Beefing up Border Patrol is a bipartisan goal, but the agency has a troubled history of violence and impunity

With U.S. voters across the political spectrum strongly concerned about border security, presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have been trying to one-up each other on who can reduce migration at the nation’s southern border fastest and most effectively.

Trump’s rhetoric is more extreme: He’s called the U.S. a “dumping ground” and promises to order mass deportations of 11 million undocumented immigrants if elected.

But on border policy, Trump and Harris have remarkably similar positions: They want to send more money, Border Patrol agents and technology to the U.S.-Mexico border.

These ideas may sound reasonable enough. Yet, as my research on the history of border enforcement reveals, flooding the zone with funding, law enforcement and technology will not necessarily make the border safer.

Since 2010, over 300 immigrants have died in interactions with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of the Border Patrol, echoing the agency’s troubling strain of violence and cruelty that dates back to its origins a century ago.

‘Rough but effective’

Congress created the Border Patrol in 1924 to enforce a new law severely restricting immigration along racial lines. Under the National Origins Quota, Congress sought to permanently limit the entry of immigrants from Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa.

Some early Border Patrol agents had military backgrounds or experience in law enforcement. Others were agricultural workers unhappy with the importation of Mexican labor.

But many of the first Border Patrol agents were recruited from the Texas Rangers, a militia group known for committing lynchings and mass killings of Mexicans and Mexican Americans – crimes that went unpunished.

The rangers brought their culture of violence and impunity with them into the Border Patrol.

Clifford Perkins, a Border Patrol supervisor in El Paso in the 1920s, called his agents’ methods “rough but effective.” Border Patrol agents regularly submitted Mexicans entering lawfully to humiliating health exams that included strip searches and sexual assault.

Migrants attempting to evade his agents got worse treatment. Perkins recalled two former Texas Rangers tying the feet of one migrant and dragging him in and out of a river until he confessed to having entered the country illegally.

Ninety years later, in 2014, James Tomsheck, a former head of internal affairs for the agency, told the investigative news site Reveal that the Border Patrol continued to commit violence without accountability.

A ‘paramilitary border security force’

These incidents also hint at another long-standing struggle within the Border Patrol – the struggle to recruit and retain qualified personnel.

At times, this has led it to employ agents who do not meet basic civil service requirements. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, for example, security checks were bypassed to almost double the size of the Border Patrol from 8,000 to nearly 15,000 in eight years. Agents with criminal histories and histories of corruption were hired and armed.

Tomsheck, the agency’s former internal affairs chief, has described the resulting Border Patrol of the 2010s as a “paramilitary border security force” that has never been held accountable for agents’ lethal use of force.

Profit motive

With all its propensity for violence, the Border Patrol was not established merely to stop immigration. Created by a law called the Labor Appropriations Act of 1924, its full mission was, as the law said, to “safeguard our borders” and “enhance the nation’s economic prosperity.”

In other words, the Border Patrol was designed with a profit motive.

In its early years, this took the form of ensuring that Mexican migrant workers – whose “docile” labor was in demand by agribusiness leaders in states like Texas, Louisiana and South Carolina – could legally enter the country.

The U.S. government enabled the entry of Mexican labor through a series of waivers on existing entry regulations in the 1920s. Later, the U.S. began officially recruiting Mexican farmworkers under the Bracero Program, a series of treaties signed by the U.S. and Mexico between 1942 and 1965.

The Border Patrol facilitated the entry of over 1 million migrant workers during this four-decade period, some of whom entered without authorization. The demand for labor was so strong that funding for border enforcement actually decreased during these decades.

‘Operation Wetback’

In the 1950s, the Border Patrol’s work shifted under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Led by a former Army general named Joseph Swing, the agency saw its role as assuaging rising public concern about the presence of Mexican workers in the U.S.

Under Swing’s command, the immigration agency launched the derogatorily named Operation Wetback: Agents rounded up over 500,000 Mexican workers, in many cases beating them, stripping them of their property and forcing them to board trains and buses headed south.

These raids weren’t meant to expel Mexican workers. Rather, once the detained workers arrived at the southern border, Border Patrol agents “legalized” them by issuing them the necessary forms to reenter as authorized workers under the Bracero Program.

Swing’s operations created the illusion of border enforcement while satisfying agribusiness leaders, who had learned that legal workers were unlikely to complain about labor conditions.

Weapons of war and ‘coyotes’

Over the next few decades, the U.S. went through different phases related to demand for labor and migration trends. While migration levels remained pretty steady, the Border Patrol’s funding began to rise rapidly in the 1970s as public concern over immigration surged.

Flush with cash, the agency began buying Vietnam War-era aircraft, surveillance cameras and landing mats from private weapons manufacturers. This was the beginning of the militarization of the Border Patrol – that is, the use of military-grade weapons and surveillance equipment in domestic immigration enforcement.

Militarizing border enforcement has led to increasing profits for weapons manufacturers like Elbit Systems and Lockheed Martin while exacerbating the Border Patrol’s existing culture of violence. Agents have been known to beat, torture and rape migrants – including, as the news site the Intercept has reported, young girls. Between 1985 and 1990, Border Patrol agents shot and killed dozens of migrants seeking to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.

Crossing into the U.S. became more difficult in the 1990s and 2000s. Then, as now, improving border security was a bipartisan goal. Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama all increased funding and investments in technology and personnel at the southern border. Federal funding for the Border Patrol grew tenfold between 1990 and 2009, from US $263 million to $2.7 billion, adjusted for inflation.

Rather than preventing migration, this crackdown led to the use of “coyotes,” or border-crossing guides.

Their fees climbed alongside the federal budget for border enforcement. Migrants I interviewed paid $500 to cross in 1992; those fees rose to nearly $5,000 by 2009. By the late 2010s, coyotes were enmeshed with organized crime. Their services now cost up to $10,000

These problems would likely be exacerbated under either Harris’ or Trump’s border plan.

History suggests that giving the Border Patrol ever more money, agents and higher-tech equipment only spurs more violence and lawlessness. It’s a good way for politicians to score political points and for weapons manufacturers to boost their profits, but a beefed-up Border Patrol doesn’t necessarily help matters at the U.S.-Mexico border.