Published: February 10, 2021 Since its creation in 1924, the U.S. Border Patrol has been steeped in institutional racism and has committed violent acts with near impunity. The racial animus of U.S. immigration policy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century formed the foundation for the agency. Federal laws banning Asian immigration were followed by the national origins quota system, which prioritized northern and western Europeans over the rest of the world. While not included in the original quotas, Mexicans, who previously could travel freely across the U.S.-Mexico border, began to experience increasing restrictions in the 1920s. Congress created the Border Patrol in 1924 to patrol the northern and southern borders between ports of entry. Many officers came from organizations with a history of racial violence and brutality, including the Ku Klux Klan and the Texas Rangers, carrying over the culture of a racist “brotherhood” into the new agency. In the Border Patrol’s early days, it focused on the unlawful entry of Asian and European immigrants. However, in the 1930s enforcement began to shift to Mexican citizens entering along the southern border. A culture of racism within the Border Patrol has persisted throughout its history. Repeated reports have surfaced of agents using racial slurs, sexual comments, and other offensive language. Various lawsuits and studies have demonstrated the Border Patrol’s use of racial profiling in stops within the interior of the United States. Agents have maintained connections to the white supremacist movement and the paramilitary SWAT-style Border Patrol Tactical Unit has been deployed to crack down on protests of police brutality against Black people. The Border Patrol began as a small agency, but its budget and deportations quickly skyrocketed. Over time, the agency targeted Mexican immigrants more aggressively, using a strategy of intensive enforcement directed at high-traffic areas. Beginning in the 1980s, the Border Patrol began a profound process of militarization and increased collaboration with other law enforcement agencies. The government began an official “prevention through deterrence” strategy in 1994, with the goal of making unlawful entry to the United States so dangerous as to discourage people from trying. The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks led to the restructuring of immigration agencies, putting the Border Patrol under the newly created Department of Homeland Security, further increasing the growth and militarization of the agency. The Border Patrol continues to perpetuate violence in the form of killing, sexual assault, excessive force, and verbal degradation—all with impunity. Despite these problems, the Border Patrol has lowered hiring standards to pursue rapid staff expansion. The Border Patrol often perpetrates violence through less direct means, including medical abuse and neglect, inhumane custody conditions, and family separation. Since its founding nearly 100 years ago, the Border Patrol has become a sprawling and immensely powerful law enforcement agency with a deeply entrenched culture of racism and abuse. Nevertheless, the agency has received ample funding from Congress and enjoys an extraordinary degree of independence. Revamping the agency will involve fundamentally reshaping how Border Patrol agents view themselves in relation to the different communities and groups of people they encounter along the border. Since its creation roughly a century ago, the U.S. Border Patrol has been steeped in institutional racism and committed violent acts with near impunity. The agency was tasked from the very beginning with rounding up immigrants deemed “racially undesirable,” namely migrants from China, other Asian countries, and nations in southern and eastern Europe. As time went on, migrants from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, the Caribbean Basin, and eventually Africa became the primary targets. Throughout its history, the Border Patrol has stereotyped and dehumanized the targets of its enforcement actions, often committing violence against them while suffering little or no legal consequences for this violence. The agency reveals little to the public or Congress about how it operates and largely gives its officers autonomy in the field. Border Patrol agents are rarely disciplined for misconduct, even when it results in death. Despite this lack of transparency and accountability, the budget, workforce, and arsenal of the agency have grown exponentially over the decades. The time is long overdue for vigorous oversight and strict adherence to the rule of law to rein in the Border Patrol’s excesses. Just as importantly, the Biden administration and Congress must work to change the culture of the Border Patrol so that its agents no longer perceive of themselves as being in a purely adversarial relationship with the people they encounter along the border. U.S. immigration policy has been based on racial expulsion from its very foundations. Beginning in the latter half of the nineteenth century and lasting into the 1940s, nativism directed against non-white immigrants swept across the nation. More precisely, nativist ire was directed against any immigrants who were not from northern and western Europe. The Chinese were the first to bear the brunt of the nativist backlash with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. But eventually all Asians, as well as immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, were defined as racially inferior to U.S.