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

Robert is joined again by Caitlin Durante to continue discussing the U.S. Border Patrol.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Mmm, hello world, but specifically Australia. This is Robert Evans
hosted Behind the Bastards, and I just wanted my Australian
listeners in particular to know that I stood up for
you against Caitlin's cruelty. Just a minute ago, she pronounced
the name of your greatest city, Melbourne, Melbourne. I guess, savage, Yeah,

(00:23):
he said Melbourne. And then okay, well, what about the
people who live in Sydney or or other cities in Australia.
One city in Australia its name is Melbourne. And that's
the end of this digression. Hello, Caitlin Duranty, guest for
today's episode. How are you doing? Uh well? I would

(00:44):
be doing better if you would pronounce my last name correctly.
Speaking of mispronunciation, Durante Durant, I think we've all learned
a lesson about maybe not judging each other, because it's
impossible to ever know how words are supposed to be say.
He thinks Ariana Grande's name is Arianna grand So you know, Sophie,

(01:04):
even give me guff about that one for a while,
as it deserves m. Well, now I'm sad. Don't be sad.
Robert if this is part two. If we didn't get
to pick on a white man at the beginning of
an episode, then like, what's the point? Yeah, this is
this is a whole episode about I don't know, let's

(01:29):
let's let's pass the Bechdel test right now, Sophie. Oh, Caitlin,
I I really enjoying the bluish shirt you're wearing right now.
Oh my gosh, well, I'm so glad you brought it up, because,
um it's it's a Paddington shirt that says migration is
not a crime, which is relevant to today's episode. Wow,

(01:51):
it really is relevant today's episode. That. But then I
said Paddington and that that I was like, are we
gendering padding in right now because that Huntington is a
non binary a sexual icon. Yes, yes, yes, yes, So
I kind of passed it back to this. Okay, Robert,
you want to post your show behind the bastards right
now because I don't actually know if we passed the

(02:13):
Bechdel test there. But you know what test we did
pass is the writing for many hours about the border
patrol test. Yes, which is a more important test, I think, so, uh,
you know this one. We're splitting up a little bit
weirdly over the course of two weeks, because my entire

(02:36):
life and schedule has been continually thrown into casts. So
I do apologize for this one being done a little
bit differently than others are done. On December six, two
th eighteen, seven year old Jacqueline Call crossed the US
Mexico border near a place called Antelope Wells, New Mexico.
She was with her father, twenty nine year old Niry Call.

(02:56):
Both were Kecchi Maya and they lived most of their
lives in the Alta are A pause region of Guatemala.
Starving in desperate, she and her family turned themselves into
the Border Patrol. When Jacqueline was taken into their custody,
she was already beginning to show signs of illness what
would turn out to have been a streptococcle infection. DHS
maintains that they conducted an initial screening and that there

(03:16):
was no evidence of health issues and the little girl,
Jacqueline was placed on a border patrol bus feverish and
vomiting from severe dehydration. Eight hours after being taken into custody,
she began to suffer seizures. She died the next day.
Gomez Alonzo, age eight, crossed the Aos Mexico border sometime
around December eighteenth. He and his father, Augustine, were members

(03:38):
of the Choose People, another Mayan group who came from
the Huahoaitanango region of Guatemala. Spent six days in border
patrol custody, shuttled around from New Mexico to El Paso,
and then back to New Mexico to be interned in
an attention facility named near Alama Gordo. He started to
show symptoms of sickness on the twenty four He was
taken to the hospital, where he was tested for the cold,

(03:58):
but not for influence zone, which he had. He was
given medicine that could not help him and sent back
to jail, where he died on Christmas Eve, two thousand eighteen.
Ye good, good times. That's awful. Yeah, it's real bad.
The deaths of Gomez and Jacqueline were briefly very big
news in the United States. It was believed that the
two were the first child immigrant deaths in border patrol

(04:20):
custody since two thousand ten. In two thousand nineteen, though,
it was revealed that another child, Darylyn Cordova, val of
El Salvador had actually died back in September two eighteen
under similar circumstances. The Trump administration received a lot of blame,
both for covering this death up to try to influence
the midterm elections and for their failure to push DHS
to take any meaningful action to stop kids from dying

(04:42):
at the border. Three dead children is a tragedy, but
their little corpses are actually just the top of an
iceberg of dead people, many of them Guatemalan, that we
can lay at the feet of border patrol agents. And
you might be surprised to learn how that whole situation
came about. You want to hear about this, Caitlin, I
have to also what colorful language you used in terms

(05:03):
of the corpses or at the top of an iceberg.
I mean, yeah, you know, I I think if you're
gonna talk about dead kids, you should do it with
a little bit of panas pizzas, panas um. Alright, I'm
keep going, all right, so let's talk about the border

(05:24):
patrol and um in in Central America. We're gonna talk
about UM something I don't think a lot of people
know about because usually, as a rule, when we talk
about how bad the Border Patrol is. We talk about
like how mean they are to people who come up
to the border. Um, but we don't talk about what
a lot of Border patrol guys did uh in the
countries that these people are fleeing from before people started

(05:47):
fleeing from those countries. So this is gonna be fun. Okay,
I'm gonna it's gonna be a good time for everybody.
Uh So. John P. Longan was a U. S Border
Patrol agent in the nineteen forties and fifties. He worked
near the Mexican border, close to where both Jacqueline and
Gomez crossed over. Most sources you find on the matter
will note that he had a reputation for violence, but

(06:07):
this was not at all uncommon among the men of
the Border Patrol, nor is it uncommon now. During operation
went back when the Border Patrol reformed itself into a
paramilitary force to wage war on Mexican immigrants, long End
run the Patrols ran the Patrol's equivalent of a military
intelligence service. Long AND's base was an unmarked building near Alameda.
He and his men interrogated, captured migrants, extracted information, and

(06:30):
used it to find and capture other groups of migrants.
Few of the men who endured these interrogations ever spoke
about it, but a lot of what happened in those
cells probably verged on what we considered torture. Long End
was good at his job, and his performance in Operation
Went Back earned him a transfer to the State Department's
Public Safety program. Now, this was, in reality a CIA
operation geared at providing counterinsurgency training and advice to Allied

(06:52):
nations combating communist insurgencies. The CIA hand picked a number
of Border Patrol agents to travel to places like Venezuela, Thailand,
the Dominican Republic in Guatemala. They particularly liked recruiting guys
like long End because they were likely to speak Spanish. Now,
the way the State Department framed this program was training
law enforcement. So uh yeah, the State Department frame this

(07:15):
program as training law enforcement. The reality, though, is that
long End and his fellow Border patrolmen were sent over
to places like Guatemala to create and train death squads.
During Operation Went Back, Border Patrol administrators had described their
work as fighting back against an invasion. In Guatemala, where
long End arrived in nineteen sixty five, he was finally
able to wage a real war using real weapons. I'm

