Robert Evans (39:28)
Yeah, it's a complicated history here and I, 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, Kelly Little Hernandez, author of the book Migra A history of the U.S. border Patrol. 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 particular around like the 40s 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 illegal immigration. They start to like, solidify as a voting bloc 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, were white dudes, and it would probably be fair to call them white supremacists. And as the years went by, our government gave them increasing powers to exercise racism with state of authority behind it. From a write up in the Intercept quote, while the 1924 immigration law spared Mexico a 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 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 shaved, 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 hundred men during its early years, and its reach along a 2000 mile line was limited, but over the years, its reported brutality grew as the number of agents 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, active in border towns from Texas to California. Practically every other member of El Paso'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. If you ask me, we keep coming back to the KKK and how it repeatedly infiltrated law enforcement. Mm, Someone maybe ought to do something about that. So for its first 10 years of existence, the Border Patrol operated under the authority of the Department of Labor. And when FDR was elected, he appointed Frances Perkins to be Secretary of Labor. And she tried to curtail the violence of the border pat and reform it. And this didn't really work out in the long run. She attempted to cut down on 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 wouldn't be subject to quotas in the 1924 immigration law. But there's a reason behind it. Because these folks had wanted these, you know, 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 1926, the Mexican is a homer. Like the pigeon, he goes home to roost. And Frizzell's promise had been that Mexicans weren't really immigrants, and thus they should be exempt from the USA's white supremacist immigration law. 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 1930s, Mexicans had started to settle all across the Southwest, buying homes and starting communities in places like Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. In 1900, only about 100,000 Mexican immigrants had lived in the United States. By 1930, there were one and a half million Mexican immigrants in this country. So this starts to freak out a lot of white agriculturalists, 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. 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 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, you still needed a certain. As it. As 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 was Senator Coleman Livingston Bliss. He was a white supremacist congressman who first took office in 1925. And his solution was, rather than creating a system of quotas and caps that would 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 1929. That law is passed. And I'm going to quote from an article in the Conversation explaining what happened here. 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 to fines, imprisonment, and ultimately deportation. But it was a crime designed to impact Mexican immigrants in particular. Neither the Western agricultural businessmen nor the restrictionists registered any objections. Congress passed Blizz's bill, the Immigration act of March 4, 1929, 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 end of 1930, the U.S. attorney General reported prosecuting 7,000 cases of unlawful entry. By the end of the decade, U.S. attorneys had prosecuted more than 44,000 cases. Now, Blizz'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 of non Mostly nonviolent ethnic cleansing. Like, I don't even know if I know if I'd say mostly nonviolent. It was used for ethnic cleansing. Throughout the 1930s, Mexicans made up at least 85% of all immigration prisoners. Sometimes some years they made up 99%. Three new prisons were built on the border to hold them all. And over the course of the decade, somewhere around 1 million Mexicans were deported from the United States. And most of these people were US citizens. Historian Francisco Balderrama argues that 60% 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 happening in the 30s was Border Patrol was just rounding. Opening 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. For kicking them out. So that's cool.
