Part One: The U.S. Border Patrol Is A Nightmare That Never Ends

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
M hm. You know, introducing a podcast is a little
bit like Megan Love. It's not it's not at all.
I'm so sorry. I'm Robert Evans failing to introduce my
podcast yet again. It's behind the bastards, it's about terrible people.

(00:20):
I'm so sorry everyone. I was. I was trying to
open with my folksy wisdom, but I have none, and
I've got now I've botched the start of this episode.
Here to attempt to take away some of my shame
is Caitlin Duranti. Caitlin, how are you doing today? Oh?
You know, I'm just barely keeping it together at any moment.

(00:42):
But otherwise, think of any similarities between introducing a podcast
and making love? Well, let me think about that. Um oh,
I have one at home? One, I have one, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
The audio levels can go up until the audio levels
can go up and down. That's a good similarity, So

(01:04):
very much. Sure. Maybe an entire episode, not just introducing
an episode, but in an entire episode, I think you
could draw some parallels between because you've got you know,
there's like the intro is sort of like the four play,
and then you've got you know, usually a big climactic
finish to the episode. Well, there you go, everybody, if
you were we figured it out. You wanted to compare

(01:26):
a random episode of my podcast about bad people to
making love, Caitlyn Durranty has kind of made it easier maybe, Caitlin,
how are you doing today? All right? Um, you know,
I'm just you're in your closet recording and you're in
your closet. I'm looking at your luggage right now. Nice luggage.

(01:49):
I see you go with the hard shell. Thank you. Yes,
it is a really nice closet. If I remember from
the photos you sent me like it's it's a very
good sized closet. It truly is. Thank you so much.
You want to hear a little story about me, Caitlin
some an narcissist? Okay, So you know I travel a
lot to Caitlin, and I have refused my entire traveling

(02:11):
life to have like a hard shelled rolly suitcase, even
though they're much more comfortable to use at the airport
than a backpack, because as a young man with an
indestructible spine, I was like, only stupid old people use
the rollie backpacks. I'm gonna be I'm gonna be a
young adventurer forever and I just get to wear a backpack,
and now I just hurt myself every time I go

(02:33):
to the airport out of pride. And that's why men
shouldn't be allowed to hold political office. I couldn't agree
with you more. Um, yeah, you mean you you carry
around one of those like big backpacking, big old, big
old backpacking backpack. Horrible, horrible. Sometimes they carry a Duffel
bag even worse. That's absurd. Yeah, it's terrible idea, but

(02:58):
you know it does tie in with the theme of
today's episode, because what do you do with What do
you do with backpacks and Rowley suitcases, Caitlin, I mean
you bring them with you to travel, You bring them
with you to cross borders. Yeah, and today we're talking
about the motherfucking me grat the border patrol. Oh boy. Yeah,

(03:24):
it's been a long journey to starting the episode this week,
but I think we got there nicely. Yeah. Sorry to
everyone who's been Um, you know, this has been a
little bit of a weird run of Behind the Bastards
the Uprising episodes. Uh, we're still going to be doing
the Dictators and grifters, you know, that are bread and butter.
But um, I keep getting obsessed with different law enforcement agencies,

(03:45):
particularly the ones you know, shooting at me. Uh. And
so I started just kind of reading a bunch about
customs and border patrol this last week or so, and
I couldn't stop, And so I wrote a lot about
them and how we're all going to talk about border
patrol because Caitlin, did you know the border patrol kind
of problematic. Wait a minute, what do you mean? Yeah,

(04:09):
not nice dudes, as it turns out, Um, and have
kind of been dicks for like a hundred something years,
or like a hundred years. They've been dicks for a
long time, very close to a hundred years. Six years,
all right, yeah, which you know, they still have time
to change. You know, a lot of people have their best,

(04:29):
their best, you know, their second act after age ninety six. Yeah.
I would just say that applies to a large number
of people. A lot of tortoises, at least a lot
of tortoises go on to do very cool things after
age Yeah. Trees as well, there's a lot of old
trees that are border patrol could be like a sequoia. Yeah,

(04:52):
but I don't know how likely. I think that is.
So we're gonna talk about We're gonna talk about Lamiger
today because they're terrible, and I don't think most people
know how terrible they are. And their terribility is important
because it is tighten with a lot of horrible things
about this country and the very concept of whiteness. So

(05:13):
how are you feeling about that, Caitlin? You know, I
don't feel good about it. I really don't. That's good
because my cunning plan has been to blame you personally
for all of the historical crimes of the U. S.
Border Patrol. Well, I did invent them. You you you
launched the Immigration Act of nineteen twenty four. That's Caitlin Durantis.

(05:37):
That's resume. Yeah. I didn't want that to be my legacy,
but here we are. Yeah. A lot of people don't
know this, but you used to be all of Congress
in the early nineteen twenties. Yeah. Yeah, I mean pretty
impressive when you think of yeah, no, it really is. Yeah,
Congress Durante, Yeah you were instead of Caitlin, you were
Congress Tournto. Just true. If we're gonna talk about the

(05:59):
border patrol, we've got to talk about the border. And
given that the territory we currently know as like Texas,
New Mexico, Arizona, and even Mexico is all land that
was stolen from indigenous people. This is not like a
case where there's a lot of good guys to choose from.
If you're talking about like conflicts over the US Mexican border,
you're talking about like a bunch of different states that

(06:19):
kind of sucked fighting each other for land that wasn't
their Like that that that's the whole that's the whole deal, right, Um. So,
the US Mexican War of eighteen forty eight is the
conflict that gained our nation most of the modern Southwest. UM.
It was a naked war of imperialist aggression against another

(06:40):
nation that brutally subjugated indigenous people's um. One can argue
that Mexico was like a broadly better country than the
US at this point since it didn't allow slavery, But
both countries not not great to anyone any like indigenous
peoples or whatever, just just just bad, bad, bad governments.
So the end of the West Mexican War, the United

(07:02):
States wound up occupying Mexico City, and that nation was
forced to seed fifty of its northern territory and the
resulting treaty, and I think a lot of Americans who
grew up kind of outside of the Southwest. I don't
really have a clear idea of how much land UM
the United States got as a result of the US
Mexican War, but we took a shipload of land from Mexico.

(07:23):
It's fucking crazy how much of this country used to
be Mexico, like up into Oklahoma. Yeah. I don't have
a good gauge on that because I grew up in
Pennsylvania and that just wasn't something that they bothered to
tell us in history class. Yeah, we went like most
of the Southwest was kind of, at one point or
another um part of Mexico. UM. And so, yeah, we

(07:48):
took about fifty of Mexico's northern territory, and a new
US Mexican border was redrawn along the Rio Grand from
um the Gulf to El Paso and then along more
or less an arbitrary line further west up the Pacific. Now,
this meant that a huge number of people who had
previously lived in Mexico and had been able to travel
freely around territory that was all part of one nation

(08:08):
now found themselves living in between two nations. Uh. This
included roughly a hundred and eighty thousand members of indigenous
tribes as well as about a hundred and fifty thousand Mexicans.
So these three hundred thousandish non white folks owned most
of the land, and like the territories in the Southwest
that you know became Texas and some of the surrounding states, um,
and the decades after the US Mexican War are kind

(08:30):
of best viewed as a gradual process of white people
taking this land from non white people, some of it
through purchase, some of it through like violent threats and intimidation, uh,
some of it as a results of the reservation system
kicking indigenous people off of their ancestral land, and some
of it through just like good old you know, good old,
good old fashioned genocide, Caitlin, just like that, just like

(08:51):
really getting your boots in it, you know. I mean,
those are the main principles that the US was founded on, right,
white people stealing end from non white people and genociding them.
You gosh darn right, Caitlin, your gosh darn right. And
that's why when I get up in the I'm just
thinking of like a Folger's coffee commercial, you know, one