(07:36):
going to quote now from an article in The Nation. Quote.
Long End taught local intelligence and police agencies how to
create death squads to target political activists, deploying tactics that
he had earlier used to capture migrants on the border.
He arrived in Guatemala in late nineteen sixty five, where
he put into place a paramilitary unit that early the
next year would execute what he called Operation the Pieza,

(07:58):
or Operation clean Up. Within three months, this unit had
conducted over eighty raids and multiple extra judicial assassinations, including
an action that, over the course of four days, captured, tortured,
and executed more than thirty prominent Left opposition leaders. The
military dumped their bodies into the sea, while the government
denied any knowledge of their whereabouts. According to Stuart Schrader
in his up forthcoming Badges Without Borders, How Global counterinsurgency

(08:21):
transformed American policing, it was common practice during the Cold
Wards and former border patrol agents like long End to
train foreign police through CIA linked to public safety programs,
since they were more likely to speak Spanish than agents
from other branches of law enforcement. In countries like El Salvador, Honduras,
and Guatemala. They did the dirty work that Reagan's envoys
said needed doing. Until the early nineteen seventies, the United States,

(08:42):
according to a nineteen seventy four Los Angeles Times report,
was flying its Latin American death squad apprintices up to
the Border Patrol Academy in Los Fresnos, Texas to receive
training from CIA instructors and the design, manufacture and potential
use of bombs and incendiary devices. Long and himself in
nineteen fifty seven clearly to scribe what he thought he
was doing at the border. We're fighting a war on

(09:03):
a wide battle front, so that's good. So they're just
basically training kill squads. They're just telling people to murder people. Yeah,
and they're they're pulling Border patrol guys off the line
to do some of the training to be like, oh,
you already are good at like tracking down these groups
of people who are trying to facilitate movement of of

(09:25):
migrants through the United States. You can use those skills
to track down political activists, except that you know, since
it's in a foreign country, you can just have them
brutally murdered by death squads. And these guys are happy
to do it because they want to be murdering people anyway.
They just can't quite usually murder people, um, you know
at the border. I mean they do it a lot anyway,

(09:46):
but like they have to be a little bit careful,
but you don't have to be careful at all in Guatemala.
So that's great. Oh, ge wiz, have ever been to Guatemala, Caitlin,
I have not, rules. Yeah, yeah, I spent a lot
of time there. It's a great country, beautiful, I uh,
completely dysfunctional government. Um. And you can see like signs
of the horrible civil war. They're all over the place.

(10:07):
Just like you cross the street and there'll just be
a bunch of guys who are all missing arms and legs. Um.
You'll be driving through the middle of nowhere and you'll
see like businesses that have been like we're shot up
decades ago with mortars and stuff, and it you know,
it's it all kind of descends from this. The the
series of political conflicts that launch in this period of time,
particularly in the early nineteen eighties, um, that are backed

(10:30):
by the United States and supported enthusiastically by the Reagan government,
and these kind of networks of right wing um murder
crews that were trained up and sent out by the
CIA and and their buddies and groups like the Border Patrol. Um,
this all starts now, and it's cool, it's great, and
it's probably it's I mean, it's refugees from Yep, these

(10:52):
conflicts that are seeking refuge in right up to today.
And then then they get here and they're like, well, sorry,
fuck you, We're either going to murder you or um
be diligent and let you die in our custody, or
send you back to this you know, war torn country

(11:15):
you're in. Yeah. If you listen to right wingers, they'll
usually say something like, oh, they should go back to
their own country and fix its problems. And the reality
is that, like, well, some of them tried to do that,
and then we trained death squads to murder them and
throw their bodies in rivers and stuff in the ocean,
and um, that's why people are less willing to try

(11:36):
to fix problems because they get killed and so did
their children because of the guys that we hired and
trained to kill them and their children when they attempt
to fight for economic justice. Oops, it's good, It's really good.
Is what I'm getting at so um. Operation Lympiasa, which
you know long and the Border Patrol guy orchestrated himself,

(11:56):
was a major moment in the history of Guatemala's collapse
to a nightmare. The military intelligence system he helped to
build would eventually eliminate tens of thousands of leftist, activist
sympathizers and random people mistaken for either. More than two
hundred thousand people were massacred openly. Tens of thousands more
were tortured in this way. The brave men of the
Border Patrol wound up at both sides of a tragedy.

(12:17):
The genocide they trained right wing Guatemalan militants to execute
fell heavily on various Maya peoples of the region, including
the Catchi and the Choose. The right wing dictator who
helped to organize much of this violence was General Afrain
Rios mont He rose to power in nineteen eighty one
and nineteen eighty two, cooing his way into command with
the help of his good friends the US. Ronald Reagan

(12:39):
described him as a man of great integrity who was
totally dedicated to democracy. The nation's right up makes continues
quote on June seventeenth, nineteen eighty two, Guatemalan soldiers under
the command of Rio's mont entered the San Francisco Catalla
estate immediately adjacent to yalm Bulock. The estate's owner, a
military colonel, had fled because of guerilla activity in the area.

(13:02):
Soldiers went house by house, rounding up workers in their
families whom they accused of supporting the guerrillas. They separated
children from their parents and killed them by slashing their
stomachs or smashing their heads against poles. Women were raped
and then burned alive. The soldiers killed them in with
bullets or by beheading. After a day of slaughter, three
hundred and fifty people were dead. Alone survivor made his
way into Mexico, where Guatemalan anthropologist and Jesuit priest Ricardo

(13:24):
Fala interviewed him. The San Francisco massacre was highlighted in
Guatemala's nineteen ninety nine Truth Commission report. After the massacre,
Yelling Block residents fled along with thousands of others, leaving
the border corridor between Guatemala and Mexico completely depopulated. As
government troops raised their villages, some were captured and killed
by the army as they fled. Others ended up in
refugee camps or dispersed throughout Mexico's southern states. Still, others

(13:48):
continued on to the United States, beginning the Great Movement
of Guatemalans to El Norte. And all told, one point
five million people were displaced by the Guatemalan army scorched
Earth campaign in nineteen one and nineteen eight too. Guatemala's
Commissioned for Historical Clarification called the violent displacement in the
Maya Choose Region and active genocide. Young Felipe Gomez Alazano's father.

