CZM Rewind: The U.S. Border Patrol Is A Nightmare That Never Ends

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hey everyone, Robert Evans here, and we're doing a rerun
episode because I need the time to get caught up.
But I figured we do this week. We rerun two
of our old episodes, cut out a bunch of extra
ads and put them in as long single episodes, and
a couple of topics that are very important. First off,
we're going to be talking about the Department of Homeland Security,

(00:24):
which as an organization is as bastardy a bastard as
we have ever discussed on this show. So here, please
listen up to a series of episodes that have unfortunately
only gotten more relevant as time has gone on. You know,
introducing a podcast is a little bit like Megan Love.

(00:48):
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. I'm so sorry everyone.
I was. I was trying to open with my folksy wisdom,
but I have none, and I now I've watched the
start of this episode here to attempt to take away

(01:12):
some of my shame. Is Caitlin Duranty. Caitlin, how are
you doing today?

Speaker 3 (01:16):
Oh? You know, I'm just barely keeping it together at
any moment, but otherwise.

Speaker 2 (01:24):
Caitlyn, Okay, think of any similarities between introducing a podcast
and making love?

Speaker 3 (01:29):
Well, let me think about that. Oh, I have one,
I have one. I have one. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:38):
The audio levels can go up and down.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
The audio levels can go up and down.

Speaker 1 (01:42):
That's a good similarity, thank you very much.

Speaker 3 (01:45):
Sure, maybe an entire episod, 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 foreplay, and then
you've got, you know, usually a big climax. Dick finished
to the episode.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
Well, there you go, everybody.

Speaker 1 (02:03):
If we figured it out, we figured it out.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
You wanted to compare a random episode of my podcast
about bad people to making love, Caitlin Duranty has kind
of made it easier. Maybe, Caitlin, how are you doing today?

Speaker 3 (02:16):
I'm all right, you know, I'm just.

Speaker 1 (02:21):
You're in your closet recording.

Speaker 3 (02:23):
I'm in my.

Speaker 2 (02:24):
Cloth, you're in your closet. I'm looking at your luggage
right now. Nice luggage. I see you go with the
hard shell.

Speaker 3 (02:30):
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (02:31):
Yes, it is a really nice closet, if I remember
from the photos you sent me like it's a very
good sized closet.

Speaker 3 (02:38):
It truly is. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
You want to hear a little story about me, Caitlin, please,
I'm a narcissist. Okay, so you know I travel a
lot too, Caitlin, and I have refused my entire traveling
life to have like a hard shelled roly 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

(03:05):
the rollly 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
to the airport out of pride. And that's why men
shouldn't be allowed to hold political office.

Speaker 3 (03:19):
I couldn't agree with you more. Yeah, you mean you
you carry around one of those like big like backpacking.

Speaker 2 (03:26):
Yeah, big old, big old, Yeah, horrible, horrible. Sometimes they
carry a duffel bag even worse.

Speaker 3 (03:33):
That's absurd.

Speaker 2 (03:34):
Yeah, it's a terrible idea. But 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 rollly suitcases, Caitlin.

Speaker 3 (03:45):
I mean you bring them with you to travel.

Speaker 2 (03:48):
You bring them with you to cross borders. Yeah, and
today we're talking about the motherfucking migrat the border patrol.

Speaker 1 (03:57):
Oh boy, I just want to say, nice job.

Speaker 2 (04:01):
Yeah, thats 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 you know, this has been
a little bit of a weird run of Behind the
Bastards the Uprising episodes. We're still going to be doing
the dictators and grifters, you know, that are bread and butter.

(04:21):
But I keep getting obsessed with different law enforcement agencies,
particularly the ones you know, shooting at me. 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 now we're all going to talk about border patrol
because Kaitlin, did you know the border patrol kind of problematic?

Speaker 3 (04:44):
Wait a minute, what do you mean?

Speaker 2 (04:48):
Yeah? Not nice dudes, as it turns out, and have
kind of been dicks for like a hundred something years
or like one hundred years. They've been dicks for a
long time, very close to one hundred years.

Speaker 3 (05:00):
Okay, ninety six years, all.

Speaker 2 (05:02):
Right, yeah, which you know, they still have time to change.
You know, a lot of people have their best, you know,
their second act after age ninety six.

Speaker 3 (05:12):
Yeah. I would say that applies to a large number
of people.

Speaker 2 (05:17):
A lot of tortoises, at least a lot of tortoises
go on to do very cool things after age ninety six.

Speaker 3 (05:24):
Yeah. Trees as well. There's a lot of old trees that.

Speaker 2 (05:26):
Are recent border patrol could be like a sequoia mm hmm, yeah,
but I don't know how likely I think that is.
So we're going to talk about We're going to talk
about lemigra 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 tied in with a lot
of horrible things about this country and the very concept

(05:50):
of whiteness. So how are you feeling about that, Caitlin?

Speaker 3 (05:55):
You know, I don't feel good about it, I really don't.

Speaker 2 (05:59):
That's good because my cunning plan has been to blame
you personally for all of the historical crimes of the
US border patrol.

Speaker 3 (06:05):
Well, I did, yeh invent them.

Speaker 2 (06:11):
You you launched the Immigration Act of nineteen twenty four.
That's Caitlin Doranty's that's a sorry resume. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (06:18):
I didn't want that to be my legacy. But here
we are.

Speaker 1 (06:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:22):
A lot of people don't know this, but you used
to be all of Congress in the early nineteen twenties.

Speaker 3 (06:27):
M Yeah, yeah, I mean pretty impressive when you think
of it.

Speaker 2 (06:31):
Yeah, no, it really is. Yeah, Congress Dorante.

Speaker 1 (06:33):
Yeah you were. You were instead of Caitlyn, you were
Congress Dorante.

Speaker 3 (06:37):
That's true.

Speaker 2 (06:38):
If we're going to talk about the 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 kind

(06:59):
of sucked fighting each other for land that wasn't theirs
like that. That's the whole that's the whole deal, right.
So the US Mexican War of eighteen forty six eighteen
forty eight is the conflict that gained our nation most
of the modern Southwest. It was a naked war of
imperialist aggression against another nation that brutally subjugated indigenous peoples.

(07:22):
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 great to anyone any
like indigenous peoples or whatever. Just bad governments. So at
the end of the US Mexican War, the United States
wound up occupying Mexico City, and that nation was forced

(07:44):
to seed fifty percent of its northern territory in the
resulting treaty. And I think a lot of Americans who
grow up kind of outside of the Southwest don't really
have a clear idea of how much land the United
States scott as a result of the US Mexican War.
But we took a shitload of land from Mexico. It's
fucking crazy how much of this country used to be Mexico,

(08:07):
Like up into Oklahoma.

Speaker 3 (08:08):
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.

Speaker 2 (08:19):
Yeah, we were, like most of the Southwest was kind of,
at one point or another part of Mexico. And so, yeah,
we took about fifty percent of Mexico's northern territory, and
a new US Mexican border was redrawn along the Rio
Grande from the Gulf to El Paso and then along
more or less an arbitrary line further west up the Pacific. Now,

(08:40):
this meant that a huge number of people who'd previously
lived in Mexico and had been able to travel freely
around territory that was all part of one nation now
found themselves living in between two nations. This included roughly
one hundred and eighty thousand members of indigenous tribes, as
well as about one hundred and fifty thousand Mexicans. So
these three hundred thousandish non white folks owned most of

(09:00):
the land, and like the territories in the Southwest that
you know became Texas and some of the surrounding states.
In the decades after the US Mexican War are kind
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,
some of it as a result of the reservation system

(09:22):
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
really getting your boots in it, you know.

Speaker 3 (09:33):
I mean, those are the main principles that the US
was founded on, right, white people stealing land from non
white people and genociding them.

Speaker 2 (09:43):
Your 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
of those old ones where was like a cowboy getting
up on the range, sipping a Folger's coffee and then
just like stepping into a pile of and just being like, ah,
nothing like a nice morning walking barthrop through a pile

(10:04):
of bones, the thing that I do every day as
a cowboy.

Speaker 3 (10:09):
Yeah, why wasn't that their ad campaign for folders.

Speaker 2 (10:13):
Folgers, Well, murder everybody. Coffee helps.

Speaker 3 (10:24):
Oh.

Speaker 2 (10:24):
I was drinking coffee and it went down the wrong hole, Caitlin.

Speaker 1 (10:26):
Oh.

Speaker 2 (10:27):
Now, see, coffee can't be stopped from attempting genocide.

Speaker 3 (10:32):
Even coffee wants to murder.

Speaker 2 (10:34):
Coffee wants nothing but to murder. So, as we discussed
in our last episode of the Behind the Police mini
series that we just did, the Texas Rangers was kind
of the first border patrol type force in you know,
the Southwest, and they began their history as as a
group like a paramilitary organization to protect white settlers in Texas.

(10:55):
They were formed by a local mayor named John Jackson Tumlinson,
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
to settle in Texas, and the Comanches, Tunkawa's, Apaches, and Carnkawa's,
who already resided in the area, got kind of angry
and started murdering them. So Tumlinson ordered the formation of

(11:18):
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 Karankawa and huaco In indigenous
people before he got off the ground.

Speaker 3 (11:30):
Well, it sounds like karma to me.

Speaker 2 (11:32):
Yeah, it sounds like it's fine. Like a shame they
didn't get more people. So the Rangers were kind of
this country's first border patrol force, and the primary method
of action for them was just again really just straight
up genocide. In the early days, there 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 onto reservations, but would also just burn their

(11:54):
villages sometime and murder their women and children because you
know whatever, Sometimes you come into the office and you
want to do things different. I don't know.

Speaker 3 (12:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (12:06):
They also engaged in the murder and intimidation of Mexicans
in border communities, and by the early nineteen hundreds, the
indigenous folks had mostly been forced off of their land
and the Rangers had become a police force focused mainly
on Mexicano Mexicano communities on the border. The primary strategy
was known to historians as revenge by proxy, and for
an example, of how that looked. I'm going to quote

(12:28):
from the American Crossroads book Migra quote. On June's twelfth,
nineteen oh one, a Mexicano rancher named Gregorio Cortes stood
at the gate of his home in Cairanes County, Texas.
There he resisted 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, Gregorio shot back and killed the sheriff,

(12:49):
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 dead body of the sheriff. The news of Gregorio's
deadly fiance quickly spread across southern Texas, and Yeah, for
ten days, the Texas Rangers and posses, numbering up to
three hundred men hunted for him. When they could not
find him, they sought revenge by proxy, arresting, brutalizing, and

(13:11):
murdering an unknown number of Mexicanos. So that's like how
the Texas Rangers kind of worked for a while. Is
a Hispanic 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 e that's the
that's the first border patrol. Horrible, pretty bad, Caitlin, pretty bad.

Speaker 3 (13:35):
Don't like it. I don't like it one bit.

Speaker 2 (13:37):
Okay, so you are you are on the You are
on the record now about not being in favor of
murdering random people as part of a fear based system
of law enforcement.

Speaker 3 (13:51):
Yes, and I am. I am happy to be on
the record.

Speaker 2 (13:54):
Of state dance. That's a bold stances. Some advertisers, Caitlin,
especially our big advertiser, Raytheon. Yeah, when you really need
a group of people intimidated by violence, there's no other
option but Ratheon Raytheon.

Speaker 1 (14:11):
It's not even robot, it's not even time for an
ad break. You're just doing this. I know.

