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Nobody is Protected: How the Border Patrol became the Most Dangerous Police Force in the United States
Late one July night in 2020, armed men, identified only by the word POLICE written across their uniforms, began snatching supporters of Black Lives Matter off the street in Portland, Oregon, and placing them in unmarked vans. These mysterious actions were not carried out by local law enforcement or even right-wing terrorists, but by the U.S. Border Patrol. Why was the Border Patrol operating so far from the boundaries of the United States? What were they doing at a protest that had nothing to do with immigration or the border?
Nobody Is Protected: How the Border Patrol Became the Most Dangerous Police Force in the United States is the untold story of how, through a series of landmark but largely unknown decisions, the Supreme Court has dramatically curtailed the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution in service of policing borders. The Border Patrol exercises exceptional powers to conduct warrantless stops and interrogations within one hundred miles of land borders or coastlines, an area that includes nine of the ten largest cities and two thirds of the American population.
Mapping the Border Patrol’s history from its bigoted and violent Wild West beginnings through the legal precedents that have unleashed today’s militarized force, Guggenheim Fellow Reece Jones reveals the shocking true stories and characters behind its most dangerous policies. With the Border Patrol intent on exploiting current laws to transform itself into a national police force, the truth behind their influence and history has never been more important.
Nobody Is Protected: How the Border Patrol Became the Most Dangerous Police Force in the United States is the untold story of how, through a series of landmark but largely unknown decisions, the Supreme Court has dramatically curtailed the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution in service of policing borders. The Border Patrol exercises exceptional powers to conduct warrantless stops and interrogations within one hundred miles of land borders or coastlines, an area that includes nine of the ten largest cities and two thirds of the American population.
Mapping the Border Patrol’s history from its bigoted and violent Wild West beginnings through the legal precedents that have unleashed today’s militarized force, Guggenheim Fellow Reece Jones reveals the shocking true stories and characters behind its most dangerous policies. With the Border Patrol intent on exploiting current laws to transform itself into a national police force, the truth behind their influence and history has never been more important.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published July 5, 2022
About the author
Reece Jones
9 books63 followersReece Jones is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow and a Professor and the Chair of the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of Hawai‘i. He is the author of two award-winning books Border Walls (2012) and Violent Borders (2016) as well as over two dozen journal articles and four edited books. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Geopolitics and he lives in Honolulu with his family.
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July 13, 2023
In…Almeida-Sanchez v. United States in 1973, Justice Thurgood Marshall, an icon of the civil rights movement and the first Black man to serve on the Supreme Court, asked a series of questions that pressed the government’s lawyers about the true extent of the Border Patrol’s authority on American highways deep inside the United States. Unsatisfied with the response, Marshall finally asked if the Border Patrol could legally stop and search the vehicle of the president of the United States without any evidence or suspicion whatsoever. When the lawyer said “Yes,” Marshall concluded, “Nobody is protected.”--------------------------------------
The Border Patrol in their green uniforms, patrols between crossing points. Customs was renamed the Office of Field Operations, its agents, in blue uniforms, work at crossing points and in airports. Agents of a third unit of CBP, Air and Marine Operations (AMO), wear brown uniforms and manage the agency’s aircraft and ships. AMO’s authorization in the U.S. code differs from the Border Patrol in that it does not include any geographical limits, so they are able to operate anywhere in the country.So a few military-looking sorts in camo, with automatic weapons, rush up to you, grab you by both arms and stuff you into an unmarked van that speeds away. Only a general “Police” insignia on their uniforms, wearing shades at night, covering their faces, no explanation of why you are being abducted. Where are you? Russia? Turkey? The West Bank? How about Portland, Oregon, July 2020? What the hell was the Border Patrol doing in Portland anyway, at a demonstration protesting the police murder of George Floyd, an event having zero to do with immigration?
In Nobody is Protected, Reece Jones explains how it has come to be that an agency created to protect the border, and to deal with immigration issues has seen its domain grow to the point where it can operate in most of the country, and take on missions having absolutely nothing to do with crossing a border. What makes them particularly dangerous is that they do not live by the laws that govern the rest of the police forces in the nation. Do they need probable cause to stop your vehicle? Not really. How about a warrant? A BP agent laughs. Can they use racial profiling for selecting who to stop? Of course. That a problem? Oh, and they are now, taken together in their three parts, adding in ICE, the largest police force in the nation. Sleep tight.
