Speaker 1: Mmm, hello world, but specifically Australia. This is Robert Evans
Speaker 1: hosted Behind the Bastards, and I just wanted my Australian
Speaker 1: listeners in particular to know that I stood up for
Speaker 1: you against Caitlin's cruelty. Just a minute ago, she pronounced
Speaker 1: the name of your greatest city, Melbourne, Melbourne. I guess, savage, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he said Melbourne. And then okay, well, what about the
Speaker 1: people who live in Sydney or or other cities in Australia.
Speaker 1: One city in Australia its name is Melbourne. And that's
Speaker 1: the end of this digression. Hello, Caitlin Duranty, guest for
Speaker 1: today's episode. How are you doing? Uh well? I would
Speaker 1: be doing better if you would pronounce my last name correctly.
Speaker 1: Speaking of mispronunciation, Durante Durant, I think we've all learned
Speaker 1: a lesson about maybe not judging each other, because it's
Speaker 1: impossible to ever know how words are supposed to be say.
Speaker 1: He thinks Ariana Grande's name is Arianna grand So you know, Sophie,
Speaker 1: even give me guff about that one for a while,
Speaker 1: as it deserves m. Well, now I'm sad. Don't be sad.
Speaker 1: Robert if this is part two. If we didn't get
Speaker 1: to pick on a white man at the beginning of
Speaker 1: an episode, then like, what's the point? Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: this is a whole episode about I don't know, let's
Speaker 1: let's let's pass the Bechdel test right now, Sophie. Oh, Caitlin,
Speaker 1: I I really enjoying the bluish shirt you're wearing right now.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, well, I'm so glad you brought it up, because,
Speaker 1: um it's it's a Paddington shirt that says migration is
Speaker 1: not a crime, which is relevant to today's episode. Wow,
Speaker 1: it really is relevant today's episode. That. But then I
Speaker 1: said Paddington and that that I was like, are we
Speaker 1: gendering padding in right now because that Huntington is a
Speaker 1: non binary a sexual icon. Yes, yes, yes, yes, So
Speaker 1: I kind of passed it back to this. Okay, Robert,
Speaker 1: you want to post your show behind the bastards right
Speaker 1: now because I don't actually know if we passed the
Speaker 1: Bechdel test there. But you know what test we did
Speaker 1: pass is the writing for many hours about the border
Speaker 1: patrol test. Yes, which is a more important test, I think, so, uh,
Speaker 1: you know this one. We're splitting up a little bit
Speaker 1: weirdly over the course of two weeks, because my entire
Speaker 1: life and schedule has been continually thrown into casts. So
Speaker 1: I do apologize for this one being done a little
Speaker 1: bit differently than others are done. On December six, two
Speaker 1: th eighteen, seven year old Jacqueline Call crossed the US
Speaker 1: Mexico border near a place called Antelope Wells, New Mexico.
Speaker 1: She was with her father, twenty nine year old Niry Call.
Speaker 1: Both were Kecchi Maya and they lived most of their
Speaker 1: lives in the Alta are A pause region of Guatemala.
Speaker 1: Starving in desperate, she and her family turned themselves into
Speaker 1: the Border Patrol. When Jacqueline was taken into their custody,
Speaker 1: she was already beginning to show signs of illness what
Speaker 1: would turn out to have been a streptococcle infection. DHS
Speaker 1: maintains that they conducted an initial screening and that there
Speaker 1: was no evidence of health issues and the little girl,
Speaker 1: Jacqueline was placed on a border patrol bus feverish and
Speaker 1: vomiting from severe dehydration. Eight hours after being taken into custody,
Speaker 1: she began to suffer seizures. She died the next day.
Speaker 1: Gomez Alonzo, age eight, crossed the Aos Mexico border sometime
Speaker 1: around December eighteenth. He and his father, Augustine, were members
Speaker 1: of the Choose People, another Mayan group who came from
Speaker 1: the Huahoaitanango region of Guatemala. Spent six days in border
Speaker 1: patrol custody, shuttled around from New Mexico to El Paso,
Speaker 1: and then back to New Mexico to be interned in
Speaker 1: an attention facility named near Alama Gordo. He started to
Speaker 1: show symptoms of sickness on the twenty four He was
Speaker 1: taken to the hospital, where he was tested for the cold,
Speaker 1: but not for influence zone, which he had. He was
Speaker 1: given medicine that could not help him and sent back
Speaker 1: to jail, where he died on Christmas Eve, two thousand eighteen.
Speaker 1: Ye good, good times. That's awful. Yeah, it's real bad.
Speaker 1: The deaths of Gomez and Jacqueline were briefly very big
Speaker 1: news in the United States. It was believed that the
Speaker 1: two were the first child immigrant deaths in border patrol
Speaker 1: custody since two thousand ten. In two thousand nineteen, though,
Speaker 1: it was revealed that another child, Darylyn Cordova, val of
Speaker 1: El Salvador had actually died back in September two eighteen
Speaker 1: under similar circumstances. The Trump administration received a lot of blame,
Speaker 1: both for covering this death up to try to influence
Speaker 1: the midterm elections and for their failure to push DHS
Speaker 1: to take any meaningful action to stop kids from dying
Speaker 1: at the border. Three dead children is a tragedy, but
Speaker 1: their little corpses are actually just the top of an
Speaker 1: iceberg of dead people, many of them Guatemalan, that we
Speaker 1: can lay at the feet of border patrol agents. And
Speaker 1: you might be surprised to learn how that whole situation
Speaker 1: came about. You want to hear about this, Caitlin, I
Speaker 1: have to also what colorful language you used in terms
Speaker 1: of the corpses or at the top of an iceberg.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, you know, I I think if you're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about dead kids, you should do it with
Speaker 1: a little bit of panas pizzas, panas um. Alright, I'm
Speaker 1: keep going, all right, so let's talk about the border
Speaker 1: patrol and um in in Central America. We're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about UM something I don't think a lot of people
Speaker 1: know about because usually, as a rule, when we talk
Speaker 1: about how bad the Border Patrol is. We talk about
Speaker 1: like how mean they are to people who come up
Speaker 1: to the border. Um, but we don't talk about what
Speaker 1: a lot of Border patrol guys did uh in the
Speaker 1: countries that these people are fleeing from before people started
Speaker 1: fleeing from those countries. So this is gonna be fun. Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna it's gonna be a good time for everybody.
Speaker 1: Uh So. John P. Longan was a U. S Border
Speaker 1: Patrol agent in the nineteen forties and fifties. He worked
Speaker 1: near the Mexican border, close to where both Jacqueline and
Speaker 1: Gomez crossed over. Most sources you find on the matter
Speaker 1: will note that he had a reputation for violence, but
Speaker 1: this was not at all uncommon among the men of
Speaker 1: the Border Patrol, nor is it uncommon now. During operation
Speaker 1: went back when the Border Patrol reformed itself into a
Speaker 1: paramilitary force to wage war on Mexican immigrants, long End
Speaker 1: run the Patrols ran the Patrol's equivalent of a military
Speaker 1: intelligence service. Long AND's base was an unmarked building near Alameda.
Speaker 1: He and his men interrogated, captured migrants, extracted information, and
Speaker 1: used it to find and capture other groups of migrants.
Speaker 1: Few of the men who endured these interrogations ever spoke
Speaker 1: about it, but a lot of what happened in those
Speaker 1: cells probably verged on what we considered torture. Long End
Speaker 1: was good at his job, and his performance in Operation
Speaker 1: Went Back earned him a transfer to the State Department's
Speaker 1: Public Safety program. Now, this was, in reality a CIA
Speaker 1: operation geared at providing counterinsurgency training and advice to Allied
Speaker 1: nations combating communist insurgencies. The CIA hand picked a number
Speaker 1: of Border Patrol agents to travel to places like Venezuela, Thailand,
Speaker 1: the Dominican Republic in Guatemala. They particularly liked recruiting guys
Speaker 1: like long End because they were likely to speak Spanish. Now,
Speaker 1: the way the State Department framed this program was training
Speaker 1: law enforcement. So uh yeah, the State Department frame this
Speaker 1: program as training law enforcement. The reality, though, is that
Speaker 1: long End and his fellow Border patrolmen were sent over
Speaker 1: to places like Guatemala to create and train death squads.
Speaker 1: During Operation Went Back, Border Patrol administrators had described their
Speaker 1: work as fighting back against an invasion. In Guatemala, where
Speaker 1: long End arrived in nineteen sixty five, he was finally
Speaker 1: able to wage a real war using real weapons. I'm
Speaker 1: going to quote now from an article in The Nation. Quote.
Speaker 1: Long End taught local intelligence and police agencies how to
Speaker 1: create death squads to target political activists, deploying tactics that
Speaker 1: he had earlier used to capture migrants on the border.
