjacent quarters. The Newton's oldest son was faster, though,
Speaker 1: and he succeeded in warning the undocumented migrants staying on
Speaker 1: the farm, which gave them the time they needed to
Speaker 1: run like hell and hide in the trees. When the
Speaker 1: border patrol men came up empty in their search, they
Speaker 1: went after the white folks who actually owned the farm,
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna quote from the book Migrant Now. They
Speaker 1: entered Newton's parents bedroom and began shining the flashlights in
Speaker 1: my mother's eyes and my father's eyes, telling them to
Speaker 1: get up. We're gonna go out and find where your
Speaker 1: Mexicans are. With my father and his pajamas, my mother,
Speaker 1: his mother in a nightgown, and no one wearing any shoes,
Speaker 1: the officers forced the family out of the house while
Speaker 1: pushing physically pushing my mother in the back, pushing my
Speaker 1: father in the back, and demanding to know where the
Speaker 1: wet backs were. Most of the workers had fled, including
Speaker 1: Newton's nanny, Loupe, for whom the officers claimed to be searching.
Speaker 1: In particular, she had heard the arrival of the patrolman
Speaker 1: and climbed out of the window on the second floor
Speaker 1: of the farmhouse, rolled down onto the roof of the garage,
Speaker 1: and run off to the southeast and was gone. Although
Speaker 1: the Newton's believed they had outsmarted the Border patrol by
Speaker 1: alerting the migrants to the raid, the head Border patrol
Speaker 1: inspector still led fifty three apprehended workers away, saying, see
Speaker 1: how you handle your groves? Now, Now that's like a
Speaker 1: bad story and everything. What's interesting here is, um, I
Speaker 1: guess how horrible Newton's family is here too, um, Because
Speaker 1: the interview with him goes on and he makes it
Speaker 1: clear that when he kind of when his dad explained
Speaker 1: to him what was happening with the Border Patrol, his
Speaker 1: dad compared the conflict to the Civil War. Um, and
Speaker 1: the side that he identified with was not the good side. Quote.
Speaker 1: Newton's father believed that by taking away their workers, the
Speaker 1: damn Yankee Border Patrol were splitting up a household. As
Speaker 1: he explained it to his son, the South Texans protected
Speaker 1: their homes, their families, their property and their way of
Speaker 1: life from the border patrol raids. He was the master.
Speaker 1: The Mexican illegals were equivalent to the black slaves, and
Speaker 1: together they formed a household, a system of labor relations
Speaker 1: in a world of tightly bound intimacy and inequity. The
Speaker 1: Border Patrol threatened their household by reducing the farmer's control
Speaker 1: over Mexico's unsanctioned migrant workers. So as the Southerners had
Speaker 1: rebelled against intrusions upon their labor relations and plantation lives,
Speaker 1: the Newton family had to defend itself against the US
Speaker 1: Border Patrol. Newton's brother took the lesson to heart. When
Speaker 1: the border patrol rated on another night, he stood in
Speaker 1: the family driveway with a shotgun named at the officers.
Speaker 1: Startled by the hostile twelve year old boy, the officers
Speaker 1: left the property and returned on another day. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is what's happening here is really complicated. Right. There's
Speaker 1: an important thing to remember here, which is that even
Speaker 1: of the like white ranch farm owners who are maybe
Speaker 1: not in favor of their workforce being sent back to
Speaker 1: their country of origin, they are still exploiting these workers,
Speaker 1: these migrant workers, um and you know, probably not paying
Speaker 1: them well, probably not offering them you know, good benefits,
Speaker 1: so and probably like keeping them in very primitive living situations,
Speaker 1: often like little more than a shack, often like like
Speaker 1: like kind of nightmares situa like these guys did. These
Speaker 1: migrants often did live very similarly to slaves. Right, it
Speaker 1: wasn't quite that bad, but it was bad. Um. And
Speaker 1: these these farmers are like the border patrol agents want
Speaker 1: these migrants out because they're racist as fuck. Um, and
Speaker 1: these farmers are also racist as fun. They just want
Speaker 1: the migrants to stay because because they can exploit the
Speaker 1: basis of their power exactly. So again, no one to
Speaker 1: root for here other than like these migrants, but they
Speaker 1: seem to mostly get just sucked over by everybody, and
Speaker 1: that's not fun. Yep. So yeah, it's important to remember
Speaker 1: that kind of the struggle between border patrol and these
Speaker 1: border farmers in Texas was a struggle between two different
Speaker 1: groups of white supremacists, and one group of white supremacists
Speaker 1: was broadly in the right because I guess it's it's
Speaker 1: worse to round up thousands of people in cattle cars
Speaker 1: and busses and throw them back across the border for
Speaker 1: no good reason. But there's no one you should be
Speaker 1: rooting for here. But what's really interesting, what's kind I
Speaker 1: find fascinating about this whole conflict is that these racist
Speaker 1: plantation owning, white border farmers wound up like fighting the
Speaker 1: Border Patrol by kind of co opting the language of
Speaker 1: social justice. Um Starting in the nineteen fifties, ranchers began
Speaker 1: to argue that Mexican nationals were being unfairly targeted for deportations.
