Migra!. Kelly Lytle Hernandez

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СКАЧАТЬ position within the broader apparatus of U.S. immigration control did not improve significantly over time. Edging up to just $1,150,000 in 1926, the Border Patrol’s budget climaxed at $2,198,000 in 1932 before dropping to $1,735,000 in 1939; all the while holding an ever-smaller share of the Immigration Bureau’s total budget, which hovered around $10,000,000 throughout the 1930s. The Border Patrol’s limited funds were used for basic operational and equipment costs such as buildings, horses, cars, guns, and uniforms, but, most of all, they paid for the salaries of U.S. Border Patrol officers as the patrol’s authorized force increased from 472 in 1925 to 916 in 1939.⁷⁶

      The Border Patrol’s small beginnings however can best be understood when examined within the context of federal law enforcement during the 1920s, namely, in the realm of liquor and drug control. Most efforts to expand federal law enforcement were stymied during the early twentieth century by anxious southerners who opposed federal intervention in southern race relations. In particular, the powerful southern bloc opposed federal response to African American activists who demanded an end to the rising number of lynchings occurring in the south. The development of federal immigration law enforcement at the nation’s borders therefore was tempered by efforts to protect white supremacy in the southern states. However, federal efforts at drug control and liquor control grew during these years.⁷⁷ In 1914, the U.S. Congress had passed the Harrison Act, which required all persons involved in the manufacture, distribution, and sale of narcotics (morphine, cocaine, opium, and heroin) to be registered and to pay a tax on all narcotics sales. Enforcement of the Harrison Act was given to the Bureau of Revenue within the Treasury Department. The passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (1919–1933) and the Volstead Act of 1919 prohibited the manufacture, sale, transport, import, or export of intoxicating beverages. The Prohibition Unit within the Internal Revenue Board was established to enforce federal liquor prohibition, and the enforcement of the Harrison Act was transferred to the Narcotics Enforcement Division within the Prohibition Unit. In comparison to the Border Patrol’s original appropriation for $1,000,000 in fiscal year 1925, the 1925 appropriation for the narcotics Division of the Prohibition Unit was $11,341,770, a figure more than ten times greater than the Border Patrol’s annual budget but only an estimated 10 percent of the total combined funds provided for the enforcement of federal liquor and narcotics control.⁷⁸ Similarly the month before Congress established the U.S. Border Patrol, it had provided the U.S. Coast Guard with a $12,000,000 boost to enhance its interdiction efforts along United States coasts.⁷⁹ In the world of federal law enforcement, the U.S. Border Patrol and immigration control had very low priority, and significant growth was unlikely until the south’s black/white divide was challenged.

      Congress seconded its paltry funding of U.S. immigration law enforcement by failing to define clearly the new land-border patrol’s mandate and authority. According to its foundational act, the Border Patrol was instructed to enforce the provisions of the Immigration Act of 1917 and subsequent acts and, more specifically, to prevent the unlawful entry of aliens into the United States. But by 1924 there were so many methods of unlawful entry (unsanctioned border crossings, fraudulent documents, breaking the conditions of legal residence) and so many classes of persons explicitly prohibited from legally entering the United States that U.S. immigration restrictions provided a broad field of possible subjects for U.S. immigration law enforcement. Prostitutes and anarchists were categorically excluded from the United States, so Border Patrol officers could have spent their time searching brothels and investigating radical immigrants, particularly the labor organizers. Or they could have raided hospitals and clinics in search of immigrants who unlawfully entered the United States with a communicable disease. Or the patrol could have reviewed cases of fraudulent documentation or, as its official title seemed to suggest, the new “land-border patrol” could have patrolled the border line to prevent all unauthorized border crossings. The original mandate was so broad that it was entirely unclear what the new “land-border patrol” was supposed to do. Further, Congress provided the Border Patrol with no authority as a law enforcement entity. The Department of Labor Appropriations Act of May 28,1924, therefore, officially established the U.S. Border Patrol but provided only limited funds and a vague mandate with no authority to act. Still, with money in hand and a broad mandate on the table, the Bureau of Immigration quickly organized the U.S. Border Patrol. Officers were on duty along the Canadian and Mexican borders by July 1,1924.

      The early months were defined by disorganization and an overarching lack of clarity. From Spokane, Washington, the regional district director admitted that “not being familiar with the provisions of the Congressional Act establishing the Border Patrol and having received no definite information from the Bureau, considerable doubt and uncertainty exists as to the authority vested in the Border Patrol officers and the scope of their duties.”⁸⁰ He followed with a request for guidance from the Bureau of Immigration regarding what the districts were supposed to do with this new patrol force. “It would therefore seem that the work would be greatly facilitated, and more in conformity in the different Districts, if the Bureau would issue some specific instructions,” he wrote.⁸¹ The commissioner-general of the Bureau of Immigration responded with little substantive guidance when he explained, in August of 1924, that he, too, was unsure of the new patrol force’s authority and function. “If the Bureau is right in its understanding of the matter,” he wrote, “the border patrols are now without the slightest authority to stop a vehicle crossing the border for the purpose of search, or otherwise, nor can they legally prevent the entry of an alien in violation of law. In other words, they possess no more powers than does the ordinary citizen, who can exercise police powers only at the request of a duly constituted officer of the law, or to prevent the commission of a felony.”⁸² Without any clear authority to enforce U.S. immigration restrictions, the commissioner-general of Immigration advised the district director in Spokane that Border Patrol officers “would be guilty of assault” if they used any amount of physical coercion while attempting to “prevent a violation of the immigration laws.”⁸³ With no authority to act in the enforcement of U.S. immigration restrictions, the new patrolmen were little more than ordinary citizens. The confusion among top administrators regarding what to do with these new ordinary citizens on the Immigration Bureau’s payroll naturally spread to the new recruits in the summer of 1924. Wesley Stiles, for example, entered on duty as a U.S. Border Patrol officer on July 28,1924, in Del Rio, Texas. “No one knew what we were supposed to do or how we were supposed to do it . . . . So we just walked around and looked wise,” recalled Stiles of his early days on patrol in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.⁸⁴

      With neither direction nor authority, the Border Patrol officers stammered through the summer and fall of 1924. In December of 1924, the Immigration Bureau took the first step toward distinguishing Border Patrol officers from the “ordinary citizen” by providing uniforms for the officers.⁸⁵ The uniforms flagged the U.S. Border Patrol as an emergent police force, but two more months passed before Border Patrol officers were invested with police powers to enforce U.S. immigration laws. Congress established the Border Patrol’s law-enforcement authority with the passage of the Act of February 27,1925 (43 Stat. 1049–1050; 8 U.S.C. 110). According to this act, a Border Patrol officer was authorized to “arrest any alien who in his presence or view is entering or attempting to enter the United States in violation of any law or regulation made in pursuance of law regulating the admission of aliens, and to take such alien immediately for examination before an immigrant inspector or other official having authority to examine aliens as to their rights to admission to the United States.” In the case of Lew Moy vs. the United States (1916), the U.S. Supreme Court had determined that an “alien is in the act of entering the United States until he reaches his interior destination.”⁸⁶ The 1925 Act and the Lew Moy decision gave Border Patrol officers broad authority to interrogate, detain, and arrest any person they believed to be engaged in the act of illegal entry, a violation of U.S. immigration law that extended from the moment unauthorized immigrants crossed the border until they reached their interior destination. The 1925 Act also authorized a Border Patrol officer to “board and search for aliens any vessel within the territorial waters of the United States, railway car, conveyance, or vehicle, in which he believes aliens are being brought into the United States, and such employee shall have power to execute any warrant or other process СКАЧАТЬ