-born Anglos to help justify subjecting them to stringent restrictions on their entry into the United States. As the decades wore on, similar prejudice was directed against Mexicans and other immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean Basin who were deemed threatening to the cultural and economic interests of native-born people of western European descent. Eventually, once most Europeans began to be considered white, enforcement shifted to primarily target Mexican immigrants. Chinese workers were aggressively recruited to come to the United States in the mid-1800s and were especially fundamental in the construction of the railroads. Once these projects were complete, racism and economic recession combined and reached a national tipping point in the 1880s. The U.S. government justified the Chinese Exclusion Act by arguing that Chinese immigrants were taking jobs from native-born Americans and that they were inherently “savage, depraved, and lustful”—and therefore incapable of assimilation into U.S. society. Chinese exclusion remained the official policy of the U.S. government until 1943. The first concerted federal attempt at border control began in the wake of the Chinese Exclusion Act, as the Mounted Guard of Chinese Inspectors were placed along the northern and southern borders to ensure that ineligible Chinese immigrants did not enter the country without inspection. However, the outright exclusion of Chinese immigrants was just the beginning of a restrictionist immigration policy toward Asia. While other Asian laborers temporarily replaced the Chinese, they too were soon excluded through a diplomatic agreement with Japan in 1907 and the “Asiatic Barred Zone” from Afghanistan to the Pacific established in the Immigration Act of 1917. While only immigrants from Asia were subject to blanket exclusion from the United States, nativists also targeted southern and eastern Europeans for severe immigration restrictions. At the national level, this culminated in the Immigration Act of 1924, which created not only the Border Patrol, but also the discriminatory “national origins quota system.” Under this system, the number of immigrants from any nation who could be admitted each year was limited to 2% of the number of foreign-born individuals of that nationality who lived in the United States at the time of the 1890 census (not counting most Asians who were entirely barred from entry). The 1890 census was chosen because that was before millions of immigrants from Italy, Russia, Hungary, Greece, and other “undesirable” countries in southern and eastern Europe had started to arrive in the United States. As in the case of Chinese immigrants, European newcomers were commonly accused of being less intelligent and more prone to criminality, immorality, and disease than native-born Americans of northern and western European descent. Many Americans joined anti-immigrant associations and spoke out against the “degraded races” of Europe. A 1920 U.S. House of Representatives report accompanying a bill that would temporarily suspend immigration described Italian immigrants as “small in stature and of a low order of intelligence,” Dutch immigrants as “filthy un-American and often dangerous in their habits,” [and] Polish immigrants as “physically deficient…exist[ing] in squalor and filth, mentally deficient, [and] socially undesirable.” This rhetoric was disguised in the pseudo-science of eugenics, which purports to prove scientifically that whites are inherently superior to other races and “race betterment” can be achieved through selective breeding. While eugenic theories were widely discredited in scientific circles over the ensuing decades, the national origins quota system remained the bedrock of U.S. immigration policy until 1965. The Demonization of Mexican Immigrants In the early 1900s, Mexicans were subjected to the same racist stereotypes as all other “non-white” people. Yet Mexican immigrants were not subject to numerical restriction or outright exclusion from the United States because they met the labor needs of the agricultural sector in the southwest United States and the foreign policy interests of the federal government. As a result, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Mexicans traveled freely between the United States and Mexico, allowing for socially unified binational border communities. But that began to change with passage of the Immigration Act of 1917, which