Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. For our September+October issue, we investigated the Border Patrol’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. Read the whole package here. The National Border Patrol Museum, which sits inside a squat building on a decommissioned bombing range on the edge of El Paso’s Franklin Mountains, has a musty and scattershot feel, as if one of America’s most troubled law enforcement agencies has just emptied its pockets at the end of a long, hard century. Seized and donated artifacts fill every available nook—a hang glider and DIY motorcycles used to haul drugs; a collection of ladders and climbing ropes for scaling fences. There is riot gear belonging to the Border Patrol agents who, deputized as US Marshals, helped James Meredith integrate the University of Mississippi. Near the entrance, looking a little lost, is a miniature Statue of Liberty that once belonged to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The museum, which is privately operated but enjoys a close relationship with the agency, is the final resting place of both Rocky, the drug-sniffing dog, and a remote-controlled robot called “R.A.D.”—short for “Robot Against Drugs”—that was introduced to schools in 1988. R.A.D. carried a squirt gun in its holster “to teach children not to play with guns”; it could also turn into a walk signal. Taken together, the museum’s exhibits and ephemera tell a simple story—of rugged, honorable men holding the line against disorder. Here, border security and immigration have been flattened into a binary of perps and heroes, and the agency absorbed into a kind of law-and-order monoculture. At the gift shop, alongside shot glasses embedded with bullets, you can buy a T-shirt with the “Thin Green Line” motif overlaid on the logo of Punisher—the serial-killing Marvel vigilante—or emblazoned on a Star Wars stormtrooper. On the day I visited, an ex-agent-turned-influencer had stopped by to show off a new, promotional gun. The line of “100th anniversary Tribute edition” rifles, available to active-duty or retired members for as little as $800, were a “token of support,” according to the Henry firearms company, for an agency on the front lines of an “ongoing national security border crisis.” The story of the Border Patrol’s founding offers a lesson for the century that followed, and a rejoinder to the agency’s modern myth: Chaos is not just the absence of a border; it is also the consequence of trying to maintain one. This image of the Border Patrol as a bulwark against anarchy is central to its identity. “If you don’t have a border, you don’t have a country,” former President Donald Trump often tells supporters. But we have not always had a Border Patrol. For much of the country’s existence, the southwestern border was guarded sporadically. Well into the 20th century it was hardly demarcated at all. Almost no one was searching for unauthorized immigrants because relatively few people were barred from entering. That dearth of rules at the federal level instilled a certain kind of order—when you can cross at a port, there is no need to die in the desert. It took nearly 100 years for the United States to pass its first major federal immigration restrictions. It was another half-century before there was a permanent force dedicated to policing them on the international boundary. Someone had to create it. His name was Claude Benton Hudspeth. Claude Benton Hudspeth, member of the US House of Representatives from Texas’ 16th districtNational Photo Company/Library of Congress/Wikimedia The efforts of a mostly forgotten rancher-turned-congressman from West Texas are worth reckoning with today because the debates on immigration and border policing from a century ago never ended. The Border Patrol was born out of migrant panics, drug wars, and clashes between saber-rattling states and the federal government. It was an era of mass deportations, suspensions of civil liberties, vigilante murders, and calls for an invasion of Mexico. The agency, and the landmark immigration-reform bill that nudged it into existence in May 1924, were backed by eugenicist politicians who feared a Great Replacement by “undesirable” immigrants. The story of the Border Patrol’s founding offers a lesson for the century that followed, and a rejoinder to the agency’s modern myth: Chaos is not just the absence of a border; it is also the consequence of trying to maintain one. To his contemporaries, Hudspeth was a kind of living relic, a “cowboy statesman” with less than a year of formal schooling who walked with a limp for most of his life on account of a steer-roping accident in his youth. He campaigned for office atop a pony named Sitting Bull and once took leave from Congress to lead a herd of Herefords several hundred miles across West Texas to a newly acquired ranch. As he rose to become one of the most powerful men in the state, that background served as