Ain’t That America
By 
Again, what ICE is doing is nothing that new in America except for expanding the operations of police violence onto white liberals who don’t like what is happening. As for state violence against immigrants, what is more American than that?
The violence, racial profiling and disregard for the Constitution that has burst into public view in Minneapolis is not new or unusual for the Border Patrol. This is how the agency has operated since it was created, though for decades those activities have been hidden in the remote borderlands. If you are uncomfortable with what the Border Patrol is doing in Minneapolis, you are uncomfortable with the Border Patrol, full stop.
While Immigration and Customs Enforcement has become the umbrella term for all immigration agents, the Border Patrol is the larger force with a longer history. ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations agents have the job of finding, detaining and deporting people. Border Patrol agents police areas in between ports of entry. Alex Pretti was shot by the Border Patrol; Renee Good was shot by ICE.
The Trump administration’s decision this week to replace the Border Patrol commander in Minneapolis, Gregory Bovino, suggested the problem was limited to leadership mistakes. But this move, and other possible solutions offered by the Trump administration and Democrats alike, does not adequately address the depth of the problem.
The tactics in Minneapolis have been used both on the border and beyond — to immigrants and citizens alike — during the Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden presidencies.
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How the Border Patrol operates can be traced back to the agency’s origins in Wild West frontier policing. The United States Border Patrol was established in May 1924, days after the signing of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which set very small quotas for immigrants from most of the world except Northern Europe. According to the Times headline at the time, the law was meant “to preserve racial type as it exists here today.”
Senator David Reed, a Pennsylvania Republican who sponsored the immigration act, explained in a 1925 Senate debate: “They have no right to go into an interior city and pick up aliens in the street and arrest them, but it is just at the border where they are patrolling that we want them to have this authority.” He reassured his concerned colleagues, “We are all on the alert against granting too much power to these officials to act without warrant.”
His promises proved empty. The first agents were hired from frontier law enforcement and brought with them a frontier ethos. One agent bragged in his memoir that he had killed 27 people, but that was just whites; he didn’t bother to count Black and brown people. Another agent, angered when a smuggler shot his partner, went to the Rio Grande and indiscriminately shot at every Mexican he could see on the other side of the river.
It goes on with the truth about the entire existence of the Border Patrol, an agency created to unleash often lethal violence against immigrants. Nothing more American than that.