Speaker 1: He arrived in Guatemala in late nineteen sixty five, where
Speaker 1: he put into place a paramilitary unit that early the
Speaker 1: next year would execute what he called Operation the Pieza,
Speaker 1: or Operation clean Up. Within three months, this unit had
Speaker 1: conducted over eighty raids and multiple extra judicial assassinations, including
Speaker 1: an action that, over the course of four days, captured, tortured,
Speaker 1: and executed more than thirty prominent Left opposition leaders. The
Speaker 1: military dumped their bodies into the sea, while the government
Speaker 1: denied any knowledge of their whereabouts. According to Stuart Schrader
Speaker 1: in his up forthcoming Badges Without Borders, How Global counterinsurgency
Speaker 1: transformed American policing, it was common practice during the Cold
Speaker 1: Wards and former border patrol agents like long End to
Speaker 1: train foreign police through CIA linked to public safety programs,
Speaker 1: since they were more likely to speak Spanish than agents
Speaker 1: from other branches of law enforcement. In countries like El Salvador, Honduras,
Speaker 1: and Guatemala. They did the dirty work that Reagan's envoys
Speaker 1: said needed doing. Until the early nineteen seventies, the United States,
Speaker 1: according to a nineteen seventy four Los Angeles Times report,
Speaker 1: was flying its Latin American death squad apprintices up to
Speaker 1: the Border Patrol Academy in Los Fresnos, Texas to receive
Speaker 1: training from CIA instructors and the design, manufacture and potential
Speaker 1: use of bombs and incendiary devices. Long and himself in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty seven clearly to scribe what he thought he
Speaker 1: was doing at the border. We're fighting a war on
Speaker 1: a wide battle front, so that's good. So they're just
Speaker 1: basically training kill squads. They're just telling people to murder people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they're they're pulling Border patrol guys off the line
Speaker 1: to do some of the training to be like, oh,
Speaker 1: you already are good at like tracking down these groups
Speaker 1: of people who are trying to facilitate movement of of
Speaker 1: migrants through the United States. You can use those skills
Speaker 1: to track down political activists, except that you know, since
Speaker 1: it's in a foreign country, you can just have them
Speaker 1: brutally murdered by death squads. And these guys are happy
Speaker 1: to do it because they want to be murdering people anyway.
Speaker 1: They just can't quite usually murder people, um, you know
Speaker 1: at the border. I mean they do it a lot anyway,
Speaker 1: but like they have to be a little bit careful,
Speaker 1: but you don't have to be careful at all in Guatemala.
Speaker 1: So that's great. Oh, ge wiz, have ever been to Guatemala, Caitlin,
Speaker 1: I have not, rules. Yeah, yeah, I spent a lot
Speaker 1: of time there. It's a great country, beautiful, I uh,
Speaker 1: completely dysfunctional government. Um. And you can see like signs
Speaker 1: of the horrible civil war. They're all over the place.
Speaker 1: Just like you cross the street and there'll just be
Speaker 1: a bunch of guys who are all missing arms and legs. Um.
Speaker 1: You'll be driving through the middle of nowhere and you'll
Speaker 1: see like businesses that have been like we're shot up
Speaker 1: decades ago with mortars and stuff, and it you know,
Speaker 1: it's it all kind of descends from this. The the
Speaker 1: series of political conflicts that launch in this period of time,
Speaker 1: particularly in the early nineteen eighties, um, that are backed
Speaker 1: by the United States and supported enthusiastically by the Reagan government,
Speaker 1: and these kind of networks of right wing um murder
Speaker 1: crews that were trained up and sent out by the
Speaker 1: CIA and and their buddies and groups like the Border Patrol. Um,
Speaker 1: this all starts now, and it's cool, it's great, and
Speaker 1: it's probably it's I mean, it's refugees from Yep, these
Speaker 1: conflicts that are seeking refuge in right up to today.
Speaker 1: And then then they get here and they're like, well, sorry,
Speaker 1: fuck you, We're either going to murder you or um
Speaker 1: be diligent and let you die in our custody, or
Speaker 1: send you back to this you know, war torn country
Speaker 1: you're in. Yeah. If you listen to right wingers, they'll
Speaker 1: usually say something like, oh, they should go back to
Speaker 1: their own country and fix its problems. And the reality
Speaker 1: is that, like, well, some of them tried to do that,
Speaker 1: and then we trained death squads to murder them and
Speaker 1: throw their bodies in rivers and stuff in the ocean,
Speaker 1: and um, that's why people are less willing to try
Speaker 1: to fix problems because they get killed and so did
Speaker 1: their children because of the guys that we hired and
Speaker 1: trained to kill them and their children when they attempt
Speaker 1: to fight for economic justice. Oops, it's good, It's really good.
Speaker 1: Is what I'm getting at so um. Operation Lympiasa, which
Speaker 1: you know long and the Border Patrol guy orchestrated himself,
Speaker 1: was a major moment in the history of Guatemala's collapse
Speaker 1: to a nightmare. The military intelligence system he helped to
Speaker 1: build would eventually eliminate tens of thousands of leftist, activist
Speaker 1: sympathizers and random people mistaken for either. More than two
Speaker 1: hundred thousand people were massacred openly. Tens of thousands more
Speaker 1: were tortured in this way. The brave men of the
Speaker 1: Border Patrol wound up at both sides of a tragedy.
Speaker 1: The genocide they trained right wing Guatemalan militants to execute
Speaker 1: fell heavily on various Maya peoples of the region, including
Speaker 1: the Catchi and the Choose. The right wing dictator who
Speaker 1: helped to organize much of this violence was General Afrain
Speaker 1: Rios mont He rose to power in nineteen eighty one
Speaker 1: and nineteen eighty two, cooing his way into command with
Speaker 1: the help of his good friends the US. Ronald Reagan
Speaker 1: described him as a man of great integrity who was
Speaker 1: totally dedicated to democracy. The nation's right up makes continues
Speaker 1: quote on June seventeenth, nineteen eighty two, Guatemalan soldiers under
Speaker 1: the command of Rio's mont entered the San Francisco Catalla
Speaker 1: estate immediately adjacent to yalm Bulock. The estate's owner, a
Speaker 1: military colonel, had fled because of guerilla activity in the area.
Speaker 1: Soldiers went house by house, rounding up workers in their
Speaker 1: families whom they accused of supporting the guerrillas. They separated
Speaker 1: children from their parents and killed them by slashing their
Speaker 1: stomachs or smashing their heads against poles. Women were raped
Speaker 1: and then burned alive. The soldiers killed them in with
Speaker 1: bullets or by beheading. After a day of slaughter, three
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty people were dead. Alone survivor made his
Speaker 1: way into Mexico, where Guatemalan anthropologist and Jesuit priest Ricardo
Speaker 1: Fala interviewed him. The San Francisco massacre was highlighted in
Speaker 1: Guatemala's nineteen ninety nine Truth Commission report. After the massacre,
Speaker 1: Yelling Block residents fled along with thousands of others, leaving
Speaker 1: the border corridor between Guatemala and Mexico completely depopulated. As
Speaker 1: government troops raised their villages, some were captured and killed
Speaker 1: by the army as they fled. Others ended up in
Speaker 1: refugee camps or dispersed throughout Mexico's southern states. Still, others
Speaker 1: continued on to the United States, beginning the Great Movement
Speaker 1: of Guatemalans to El Norte. And all told, one point
Speaker 1: five million people were displaced by the Guatemalan army scorched
Speaker 1: Earth campaign in nineteen one and nineteen eight too. Guatemala's
Speaker 1: Commissioned for Historical Clarification called the violent displacement in the
Speaker 1: Maya Choose Region and active genocide. Young Felipe Gomez Alazano's father.
Speaker 1: He was the little kid, one of the little kids
Speaker 1: who died. Augustin Gomez Perez was a child of eleven
Speaker 1: during that execute. Yalla Ballocks villagers stayed away for fourteen years,
Speaker 1: returning only after the signing of the Piece Accords in
Speaker 1: So that's cool, mm hmm. What can you say? That's horrible?
Speaker 1: You can say that, like we're focusing on Guatemala right here,
Speaker 1: because it's uh one where there's a bit more documentation.
Speaker 1: But like this ship happened in Al Salad or, it
Speaker 1: happened in a bunch of different parts of Latin and
Speaker 1: Central America UM, where you know, refugees come from all
Speaker 1: the time. Now, UM, it was, it was, it's still
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways going on today if you
Speaker 1: want to read about like Plan Colombia and stuff like,
Speaker 1: there's aspects of this that are very much still occurring, UM.
Speaker 1: And that the border patrol still winds up getting tied
Speaker 1: up been from time to time. And that's great, good grief. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is like the stuff that part of me that
Speaker 1: like is optimistic wants to believe that, oh, if people
Speaker 1: just knew this, like knew how this all, how how
Speaker 1: US policy and and in US UM plotting UH played
Speaker 1: into the tragedy being suffered by these people. Unlike the
Speaker 1: insecurity of these regions, they would have better attitudes towards
Speaker 1: you know, Guatemal immigration and whatnot into the United States.