(09:12):
of those old ones who was like a cowboy getting
up on the range sipping a Folger's coffee and then
just like stepping into a pile of bones and just
being like, ah, nothing like a nice morning walking barethrop
through a pile of bones, the thing that I do
every day as a cowboy. Yeah. Why wasn't that their
ad campaign for Folgers, Well, murder everybody coffee helps. Oh

(09:44):
I was drinking coffee and it went down the wrong hole, Caitlin. See,
coffee can't be stopped from attempting genocide. Even coffee wants
to murder. A coffee wants nothing but to murder. So,
as we discussed in our last episod Zoe of the
Behind the Police mini series that we just did, the
Texas Rangers was kind of the first border patrol type

(10:06):
force UH in you know, the southwest UH And they
began their history as a as a group like a
paramilitary organization to provide to protect white settlers in Texas.
They were formed by a local mayor named John Jackson Tomlinson,
who was part of the old three hundred White families
who first settled in Texas with Stephen F. Austin. Now,
it wasn't a popular decision for these three hundred families

(10:28):
to settle in Texas, and the Comanches, Tangkawa's, Apaches, and
Karankawas who already resided in the area got kind of
angry and started murdering them. So Tomlinson ordered the formation
of a roving defensive patrol. This patrol became the Texas Rangers,
but Tumlinson never got to see it formed because he
was almost immediately killed by karen Kawa and huako In
indigenous people before he got off the ground. Um, well,

(10:51):
it sounds like karma to me. Yeah, it sounds like
it's fine. Like a shame they didn't get more people.
So the Rangers were kind of this country first border
patrol force, and the primary method of action for them
was just again really just straight up genocide. In the
early days, they were like a paramilitary army. They acted
as scouts for actual militias. They would swoop in and
force Indigenous people out of their homes and under reservations,

(11:14):
but would also just burn their villages sometime and murder
their women and children. Because you know. Whatever do you
Sometimes you coming to the office and you want to
do things different. Um, I don't know. Yeah. They also
engaged in the murder and intimidation of Mexicans and border communities,
and by the early nineteen hundreds of the indigenous folks
had mostly been forced off of their land, and the

(11:34):
Rangers have become a police force focused mainly on Mexicano
Mexicano communities on the border. The primary strategy was what's
known to historians as revenge by proxy. And for an
example of how that looked, I'm gonna quote from the
American Crossroads book Migra quote. On June's twelfth, nineteen o one,
and Mexicano rancher named Gregorio Cortez stood at the gate

(11:57):
of his home in Kirness County, Texas. There he was
us to arrest for a crime that he did not commit.
The sheriff persisted, drew his gun and shot Gregorio's brother
in the mouth. When he charged at the sheriff to
protect Gregorio, Gregorios shot back and killed the sheriff, an
act that was sure to bring the Texas Rangers to
his doorstep. When they came, Gregorio and his family including
his wounded brother, were gone. All that remained was the

(12:17):
dead body of the sheriff. The news of Gregorio's deadly
defiance quickly spread across southern Texas. UM and Yeah, for
ten days, the Texas Rangers and posse's numbering up to
three men hunted for him. When they could not find him,
they sought revenge by proxy, arresting, brutalizing, and murdering an
unknown number of Mexican yos. So that's like how the
Texas Rangers kind of worked for a while. Is Hispanic

(12:38):
person commits a crime or a perceived crime, and if
they can't catch him to murder him publicly, they just
kill a bunch of other random Mexicans so that like
people don't get up at it. That's the that's the
first border patrol. Horrible, pretty bad, Caitlin, pretty bad. Don't
like it. I don't like it one bit. Okay, So

(12:58):
you are you are on them. You are on the
record now about not being in favor of murdering random
people um as part of a fear based a system
of law enforcement. Yes, and I am. I am happy
to be on the record. State it's a bold stance.
That's a bold stance to lose your Some advertisers, Caitlin especially,

(13:21):
are big advertiser Raytheon. When you really need a group
of people intimidated by violence, there's no other option but
Raytheon a robot ad brick. You're just doing. I know,
that's a that's a free that's a free one. Raytheon
just had to lay off a lot of employees, Sophie
and I for one to have a sense of loyalty.

(13:42):
So I'm trying to help Raytheon out with some free ads.
So look, if you've got a couple of billion extra
dollars that you need to spend on missiles that are
filled with knives in order to assassinate, you know, insurgent
leaders in Yemen, Um, look, don't go to Lockheed Martin,
go to Raytheon. Okay there, it's just better knife missiles. Right.
That's that's all I'm gonna say. I have a sense

(14:04):
of loyalty. So for the first twenty years of the century,
the US Mexican border was policed by a mix of
Texas rangers and like local sheriffs. UH. Such enforcement was
always piecemeal, with hundreds of miles of borderland operating basically
autonomously as it had for generations. Like the idea that
we would police our border like didn't exist until pretty recently.

(14:24):
For most of American history, it was just like, well, yeah,
you've got this big empty chunk of country and eventually
it becomes Mexico and it's nobody's nobody really gives a ship. Yeah.
You see, all these communities had existed for forever, for
hundreds of years in a lot of cases, and you know,
they had family who would be up in Mexico or
up in the United States, and it would have seemed like, um,

(14:45):
it would have seemed like madness to try to, uh,
to try to split these communities up based on an
arbitrary border line that nobody could even see. Um. But yeah,
in the nineteen twenties that started to change. In nine
twenty four, the Immigration Act was passed and the Immigration
Act banned all immigration to the United States from Asia,

(15:06):
and it massively reduced immigration in from the Southern from
Southern and Eastern Europe. The goal of the Act was
for the first time to enshrine in law the federal
government's preference for Nordic whites above non white people when
it came to immigration. So basically set up a quota system. Ye. Yeah,
have you heard about this? This is when we decided

(15:26):
that only one kind of white people were allowed in
the country. Um, this is the Italians aren't white enough law.
But people used to really care about that right in
the Immigration Act. A big part of it was stopping
Italians or as they would have called them, Italians, uh,

(15:47):
which it used to be I think more racist than
it is and is now just a funny, old timy
way of making fun of Italians, which I'm always I'm
always in favor of Caitlin. How do you feel? You know?
You do know that my last name is Durante and
the Diana I partly Italian? Yeah, so am I that's
why it's okay? Good? All right? Yeah? Yeah? Yeah? Are

(16:09):
we are? Are we white? How's that? How's that work? Uh?
I have heard slightly varying things, but I think by
and large Italian people are considered white. Yes. I was
looking at a Nazi cartoon the other day because I
do things like that for my mental health, and it

(16:31):
was like the point it was making is that like
social justice advocates are always white, uh, and fascists are
actually really diverse and so like it was a bunch
of white people lecturing Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirahito. But but
because it was drawn by a fascist, they drew in
Mussolini as a black man because they don't think Italians
are white. So it's just like there were a lot

(16:54):
of layers of wrongness there to pass through. It was
one of those things that looked very confusing to people
who don't immediately recognize, Oh, these are the kind of
racists who don't even think Italians count as white. Um,
it's very funny. But in the nineteen twenties that was
all of Congress, sure, and they were like, we gotta
pass a lot to stop these Italians from coming in. Um. So, yeah,

(17:16):
the Immigration Act in nineteen bands all Asian immigration and
tries to kind of restrict to only the right kind
of white people. And the one real exception to this
the only kind of like non white folks who were
allowed into the country under the Immigration Act without any
kind of um restriction, where we're Mexicans. Um. And this

(17:36):
is because of hardcore labor or lobbying by the agricultural industry, right,
because like basically you had all these ranchers and farmers
in Texas particularly and in the Southwest, who are like,
our entire industry doesn't work without these people, so you
have to let them in. UM. So the Act does
kind of make an exception for that. Um. It's very

(17:57):
heavily based on race science. And in fact, a big
factor in what got the Act passed was a bunch
of bogus studies conducted by the Eugenics Research Office at
cold Spring Harbor that kind of provided intellectual justification for
the law by arguing that the wrong kind of immigrants
would leave the surges and violent crime and declines in
i Q. Um, No, this is bad. This is bad.