(14:10):
He was the little kid, one of the little kids
who died. Augustin Gomez Perez was a child of eleven
during that execute. Yalla Ballocks villagers stayed away for fourteen years,
returning only after the signing of the Piece Accords in
So that's cool, mm hmm. What can you say? That's horrible?
You can say that, like we're focusing on Guatemala right here,

(14:32):
because it's uh one where there's a bit more documentation.
But like this ship happened in Al Salad or, it
happened in a bunch of different parts of Latin and
Central America UM, where you know, refugees come from all
the time. Now, UM, it was, it was, it's still
in a lot of ways going on today if you
want to read about like Plan Colombia and stuff like,

(14:53):
there's aspects of this that are very much still occurring, UM.
And that the border patrol still winds up getting tied
up been from time to time. And that's great, good grief. Yeah,
this is like the stuff that part of me that
like is optimistic wants to believe that, oh, if people
just knew this, like knew how this all, how how

(15:16):
US policy and and in US UM plotting UH played
into the tragedy being suffered by these people. Unlike the
insecurity of these regions, they would have better attitudes towards
you know, Guatemal immigration and whatnot into the United States.
And then the part of me that that has been

(15:37):
paying attention for the last several decades knows that like, no,
actually UM people would share the murders of the folks
and the destruction of these areas because UM Americans have
been so thoroughly broken by propaganda that the people who
are still on the right and still broadly pro American
UM can't be convinced by any reason that any amount

(16:00):
of murder or violence is not justified by the fact
that America is cool as hell. It is this what
a toxic mentality that we as Americans, or at least
some of us have, because like, and this is I'm
not about to say anything new or profound here, but

(16:22):
the fact that, uh, you know, the white European settlers
were escaping the same you know, kind of civil unrest
or religious persecution or whatever it was the custom to
fled their countries and uh then and then we settled here,
uh by killing millions of indigenous people. And now we're like, well,

(16:48):
our borders are closed now sorry everyone. And it's like,
how how can you live? How can these people live
with the hypocrisy of that simple fact? Um? Because they
there their ship anyway. Uh So most of these death squads, um,

(17:08):
we're trained in the United States because like, hey, if
you're gonna build a death squad for a foreign country,
you don't want to like train it there. Um that's
kind of gosh. Uh So you bring them into your
country to train them there because you're you're you're you know,
you're good at training death squads. So the facility where
they actually trained a lot of these death squads. And
again not just in Guatemala, but for places like Columbia

(17:29):
and El Salvador, are all throughout the fucking world. The
place where they would like take these men to teach
them how to be terrorists, how to make bombs and
all this ship was the Los Fresnos, Texas Border Patrol facility. UM.
It was an existing base, it was in a good location, UM,
and the Border Patrol was perfectly happy to have Minstila

(17:49):
over there to learn how to become murderous guerillas and
then set off terrorist bombs in the middle of their
own countries. UM, because they were like that sounds like
a thing the Border Patrol should be involved with. Now.
The technical Investigations course that was given to foreign police
there was taught by CIA instructors. It lasted for weeks
and it included curriculum like terrorist concepts, terrorist devices, fabrication

(18:12):
and functioning of devices and provides, triggering devices, incendiaries and
assassination weapons. A discussion of various weapons which may be
used by the assassin. And when you read it like that,
you can kind of trick yourself into thinking it might
not be like it might be a reasonable thing for
cops to learn. Right, of course, cops might need to
learn about terrorist concepts and the kind of weapons assassins use.

(18:33):
But these were not just informational courses. They were instructed.
So the police who attended, we're just learning, Oh, here's
weapons that assassins sometimes used. They were learning, like, if
you're going to assassinate somebody, here's a variety of different
weapons that you can use to assassinate people. And we're
just learning, like, here's different ways terrorists build triggers for bombs.
They were learning, here's how to build triggers for the
bombs you're going to make to kill people. Um. The

(18:57):
the reality of the whole the whole program came out
during congressional investigations in the nineteen seventies. And I'm gonna
quote now from a book titled Instruments Instruments of state Craft,
US Guerrilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and counter Terrorism, which is available
for in full for free online right now. Quote. During
congressional investigations led by Senator James Albaresque in nineteen seventy three,

(19:19):
eight officials admitted that the Los Fresno sessions what the
press would call the bomb school offered lessons not in
bomb disposal, but in bomb making. The course is not
designed to nor does it prepare the student to be
a bomb or explosive technical disposal technician. There's thrust of
the instruction introduces trainees to commercially available materials and home
laboratory techniques and the manufacture of explosives and incendiaries. Different

(19:40):
types of explosive techniques and booby traps and their construction
and used by terrorists are demonstrated. And again, all these
classes were taught at a Border Patrol facility, And while
the main instructors were CIA agents, it was not just
the convenient location that made the agency use Los Fresnos.
The Border Patrol had always had within it the seeds
of a national secret police force. Decades before CBP agents

(20:01):
were operating an unmarked snatch fans on the streets of
Portland and it was Customs and Border Patrol who was
doing that. Um, they helped to train foreign police to
do the exact same thing and much worse. Besides, that's fun,
Like wanting to say, like what a fun thing? What?
I don't know what else to say. It's just like
this kind of litany of horrors that we've all just

(20:21):
kind of blithely funded our entire lives, even though a
great deal of information exists on how bad this agency
has always been. Um because the only real if you
actually like get into it as we are today, the
only real conclusion is that, like, oh, maybe when you
have people whose job it is to police the border,
they're they're they're just going to be the worst people.

(20:43):
And and maybe you shouldn't police the border at all
because this happened. But maybe border borders are completely arbitrary
and mean nothing. And why or why have we decided
that they that crossing them is a crime. Yeah, yeah,
it's bad. And the kind of people who decide that,

(21:07):
like they want to make their whole lives about punishing
desperate people for the quote unquote crime of crossing the border.
H our our our monsters, and when you start giving
them guns and power, h they use it to enable
genocides and political oppression abroad, and then inevitably do you
so back at home, which is what's happening now. So
when it comes to government agencies that Americans, particularly liberals,

(21:30):
rage against, customs and border patrol has spent most of
its history, kind of sliding under the mainstream radar. But
liberals who only started paying attention to the agency after
Trump took office might be surprised to know that NYT
Report or New York Times reporter John Crudeson won a
Pulitzer Prize in nineteen eighty for a series of articles
about the Border Patrol whose titles would not look at
all out of place. In titles like Border Patrol sweeps

(21:53):
of illegal aliens leave scores of children in jails. Um,
it sounds a little familiar. Uh The intercept summarizing his
work notes patrollers he reported regularly engaged in beatings, murder, torture,
and rape, including the rape of girls as youngest twelve.
Some patrollers ran their own in house outlaw vigilante groups.
Others maintained ties with groups like the Clan. Border Patrol

(22:15):
agents also used the children of migrants, either as bait
or as pressure pressure tactic to force confessions. When coming
upon a family, agents tried to apprehend the youngest member first,
with the idea that relatives would give themselves up so
as not to be separated. It may sound cruel when
Patroller said, but it often worked. Separating migrant families was
not official government policy in the years Crudsen was reporting

(22:36):
on abuses, but left to their own devices. Border Patrol
agents regularly took children from parents, threatening that they would
be separated forever unless one of them confessed that they
had entered the country illegally. Mothers, especially, an agent said,
would always break Once a confession was extracted. Children might
be placed in foster care or left to language in
federal jails. Others were released into Mexico alone, far from

(22:57):
their homes, forced to survive, according to public offenders, by
garbage cans, grounging, living on rooftops, and whatever. Ten year
old Sylvia Alvarado, separated from her grandmother as they crossed
into Texas, was kept in a small cinder block cell
for more than three months in California. Thirteen year old
Julia Perez, threatened with being arrested and denied food, broke
down and told her investigator that she was Mexican, even

(23:19):
though she was a US citizen. The Border Patrol released
Perez into Mexico with no money or way to contact
her US family. Such cruelties weren't one offs, but part
of a pattern encouraged and committed by officers up the
chain of command. The violence was both gratuitive and systemic,
including stress techniques later associated with the war in Iraq.
I mean, wow, what kind of truly in human monster

(23:45):
do you have to be to use to be yes
and more specifically to use children as bait or to
like snatch them first as just like I can't even
form a sentence that is yeah, it's not great. I

(24:07):
mean the sentence that that you said, like I got
teary eyed with the mothers, the mothers broke first or
what yea horrible no, it's um. I don't know, you know,
when I talk about how this all actually makes me feel,
there's no way to do that without repeatedly urging other

(24:27):
people to commit federal crimes um up to when including
assaulted murder. So I'm just like gonna stop right there
and continue talking about the border patrol instead, um, because
we shouldn't do that on a podcast. One tactic the
border patrol came to a door was the locking of
migrants and freezing cold rooms called heliara's or ice boxes.

