This is what the Border Patrol is meant to do...
...and Democrats & Republicans alike continue to approve of the agency's terror
(Photo by Paul Ratje / AFP)
We will spend the rest of this week focusing attention on the latest crimes against humanity committed by the United States government against people of color at our border. As nauseating as it is to see our Border Patrol police force attack, insult, and terrorize women, children, and men from Haiti seeking asylum instead of helping them through the asylum process it is important to realize just how normal this is for the federal law enforcement agency.
This is what the U.S. Border Patrol is. The agency was founded to appease anti-Mexican White supremacist lobbying groups, and was originally staffed with violent racist police officer zealots with prior records of abuse.
Since its founding, the agency has compounded that initial violence with a consistent and systemic pattern of abuse. The U.S. Border Patrol has been called “the most politicized and abusive branch of federal law enforcement.”
That’s a significant designation in a nation where the F.B.I. has been involved in the illegal spying on and assassination of Civil Rights leaders and where all police forces have joined together to create a “New Jim Crow” apartheid system that to this day incarcerates more people than any other nation on earth, and uses slave labor.
The US Border Patrol, which was caught this week on camera whipping, insulting and corralling Black asylum seekers like livestock, also currently operates ethnic concentration camps for Latin people. The agency also has a well-documented and horrifying culture of rape.
As shocking as the images of Border Patrol law enforcement officers brutally violating US and international law by denying asylum seekers their due process might be, this is normal for them. Make no mistake about it - this is what the US Border Patrol is.
Furthermore, this is who the United States is. Under Democratic control of the federal government, this federal agency remains what it was under Republican control, what it was built to be, and has subsequently always been - a well-funded, sanctioned, racist terrorist organization.
Border Patrol agency funding increases year after year regardless of who is in office because of bi-partisanship support for it in Congress. Since 2003, the Border Patrol’s funding has tripled, hitting an all-time high in 2021 of 17.7 billion.
That record-high of funding, approved by Democrats and Republicans alike, came after years of the agency’s abuse and illegal internment and kidnapping of Latin asylum seekers in concentration camps became widely known. Despite what they might tweet and say on television, liberals and conservatives alike keep giving the Border Patrol increased budgets to continue committing their well-documented crimes.
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