Reece Jones - image from Counterpoint – photo by Silvay Jones
Jones looks at the history of border patrol efforts prior to the establishment of BP in 1924. He tracks the changes in the characteristics of the BP over time, while noting some of the traits that have not changed at all. The Texas Rangers of the early 20th century figure large in this, complete with reports of Ranger atrocities and their considerable representation in the Border Patrol once it was set up. As Mexico outlawed slavery long before the USA, one of the things the Rangers did was intercept American slaves trying to flee the country. The mentality persisted into the BP force, along with those Rangers. Jones offers reminders that the charge of the patrol was often racist, reflecting national legislation that sought to exclude non-white immigrants, with particular focus on Mexicans and Chinese. Exceptions were made, of course, to accommodate Texan farmers during the seasons when labor was needed. A guest worker program was established to compensate for many American men being away during World War II.
Willard Kelly, the Border Patrol chief at the time, told a Presidential Commission in 1950 that “Service officers were instructed to defer apprehensions of Mexicans employed on Texas farms where to remove them would likely result in the loss of crops.” Instead, they would focus on the period after the harvest in order to send the workers back to Mexico. Similarly, during economic downturns, the Border Patrol would step up enforcement to ensure the state did not have to provide for the unemployed laborers. These roundups would often happen just before payday, so agribusinesses got the labor and the agents got their apprehension quotas, but the Mexican workers were not paid.Outside the illuminating history of the force itself, much of what Jones offers here is a delineation of the laws that define where BP responsibilities and limitations lie, looking particularly closely at several Supreme Court decisions.
We have all heard of Roe v Wade and Brown v the Board of Ed, cases decided (some later undecided) by the Supreme Court (SCOTUS), that were major legal landmarks. Roe established a right of privacy that made abortion legal across the nation. Brown established that separate-but-equal was not a justification for continuing segregation in public schools. There are many such landmark cases. In Nobody is Protected, Reece Jones looks at the rulings that have allowed the Border Patrol to become a dangerous federal police force, subject to far fewer limitations than any other police force in the nation. These cases, while not household names like Roe and Brown, are of considerable importance for the civil rights of all of us, not just immigrants. In Almeida-Sanchez v. United States in 1973, SCOTUS allowed the BP to search a vehicle without any justification. In its 1975 decision in The United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, SCOTUS was ok with agents using racial profiling for selecting vehicles to stop. In 1976, SCOTUS held in The United States v. Martinez-Fuerte that BP could establish checkpoints in the interior of the USA and detain anyone to ask about their immigration status.
So you live nowhere near the border, right? Shouldn’t impact you. But hold on a second. By administrative fiat, BP was granted a one hundred mile border zone. And not just from the expected Mexican and Canadian borders, but from the edge of the land of the USA. So, this means that two thirds of the population of the United States falls within BP’s rights-light border zone. Fourth Amendment? What fourth amendment?
Jones reports on a crusader named Terry Bressi, an astronomer who has been stopped 574 times (as of the writing of the book) while driving to work at an interior checkpoint. He got fed up and started videotaping all his interactions with checkpoint law enforcement, for posting on line. They did not like that. They hated even more that he knew his rights and stood up to bullying by local cops who had been assigned to the checkpoint.
You will learn a lot here. About a policy of Prevention through Deterrence that channeled thousands of would be immigrants and asylum seekers away from normal points of entry, toward perilous crossings. And if they should not survive the effort? Sorry, not our problem. And they try to interfere with people who simply want to save the lives of those coming into our country at risk of their own lives.
In addition to failing to properly search for missing people in the border zone, the Border Patrol also actively disrupts efforts by humanitarian agencies. Beyond the destruction of water drops and aid stations, they often refuse to provide location information to other rescuers, deny access to interview people in Border Patrol custody who were with the missing person, and harass search teams in the border zone.You will learn of agency mission creep, from border control to drug enforcement to testing for radiation in vehicles (which catches a lot of cancer patients, but so far no dirty bomb terrorists) to actions that are blatantly political in nature and patently illegal.