(18:20):
And the nineteen four Immigration Act is what establishes the
US Border Patrol for the very first time. So this,
this fundamentally racist law written by people who justified it
explicitly with race like like bad, race science is where
the border patrol is initially established. So literally born in
an orgy of racism. Uh. And in fact, the the

(18:42):
nineteen Immigration Act that established the Border Patrol was so
nakedly racist that Adolf Hitler took inspiration from it. Uh
in nineteen Yeah, it's bad, It's really bad, Caitlin. This
is where border patrol comes from. Oh yeah, it's not great.
Um in n Hitler wrote this of the law, there

(19:03):
is currently one state in which one can observe at
least a week beginnings of a better conception. This is,
of course, not Germany, but the American Union. The American
Union Union categorically refuses the immigration if physically unhealthy elements
and simply excludes the immigration of certain races. So Hitler
in the twenties took a look at what we were

(19:24):
doing in the US and was like, I like the
looks of that. Let me be copy paste and do that.
That's exactly what happened. That's exactly what happened. That's exactly
And he wrote extensively about how inspired he was by
US immigration law, which was like the most racist in
the world at the time. Holy ship, you want to

(19:47):
know something else, cool, Caitlin, this is a neat story.
You're gonna love this. Please see the you know, El Paso,
great town, solid Tacos. A lot of immigration in Del
Paso right always has been because it's it's the pass right,
you know, that's just where it's located. Back in like
the twenties and thirties, when immigrants would come in. Racist
white people were so worried about how dirty they thought

(20:09):
Mexicans were that they would mandate de lousing bats for
everybody who entered the country, and they would just douse
them in uh pesticide. And the pesticide that they chose
was zyklon. B Wait what is that? That's what they
killed all the Jews with. And the yeah, yeah, that's
another thing. The Nazis were like, oh, this seems like

(20:30):
something we could modify a little bit to make better
for us. That's good stuff. It's not. It was super
flammable and sometimes people burnt horribly to death. Good stuff
on the border kind of always a nightmare, kind of
If you study the history of the border, maybe the
only reasonable conclusion is that borders are fundamentally toxic, but

(20:56):
and completely made up. They're just yeah, total of like
horrible usually racist ideology. They're just lines, racist lines we
draw on a map that murder tons of people. It's awesome,
it's really good. So yeah, the border patrol comes out
of is formed from a law that the Nazis look

(21:17):
at and go, that's a good law, says we the Nazis.
Um sweet stuff, Caitlin. So because the the Immigration Act
has passed alongside a surge of racist nativist fear about
those dastardly non white immigrants. It mandated that the new
Border Patrol be established quickly. The first version of the
force was basically built overnight from July one, so rapidly

(21:40):
that there was no time for the Patrol to actually
create any kind of qualification exam for its new recruits.
The first wave of men to where the services green
uniform were instead required to pass the railway mail clerk
civil service exam, which I'm sure is basically the same thing. Yeah.
So as a result, and this is something we'll talk
about in part two, this this winds up being a

(22:01):
long trend in the Border Patrol is every decision they
make they have to like immediately adopt it, and they
never have time to train anybody to do the job
that they're going to do, and everyone's just fine with this,
and it persists for ninety six years. So the whole thing,
every like decisions are made all willy nilly people are
brought in with no training, no training implemented, with no

(22:25):
thought given to it. They're just like, here's what we decided,
and we're not going to take a second, to examine
this at all, We're just going to do it. Yeah,
I mean, the current DHS Secretary Chad Wolf, has no
law enforcement experience, was never in the military, and I
think went to college on like a tennis scholarship. Um.

(22:47):
So it's great and it's cool how things are always
exactly the same forever because yeah, again, if people ever
learn a single lesson from history, the world will explode.
So we have to not do that, um anyway. But
there's also a conundrum there too, right, because so much

(23:08):
of history that gets taught, at least in schools is
so horribly whitewashed and revisionists that like, how can anyone
learn anything from it? Yeah? Yeah, you know, that's a
good point, Caitlin. And that's that's why as I see
all these kids in the street who just aren't going

(23:30):
to school anymore and are instead spending their nights drop
kicking the doors of a federal courthouse to try to
taunt the agents inside to attack them, I think it's
probably fine, probably learning about as much, right. So, um yeah,
the very first border patrolmen were mostly male clerks, and

(23:52):
obviously mail clerks maybe aren't super meant to be tromping
around the desert hunting people, and about a quarter of
everyone in the Border Patrol quit in their first month
of the job. Turnover remained incredibly high for basically the
whole history of the organization, but particularly it's early years,
and this made it kind of impossible for it to
develop any kind of functional internal culture. At the start,

(24:14):
by the Border Patrol had been forced to hire inspectors
who could not even pass civil service exams. The agency
tried desperately to recruit military veterans and men with law
enforcement experience, but the vast majority of their new hires
were just unemployed men who lived in border towns. These
were white, working class folks who had trouble keeping a job,

(24:34):
and we're kind of desperate for a leg up and
the regular income that a law enforcement career would allow,
as well as kind of the respect in pride or
respect that you would get as a member of law enforcement. Right,
Like they wanted some power. These were like poor working
class whites. Don't give anybody power. It never goes well, No,

(24:56):
especially not poor white men in the country. Um. Yeah,
So immigration from Mexico into the United States had not
traditionally been like a major subject of national political debate.
People in Texas, you know, there were folks who cared
about it, but like, really, on a national level, if
you'd like run based on your plan to build a

(25:16):
wall around Mexico, Americans have been like, what the fund
is your probable? Like, why do you give a shit
about that? Everyone is dying of diphtheria and the economy
is permanently crashed. Please please stop? Um, which I guess
now we're back at so maybe that'll help. I mean,

(25:37):
I don't hear as many people giving a shit about
the border these days, I'll say that much. But maybe
it's because nobody wants to come here anymore. We did it, Caitlin,
We finally stopped it. Just turn the US into a
disease written Hell, all it took was a runaway plague
that we completely give up any hope of every dealing with.

(26:01):
You know what, President Trump figured it out, Good for him.
Do you know what President Trump didn't figure out? Oh? Um,
the products and services that support this podcast. That's right.
We keep them a secret from the president. Um, but
if you listen in, it can be a secret that
you and I share and hide at all costs from

(26:24):
the administration, we're back. Oh my gosh, I for one
love that Trump for America bought up all of our
advertising space. Um. When I think of President, I think
of the president anyway. Uh. So immigration from Mexico had

(26:48):
not traditionally been a big, big political debate issue, right. Uh.
The wealthy agribusiness owners in Texas preferred simple immigration from Mexico. Uh,
and they fought to ensure that Mexicans were not subject
to the same harsh immigration restrictions as other immigrants. In
the nineteen twenty four bill, one business owner put it simply,
without the Mexicans, we would be done. Um, which hasn't

(27:10):
really changed, you know. And it's like we'll talk about
this a little bit later on, but it is. It
is this kind of one of the things that you
I didn't even realize was like really problematic when I
was a young person kind of dealing with. Um. The
mix between outwardly hateful racists in the Southwest, UM and
nice people who don't realize they're racist. Is like the

(27:33):
nice people the outwardly hateful people are like you know,
the Trump type folks that you know who want to
build a wall and kick all the rapists Mexicans out. Sure,
they're easy to spot, yeah yeah, And then you have
this chunk of people who are like, well, I hate
what Trump's doing, and like I'm happy to have Mexicans
here because you know, they do great work and you