Speaker 1: They complained that the buses, planes, and trains used to
Speaker 1: take migrants away were cruel, in human and outrageous practices
Speaker 1: trading in human misery. They began to argue that hiring
Speaker 1: Mexicans was an act of kindness by American ranchers. Mexican
Speaker 1: laborers deserve the chance to win a better life by
Speaker 1: working low paid jobs as domestic servants and laborers. The
Speaker 1: Border Patrol was in fact actually fostering communism by sending
Speaker 1: these men and women back to the interior of Mexico,
Speaker 1: where there would no doubt live on in miserable poverty
Speaker 1: and join some leftist guerrilla movement. So because their lives
Speaker 1: being exploited farm hands in the US was so much better.
Speaker 1: What Oh my gosh, yeah, it's pretty cool. How naturally
Speaker 1: that came to these farmers. I like it. So the
Speaker 1: Border Patrol obviously didn't listen to the protest against them.
Speaker 1: They continued to, in their own words, pound away in
Speaker 1: the borderlands, raising apprehensions UH. The increased workload necessary uh
Speaker 1: necessitated more men and facilities, and in nineteen fifty three,
Speaker 1: the Border Patrol attempted to hire two dred and forty
Speaker 1: additional officers and made plans to build two new detention
Speaker 1: centers at the Lower Real Grand Valley. This enraged local farmers,
Speaker 1: and one quote threatened to arm his wet back laborers
Speaker 1: against the Border Patrol, threatening that there is liable to
Speaker 1: be a couple of dead border patrolmen. Death threats against
Speaker 1: patrolman became a daily occurrence, and farmers in the Lower
Speaker 1: Rio Grand lobbied their congressmen to deny the appropriation request
Speaker 1: necessary to fund the new men and facilities. These farmers
Speaker 1: insisted they weren't lobbying for their own benefit, but for
Speaker 1: doing we're doing it from migrants who were victims of
Speaker 1: the patrols. Cheap vindictiveness, a great hunger to ruler ruin
Speaker 1: to control to govern anything to carry a point reckless
Speaker 1: of the consequences to the poor workman, which they heard
Speaker 1: around as cattle, and they weren't wrong in this. The
Speaker 1: facility the Border Patrol wanted to build was essentially a
Speaker 1: concentration camp. Eventually, Congress listened and the appropriation crest request
Speaker 1: was denied. So like the protest of all these guys
Speaker 1: in Texas worked, the Border Patrol had to send its
Speaker 1: two hundred and forty men back home and cancel construction.
Speaker 1: According to the book Migra Quote, one month after losing
Speaker 1: the supplemental appropriation, Chief Kelly announced the Border Patrols withdrawal
Speaker 1: from the Rio Grand Valley to a new defend line
Speaker 1: ten miles to the north of Kingsville. Fall furious and
Speaker 1: Hebronville rather than fight a losing battle in the lower
Speaker 1: Rio Grand Valley at the Border Patrol decided to pull
Speaker 1: out of the area because with limited forces we can
Speaker 1: best control the wet back invasion as at the line
Speaker 1: farther north. It's one of those things, I guess, like
Speaker 1: I always kind of debate when you've got like something
Speaker 1: that is essentially a slur or is a slur um.
Speaker 1: In an episode of like this how often to say it?