Speaker 2 (14:14):
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, have a sense of loyalty, so
I'm trying to help Raytheon out with some free ads.
So look, if you've got a couple 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. Look, don't go to Lockheed Martin, go to Raitheon. Okay, there,

(14:38):
it's just better knife missiles. Right. That's that's all I'm
gonna say.

Speaker 3 (14:41):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 2 (14:43):
I have a sense 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.
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. For most of American history, it

(15:05):
was just like, well, yeah, you've got this big empty
chunk of country, and eventually it becomes Mexico, and it's
nobody really gives a shit. 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 it would
have seemed like madness to try to try to split

(15:28):
these communities up based on an arbitrary borderline that nobody
could even see. But yeah, in the nineteen twenties that
started to change. In nineteen twenty four, the Immigration Act
was passed and the Immigration Act banned all immigration to
the United States from Asia, and it massively reduced immigration
in from the south from southern and eastern Europe. The

(15:50):
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. Yeah, yeah, have you
heard about this. This is when we decided that only
one kind of white people were allowed in the country.

(16:13):
This is the Italians aren't white enough law. But people
used to really care about that, right in the nineteen
twenty four Immigration Act, A big part of it was
stopping Italians or as they would have called them, Italians,
which it used to be I think more racist than
it is and is now just a funny, old timeyway
of making fun of Italians, which I'm always I'm always

(16:36):
in favor of Caitlin. How do you feel you know, you.

Speaker 3 (16:40):
Do know that my last name is Derante and that
I am I partly Italian?

Speaker 2 (16:44):
Yeah, so am I? That's why it's okay, good?

Speaker 3 (16:46):
All right?

Speaker 2 (16:47):
Yeah? Yeah? Yeah? Are we are we white? How's that?
How's that work?

Speaker 3 (16:53):
Uh? I have heard slightly varying things, but I think
by in law, large Italian people are considered white.

Speaker 1 (17:02):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (17:03):
I was looking at a Nazi cartoon the other day
because I do things like that for my mental health,
and it was like, the point it was making is
that like, social justice advocates are always white, and fascists
are actually really diverse, and so like it was a
bunch of white people lecturing Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohido, but

(17:24):
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
of layers of wrongness there to parse through. Is 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. It's very funny,

(17:47):
but in the nineteen twenties, that was all of Congress, sure,
and they were like, we got to pass a lot
to stop these Italians from coming in. So yeah, the
Immigration Act in nineteen twenty four bans all Asian immigration
and tries to 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

(18:08):
into the country under the Immigration Act without any kind
of restriction were Mexicans. And this 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, where like our entire industry
doesn't work without these people, so you have to let

(18:30):
them in. So the nineteen twenty four Act does kind
of make an exception for that. It's very heavily based
on race science, and in fact, like 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

(18:52):
leave the surges and violent crime and declines in IQ. No,
this is bad. This is bad. And the nineteen twenty
four Immigration Act is what establishes the US Border Patrol
for the very first time. So this fundamentally racist law,
written by people who justified it explicitly with race like

(19:13):
bad race science, is where the border patrol is initially established.
So literally born in an orgy of racism. And in fact,
the nineteen twenty four Immigration Act that established the border
patrol was so nakedly racist that Adolph Hitler took inspiration
from it in nineteen Yeah it's bad. It's really bad, Caitlin.

(19:34):
This is where borter patrol comes from. Oh no, yeah,
it's not great. In nineteen twenty eight, Hitler wrote this,
of the law, there 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 categorically refuses the immigration of

(19:54):
physically unhealthy elements and simply excludes the immigration of certain races.

Speaker 3 (20:00):
So wait, Hitler in the twenties took a look at
what we were doing in the US and was like,
I like the looks of that. Let me copy paste
and do that.

Speaker 2 (20:14):
Yeah, 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 shit, you want to
know something else, Cool, Caitlin, this is a neat story.
You're gonna love this.

Speaker 3 (20:30):
Please tell me the story.

Speaker 2 (20:31):
You know, El Paso, great town, solid tacos. A lot
of immigration in Del Passo, right, always has been because
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 Mexicans were that they would mandate delousing

(20:52):
bats for everybody who entered the country, and they would
just douse them in pesticide, and the pesticide that they
chose with zyklon.

Speaker 3 (21:01):
B Wait, what is that?

Speaker 2 (21:03):
That's what they killed all the Jews with and the
good yeah wow, yeah, that's another thing. The Nazis were like, Oh,
this seems like something we could modify a little bit
to make better for us. That's good stuff.

Speaker 3 (21:16):
It's not really shit.

Speaker 2 (21:17):
It was super flammable and sometimes people burned 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.

Speaker 3 (21:35):
And completely made up. They're just yeah, and totalitye of
like horrible usually racist ideology.

Speaker 2 (21:45):
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 at and go, that's a
good law, says we the Nazis. Sweet stuff, Caitlin. Yeah. So,
because the Immigration Act was passed alongside a surge of

(22:08):
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
May twenty eighth to July first, so rapidly 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 wear the service's green uniform were
instead required to pass the Railway Mail Clerk Civil Service Exam,

(22:32):
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 winds up being a 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.

Speaker 3 (22:54):
So the whole thing every like decisions are made all
willy nilly people are brought in yeah, with no training,
no training implemented, with nobody no 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.

Speaker 2 (23:15):
Yeah. I mean, the current DHS Secretary Chad Wolfe, has
no law enforcement experience, was never in the military, and
I think went to college on like a tennis scholarship.
So it's great, it's cool how things are always exactly
the same forever.

Speaker 3 (23:32):
Hmmm.

Speaker 2 (23:33):
Because yeah, again, if people ever learn a single lesson
from history, the world will explode. So we have to
not do that anyway.

Speaker 3 (23:45):
But there's also a conundrum there too, right, because so
much of history that gets taught, at least in schools
is so horribly whitewashed, and revisionists that like, how can
anyone learn anything from it?

Speaker 2 (23:59):
Yeah, yeah, you know, that's a good point, Caitlin. And
that's why as I see all these kids in the
street who just aren't going to school anymore and are
instead spending their nights dropkicking the doors of a federal
courthouse to try to taunt the agents inside to attack them,
I think, probably fine, probably learning about as much, right, true. So, yeah,

(24:28):
the very first Border Patrol men were mostly mail clerks,
and obviously mail clerks maybe aren't super meant to be
tramping 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 its early years,

(24:48):
and this made it kind of impossible for it to
develop any kind of functional internal culture at the start.
By nineteen twenty seven, 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.

(25:10):
These were white, working class folks who'd had trouble keeping
a job and were 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.

Speaker 3 (25:31):
Don't give anybody power. It never goes well.

Speaker 2 (25:35):
No, especially not poor white men in the country. 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

(25:56):
wall around Mexico, ninety nine percent of Americans had been like,
what the fuck is your problem? Like, why do you
give a shit about that? Right, everyone is dying of
diphtheria and the economy is permanently crashed. Please please stop,
which I guess now we're back at so maybe that'll help.

Speaker 3 (26:15):
I mean, wow, the parent I don't hear.

Speaker 2 (26:17):
As many people giving a shit about the border these days.
I'll say that much.

Speaker 3 (26:20):
That's true.

Speaker 2 (26:21):
Maybe it's because nobody wants to come here anymore. We
did it, Caitlin, We finally stopped it.

Speaker 3 (26:27):
Just turn the US into a disease uh ridden hellhole.

Speaker 2 (26:33):
All it took was a runaway plague that we completely
give up any hope of ever dealing with. Yeah, you
know what, President Trump figured it out. Good for him.

Speaker 1 (26:46):
You know what President Trump didn't figure out.

Speaker 2 (26:49):
Oh, the products and services that support this podcast, that's right.
We keep them a secret from the president. Yeah, but
if you listen in, it can be a secret that
you and I share and hide at all costs from
the administration. We're back. Oh my gosh, I for one

(27:13):
love that Trump for America bought up all of our
advertising space. When I think of President, I think of
the president anyway. So immigration from Mexico had not traditionally
been a big, big political debate issue, right The wealthy
agribusiness owners in Texas preferred simple immigration from Mexico, and

(27:36):
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, which hasn't really changed,
you know. And it's like we'll talk about this a
little bit later on, but it is this kind of

(27:57):
one of the things that you I didn't even realize
was a really problem when I was a young person,
kind of dealing with the mix between outwardly hateful racists
in the Southwest and nice people who don't realize they're racist.
Is like the nice people, the outwardly hateful people are like,
you know, the Trump type folks that you know, who

(28:17):
want to build a wall and kick all the rapist
Mexicans out.

Speaker 3 (28:20):
Sure, they're easy to spot, yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:22):
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
they do great work, and you 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 is eighteen nineteen, like what what's actually

(28:46):
being said there, which is like the commodification of non
white bodies, which is like not cool. But we're going
to talk more about that later because this is where
that all starts in an organized way, which is awesome.
So the white working class in text so obviously like
these kind of these kind of landowners, the kind of

(29:07):
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 needed
people 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

(29:28):
based on a mix of like fear that Mexican immigrants
would take their jobs, that was always like a core
part of it, and also based on kind of like
good old fashioned racism. One labor union 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. Oh yeah, Well,

(29:52):
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 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.

Speaker 3 (30:11):
I mean, which that all stems from capitalism more or less.
Where was any fairness or parody when it came to
income and labor. People wouldn't have to be worried about
other people. There wouldn't be this fear of like, who

(30:32):
is my job in danger? Who's going to take my job?
Because they're like a more just just socialized economy would
eliminate that fear absolutely.

Speaker 2 (30:47):
Yeah. So the actual laws on the books in this
period of time had been written largely by the rich
land of gentry who needed Mexican immigrants. But now that
the border patrol existed post nineteen twenty four, the men
in forceeing 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 police undocumented

(31:12):
migrants as a way of kind of equalizing their level
of social power with farmers, because like, you know, they
were poorer than these guys, they didn't have property, but
now they had the ability to arrest these dudes workers,
and like that gave them a level of power in
their culture and a level of power of these people
who had kind of previously been the bosses. And you know,

(31:35):
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 going to
quote again from the book Migra quote. Early officers may
have lived in white neighborhoods, worshiped at white churches, and
sent their children to white schools. But as salesman, chauffeurs, machinists,

(31:56):
and cowpunchers, they had labored at the edges of whiteness
in the borderland. 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 borderland communities.
Policing Mexicans, in other words, presented officers with the opportunity
to enter the region's primary economy and in the process

(32:20):
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 therefore placed
border patrol officers at what police scholar David Bailey describes
as the cutting edge of the state's knife in terms

(32:40):
of enforcing new boundaries between whites and non whites. So
that is the border patrol in this period, the cutting
edge of the state's knife, you know, cleaving the boundaries
between white and non white people. The way to look
at it, very picturesque.

Speaker 3 (32:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (32:58):
Now this has made a lot more complicated by the
fact that a chunk of the early border patrol were
Mexican American 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 United Latin American Citizens or LULAC, specifically stated that
Mexican American association with colored races is what held them

(33:21):
back from full acceptance by white society in this period
of time. 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 the man's feet and yelled, I am not a Mexican,
I am a Spanish American. Yeah. So this is like.

Speaker 3 (33:44):
Internalized.

Speaker 2 (33:45):
Yeah, it's a complicated history here, and I'm not going
to I'm not going to go into tremendous 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 Little Hernandez,
author of the book Migra, History of the US Border Patrol.

