Border Guards
BORDER PATROL STATION, TEXAS STATE ROUTE 4
AFTER SAYING GOOD-BYE TO SANTIAGO, WE RETRACED OUR tracks along the ranch road, returned to the Route 4 pavement, and headed toward Brownsville. The clouds to the south darkened and the winds picked up, and a few drops of rain fell just as we neared the easternmost Border Patrol station in the United States. There had been no one checking eastbound traffic the night before, but that morning plenty of signs warned westbound drivers to prepare to stop ahead. A small mobile office was situated alongside the road in the middle of sand and low-growing bushes. A large round cage fan was blowing air onto the area where the officers usually stand to inspect cars. The traffic that morning was so sparse that the two officers on duty were inside their small air-conditioned outbuilding when we pulled up to the huge stop signs and the yellow line. Since ours was likely the first westbound vehicle to approach the station that morning, no one was outside, and with rain coming, I thought we might get a wave-through.
A Border Patrol truck drives away after checking the photographer’s identity at Friendship Park near San Diego, California.
I was wrong. As we slowed, a tall, heavyset man in his early thirties, dressed in a dark green uniform and a shiny and heavy black gun belt, stepped out of the building and walked toward our car. He said good morning and asked where we were headed. “To Brownsville,” we both replied. Bending down and looking in the car window at both of us and into our back seat, he asked, “Are you U.S. citizens?” and we each answered “yes.” He stepped back to wave us on. But knowing no one was behind us, I decided to ask him a few questions about his work before driving off.
His nametag said Johnson. He said he had come from the Midwest and hadn’t worked on the border long. He told us he rarely saw people trying to sneak across where they were located. But migrants could wade or swim or cross by boat and then catch a ride with someone on the U.S. side and head toward Brownsville, he said. Or maybe there could be a drug run down the river during the night. I wanted to ask him how often that happened, but just then a bolt of lightning flashed as rain began to fall in huge sporadic drops and a gust of wind hit the side of our car. “Have a safe trip!” he said, running toward the building. Less than a minute later, rain fell so hard we could barely see the road.
Creeping along westward with the windshield wipers not keeping up, I bumped the dashboard with the heel of my hand. “Why didn’t I ask to photograph him while we were talking?” I had realized then that I couldn’t talk about our trip along the border without including the Border Patrol front and center. I knew it would be the first of many encounters, and so I wanted to start documenting them right away.
One of the first things to know about today’s Border Patrol is that it is now under the auspices of Homeland Security, the anti-terrorist agency created after 9/11, and is no longer charged with merely controlling U.S./Mexico interchange. According to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) website, the Border Patrol is on the front lines of the government’s “War on Terror.” That meant a huge change, but it was not the first revamping. Looking back over the last century, it is possible to trace our nation’s history of deepest concerns by learning about the Border Patrol’s different phases.
Back when they started patrolling in 1905, the border guards were a group of seventy-five watchmen under the auspices of U.S. Immigration Services. They operated out of El Paso and were charged with protecting the entire border—on horseback. In 1915, during the middle of the Mexican Revolution, Congress funded a separate entity known alternatively as the Mounted Guards or Mounted Inspectors. Their main charge was to track down migrants trying to come through Mexico, particularly Chinese people trying to get around the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act—a law that blatantly tried to prevent Chinese people from immigrating to the United States. The Border Patrol’s short website history doesn’t even mention catching Mexican immigrants during those years—it wasn’t a priority. The Chinese were the main target instead.
When Prohibition began in 1919, the patrol’s focus changed to cracking down on illegal liquor being trafficked across the border for sale to dry Americans. The Prohibition-era recruits made $1,680 a year but had to furnish their horses and saddles out of their salary. By 1935 they had started using motorized vehicles. During the World War II years of 1941–1945, the force increased to over fourteen hundred officers. By then the Chinese were off the radar, and the Border Patrol was charged with searching for “Axis saboteurs”—namely the Germans, Italians, and Japanese.
It wasn’t until around 1950 that “illegal immigrants” from Mexico began to be the explicit target, when some fifty-two thousand Mexicans were deported back to Mexico. That repatriation program known as “Operation Wetback” occurred, perhaps not by chance, in the middle of the Bracero program’s two decades. Coincidentally, that was also the beginning of the McCarthy era, when the misguided search for Communists commenced. It was during this time that the Border Patrol gained authority to search vehicles anywhere in the United States and law allowed the agents to arrest anyone traveling in the country without documentation. That was likely the first time officers began looking into cars and asking about citizenship.
With the passage of several fence-building bills in the mid-1990s, Including Operations “Gatekeeper” and “Hold the Line,” which coincided with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, the Border Patrol got another boost as their numbers were increased to over ten thousand.
I realized that the five men who came to my farm during the 1980s were part of the group the Border Patrol website said were “a tremendous influx of illegal immigration to America.” I knew firsthand that some of their targeted population had come to fill jobs in poultry plants by invitation. I’d seen a photograph of a billboard in Oaxaca advertising the jobs. And the workers had told me as much. They weren’t “illegals” to me; they had names, families, and jobs—and it was clear we had needed them, and asked them to come.
September 11 changed everything for America. Afterward, we began to fear a different enemy: a stateless and sinister group of terrorists with dirty bombs and an ideology of hate. But when the economy took a nosedive in the Bush years, fears of terrorism mixed with anxieties about losing our jobs and services to “illegals.” New venom spewed on talk radio and TV. New vigilante groups sprang up. We began holding the line even more, and the Border Patrol numbers shot up to twenty thousand, which included new recruits like Officer Johnson stationed on Route 4.