Speaker 1: And it's one of those things where I kind of
Speaker 1: feel like cleaning up the Border Patrols official statements in
Speaker 1: the matter would be, I don't know, making it seem
Speaker 1: like they were less of a naked force for white
Speaker 1: supremacy than they were, Like if you, if you, if
Speaker 1: you replace that with Mexican nationals, that's not really what
Speaker 1: they're saying, right, Yeah, I don't know, that's yeah. I
Speaker 1: mean that puts you in a pretty tricky position. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I I don't know. Yeah, they use it a lot. Um,
Speaker 1: it's the Border Patrol are cool guys, And we're about
Speaker 1: to hear it used again in another big way. Um. So,
Speaker 1: the men of the Border Patrol did see the immigration
Speaker 1: of Mexicans into the US as an invasion, and they
Speaker 1: sought to repel it with military force, as kind of
Speaker 1: that language above, right, referring to it as a defensive
Speaker 1: line and stuff, like they're defending whiteness again, and they
Speaker 1: see the encroachment of these, um, these undocumented migrants as
Speaker 1: like an assault on on white blood more than anything else. Um.
Speaker 1: In nineteen fifty three, with the rebellion of the Texas
Speaker 1: Ranchers in full swing. Harlan Carter, who's again the murderer
Speaker 1: who became the head of the Border Patrol, sat down
Speaker 1: with two US generals to ask for their help. He
Speaker 1: wanted the military and the National Guard to assist the
Speaker 1: Border Patrol in a nationwide purge of undocumented Mexican nationals
Speaker 1: called Operation Cloudburst. The first step for this would be
Speaker 1: an anti infiltration campaign to seal the border with the
Speaker 1: help of eight troops Border Patrol wood station soldiers at
Speaker 1: strategic locations and build several long fences to block areas
Speaker 1: of heavy traffic. This part of the operation is fairly standard,
Speaker 1: aside from the presence of US troops. Part to the
Speaker 1: would be a containment operation, which would involve roadblocks on
Speaker 1: every major highway from the southwest to the interior of
Speaker 1: North America. These checkpoints would be used to search vehicles
Speaker 1: for illegal migrants around the clock. Part three was the
Speaker 1: mopping up phase, and this would involve a massive series
Speaker 1: of raids in northern locations. Places far from the border
Speaker 1: like San Francisco where groups of migrants were believed to
Speaker 1: have gathered. Businesses and camps would be rated and the
Speaker 1: arrested migrants would be airlifted or sent by train to
Speaker 1: the interior of Mexico, now again using the military. This
Speaker 1: was essentially he wanted to to bring in the army
Speaker 1: to carry out a military action to purge the United
Speaker 1: States of Hispanic people. That that's what the head of
Speaker 1: Border Patrols trying to do here, and all of the
Speaker 1: military guys he talked to are like, this sounds like
Speaker 1: a great idea. We'd love to help, um, but it's illegal,
Speaker 1: right Posse commatatas means you can't use the army for
Speaker 1: ship like this. Um. The only way around it is
Speaker 1: a presidential proclamation. And Dwight Eisenhower was actually initially all
Speaker 1: on board with issuing that proclam a asian um, but
Speaker 1: in the end he kind of backed away, uh, and
Speaker 1: instead he appointed a General Joseph Swing to be the
Speaker 1: new Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and was
Speaker 1: basically like, we can't use soldiers for this because it's unconstitutional,
Speaker 1: but I'm gonna promote a general to be in charge
Speaker 1: of the I n S. And you figure out a
Speaker 1: way to do the same thing with the resources border
Speaker 1: patrol has, like us your yeah, yeah, I still want
Speaker 1: a military operation to clear out these Hispanic people. Um,
Speaker 1: I just can't use soldiers, so that's good grief. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the mental gymnastics. That what these people do to justify
Speaker 1: their horrible actions. Anyway, Sorry, go ahead, Yeah it's pretty great.
Speaker 1: I don't know. So. One month after joining I n S,
Speaker 1: General Swing announces that he's going to be leading the
Speaker 1: Border Patrol in a new paramilitary campaign based on the
Speaker 1: tactics pioneered by Albert Quillan. The new operation is given
Speaker 1: the name Operation wet Back. Again. That's the Border Patrol's
Speaker 1: official name for it. That's what all these guys call it.