(34:07):
She does talk about this in more depth, and I
really recommend her book. But you should know that's like
an aspect of what's going on here. And as a rule,
one of the things that starts to happen in particularly
around like the forties is kind of a growing Spanish
or Mexican American community who are very pro immigration enforcement
and pro like harsher immigration laws and laws against illlegal immigration.

(34:31):
They start to solidify as a voting block in the
Southwest in this period too, and they still are to
this day. It's a lot of people are like shocked
when they see Hispanics for Trump and stuff, and there's
actually pretty deep roots for a lot of that stuff. Yeah.
So most early border patrol men though, we're white dudes,
and it would probably be fair to call them white supremacists.

(34:52):
And as the years went by, our government gave them
increasing powers to exercise racism with stay of authority behind it.
From a write up in the Inner 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

(35:14):
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 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

(35:35):
hundred men during its early years, and its reach along
a two thousand mile line was limited, but over the
years its reported brutality grew as the number of 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,

(35:57):
active in border towns from Texas to California. Yea, practically
every other member of Elpaso's National Guard was in the klan,
one military officer recalled, and many had joined the Border
Patrol upon its establishment. So not great ideally, you know,
if you ask me, we keep coming back to the
KKK and how it repeatedly infiltrated law enforcement.

Speaker 1 (36:20):
M M.

Speaker 2 (36:21):
Someone maybe ought to do something about that. So for
its first ten years of existence, 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, and this didn't really
work out in the long run. She attempted to cut

(36:42):
down a warrantless arrests. She mandated that detained migrants had
a right to receive phone calls. She fought to provide
migrants with at least some version 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. Now this
might seem surprising at first, because like these rich farmers
were the same folks who'd fought to ensure Mexican immigrants

(37:04):
wouldn't be subject to quotas in the nineteen twenty four
immigration law. But there's a reason behind it. Because these
folks had wanted these 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 Frizzell had told Congress in nineteen twenty six, the

(37:24):
Mexican is a homer, like the pigeon he goes home
to roost. And Frizell'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 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

(37:44):
to settle all across the Southwest, buying homes and starting
communities and places like Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.
In nineteen hundred, only about one hundred thousand Mexican immigrants
had lived in the United States. By nineteen thirty, there
were one and a half million Mexican immigrants this country.
So this starts to freak out a lot of white agriculturists,

(38:05):
right and 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 were the
same kind of white supremacists as the border patrol men.
They 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

(38:26):
demographics of the nation, they panicked. 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. And there was a real big like
debate over this, right because you still needed at as

(38:46):
these farmers, you still needed a certain minimum amount of
migrants coming in every year in order to actually like
keep your farms working. And the guy who kind of
figured out a solution to this problem with Senator Coleman
Livingstone Bliee, was a white supremacist congressman who first took
office in nineteen twenty five, and his solution was, rather
than creating a system of quotas and caps that would

(39:07):
have reduced manpower in American fields, he just wanted to
criminalize unmonitored border crossing. So this is the very first
time that it becomes illegal to cross the US Mexican
border without doing it at a border station. That's nineteen
twenty nine. That law has passed. And I'm going to
quote from an article in The Conversation explaining what happened here.

(39:29):
According to Bliss'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 authorized and monitored stream that could
be turned on and off at will at ports of entry.
Any immigrant who entered the United States outside of bounds
of the stream would be a criminal, subject of fines, imprisonment,
and ultimately deportation. But it was a crime designed to

(39:51):
impact Mexican immigrants in particular. Neither the Western agricultural businessmen
nor the restrictionists registered any objections. Congress passed Bleiz's bill
the Immigration Act of March fourth, nineteen twenty nine, and
dramatically altered the story of crime and punishment in the
United States with stunning precision. The criminalization of unauthorized entry
caged thousands of Mexicans Mexico's birds of passage. By the

(40:12):
end of nineteen thirty, the US 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 Bleeze's law applied technically to like Canadians
as well, but basically everyone prosecuted under it was Mexican,
and it was mainly used as kind of a method

(40:33):
of non mostly non violent ethnic cleansing. Like I don't
even know if I 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
ninety nine percent. Three new prisons were built on the
border to hold them all, and over the course of

(40:54):
the decades, somewhere around one million Mexicans were deported from
the United States, and most these people were US citizens.
Historian Francisco Balderama argues that sixty percent of the million
people who were deported were US citizens of Mexican descent,
and border patrol forces would call what was happening here
repatriation to make it seem voluntary, but what was really

(41:16):
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 kicking them out. So that's cool.

Speaker 3 (41:33):
I just the resources that get used and spent to
enforce these laws and build prisons and maintain the prison
and just like all of that cost so much time
and is so much effort. Why, like it would be

(41:56):
so much easier if we would just let immigrants come
and then just let them live and be a part
of the community.

Speaker 2 (42:07):
I mean, I know why, Because yeah, racism, Yeah, yeah,
it's absurd. Yeah, the Border Patrol's pretty lame, okaylin you
know 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.

(42:27):
And it just lies about what it's doing because it's
from the beginning, its job has never been to actually
enforce the rule of law or even protect the border.
Its job is to protect whiteness, right yep. So the
very the primary method of action for Border Patrol agents
from the beginning up to now was violence. The force

(42:47):
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 twenty eight, explained Stoveall, who
was a Border patrol agent. He was patrolling alone near
San Elizario, Texas, when he decided to drive through town.

(43:09):
San Elizario was this little Mexican town on the Rio Grande,
said Stoveall, who remembered that when he got to town
that day, he saw a mexicanyo come out from behind
the bank of a drainage ditch and then duck back.
Stoveall 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
two bottles of beer and put them down on the
bridge and broke them so he wouldn't have any evidence.

(43:30):
Reflecting upon the incident, Stovall 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 for his gun,
and firing. Stoveall fled. I got in my car and
got away from there, remembered Stoveall, because it was in daylight,
about one o'clock. If I had pulled my gun and fired,
there would have been fifty Mexicans around me that quick.

(43:50):
According to Stovall, God spared his life that day by
taking charge of his hands and preventing him from shooting
at the mexicanyo. So this is nineteen twenty eight and
kind of a common additude, Like this border patrol agent
approaches a guy who's got a legal alcohol and the
dude breaks the bottles on him, and the man's lingering

(44:10):
question that he's wondering for years afterwards is why didn't
I shoot that man to death? Like?

Speaker 3 (44:16):
Yeah, what some people think justifies killing another person is
something I will never comprehend.

Speaker 2 (44:26):
Yeah, I don't think they thought they were people, true. Yeah,
And it's probably worth noting how common brutality was, like
open brutality was among US law enforcement officials, even at
like pretty high levels in politics at this time. In
May of nineteen fifty four, Herbert Brownell, the Attorney General,
Eisenhower's attorney General, gave a speech where he asked US

(44:50):
labor leaders for their support in the event that Border
patrol agents quote shot wetbacks 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 going to mess up.
Is like, you know, my guys might murder some some Mexicans.
You know, my guys are absolutely going to commit murder

(45:10):
in cold blood, and I need you to like have
my back, right. That's the Attorney General of the United
States nineteen fifty forties. Cool stuff?

Speaker 1 (45:20):
You know what else is cool stuff?

Speaker 2 (45:24):
Don't, Sophie. I can't imagine what you're going for here.
What is cool stuff?

Speaker 1 (45:29):
That's fine? Don't that's fine. I'll just leave.

Speaker 2 (45:33):
You know who isn't the Attorney General of the United States,
hopefully the products and services that support this podcast. So
racism's not good. You know who else isn't good? The
head of the Border Patrol in the nineteen fifties.

Speaker 3 (45:51):
Pivot.

Speaker 2 (45:51):
Nice, yeah, a great pivot. So the guy in charge
of the Border Patrol as we turn 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 who Yeah, in
nineteen thirty one, as a teenager, he'd shot a Mexican

(46:12):
boy in the chest at point blank range with a
twelve gage shotgun, 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

(46:33):
was let out after two owing to a technicality. So
back in nineteen thirty one, by the way, you could
shoot a man in the chest with a twelve gage
and get three years. That's neat. Um.

Speaker 3 (46:45):
I love laws, Yeah, just so our justice system is cool.

Speaker 2 (46:51):
Yeah, he got rehabilitated. He went on to become the
head of the Border Patrol and also was the head
of the NRA. Uh Oh, Harlan Carter's an interest piece
of shit. So throughout the forties, apprehensions by the Border
Patrol were kind of ad hoc and disorganized, and they
were mostly the result of individual agents seeking out undocumented
immigrants by catching them in transit. This meant that large

(47:14):
numbers of people were almost never apprehended at a time.
It was more just like agents kind of going out
and hunting people down and grabbing a couple of folks.
This was an easy system for dumb, violent men to
like figure out, you know, you're just kind of it's
like hunting basically, and it appealed to the kind of
folks who became Border Patrol agents. But starting in nineteen fifty,
a young agent named Albert Quillen began to change things.

(47:36):
He was intelligent and ambitious, and when the chief supervisor
of Border Patrol demanded that he and his colleagues increase apprehensions,
Quillen began experimenting with bold new strategies. At five am
on February eleventh, 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,

(47:56):
and then split into two groups to clean as well
as possible certain section of illegal aliens. The plane acted
as a spotter while the buses were used to quote
Haull Wets to the border. One 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

(48:17):
and sixty one wets, which is again always the term
they use for that. Do you understand where that term
comes from?

Speaker 3 (48:22):
I don't know that I actually know the source of it. No.

Speaker 2 (48:25):
Yeah. So basically the idea is that there were kind
of two two options for Mexicans at this time. There
was the Bracero program, which was a program by which
they could kind of enter the country quasi legally and
get like legal working rights to be like a laborer
or something like that. And then there was you could
just cross the border right illegally, and that usually meant

(48:46):
crossing the Rio Grande, which is a river, right, so
you wind up wet on the other side of the river,
so they call them wetbacks like that's that's still to
this day a racist slang term for particularly Mexicans, be
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

(49:08):
professional documents and everything. This is what they call migrants. Yeah.
So Quillan's forces catch five hundred and sixty one wets
on their second day, and on their third day they
catch two hundred and sixty four. On the fourth day
they catch one hundred and thirty four. In less than
a week, they captured and deported more than a thousand
undocumented laborers. And this was like unprecedented. The Border Patrol

(49:30):
had never caught this many people this quickly. It was
seen as an astonishing achievement by Quillan's superiors, and they
began setting up other raids in imitation of his Border
Patrol supervisors noted that these new task forces, as they
started being called, we're quote pounding away on these wets
cool dudes. Soon multiple task forces had been established throughout
California and Texas, carrying out constant raids and netting huge

(49:53):
numbers of undocumented persons. On some single days, more than
five thousand Mexican nationals would be apprehended and shipped to
temporary to ten camps before being sent back across the border.
Patrolman 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 are being returned to your homeland. If

(50:13):
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. Wetbacks 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. Yikes, nice letter there.

Speaker 3 (50:31):
Oh, terrifying language. Also, you had said alien 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,

(50:52):
to you'll refer to simply someone who travels to another
place and wants to stay there.

Speaker 2 (51:00):
It's pretty 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're we're all
planning to have and suddenly a shipload of.

Speaker 1 (51:18):
But continue like.

Speaker 2 (51:19):
Yeah, I'm I'm excited for the people who treated Syrian
refugees and treat Guatemalan and Honduran and Mexican refugees like shit,
and I'm excited for them all to I don't know,
get gutten down by Canadian border guards as we deserve
as a nation. I don't know. I'm angry all the time, Kitlyn,
I'm sorry.