Speaker 1: And then the part of me that that has been
Speaker 1: paying attention for the last several decades knows that like, no,
Speaker 1: actually UM people would share the murders of the folks
Speaker 1: and the destruction of these areas because UM Americans have
Speaker 1: been so thoroughly broken by propaganda that the people who
Speaker 1: are still on the right and still broadly pro American
Speaker 1: UM can't be convinced by any reason that any amount
Speaker 1: of murder or violence is not justified by the fact
Speaker 1: that America is cool as hell. It is this what
Speaker 1: a toxic mentality that we as Americans, or at least
Speaker 1: some of us have, because like, and this is I'm
Speaker 1: not about to say anything new or profound here, but
Speaker 1: the fact that, uh, you know, the white European settlers
Speaker 1: were escaping the same you know, kind of civil unrest
Speaker 1: or religious persecution or whatever it was the custom to
Speaker 1: fled their countries and uh then and then we settled here,
Speaker 1: uh by killing millions of indigenous people. And now we're like, well,
Speaker 1: our borders are closed now sorry everyone. And it's like,
Speaker 1: how how can you live? How can these people live
Speaker 1: with the hypocrisy of that simple fact? Um? Because they
Speaker 1: there their ship anyway. Uh So most of these death squads, um,
Speaker 1: we're trained in the United States because like, hey, if
Speaker 1: you're gonna build a death squad for a foreign country,
Speaker 1: you don't want to like train it there. Um that's
Speaker 1: kind of gosh. Uh So you bring them into your
Speaker 1: country to train them there because you're you're you're you know,
Speaker 1: you're good at training death squads. So the facility where
Speaker 1: they actually trained a lot of these death squads. And
Speaker 1: again not just in Guatemala, but for places like Columbia
Speaker 1: and El Salvador, are all throughout the fucking world. The
Speaker 1: place where they would like take these men to teach
Speaker 1: them how to be terrorists, how to make bombs and
Speaker 1: all this ship was the Los Fresnos, Texas Border Patrol facility. UM.
Speaker 1: It was an existing base, it was in a good location, UM,
Speaker 1: and the Border Patrol was perfectly happy to have Minstila
Speaker 1: over there to learn how to become murderous guerillas and
Speaker 1: then set off terrorist bombs in the middle of their
Speaker 1: own countries. UM, because they were like that sounds like
Speaker 1: a thing the Border Patrol should be involved with. Now.
Speaker 1: The technical Investigations course that was given to foreign police
Speaker 1: there was taught by CIA instructors. It lasted for weeks
Speaker 1: and it included curriculum like terrorist concepts, terrorist devices, fabrication
Speaker 1: and functioning of devices and provides, triggering devices, incendiaries and
Speaker 1: assassination weapons. A discussion of various weapons which may be
Speaker 1: used by the assassin. And when you read it like that,
Speaker 1: you can kind of trick yourself into thinking it might
Speaker 1: not be like it might be a reasonable thing for
Speaker 1: cops to learn. Right, of course, cops might need to
Speaker 1: learn about terrorist concepts and the kind of weapons assassins use.
Speaker 1: But these were not just informational courses. They were instructed.
Speaker 1: So the police who attended, we're just learning, Oh, here's
Speaker 1: weapons that assassins sometimes used. They were learning, like, if
Speaker 1: you're going to assassinate somebody, here's a variety of different
Speaker 1: weapons that you can use to assassinate people. And we're
Speaker 1: just learning, like, here's different ways terrorists build triggers for bombs.
Speaker 1: They were learning, here's how to build triggers for the
Speaker 1: bombs you're going to make to kill people. Um. The
Speaker 1: the reality of the whole the whole program came out
Speaker 1: during congressional investigations in the nineteen seventies. And I'm gonna
Speaker 1: quote now from a book titled Instruments Instruments of state Craft,
Speaker 1: US Guerrilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and counter Terrorism, which is available
Speaker 1: for in full for free online right now. Quote. During
Speaker 1: congressional investigations led by Senator James Albaresque in nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 1: eight officials admitted that the Los Fresno sessions what the
Speaker 1: press would call the bomb school offered lessons not in
Speaker 1: bomb disposal, but in bomb making. The course is not
Speaker 1: designed to nor does it prepare the student to be
Speaker 1: a bomb or explosive technical disposal technician. There's thrust of
Speaker 1: the instruction introduces trainees to commercially available materials and home
Speaker 1: laboratory techniques and the manufacture of explosives and incendiaries. Different
Speaker 1: types of explosive techniques and booby traps and their construction
Speaker 1: and used by terrorists are demonstrated. And again, all these
Speaker 1: classes were taught at a Border Patrol facility, And while
Speaker 1: the main instructors were CIA agents, it was not just
Speaker 1: the convenient location that made the agency use Los Fresnos.
Speaker 1: The Border Patrol had always had within it the seeds
Speaker 1: of a national secret police force. Decades before CBP agents
Speaker 1: were operating an unmarked snatch fans on the streets of
Speaker 1: Portland and it was Customs and Border Patrol who was
Speaker 1: doing that. Um, they helped to train foreign police to
Speaker 1: do the exact same thing and much worse. Besides, that's fun,
Speaker 1: Like wanting to say, like what a fun thing? What?
Speaker 1: I don't know what else to say. It's just like
Speaker 1: this kind of litany of horrors that we've all just
Speaker 1: kind of blithely funded our entire lives, even though a
Speaker 1: great deal of information exists on how bad this agency
Speaker 1: has always been. Um because the only real if you
Speaker 1: actually like get into it as we are today, the
Speaker 1: only real conclusion is that, like, oh, maybe when you
Speaker 1: have people whose job it is to police the border,
Speaker 1: they're they're they're just going to be the worst people.
Speaker 1: And and maybe you shouldn't police the border at all
Speaker 1: because this happened. But maybe border borders are completely arbitrary
Speaker 1: and mean nothing. And why or why have we decided
Speaker 1: that they that crossing them is a crime. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's bad. And the kind of people who decide that,
Speaker 1: like they want to make their whole lives about punishing
Speaker 1: desperate people for the quote unquote crime of crossing the border.
Speaker 1: H our our our monsters, and when you start giving
Speaker 1: them guns and power, h they use it to enable
Speaker 1: genocides and political oppression abroad, and then inevitably do you
Speaker 1: so back at home, which is what's happening now. So
Speaker 1: when it comes to government agencies that Americans, particularly liberals,
Speaker 1: rage against, customs and border patrol has spent most of
Speaker 1: its history, kind of sliding under the mainstream radar. But
Speaker 1: liberals who only started paying attention to the agency after
Speaker 1: Trump took office might be surprised to know that NYT
Speaker 1: Report or New York Times reporter John Crudeson won a
Speaker 1: Pulitzer Prize in nineteen eighty for a series of articles
Speaker 1: about the Border Patrol whose titles would not look at
Speaker 1: all out of place. In titles like Border Patrol sweeps
Speaker 1: of illegal aliens leave scores of children in jails. Um,
Speaker 1: it sounds a little familiar. Uh The intercept summarizing his
Speaker 1: work notes patrollers he reported regularly engaged in beatings, murder, torture,
Speaker 1: and rape, including the rape of girls as youngest twelve.
Speaker 1: Some patrollers ran their own in house outlaw vigilante groups.
Speaker 1: Others maintained ties with groups like the Clan. Border Patrol
Speaker 1: agents also used the children of migrants, either as bait
Speaker 1: or as pressure pressure tactic to force confessions. When coming
Speaker 1: upon a family, agents tried to apprehend the youngest member first,
Speaker 1: with the idea that relatives would give themselves up so
Speaker 1: as not to be separated. It may sound cruel when
Speaker 1: Patroller said, but it often worked. Separating migrant families was
Speaker 1: not official government policy in the years Crudsen was reporting
Speaker 1: on abuses, but left to their own devices. Border Patrol
Speaker 1: agents regularly took children from parents, threatening that they would
Speaker 1: be separated forever unless one of them confessed that they
Speaker 1: had entered the country illegally. Mothers, especially, an agent said,
Speaker 1: would always break Once a confession was extracted. Children might
Speaker 1: be placed in foster care or left to language in
Speaker 1: federal jails. Others were released into Mexico alone, far from
Speaker 1: their homes, forced to survive, according to public offenders, by
Speaker 1: garbage cans, grounging, living on rooftops, and whatever. Ten year
Speaker 1: old Sylvia Alvarado, separated from her grandmother as they crossed
Speaker 1: into Texas, was kept in a small cinder block cell
Speaker 1: for more than three months in California. Thirteen year old
Speaker 1: Julia Perez, threatened with being arrested and denied food, broke
Speaker 1: down and told her investigator that she was Mexican, even
Speaker 1: though she was a US citizen. The Border Patrol released
Speaker 1: Perez into Mexico with no money or way to contact
Speaker 1: her US family. Such cruelties weren't one offs, but part
Speaker 1: of a pattern encouraged and committed by officers up the
Speaker 1: chain of command. The violence was both gratuitive and systemic,
Speaker 1: including stress techniques later associated with the war in Iraq.