more than political window dressing. It formed the backbone of his politics. The son of a county sheriff, Hudspeth spent his formative years running sheep and cattle on South and West Texas ranches that had, in recent memory, been violently wrested from Mexicans and Indigenous peoples. A sense of deadly disorder lurking across the line was instilled early. During a 1919 floor speech calling for a military occupation of Mexico, Hudspeth described riding across the Rio Grande with “peace officers” as a boy to retrieve stolen livestock. When he was 19, in 1896, in an episode that seems ripped from a John Ford movie, he and a brother assembled a crew and rode hundreds of miles to Ciudad Juarez to spring their half brother from jail. They claimed he was unjustly imprisoned; the evidence suggests he had a penchant for cattle rustling. At the time, crossing the river to stage a jailbreak was just a thing you could do. The border of Hudspeth’s youth bore little resemblance to the militarized surveillance state of today. The federal government had only begun to seriously restrict voluntary immigration in 1875, when it barred Chinese contract laborers and women “imported for the purposes of prostitution” from entering the country. As late as 1891, Harvard University professor Erika Lee writes in her history of Chinese exclusion, At America’s Gates, the California-Mexico border was patrolled by exactly three customs agents, whose primary focus was livestock. Alcohol was legal, and the federal government interfered little in the day-to-day comings and goings of many borderlands residents. There was no such thing as unlawful entry. Except for the Chinese, who were forced to present detailed paperwork upon their arrival, no one even needed passports. As late as 1891, the California–Mexico border was patrolled by exactly three customs agents, whose primary focus was livestock. This border was permeable, but the idea that it was “open” is also a myth, says University of Virginia historian S. Deborah Kang. In the absence of a large federal immigration bureaucracy, Kang notes, states and territories imposed their own rules, deporting undesirable Irish and restricting the movement of African Americans; the 1881 Chinese Exclusion Act—which banned almost all Chinese, not just contract laborers and “immoral” women—was passed only after California spent years attempting to accomplish the same thing. The US Army, whose far-flung units were sometimes referred to as a “border patrol,” powered white expansion by invading Mexico (on the pretext of defending a disputed boundary) and waging genocide against Native Americans. “And then on top of that, you have a lot of private violence or vigilante violence being deployed by settlers in that region,” Kang says. “Today, historians all see those forms of policing, whether public or private, as forms of border policing.” In Texas, complaints that the federal government wasn’t doing enough to secure its border were foundational. The state had even cited Washington’s failure to secure the border “against the Indian savages” and “the murderous forays of banditti from neighboring Mexico” in its 1861 articles of secession. By the time Hudspeth arrived in Austin in 1906, as a state senator representing 800 miles of the Rio Grande, a few dozen of the state’s most infamous lawmen had assumed much of the responsibility for patrolling the boundary. The Texas Rangers had been formed to keep enslaved people in and Indigenous peoples out. Hudspeth had briefly served with the Rangers, and he saw its members as the embodiment of what a border police force could be. Hudspeth spent his first years in office on matters of hyperlocal concern, pushing a bounty on wolf pelts and a ban on competitive cattle-roping. But the start of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 brought the interests of fellow ranchers and white borderlands residents to the forefront of state and national politics. At first, the dynamic on the border was inverted—federal troops tried to prevent Mexicans from leaving the United States to foment insurrection back home. But as refugees and raiding parties began heading north, white Texans demanded a more militant defense of their property. Just like their antebellum predecessors, Democrats in the state now rewrote their platform to demand the government protect them from “depredations by marauders from Mexico.” And much like Gov. Greg Abbott today, Texas’ actions were openly belligerent—feuding with Washington and threatening violence against Mexicans on both sides of the river. Hudspeth called for military intervention against the “lawless, howling mob” running Mexico and more funding for the men patrolling the border. Texas pushed to triple the size of the Ranger force and demanded President William Howard Taft pay for it. At one point after the state mobilized its National Guard, according to the historians Charles Harris and Louis Sadler, the