Speaker 3 (51:38):
That's not right likewise, so am I.

Speaker 2 (51:42):
Yeah. Anyway, it'll be up to Canada to be racist
then and then eventually Alaska and then the biosphere will die.
So you know what won't die, Caitlin, are.

Speaker 1 (51:58):
You doing necessary transous? Do your podcast? Do your podcast?

Speaker 2 (52:03):
I know I went off on a really sad rant,
and so I decided to throw in a raytheon ad
because everybody likes thinking about raytheon. So back to the
border patrol. 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
and then would take them into Mexico where the Mexican

(52:24):
military would basically dump them in the middle of the
country as 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

(52:44):
hundred and sixty nine thousand to almost eight hundred and
forty thousand. This caused immediate problems for ranchers and farmers,
who started to realize that the new legal powers they'd
given the Border Patrol had vastly realigned the organization's power
in a way that allowed the white supremacists too ran
it to harm agribusiness by wiping out their workforce at
stake was also a sort of cultural readjustment. Farmers and

(53:07):
ranchers were used to occupying a position at the top
of society, 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 with these like white
farmers trying to defend their workforce, and as the conflict

(53:30):
between the farmers and border patrol grew uglier, white border
town farmers suddenly found themselves facing off against the same
men who'd 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,

(53:51):
and to surprise everyone sleeping in the farmhouse 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 height in the trees. When the border patrol men
came up empty in their search, they went after the
white folks who awk actually owned the farm. And I'm
going to quote from book migrenow they entered Newton's parents

(54:14):
bedroom and began shining the flashlights in my mother's eyes
and my father's eyes, telling them to get up. We're
going to go out and find where your Mexicans are.
With my father and his pajamas, 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 Lupe, for

(54:37):
whom the officers claimed to be searching. In particular, she
had heard the arrival of the patrolmen 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 Newtons
believed they had outsmarted the border patrol by alerting the
migrants to the raid, the head border patrol inspectors still
led fifty three apprehended workers away, saying, see how you

(54:58):
handle your groves. Now, now that's like a bad story
and everything. What's interesting here is I guess how horrible
Newton's family is here too, because the interview with him
goes on and he makes it clear that he kind
of when his dad explained to him what was happening
with the Border Patrol. His dad compared the conflict to

(55:19):
the Civil War, and the side that he identified with
was not the good side. Quote. 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

(55:41):
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 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
defe itself against the US Border Patrol. Newton's brother took

(56:03):
the lesson to heart. When the Border Patrol raided on
another night, he stood in the family driveway with a
shotgun named at the officers. 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.

Speaker 3 (56:18):
Yeah right. There's an important thing to remember here, which
is that even of the like white ranch farm owners
who are maybe not in favor of their workforce being
sent back to their country of origin, they are still

(56:39):
exploiting these workers, these migrant workers, and you know, probably
not paying them well, probably not offering them you know,
good benefits, except.

Speaker 2 (56:55):
And probably like keeping them in very primitive living situations,
often like little more than a shack, often 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. And these these
farmers are like the border patrol agents want these migrants

(57:17):
out because they're racist as fuck, and these farmers are
also racist as fuck. They just want the migrants to
stay because.

Speaker 3 (57:25):
It because they can exploit the basis of.

Speaker 2 (57:27):
Their power exactly right. So again, no one to root
for here other than like these migrants, but they seem
to mostly get just fucked over by everybody, and that's
not fun. Yep. So yeah, it's important to remember 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

(57:50):
broadly in the right, because I guess it's it's worse
to round up thousands of people in cattle cars and
buses and throw them back across a border for no
good reason. M but there's no one you should be
rooting for here. But what's really interesting I find fascinating
about this whole conflict is that these racist plantation owning

(58:11):
white border farmers wound up like fighting the border patrol
by kind of co opting the language of social justice.
Starting in the nineteen fifties, ranchers began to argue that
Mexican nationals were being unfairly targeted for deportations. They complained
that the buses, planes, and trains used to take migrants
away were cruel, in human and outrageous practices, trading in

(58:33):
human misery. They began to argue that hiring Mexicans was
an act of kindness by American ranchers. Mexican laborers deserved
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 these men
and women back to the interior of Mexico, where they
would no doubt live on in miserable poverty and join

(58:54):
some leftist gorilla movement.

Speaker 3 (58:56):
So yeah, because they're lies being exploited farm hands in
the US was so much better. What, Oh my gosh.

Speaker 2 (59:07):
Yeah, it's pretty cool. How naturally that came to these farmers.
I like it. So the Border Patrol obviously didn't listen
to the protests against them. They continued to, in their
own words, pound away in the borderlands, raising apprehensions. The
increased workload necessary necessitated more men in facilities, and in

(59:27):
nineteen fifty three, the Border Patrol attempted to hire two
hundred and forty additional officers and made plans to build
two new detention centers at the lower Rio Grand Valley.
This enraged local farmers, and one quote threatened to arm
his wetback 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

(59:48):
in the Lower Rio Grand lobbied their congressmen to deny
the appropriation request necessary to fund the new men in facilities.
These farmers insisted they weren't lobbying for their own benefit,
but we're doing it for migrants who were victor of
the Patrol's cheap vindictiveness, a great hunger to ruler, ruin
to control, to govern, anything to carry a point, reckless
of the consequences to the poor workmen which they heard

(01:00:10):
around us cattle. And they weren't wrong in this. The
facility the Border Patrol wanted to build was essentially a
concentration camp. Eventually, Congress listened and the appropriations 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,

(01:00:32):
Chief Kelly announced the Border Patrols withdrawal from the Rio
Grand Valley to a new defense line ten miles to
the north of Kingsville. Fall furious, and Hebronville rather than
fight a losing battle in the Lower Rio Grand Valley.
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 I always kind of debate

(01:00:54):
when you've got like something that is essentially a slur,
or is a slur 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 Patrol's 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

(01:01:15):
if you replace that with Mexican nationals, that's not really
what they're saying, right, Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:01:22):
That's yeah. I mean that puts you in a pretty
tricky position. Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:01:28):
Yeah, they use it a lots. It's the Border Patrol
are cool guys, And we're about to hear it used
again in another big way. So 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

(01:01:51):
these undocumented migrants as like an assault on white blood
more than anything else. 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

(01:02:14):
of undocumented Mexican nationals called Operation Cloudburst. The first step
for this would be an anti infiltration campaign to seal
the border with the help of twenty one hundred and
eighty troops. Border Patrol would 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 two, though, would be

(01:02:36):
a containment operation, which would involve roadblocks on every major
highway from the southwest to the interior of 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

(01:02:59):
and camps would be raided and the arrested migrants would
be airlifted or sent by train to the interior of Mexico.
Now again using the military. This was essentially he wanted
to bring in the army to carry out a military
action to purge the United States of Hispanic people. That's
what the head of Border patrols trying to do here,
and all of the military guys he talked to are like,

(01:03:21):
this sounds like a great idea. We'd love to help,
but it's illegal, right possecomatadis means you can't use the
army for shit like this. The only way around it
is a presidential proclamation, and Dwight Eisenhower was actually initially
all on board with issuing that proclamation, but in the
end he kind of backed away and instead he appointed

(01:03:41):
a General Joseph Swing to be the new Commissioner of
the Immigration and Naturalization Service and was basically like, we
can't use soldiers for this because it's unconstitutional. But I'm
going a promoted general to be in charge of the
i INS and you figure out a way to do
the same thing with the resources Border Patrol has, like, yeah, yeah,

(01:04:01):
I still want a military operation to clear out these
Hispanic people. I just can't use soldiers.

Speaker 3 (01:04:08):
So that's good grief. Yeah, the mental gymnastics that what, yeah,
that these people do to justify their horrible actions. Anyway, sorry,
go ahead.

Speaker 2 (01:04:21):
Yeah, it's pretty great. I don't know. So one month
after joining i INS, General Swing announces that he's going
to be leading the Border Patrol in a new paramilitary
campaign based on the tactics pioneered by Albert Quillen. The
new operation is given the name Operation Wetback Again. That's
the Border Patrol's official name for it. That's what all

(01:04:43):
these guys call it. That's what it's written up in
the documents and stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:04:46):
She's Louise.

Speaker 2 (01:04:47):
Yeah, they just didn't have a fuck to give on
this matter. So 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 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 ninth, nineteen fifty four,

(01:05:09):
when the operation began, was a letter from General Swing
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. Y. Yeah, So in its first day, California
or in the first day of this operation, California and

(01:05:30):
Arizona agents apprehended nearly eleven thousand migrants. The flood of
people only accelerated after that, and the sheer 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 a Lesion Park in Los Angeles
into an open air concentration camp. Yeah, that's Nate, go

(01:05:53):
to Alesian Park.

Speaker 3 (01:05:55):
I've been there before and I'll never go again.

Speaker 2 (01:05:59):
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. Twenty five percent
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. So that's great.

(01:06:23):
The Mexican government's capacity to take and transport all these
people broke down almost immediately, and they were like, we
need you 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 and kept just shotgunning people
on over there, and the sheer scale of deportations began
to fuck with American industry. But border patrol didn't really

(01:06:44):
give a shit about this either. I'm going to quote
again from the book Migra. Between June seventeenth and July
twenty sixth, nineteen fifty four, twenty eight hundred and twenty
seven of the four thousand, four hundred and three migrants
apprehended by 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 and temporarily closed

(01:07:07):
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, etc. Officers
reported apprehending such workers at well known establishments such as
the Biltmore Hotel, Beverly Hills Hotel, Hollywood, Roosevelt Hotel, Los
Angeles Athletic Club, and the Brown Derby. At times, the

(01:07:28):
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
onlike raids in big Hollywood locations is because they were
trying to make a point to these like these ranchers

(01:07:48):
who were still fighting them in South Texas. And the
message was, if we're willing to do this shit 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 Biltmore, we'll ruin you,
Like we don't give a shit, we're the Border Patrol.
And in the end, Operation Wetback was responsible for the
deportations of somewhere between a quarter of a million at

(01:08:09):
the low end and about one point five million people
at the high end, and at the end of the day, yeah,
it kind of ended in retreat by the Border Patrol.
Part of this was that around the same time, the
US government reformed the Brassero 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

(01:08:30):
of these these ranchers and farmers started making sure that
their workers kind of went through a legal path to
gain working status in the United States. 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,
and kind of as a result, border patrol apprehensions plummeted.
The next year, in nineteen fifty five, the task forces

(01:08:52):
that had once captured thousands of migrants in a day
were disbanded and demobilized, and for a little while it
seemed as if the Border Patrol had gone into hibernation.
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 shit
that the Border Patrol gets up to in this episode,
because that's how much worse it gets.

Speaker 3 (01:09:14):
Oh, they can't wait to hear about it.

Speaker 2 (01:09:18):
So how are you feeling?

Speaker 3 (01:09:21):
I feel pretty terrible.

Speaker 2 (01:09:23):
That's good. I love it when people feel terrible.

Speaker 3 (01:09:27):
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 by how
horrible people have been to each other.

Speaker 2 (01:09:41):
Yes, and you were the one who picked this topic
with a text message. Lol. I think the Border Patrol
sounds fund.

Speaker 3 (01:09:52):
That did never happen. But yeah, I mean it's good
to be informed about these things, so I appreciate learning
and being further informed about it. So yeah, thank you,
thank you for that.

Speaker 2 (01:10:10):
Yep, you're welcome, Caitlin, Thank you for coming on.