(27:53):
know they're they're they're great at this, and they're good
at that, and they're good at and it's this thing
where like especially like you know, you don't necessarily notice,
especially as like a young white person was the eighteen
nineteen like what what what's actually being said there? Which
is like the commodification of of non white bodies, um,
which is like not not cool. Um. But we're going

(28:15):
to talk more about that later because this is where
that all starts in an organized way, which is awesome. Um.
So uh. The white working class and texts, so obviously
like these kind of these kind of landowners, the kind
of aristocracy in Texas in this period, right like the
ranchers and stuff. They were broadly like they wanted more
Mexicans and they could never get enough because like they

(28:36):
needed people to to actually work their farms. But the
white working class in Texas and the white working class
even in rural areas really had nursed like a growing
hatred of Mexican people and had been for years. And
this was based on a mix of like fear that
Mexican immigrants would take their jobs that was always like
a core part of it um and also based on
kind of like good old fashioned racism. One labor union

(28:58):
official in Texas at the time noted, quote, I hope
they never let another Mexican come to the United States.
The country would be a whole lot better off for
the white laboring man if there weren't so many inwards
and Mexicans. And then, yeah, well, and this is one
of those things if you're like kind of squaring yourself
with the history of labor. You know, I'm a big
fan of labor history, and I think there's a lot
of wonderful stuff there. You do have to square with

(29:20):
the fact that like a lot of those dudes who
were right about a lot of important things were incredibly
racist and hated non white people because they saw them
as a threat to white working class people. Um well,
I mean, which that all stems from capitalism more or less.
There was any um fairness or parody when it came

(29:43):
to income and labor. People wouldn't have to be worried
about other people. There wouldn't be this fear of like,
who is my job in danger? Who's going to take
my job? Um, because they're like a more just just
socialized economy would eliminate that fear absolutely. Yeah. So, the

(30:09):
the actual laws on the books in this period of
time had been written largely by the rich landed gentry
who needed Mexican immigrants. But now that the border patrol
existed post the men enforcing those laws were working class
whites who really just hated Mexicans and they honestly didn't
give a shit about the needs of farmers. And in fact,
a lot of them saw kind of being able to

(30:29):
police undocumented migrants as a way of kind of equalizing
their level of social power with farmers, because like, you know,
they were poor or than these guys. They didn't have property,
but now they had the ability to to arrest these
dudes workers, and like that gave them a level of
power in their culture and a level of power of

(30:50):
these people who had kind of previously been the bosses um.
And you know, kind of for a lot of these
guys who became the first border patrol workers, these were
obviously these were white men but there were men whose
kind of sense of whiteness had been hanging on by
a thread prior to this, this opportunity coming around, and
I'm gonna quote again from the book Migra quote. Early

(31:10):
officers may have lived in white neighborhoods, worshipped at white churches,
and sent their children to white schools. But a salesman, chauffeurs, machinists,
and cow punchers, they had labored at the edges of
whiteness in the borderlands. The steady pay and everyday social
authority of US immigration law enforcement work dangled before them
the possibility of lifting themselves from a marginalized existence as
what Neil Foley has examined as the white scourge of

(31:31):
borderland communities. Policing Mexicans, in other words, presented officers with
the opportunity to enter the region's primary economy and in
the process shore up their tentative claims upon whiteness. As
immigration control was emerging as a critical site of simultaneously
expanding the boundaries of whiteness while hardening the distinctions between
whites and non whites. The project of enforcing immigration restrictions

(31:53):
therefore placed border patrol officers and what police scholar David
Bailey describes as the cutting edge of the state eats
knife in terms of enforcing new boundaries between whites and
non whites. So that is the border patrol in this period,
the cutting edge of the states knife, you know, cleaving
the boundaries between white and non white people. It's a

(32:13):
way to look at it, very picturesque. Yeah. Now this
has made a lot more complicated by the fact that
a chunk of the early border patrol were Mexican American
UM and these guys in a lot of cases saw
their ability their career in law enforcement as a way
of separating themselves from non white people. The League of

(32:34):
United Latin American Citizens or LULAC, specifically stated that Mexican
American association with colored races is what held them back
from full acceptance by white society in this period of time.
Um And the book Migra includes the story of one
early officer patrol, inspector Pete Torres, who was marked by
a colleague for being Mexican. In response, he shot at

(32:54):
the man's feet and yelled, I am not a Mexican,
I am a Spanish American. Um. Yeah, So this is like, yeah, internalized. Yeah,
it's a complicated history here. UM. And I I'm not
going to, Um, I'm not going to go into tremendous

(33:14):
depth about this aspect of the history because I'm just
I'm not at all the right person to do so.
The right person to do so, in fact, is probably
Kelly Kelly Little Hernandez, author of the book migra Um
History of the U. S. Border Patrol. She does talk
about this in in more depth, and I really recommend
her book. Um, but you should know that's like an
aspect of what's going on here and and and as

(33:35):
a rule, one of the things that starts to happen
in particular around like the forties is kind of a
growing Spanish or Mexican American community who are very pro
immigration enforcement um and pro like harsher immigration laws and
laws against the legal immigration. They start to like solidify
as a voting block in the Southwest in this period too,

(33:56):
and they still are to this day. It's. Um, a
lot of people are like shocked and they see Hispanics
for Trump and stuff, and there's actually pretty deep roots
for a lot of that stuff. Um. Yeah. So uh,
most early border patrol men, though we were white dudes,
and it would probably be fair to call them white supremacists.
And as the years went by, our government gave them
increasing powers to exercise racism with state of authority behind it.

(34:19):
From a right up in the intercept quote. While the
nineteen twenty four immigration law spared Mexico quota, a series
of secondary laws, including one that made it a crime
to enter the country outside of official ports of entry,
gave border and customs agents on the spot discretion to
decide who could enter the country legally. They had the
power to turn what had been a routine, daily or
seasonal event crossing the border to go to work into
a ritual of abuse. Hygienic inspections became more widespread and

(34:42):
even more degrading. Migrants had their head shaped and they
were subjected to an increasingly arbitrary set of requirements at
the discretion of patrollers, including literacy tests and entrance fees.
The Patrol wasn't a large agency at first, just a
few hundred men during its early years, and it's reached
along a two thousand mile line was limited, but over
the years it's reported brutality grew as the number of

(35:03):
agents that deployed increased. Border agents beat, shot, and hung
migrants with regularity. Two patrollers, former Texas rangers, tied the
feet of one migrant and dragged him in and out
of a river until he confessed to having entered the
country illegally. Other patrollers were members of the resurgent Ku
Klux Klan, active in border towns from Texas to California.
Practically every other member of El Paso's National Guard was

(35:23):
then the clan. One military officer recalled, and many had
joined the Border Patrol upon its establishment. So not great ideally,
you know, if you if you ask me, we keep
coming back to the k k K and how it
repeatedly infiltrated law enforcement. Someone maybe how to do something
about that. So for its first ten years of existence,

(35:48):
the Border Patrol operated under the authority of the Department
of Labor, and when FDR was elected, he appointed Francis
Perkins to be Secretary of Labor and she tried to
curtail the violence of the Border Patrol and reform it
um and this didn't really work out in the long run.
She attempted to cut down and warrantless arrest. She mandated
that detained migrants had a right to receive phone calls.
She fought to provide migrants with at least some version

(36:09):
of the civil rights they lacked as non citizens. But
before long FDR was pressured by the agricultural industry to
put the border patrol under the control of the Department
of Justice. Uh. Now, this might seem surprising at first,
because like, these rich farmers were the same folks who
had fought to ensure Mexican immigrants wouldn't be subject to
quotas in the nineteen four immigration law. But there's a
reason behind it, because these folks had wanted these you know,