Boca Chica wasn’t the first place where I had been stopped by Border Patrol officers. I’d gone through numerous roadblocks while driving in Arizona in previous summers, often with groups of students in a BorderLinks van. I’d never felt comfortable with the exchanges, particularly with young people involved. The premise that the officers were there to keep us safe never comforted me either. I was especially bothered when some members of our diverse student group, particularly Latinos and Asians, were subjected to further questioning than the others. It was embarrassing to see them profiled, as their passports were taken in for inspection and held longer while all of us waited. At least the wait gave us time to think and talk about border policies.
Amidst the small talk and joking that went on in the van while officers took the passports inside and checked them by computer, I sometimes used the opportunity to ask what the students thought of it all. Once I told them about my connection to Checkpoint Charlie, the infamous Berlin gate into no-man’s-land surrounded by barbed wire, brick walls, and barricades. My Uncle Bill had been stationed in Berlin during the Cold War. He brought back his stories and slides of that infamous barrier, and I had taken a special interest in it since he told us about it in the 1960s. Another time I asked two Korean students, one with a passport and the other, a student visa, about the Korean DMZ. It wasn’t a happy comparison to have to make, but it resonated. One time as we drove away from an Arizona checkpoint, we tried to think of all the places in the world where walls like ours had been built and border guards were common, such as Northern Ireland and the West Bank or between Kuwait and Iraq, Botswana and Zimbabwe, Spain and Morocco, for example. None of these barriers had been encouraging places in the world, we concluded. The discussions were never lighthearted, but I believed it necessary to have them. I was in the business of helping educate citizens after all. Of course, we need police to protect us, and everyone can agree on that, but I believe it’s okay for us to ask questions about how we are policed. Americans always have.
. . .
BORDER GUARDING HAD BEEN one of the few bright spots on the U.S. employment front during the Great Recession, and one of the few government jobs that representatives of both political parties champion. Tens of thousands of young people from their early twenties up to forty with “an ability to learn Spanish” had trained for and taken the jobs in the last twenty years. The patrol had hired men and women, Hispanic and white for the most part. Some new recruits had never seen the border before their training; some, like Officer Johnson, were rural people from the Midwest. Some were from the Southeast, as a training center had opened in South Carolina and in other locations far away from the border. The pay was good, with the advertised salary in 2010 ranging from $40,000 to over $70,000. The Border Patrol had been a veritable federal jobs stimulus plan, bringing a significant boost to the economy in this region that has lost its tourism. Sales of four-wheel-drive vehicles and motion detection and satellite technologies to find migrants had boomed as well.
For the applicants, the Border Patrol website advertised the work as follows:
Customs and Border Protection employees protect our Nations [sic] borders from terrorism, human and drug smuggling and illegal entrance into the United States while simultaneously facilitating the flow of legitimate travel and trade. Border Patrol Agents play a vital role in preventing terrorists and terrorist weapons from entering the United States. Border Patrol Agents rescue individuals who fall into dangerous conditions traversing our borders.
The site said that 9/11 had changed their purview: “Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the focus of the Border Patrol has changed to detection, apprehension and/or deterrence of terrorists and terrorist weapons.” Of course we know the terrorists of 9/11 came through Canada by plane and with legal documents, but the Mexican border had been getting the most attention.
So many themes like that came up with the students in the van while we waited for the guards to return. “Are border checks effective?” I asked. “Do you think the measures they’re using are the best way to catch the bad guys?” One replied, “Wouldn’t the worst of them be sophisticated enough to find other routes?” We knew from experience that the guards detain a lot of different people, as we were seeing at that very moment at the roadblock, and we, just a university group, were among them. I also brought up the drones at the border, and more discussion about surveillance and civil liberties ensued. Students who had traveled internationally, or who had lived elsewhere in places like Korea or Israel, were always good to bring in comparative perspectives.
We talked of other topics like U.S.-made guns, night-vision goggles, and body armor going south into Mexico, falling into the hands of the drug cartels, and allowing them to terrorize citizens there. In 2010 the Miami Herald reported that 253,000 U.S. guns are smuggled to Mexico annually. In other words, we are arming the cartels, and as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in Mexico in 2009, they are using our guns to shoot our guards and other U.S. citizens. And then there is the little-known tragedy of Border Patrol agents who have committed suicide—twenty of them in the two years prior to Hope’s and my sojourn. There was never a shortage of topics to discuss with the students, even if the answers weren’t always forthcoming.
. . .
MY UNCLE BILL’S assignment as a military vehicle driver had been to support the team guarding the East/West German border and to keep Checkpoint Charlie safe. I thought of two white men from rural areas fifty years apart in age: one named Thompson, the other Johnson. Two assignments: one at an urban checkpoint in the largest city in Germany in the Cold War, and the other at a little hut on a dead-end road in south Texas post 9/11. The former was a guard stationed by a massive wall only recently erected to try to contain communism and subsequently torn down—casting doubt on the reason for its construction. The latter was part of a newly militarized zone lined with walls, guards, and roadblocks that was still being expanded, and that now groaned under not only the weight of the past but also all that we live with now, and all that is yet to come.
As we neared Brownsville, I thought of Santiago. Sometime after the storm passed, I knew he would be heading back to his home in Brownsville and driving through the same border checkpoint we had just crossed. I could only imagine the exchange Santiago might have with Officer Johnson. I hoped it would be a conversation between peers, one newly arrived guard protecting today’s border, perhaps learning something from a seasoned former palace guard from Mexico who had lived the border all his life. That’s what I hoped for, but I feared something else.