Speaker 1: I mean, wow, what kind of truly in human monster
Speaker 1: do you have to be to use to be yes
Speaker 1: and more specifically to use children as bait or to
Speaker 1: like snatch them first as just like I can't even
Speaker 1: form a sentence that is yeah, it's not great. I
Speaker 1: mean the sentence that that you said, like I got
Speaker 1: teary eyed with the mothers, the mothers broke first or
Speaker 1: what yea horrible no, it's um. I don't know, you know,
Speaker 1: when I talk about how this all actually makes me feel,
Speaker 1: there's no way to do that without repeatedly urging other
Speaker 1: people to commit federal crimes um up to when including
Speaker 1: assaulted murder. So I'm just like gonna stop right there
Speaker 1: and continue talking about the border patrol instead, um, because
Speaker 1: we shouldn't do that on a podcast. One tactic the
Speaker 1: border patrol came to a door was the locking of
Speaker 1: migrants and freezing cold rooms called heliara's or ice boxes.
Speaker 1: This goes back at least to the nineteen eighties. According
Speaker 1: to Crudzen, agents would tell prisoners in this place, you
Speaker 1: have no rights. Since these people had committed no crime
Speaker 1: beyond crossing a line in the dirt, their detention serve
Speaker 1: no real purpose beyond cruelty. Cruelty was the point. Border
Speaker 1: Patrol agents throughout the seventies, eighties, and nineties were repeatedly
Speaker 1: documented torturing migrants. A popular method was handcuffing them to
Speaker 1: squad cars and then making them run alongside the video
Speaker 1: as it half dragged them to the border. Outright murder
Speaker 1: was common as well. One Patrol agent told Crudeson that
Speaker 1: agents commonly pushed illegals off cliffs so it would look
Speaker 1: like an accident. Much of the agency's behavior wasn't distinguishable
Speaker 1: from that of a straight up gang. Agents with I
Speaker 1: n S. Border Patrol's parent agency at the time, were
Speaker 1: caught trading Mexican women to the Los Angeles Rams in
Speaker 1: exchange for season tickets. What yes, the thing that happened?
Speaker 1: I can't brave men and women of the Border Patrol.
Speaker 1: We're in the green. Oh my god, it's time for
Speaker 1: an advert so that I can go vomit. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: know who doesn't trade women for you can't even sports?
Speaker 1: It's an ad break products and services, and we're back.
Speaker 1: We're having a good time. So I n S agents
Speaker 1: were also caught supplying Mexican prostitutes to congressmen and judges
Speaker 1: in exchange for political favors. Over time, the Border Patrol
Speaker 1: found ways to get over their long standing conflicts with
Speaker 1: with Texan ranchers. In numerous cases, they worked out deals
Speaker 1: with ranch owners whereby they would hold off on immigration
Speaker 1: raids until right before payday, giving ranchers the use of
Speaker 1: migrant bodies without the need to pay them. Border patrol
Speaker 1: men got to hunt and fitch for free on their
Speaker 1: ranches as payments. This is kind of how they worked
Speaker 1: out that that little set of disagreements, that little the
Speaker 1: uprising in Texas that had been sparked by it. They
Speaker 1: would exploit the labor and and then have an agreement
Speaker 1: with the Border Patrol and be like, okay, see them
Speaker 1: on this day, yeah, so that I don't have to
Speaker 1: pay the Oh my god's good, yeah crude sent that.
Speaker 1: New York Times journalists even documented that one of the
Speaker 1: range the ranches Border Patrol worked out in arrangement with
Speaker 1: was owned by President Lyndon B. Johnson while he was president.
Speaker 1: Oh holy good stuff. Between nineteen eight five and nineteen ninety,
Speaker 1: federal agents gunned down twenty two migrants just in the
Speaker 1: area around San Diego. The Intercept reports quote on April eighteen,
Speaker 1: nineteen eight six, for instance, patroller Edward Cole was beating
Speaker 1: fourteen year old Edwardo Carrillo Estrada on the U S
Speaker 1: side of the border's chain link fence when he stopped
Speaker 1: and shot at Wardo's younger brother, Humberto in the back.
Speaker 1: Humberto was standing on the other side of the fence
Speaker 1: on Mexican soil. A court ruled that Cole, who had
Speaker 1: previous incidents of shooting through the fence and Mexicans, had
Speaker 1: reason to fear for his life from Humberto and used
Speaker 1: justifiable force. Such abuses persisted through the nineteen nineties and
Speaker 1: two thousands. In nineteen nine three, the House Subcommittee on
Speaker 1: International Law, Immigration and Refugee held hearings on border patrol abuse,
Speaker 1: and its transcript is a catalog of horrors. One former guard,
Speaker 1: Toney Heffner, at the I n S Detention Center in
Speaker 1: Port Isabel, Texas, reported that a young Salvadoran girl was
Speaker 1: forced to perform personal duties like dancing the Lambada for
Speaker 1: I n S officials. In two thousand eleven, Hefner published
Speaker 1: a memoir with more accusations of sexual abuse by as
Speaker 1: Hefner Rights the ion S brass. Roberto Martinez, who worked
Speaker 1: with the San Diego based US Mexico Border program for
Speaker 1: the American Friends Service Committee, testified that human and civil
Speaker 1: rights violations by board the Border Patrol run the gamut
Speaker 1: of abuse is imaginable, from rape to murder. Agents regularly
Speaker 1: seized original birth certificates in green cards from Latino citizens,
Speaker 1: leaving the victim with the financial burden of having to
Speaker 1: go through a lengthy process of applying for a new document.
Speaker 1: Rapes and sexual abuse and I I S attention centers
Speaker 1: around the United States, Martinez said, seemed to be escalating
Speaker 1: throughout the border region. Okay, I have to talk through
Speaker 1: something here. So, in theory law and forcement is there
Speaker 1: to prevent crime, stop crime, find criminals, et cetera. We
Speaker 1: know that that's barely what they do, right, but that's
Speaker 1: in theory the purpose of law enforcement, and so by
Speaker 1: by extension border patrol if it is for since it
Speaker 1: is for some reason illegal to you know, cross a
Speaker 1: border undocumented or without the proper documentation that is quote,
Speaker 1: a crime according to ridiculous standards, right. And I also
Speaker 1: understand in theory the concept of like punishing things that
Speaker 1: are actual crime. That makes sense to me as long
Speaker 1: as it's done responsibly, which it never is. The idea
Speaker 1: of seeing crossing a border without the proper documentation and
Speaker 1: deciding that the punishment for that crime warrants things like
Speaker 1: human trafficking, murder, sexual assault, uh all manner of other horrible, horrible,
Speaker 1: unmentionable things like where I just it is the most
Speaker 1: disgusting thing. I think the problem here that you're having
Speaker 1: is in thinking that the goal, the purposes ever to
Speaker 1: prevent crime UM, whereas the reality is the purpose is
Speaker 1: to UM is to protect it's to protect whiteness exactly, yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: and and it's to provide an outlet for UM for
Speaker 1: fascists in this country to do horrible violence on people
Speaker 1: UM in a way that is, rather than being disorganized
Speaker 1: and sort of being anti state and being something that
Speaker 1: like causes disorder, being UM violence that they are allowed
Speaker 1: to carry out that UM that enforces the uh, the
Speaker 1: the kind of the state itself that like that like
Speaker 1: backs up the existence of the state. Um, like you
Speaker 1: have all these you have all these tremendously violent people, right, um,
Speaker 1: and you can do a couple of things to them. Um,
Speaker 1: but they're there. Uh So either you you try to
Speaker 1: like deal with them and and de radicalize them and
Speaker 1: make them less dangerous, you kill them, or as we do,
Speaker 1: you give them guns and make them unaccountable and allow
Speaker 1: them to to do horrible violence to large groups of
Speaker 1: people who have no political agency. Yes, that is exactly
Speaker 1: what it is. It's like people who are like, well,
Speaker 1: the general population thinks that, you know, being a member
Speaker 1: of a hate group like the KKK is bad. So
Speaker 1: I'm going to do the same exact things that the
Speaker 1: KKK does, but it's being masked as a government agency.
Speaker 1: Like basically, this terror or terrorist organization, this hate group
Speaker 1: is protected and quote justified because it is a government agency.
Speaker 1: Even they're committing the same heinous acts in the name
Speaker 1: of under the guise of some kind of protection. But
Speaker 1: truly it's the like you said, protection of of whiteness
Speaker 1: and criminalizing being not white. And that's been and that's
Speaker 1: the only way it ever will be as long as
Speaker 1: we have a border, um, and we consider there to
Speaker 1: be some sort of fundamental value in um, the sanctity
Speaker 1: of that border. Right, And that's good. I want to
Speaker 1: cry about it. Yeah, it's it's good to do that sometimes.