(36:32):
ranchers and stuff, had wanted Mexicans here to work their farms,
but they hadn't wanted these people to actually stay in
the United States. Lobbyist S. Parker Frazel had told Congress
in nineteen the Mexican is a homer, like the pigeon
he goes home to roost. And Frizelle's promise had been
that Mexicans weren't really immigrants, and thus they should be
exempt from the USA's white supremacist immigration laws. They were

(36:55):
birds of passage, he argued, just hanging around for a
little while to work. But by the turn of the decade.
As we hit like start going into the nineteen thirties,
Mexicans had started to settle all across the Southwest, buying
homes and starting communities and places like Texas, New Mexico, Arizona,
and California. Uh. In nineteen hundred, only about a hundred
thousand Mexican immigrants had lived in the United States. By

(37:17):
nineteen thirty, there were one and a half million Mexican
immigrants in this country. Um. So this starts to freak
out a lot of white agriculturalists, right Um. And it
it kind of you know, they had been they had
been okay with these people coming into work, but at
the end of the day there there were the same
kind of white supremacists as the border patrol men. They

(37:39):
were just a little bit more refined. And once it
started to look like these these Mexicans were coming in
and actually going to be contributing and changing the demographics
of the nation, they panicked. Um. And the only thing
they could really think of to do was give the
border patrol more power to enforce how many Mexicans could
enter the country. Um. And there was a real big

(38:00):
like debate over this, right um, because uh, you you
still needed a certain as as these farmers, you still
needed a certain minimum amount of of of migrants coming
in every year in order to actually like keep your
farms working. Um. And the guy who kind of figured
out a solution to this problem with Senator Coleman Livingston Blie.
He was a white supremacist congressman who first took office

(38:22):
in nine and his solution was, rather than creating a
system of quotas and caps that would have reduced manpower
in American fields, he just wanted to criminalize unmonitored border crossing. Um.
So this is the very first time that it becomes
illegal to cross the US Mexican border without doing it
at a border station. Um. That's nineteen twenty nine. That

(38:43):
law has passed. Um. And I'm gonna quote from an
article in the Conversation explaining what happened here. According to
Blize's bill, unlawfully entering the country would be a misdemeanor,
while unlawfully returning to the United States after deportation would
be a felony. The idea was to force Mexican immigrants
into an author rised and monitored stream that could be
turned on and off at will at ports of entry.

(39:03):
Any immigrant who entered the United States outside of bounds
of the stream would be a criminal subject defines imprisonment
and ultimately deportation. But it was a crime designed to
impact Mexican immigrants in particular. Neither the Western agricultural businessmen
nor the restrictionists registered any objections. Congress passed Blizes Bill
the Immigration Act of March fourth, ninety nine, and dramatically
altered the story of crime and punishment in the United

(39:25):
States with stunning precision. The criminalization of unauthorized entry caged
thousands of Mexicans Mexico's birds of passage. By the end
of nineteen thirty, the U. S. Attorney General reported prosecuting
seven thousand cases of unlawful entry. By the end of
the decade, US attorneys had prosecuted more than forty four
thousand cases. Now Blazes law applied technically to like Canadians

(39:47):
as well, but basically everyone prosecuted under it was Mexican,
and it was mainly used as kind of a method
of non mostly non violent ethnic cleansing. Like I don't
even if I know if i'd say mostly non violent.
It was used for ethnic cleansing throughout the nineteen thirties,
Mexicans made up at least eighty five percent of all
immigration prisoners. Sometimes some years they made up three new

(40:11):
prisons were built on the border to hold them all,
and over the course of the decades, somewhere around one
million Mexicans were deported from the United States, and most
of these people were US citizens. Historian Francisco Balderama argues
that sixt of the million people who were deported were
US citizens of Mexican descent. Um and border patrol forces

(40:31):
would call the what was happening here repatriation to make
it seem voluntary, But what was really happening in the
thirties was border patrol was just rounding up all of
the Mexicans they could get and throwing them across the
border and kind of accusing people of unlawful like crossing
of the border basically as a justification for for kicking
them out. Um, so that's cool. I just the resources

(40:57):
that get used and spent to uh like, enforce these
laws and build prisons and maintain the prison and just
like all all of that costs so much time and
is so much effort. Why, like it would be so

(41:17):
much easier if we would just let immigrants come and
then just let them live and be a part of
the community. I mean, I know why because racism. Yeah, yeah,
it's absurd. Yeah, the border patrols pretty lame. You know,

(41:37):
this is like that. But like this, this is what
it is from the beginning, Like one of the first
things the Border Patrol ever does is to port a
million people, more than half of whom are US citizens. Um.
And it just lies about what it's doing because it's
from the beginning. It's job has never been to actually
enforce the rule of law or even protect the border.
Its job is to protect whiteness, right yep, souh the

(42:01):
very The primary method of action for Border Patrol agents
from the beginning up to now was violence. Um. The
force was always undermanned and underfunded. With a handful of
officers responsible for thousands of miles of rugged terrain, there
was little to no oversight, and agents generally used violence
at their discretion. As this anecdote from the book Migra
Illustrates Quote one Day in nineteen explains Stovall, who was

(42:24):
a Border Patrol agent. He was patrolling alone near San Elizario, Texas,
when he decided to drive through town Santa Lazario was
this little Mexican town on the Rio Grand, said stove All,
who remembered that when he got to town that day,
he saw a Mexicano come out from behind the bank
of a drainage ditch and then duck back. Stove All
admitted to knowing the man, but stopped the car and
asked him, what do you have there in your bosom?
The man reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out

(42:46):
two bottles of beer and put them down on the
bridge and broke them so he wouldn't have any evidence.
Reflecting upon the incident, stove All wondered, why didn't I
pull out my gun and fire at that Mexican. I
don't know. I don't know why. Instead of reaching his
gun and firing, stove All fled. I got in my
car and got away from there, remembered stove All, because
it was in daylight, about one o'clock. If I had

(43:07):
pulled my gun and fired, there would have been fifty
Mexicans around me that quick. According to stove All, God
spared his life that day by taking charge of his
hands and preventing him from shooting at the Mexican. You know,
so this is this is nineteen and kind of a
common addit like this border patrol agent approaches a guy
who's got a legal alcohol and the dude breaks the

(43:28):
bottles on him, and the man's lingering question that he's
wondering for years afterwards is why didn't I shoot that
man to death? Like, yeah, some people think justifies killing
another person is something I will never comprehend. Yeah, I
don't think they thought they were people. Um, yeah, and

(43:51):
it's it's probably worth noting how common brutality was, like
like open brutality was among US law enforcement officials, um,
even at like pretty high levels in politics at this time.
In May of nineteen fifty four, Herbert Brownell, the Attorney
General UH Eisenhower's Attorney General, gave a speech where he
asked US labor leaders for their support and the event

(44:12):
that border patrol agents quote shot wet backs in cold blood.
So again not saying like, hey, we might have an
accidental shooting and I need your support because like what
we're doing is hard and you know, people are gonna
mess up. He's like, you know, my guys might murder
some some Mexicans. You know, my guys are absolutely going
to commit murder in cold blood, and I need you
to like have my back, right. That's the Attorney General

(44:34):
of the United States. Cool stuff? You know what else
is cool stuff? Uh? Don't, Sophie. I can't imagine what
you're going for here. That's fine, that's fine. I'll just leave.
You know who isn't the the Attorney General of the

(44:57):
United States. Hopefully the products and services that with this podcast.
So racism's not good. You know who else isn't good?
The head of the Border Patrol in the nineteen fifties. Uh, yeah,
a great pivot. So the guy in charge of the

(45:17):
Border Patrol as we turned into the nineteen fifties is
an outright monster by the name of Harlan Carter. Now
Carter was, by the time he became the head of
the Border Patrol, a convicted murderer. Yeah, in nineteen thirty one,
is a teenager. He'd shot a Mexican boy in the
chest at point blank range with a twelve gage shotgun,