Speaker 1 (01:10:13):
Is there a place as people might be able to
find you, listen to you, ways to support your work?

Speaker 3 (01:10:22):
Why? There certainly are places to do that, starting with
You can follow me personally on Twitter and Instagram at
Caitlin Durante. 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

(01:10:43):
the representation of women in film and just film in general,
examining it through an intersectional feminist lens. So that is
what we do, and you can, yeah, check out.

Speaker 1 (01:10:57):
Podcast screenwriting classes right now.

Speaker 3 (01:11:00):
Oh yes, I am, thank you so much for bringing
that up. I also teach screenwriting on account of a
master's degree in screenwriting that I absolutely hate to mention
or ever just bring up, but it does allow me
to teach online classes. So if that's of any interest

(01:11:20):
to anyone, go to my website Caitlinderante dot com slash
classes and I usually have news sections coming up starting
soon at any given point.

Speaker 2 (01:11:33):
And if you want to learn from me, I don't
teach screenwriting, but I do teach screenwriting, which is where
you sit down with a pencil and paper and I
scream at you and then eventually you give me money
to go away.

Speaker 3 (01:11:47):
That sounds very educational.

Speaker 2 (01:11:50):
We all have to have an extra couple, so either
pay Caitlin for an actual service or pay me to
abuse you.

Speaker 1 (01:12:02):
Either way, don't love that as an You know what Sophie.

Speaker 2 (01:12:07):
Look everybody, look, you gotta. You gotta be mean to
the audience, Sophie, you gotta.

Speaker 1 (01:12:12):
I don't know about who. I love them, I appreciate them,
and I appreciate you, Robert, so kindness.

Speaker 3 (01:12:22):
Is there any way in which you think that, like
closing out a podcast is similar to making love just
to bring things full service? Wow? Good question.

Speaker 2 (01:12:32):
Here's how closing a podcast is like making love. Both
of them are inherently disappointing.

Speaker 1 (01:12:40):
And you can, Robert and I write, okay on Twitter.
You can follow us at Bastards Fought on Twitter and Instagram.
We have a tea public store. Uh that's it, Bye.

Speaker 2 (01:12:54):
Bye, 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

(01:13:18):
the name of your greatest city, Melbourne, Melbourne. I guess, savage, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:13:24):
I said Melbourne. And then okay, well, what about the
people who live in Sydney or other cities in Australia.

Speaker 2 (01:13:35):
One city in Australia, its name is Melbourne, and that's
the end of this digression. Hello, Caitlyn Duranty, guest for
today's episode. How are you doing?

Speaker 1 (01:13:44):
Ah?

Speaker 3 (01:13:45):
Well, I would be doing better if you would pronounce
my last name correctly.

Speaker 1 (01:13:49):
Speaking of mispronunciation, donte Caitlin.

Speaker 2 (01:13:53):
Yes, 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 said.

Speaker 3 (01:14:01):
He thinks.

Speaker 1 (01:14:02):
Ariana Grande's name is Ariana grand So you.

Speaker 2 (01:14:05):
Know, Sophie, you've been giving me guff about that one.

Speaker 1 (01:14:07):
For a while, as it deserves mm hmm.

Speaker 2 (01:14:11):
Well now I'm sad.

Speaker 1 (01:14:14):
Don't be sad, Robert.

Speaker 2 (01:14:16):
This is part two.

Speaker 1 (01:14:17):
If we get to pick on a white man at
the beginning of an episode, then like, what's the point?

Speaker 2 (01:14:24):
Yeah, this is this is a whole episode about I
don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:14:30):
Series. Let's pass the Bechdel test right now, Sophie.

Speaker 1 (01:14:33):
Oh, Caitlin, I I'm really enjoying the bluish shirt you're
wearing right now.

Speaker 3 (01:14:38):
Oh my gosh. Well, I'm so glad you brought it
up because it's it's a Paddington shirt that says migration
is not a crime, which is relevant to today's episode.

Speaker 1 (01:14:51):
Oh wow, it really is relevant today's episode.

Speaker 3 (01:14:54):
That But then I said Paddington and that that I
was like.

Speaker 1 (01:14:59):
Are we just during Paddington right now because.

Speaker 3 (01:15:02):
Heddington is a non binary asexual icon.

Speaker 1 (01:15:06):
Yes, yes, yes, yes, so I kind of passed the
backl Thats okay, Robert, you want to ass your show
behind the bastards right now because.

Speaker 2 (01:15:12):
I don't actually know if we passed the 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 you
know this one we're splitting up a little bit weirdly

(01:15:33):
over the course of two weeks because my entire life
and schedule has been continually thrown into chaos. So I
do apologize for this one being done a little bit
differently than others are done. On December sixth, twenty eighteen,
seven year old Jacqueline Call crossed the US Mexico border
near a place called Antelope Wells, New Mexico. She was

(01:15:54):
with her father, twenty nine year old Nary Call. Both
were Kekchi Maya, and they'd lived most of their life
lives in the Alta Vera Paz region of Guatemala. Starving
and 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 streptococcal infection. DHS maintains

(01:16:15):
that they conducted an initial screening and that there was
no evidence of health issues in 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

(01:16:36):
around December eighteenth. He and his father, Augustin, were members
of the Chuj people, another Mayan group who came from
the Juahuitenango region of Guatemala. Gomez 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 Alamagordo. He started to show
symptoms of sickness. On the twenty fourth, he was taken

(01:16:57):
to the hospital, where he was tested for the cold,
but not for influenza, which he had. He was given
medicine that could not help him and sent back to jail,
where he died on Christmas Eve, twenty eighteen. No, yep, good,
good times.

Speaker 3 (01:17:11):
That's awful.

Speaker 2 (01:17:12):
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 custody since twenty ten. In twenty nineteen, though,
it was revealed that another child, Darylyn Cordovaval of l Salvador,
had actually died back in September twenty eighteen under similar circumstances.

(01:17:33):
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 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

(01:17:54):
to learn how that whole situation came about. You want
to hear about this, Caitlin.

Speaker 3 (01:18:00):
So I have to also what colorful language you used
in terms of the corpses or at the top of
an iceberg.

Speaker 2 (01:18:08):
I mean, well, yeah, you know, I think if you're
gonna talk about dead kids, you should do it with
a little bit of panazz, pizaz panash.

Speaker 3 (01:18:19):
All right, I'm ready, I'm keep going.

Speaker 2 (01:18:22):
All right, So let's talk about the border patrol and
in Central America. We're gonna talk about 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. But we
don't talk about what a lot of border patrol guys

(01:18:43):
did in the countries that these people are fleeing from
before people started fleeing from those countries. So this is
gonna be fun, Okay, It's gonna be good time for everybody.

Speaker 1 (01:18:54):
So.

Speaker 2 (01:18:55):
John P. Longan was a US 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 manner will note that he
had a reputation for violence, but this was not at
all uncommon among the men of the Border Patrol, nor
is it uncommon now. During Operation wet Back, when the
Border Patrol reformed itself into a paramilitary force to wage

(01:19:18):
war on Mexican immigrants, Longan run The Patrols ran the
Patrol's equivalent of a military intelligence service. Longan's base was
an unmarked building near Alameda. He and his men interrogated,
captured migrants, extrapped into information, and 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

(01:19:39):
what we'd consider torture. Long End was good at his job,
and his performance and Operation wet 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 nations combating Communist insurgencies. The
CIA hand picked a number of Border Patrol agents to
travel to places like the Zezuela, Thailand, the Dominican Republic

(01:20:02):
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 framed this program as
training law enforcement. The reality, though, is that Longan and
his fellow Border patrolmen were sent over to places like

(01:20:22):
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 En arrived in
nineteen sixty five, he was finally able to wage a
real war using real weapons. I'm going to quote now
from an article in The Nation. Quote. Longan taught local

(01:20:42):
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 Limpieza, or Operation and clean Up.
Within three months, this unit had conducted over eighty raids

(01:21:03):
and multiple extrajudicial 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 transformed American policing, It

(01:21:24):
was common practice during the Cold wartis and former Border
Patrol agents like long End to train foreign police through
CIA linked 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, according to
a nineteen seventy four Los Angeles Times report, was flying

(01:21:46):
its Latin American Death Squad apprentices 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 End himself in nineteen fifty
seven clearly describe what he thought he was doing at
the border. We're fighting a war on a wide battle front,
so that's good.

Speaker 3 (01:22:07):
So they're just basically training kill squads. They're just telling
people to murder people.

Speaker 2 (01:22:14):
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 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

(01:22:35):
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, you know, at
the border. I mean they do it a lot anyway,
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.

Speaker 3 (01:22:51):
Oh, gie, Whiz, have you ever.

Speaker 2 (01:22:54):
Been to Guatemala, Caitlin, I have not, rules. Yeah, yeah,
I spent a lot of time there. It's a great country,
beautiful place, completely dysfunctional government, and you can see like
signs of the horrible Civil war there all over the place.
Just like you'll cross the street and there'll just be
a bunch of guys who are all missing arms and legs.
You'll be driving through the middle of nowhere and you'll

(01:23:15):
see like businesses that have been like were shot up
decades ago with mortars and stuff, and it you know,
it all kind of descends from this. The series of
political conflicts that launch in this period of time, particularly
in the early nineteen eighties, that are backed by the
United States and supported enthusiastically by the Reagan government, and
these kind of networks of right wing murder crews that

(01:23:40):
were trained up and sent out by the CIA and
their buddies and groups like the Border Patrol. This all
starts now, and it's cool, it's great, and.

Speaker 3 (01:23:49):
It's probably it's I mean, it's refugees from yep, these
conflicts that are seeking refuge in right up to the
today US and then and then they get here and
they're like, well, sorry, fuck, you were either going to
murder you or the peligeon and let you die in

(01:24:10):
our custody or send you back to this you know,
war torn country. You're in.

Speaker 2 (01:24:17):
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 that's why
people are less willing to try to fix problems because

(01:24:38):
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 Operation Limpieza, which you know Longen the Border Patrol
guy orchestrated himself, was a major moment in the history

(01:24:59):
of Guatemala's collapse into 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. The genocide they trained right wing Guatemalan

(01:25:21):
militants to execute fell heavily on various Maya peoples of
the region, including the Kecchi in the Jews. 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, cooping his way
into command with the help of his good friends. The
US Ronald Reagan described him as a man of great

(01:25:41):
integrity who was totally dedicated to democracy. The nation's ride
up makes it continues quote. On June seventeenth, nineteen eighty two,
Guatemalan soldiers under the command of Rios Mont entered the
San Francisco Catalyst State immediately adjacent to Yallam Bulock. The
estate's owner, a military colonel, had fled because of guerrilla

(01:26:01):
activity in the area. 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. A
lone survivor made his way into Mexico, where Guatemalan anthropologist

(01:26:24):
and Jesuit priest Ricardo Fala interviewed him. The San Francisco
massacre was highlighted in Guatemala's nineteen ninety nine Truth Commission report.
After the massacre, Yellum Biloc 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

(01:26:44):
ended up in refugee camps or dispersed throughout Mexico's southern states.
Still others continued on to the United States, beginning the
Great Movement of Guatemalans to El Norte. All told, one
point five million people were displaced by the Guatemalan armies
scorched Earth campaign in nineteen eighty one. In nineteen eighty two,
Guatemala's Commission for Historical Clarification called the violent displacement in

(01:27:05):
the Maya Cheus region an active genocide. Young Felipe Gomez
Alazano's father. He was the little kid, one of the
little kids who died. Augustine Gomez Perez was a child
of eleven during that execute. Y'all Unblock's villagers stayed away
for fourteen years, returning only after the signing of the
Peace Accords in nineteen ninety six. So that's cool, m.