doubled the head tax and imposed a visa fee, literacy test, and health examination on all foreigners seeking entry into the United States. Mexican nationals were exempt from these requirements until 1919, after which many began to enter without inspection to avoid them. Even after these legal restrictions came into force, federal officials often ignored them in the case of Mexican migrant workers, who were pivotal to the southwestern economy of the United States. The list of restrictions on Mexican immigration began to grow during the 1920s. The Immigration Act of 1924 did not restrict Mexican immigration directly but removed the statute of limitations on deportation as a penalty for unauthorized entry into the country without a visa or inspection. The 1924 Act also required that all immigrants pass through a port of entry, thereby creating—for the first time—the possibility that Mexicans could “illegally” enter the United States. This rapidly fueled a nativist discourse of Mexican immigrants as criminals, with the Commissioner General of Immigration stating in 1925 that their “first act upon reaching our shores was to break our laws by entering in a clandestine manner.” Another immigration official stated, “It is easier and sometimes appears even more necessary for [a wetback] to break other laws since he considers himself to be an outcast, even an outlaw.” Over time, the concept of the “illegal alien” melded with racist stereotypes about Mexicans in general. Supporters of eugenics pushed for an end to Mexico’s quota exemption, arguing that Mexicans were “mongrels” and “inassimilable racial inferiors.” It was against this backdrop that Congress created the Border Patrol in 1924 for the purpose of patrolling the border between inspection stations. The agency was within the Department of Commerce and Labor, as part of the Bureau of Immigration, which was later combined with the Bureau of Naturalization to form the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Approximately one-quarter of new Border Patrol recruits were transferred from the Mounted Guard. Many of the other new Border Patrol officers came from organizations with a history of racial violence and brutality, including the Ku Klux Klan and the Texas Rangers. While the racial violence of the Ku Klux Klan is notorious, the Texas Rangers also had a penchant for violence. The Rangers had abused their power through their repeated restructurings in the nineteenth century, as informal security for white settlers against Indigenous nations in Mexican Texas, citizen soldiers defending the succeeded Republic of Texas against Mexico, and then as state police after the Civil War. During the 1918 Porvenir massacre, a group of Rangers killed 15 Mexican men alleged to have participated in the raid of Brite Ranch. A 1919 investigation by Texas legislator José Tomás Canales concluded that anywhere from 300 to 5,000 people—mostly of Mexican descent—had been killed by the Texas Rangers between 1910 and 1919. The Rangers carried their “masculine and highly racialized…tradition of violence” into the culture of the Border Patrol. This included a brutal practice known as “revenge by proxy,” in which agents killed anyone they believed to be of Mexican descent as revenge for crimes committed by perpetrators believed to be Mexican. Nevertheless, Clifford Perkins—the first Border Patrol inspector in charge in El Paso, Texas—called the methods employed by the Rangers “rough but effective,” contributing to a culture of impunity that exists within the agency to this day. In the Border Patrol’s early days, the agency focused on the unlawful entry of Asian and European immigrants from the northern border, since most illegal migration took place through Canada—not Mexico. However, in the 1930s and 1940s enforcement began to shift to the growing number of Mexican citizens entering the United States without inspection along the southern border. From the beginning, the Border Patrol “brotherhood” has consistently perpetuated an internal culture of racism. To maintain whiteness within its ranks, the Border Patrol pushed out many officers who had close ties to the surrounding Mexican communities. In 1927 in the El Paso district, only one patrol inspector out of 34 was Mexican American. Meanwhile, half of the Border Patrol officers in Laredo, Texas were of Mexican descent. The Border Patrol subsequently forced out all Mexican American officers in the Laredo district and replaced them with former Texas Rangers, thereby cutting ties with the local Mexican American elite. While the agency later improved its hiring diversity, it has failed to meaningfully address the role of racism in its history. Since the agency’s inception, the Border Patrol has targeted people in border communities for enforcement on the basis of their physical appearance—what one officer described as “Mexican male; about 5’5” to 5’8”; dark brown hair; brown eyes; dark complexion”—or what immigration historian Kelly Lytle Hernández calls “M