As No More Deaths volunteer Max Granger, explained, “The agency itself is causing the deaths and disappearances. Any response, even if it is a more robust response, is going to be inadequate. Their entire overarching prevention through deterrence policy paradigm requires death and suffering to work. They are not invested in saving people’s lives.
I expect you will not be shocked to learn that abuse by BP personnel goes largely unpunished. No action against the agent was taken in over 95% of cases of reported abuse. When the Inspector General for the agency tried to investigate the 25% of BP deaths-in-custody that were deemed suspicious, he was stopped (this last bit is from the This Is Hell interview, not the book).
The BP manifests a Wild West mentality that is not much changed from when it was staffed with slave hunters and disgruntled confederates. One thing that has changed is the increasing politicization of immigration by fear-mongering Republican demagogues, and the increased concern over national security brought about by 9/11. There are vastly more agents on the force today. In the 1970s, for example, there were only about fifteen hundred BP agents. Today, just in the BP wing of Customs and Border Patrol (CPB) there are almost twenty thousand. The Field Operations branch adds another twenty thousand, and the Air and Marine Operations branch tops that off with another eighteen hundred. Another twenty thou in ICE, and it gets even larger. Jones may not be entirely correct when he says that the Border Patrol, per se, is the largest police force in the USA, but when these four connected wings are considered as one, ok, yeah, it is.
Jones offers some do-able solutions in addition to proposing legislative changes that might rein in this growing giant, and increasing threat to the rights of all Americans. It is usual for books on policy to toss out solutions that have zero chance of seeing the light of day. So, sensibility here is most welcome.
I have two gripes with the book. There needed to be considerable attention paid to the SCOTUS decisions that have allowed the BP to expand its legal domain. But Jones dug a bit too deep at times, incorporating intel that slowed the overall narrative without adding a lot. In fact, a better title for this might have been The Gateway to Absolute Police Power: SCOTUS and the Border Patrol. Second is that there is no index. Maybe not a big deal if one is reading an EPUB and can search at will, but in a dead-trees-and-ink book, it is a decided flaw.
Bottom line is that Reece Jones has done us all a service in reporting on how a federal police agency has grown way larger than it needs to be, has accumulated more power than it requirea to do its job, and has used that power to feed itself, to the detriment of the nation. He points out in the interview that border security has become an “industrial-complex” much like its military cousin, albeit on a smaller scale, with diverse public and private vested interests fighting to sustain and expand the agency, regardless of the value returned on investment. It is a dark portrait, but hopefully, by Jones shining some light on it, changes might be prompted that can rein in the beast before it devours what rights we have left.
Despite the transformation of the border in the public imagination, the people arriving there are largely the same as they always were. The majority are still migrant farm and factory workers from Mexico. In the past few years, they have been joined by entire families fleeing violence in Central America. These families with small children, who turn themselves in to the Border Patrol as soon as they step foot in the United States, in order to apply for asylum, pose no threat and deserve humane treatment. However, that is not what they have received. As journalist Garrett Graf memorably put it, “CBP went out and recruited Rambo, when it turned out the agency needed Mother Teresa.”Review first posted – 7/29/22
Publication dates
----------Hardcover - 7/5/22
----------Trade paperback - 7/11/23
I received a hardcover of Nobody is Protected from Counterpoint in return for a fair review. Thanks, KQM.
This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi!
=============================EXTRA STUFF
Links to the Reece Jones’s personal and Twitter pages
Profile - from Counterpoint
REECE JONES is a Guggenheim Fellow. He is a professor and the chair of the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of Hawai’i. He is the author of three books, the award-winning Border Walls and Violent Borders, as well as White Borders. He is the editor in chief of the journal Geopolitics and he lives in Honolulu with his family.
Interview
-----This is Hell - Nobody is Protected / Reece Jones - audio – 52:10 - by Chuck Mertz – this is outstanding!