Speaker 1: Other times it's good to continue reading a podcast script,
Speaker 1: which I will now do, okay, because this is how
Speaker 1: I deal with problems. This is the only way that
Speaker 1: I deal with problems is by reading podcast scripts. I
Speaker 1: mean informing Informing the people helps. Yeah, that's that's a
Speaker 1: way that you can describe this as informing the people.
Speaker 1: I don't know, you know. UM. In nineteen seventy nine,
Speaker 1: Maria Contreris, nine months pregnant, crossed back into the United
Speaker 1: States from Mexico legally after shopping for food. Border patrol
Speaker 1: agents found the suspicious and they tortured her to try
Speaker 1: to get her to reveal information about undocumented migrants. She
Speaker 1: died under interrogation, leaving six children behind. UM. This sort
Speaker 1: of thing happened all the time. You know, we have
Speaker 1: documentation about Maria Contreriss case, but this is maybe even
Speaker 1: a daily matter, and it's something that continues to this day. UM,
Speaker 1: in dark and terrifying corners of the border, where such
Speaker 1: things are not documented most of the time, but which
Speaker 1: we all pay for. Throughout all of this, the Border
Speaker 1: patrol and I n S were sort of the redheaded
Speaker 1: step child to federal agencies with law enforcement powers. They
Speaker 1: were barely funded because, if you can imagine this, illegal
Speaker 1: immigration was not something people cared about. So for most
Speaker 1: of these periods, this period, while all of the horrible
Speaker 1: things we've been talking about have been happening, border control
Speaker 1: has basically no money, um and very few agents considering
Speaker 1: like what it's supposed to be watching in its purview,
Speaker 1: it's just kind of a place where we keep all
Speaker 1: of our most violent law enforcement officers and they don't
Speaker 1: have the money to do much um, but nobody's watching them,
Speaker 1: so they can carry out horrific acts of violence. And
Speaker 1: that's the Border Patrol and really I n s too. UM.
Speaker 1: For the most part, Yeah, border states probably had you know,
Speaker 1: not probably border states had debates on the matter of
Speaker 1: illegal immigration. It was certainly like you know, a political
Speaker 1: issue in Texas, in New Mexico and stuff. But random
Speaker 1: people in Deluth, random Americans in Duluth or you know,
Speaker 1: Wichita or bubble fuck Montana or whatever, didn't really care
Speaker 1: about the border right eighties and nineties, it was not
Speaker 1: a big vote getter for most of that period of time. Now,
Speaker 1: at the start of the Clinton administration, there were only
Speaker 1: about four thousand border patrol agents watching both Canada and
Speaker 1: Mexico UM, which is not a lot if you think
Speaker 1: about how big both of those borders are. There are
Speaker 1: many miles long. Yeah, they're pretty big. In n NAFTA
Speaker 1: became a thing, the North American free trade thing of
Speaker 1: the jigger UH, and illegal immigration grew by leaps and
Speaker 1: bounds alongside right wing fearmongering about illegal immigration. The border
Speaker 1: patrol more than doubled in size by the turn of
Speaker 1: the millennium. So this is like the first thing that
Speaker 1: really leads to a massive surge in the border patrol
Speaker 1: is NAFTA becomes a thing, and suddenly a shipload more
Speaker 1: people are trying to cross the border. UH. Illegal immigration,
Speaker 1: by the end of the nineteen nineties is a major
Speaker 1: national political issue. In the border patrol more than doubles
Speaker 1: under Clinton. UH. In the year two thousand, our nation's
Speaker 1: peak year for illegal immigration, border patrol agents apprehended one
Speaker 1: point six million people UH. This, though, was just a
Speaker 1: fraction of the total that got through. Border patrol agents
Speaker 1: were unhappy about the fact that most undocumented migrants were
Speaker 1: still getting through the border, and that the many rules
Speaker 1: and that there were many rules in place to stop
Speaker 1: them from you know, doing Operation Wetback type stuff and
Speaker 1: basically carrying out an ethnic cleansing to get rid of
Speaker 1: uh non white people from border areas. From an article
Speaker 1: in Politico quote quote. Near the top of the Border
Speaker 1: Patrol's list of complaints was the policy known internally as
Speaker 1: CARP or catch, the catch and release policy. By the
Speaker 1: end of the Clinton administration, eighty percent of people who
Speaker 1: were caught and released with a notice who appeared a
Speaker 1: deportation hearing never showed up in a court. But despite
Speaker 1: millions of border crossings, the Border Patrol had the financing
Speaker 1: in two thousand one for just sixty detainees a day
Speaker 1: across the entire country. They could turn themselves in and
Speaker 1: have a high confidence that they wouldn't be returned to
Speaker 1: their home countries require riccalls. Michael Cherdoff, who would go
Speaker 1: on to become President George W. Bush's second second Secretary
Speaker 1: of Homeland Security. Mostly agents just asked border violators for
Speaker 1: their names and then did a cursory background check before
Speaker 1: returning them to Mexico or releasing them into the United States.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they ran fingerprints, sometimes they didn't. In June nine,
Speaker 1: agents captured one of the FBI's ten most wanted fugitives,
Speaker 1: a rapist and serial killer named Angel Maturino Rascinde's a
Speaker 1: k a. The Railway Killer, and unknowingly released him back
Speaker 1: into Mexico, whereupon Rascindez promptly sneaked back into the United
Speaker 1: States and murdered four more people before being apprehended by
Speaker 1: Texas rangers. So the story of the railway Killer was,
Speaker 1: of course used to justify the need for more funding
Speaker 1: to the Border Patrol. What the whole story really illustrates
Speaker 1: is that even when the Border Patrol had occasional chances
Speaker 1: to actually protect Americans by apprehending people, they were as
Speaker 1: likely to funk up as anything, because most of them
Speaker 1: were shitass, incompetent, and anything besides doing violence. So nine
Speaker 1: eleven happens. Do you remember nine eleven? I remember? It's good.
Speaker 1: You're not supposed to forget it. Now. Nine eleven happens.
Speaker 1: And if you were alive in Cognizant at the time,
Speaker 1: you might remember that basically everybody in their grandma was
Speaker 1: obsessed with the imminent possibility that al Qaeda might drive
Speaker 1: a regiment of terrorist nuclear hanks or whatever across the
Speaker 1: Texas border. As someone who lived in Texas at the time,
Speaker 1: where a bunch of people freaking out about how like
Speaker 1: terrorists hit squads we're gonna be making their way up
Speaker 1: through the border. Kids at my like suburban Texas high school,
Speaker 1: We're certain that al Qaeda was going to be sending
Speaker 1: people to shoot up our school because like plane Oh,
Speaker 1: Texas was real high on fucking Osama bin Laden's Hitlas.
Speaker 1: What did they think they were going to like go
Speaker 1: to Mexico first and then cross the border? What they
Speaker 1: think It didn't It didn't really scan a lot. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'll say this, I think that it's maybe not talked
Speaker 1: about enough that agree to which guys like John Milnius
Speaker 1: and movies like Red Dawn prepared everybody to believe the
Speaker 1: bullshit the Bush administration said about how terrorists we're gonna
Speaker 1: be sneaking through the border. Um, but like yeah, whatever,
Speaker 1: Um it was very dumb. It was a very dumb time.
Speaker 1: But also like you know, a bunch of guys had
Speaker 1: worked together to ram planes into the Pentagon and destroy
Speaker 1: two skyscrapers in New York City. People were willing to
Speaker 1: believe a lot of terrible things were possible. And because
Speaker 1: the border, you know, right wing pundits had been convincing
Speaker 1: everybody that the border was this dangerous and and unmonitored
Speaker 1: place for so long. People were like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: of course the terrorists will try there. They never did,
Speaker 1: um but you know they still might any day, now, Caitlin,
Speaker 1: any day al kaas finally get a squad up there.
Speaker 1: Nobody will notice all of the anyway whatever. Uh So, yeah,
Speaker 1: Tom Ridge, the former governor of Pennsylvania, was made President
Speaker 1: Bush's homeland securities are Now this was before the Department
Speaker 1: of Homeland Security existed. That came about in like November
Speaker 1: of um but as soon as like nine eleven is
Speaker 1: a thing, Bushes like, we gotta have somebody whose job
Speaker 1: is to think about safety for the country, which like
Speaker 1: there were already a bunch of people doing that and
Speaker 1: it hadn't helped. And but anyway, whatever, um so Tom
Speaker 1: Ridge is like is made the Czar of Homeland Security,
Speaker 1: and he made border control one of his priorities. He
Speaker 1: realized pretty much immediately that the border patrol was going
Speaker 1: to be an is shoe for him. Robert Bonner, who
Speaker 1: worked with Ridge and later became the first head of
Speaker 1: Customs and Border Patrol, told Politico quote, within the I
Speaker 1: n S structure, they were the poor step child. That
Speaker 1: was how most of ions viewed them at every level.
Speaker 1: They weren't appreciated and weren't viewed with respect, and that
Speaker 1: created this defensiveness and in celerity within the Border Patrol.