Speaker 3 (01:27:27):
What can you say science that's horrible.

Speaker 2 (01:27:30):
You can say that, Like, we're focusing on Guatemala right
here because it's one where there's a bit more documentation,
but like, this shit happened in Al Salad, or it
happened in a bunch of different parts of Latin in
Central America where you know, refugees come from all the time.
Now it was, it's still in a lot of ways

(01:27:51):
going on today if you want to read about like
Plan Columbia and stuff like, there's aspects of this that
are very much still occurring, and that the border patrol
still ends up getting tied up and from time to time,
and that's great.

Speaker 3 (01:28:05):
Good grief.

Speaker 2 (01:28:07):
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
US policy and US plotting played into the tragedy being
suffered by these people, and like the insecurity of these regions,

(01:28:28):
they would have better attitudes towards you know, Guatemal immigration
and whatnot into the United States. And then the part
of me that has been paying attention for the last
several decades knows that like, no, actually people would cheer
the murders of the folks and the destruction of these
areas because Americans have been so thoroughly broken by propaganda

(01:28:52):
that the people who are still on the right and
still broadly pro American can't be convinced by any reason
that any amount of murder or violence is not justified
by the fact that America is cool as hell.

Speaker 3 (01:29:08):
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 the fact that you know, the white
European settlers were escaping the same you know, kind of

(01:29:32):
civil unrest or religious persecution or whatever it was the
coust them to flood their countries, and then we settled
here by killing millions of indigenous people, and now we're like, well,
our borders are closed now. Sorry everyone, And it's like,
how can you live? How can these people live with

(01:29:55):
the hypocrisy of that simple fact.

Speaker 2 (01:30:02):
Because they're they're ship anyway. Uh So, most of these
death squads were 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. That's kind
of ghosh. Uh So you bring them into your country
to train them there because you're you know, you're good

(01:30:22):
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 and El
Salvador all throughout 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 shit was the
Los Fresnos, Texas Border Patrol facility. It was an existing base,

(01:30:44):
it was in a good location, and the Border Patrol
was perfectly happy to have minsilt over there to learn
how to become murderous gorillas and then set off terrorist
bombs in the middle of their own countries 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.

(01:31:07):
It lasted for weeks and it included curriculum like terrorist concepts,
terrorist devices, fabrication and functioning of devices and provides, triggering
devices and scendiaries, 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,

(01:31:29):
cops might need to learn about terrorist concepts and the
kind of weapons assassins use. 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 use.
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

(01:31:52):
how to build triggers for the bobs you're going to
make to kill people. The reality of the whole The
whole program came out during congressional investigations in the nineteen seventies.
And I'm going to 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

(01:32:16):
James Alboresque in nineteen seventy three, 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
disposal technician. The thrust of the instruction introduces trainees to
commercially available materials and home laboratory techniques in the manufacture

(01:32:39):
of explosives and incendiaries. Different types of explosive techniques and
booby traps and their construction and use 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
ad agency use Los Fresnos. The Border Patrol had always
had within it the seeds of a national secret police force.

(01:33:00):
Decades before CBP agents were operating in unmarked snatch fans
on the streets of Portland and it was Customs and
Border Patrol who was doing that. They helped to train
foreign police to do the exact same thing and much worse. Besides,
that's fun, Like I carry, I keep like wanting to say, like, ah,
what a fun thing. What I don't know what else
to say. It's just like this kind of litany of

(01:33:21):
ours that we've all just kind of blithely funded our
entire lives, even though a great deal of information exists
on how bad this agency has always been. Because the
only real if you actually 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

(01:33:43):
the worst people. And and maybe you shouldn't police the
border at all because this happened.

Speaker 3 (01:33:49):
But borders are completely arbitrary and mean nothing, And why
or why have we decided that they that cross them
is a crime.

Speaker 2 (01:34:03):
Yeah, yeah, it's bad. And the kind of people who
decide that they want to make their whole lives about
punishing desperate people for the quote unquote crime of crossing
a border are monsters, and when you start giving them
guns in power, they use it to enable genocides and
political oppression abroad and then inevitably do so back at home,

(01:34:25):
which is what's happening now. So when it comes to
government agencies that Americans, particularly liberals, 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 Crudsen won a Pulitzer Prize in nineteen

(01:34:46):
eighty for a series of articles about the Border Patrol
whose titles would not look at all out of place
in twenty twenty, titles like Border Patrol sweeps of illegal
aliens leave scores of children in jails a little familiar.
The intercept summarizing his work notes patrollers he reported regularly
engaged in beating's, murder, torture, and rape, including the rape

(01:35:09):
of girls as young as twelve Some patrollers ran their
own in house outlaw vigilante groups. Others maintained ties with
groups like the Clan. Border patrol agents also used the
children of migrants, either as bait or as pressure. A
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, one patroller said,

(01:35:31):
but it often worked. Separating migrant families was not official
government policy in the years Crudsen was reporting 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, agents said, would always break.
Once a confession was extracted, children might be placed in

(01:35:53):
foster care or left to languish in federal jails. Others
were released into Mexico alone, far from their homes, forced
to survive, according to public defenders, by garbage can scrounging,
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

(01:36:16):
with being arrested in denied food, broke down and told
her investigator that she was Mexican, even 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.

Speaker 1 (01:36:38):
I mean, wow, what.

Speaker 3 (01:36:41):
Kind of truly inhuman monster 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.

Speaker 2 (01:37:05):
That is Yeah, it's not great.

Speaker 1 (01:37:08):
I mean the sentence that you said, like I got
teary eyed with the mother, Yes, the mothers broke first
or whatnot? Yeah? That was yeah, horrible.

Speaker 2 (01:37:19):
No, it's 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 people to
commit federal crimes up to when including assault and murder.
So I'm just like gonna stop right there and continue
talking about the Border Patrol instead, because we shouldn't do

(01:37:40):
that on a podcast. One tactic the Border Patrol came
to a door was the locking of migrants in freezing
cold rooms called hellieras or ice boxes. This goes back
at least to the nineteen eighties. According to Krudsen, 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

(01:38:01):
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 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 Krudsen that agents commonly pushed illegals

(01:38:21):
off cliffs so it would look like an accident. Much
of the agency's behavior was indistinguishable from that of a
straight up Gang. Agents with ins Border Patrol's parent agency
at the time were caught trading Mexican women to the
Los Angeles Rams in exchange for season tickets. What yes,
the thing that happened.

Speaker 3 (01:38:44):
I can't.

Speaker 2 (01:38:47):
Brave men and women of the Border Patrol. We're in
the green.

Speaker 1 (01:38:51):
Oh my god, it's time for an AD break so
that I can go vomit.

Speaker 2 (01:38:55):
Yeah, you know who doesn't trade women for it?

Speaker 1 (01:39:02):
Vomit. It's an AD break.

Speaker 2 (01:39:05):
Products and services and we're back. We're having a good time.

Speaker 3 (01:39:18):
Jeez, so.

Speaker 2 (01:39:21):
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 UH with Texan ranchers. In numerous cases,
they worked out deals with ranch owners whereby they would
hold off on immigration raids until right before payday, giving
ranchers the use of migrant bodies without the need to

(01:39:42):
pay them. Border patrol men got to hunt and fish
for free on their ranches as payments. This is kind
of how they they worked out that that little set
of disagreements, that little UH. The the uprising in Texas
that had been sparked by a lot of.

Speaker 3 (01:39:55):
The labor and then have an agreement with the border
patrol and like, okay, seize them on this day.

Speaker 2 (01:40:02):
Yeah, so that.

Speaker 3 (01:40:03):
I don't have to pay all My god, it's good.

Speaker 2 (01:40:06):
Yeah crudzen. That New York Times journalist even documented that
one of the rangers the Ranch's border patrol worked at
an arrangement with was owned by President Lyndon B. Johnson
while he was president. Oh holy shit, good stuff. Between
nineteen eighty five and nineteen ninety, federal agents gunned down
twenty two migrants just in the area around San Diego.

(01:40:28):
The Intercept reports quote on April eighteenth, nineteen eighty six,
For instance, patroller Edward Cole was beating fourteen year old
Eduardo Corrillo Estrada on the US side of the border's
Chain League fence when he stopped and shot Eduardo's younger brother,
Humberto in the back. Umberto was standing on the other
side of the fence on Mexican soil. A court ruled
that Cole, who had previous incidents of shooting through the

(01:40:48):
fence at 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 ninety three,
the House Subcommittee on International Law, immigran and Refugees held
hearings on border patrol abuse, and its transcript is a
catalog of horrors. One former guard, Tourney Hefner, at the
Ions Detention Center in Port Isabel, Texas, reported that a

(01:41:10):
young Salvadoran girl was forced to perform personal duties like
dancing the Lombarda for IONS officials. In twenty eleven, Hefter
published a memoir with more accusations of sexual abuse by
as Hefner writes, the Ions brass Roberto Martinez, who worked
with the San Diego based US Mexico Border program for
the American Friends Service Committee, testified that human and civil

(01:41:31):
rights violations by the Border Patrol run the gamut of
abuses 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 in Ions attention centers around the United
States Martinez said, seemed to be escalating throughout the border region.

Speaker 3 (01:41:53):
Okay, I have to talk through something here. So, in theory,
law enforcement is there to prevent crime, stop crime, find criminals,
et cetera. We know that that's barely what they do, right,
But that's in theory the purpose of law enforcement. And

(01:42:16):
so by extension border patrol if it is since it
is for some reason illegal to you know, cross a
border undocumented or without the proper documentation, that is quote
a crime according to ridiculous standards, right. And I also
understand in theory the concept of like punishing things that

(01:42:42):
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
deciding that the punishment for that crime, I'm warrants things
like human trafficking, murder, sexual assault, all manner of other horrible, horrible,

(01:43:11):
unmentionable things like where I just it is the most
disgusting thing.

Speaker 2 (01:43:19):
I think the problem here that you're having is in
thinking that the goal, the purpose is ever to prevent crime,
whereas the reality is the purpose is to is to protect.
It's to protect whiteness exactly, Yes, yeah, And it's to
provide an outlet for for fascists in this country to

(01:43:42):
do horrible violence on people in a way that is,
rather than being disorganized and sort of being anti state
and being something that like causes disorder, being violence that
they are allowed to carry out, that that enforces the uh,
the kind of the state itself that like that like

(01:44:05):
backs up the existence of the state. Right, Like you
have all these you have all these tremendously violent people, right,
and you can do a couple of things to them,
but they're there. So either you you try to like
deal with them and deradicalize them and make them less dangerous,
you kill them, or as we do, you give them

(01:44:27):
guns and make them unaccountable and allow them to do
horrible violence to large groups of people who have no
political agency.

Speaker 3 (01:44:34):
Yes, that is exactly what it is. 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 I'm going to do the same exact
things that the KKK does, but it's being masked as

(01:44:56):
a government agency. Like basically, this terror terrors organization, this
hate group is protected and quote justified because it is
a government agency, even though they're committing the same heinous
acts in the name of under the guise of some

(01:45:19):
kind of protection. But truly it is the like you said,
protection of whiteness and criminalizing being not white.

Speaker 2 (01:45:29):
And that's the that's the only way it's ever been,
and that's the only way it ever will be, as
long as we have a border and we consider there
to be some sort of fundamental value in the sanctity
of that border. Right, And that's good.