Speaker 1: That's what it's written up in in the documents and stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they just didn't have a fund to give on this matter. So,
Speaker 1: true to form, Border Patrol was only given four weeks
Speaker 1: to prepare for what would become the largest operation in
Speaker 1: their history. The plan was to engage in an unprecedented sweep,
Speaker 1: deporting hundreds of thousands of people. No one received any
Speaker 1: training or specialized equipment to actually do this, though. All
Speaker 1: that most agents had on June nine, nine fifty four,
Speaker 1: when the operation began, was a letter from General Swing
Speaker 1: ordering them to purge the nation by removing the huge
Speaker 1: number of Mexican nationals who were in this country in
Speaker 1: violation of the immigration laws. Always good to hear about
Speaker 1: a purge. Yea. Yeah. So in its first day, California
Speaker 1: and or in the first day of this operation, California
Speaker 1: and Arizona agents apprehended nearly eleven thousand migrants. The flood
Speaker 1: of people only accelerated after that, and the year number
Speaker 1: of deportees overwhelmed the Border Patrol's capacity to hold or
Speaker 1: carry them. People were left in primitive, exposed concentration camps
Speaker 1: for days. The Border Patrol turned Alesion Park in Los
Speaker 1: Angeles into an open air concentration camp. Um. Yeah, that's nate.
Speaker 1: Go to Allegian parks. I've been there before and I'll
Speaker 1: never go again. A lot of the men who were
Speaker 1: in turn there, men and women, got sick and sometimes
Speaker 1: died of sunstroke because there was no care given to
Speaker 1: their health and it can get very hot down there. Uh.
Speaker 1: Of all, deportees were transported by boats, many of which
Speaker 1: were so cramped and filthy that their occupants later compared
Speaker 1: them to slave ships or penal hell ships. Um. So,
Speaker 1: that's great. The Mexican government's capacity to take and transport
Speaker 1: all these people broke down almost immediately, and they were like,
Speaker 1: we need you to to not send these people to
Speaker 1: us so quickly because we can't handle them. And the
Speaker 1: US government said, we don't give a fuck um and
Speaker 1: kept just shotgunning people on over there, and the sheer
Speaker 1: scale of deportations began to funk with American industry. But
Speaker 1: Border patrol didn't really give a shit about this either.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote again from the book Migra. Between June
Speaker 1: seventeenth and July fifty four, two thousand, eight hundred and
Speaker 1: twenty seven of the four thousand and four hundred and
Speaker 1: three migrants apprehended by task the task force assigned to
Speaker 1: the Los Angeles area had worked in industry. After border
Speaker 1: patrol raids during the summer of nineteen fifty four, three
Speaker 1: Los Angeles brickyards were left without sufficient numbers of workers
Speaker 1: and temporarily closed down their operations. Similarly, border patrol officers
Speaker 1: paid close attention to the hotel and restaurant business, which
Speaker 1: routinely hired undocumented Mexican immigrants as bus boys, kitchen help waiters,
Speaker 1: et cetera. Officers reported apprehending such workers at well known
Speaker 1: establishments such as the Builtmore Hotel, Beverly Hills Hotel, Hollywood,
Speaker 1: Roosevelt Hotel, Los Angeles Athletic Club, and the Brown Derby.
Speaker 1: At times, the Border Patrol raids created moments of chaos
Speaker 1: at popular restaurants when migrants attempted to escape by running
Speaker 1: through the serving area. The raids were public and regularly
Speaker 1: drew significant attention from the press, and this was part
Speaker 1: of the point. The reason the Border Patrol focused so
Speaker 1: much on Los Angeles on like raids in big Hollywood
Speaker 1: locations is because they were trying to make a point
Speaker 1: to these like these ranchers who were still fighting them
Speaker 1: in South Texas. And the the message was, if we're
Speaker 1: willing to do this ship in fucking Hollywood, you'd better
Speaker 1: believe that one day we're going to come to your
Speaker 1: ranch and fuck you up, right, Like if we'll do
Speaker 1: this to the built More, will ruin you, Like we
Speaker 1: don't give a ship where the where The Border Patrol
Speaker 1: um and in the end, Operation wet Back was responsible
Speaker 1: for the deportations of somewhere between a quarter of a
Speaker 1: million at the low end, uh and about one point
Speaker 1: five million people at the high end. And you know,
Speaker 1: at the end of the day. Yeah, it kind of
Speaker 1: ended in retreat by the Border patrol. UM. Part of
Speaker 1: this was that around the same time, the US government
Speaker 1: reformed to the Broscero program, which allowed Mexican nationals to
Speaker 1: get legal working status in the US, and that became
Speaker 1: much more popular after this time, So a lot of
Speaker 1: these these ranchers and farmers started making sure that their
Speaker 1: workers kind of went through a legal path to gain
Speaker 1: working status in the United States. UM. And some of
Speaker 1: it was just that, like there was blowback to this program.