(24:48):
This goes back at least to the nineteen eighties. According
to Crudzen, agents would tell prisoners in this place, you
have no rights. Since these people had committed no crime
beyond crossing a line in the dirt, their detention serve
no real purpose beyond cruelty. Cruelty was the point. Border
Patrol agents throughout the seventies, eighties, and nineties were repeatedly
documented torturing migrants. A popular method was handcuffing them to

(25:10):
squad cars and then making them run alongside the video
as it half dragged them to the border. Outright murder
was common as well. One Patrol agent told Crudeson that
agents commonly pushed illegals off cliffs so it would look
like an accident. Much of the agency's behavior wasn't distinguishable
from that of a straight up gang. Agents with I
n S. Border Patrol's parent agency at the time, were

(25:31):
caught trading Mexican women to the Los Angeles Rams in
exchange for season tickets. What yes, the thing that happened?
I can't brave men and women of the Border Patrol.
We're in the green. Oh my god, it's time for

(25:52):
an advert so that I can go vomit. Yeah, you
know who doesn't trade women for you can't even sports?
It's an ad break products and services, and we're back.

(26:14):
We're having a good time. So I n S agents
were also caught supplying Mexican prostitutes to congressmen and judges
in exchange for political favors. Over time, the Border Patrol
found ways to get over their long standing conflicts with
with Texan ranchers. In numerous cases, they worked out deals
with ranch owners whereby they would hold off on immigration

(26:36):
raids until right before payday, giving ranchers the use of
migrant bodies without the need to pay them. Border patrol
men got to hunt and fitch for free on their
ranches as payments. This is kind of how they worked
out that that little set of disagreements, that little the
uprising in Texas that had been sparked by it. They
would exploit the labor and and then have an agreement

(26:58):
with the Border Patrol and be like, okay, see them
on this day, yeah, so that I don't have to
pay the Oh my god's good, yeah crude sent that.
New York Times journalists even documented that one of the
range the ranches Border Patrol worked out in arrangement with
was owned by President Lyndon B. Johnson while he was president.
Oh holy good stuff. Between nineteen eight five and nineteen ninety,

(27:22):
federal agents gunned down twenty two migrants just in the
area around San Diego. The Intercept reports quote on April eighteen,
nineteen eight six, for instance, patroller Edward Cole was beating
fourteen year old Edwardo Carrillo Estrada on the U S
side of the border's chain link fence when he stopped
and shot at Wardo's younger brother, Humberto in the back.
Humberto was standing on the other side of the fence

(27:43):
on Mexican soil. A court ruled that Cole, who had
previous incidents of shooting through the fence and Mexicans, had
reason to fear for his life from Humberto and used
justifiable force. Such abuses persisted through the nineteen nineties and
two thousands. In nineteen nine three, the House Subcommittee on
International Law, Immigration and Refugee held hearings on border patrol abuse,
and its transcript is a catalog of horrors. One former guard,

(28:05):
Toney Heffner, at the I n S Detention Center in
Port Isabel, Texas, reported that a young Salvadoran girl was
forced to perform personal duties like dancing the Lambada for
I n S officials. In two thousand eleven, Hefner published
a memoir with more accusations of sexual abuse by as
Hefner Rights the ion S brass. Roberto Martinez, who worked
with the San Diego based US Mexico Border program for

(28:27):
the American Friends Service Committee, testified that human and civil
rights violations by board the Border Patrol run the gamut
of abuse is imaginable, from rape to murder. Agents regularly
seized original birth certificates in green cards from Latino citizens,
leaving the victim with the financial burden of having to
go through a lengthy process of applying for a new document.
Rapes and sexual abuse and I I S attention centers

(28:48):
around the United States, Martinez said, seemed to be escalating
throughout the border region. Okay, I have to talk through
something here. So, in theory law and forcement is there
to prevent crime, stop crime, find criminals, et cetera. We

(29:09):
know that that's barely what they do, right, but that's
in theory the purpose of law enforcement, and so by
by extension border patrol if it is for since it
is for some reason illegal to you know, cross a
border undocumented or without the proper documentation that is quote,

(29:30):
a crime according to ridiculous standards, right. And I also
understand in theory the concept of like punishing things that
are actual crime. That makes sense to me as long
as it's done responsibly, which it never is. The idea
of seeing crossing a border without the proper documentation and

(29:56):
deciding that the punishment for that crime warrants things like
human trafficking, murder, sexual assault, uh all manner of other horrible, horrible,
unmentionable things like where I just it is the most

(30:17):
disgusting thing. I think the problem here that you're having
is in thinking that the goal, the purposes ever to
prevent crime UM, whereas the reality is the purpose is
to UM is to protect it's to protect whiteness exactly, yes, yeah,
and and it's to provide an outlet for UM for

(30:40):
fascists in this country to do horrible violence on people
UM in a way that is, rather than being disorganized
and sort of being anti state and being something that
like causes disorder, being UM violence that they are allowed
to carry out that UM that enforces the uh, the

(31:02):
the kind of the state itself that like that like
backs up the existence of the state. Um, like you
have all these you have all these tremendously violent people, right, um,
and you can do a couple of things to them. Um,
but they're there. Uh So either you you try to
like deal with them and and de radicalize them and
make them less dangerous, you kill them, or as we do,

(31:26):
you give them guns and make them unaccountable and allow
them to to do horrible violence to large groups of
people who have no political agency. Yes, that is exactly
what it is. It's like people who are like, well,
the general population thinks that, you know, being a member
of a hate group like the KKK is bad. So

(31:48):
I'm going to do the same exact things that the
KKK does, but it's being masked as a government agency.
Like basically, this terror or terrorist organization, this hate group
is protected and quote justified because it is a government agency.