Speaker 1: There was a lot of debate about what to do
Speaker 1: with the organization and whether or not to just take
Speaker 1: all the different groups that handled various border related things
Speaker 1: and merge them into one border agency. But that would
Speaker 1: have meant several different cabinet secretaries would have each lost
Speaker 1: tiny amounts of power and money. Because you know, you
Speaker 1: have this group that's like, you know, your your job
Speaker 1: is to look for war criminals who might have like
Speaker 1: accidentally gotten citizenship or green cards. You have this other
Speaker 1: group his job as to like, you know, handle customs enforcement.
Speaker 1: You know, you have the Border Patrol. You have like
Speaker 1: the group that's job is to go around and look
Speaker 1: for people who might be violating immigration law. You have
Speaker 1: all these different groups that are like under different sort
Speaker 1: of people's perview and putting them all in one like
Speaker 1: organized border patrol that does everything would have meant that
Speaker 1: all of the different cabinet secretaries lost a little bit
Speaker 1: of money and power. So they all vetoed that idea
Speaker 1: in unison no no, no, no, funk that ship. Um. Instead,
Speaker 1: the decision was made to dissolve I n S and
Speaker 1: put the border patrol under the purview of the new
Speaker 1: Customs and Border Patrol, which would itself be part of
Speaker 1: the brand new Department of Homeland Security. The final nail
Speaker 1: in ion SS coffin was the fact that the agency
Speaker 1: had approved visas for two of the nine eleven hijackers
Speaker 1: after nine eleven UM. So this is kind of what like, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the that's the wrong time to do that. Somebody
Speaker 1: probably should have like gotten on the phone immediately after
Speaker 1: that and been like, hey, we should run these names,
Speaker 1: like just make sure we're not going to embarrass everybody,
Speaker 1: But they did um. And when the news kind of
Speaker 1: came out that ion S had approved visas for two
Speaker 1: of the people who had just carried out the biggest
Speaker 1: terrorist attack in the US history, the Bush administration was
Speaker 1: really not happy with ion S UM and that kind
Speaker 1: of that kind of spelled their doom. Uh And in fact,
Speaker 1: we they dissolved the agency. No one from the White
Speaker 1: House even thought to call the I n S commissioner
Speaker 1: and tell him, um, yeah, I'm gonna quote again from
Speaker 1: Politico's article, I and S was such a broken bureaucracy
Speaker 1: that it would be the single agency in the entire U. S.
Speaker 1: Government to receive the ultimate death penalty. After nine eleven,
Speaker 1: in the wide arranging bureaucratic reorganization that led to the
Speaker 1: Department of Homeland Security, I and S was completely disbanded,
Speaker 1: its responsibilities removed from the Justice Department, and it's duties
Speaker 1: reassigned among three new DHS agencies, Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE,
Speaker 1: Citizenship and Immigration Services c i S, and Customs and
Speaker 1: Border Protection CBP. And the newly created DHS would be
Speaker 1: a reality in less than a year. So that's the
Speaker 1: situation um now. The man tasked with creating the CBP
Speaker 1: was Robert Bonner, a federal judge and a former d
Speaker 1: E A head. His most first and most pressing decision
Speaker 1: was whether or not to change the agency's famous Green
Speaker 1: Unit form, which is obviously more important than like the
Speaker 1: rape training of women for sports tickets and stuff. Why
Speaker 1: is that the first order of business? Why are the
Speaker 1: orders These brave men of the Border Patrol who only
Speaker 1: occasionally commit mass rape and sex trafficking that includes sex
Speaker 1: trafficking of twelve year olds and only occasionally torture pregnant
Speaker 1: women to death. Those brave men have a lot of
Speaker 1: pride in their uniform, and they want to know that
Speaker 1: uniform is not going to change. You know. They have
Speaker 1: to be presentable. That's the most that's important thing. The
Speaker 1: most important thing is that they get to still feel
Speaker 1: like they're part of the part of the old Border
Speaker 1: Patrol that they love, you know, the old Border Patrol.
Speaker 1: But let some torture all those people and throw kids
Speaker 1: into into dank, freezing cells for months on end, many
Speaker 1: of whom are actually American citizens. That's just how it's
Speaker 1: it's important, you know, yeah so uh from Politico quote weeks.
Speaker 1: But for the new agency officially launched on March first,
Speaker 1: two thousand three, he invited all of the Border Patrols
Speaker 1: twenties sector chiefs to Washington to discuss the transition. They
Speaker 1: all arrived in d C in full dress, green uniforms, shoes,
Speaker 1: polished brass buttons gleaming. As Bonner walked into the room,
Speaker 1: everyone stood and snapped to attention. The new commissioner began
Speaker 1: his remarks, simply, the Border Patrol will remain green. The
Speaker 1: room erupted in applause and cheers. They're proud of the green.
Speaker 1: They were very proud of that uniform, Bonner recalls today.
Speaker 1: They were concerned about losing that identity. Who cares about
Speaker 1: your green uniform? The Border Patrol caressers. See this is why,
Speaker 1: as as I've always said, uh and so if you
Speaker 1: can back me up on this, Caitlin, you would be
Speaker 1: a terrible head of the Border Patrol m because I
Speaker 1: don't respect the green exactly. Well, I don't even understand,
Speaker 1: but it's because I hate the Celtics. So I and
Speaker 1: happy see Sophie, you'd be bad at this too, because
Speaker 1: as a Border Patrol agent, you should be trading kidnapped
Speaker 1: women to the Celtics in exchange for season tickets. Oh
Speaker 1: my god, can we just go to an ad break?
Speaker 1: Jesus Christ, speaking of the Celtics. You know who else
Speaker 1: supports this podcast? Hey? You know who else is whore
Speaker 1: No no predace and services. And we're back that that Celtics.
Speaker 1: Dig I just would like to denote that I will
Speaker 1: keep doing that and also high prop. Yeah, it's that
Speaker 1: I don't understand who the Celtics are Celtics. I don't
Speaker 1: understand any of this. This is also because if you
Speaker 1: love that team, if you love that team, send your
Speaker 1: death threats to Sophie. Yeah, if you love that if
Speaker 1: you love that team, just don't follow me because we
Speaker 1: will never be friends. Also because I don't know who
Speaker 1: they are. If you if you don't give a ship
Speaker 1: about sports teams in existence tenness, follow me. Yeah, except
Speaker 1: for soccer. Soccer is allowed. Soccer's cool. Soccer is the
Speaker 1: only sport. Soccer is definitely not allowed. What soccer soccer
Speaker 1: is there is. There is one sport allowed in my
Speaker 1: ideal world, and it's that that game they play in
Speaker 1: Afghanistan where they all ride around on horseback with a
Speaker 1: goat head and people get killed sometimes because they it's
Speaker 1: it's yeah, you just fully Robert died this entire thing. Anyways,
Speaker 1: followed Caitlin on Twitter. On Instagram, She's a great follow
Speaker 1: continue with your go to Afghanistan to play sports anyway. Uh.
Speaker 1: They were not particularly concerned the border patrol with making
Speaker 1: any changes to reduce the number of migrants killed by
Speaker 1: border patrol agents. Since two thousand three, border patrol agents
Speaker 1: have killed at least ninety seven people. Six of those
Speaker 1: people were children. They've also taken repeated action to stop
Speaker 1: other people from saving lives. As summers grew more brutal,
Speaker 1: more and more migrants started dying in the Sonora and desert.
Speaker 1: In two thousand four, the faith based organization No More
Speaker 1: Deaths leading gallant leaving gallon jugs of water out in
Speaker 1: near common footpaths and the desperate hope that it might
Speaker 1: stop a few people from dying horribly in the desert.
Speaker 1: They soon noticed that their water bottles were being slashed open.
Speaker 1: No More Death set up hidden cameras. They found in
Speaker 1: every case border patrol agents destroying water caches, almost with
Speaker 1: visible glee. You can see one of these videos for
Speaker 1: yourself and the PBS documentary Need to Know. Salon dot
Speaker 1: COM's description is quite good. Quote three border patrol agents,
Speaker 1: two men and a woman, are walking along a migrant
Speaker 1: trail and approaching a half half a dozen one gallon
Speaker 1: jugs of water. The female agent stops in front of
Speaker 1: the containers and begins to kick them with forced down
Speaker 1: a ravine. The bottles crash against rocks, bursting open. She's smiling.
Speaker 1: One of the agents watching her smiles as well, seemed
Speaker 1: to take real pleasure in the spectacle. He says something
Speaker 1: under his breath, and the word talk is clearly audible.
Speaker 1: Do you know what talk means? I don't. So we
Speaker 1: talked about wet back in episode one and how that
Speaker 1: was the Border Patrols kind of old term for for
Speaker 1: particularly Mexican immigrants because of the river they have to cross.
Speaker 1: Talk is new the new slur that the Border patrol
Speaker 1: uses for a documented immigrants, and it comes from the
Speaker 1: sound that a flashlight makes when you hit someone in
Speaker 1: the head. Oh my god, you'll hear this if in
Speaker 1: any article you read about the modern border Patrol, that
Speaker 1: that they the word talk is like their their standard
Speaker 1: term for for migrants, and it's a term because of
Speaker 1: what it sounds like when they beat these people with flashlights.