War Department feared that Texas was actually going to invade Mexico. “If the federal government does not protect the border with troops,” Gov. Oscar Colquitt said in 1913, “the state of Texas will.” Artillery patrol on the Mexico border at Fort Brown in Brownsville, Texas, in 1916Bain News Service/Library of Congress Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa’s 1916 attack on Columbus, New Mexico, followed a year later by the United States’ entry into World War I, injected urgency and resources into the situation. Fearing a Mexican alliance with Germany, and a full-scale invasion of the Southwest, President Woodrow Wilson’s administration sent more than 100,000 soldiers to the border and dispatched scores of immigration agents and intelligence officers to watch for subversives—namely, German spies, Bolsheviks, and anarchists. In Arizona, a sheriff conducted a mass deportation of 1,000 striking mineworkers—many of them Mexican nationals—citing their support from the International Workers of the World and fears that they were allied with Villa. Meanwhile, Texas’ state government decided to build the border force it always wanted. In April 1917, Hudspeth pushed through a bill allocating $250,000 for 1,000 new Rangers, and an expanded National Guard. At his request, the state even created a special Ranger company, composed of ranch hands in his district. They were called the Hudspeth Scouts. This was border policing as Texas had always practiced it, less a matter of a line on a map than of identity and power. For Hudspeth, by now one of the state’s biggest ranchers, the unrest on the border was personal. Several of his constituents had been killed during “bandit” raids, including an old friend from his cowboy days. Rangers had been posted to his land. It was, undeniably, a dangerous time to run a ranch in the borderlands. But the Rangers protected the livestock and lives of white Texans by killing a lot of people and trampling the rights of those of Mexican descent. This was border policing as Texas had always practiced it, less a matter of a line on a map than of identity and power. Rangers seized firearms from Hispanic citizens. They shut down newspapers. In 1918 at Porvenir, a remote Rio Grande village in Hudspeth’s district, a force of Rangers, local ranchers, and U.S Cavalry, lined up 15 men and boys in the middle of the night and shot them. A flock of sheep at the US-Mexico border in the 1930sKeystone-France/Gamma-Keystone/Getty Border Patrol agents walk along a line of migrants waiting to turn themselves for processing after crossing the US-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas, in May 2023.Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty When the legislature convened hearings on the Rangers’ brutality in 1919, Hudspeth, who was about to go to Washington as a newly elected member of Congress, stopped in Austin to defend the force. “You cannot handle those Mexicans with kid gloves, not when they come 12 miles below El Paso and steal a milch cow every night or two,” he said. His prescription was simple: “You have got to kill those Mexicans where you find them.” The Porvenir massacre, he claimed—in defiance of the facts—was the work of honest lawmen and “good citizens” who were simply protecting their property. Hudspeth was playing a familiar part. He was, in a sense, the original Beleaguered Rancher of contemporary newscasts—sunburnt and sober, defending not just his property but, he intimated, the civilization that people like him had clawed out of the brush. (How they had clawed it away was not a matter to dwell on.) His constituents talked of moving their ranches 100 miles inland and sending their families away for safety. Without the Rangers, Hudspeth argued, the entire region might as well be ceded to the Mexicans. Increasingly, he and many others with far different backgrounds were starting to insist that if you didn’t have a patrol, you couldn’t really have a border. While Texas was taking matters into its own hands, Hudspeth arrived that spring at a Capitol that was preparing to tackle the border crisis head-on. In response to the Mexican Revolution and the Great War, Washington had shifted into overdrive to protect itself against the threat of an actual invading army. Now, a group of Democrats and Republicans wanted to go much further. The “invasion” they feared wasn’t from soldiers or cattle thieves. It was from immigrants. There had long been rumblings that the federal system for detecting the “surreptitious” entry of people was insufficient. Difficulties enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Act had led to the creation, in 1904, of a small Mounted Guard whose members were known as “Chinese Inspectors.” By 1914, the US Immigration Service argued that “contraband traffic and illegal entry of aliens can only be broken up by a general and complete organization of border patrol.” A few years later, Frank Ber