Items of Interest
-----Borderless - excerpt
-----The Intercept – 7/12/19 - BORDER PATROL CHIEF CARLA PROVOST WAS A MEMBER OF SECRET FACEBOOK GROUP by Ryan Deveaux
-----No More Deaths - an NGO doing humanitarian work at the border
-----Holding Border Patrol Accountable: Terry Bressi on Recording his 300+ Checkpoint interactions (probably over 600 by now)
-----My review of The Line Becomes a River, a wonderful memoir by a former BP agent
-----Washington Post - September 18, 2022 - How to prevent customs agents from copying your phone’s content by Tatum Hunter
June 26, 2022
In the United States, people look overseas, puzzled at the numerous national police forces used by corrupt or ideological governments to control the citizenry or foist a reign of terror on everyone. This could never happen in the USA, as police are constitutionally local or state institutions. Federal forces like the FBI and the National Guard have very specific and limited mandates and jurisdictions. But in Nobody is Protected, Reece Jones shows that the USA is building a national police force, already nearly 20,000 strong, which has the self-delegated mandate to completely ignore the constitutional rights of citizens and in particular the 4th amendment on unreasonable search and seizure.
The poster child for this ominous mess is the Department of Homeland Security and it border patrol, the CBP (Customs and Border Protection). Mandated to find undocumented entrants to the USA, it has spread itself to the interior of the country, expanded its purview to spying, drugs and protesters, and multiplied its staff out of all proportion to its needs. In a thorough and intensive (not to mention engrossing) examination of its operations, Jones found that most agents have all but nothing to do all day long except doomscrolling. And hassling people. But they’re ready to crack skulls on demand.
In order to make some use of all those agents, the force has been expanding its role, without any basis. It now operates drones, for example, to track the movements and meetings of environmentalists within the country, as well as political protesters. It sells the video to other forces. It encircled the funeral of George Floyd in Texas with a shoot-to-kill mandate if it received violent pushback. It has set up a good hundred highway checkpoint blockades, where agents eyeball drivers and passengers. The slightest suspicion (from avoiding eye contact to staring at the officer) will cause them to pull the vehicle over, and set drug-sniffing dogs on it and in it.
Worse possibly, it has spread this unconstitutional interference in daily life to its ever-expanding territory, currently 100 miles inland from any border or shore. This takes in two thirds of the population of the country. This is not border protection by anyone’s definition. And it involves absolutely anyone just driving to work. Asked at the Supreme Court if they could stop and search the president’s car, the answer was yes. It was at that point that Justice Thurgood Marshall said, then “no one is protected,” giving this book its title.
During the Trump administration, the president encouraged the CBP to interfere in protests in cities like Portland, Oregon. It rented unmarked vans that non-uniformed and non-identifiable officers kidnapped people off the streets, drove them far away from the action, and dumped them. Without charges, due process, identification, or anything. In crystal clear violation of the 4th amendment on unreasonable search and seizure by the government. Not to mention the interruption or curtailment of free speech. This is exactly why a national police force is to be avoided.
In the case of the highway checkpoints, the CBP often invites local police to participate, handing out tickets for anything they feel like, and nothing at all to do with illegal immigrants, who are few and far between. This annoys literally millions of Americans every day, subject to this neverending harassment.
And when I say harassment, Jones gives an extraordinary example. Terry Blessi is an astronomer at the University of Arizona. Using a university-marked truck, he drives up to the observatory, and must stop at the CBP checkpoint. On his 283rd stop, he had had enough. He refused to answer the silly questions, and was eventually waved through anyway because he was holding up the line. An officer then chased him, stopped him and arrested him for it. For holding up the line. By this time Blessi had long stopped using the university’s truck, and equipped his own with cameras. He had been posting the videos on Youtube, and the arresting officer complimented him on them. He enjoyed them, just like he enjoyed his job arresting people. In court, as elsewhere, the officer explained he just loved stopping as many cars as he wanted and giving out tickets. Plus, this was a wonderful opportunity to do it for additional pay.
It seems the CBP obtained huge funding from the federal government to pay local police to staff their blockades for them. It has co-opted and dragged local forces into manning and operating its facilities, even though the local cops aren’t there for immigration infractions. Just like the CBP is not there for drug busts. That’s how twisted the whole thing has become. The story of Blessi the astronomer goes on for ten pages, getting ever more surreal as it goes. It’s a cross between 1984 and Brazil, but it’s live in the USA. A daily insult to all.