(45:39):
and the two had been having an argument, and the
Mexican boy had a knife, but he was not actively
threatening Carter, and in fact, he'd laughed at the boy's
gun because he just kind of seemed to think it
was silly that they were having a fight at all,
and Carter shot him to death because he was angry
for being laughed at. He was convicted of murder and
sentenced to three years in prison, but he was led
out after two owing to a technicality. So in nineteen

(46:00):
thirty one, by the way, you could shoot a man
in the chest with a twelve gage and get three years.
But that's neat. Um. I love laws, Yeah, just so
our justice system is cool. Yeah, he got rehabilitated. He
went on to become the head of the Border Patrol
and also was the head of the n R A. Oh,

(46:22):
Harlan Carter is an interesting piece of shit. Um. So,
throughout the forties, apprehensions by the Border Patrol we're kind
of ad hawc and disorganized, and they were mostly the
result of individual agents seeking out undocumented immigrants by catching
them in transit. This meant that large numbers of people
were almost never apprehended at a time. It was more
just like agents kind of going out and hunting people

(46:43):
down and grabbing a couple of folks. This was an
easy system for dumb violent men to like figure out,
you know, you just kind of it's like hunting basically
um and it appealed to the kind of folks who
became Border patrol agents. But starting in nineteen fifty, a
young agent named Albert Quillan began to change things. He wasn't,
telligent and ambitious, and when the chief supervisor of Border
Patrol demanded that he and his colleagues increase apprehensions, Quillan

(47:06):
began experimenting with bold new strategies. At five am on
February eleven, Quillan took a detail of twelve patrol men
with two buses, one plane, one truck, and nine automobiles.
The men drove out to a small station in Real Hondo, Texas,
and then split into two groups to clean as well
as possible a certain section of illegal aliens. The plane

(47:26):
acted as a spotter while the buses were used to
quote hall wets to the border. A hundred people were
apprehended in short order, and they were deported the next day.
Quillan soon moved on with his force to a series
of farms near Los Fresnos, Texas. They found five hundred
and sixty one wets, which is again always the term
they used for that. Do you understand where that term
comes from I don't know that I actually know the

(47:48):
source of it. No. Yeah, So basically the idea is that, um,
there were kind of tooth two options from Mexicans at
this time. There was the Briscero program, which was a
program by which they could kind of enter the country
quasi legally and get like legal working rights to to
be like a laborer or something like that. Um. And
then there was you could just cross the border right
illegally um. And that usually meant crossing the Rio grant

(48:11):
which is a river, right, so you wind up wet
on the other side of the river. So they called
the wet backs like that. That's that's still to this
day a racist slang term for particularly Mexicans, kind of
all people of Hispanic descent, and a lot of Texas
like you hear it a lot from raises there and
the border patrol. It is their standard term for these people.
This is like on all of their professional documents and everything.

(48:33):
This is what they call migrants. Yeah. Um. So Quillan's
forces catch five hundred and sixty one wets on their
second day, and on their third day they catch two
hundred sixty four. On the fourth day they catch a
hundred and thirty four uh. In less than a week,
they captured and deported more than a thousand undocumented laborers,
and this was like unprecedented. The Border patrol had never

(48:54):
caught this many people this quickly. Um It was seen
as an astonishing achievement by Quillan superiors, and they began
setting up other raids in imitation of his. Border Patrol
supervisors noted that these new task forces as started being called,
we're quote pounding away on these wets, cool dudes. Soon
multiple task forces had been established throughout California and Texas,

(49:14):
carrying out constant raids and netting huge numbers of undocumented persons.
On some single days, more than five thousand Mexican nationals
would be apprehended and shipped to temporary detention camps before
being sent back across the border. Patrolmen handed deportees notes
that read quote, you have entered the United States illegally
and in violation of the laws of your land and
those of the United States. For this reason, you're being

(49:35):
returned to your homeland. If you return again illegally, you
will be arrested and punished as provided by law. We
understand that the life of a wet back is difficult.
Wet Backs are unable to work for more than a
few hours before they are apprehended and deported. Remember these
words and transmit the news to your families and countrymen
if you want to do them a favor. So that's fun, Yanks,
nice letter there. Terrified language. Also, you had said alien

(50:01):
that that was something that had been and still gets like.
That language is still used and it's just the most
dehumanizing word. Yeah, to refer to simply someone who travels
to another place and wants to stay there. It's pretty

(50:24):
crazy because we don't use that word for uh, I
don't know us. I'm I'm excited for when we have
finally the big civil war that we were all planning
to have and suddenly a shipload of people but continued
like yeah, I'm I'm excited for the people who treated

(50:46):
Syrian refugees and treat Guatemalan and Honduran and Mexican refugees
like ship and I'm excited for them all to I
don't know, get gunned down by Canadian border guards, um
as we deserve as a nation. I don't know, I'm
angry all the time. Cab, I'm sorry that's not right likewise,
am I yeah? Um? Anyway, it'll be up to Canada.

(51:10):
We racist then and then eventually Alaska and then the
biosphere will die. Um, so you know what won't die, Caitlin, Um,
are you doing a necessary I know, I went off
on a really sad rant. Uh, and so I decided

(51:30):
to throw in a raytheon ad because everybody likes thinking
about raytheon. So back to the border patrol. Um. So
the border patrol would like pick up all these folks,
huge numbers, thousands in a day sometimes and they would
put them in these like temporary camps um and then
would take them into Mexico, where the Mexican military would
basically dump them in the middle of the country as

(51:50):
far away from the border as possible. And these were
generally places where there was no work and where these
migrants had no family connections, and it was just a
horrible situation for most people. As a result of these
new tactics, between nineteen fifty and nineteen fifty three, the
number of border patrol apprehensions nearly doubled, from four hundred
and sixty nine thousand to almost eight hundred and forty thousand.

(52:12):
This caused immediate problems for ranchers and farmers, who started
to realize that the new legal powers they had given
the Border Patrol had vastly realigned the organization's power in
a way that allowed the white supremacists who ran it
to harm agrabusiness by wiping out their workforce. At stake
was also a sort of cultural readjustment. Farmers and ranchers
were used to occupying a position at the top of society,

(52:33):
but now Border patrol men could exercise the power of
deportation again and take away their workers. And Texas border
towns like Marfa farmers hired armed guards, hired lookouts, and
booby trapped farm gates in order to protect their workforce.
There were gunfights with border patrol um with these like
white farmers trying to defend their workforce, and as the
conflict between the farmers and border patrol grew uglier, white

(52:56):
border town farmers suddenly found themselves facing off against the
same men who had hunted their workers. The book Migra
tells the story of D. C. Newton, whose family were
border patrol farmers who posted guards to warn about raids
they went to sleep. They want to sleep. One night
in nineteen fifty two and woke up to find that
dozens of Border patrol agents had snuck in with their
headlights off and to surprise everyone sleeping in the farmhouse

(53:17):
and adjacent quarters. The Newton's oldest son was faster, though,
and he succeeded in warning the undocumented migrants staying on
the farm, which gave them the time they needed to
run like hell and hide in the trees. When the
border patrol men came up empty in their search, they
went after the white folks who actually owned the farm,
and I'm gonna quote from the book Migrant Now. They
entered Newton's parents bedroom and began shining the flashlights in

(53:40):
my mother's eyes and my father's eyes, telling them to
get up. We're gonna go out and find where your
Mexicans are. With my father and his pajamas, my mother,
his mother in a nightgown, and no one wearing any shoes,
the officers forced the family out of the house while
pushing physically pushing my mother in the back, pushing my
father in the back, and demanding to know where the
wet backs were. Most of the workers had fled, including
Newton's nanny, Loupe, for whom the officers claimed to be searching.