Speaker 3 (01:45:49):
I want to cry about it.

Speaker 2 (01:45:51):
Yeah, it's it's good to do that sometimes. Other times
it's good to continue reading a podcast script, 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.

Speaker 3 (01:46:09):
I mean informing the people helps.

Speaker 2 (01:46:14):
Yeah, that's a way that you can describe this as
informing the people. I don't know, you know. In nineteen
seventy nine, Maria Contreras, 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. This sort

(01:46:38):
of thing happened all the time. You know, we have
documentation about Maria Contreras's case, but this is maybe even
a daily matter, and it's something that continues to this
day 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 ins were sort of the red

(01:46:59):
headed step chat to federal agencies with law enforcement powers.
They were barely funded because, if you can imagine this,
illegal immigration was not something people cared about. So for
most of these period, this period, while all of the
horrible things we've been talking about have been happening, border
patrol has basically no money and very few agents considering
like what it's supposed to be watching in its purview,

(01:47:21):
it's just kind of a place where we keep all
of our most violent law enforcement officers and they don't
have the money to do much, but nobody's watching them,
so they can carry out horrific acts of violence. And
that's the border patrol and really ins too for the
most part. Yeah, states probably had you know not. Probably
border states had debates on the matter of illegal immigration.

(01:47:43):
It was certainly like, you know, a political issue in Texas,
in New Mexico and stuff. But random people in random
Americans and 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 to that period of time. Now, at the
start of the Clinton administration, there were only about four

(01:48:04):
thousand border patrol agents watching both Canada and Mexico, which
is not a lot if you think about how big
both of those borders are.

Speaker 3 (01:48:12):
There are many miles long.

Speaker 2 (01:48:14):
Yeah, they're pretty big. In nineteen ninety three, NAFTA became
a thing, the North American free trade thing of a jigger,
and illegal immigration grew by leaps and bounds alongside right
wing fear mongering 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 really leads
to a massive surge in the border patrol is NAFTA

(01:48:34):
becomes a thing, and suddenly a shitload more people are
trying to cross the border. Illegal immigration by the end
of the nineteen nineties is a major national political issue
in the Border Patrol more than doubles under Clinton. In
the year two thousand, our nation's peak year for illegal immigration,
border patrol agents apprehended one point six million people. This, though,

(01:48:55):
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 non white people from border areas. From

(01:49:17):
an article in Politico quote quote. Near the top of
the Border Patrol's list of complaints was the policy known
internally as KARP or 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 court. But despite
millions of border crossings, the Border Patrol had the financing
in two thousand and one for just sixty detainees a

(01:49:38):
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, recalls Michael Cherdoff, who would go
on to become President George W. Bush's second Secretary of
Homeland Security. Mostly, agents just asked border violators for their
names and then did a cursory background check before returning
them to Mexico or releasing them into the United States.

(01:49:59):
Sometimes they ran fingerprints, sometimes they didn't. In June nineteen
ninety nine, agents captured one of the FBI's ten most
wanted fugitives, a rapist and serial killer named Angel Maturino
Racindez aka the Railway Killer, and unknowingly released him back
into Mexico, whereupon Rascindez promptly sneaked back into the United
States and murdered four more people before being apprehended by

(01:50:20):
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 fuck up as anything, because most of them
were shit ass incompetent in anything besides doing violence. So

(01:50:42):
nine to eleven happens. You remember nine to eleven, I remember,
It's good. You're not supposed to forget it.

Speaker 3 (01:50:49):
Now.

Speaker 2 (01:50:49):
Nine to eleven happens. And if you were alive and
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 tanks
or whatever across the Texas border. As someone who lived
in Texas at the time, we were a bunch of
people freaking out about how, like terrorist hit squads we're
going to be making their way up through the border.
Kids at my suburban Texas high school were certain that

(01:51:11):
al Qaida was going to be sending people to shoot
up our school because, like Plano, Texas was real high
on fucking Osama bin Laden's hit list.

Speaker 3 (01:51:20):
Wait, did they think they were going to like go
to Mexico first and then cross the border?

Speaker 1 (01:51:25):
Is?

Speaker 2 (01:51:25):
Yeah, what they thought? 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 going to be sneaking through the border, but like, yeah, whatever,
it was very dumb. It was a very dumb time.

(01:51:46):
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 really 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 unmonitored place
for so long. People were like, oh, my god, of

(01:52:07):
course the terrorists will try there. They never did, but
you know they still might any day now, Caitlin, any
day Al Kaita's got out. Finally get a squad up there.
Nobody will notice all of the anyway. Whatever. So yeah,
Tom Ridge, the former governor of Pennsylvania, was made President.
Bush's homeland securities are Now this was before the Department

(01:52:29):
of Homeland Security existed. That came about in like November
of two thousand and two. But as soon as like
nine to eleven is a thing, Bush is like, ah,
we got to 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.
But anyway, whatever, So Tom Ridge is like is made

(01:52:51):
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 issue for him.
Robert Bonner, who worked with Ridge and later became the
first head of Customs and Border Patrol, told Politico quote,
within the ions structure, they were the poor stepchild. That
was how most ofs viewed them at every level. They

(01:53:12):
weren't appreciated and weren't viewed with respect, and that created
this defensiveness and insolerity 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 merged
them into one border agency. But that would have meant
several different cabinet secretaries would have each lost tiny amounts
of power and money because you know, you have this

(01:53:34):
group that's like, you know, 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
is 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 of people's purview,

(01:53:54):
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 in power.
So they all vetoed that idea in unison. No no, no, no,
fuck that shit. Instead, the decision was made to dissolve
i INS and put the Border Patrol under the purview
of the new Customs and Border Patrol, which would itself

(01:54:16):
be part of the brand new Department of Homeland Security.
The final nail in Ins's coffin was the fact that
the agency had approved visas for two of the nine
to eleven hijackers after nine eleven. So this is kind
of what like, yeah, that's the that's the wrong time
to do that. Somebody probably should have gotten on the
phone immediately after that and been like, hey, you we

(01:54:38):
should run these names, like just make sure we're not
going to embarrass everybody, but they did. And when the
news kind of came out that i INS 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 IONS, and that
kind of that kind of spelled their doom, and in fact,

(01:55:00):
in they dissolved the agency. No one from the White
House even thought to call the INS commissioner and tell him.
I'm going to quote again from Politico's article, i INS
was such a broken bureaucracy that it would be the
single agency in the entire US government to receive the
ultimate death penalty. After nine to eleven, in the wide

(01:55:21):
ranging bureaucratic reorganization that led to the Department of Homeland Security,
i INS was completely disbanded, its responsibilities removed from the
Justice Department, and its duties reassigned among three new DHS agencies,
Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE, Citizenship and Immigration Services CIS,
and Customs and Border Protection CBP in the newly created

(01:55:42):
DHS would be a reality in less than a year.
So that's the situation.

Speaker 3 (01:55:48):
Now.

Speaker 2 (01:55:48):
The man tasked with creating the CBP was Robert Bonner,
a federal judge and a former DEA head. His first
and most pressing decision was whether or not to change
the agency's famous green union, which is obviously more important
than like the rapes, the right trading of women for
sports tickets and stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:56:08):
Why is that the first order of business? Why are
they us?

Speaker 2 (01:56:11):
Look, Caitlin, 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 women to death. Those brave men have a lot
of pride in their uniform, and they want to know
that that uniform is not going to change.

Speaker 1 (01:56:29):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:56:30):
They have to be presentable. That's the most That's the
most important thing.

Speaker 2 (01:56:35):
The most important thing is that they 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. Let them torture all those people and throw
kids into into t 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

(01:56:59):
quote weeks before the new agency officially launched on March
first two thousand and three, he invited all of the
Border Patrols twenty sector chiefs to Washington to discuss the transition.
They all arrived in DC 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 remark, simply, the Border Patrol will remain green. The

(01:57:21):
room erupted in applause and cheers. They're proud of the green.
They were very proud of that uniform, Bonner recalls today.
They were concerned about losing that identity.

Speaker 3 (01:57:31):
Eh, who cares about your green uniform?

Speaker 1 (01:57:36):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (01:57:36):
The Border Patrol cares.

Speaker 1 (01:57:37):
Fuck off and fucking losers.

Speaker 2 (01:57:41):
See this is why, as I've always said, uh and
so if you can back me up on this, Caitlin,
you would be a terrible head of the Border.

Speaker 3 (01:57:49):
Patrol because I don't respect the green exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:57:54):
Well, I don't even I don't wear green. But it's
because I hate the Celtics. I can't have Aby there.

Speaker 3 (01:58:01):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:58:02):
See, Sophie, you'd be bad at this too, because as
a Border Patrol agent, you should be trading kidnapped women
to the Celtics in exchange for season tickets.

Speaker 1 (01:58:10):
Oh my god, can we just go to an ad break,
Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 (01:58:14):
Speaking of the Celtics, you know who else supports this podcast?

Speaker 3 (01:58:18):
Hey?

Speaker 1 (01:58:19):
You know who else is?

Speaker 3 (01:58:20):
Who?

Speaker 1 (01:58:20):
Nope, nope, nope, and we're back that that that Celtics.
Dig I just would like to denote that. I will
keep doing that and also high prop.

Speaker 2 (01:58:36):
Yeah, it's that I don't understand who the Celtics are Celtics.
I don't understand any of this. This is all Sophie.
If you love that team, if you love that team,
send your death threats to Sophie.

Speaker 1 (01:58:48):
Yeah, if you love that if you love that team,
just unfollow me because we will never be friends.

Speaker 3 (01:58:53):
Also, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:58:54):
Who they.

Speaker 3 (01:58:55):
If you, if you don't give a ship about sports
teams in existence tennis, follow me.

Speaker 1 (01:59:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:59:04):
Except for soccer, Soccer is allowed. Soccer's cool. Soccer is
the only sport.

Speaker 1 (01:59:08):
No.

Speaker 2 (01:59:09):
Soccer is definitely not allowed.

Speaker 1 (01:59:10):
What soccer soccer is allowed.

Speaker 3 (01:59:12):
There is.

Speaker 2 (01:59:12):
There is one sport allowed in my 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.

Speaker 1 (01:59:24):
Just fully Robert died this entire thing. Anyway, it's follow
Caitlin on Twitter on Instagram. She's a great follow.

Speaker 2 (01:59:30):
Continue with your podcast Afghanistan to play sports anyway. They
were not particularly concerned the Border Patrol with making any
changes to reduce the number of migrants killed by border
patrol agents. Since two thousand and 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,

(01:59:51):
more and more migrants started dying in the Sonoran Desert.
In two thousand and four, the faith based organization No
More Deaths started leading gallant leaving gallon jugs of water
out near cop and 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

(02:00:13):
caches almost with visible glee. You can see one of
these videos for yourself and the PBS documentary Need to Know.
Salon dot COM's description is quite good. Quote. Three Border
Patrol agents, two men and a woman are walking along
a migrant trail and approaching half a dozen one gallon
jugs of water. The female agent stops in front of
the containers and begins to kick them with force down

(02:00:34):
a ravine. The bottles crash against rocks, bursting open. She's smiling.
One of the agents watching her smiles as well, seeming
to take real pleasure in the spectacle. He says something
under his breath, and the word tonk is clearly audible.
Do you know what tonk means?

Speaker 3 (02:00:47):
I don't.