Speaker 1: Well mm hmm, okay, let me just process that. New
Speaker 1: slurs were, of course, of course, far from the only
Speaker 1: changes to hit border patrol during the Bush years. By
Speaker 1: the time President Obama took office, the Border Patrol had
Speaker 1: gone from an underfunded force of about nine thousand to
Speaker 1: a twenty one person army. The largest federal law enforcement
Speaker 1: agency in the country. Um, there are actual armies smaller
Speaker 1: than the Border Patrol and less well equipped. Uh. They're
Speaker 1: the largest law enforcement agency in the country now, Um,
Speaker 1: so that's good. All those new officers had to be
Speaker 1: trained up quick, and this did not leave time for
Speaker 1: rigorous vetting and background checking that other federal agents go through.
Speaker 1: Border Patrol agents today still have the least average years
Speaker 1: of experience of any federal law enforcement agency. They also
Speaker 1: have the lowest standards for new recruits. This may have
Speaker 1: something to do with the fact that Border Patrol agents
Speaker 1: are involved in more fatal shootings than any other federal
Speaker 1: law enforcement agency. Uh. Yeah, you know. Probably. It's not
Speaker 1: like any federal LA enforcement agency is good about giving
Speaker 1: us numbers about how many people they shoot. But probably
Speaker 1: they kill more than any of the others. Okay, I
Speaker 1: believe it. Yeah. One senior DHS official even admitted to
Speaker 1: Politico quote, the agency has created a culture that says,
Speaker 1: if you throw a rock at me, you're going to
Speaker 1: get shot. Between two thousand and five and two thousand twelve,
Speaker 1: roughly one CBP officer was arrested for misconduct every single
Speaker 1: day during President Obama's first term. Things got so bad
Speaker 1: that DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano ordered the CBP to change
Speaker 1: its institutional definition of the word corruption so they wouldn't
Speaker 1: have to admit to as many problems When they were
Speaker 1: questioned by Congress about all of the murders. It's yeah,
Speaker 1: again under Obama, it's pretty much impossible. No, I just like,
Speaker 1: uh yeah, Like we're not even really going to get
Speaker 1: into the Trump years in this two parter because that's
Speaker 1: like a whole another thing to start talking about. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like most of this that we're talking about today, I
Speaker 1: mean it's Reagan, uh Bush Senior, Clinton Bush Jr. And Obama, Right,
Speaker 1: those are the guys that this is happening under. Those
Speaker 1: are the guys funding this right enthusiastically. All of the
Speaker 1: politicians that everybody thinks they're fine now because Trump is
Speaker 1: such a such a dick anyway. Um, yeah, it's pretty
Speaker 1: much impossible to exaggerate how bad border patrol isn't was like,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna guess that most of our listeners come from
Speaker 1: a broad position that like Feds are not good, um,
Speaker 1: which is mine and accurate. But even among that company,
Speaker 1: like even if you're like, oh, federal agents are pretty
Speaker 1: much all bad, it's shocking how bad the agents of
Speaker 1: the CBPR. Like it's like, it's it's staggering, how shitty
Speaker 1: they they particularly become in the odds. Uh. And I'm
Speaker 1: gonna quote from Salon again. There was my There was
Speaker 1: the Miami CBP officer who used his law enforcement status
Speaker 1: to bypass airport security and personally smuggle cocaine and heroin
Speaker 1: into Miami. There was the green uniformed agent in Yuma, Arizona,
Speaker 1: who was caught smuggling seven dred pounds of marijuana across
Speaker 1: the border in his green and white border patrol truck.
Speaker 1: The brand new twenty six year old border patrol agent
Speaker 1: who joined a drug smuggling operation to distribute more than
Speaker 1: a thousand kilograms of marijuana and del Rio, Texas. The
Speaker 1: thirty two year old border patrol agent whose wife would
Speaker 1: tip him off on which buses filled with illegal immigrants
Speaker 1: uh to let through his checkpoint on I thirty five
Speaker 1: in Laredo, Texas. Some cases were more obvious than others,
Speaker 1: like the new border patrol agent who took an unusual
Speaker 1: interest in maps of the agency's sensors along the border,
Speaker 1: and was arrested just seven and months into the job
Speaker 1: after he sold smugglers those maps for dollars. In November
Speaker 1: two thousand seven, CBP official Thomas Winkowski wrote an agency
Speaker 1: wide memo citing numerous incidents, or, as he called them,
Speaker 1: disturbing events, saying that the leadership was concerned about the
Speaker 1: increase in the number of employee arrests. The memo, never
Speaker 1: made public, but obtained by the Miami Herald, reminded officers
Speaker 1: and agents, it is our responsibility to uphold the laws,
Speaker 1: not break the law. Now. Right around that time, internal
Speaker 1: CBP investigations uncovered that the agency had, in dozens of
Speaker 1: cases hired members of Mexican drug cartels and gangs like
Speaker 1: m S thirteen to be agents. They had also hired
Speaker 1: at least one serial killer, Juan David Ortiz, who murdered
Speaker 1: five women during his time as an intelligence analyst for
Speaker 1: the agency. He has also suspected of kidnapping a woman.
Speaker 1: Will never really know the exact extent of his crimes,
Speaker 1: and in that regard he fits in with another Border
Speaker 1: Patrol veteran Estebon Manzanares. It is possible that Estebon Manzanares
Speaker 1: was not a serial killer. He hasn't been convicted of
Speaker 1: any murder, but he was caught abducting three migrant women,
Speaker 1: a mother and her two teenage daughters. He attempted to
Speaker 1: bury one alive, and he raped another. Uh and yeah.
Speaker 1: Earlier this year, in appeals court ruled that his victims
Speaker 1: could not sue the federal government as Menzonaras was not
Speaker 1: acting in his official capacity as a border patrol agent
Speaker 1: when he assaulted those women. Sure, he arrested them during
Speaker 1: his duties as a border patrol agent, and he took
Speaker 1: them to a border patrol processing facility before taking them
Speaker 1: to a gated compound to assault them. But he wasn't.
Speaker 1: He wasn't acting as a border patrol agent. Oh wow,
Speaker 1: the mental gymnastics people do just legal ones. Yeah okay, yeah. Now.
Speaker 1: The good news is that a few bad apples like
Speaker 1: man Sinara's and Ortiz, and also all of the thousands
Speaker 1: of agents who got arrested on a nearly daily basis
Speaker 1: for seven straight years, didn't stop the orchard from detaining
Speaker 1: more migrants than ever before during the Obama years. DHS
Speaker 1: deported more undocumented migrants than ever four of the year.
Speaker 1: As President Obama said in two thousand eleven, the presence
Speaker 1: of so many illegal immigrants make a mockery of all
Speaker 1: those who are trying to immigrate legally. Now, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: good to Obama. It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool. What
Speaker 1: a problem this was. Yeah, so and again, all of
Speaker 1: these legally immigrants make a mockery of everyone trying to
Speaker 1: immigrate illegally. The the data shows that during this period,
Speaker 1: that's like fucking seven year period, an average of one
Speaker 1: border patrol agent per day almost was arrested for serious
Speaker 1: crimes like ranging from like rape and sexual assault to
Speaker 1: attempted murder um too, you know, drug smuggling. Like every
Speaker 1: day a border patrol agent basically was getting arrested during
Speaker 1: these years. But that's not that's not making a mockery
Speaker 1: of law enforcement or whatever. Yeah, yeah, Now, there were
Speaker 1: a number of reasons why things got so bad in
Speaker 1: border patrol. We've talked about some of them, just of
Speaker 1: like the inherent racist nature of of the the existence
Speaker 1: of the border patrol um. But there are also just
Speaker 1: sort of some um uh, some reasons that you would
Speaker 1: describe as kind of broadly, uh, bureaucratic. There were a
Speaker 1: bunch of bureaucratic reasons why it happened to write kind
Speaker 1: of outside of the inherent you know, problems of policing
Speaker 1: a border. Um. For one point, like they were increasing
Speaker 1: the size of the border patrol faster than any law
Speaker 1: enforcement agency had ever been increased. UM, and that meant
Speaker 1: bringing in a shiplet of people who weren't qualified. Um.
Speaker 1: They had all of this money and they did not
Speaker 1: have enough people who could actually responsibly do the jobs.
Speaker 1: They were just throwing people in shares and giving them
Speaker 1: guns and badges. Um. Now, the issues of hiring a
Speaker 1: bunch of people for an agency based on assaulting non
Speaker 1: white people, um and giving them you know, broad powers
Speaker 1: were compounded by structural problems within the board, like the
Speaker 1: way the border patrol was set up. Most border patrol
Speaker 1: men are agents. UM. This differs from special agents, which
Speaker 1: are the cool dudes like Fox molder that everyone who
Speaker 1: becomes a FED wants to be special agents can both
Speaker 1: arrest people and investigate crimes. Agents only have arresting powers.