(54:02):
In particular, she had heard the arrival of the patrolman
and climbed out of the window on the second floor
of the farmhouse, rolled down onto the roof of the garage,
and run off to the southeast and was gone. Although
the Newton's believed they had outsmarted the Border patrol by
alerting the migrants to the raid, the head Border patrol
inspector still led fifty three apprehended workers away, saying, see
how you handle your groves? Now, Now that's like a

(54:25):
bad story and everything. What's interesting here is, um, I
guess how horrible Newton's family is here too, um, Because
the interview with him goes on and he makes it
clear that when he kind of when his dad explained
to him what was happening with the Border Patrol, his
dad compared the conflict to the Civil War. Um, and
the side that he identified with was not the good side. Quote.

(54:49):
Newton's father believed that by taking away their workers, the
damn Yankee Border Patrol were splitting up a household. As
he explained it to his son, the South Texans protected
their homes, their families, their property and their way of
life from the border patrol raids. He was the master.
The Mexican illegals were equivalent to the black slaves, and
together they formed a household, a system of labor relations
in a world of tightly bound intimacy and inequity. The

(55:11):
Border Patrol threatened their household by reducing the farmer's control
over Mexico's unsanctioned migrant workers. So as the Southerners had
rebelled against intrusions upon their labor relations and plantation lives,
the Newton family had to defend itself against the US
Border Patrol. Newton's brother took the lesson to heart. When
the border patrol rated on another night, he stood in
the family driveway with a shotgun named at the officers.

(55:32):
Startled by the hostile twelve year old boy, the officers
left the property and returned on another day. So, yeah,
this is what's happening here is really complicated. Right. There's
an important thing to remember here, which is that even
of the like white ranch farm owners who are maybe

(55:53):
not in favor of their workforce being sent back to
their country of origin, they are still exploiting these workers,
these migrant workers, um and you know, probably not paying
them well, probably not offering them you know, good benefits,

(56:18):
so and probably like keeping them in very primitive living situations,
often like little more than a shack, often like like
like kind of nightmares situa like these guys did. These
migrants often did live very similarly to slaves. Right, it
wasn't quite that bad, but it was bad. Um. And
these these farmers are like the border patrol agents want

(56:40):
these migrants out because they're racist as fuck. Um, and
these farmers are also racist as fun. They just want
the migrants to stay because because they can exploit the
basis of their power exactly. So again, no one to
root for here other than like these migrants, but they
seem to mostly get just sucked over by everybody, and
that's not fun. Yep. So yeah, it's important to remember

(57:05):
that kind of the struggle between border patrol and these
border farmers in Texas was a struggle between two different
groups of white supremacists, and one group of white supremacists
was broadly in the right because I guess it's it's
worse to round up thousands of people in cattle cars
and busses and throw them back across the border for
no good reason. But there's no one you should be

(57:28):
rooting for here. But what's really interesting, what's kind I
find fascinating about this whole conflict is that these racist
plantation owning, white border farmers wound up like fighting the
Border Patrol by kind of co opting the language of
social justice. Um Starting in the nineteen fifties, ranchers began
to argue that Mexican nationals were being unfairly targeted for deportations.

(57:49):
They complained that the buses, planes, and trains used to
take migrants away were cruel, in human and outrageous practices
trading in human misery. They began to argue that hiring
Mexicans was an act of kindness by American ranchers. Mexican
laborers deserve the chance to win a better life by
working low paid jobs as domestic servants and laborers. The
Border Patrol was in fact actually fostering communism by sending

(58:12):
these men and women back to the interior of Mexico,
where there would no doubt live on in miserable poverty
and join some leftist guerrilla movement. So because their lives
being exploited farm hands in the US was so much better.
What Oh my gosh, yeah, it's pretty cool. How naturally

(58:33):
that came to these farmers. I like it. So the
Border Patrol obviously didn't listen to the protest against them.
They continued to, in their own words, pound away in
the borderlands, raising apprehensions UH. The increased workload necessary uh
necessitated more men and facilities, and in nineteen fifty three,
the Border Patrol attempted to hire two dred and forty

(58:54):
additional officers and made plans to build two new detention
centers at the Lower Real Grand Valley. This enraged local farmers,
and one quote threatened to arm his wet back laborers
against the Border Patrol, threatening that there is liable to
be a couple of dead border patrolmen. Death threats against
patrolman became a daily occurrence, and farmers in the Lower
Rio Grand lobbied their congressmen to deny the appropriation request

(59:15):
necessary to fund the new men and facilities. These farmers
insisted they weren't lobbying for their own benefit, but for
doing we're doing it from migrants who were victims of
the patrols. Cheap vindictiveness, a great hunger to ruler ruin
to control to govern anything to carry a point reckless
of the consequences to the poor workman, which they heard
around as cattle, and they weren't wrong in this. The

(59:36):
facility the Border Patrol wanted to build was essentially a
concentration camp. Eventually, Congress listened and the appropriation crest request
was denied. So like the protest of all these guys
in Texas worked, the Border Patrol had to send its
two hundred and forty men back home and cancel construction.
According to the book Migra Quote, one month after losing
the supplemental appropriation, Chief Kelly announced the Border Patrols withdrawal

(59:57):
from the Rio Grand Valley to a new defend line
ten miles to the north of Kingsville. Fall furious and
Hebronville rather than fight a losing battle in the lower
Rio Grand Valley at the Border Patrol decided to pull
out of the area because with limited forces we can
best control the wet back invasion as at the line
farther north. It's one of those things, I guess, like
I always kind of debate when you've got like something

(01:00:18):
that is essentially a slur or is a slur um.
In an episode of like this how often to say it?
And it's one of those things where I kind of
feel like cleaning up the Border Patrols official statements in
the matter would be, I don't know, making it seem
like they were less of a naked force for white
supremacy than they were, Like if you, if you, if

(01:00:39):
you replace that with Mexican nationals, that's not really what
they're saying, right, Yeah, I don't know, that's yeah. I
mean that puts you in a pretty tricky position. Yeah,
I I don't know. Yeah, they use it a lot. Um,
it's the Border Patrol are cool guys, And we're about
to hear it used again in another big way. Um. So,

(01:01:01):
the men of the Border Patrol did see the immigration
of Mexicans into the US as an invasion, and they
sought to repel it with military force, as kind of
that language above, right, referring to it as a defensive
line and stuff, like they're defending whiteness again, and they
see the encroachment of these, um, these undocumented migrants as
like an assault on on white blood more than anything else. Um.

(01:01:21):
In nineteen fifty three, with the rebellion of the Texas
Ranchers in full swing. Harlan Carter, who's again the murderer
who became the head of the Border Patrol, sat down
with two US generals to ask for their help. He
wanted the military and the National Guard to assist the
Border Patrol in a nationwide purge of undocumented Mexican nationals
called Operation Cloudburst. The first step for this would be

(01:01:44):
an anti infiltration campaign to seal the border with the
help of eight troops Border Patrol wood station soldiers at
strategic locations and build several long fences to block areas
of heavy traffic. This part of the operation is fairly standard,
aside from the presence of US troops. Part to the
would be a containment operation, which would involve roadblocks on
every major highway from the southwest to the interior of

(01:02:06):
North America. These checkpoints would be used to search vehicles
for illegal migrants around the clock. Part three was the
mopping up phase, and this would involve a massive series
of raids in northern locations. Places far from the border
like San Francisco where groups of migrants were believed to
have gathered. Businesses and camps would be rated and the
arrested migrants would be airlifted or sent by train to

(01:02:26):
the interior of Mexico, now again using the military. This
was essentially he wanted to to bring in the army
to carry out a military action to purge the United
States of Hispanic people. That that's what the head of
Border Patrols trying to do here, and all of the
military guys he talked to are like, this sounds like
a great idea. We'd love to help, um, but it's illegal,

(01:02:48):
right Posse commatatas means you can't use the army for
ship like this. Um. The only way around it is
a presidential proclamation. And Dwight Eisenhower was actually initially all
on board with issuing that proclam a asian um, but
in the end he kind of backed away, uh, and
instead he appointed a General Joseph Swing to be the
new Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and was