(32:10):
Even they're committing the same heinous acts in the name
of under the guise of some kind of protection. But
truly it's the like you said, protection of of whiteness
and criminalizing being not white. And that's been and that's

(32:35):
the only way it ever will be as long as
we have a border, um, and we consider there to
be some sort of fundamental value in um, the sanctity
of that border. Right, And that's good. I want to
cry about it. Yeah, it's it's good to do that sometimes.
Other times it's good to continue reading a podcast script,

(32:57):
which I will now do, okay, because this is how
I deal with problems. This is the only way that
I deal with problems is by reading podcast scripts. I
mean informing Informing the people helps. Yeah, that's that's a
way that you can describe this as informing the people.

(33:18):
I don't know, you know. UM. In nineteen seventy nine,
Maria Contreris, nine months pregnant, crossed back into the United
States from Mexico legally after shopping for food. Border patrol
agents found the suspicious and they tortured her to try
to get her to reveal information about undocumented migrants. She
died under interrogation, leaving six children behind. UM. This sort
of thing happened all the time. You know, we have

(33:39):
documentation about Maria Contreriss case, but this is maybe even
a daily matter, and it's something that continues to this day. UM,
in dark and terrifying corners of the border, where such
things are not documented most of the time, but which
we all pay for. Throughout all of this, the Border
patrol and I n S were sort of the redheaded
step child to federal agencies with law enforcement powers. They

(34:02):
were barely funded because, if you can imagine this, illegal
immigration was not something people cared about. So for most
of these periods, this period, while all of the horrible
things we've been talking about have been happening, border control
has basically no money, um and very few agents considering
like what it's supposed to be watching in its purview,
it's just kind of a place where we keep all
of our most violent law enforcement officers and they don't

(34:26):
have the money to do much um, but nobody's watching them,
so they can carry out horrific acts of violence. And
that's the Border Patrol and really I n s too. UM.
For the most part, Yeah, border states probably had you know,
not probably border states had debates on the matter of
illegal immigration. It was certainly like you know, a political
issue in Texas, in New Mexico and stuff. But random

(34:49):
people in Deluth, random Americans in Duluth or you know,
Wichita or bubble fuck Montana or whatever, didn't really care
about the border right eighties and nineties, it was not
a big vote getter for most of that period of time. Now,
at the start of the Clinton administration, there were only
about four thousand border patrol agents watching both Canada and
Mexico UM, which is not a lot if you think

(35:10):
about how big both of those borders are. There are
many miles long. Yeah, they're pretty big. In n NAFTA
became a thing, the North American free trade thing of
the jigger UH, and illegal immigration grew by leaps and
bounds alongside right wing fearmongering about illegal immigration. The border
patrol more than doubled in size by the turn of
the millennium. So this is like the first thing that

(35:31):
really leads to a massive surge in the border patrol
is NAFTA becomes a thing, and suddenly a shipload more
people are trying to cross the border. UH. Illegal immigration,
by the end of the nineteen nineties is a major
national political issue. In the border patrol more than doubles
under Clinton. UH. In the year two thousand, our nation's
peak year for illegal immigration, border patrol agents apprehended one

(35:52):
point six million people UH. This, though, was just a
fraction of the total that got through. Border patrol agents
were unhappy about the fact that most undocumented migrants were
still getting through the border, and that the many rules
and that there were many rules in place to stop
them from you know, doing Operation Wetback type stuff and
basically carrying out an ethnic cleansing to get rid of

(36:14):
uh non white people from border areas. From an article
in Politico quote quote. Near the top of the Border
Patrol's list of complaints was the policy known internally as
CARP or catch, the catch and release policy. By the
end of the Clinton administration, eighty percent of people who
were caught and released with a notice who appeared a
deportation hearing never showed up in a court. But despite
millions of border crossings, the Border Patrol had the financing

(36:36):
in two thousand one for just sixty detainees a day
across the entire country. They could turn themselves in and
have a high confidence that they wouldn't be returned to
their home countries require riccalls. Michael Cherdoff, who would go
on to become President George W. Bush's second second Secretary
of Homeland Security. Mostly agents just asked border violators for
their names and then did a cursory background check before

(36:56):
returning them to Mexico or releasing them into the United States.
Sometimes they ran fingerprints, sometimes they didn't. In June nine,
agents captured one of the FBI's ten most wanted fugitives,
a rapist and serial killer named Angel Maturino Rascinde's a
k a. The Railway Killer, and unknowingly released him back
into Mexico, whereupon Rascindez promptly sneaked back into the United

(37:17):
States and murdered four more people before being apprehended by
Texas rangers. So the story of the railway Killer was,
of course used to justify the need for more funding
to the Border Patrol. What the whole story really illustrates
is that even when the Border Patrol had occasional chances
to actually protect Americans by apprehending people, they were as
likely to funk up as anything, because most of them

(37:38):
were shitass, incompetent, and anything besides doing violence. So nine
eleven happens. Do you remember nine eleven? I remember? It's good.
You're not supposed to forget it. Now. Nine eleven happens.
And if you were alive in Cognizant at the time,
you might remember that basically everybody in their grandma was
obsessed with the imminent possibility that al Qaeda might drive
a regiment of terrorist nuclear hanks or whatever across the

(38:01):
Texas border. As someone who lived in Texas at the time,
where a bunch of people freaking out about how like
terrorists hit squads we're gonna be making their way up
through the border. Kids at my like suburban Texas high school,
We're certain that al Qaeda was going to be sending
people to shoot up our school because like plane Oh,
Texas was real high on fucking Osama bin Laden's Hitlas.
What did they think they were going to like go

(38:22):
to Mexico first and then cross the border? What they
think It didn't It didn't really scan a lot. I mean,
I'll say this, I think that it's maybe not talked
about enough that agree to which guys like John Milnius
and movies like Red Dawn prepared everybody to believe the
bullshit the Bush administration said about how terrorists we're gonna
be sneaking through the border. Um, but like yeah, whatever,

(38:43):
Um it was very dumb. It was a very dumb time.
But also like you know, a bunch of guys had
worked together to ram planes into the Pentagon and destroy
two skyscrapers in New York City. People were willing to
believe a lot of terrible things were possible. And because
the border, you know, right wing pundits had been convincing
everybody that the border was this dangerous and and unmonitored

(39:05):
place for so long. People were like, oh my god,
of course the terrorists will try there. They never did,
um but you know they still might any day, now, Caitlin,
any day al kaas finally get a squad up there.
Nobody will notice all of the anyway whatever. Uh So, yeah,
Tom Ridge, the former governor of Pennsylvania, was made President

(39:26):
Bush's homeland securities are Now this was before the Department
of Homeland Security existed. That came about in like November
of um but as soon as like nine eleven is
a thing, Bushes like, we gotta have somebody whose job
is to think about safety for the country, which like
there were already a bunch of people doing that and
it hadn't helped. And but anyway, whatever, um so Tom

(39:49):
Ridge is like is made the Czar of Homeland Security,
and he made border control one of his priorities. He
realized pretty much immediately that the border patrol was going
to be an is shoe for him. Robert Bonner, who
worked with Ridge and later became the first head of
Customs and Border Patrol, told Politico quote, within the I
n S structure, they were the poor step child. That