Speaker 1: It wasn't very popular, all of the massive public raids
Speaker 1: UM and kind of as a result, border patrol apprehensions plummeted.
Speaker 1: The next year in nineteen fifty five, the task forces
Speaker 1: that had once captured thousands of migrants in a day
Speaker 1: were disbanded and demobilized, and for a little while it
Speaker 1: seemed as if the Border Patrol had gone into hibern nation.
Speaker 1: Of course, that Caitlin was not the case. And in
Speaker 1: part two, we're going to talk about the fact that
Speaker 1: we haven't even talked about any of the worst ship
Speaker 1: that the Border Patrol gets up to in this episode,
Speaker 1: because that's how much worse it gets. Oh, they can't
Speaker 1: wait to hear about it. So how are you feeling? UM,
Speaker 1: I feel pretty terrible. That's good. I love it when
Speaker 1: people feel terrible. Every I'm always like, oh, I can't
Speaker 1: wait to be a guest on Behind the Bastards, And
Speaker 1: then every time I do it, I'm like, oh, yes,
Speaker 1: I'm reminded how horrible people have been to each other. Yes,
Speaker 1: and you were the one who picked this topic with
Speaker 1: a text message L O L. I think the Border
Speaker 1: Patrol sounds fund that did never happen. UM. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's good to be informed about these things.
Speaker 1: So I appreciate UM learning and being further informed about it. UM.
Speaker 1: So yeah, thank you, thank you for that. Yep, you're welcome, Caitlin,
Speaker 1: thank you for coming on. Is there a place as
Speaker 1: people might be able to find you, listen to you,
Speaker 1: ways to support your work? Why? They're certainly are places
Speaker 1: to do that starting with UM. You can follow me
Speaker 1: personally on Twitter and Instagram at Caitlin Darante. You can
Speaker 1: also check out my podcast right here on this network.
Speaker 1: It's called The Bechdel Cast. I co host it with
Speaker 1: Jamie Loftus, and we talk about the representation of women
Speaker 1: in film and just film in general, examining it through
Speaker 1: an intersectional feminist lens. So that is what we do.
Speaker 1: And you can yeah, check out screenwriting classes right now.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, yes, I am, thank you so much for
Speaker 1: bringing that up. I also teach screenwriting um on account
Speaker 1: of a master's degree in screenwriting that I absolutely hate
Speaker 1: to mention or ever just bring up. But UM, it
Speaker 1: does allow me to teach online classes. So if that's
Speaker 1: of any interest to anyone, UM, go to my website
Speaker 1: Caitlin Toronte dot com slash classes and UH. I usually
Speaker 1: have news sections coming up starting soon at any given point.
Speaker 1: And if you want to learn from me, I don't
Speaker 1: teach screenwriting, but I do teach screamwriting, which is where
Speaker 1: you sit down with a pencil and paper and I
Speaker 1: scream at you and then eventually you give me money
Speaker 1: to go away. That's sounds very educational. We all have
Speaker 1: to have an extra couple of grisons, So either pay
Speaker 1: Caitlin for an actual service or pay me to abuse you. Um.
Speaker 1: Either way, you know what, Sophie, look, everybody, look, you
Speaker 1: gotta you gotta be mean to the audience. Sophie, you
Speaker 1: gotta you gotta really kick their I don't know about
Speaker 1: I love them, I appreciate them, and Robert so kindness.
Speaker 1: Is there any way in which you think that, like
Speaker 1: closing out a podcast is similar to making love, just
Speaker 1: to bring things full Here's how closing a podcast is
Speaker 1: like making love. Both of them are inherently disappointing. And uh,
Speaker 1: you can follow Robert and I write on Twitter. You
Speaker 1: can follow us at Boust and spat on Twitter, on Instagram.
Speaker 1: We have a key public store. Uh that's it. Bye
Speaker 1: bye bye m M