Speaker 2 (02:00:48):
So we talked about wetback in episode one and how
that was the Border Patrol's old term for particularly Mexican immigrants,
because of the river they have to cross. Tonk is
new the new slur that the Border Patrol uses for
a documented immigrants, and it comes from the sound that
a flashlight makes when you hit someone in the head.

Speaker 3 (02:01:08):
Oh my god, you'll hear.

Speaker 2 (02:01:11):
This if in any article you read about the modern
Border Patrol that they the word tonk is like their
standard term for migrants, and it's a term because of
what it sounds like when they beat these people with flashlights.

Speaker 3 (02:01:23):
Well, m okay, let me just process that.

Speaker 2 (02:01:30):
New 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 thousand person army, the largest federal
law enforcement agency in the country. There are actual armies
smaller than the Border Patrol and less well equipped. They're

(02:01:52):
the largest law enforcement agency in the country now, so
that's good. All those new officers had to be trained
up quick, and this did not lead 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

(02:02:12):
something to do with the fact that Border Patrol agents
are involved in more fatal shootings than any other federal
law enforcement agency. Yeah, you know, probably. It's not like
any federal lawenforcement agency is good about giving us numbers
about how many people they shoot, but probably they kill
more than any of the others.

Speaker 3 (02:02:29):
Okay, I believe it.

Speaker 2 (02:02:30):
Yeah. One senior DHS official even admitted to 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 twenty 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

(02:02:53):
definition of the word corruption so they wouldn't have to
admit to as many problems. When they were questioned by
Congress about all of the murder, it's yeah, wow again
under Obama, it's pretty much impossible. No, I just like, yeah, Like,

(02:03:15):
we're not even really gonna get into the Trump years
in this two parter because that's like a whole nother
thing to start talking about. Yeah, like most of this
that we're talking about today, I mean it's Reagan Bush Senior,
Clinton Bush Junior, and Obama, Right, those are the guys
that this is happening under. Those are the guys funding
this right enthusiastically. All of the politicians that everybody thinks

(02:03:39):
are fine now because Trump is such a such a
dick anyway. Yeah, it's pretty much impossible to exaggerate how
bad Border patrol ISNT. Was like, I'm gonna guess that
most of our listeners come from a broad position that
like Feds are not good, which is fine and accurate.
But even among that company, like even if you're like, oh,

(02:04:00):
federal agents are pretty much all bad, it's shocking how
bad the agents of the CBP are. It's like, it's
staggering how shitty they particularly become in the aughts. And
I'm going to quote from Salon again. There was the
Miami CBP officer who used his law enforcement status to
bypass airport security and personally smuggle cocaine and heroin into Miami.

(02:04:24):
There was the green uniformed agent in Yuma, Arizona, who
was caught smuggling seven hundred 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 in Del Rio, Texas. The thirty
two year old border patrol agent whose wife would tip
him off on which buses filled with illegal immigrants to

(02:04:46):
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 months into the job after he sold smugglers
those maps fifty five hundred dollars. In November two thousand
and seven, CBP official Thomas Winkowski wrote an agency wide

(02:05:06):
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 CBP investigations

(02:05:27):
uncovered that the agency had, in dozens of cases, hired
members of Mexican drug cartels and gangs like MS thirteen
to be agents. They'd 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 is also
suspected of kidnapping a woman. We'll never really know the
exact extent of his crimes, and in that regard he

(02:05:48):
fits in with another border patrol veteran Esteban Manzanares. It
is possible that Estebon Manzanares was not a serial killer.
He hasn't been convicted of any murders, 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. And yeah, earlier this year, in appeals court
ruled that his victims could not sue the federal government

(02:06:09):
as Mensinares 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 acting as a border patrol agent.

Speaker 3 (02:06:27):
Oh wow, the mental gymnastics as people do.

Speaker 2 (02:06:33):
Just legal ones.

Speaker 3 (02:06:36):
Yeah, okay, yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:06:38):
Now, the good news is that a few bad apples
like Manzanares and Arties, and also all of the thousands
of agents who got arrested on an early daily basis
for seven straight years didn't stop the orchard from detaining
more migrants than ever before. During the Obama years, DHS
deported more undocumented migrants than ever four hundred thousand a year.
As President Obama said in twenty eleven, the presence of

(02:07:01):
so many illegal immigrants make a mockery of all those
who are trying to immigrate legally. Now, yeah, that's good, mama,
it's pretty cool. It's pretty cool. What a problem this was. Yeah,
so and again, all of these legal immigrants make a
mockery of everyone trying to immigrate illegally. The data shows

(02:07:23):
that during this period, this 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 attempted murder to you know, drug smuggling.
Like every day a border patrol agent basically was getting
arrested during these years. But that's not making a mockery

(02:07:45):
of life, right, law enforcement or whatever. Yeah, yeah, Now,
there were a number of reasons why things got so
bad in border patrol. We've talked about some of them,
just sort of like the inherent racist nature of the
existence of the Border patrol. But there are also just
sort of some some reasons that you would describe as

(02:08:07):
kind of broadly bureaucratic. There were a bunch of bureaucratic
reasons why it happened to right, kind of outside of
the inherent, you know, problems of policing a border. For
one point, like, they were increasing the size of the
Border Patrol faster than any law enforcement agency had ever
been increased, and that meant bringing in a shitload of

(02:08:28):
people who weren't qualified. They had all of this money,
and they did not have enough people who could actually
responsibly do the job. So they were just throwing people
in chairs and giving them guns and badges. Now, the
issues of hiring a bunch of people for an agency
based on assaulting non white people and giving them, you know,
broad powers, were compounded by structural problems within the like

(02:08:51):
the way the border patrol was set up. Most border
patrol men are agents. This differs from special agents, which
are the cool dudes like Fox Molder. 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

(02:09:13):
shittiest federal law enforcement agency, the dumping ground for all
of the violent assholes, our government doesn't like to make
them special agents. According to Politico Quote. In many ways,
the difference between the two is CBP's original sin, a
seemingly minor technical distinction made in the harried heat of
DHS creation a decade ago, that would allow hundreds of
cases of corruption in CBP's Office of Field Operations and

(02:09:35):
use of force abuses in the Border Patrol offestor for years.
The problem was that no one at 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 oh one authority, a lesser classification that allowed border
patrol agents and customs officers to make arrests an enforced

(02:09:58):
federal law, but not in investigate. They could be cops
but not detectives. This didn't particularly matter, and the daily
performance of CBP's 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

(02:10:19):
in running the CBP agrees, like, yeah, this is a
real big problem because it means that they're even less
accountable than other law enforcement agencies because those 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.

Speaker 3 (02:10:40):
Wow, no accountability, Holy crap.

Speaker 2 (02:10:45):
Yeah. Yeah, other law enforcement agencies look at Border Patrol
and go Jesus Christ, those people are unaccountable when they
commit acts of unspeakable violence.

Speaker 3 (02:10:54):
That is bleak. That's bleak, very bleak.

Speaker 2 (02:10:58):
By twenty twelve, the problems in Border Patrol were obvious
enough that they spilled out into the public's fear. The
Arizona a Public conducted an investigation which showed that agents
had killed at least forty two people, thirteen of whom
were citizens, since two thousand and five. In none of
these killings was any agent known to effaced consequences of
any kind. Congressional pressure forced the agency to submit to

(02:11:18):
an investigation by the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington,
DC based law enforcement think tank. The PERF investigated sixty
seven cases of lethal force by Border Patrol agents. 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 PERF report advised, among other things,

(02:11:41):
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 Patrols saying in an interview,
I've known agents who have almost 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 Iraq.
I can't really find evidence of one being seriously injured

(02:12:02):
by Iraq either. What I can find is that in
twenty fourteen, CBP leadership estimated a full twenty percent of
their force was corrupt. Attempse at reform were made in
the last two years of the Obama administration, and in
twenty 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

(02:12:24):
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 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

(02:12:45):
racist right, with these CVP and BORTAC units set up
using Border patrol men being sent into American cities to
police dissent because they're the most dedicated and least accountable
and most violent law enforcement officers the country has. And yeah,
there's a lot more I could and should get into

(02:13:06):
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.

Speaker 3 (02:13:16):
Right, and yeah we're not even at the you know,
the whole the frenzy around Yeah, build the wall and
just like yack, yeah, yeah, so yeah, I guess that's
another podcast.

Speaker 2 (02:13:33):
Yeah, it's another kind of podcast. And I guess if
I'm gonna lead leave somewhere or in this somewhere, I
probably it would probably be good to end by talking
again about Harlan Carter for just a little bit. Do
you remember Harlan Carter. He was the former Border Patrol

(02:13:53):
head it was in charge during Operation Wetback, and who
was a convicted murderer in nineteen thirty one, he shot
a Mexican boy in the chest. So yeah, the young
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 line in it

(02:14:15):
about Harlan Carter. You know, this former head of the
Border Patrol who goes on by the way to become
the head of the NRA and is like one of
the guys in charge of the NRA when it turns
into the NRA 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 NRA
used to just be like a normal, pretty normal thing,

(02:14:35):
and then it turns into this crazy thing that it
is today, this quasei military or not quasi military, but
like this explicitly fascist organization urging political violence. Anyway, Harlan
Carter is the guy behind that too.

Speaker 1 (02:14:48):
So not somebody we'd want to get a drink.

Speaker 2 (02:14:51):
With, not somebody you'd want to get a drink with.
And there's there's a couple of lines about him in
this song Raymond Casiana, which is named after the guy
that Harlan Carter killed, 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. He had the
makings of a leader of a certain kind of men

(02:15:13):
who need to feel the worlds against him, out to
get him if it can, men who's trigger pull their fingers,
of men who'd rather fight than win united in a revolution,
like in mind and like in skin. Yeah, yeah, it's
a good song.

Speaker 3 (02:15:28):
Mm hm, well good it a listen.

Speaker 2 (02:15:31):
So Caitlin, you wanna you wanna plug your pluggables?

Speaker 3 (02:15:35):
Sure well, thank you for enlightening me with this information.
A lot of it I did not know, so I
I appreciate now knowing depressing and upsetting though it may be,
it's good to be informed. You can follow me on

(02:15:56):
Twitter and Instagram at Caitlyn Dante, and you can check
out my podcast on this network called The Bechdel Cast.
So you know, that little conversation that Sophie and I
had at the beginning was a reference to that. We
talk about the representation of women in film. A yeah,

(02:16:19):
check check, check it all out, check it all out.

Speaker 1 (02:16:23):
And you can follow Robert on Twitter at I Write Okay.
You can follow this podcast on Twitter, at Instagram at
Bastards Pod. You can now email us at Behind the
Bastards at iHeartMedia dot com. And you can buy merch
at our Tea Public Store. You can also buy merch
from Caitlin and Jamie's Tea Public Store, which has some

(02:16:44):
of my absolute favorite items in the entire planet.

Speaker 3 (02:16:48):
This diicon.

Speaker 1 (02:16:49):
How's that for a plug?

Speaker 3 (02:16:52):
That great? Thank you, Sophie.

Speaker 2 (02:16:53):
Feminist icons. You know who else is a feminist icon?

Speaker 3 (02:16:57):
I can't wait to see who? You say?

Speaker 2 (02:16:58):
Dear Caitlin Durante.

Speaker 3 (02:17:00):
Oh thank you, all right, I'll.

Speaker 1 (02:17:04):
Say very very very very warmly.

Speaker 3 (02:17:08):
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (02:17:09):
That's the that's the episode Bye Guys.

Speaker 2 (02:17:12):
Episode.

Speaker 1 (02:17:16):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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Robert Evans

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