Jones also provides a remarkable list of celebrities who have been stopped and charged – not with illegal entry, but with drugs or paraphernalia - on their road tours, or just personal trips, such as Snoop Dogg on his way to his son’s football game. The checkpoints bring in lots of drugs charges, but precious few illegal immigrants, which is supposedly their sole purpose and the only reason they are even allowed. There are so many drug charges that local police have changed their systems to simply ticket offenders because they can’t handle the trials of all the cases the CBP unloads on them hourly.
At one such stop called Sierra Blanca, on Interstate 10, 80% of the arrests are of American citizens, not immigrants. And 88% of the charges are for minor drug possession, not illegal entry. And while the town has a population of less than 800, 2500 arrests are made annually. Jones does not say whether the town has been able to stop collecting taxes from its residents.
Similar blockades now appear in New England, to guard against all the infiltration by Mexicans from Québec. With similar results. In one study of the blockade in Woodstock, Vermont, none of those arrested on any charge had crossed from Canada. Jones says overall at Woodstock, less than one quarter of one percent of those arrested is Canadian.
Jones does not venture into the economics of it, but it is pretty obvious that millions of cars slowing and stopping on interstate freeways cost a huge amount in lost time, wasted gas, worn brakes, air pollution and general frustration over infringement of the freedom of movement inside the country.
The CBP has been aided in no small part by the US Supreme Court. In three key cases, Jones portrays the justices and their clerks, many of whom have since become well known in their own right, as they alone decided what powers the CBP should have and how they could use them. It is very detailed and character-driven, a fascinating look at the inner workings of the court and the mindset of its movers and shakers. And, unfortunately, how really bad decisions are made at the very top.
Specifically, Justice Potter Stewart, with no experience or expertise in such matters, wrote two of the key decisions, forever confusing the issues and leaving gaps the CBP could drive its trucks through. There is also the conflict with the Ninth Circuit (west coast), where the blockades in question are located, and the conflicts between those who try to uphold the Bill of Rights and those who ignore it at the Supreme Court. It makes for compulsive reading, a totally unexpected immersion and an additional reason why Nobody is Protected is an important and valuable book.
These ill-thought decisions, openly criticized by Justice William Brennan precisely for their unconscionable unconstitutionality, built on each other, giving the CBP the absolute right to racially profile at will. The result has been extreme discrimination against Latin Americans, in a police force not just comfortable with it but enjoying the racially specific work. Agents who don’t use the slurs for different nationalities become outcasts themselves, Jones quotes a former agent as saying. It’s that bro kind of atmosphere, nationwide.
They also kill with impunity. Again, courts have created absurd frameworks whereby officers cannot be held liable for shooting someone on the Mexican side of the border if the officer was on the US side. And unless both were on the US side, the victim’s family has no standing to sue at all. No surprise then that not a single CBP officer has been convicted of killing any of the 119 people it has murdered since 2010.
CBP agents sport other disappointing stats too. They themselves are arrested at five times the rate of regular police officers, Jones says. And about one a day is arrested for child pornography or domestic violence while off-duty. And while on-duty officers get charged for sexual shenanigans with detainees, the agency ignores 95% of those cases. This is not the A-Team.
One of the problems, the big one, is there is little or no need for the CBP at all. Arrests of illegal immigrants have plunged to microscopic levels as the number of agents has rocketed. Today, Jones says, the average CBP agent brings in one illegal immigrant every 11 shifts. That means barely two a month. Meanwhile, total arrests have sunk by 75%. (The agency called ICE handles the actual border crossings where most of the detentions take place.) So management needed to find things for their people to do.
The stories of agents swarming cities in Wisconsin with nothing to do are not legend; they are accurate. Jones tells the story of an agent there who overheard two Hispanic women actually speaking Spanish to each other, right in public, and detained them for it. He called for backup and supervision and caused a whole scene in the parking lot of the store while the women, one born in Texas and the other in California, were grilled until there was nothing to hold them for, except having the nerve to speak Spanish in Wisconsin. So yes, the CBP needed to somehow justify its unjustifiable staffing and budget.
It settled on scope creep.
Now that the border patrol is being used to corral protesters, environmentalists and natives, subdue riots and snarl highway traffic, their own training comes in for examination too. Jones says straight out “What they are not trained for are de-escalation strategies or civilian interactions, as DHS memos warned prior to the summer 2020 deployments to U.S. cities to deal with crowd control.” They are trained to look for Mexicans and bring them in, one at a time.