(40:09):
was how most of ions viewed them at every level.
They weren't appreciated and weren't viewed with respect, and that
created this defensiveness and in celerity within the Border Patrol.
There was a lot of debate about what to do
with the organization and whether or not to just take
all the different groups that handled various border related things
and merge them into one border agency. But that would
have meant several different cabinet secretaries would have each lost

(40:31):
tiny amounts of power and money. Because you know, you
have this group that's like, you know, your your job
is to look for war criminals who might have like
accidentally gotten citizenship or green cards. You have this other
group his job as to like, you know, handle customs enforcement.
You know, you have the Border Patrol. You have like
the group that's job is to go around and look
for people who might be violating immigration law. You have
all these different groups that are like under different sort

(40:53):
of people's perview and putting them all in one like
organized border patrol that does everything would have meant that
all of the different cabinet secretaries lost a little bit
of money and power. So they all vetoed that idea
in unison no no, no, no, funk that ship. Um. Instead,
the decision was made to dissolve I n S and
put the border patrol under the purview of the new

(41:13):
Customs and Border Patrol, which would itself be part of
the brand new Department of Homeland Security. The final nail
in ion SS coffin was the fact that the agency
had approved visas for two of the nine eleven hijackers
after nine eleven UM. So this is kind of what like, yeah,
that's the that's the wrong time to do that. Somebody

(41:34):
probably should have like gotten on the phone immediately after
that and been like, hey, we should run these names,
like just make sure we're not going to embarrass everybody,
But they did um. And when the news kind of
came out that ion S had approved visas for two
of the people who had just carried out the biggest
terrorist attack in the US history, the Bush administration was
really not happy with ion S UM and that kind

(41:56):
of that kind of spelled their doom. Uh And in fact,
we they dissolved the agency. No one from the White
House even thought to call the I n S commissioner
and tell him, um, yeah, I'm gonna quote again from
Politico's article, I and S was such a broken bureaucracy
that it would be the single agency in the entire U. S.

(42:16):
Government to receive the ultimate death penalty. After nine eleven,
in the wide arranging bureaucratic reorganization that led to the
Department of Homeland Security, I and S was completely disbanded,
its responsibilities removed from the Justice Department, and it's duties
reassigned among three new DHS agencies, Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE,
Citizenship and Immigration Services c i S, and Customs and

(42:39):
Border Protection CBP. And the newly created DHS would be
a reality in less than a year. So that's the
situation um now. The man tasked with creating the CBP
was Robert Bonner, a federal judge and a former d
E A head. His most first and most pressing decision
was whether or not to change the agency's famous Green

(42:59):
Unit form, which is obviously more important than like the
rape training of women for sports tickets and stuff. Why
is that the first order of business? Why are the
orders These brave men of the Border Patrol who only
occasionally commit mass rape and sex trafficking that includes sex
trafficking of twelve year olds and only occasionally torture pregnant

(43:22):
women to death. Those brave men have a lot of
pride in their uniform, and they want to know that
uniform is not going to change. You know. They have
to be presentable. That's the most that's important thing. The
most important thing is that they get to still feel
like they're part of the part of the old Border
Patrol that they love, you know, the old Border Patrol.

(43:42):
But let some torture all those people and throw kids
into into dank, freezing cells for months on end, many
of whom are actually American citizens. That's just how it's
it's important, you know, yeah so uh from Politico quote weeks.
But for the new agency officially launched on March first,

(44:02):
two thousand three, he invited all of the Border Patrols
twenties sector chiefs to Washington to discuss the transition. They
all arrived in d C in full dress, green uniforms, shoes,
polished brass buttons gleaming. As Bonner walked into the room,
everyone stood and snapped to attention. The new commissioner began
his remarks, simply, the Border Patrol will remain green. The
room erupted in applause and cheers. They're proud of the green.

(44:24):
They were very proud of that uniform, Bonner recalls today.
They were concerned about losing that identity. Who cares about
your green uniform? The Border Patrol caressers. See this is why,
as as I've always said, uh and so if you

(44:45):
can back me up on this, Caitlin, you would be
a terrible head of the Border Patrol m because I
don't respect the green exactly. Well, I don't even understand,
but it's because I hate the Celtics. So I and
happy see Sophie, you'd be bad at this too, because
as a Border Patrol agent, you should be trading kidnapped

(45:07):
women to the Celtics in exchange for season tickets. Oh
my god, can we just go to an ad break?
Jesus Christ, speaking of the Celtics. You know who else
supports this podcast? Hey? You know who else is whore
No no predace and services. And we're back that that Celtics.

(45:33):
Dig I just would like to denote that I will
keep doing that and also high prop. Yeah, it's that
I don't understand who the Celtics are Celtics. I don't
understand any of this. This is also because if you
love that team, if you love that team, send your
death threats to Sophie. Yeah, if you love that if
you love that team, just don't follow me because we

(45:54):
will never be friends. Also because I don't know who
they are. If you if you don't give a ship
about sports teams in existence tenness, follow me. Yeah, except
for soccer. Soccer is allowed. Soccer's cool. Soccer is the
only sport. Soccer is definitely not allowed. What soccer soccer
is there is. There is one sport allowed in my

(46:18):
ideal world, and it's that that game they play in
Afghanistan where they all ride around on horseback with a
goat head and people get killed sometimes because they it's
it's yeah, you just fully Robert died this entire thing. Anyways,
followed Caitlin on Twitter. On Instagram, She's a great follow
continue with your go to Afghanistan to play sports anyway. Uh.
They were not particularly concerned the border patrol with making

(46:40):
any changes to reduce the number of migrants killed by
border patrol agents. Since two thousand three, border patrol agents
have killed at least ninety seven people. Six of those
people were children. They've also taken repeated action to stop
other people from saving lives. As summers grew more brutal,
more and more migrants started dying in the Sonora and desert.
In two thousand four, the faith based organization No More
Deaths leading gallant leaving gallon jugs of water out in

(47:02):
near common footpaths and the desperate hope that it might
stop a few people from dying horribly in the desert.
They soon noticed that their water bottles were being slashed open.
No More Death set up hidden cameras. They found in
every case border patrol agents destroying water caches, almost with
visible glee. You can see one of these videos for
yourself and the PBS documentary Need to Know. Salon dot

(47:24):
COM's description is quite good. Quote three border patrol agents,
two men and a woman, are walking along a migrant
trail and approaching a half half a dozen one gallon
jugs of water. The female agent stops in front of
the containers and begins to kick them with forced down
a ravine. The bottles crash against rocks, bursting open. She's smiling.
One of the agents watching her smiles as well, seemed
to take real pleasure in the spectacle. He says something

(47:45):
under his breath, and the word talk is clearly audible.
Do you know what talk means? I don't. So we
talked about wet back in episode one and how that
was the Border Patrols kind of old term for for
particularly Mexican immigrants because of the river they have to cross.
Talk is new the new slur that the Border patrol
uses for a documented immigrants, and it comes from the

