Borderline Justice

Nate Blakeslee reports on members of the US Border Patrol using deadly force against rock-throwers, suggesting that part of the problem lies with the structure of the agency itself:

Policymakers and senior officials at the agency seem torn about whether the Border Patrol is an army or an enormous police force. The seeds of this identity confusion were planted shortly after 9/11, when the Border Patrol was subsumed under the newly created Department of Homeland Security and recast as one of many regiments in the nation’s war on terrorism.

The Border Patrol’s new mission was said to be aligned with that of the Army or the Navy or the NSA: to protect us from foreign invaders bent on our destruction. But while having 21,000 agents on or near the border no doubt has dissuaded some foreign elements from entering the country overland, fighting terror is not principally what those agents do. The Border Patrol arrested 364,000 people in 2012. Not a single one was an international terrorist. The vast majority were migrants in search of jobs. An agent spends most of his or her time chasing would-be nannies, construction workers, and landscapers. Even the drug mules, los mochileros, are not generally armed or dangerous.

The difference between a soldier and a police officer is more than a semantic one, and the Border Patrol’s identity crisis has genuine consequences. War and police work are fundamentally dissimilar, explains Christopher Wilson, a border-security expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a Washington, D.C., think tank. “When you’re told your mission is national security, and the people you’re interacting with are not citizens – meaning they’re not the people you’re accountable to in a democratic structure – that does replicate to a certain extent the situation the military faces,” he said. “Nonetheless, they are law enforcement. And what that means is you use the minimal force needed to do your job.”