Speaker 1: They cannot investigate crimes. Now, because CBP is seen as
Speaker 1: the shittiest federal law enforcement agency the dumping ground for
Speaker 1: all of the violent assholes. Our government doesn't like to
Speaker 1: make them special agents. According to Politico quote. In many ways,
Speaker 1: the difference between the two is CBPS original sin, a
Speaker 1: seemingly minor technical distinction made in the harried heat of
Speaker 1: DHS creation a decade ago that would allow hundreds of
Speaker 1: caraces of corruption in CBP's Office of Field Operations and
Speaker 1: use of force abuses in the patrol border patrol to
Speaker 1: fester for years. The problem was that no one at
Speaker 1: CBP received what's known as eighteen eleven authority. When DHS
Speaker 1: was set up, Ice was given exclusive eighteen eleven authority
Speaker 1: to conduct investigations in the border region. CBP was only
Speaker 1: given so called eighteen o one authority, a lesser classification
Speaker 1: that allowed border patrol agents and customs officers to make
Speaker 1: arrests and enforced federal law, but not investigate. They could
Speaker 1: be cops but not detectives. This didn't particularly matter in
Speaker 1: the daily performance of CBPS duties. The borders were patrolled
Speaker 1: to the ports of entry watched, except that CBP was
Speaker 1: legally prohibited from policing its own workforce. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: again one of these things every single person who's ever
Speaker 1: been involved in running the CBP agrees like, yeah, this
Speaker 1: is a real big problem because it means that they're
Speaker 1: even less accountable than other law enforcement agencies. Because like
Speaker 1: ones are barely accountable, and those ones are barely accountable.
Speaker 1: But like, even when Border Patrol agents commit a crime
Speaker 1: that other border patrol agents think is horrible, like they
Speaker 1: can't investigate, no accountability, Holy crap. Um. Yeah, other law
Speaker 1: enforcement agencies look at Border Patrol and go Jesus Christ,
Speaker 1: those people are unaccountable when they commit acts of unspeakable violence.
Speaker 1: That is bleak. That's bleak, very bleak. By two thousand
Speaker 1: and twelve, the problems in Border Patrol were obvious enough
Speaker 1: that they spilled out into the public sphere. The Arizona
Speaker 1: Republic conducted an investigation which showed that agents had killed
Speaker 1: at least forty two people, thirteen of whom were citizens,
Speaker 1: since two thousand five, and none of these killings was
Speaker 1: any agent known to have faced consequences of any kind.
Speaker 1: Congressional pressure forced the agency to submit to an investigation
Speaker 1: by the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington, d c.
Speaker 1: Based law enforcement think tank. The p e r F
Speaker 1: investigated sixty seven cases of lethal force by Border Patrol agents.
Speaker 1: They found, among other things, cases of agents firing at
Speaker 1: fleeing vehicles. The report concluded too many cases do not
Speaker 1: appear to meet the test of objective reasonableness with regard
Speaker 1: to the use of deadly force. The pr F report advised,
Speaker 1: among other things, that agents should not use lethal force
Speaker 1: on unarmed drivers or rock throwers. The agency rejected this
Speaker 1: out of hand, with the head of Border Patrol saying
Speaker 1: in an interview, I have known agents who have almost
Speaker 1: died from being rocked along the border, and I think
Speaker 1: it was completely ridiculous that they wanted that prohibition. I
Speaker 1: should note here that no Border Patrol officer has ever
Speaker 1: been killed by a rock, and I can't really find
Speaker 1: evidence of one being seriously injured by Iraq either. What
Speaker 1: I can find is that in two thousand fourteen, CBP
Speaker 1: leadership estimated a full of their force was corrupt. Attempts
Speaker 1: at reform were made in the last two years of
Speaker 1: the Obama administration, and in two thousand sixteen it looked
Speaker 1: like things might finally be headed in a less murdery direction.
Speaker 1: But then Donald Trump became the president, and here we
Speaker 1: are a presidential administration filled with literal Nazis was handed
Speaker 1: a vast, heavily armed force of sociopaths and rapists who
Speaker 1: just spent the last two years being told that they
Speaker 1: had to rape and murder less, and then all of
Speaker 1: a sudden they were told, whatever you want to do
Speaker 1: is find just get these brown people out of the
Speaker 1: United States. And that's kind of where things stand today
Speaker 1: with the Border Patrol as sort of the turning into
Speaker 1: the official armed wing of the the racist right. Uh,
Speaker 1: with these CBP and bor tech units set up using
Speaker 1: Border patrol men being sent into American cities to police
Speaker 1: dissent because they're the most dedicated, in least accountable, and
Speaker 1: most violent law enforcement officers the country has um And yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a lot more I could and should get into
Speaker 1: about where things are at the moment with Border Patrol,
Speaker 1: But this is it took me this long just to
Speaker 1: get us up to the fucking Trump administration, right, and
Speaker 1: yeah we're not even at the you know, the whole
Speaker 1: the frenzy around Yeah, build the wall, and just like yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So I guess that's another podcast. Yeah, it's another kind
Speaker 1: of podcast. And I guess if I'm gonna leads leaves
Speaker 1: somewhere or or in this somewhere. I probably it would
Speaker 1: probably be good to end by talking again about Harlan Carter.
Speaker 1: Um for just a little bit. You remember Harlan Carter.
Speaker 1: He was the former Border Patrol head it was in
Speaker 1: charge during Operation wet Back, and who was a convicted murderer.
Speaker 1: He in N one he shot a Mexican boy in
Speaker 1: the chest. Uh so yeah, the the young uh Mexican
Speaker 1: boy that he murdered was named Raymond Cassiano. And there's
Speaker 1: actually a really good song about the Border Patrol and
Speaker 1: about Raymond Casiano by a band I quite like called
Speaker 1: Drive By Truckers, And there's a there's a line in
Speaker 1: it about Harlan Carter. You know, this former head of
Speaker 1: the Border Patrol who goes on by the way to
Speaker 1: become the head of the n r A. And it's
Speaker 1: like one of the guys in charge of the n
Speaker 1: r A when it turns into the n r A
Speaker 1: we all know today from the organization that was like, oh,
Speaker 1: people should learn how to shoot accurately so they can
Speaker 1: hunt deer. Right Like the n r used to just
Speaker 1: be like a normal, pretty normal thing, and then it
Speaker 1: turns into this crazy thing that it is today is
Speaker 1: quasi military or not quasi military, but like this explicitly
Speaker 1: fascist organization urging political violence anyway, Harlan Carter is the
Speaker 1: guy behind that too. So not somebody we'd want to
Speaker 1: get a drink with, not somebody you would want to
Speaker 1: get a drink with. And there's there's a couple of
Speaker 1: lines about him in this song Ray in Casiana, which
Speaker 1: is named after the guy that Um, Harlan Carter killed. UM,
Speaker 1: and it's it's a song yeah, really about not just
Speaker 1: Harlan Carter, but about the kind of men who become
Speaker 1: border patrol agents. Um. He had the makings of a
Speaker 1: leader of a certain kind of men who need to
Speaker 1: feel the world's against him, out to get him if
Speaker 1: it can, men whose trigger pull their fingers, of men
Speaker 1: who'd rather fight than win united in a revolution, like
Speaker 1: in mind and like in skin. Yeah, yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: good song. I'll give it a listen. So Caitlin, you
Speaker 1: wanna you wanna plug your plug doubles. Sure well, thank
Speaker 1: you for for enlightening me with this information. A lot
Speaker 1: of it I did not know, UM, so I I
Speaker 1: appreciate now knowing UM depressing and upsetting, though it may be.
Speaker 1: It's good to be informed. Um. You can follow me
Speaker 1: on Twitter, UM and Instagram at Caitlin Darante, and you
Speaker 1: can check out my podcast on this network called the
Speaker 1: Bechtel Cast. So you know, that little conversation that Sophie
Speaker 1: and I had at the beginning was a reference to that.
Speaker 1: We talked about the representation of women in film. A M. Yeah,
Speaker 1: check check, check it all out, check it all out.
Speaker 1: And you can follow Robert on Twitter at I right, okay,
Speaker 1: you can follow this podcast on Twitter, at Instagram at
Speaker 1: Bastard's Pod. You can now email us at behind the
Speaker 1: Bastards at iHeart media dot com. And you can buy
Speaker 1: merch at our TA Public store. You can also buy
Speaker 1: merch from Caitlin and Jamie's TA Public Store, which has
Speaker 1: some of my absolute favorite items in the entire planet.
Speaker 1: How's that for a plug? Great? Thank you, Sophie. Feminist icons.
Speaker 1: You know who else is a feminist icon? I can't
Speaker 1: wait to see who? Thank you? All right? This end also,
Speaker 1: very very very very warmly thank you. That's that's the
Speaker 1: episode by guys. Episode m M