(48:07):
sound that a flashlight makes when you hit someone in
the head. Oh my god, you'll hear this if in
any article you read about the modern border Patrol, that
that they the word talk is like their their standard
term for for migrants, and it's a term because of
what it sounds like when they beat these people with flashlights.
Well mm hmm, okay, let me just process that. New

(48:33):
slurs were, of course, of course, far from the only
changes to hit border patrol during the Bush years. By
the time President Obama took office, the Border Patrol had
gone from an underfunded force of about nine thousand to
a twenty one person army. The largest federal law enforcement
agency in the country. Um, there are actual armies smaller
than the Border Patrol and less well equipped. Uh. They're

(48:55):
the largest law enforcement agency in the country now, Um,
so that's good. All those new officers had to be
trained up quick, and this did not leave time for
rigorous vetting and background checking that other federal agents go through.
Border Patrol agents today still have the least average years
of experience of any federal law enforcement agency. They also
have the lowest standards for new recruits. This may have

(49:15):
something to do with the fact that Border Patrol agents
are involved in more fatal shootings than any other federal
law enforcement agency. Uh. Yeah, you know. Probably. It's not
like any federal LA enforcement agency is good about giving
us numbers about how many people they shoot. But probably
they kill more than any of the others. Okay, I
believe it. Yeah. One senior DHS official even admitted to

(49:36):
Politico quote, the agency has created a culture that says,
if you throw a rock at me, you're going to
get shot. Between two thousand and five and two thousand twelve,
roughly one CBP officer was arrested for misconduct every single
day during President Obama's first term. Things got so bad
that DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano ordered the CBP to change
its institutional definition of the word corruption so they wouldn't

(49:58):
have to admit to as many problems When they were
questioned by Congress about all of the murders. It's yeah,
again under Obama, it's pretty much impossible. No, I just like,
uh yeah, Like we're not even really going to get

(50:19):
into the Trump years in this two parter because that's
like a whole another thing to start talking about. Yeah,
like most of this that we're talking about today, I
mean it's Reagan, uh Bush Senior, Clinton Bush Jr. And Obama, Right,
those are the guys that this is happening under. Those
are the guys funding this right enthusiastically. All of the

(50:40):
politicians that everybody thinks they're fine now because Trump is
such a such a dick anyway. Um, yeah, it's pretty
much impossible to exaggerate how bad border patrol isn't was like,
I'm gonna guess that most of our listeners come from
a broad position that like Feds are not good, um,
which is mine and accurate. But even among that company,

(51:02):
like even if you're like, oh, federal agents are pretty
much all bad, it's shocking how bad the agents of
the CBPR. Like it's like, it's it's staggering, how shitty
they they particularly become in the odds. Uh. And I'm
gonna quote from Salon again. There was my There was
the Miami CBP officer who used his law enforcement status

(51:23):
to bypass airport security and personally smuggle cocaine and heroin
into Miami. There was the green uniformed agent in Yuma, Arizona,
who was caught smuggling seven dred pounds of marijuana across
the border in his green and white border patrol truck.
The brand new twenty six year old border patrol agent
who joined a drug smuggling operation to distribute more than
a thousand kilograms of marijuana and del Rio, Texas. The

(51:43):
thirty two year old border patrol agent whose wife would
tip him off on which buses filled with illegal immigrants
uh to let through his checkpoint on I thirty five
in Laredo, Texas. Some cases were more obvious than others,
like the new border patrol agent who took an unusual
interest in maps of the agency's sensors along the border,
and was arrested just seven and months into the job
after he sold smugglers those maps for dollars. In November

(52:05):
two thousand seven, CBP official Thomas Winkowski wrote an agency
wide memo citing numerous incidents, or, as he called them,
disturbing events, saying that the leadership was concerned about the
increase in the number of employee arrests. The memo, never
made public, but obtained by the Miami Herald, reminded officers
and agents, it is our responsibility to uphold the laws,
not break the law. Now. Right around that time, internal

(52:28):
CBP investigations uncovered that the agency had, in dozens of
cases hired members of Mexican drug cartels and gangs like
m S thirteen to be agents. They had also hired
at least one serial killer, Juan David Ortiz, who murdered
five women during his time as an intelligence analyst for
the agency. He has also suspected of kidnapping a woman.
Will never really know the exact extent of his crimes,

(52:50):
and in that regard he fits in with another Border
Patrol veteran Estebon Manzanares. It is possible that Estebon Manzanares
was not a serial killer. He hasn't been convicted of
any murder, but he was caught abducting three migrant women,
a mother and her two teenage daughters. He attempted to
bury one alive, and he raped another. Uh and yeah.
Earlier this year, in appeals court ruled that his victims

(53:11):
could not sue the federal government as Menzonaras was not
acting in his official capacity as a border patrol agent
when he assaulted those women. Sure, he arrested them during
his duties as a border patrol agent, and he took
them to a border patrol processing facility before taking them
to a gated compound to assault them. But he wasn't.
He wasn't acting as a border patrol agent. Oh wow,

(53:32):
the mental gymnastics people do just legal ones. Yeah okay, yeah. Now.
The good news is that a few bad apples like
man Sinara's and Ortiz, and also all of the thousands
of agents who got arrested on a nearly daily basis
for seven straight years, didn't stop the orchard from detaining

(53:53):
more migrants than ever before during the Obama years. DHS
deported more undocumented migrants than ever four of the year.
As President Obama said in two thousand eleven, the presence
of so many illegal immigrants make a mockery of all
those who are trying to immigrate legally. Now, yeah, that's
good to Obama. It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool. What

(54:16):
a problem this was. Yeah, so and again, all of
these legally immigrants make a mockery of everyone trying to
immigrate illegally. The the data shows that during this period,
that's like fucking seven year period, an average of one
border patrol agent per day almost was arrested for serious
crimes like ranging from like rape and sexual assault to

(54:36):
attempted murder um too, you know, drug smuggling. Like every
day a border patrol agent basically was getting arrested during
these years. But that's not that's not making a mockery
of law enforcement or whatever. Yeah, yeah, Now, there were
a number of reasons why things got so bad in

(54:57):
border patrol. We've talked about some of them, just of
like the inherent racist nature of of the the existence
of the border patrol um. But there are also just
sort of some um uh, some reasons that you would
describe as kind of broadly, uh, bureaucratic. There were a
bunch of bureaucratic reasons why it happened to write kind
of outside of the inherent you know, problems of policing

(55:19):
a border. Um. For one point, like they were increasing
the size of the border patrol faster than any law
enforcement agency had ever been increased. UM, and that meant
bringing in a shiplet of people who weren't qualified. Um.
They had all of this money and they did not
have enough people who could actually responsibly do the jobs.
They were just throwing people in shares and giving them

(55:40):
guns and badges. Um. Now, the issues of hiring a
bunch of people for an agency based on assaulting non
white people, um and giving them you know, broad powers
were compounded by structural problems within the board, like the
way the border patrol was set up. Most border patrol
men are agents. UM. This differs from special agents, which

