In a major overhaul of immigration enforcement leadership, the Trump administration is replacing nearly half of top leaders at ICE offices across the country with current or retired Border Patrol officers.
For months, masked immigration agents have brought terror to communities across the U.S., arresting parents in carpool lines, dragging people into unmarked vans, threatening protestors, and arresting elected officials. So far, there has been no governmental accountability for these tactics.
Instead, the Trump administration is ramping up enforcement by pulling in staff from an even more aggressive agency. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has long been criticized for its culture of cruelty, racism, and impunity for human rights violations. Its subagency, Border Patrol, has been at the center of these complaints. This is the same agency that implemented President Donald Trump’s 2017 family separation policy, where infants and toddlers were stripped from their parents’ arms. As immigration raids escalate and become more brazen and aggressive, the decision to put the country’s most lawless agency in charge of immigration enforcement in major cities is an alarming escalation. And we are already seeing the effects. They’ve launched tear gas in residential neighborhoods in Chicago and Portland, rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter into an apartment building to arrest families at night, violently attacked U.S. citizens, and used predator drones to surveil protests, predator drones to surveil protests.
Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino leads federal agents through the streets outside a federal building during a protest in Broadview, Illinois.
Daniel Powell/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock
U.S. Border Patrol is a lawless agency with a history of abuses
CBP is one of the world's largest law enforcement organizations with 60,000 agents, including nearly 20,000 Border Patrol agents. H.R. 1,Trump’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” provided funding to hire another 10,000 Border Patrol agents in July. Border Patrol has historically focused on immigration enforcement and drug interdiction at or near the borders with Mexico and Canada, where it operates checkpoints, roving patrols, and aerial surveillance.
For years, Border Patrol agents have engaged in reckless, abusive, unconstitutional conduct in their limited zone of authority and have rarely faced accountability for abuses. In the last 15 years, nearly 200 people have died as a result of encounters with Border Patrol: that includes 70 use-of-force cases, six people killed in cross-border shootings with no impunity, and more than 100 fatalities from Border Patrol-led car chases. Upon taking office, the Trump administration rescinded a hard-won agency policy to restrict these dangerous car chases.
Among those shot and killed by an on-duty agent was 16-year-old Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez. In 2012, Jose was shot approximately 10 times through the border fence by a U.S. Border Patrol agent while walking home from playing basketball. He was shot in the back and died on the sidewalk, only a few blocks from his home. In 2023, Border Patrol agents shot Raymond Mattia nine times, killing him outside his home on tribal lands in Arizona.
No agent has ever been convicted of criminal wrongdoing while on duty, despite documented deaths, excessive use of force during arrests, inadequate medical care, and deaths in Border Patrol custody due to neglect. The agency has a longstanding crisis of accountability. A decade ago, CBP’s former internal affairs chief warned that the agency “goes out of its way to evade legal restraints” and is “clearly engineered to interfere with our efforts to hold the Border Patrol accountable.”
During Trump’s first term, a Facebook group of current and former Border Patrol agents joked about migrant deaths and posted sexist and graphic memes about women in Congress. Since then, the agency has received more funding, more surveillance and military equipment, and now more power. It has never received real oversight or legal accountability. And now the agency is in charge of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s main operation: mass deportation.
Trump is deploying Border Patrol agents away from the U.S. border
Over the last several months, Miller and Trump have cannibalized federal agencies to build an unprecedent federal police force. The administration has primarily focused on terrorizing cities and arresting, detaining, and deporting immigrants. The face of these sprawling operations is Gregory Bovino, the El Centro Sector Border Patrol chief whose aggressive raids in California appear to have won him a leadership role in the new interior operations. Bovino oversaw CBP operations in L.A. this June and was subsequently put in charge of the administration’s operation in Chicago. Just last week, Bovino himself threw a tear gas cannister in a residential neighborhood, captured on video. Agents under his command have used increasingly aggressive tactics, like punching a restrained man, and pulling dozens of U.S. citizens and children from their beds in a nighttime apartment raid.
Border Patrol’s elevation in this new enforcement regime is dangerous. And that danger is multiplied further through the 287(g) program. This program allows state and local police to enter into agreements with the federal government that allow them to participate in certain immigration enforcement activities under federal supervision and training. That is, instead of the state and local policing work that taxpayers hired them to do. More than 1,000 state and local police agencies are now part of that program.
But now, local police wouldn’t just be collaborating with ICE. They could be supervised and “trained” by Border Patrol officials in their new immigration enforcement roles. This is alarming, given Border Patrol’s culture of abuse, its track record on use of force, its lack of experience in the nation’s interior, and its apparent disdain for accountability and the rights of even U.S. citizens.
It’s no accident that Miller and Trump have put Border Patrol at the head of their politicized and violent immigration enforcement campaigns. As one former Department of Homeland Security official said, the replacement of career ICE officials is “designed to silence dissent and clear the field for Bovino’s task forces.” Cities and states should refuse to participate in this administration’s campaign of terror, and members of Congress must hold Border Patrol accountable, especially now that it is becoming Trump’s personal police force.
Comments
Post a Comment