The past was no better, by the way. The book details the glorious history of the force, tracing it right back to the out of control Texas Rangers in the time of The Alamo. Jones makes it colorful and vivid. Whatever its name, the force has always been home to racists and bigots, looking for a way to live out their Wild West fantasies, ruining the lives of others at will. As much as Bressi the astronomer was hassled in his 300 encounters with the CBP, he is white. He was not strip-searched, beaten, raped or killed. He was driving a marked University of Arizona truck to work. Imagine how many times and in how many ways anyone who fit the racial profile has to put up with, daily. It is a motorized version of the also justifiably hated Stop and Frisk of local police.
The force is a clear case of ethnic cleansing in the USA. In 1882, Congress passed the first law focused entirely on ethnic cleansing, when it banned any Chinese from immigrating. This added a legal shine to the ethnic cleansing of Mexicans and native American Indians that was already well entrenched.
In 1934, Senator David Reed of Pennsylvania was proud to shepherd a bill formalizing the border patrol specifically to prevent the mix of races then in the USA from ever changing. That was its raison d’être, preventing a change in the racial mix. The Supreme Court then specified who the agents could profile, according to their skin color and “Mexican-style” haircuts. This is about as overt as American governmental racism gets. And it came directly from the top.
The conclusion of Nobody is Protected is bit surprising. Jones focuses on the border and how it would be better to have a border police that was humane and even-handed, instead of racist and automatically against and suspicious of everyone it encounters. I mean, this is the same Reece Jones who points out early on that one of the reasons for the 2nd amendment regarding the right to bear arms was to support slave patrols. State militias spun out these patrols, whose officers could invade any locale or home without a warrant, looking for escaped slaves, and seizing contraband like pencils and paper that were dangerous in the hands of Negroes. Unreasonable search was their pleasure. The Ku Klux Klan was a legitimate expression of those slave patrols enshrined in the 2nd amendment of the Bill of Rights. The CBP is their direct descendant.
His conclusion misses his whole point. The border police are redundant. America doesn’t need a shakeup and better hiring practices for the border police. It needs to rein in the uncontrolled growth of the border police into a national police force that nobody wants or needs or has approved. Stop using tax dollars for illegal search and seizure across the country.
The US also needs a mechanism whereby the constitution cannot be ignored by conflicting laws and outlandish court decisions. Things are so out of alignment that someone as organized and perceptive as Reece Jones seems to have been numbed by the insanity of how Washington works. And this is his third book on the subject.
So if you think personal freedom is under attack, you are correct, and Nobody is Protected lays it out for me like nothing else yet has. If anything needs corralling, it is the CBP.
David Wineberg
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May 18, 2022
Nobody is Protected by Reece Jones is a much-needed examination of how the Border Patrol has become a major arm of the white supremacist enforcement forces, which now includes every police department in the country since they are now actually amateurs formed into paramilitary units with powers well beyond what they need or warrant.
Between the Border Patrol and ICE the United States has, in the past few decades in particular, made it explicit that it is a white supremacist country and will use whatever means they can to maintain that hold. This book, while perhaps not stating everything quite as blatantly as I am, makes the case that as the powers have expanded for police in general they have been exponentially applied to make the Border Patrol into a racist paramilitary unit that cares nothing about rights, justice, nor human life.
I want to suggest another book to read along with this one. Not in place of, they cover some of the same ground but not all, and they come from different perspectives, but alongside. The book is Unreasonable by Devon W Carbado and addresses specifically the way the 4th amendment has been destroyed by the courts to serve the larger purpose of white supremacy. Carbado is a legal scholar and together with Jones' book they paint a grim picture of what passes for justice in this country.
I would recommend this to anyone who wants to know how and why citizens can be picked up off the street with no explanation, how and why some people can be stopped while others aren't even when they are all doing the same thing, and especially how and why justice has long been absent from the US justice system.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
Between the Border Patrol and ICE the United States has, in the past few decades in particular, made it explicit that it is a white supremacist country and will use whatever means they can to maintain that hold. This book, while perhaps not stating everything quite as blatantly as I am, makes the case that as the powers have expanded for police in general they have been exponentially applied to make the Border Patrol into a racist paramilitary unit that cares nothing about rights, justice, nor human life.
