Hi folks. I'm Ian Gordon, an editorial director here at Mother Jones.
In the spring of 1924, shortly after passing an exclusionary immigration law known as the National Origins Act, Congress earmarked $1 million for "additional land-border patrol." The country’s newest law enforcement agency staffed up so quickly that it didn’t bother with a test for new recruits—and then watched as many of them suddenly quit.
It was an inauspicious start, and it foreshadowed the Border Patrol’s longtime status as a bureaucratic backwater. Even as late as 1993, the Border Patrol employed only 4,000 agents nationwide. Then came 9/11. As "securing our borders" became a key component of the new national security paradigm, the Border Patrol became the beneficiary of extreme largesse. Yet the oversight necessary to manage a ballooning federal agency—let alone one that for decades had made its own rules—never really caught up.
The Border Patrol added thousands of agents, and scandals quickly followed. Infiltration by cartels. Corruption. Assault. Rape. Murder. Within a few years, the Border Patrol had become one of the nation’s largest, and least accountable, law enforcement agencies. At the same time, the US-Mexico border became even more politicized. And then Donald Trump entered the fray.
Trump’s latest campaign relies on a familiar script: decrying an “invasion” at our southern border, calling for mass deportations, and still promising to build that wall. The Border Patrol is once again a key part of his plans. So for our September+October issue, we investigated the agency’s sharp growth, its troubling record on civil liberties, its culture of impunity, and its role in shaping the current political moment—one that echoes the anti-immigrant fever that led to the agency’s creation a century ago.
—Ian Gordon
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