(56:01):
are the cool dudes like Fox molder that everyone who
becomes a FED wants to be special agents can both
arrest people and investigate crimes. Agents only have arresting powers.
They cannot investigate crimes. Now, because CBP is seen as
the shittiest federal law enforcement agency the dumping ground for
all of the violent assholes. Our government doesn't like to

(56:22):
make them special agents. According to Politico quote. In many ways,
the difference between the two is CBPS original sin, a
seemingly minor technical distinction made in the harried heat of
DHS creation a decade ago that would allow hundreds of
caraces of corruption in CBP's Office of Field Operations and
use of force abuses in the patrol border patrol to
fester for years. The problem was that no one at

(56:43):
CBP received what's known as eighteen eleven authority. When DHS
was set up, Ice was given exclusive eighteen eleven authority
to conduct investigations in the border region. CBP was only
given so called eighteen o one authority, a lesser classification
that allowed border patrol agents and customs officers to make
arrests and enforced federal law, but not investigate. They could

(57:03):
be cops but not detectives. This didn't particularly matter in
the daily performance of CBPS duties. The borders were patrolled
to the ports of entry watched, except that CBP was
legally prohibited from policing its own workforce. Yeah, and it's
again one of these things every single person who's ever
been involved in running the CBP agrees like, yeah, this

(57:24):
is a real big problem because it means that they're
even less accountable than other law enforcement agencies. Because like
ones are barely accountable, and those ones are barely accountable.
But like, even when Border Patrol agents commit a crime
that other border patrol agents think is horrible, like they
can't investigate, no accountability, Holy crap. Um. Yeah, other law

(57:50):
enforcement agencies look at Border Patrol and go Jesus Christ,
those people are unaccountable when they commit acts of unspeakable violence.
That is bleak. That's bleak, very bleak. By two thousand
and twelve, the problems in Border Patrol were obvious enough
that they spilled out into the public sphere. The Arizona
Republic conducted an investigation which showed that agents had killed

(58:10):
at least forty two people, thirteen of whom were citizens,
since two thousand five, and none of these killings was
any agent known to have faced consequences of any kind.
Congressional pressure forced the agency to submit to an investigation
by the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington, d c.
Based law enforcement think tank. The p e r F
investigated sixty seven cases of lethal force by Border Patrol agents.

(58:31):
They found, among other things, cases of agents firing at
fleeing vehicles. The report concluded too many cases do not
appear to meet the test of objective reasonableness with regard
to the use of deadly force. The pr F report advised,
among other things, that agents should not use lethal force
on unarmed drivers or rock throwers. The agency rejected this
out of hand, with the head of Border Patrol saying
in an interview, I have known agents who have almost

(58:53):
died from being rocked along the border, and I think
it was completely ridiculous that they wanted that prohibition. I
should note here that no Border Patrol officer has ever
been killed by a rock, and I can't really find
evidence of one being seriously injured by Iraq either. What
I can find is that in two thousand fourteen, CBP
leadership estimated a full of their force was corrupt. Attempts

(59:13):
at reform were made in the last two years of
the Obama administration, and in two thousand sixteen it looked
like things might finally be headed in a less murdery direction.
But then Donald Trump became the president, and here we
are a presidential administration filled with literal Nazis was handed
a vast, heavily armed force of sociopaths and rapists who
just spent the last two years being told that they
had to rape and murder less, and then all of

(59:35):
a sudden they were told, whatever you want to do
is find just get these brown people out of the
United States. And that's kind of where things stand today
with the Border Patrol as sort of the turning into
the official armed wing of the the racist right. Uh,
with these CBP and bor tech units set up using
Border patrol men being sent into American cities to police

(59:57):
dissent because they're the most dedicated, in least accountable, and
most violent law enforcement officers the country has um And yeah,
there's a lot more I could and should get into
about where things are at the moment with Border Patrol,
But this is it took me this long just to
get us up to the fucking Trump administration, right, and

(01:00:19):
yeah we're not even at the you know, the whole
the frenzy around Yeah, build the wall, and just like yeah, yeah, yeah,
So I guess that's another podcast. Yeah, it's another kind
of podcast. And I guess if I'm gonna leads leaves

(01:00:41):
somewhere or or in this somewhere. I probably it would
probably be good to end by talking again about Harlan Carter.
Um for just a little bit. You remember Harlan Carter.
He was the former Border Patrol head it was in
charge during Operation wet Back, and who was a convicted murderer.
He in N one he shot a Mexican boy in

(01:01:03):
the chest. Uh so yeah, the the young uh Mexican
boy that he murdered was named Raymond Cassiano. And there's
actually a really good song about the Border Patrol and
about Raymond Casiano by a band I quite like called
Drive By Truckers, And there's a there's a line in
it about Harlan Carter. You know, this former head of
the Border Patrol who goes on by the way to

(01:01:23):
become the head of the n r A. And it's
like one of the guys in charge of the n
r A when it turns into the n r A
we all know today from the organization that was like, oh,
people should learn how to shoot accurately so they can
hunt deer. Right Like the n r used to just
be like a normal, pretty normal thing, and then it
turns into this crazy thing that it is today is
quasi military or not quasi military, but like this explicitly

(01:01:45):
fascist organization urging political violence anyway, Harlan Carter is the
guy behind that too. So not somebody we'd want to
get a drink with, not somebody you would want to
get a drink with. And there's there's a couple of
lines about him in this song Ray in Casiana, which
is named after the guy that Um, Harlan Carter killed. UM,

(01:02:05):
and it's it's a song yeah, really about not just
Harlan Carter, but about the kind of men who become
border patrol agents. Um. He had the makings of a
leader of a certain kind of men who need to
feel the world's against him, out to get him if
it can, men whose trigger pull their fingers, of men
who'd rather fight than win united in a revolution, like

(01:02:26):
in mind and like in skin. Yeah, yeah, it's a
good song. I'll give it a listen. So Caitlin, you
wanna you wanna plug your plug doubles. Sure well, thank
you for for enlightening me with this information. A lot
of it I did not know, UM, so I I

(01:02:48):
appreciate now knowing UM depressing and upsetting, though it may be.
It's good to be informed. Um. You can follow me
on Twitter, UM and Instagram at Caitlin Darante, and you
can check out my podcast on this network called the
Bechtel Cast. So you know, that little conversation that Sophie

(01:03:12):
and I had at the beginning was a reference to that.
We talked about the representation of women in film. A M. Yeah,
check check, check it all out, check it all out.
And you can follow Robert on Twitter at I right, okay,
you can follow this podcast on Twitter, at Instagram at
Bastard's Pod. You can now email us at behind the

(01:03:37):
Bastards at iHeart media dot com. And you can buy
merch at our TA Public store. You can also buy
merch from Caitlin and Jamie's TA Public Store, which has
some of my absolute favorite items in the entire planet.
How's that for a plug? Great? Thank you, Sophie. Feminist icons.

(01:03:57):
You know who else is a feminist icon? I can't
wait to see who? Thank you? All right? This end also,
very very very very warmly thank you. That's that's the
episode by guys. Episode m M