I want to suggest another book to read along with this one. Not in place of, they cover some of the same ground but not all, and they come from different perspectives, but alongside. The book is Unreasonable by Devon W Carbado and addresses specifically the way the 4th amendment has been destroyed by the courts to serve the larger purpose of white supremacy. Carbado is a legal scholar and together with Jones' book they paint a grim picture of what passes for justice in this country.
I would recommend this to anyone who wants to know how and why citizens can be picked up off the street with no explanation, how and why some people can be stopped while others aren't even when they are all doing the same thing, and especially how and why justice has long been absent from the US justice system.
Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
August 13, 2022
This book has numerous shortcomings. As a whole, analysis is lacking; instead there are data dumps of information culled from the Internet, with predictable accompanying partisan assertions. Misleadingly, the Border Patrol is treated as if it were an autonomous agency, entirely in control of its own destiny, rather than a product of alternating Presidential administrations and changing Congressional priorities. The Border Patrol of Clinton and Obama is meaningfully different than that of Donald Trump, for example. The book does not adequately address Executive and Legislative branch direction and influence. (It does a good job reviewing the influence of the Judicial branch.) Further the book lacks the viewpoints of Border Patrol Agents (other than a few who published memoirs in the very early days quoted at the beginning of the book). Almost nothing here about the psychology of the Agents—their goals, objectives, ways of looking at their role (except for a small anecdote from ex-Agent Jean Budd, who is now an immigration rights activist). This lack shows this is not a work of journalism or careful examination of the issues, but rather simply advocacy for a particular point of view.
September 7, 2022
"Nobody is Protected" is a solid little piece of pop journalism that is light on analysis. It will not tell you anything new if you have even a passing familiarity of early 20th century US immigration laws.
This book is an info dump and I honestly felt my time would have been better spent on Wikipedia. It also failed to convince me that the border patrol is the most dangerous police force as the way the border patrol exists in relationship to other agencies and bureaus of power is never really contextualized.
Ultimately this book felt like it was saying 'gee sure is sad about all those human rights abuses you brown people have suffered for a century, but now that I, a white man, am inconvenienced, I feel we should do something about this.'
This book is an info dump and I honestly felt my time would have been better spent on Wikipedia. It also failed to convince me that the border patrol is the most dangerous police force as the way the border patrol exists in relationship to other agencies and bureaus of power is never really contextualized.
Ultimately this book felt like it was saying 'gee sure is sad about all those human rights abuses you brown people have suffered for a century, but now that I, a white man, am inconvenienced, I feel we should do something about this.'
August 13, 2022
I'm rounding up to 5 stars from 4.5 because I know there'll be some yahoos who haven't even read the book but will try and bomb it with stars.
This is a good, informative, historical overview of the border in the US. It is accessible to non immigration people but I can say as an immigration attorney (I do policy work related to the border and asylum) that it also makes sense and isn't too pop-nonfiction to not be interesting to someone in the field.
Why I took off half a star: There were a couple of points where I was like okay why are we going into this detail, why is it relevant, what is the point. Some details were not just superfluous but repetitive (if I recall something about Powell's clerk was said twice fairly close together in exactly the same way). The beginning in particular wound in a way that had me impatiently asking what the argument was. But I was also listening to it, and I'm an impatient reader with an existing baseline understanding.
Worth reading/listening to. Would be a good option for college courses on a related topic. Side benefit: the narrator has a NICE voice.
This is a good, informative, historical overview of the border in the US. It is accessible to non immigration people but I can say as an immigration attorney (I do policy work related to the border and asylum) that it also makes sense and isn't too pop-nonfiction to not be interesting to someone in the field.
Why I took off half a star: There were a couple of points where I was like okay why are we going into this detail, why is it relevant, what is the point. Some details were not just superfluous but repetitive (if I recall something about Powell's clerk was said twice fairly close together in exactly the same way). The beginning in particular wound in a way that had me impatiently asking what the argument was. But I was also listening to it, and I'm an impatient reader with an existing baseline understanding.
Worth reading/listening to. Would be a good option for college courses on a related topic. Side benefit: the narrator has a NICE voice.