(01:03:10):
basically like, we can't use soldiers for this because it's unconstitutional,
but I'm gonna promote a general to be in charge
of the I n S. And you figure out a
way to do the same thing with the resources border
patrol has, like us your yeah, yeah, I still want
a military operation to clear out these Hispanic people. Um,
I just can't use soldiers, so that's good grief. Yeah,

(01:03:35):
the mental gymnastics. That what these people do to justify
their horrible actions. Anyway, Sorry, go ahead, Yeah it's pretty great.
I don't know. So. One month after joining I n S,
General Swing announces that he's going to be leading the
Border Patrol in a new paramilitary campaign based on the

(01:03:55):
tactics pioneered by Albert Quillan. The new operation is given
the name Operation wet Back. Again. That's the Border Patrol's
official name for it. That's what all these guys call it.
That's what it's written up in in the documents and stuff. Yeah,
they just didn't have a fund to give on this matter. So,

(01:04:15):
true to form, Border Patrol was only given four weeks
to prepare for what would become the largest operation in
their history. The plan was to engage in an unprecedented sweep,
deporting hundreds of thousands of people. No one received any
training or specialized equipment to actually do this, though. All
that most agents had on June nine, nine fifty four,
when the operation began, was a letter from General Swing

(01:04:35):
ordering them to purge the nation by removing the huge
number of Mexican nationals who were in this country in
violation of the immigration laws. Always good to hear about
a purge. Yea. Yeah. So in its first day, California
and or in the first day of this operation, California
and Arizona agents apprehended nearly eleven thousand migrants. The flood

(01:04:57):
of people only accelerated after that, and the year number
of deportees overwhelmed the Border Patrol's capacity to hold or
carry them. People were left in primitive, exposed concentration camps
for days. The Border Patrol turned Alesion Park in Los
Angeles into an open air concentration camp. Um. Yeah, that's nate.
Go to Allegian parks. I've been there before and I'll

(01:05:21):
never go again. A lot of the men who were
in turn there, men and women, got sick and sometimes
died of sunstroke because there was no care given to
their health and it can get very hot down there. Uh.
Of all, deportees were transported by boats, many of which
were so cramped and filthy that their occupants later compared
them to slave ships or penal hell ships. Um. So,

(01:05:45):
that's great. The Mexican government's capacity to take and transport
all these people broke down almost immediately, and they were like,
we need you to to not send these people to
us so quickly because we can't handle them. And the
US government said, we don't give a fuck um and
kept just shotgunning people on over there, and the sheer
scale of deportations began to funk with American industry. But

(01:06:07):
Border patrol didn't really give a shit about this either.
I'm gonna quote again from the book Migra. Between June
seventeenth and July fifty four, two thousand, eight hundred and
twenty seven of the four thousand and four hundred and
three migrants apprehended by task the task force assigned to
the Los Angeles area had worked in industry. After border
patrol raids during the summer of nineteen fifty four, three
Los Angeles brickyards were left without sufficient numbers of workers

(01:06:29):
and temporarily closed down their operations. Similarly, border patrol officers
paid close attention to the hotel and restaurant business, which
routinely hired undocumented Mexican immigrants as bus boys, kitchen help waiters,
et cetera. Officers reported apprehending such workers at well known
establishments such as the Builtmore Hotel, Beverly Hills Hotel, Hollywood,
Roosevelt Hotel, Los Angeles Athletic Club, and the Brown Derby.

(01:06:51):
At times, the Border Patrol raids created moments of chaos
at popular restaurants when migrants attempted to escape by running
through the serving area. The raids were public and regularly
drew significant attention from the press, and this was part
of the point. The reason the Border Patrol focused so
much on Los Angeles on like raids in big Hollywood
locations is because they were trying to make a point
to these like these ranchers who were still fighting them

(01:07:12):
in South Texas. And the the message was, if we're
willing to do this ship in fucking Hollywood, you'd better
believe that one day we're going to come to your
ranch and fuck you up, right, Like if we'll do
this to the built More, will ruin you, Like we
don't give a ship where the where The Border Patrol
um and in the end, Operation wet Back was responsible
for the deportations of somewhere between a quarter of a
million at the low end, uh and about one point

(01:07:35):
five million people at the high end. And you know,
at the end of the day. Yeah, it kind of
ended in retreat by the Border patrol. UM. Part of
this was that around the same time, the US government
reformed to the Broscero program, which allowed Mexican nationals to
get legal working status in the US, and that became
much more popular after this time, So a lot of
these these ranchers and farmers started making sure that their

(01:07:57):
workers kind of went through a legal path to gain
working status in the United States. UM. And some of
it was just that, like there was blowback to this program.
It wasn't very popular, all of the massive public raids
UM and kind of as a result, border patrol apprehensions plummeted.
The next year in nineteen fifty five, the task forces
that had once captured thousands of migrants in a day

(01:08:18):
were disbanded and demobilized, and for a little while it
seemed as if the Border Patrol had gone into hibern nation.
Of course, that Caitlin was not the case. And in
part two, we're going to talk about the fact that
we haven't even talked about any of the worst ship
that the Border Patrol gets up to in this episode,
because that's how much worse it gets. Oh, they can't

(01:08:40):
wait to hear about it. So how are you feeling? UM,
I feel pretty terrible. That's good. I love it when
people feel terrible. Every I'm always like, oh, I can't
wait to be a guest on Behind the Bastards, And
then every time I do it, I'm like, oh, yes,
I'm reminded how horrible people have been to each other. Yes,

(01:09:04):
and you were the one who picked this topic with
a text message L O L. I think the Border
Patrol sounds fund that did never happen. UM. But yeah,
I mean it's good to be informed about these things.
So I appreciate UM learning and being further informed about it. UM.

(01:09:30):
So yeah, thank you, thank you for that. Yep, you're welcome, Caitlin,
thank you for coming on. Is there a place as
people might be able to find you, listen to you,
ways to support your work? Why? They're certainly are places
to do that starting with UM. You can follow me

(01:09:53):
personally on Twitter and Instagram at Caitlin Darante. You can
also check out my podcast right here on this network.
It's called The Bechdel Cast. I co host it with
Jamie Loftus, and we talk about the representation of women
in film and just film in general, examining it through
an intersectional feminist lens. So that is what we do.

(01:10:18):
And you can yeah, check out screenwriting classes right now.
Oh yes, yes, I am, thank you so much for
bringing that up. I also teach screenwriting um on account
of a master's degree in screenwriting that I absolutely hate
to mention or ever just bring up. But UM, it

(01:10:40):
does allow me to teach online classes. So if that's
of any interest to anyone, UM, go to my website
Caitlin Toronte dot com slash classes and UH. I usually
have news sections coming up starting soon at any given point.
And if you want to learn from me, I don't
teach screenwriting, but I do teach screamwriting, which is where

(01:11:04):
you sit down with a pencil and paper and I
scream at you and then eventually you give me money
to go away. That's sounds very educational. We all have
to have an extra couple of grisons, So either pay
Caitlin for an actual service or pay me to abuse you. Um.

(01:11:26):
Either way, you know what, Sophie, look, everybody, look, you
gotta you gotta be mean to the audience. Sophie, you
gotta you gotta really kick their I don't know about
I love them, I appreciate them, and Robert so kindness.
Is there any way in which you think that, like

(01:11:49):
closing out a podcast is similar to making love, just
to bring things full Here's how closing a podcast is
like making love. Both of them are inherently disappointing. And uh,
you can follow Robert and I write on Twitter. You

(01:12:10):
can follow us at Boust and spat on Twitter, on Instagram.
We have a key public store. Uh that's it. Bye
bye bye m M

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: The U.S. Border Patrol Is A Nightmare That Never Ends