July 5, 2022
An honestly frightening study of how free the border patrol is to police almost every citizen in the US today with extremely few reigns and a carte-blanche decree from Supreme Court rulings from the 1970s to use racial profiling for stops and seizures, essentially making the 4th Amendment irrelevant. The history of the border patrol is fascinating, as are the Supreme Court rulings that led us to where we are today. Jones keeps things moving and taut, never getting bogged down in legalese though also never shying away from the intricacies of the law. Highly recommended.
July 9, 2022
terrifying and necessary
a small glimpse into the border and patrol "force" - no one is safe, no one is protected, unless of course you have the right resources (namely cash) or protectors
a small glimpse into the border and patrol "force" - no one is safe, no one is protected, unless of course you have the right resources (namely cash) or protectors
September 17, 2022
A national police force--CBP already is acting this way, and nothing in US law stops them.
Three parts to this book.
First part is the history, mostly of the Texas Rangers and 1920s escalations in US immigration law.
Second part is about 1970s cases at SCOTUS. Some rock star public defenders in San Diego won three out of four of these cases, but compromises among the justices resulted in precedent for legalized racial profiling. Along the way, a journalist's retelling of the facts of Carroll--professors who teach that case might like to offer that chapter as supplementary reading.
Third part tells more recent stories, of CBP killing people on the Mexican side of the border, of CBP harassing white people in Tucson and Spanish speakers in Montana, and of CBP monitoring Native American water protectors and civil rights protestors in Minnesota, as well as snatching people off the streets in Portland.
If you're a suburban middle-aged white person who lives more than 100 miles away from a border or coastline (including one of the Great Lakes), you might think, well, not good, and my heart goes out to all the people in CBP's crosshairs, but this problem is unlikely to affect me, b/c I don't have a vape pen in my car, and I don't go to protests, and police are as nice to me as they were to Justice Powell. This book should at least get you to ask yourself some hard questions and use a little imagination.
Three parts to this book.
First part is the history, mostly of the Texas Rangers and 1920s escalations in US immigration law.
Second part is about 1970s cases at SCOTUS. Some rock star public defenders in San Diego won three out of four of these cases, but compromises among the justices resulted in precedent for legalized racial profiling. Along the way, a journalist's retelling of the facts of Carroll--professors who teach that case might like to offer that chapter as supplementary reading.
Third part tells more recent stories, of CBP killing people on the Mexican side of the border, of CBP harassing white people in Tucson and Spanish speakers in Montana, and of CBP monitoring Native American water protectors and civil rights protestors in Minnesota, as well as snatching people off the streets in Portland.
If you're a suburban middle-aged white person who lives more than 100 miles away from a border or coastline (including one of the Great Lakes), you might think, well, not good, and my heart goes out to all the people in CBP's crosshairs, but this problem is unlikely to affect me, b/c I don't have a vape pen in my car, and I don't go to protests, and police are as nice to me as they were to Justice Powell. This book should at least get you to ask yourself some hard questions and use a little imagination.
July 16, 2022
This book is a phenomenal and accessible book on the history of the U.S. Border Patrol and how they became a terrifyingly powerful police force in the U.S. Jones takes us from their inception in the 1920s, to their massive expansion following immigration reform in the 1960s, and explains how a series of court rulings have dramatically expanded their political power and reach to the point where they were able to infamously disappear BLM protestors in Portland in 2020. An insightful and valuable contribution. A must read for anyone who cares about battling the police/carceral/detention state and cares about the politics of immigration in the U.S.
November 27, 2022
I am surprised to learn that all those living in Chicago and its suburbs (and 100 miles from Lake Michigan are part of the "border". Indeed a large percentage of US citizens are living in the borderlands as most of our population lives within 30 miles of the Great Lakes, oceansides, and Mexican/Canadian borders. Important book to read and ponder its implications. Of my family, 17 people, I am the only one not living in the borderlands (unless reservations count as borders?)
January 10, 2023
really solid and easy to digest history of the border patrol and the effects and implications of its existence when there is no oversight or legal guardrails
August 13, 2022
A pretty good summary of what makes so much of Federal law enforcement problematic. In some places the author goes a bit over-the-top in posing the ills of the Border Patrol, but by and large he does not sound alarmist.
January 20, 2023
Less sensationalism, more straightforward data about the Border Patrol and the changes in immigration law over time. I expected the book to be a lot drier than it was.
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