Migra!. Kelly Lytle Hernandez

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СКАЧАТЬ exclusion, or expulsion of aliens.”⁸⁷ As such, the 1925 Act invested Border Patrol officers with broad powers of arrest without warrant in the pursuit of U.S. immigration law enforcement and defined a massive jurisdiction for Border Patrol work.

      Over the years, there would be many shifts in the policies guiding the interpretation of the Border Patrol’s jurisdiction and authority, but the 1925 Act defined the substance and limits of the Border Patrol’s law-enforcement capacities until 1946. According to the 1925 Act, Border Patrol officers could chase unsanctioned immigrants and search vessels within the broader borderlands and, without a warrant, arrest those they suspected of being engaged in the act of unlawful entry. Border Patrol officers also held the power to serve warrants in the enforcement of all U.S. immigration laws. These powers defined the U.S. Border Patrol as the uniformed, law-enforcement wing of the U.S. Immigration Service. Still the patrol’s job remained mired in questions and complexities.

      Given the various classes of exclusion, the many methods of unlawful entry, and the extended periods during which immigrants were subject to deportation, the United States Border Patrol was confronted with forging a manageable program for U.S. immigration law enforcement. In particular, from the long list of U.S. immigration restrictions, Border Patrol officers needed to prioritize the many possibilities of migration control and develop everyday practices of U.S. immigration law enforcement. The rapid localization of U.S. Border Patrol personnel and supervision allowed the officers of the U.S. Border Patrol to direct this project.

      THE MEN OF THE U.S. BORDER PATROL

      Clifford Alan Perkins first arrived in El Paso, Texas, in 1908. He needed a job, but—as he recalled—“nobody seemed to be interested in hiring an inexperienced, nineteen-year-old semi-invalid.”⁸⁸ A suspected case of tuberculosis had forced Perkins to move away from his family in Wisconsin and seek out relatives in Texas. The dry El Paso climate improved his health, but finding work in the border town was difficult. Fortunately, low pay and bad hours caused the Post Office to have “trouble filling an opening in the registered mail division.”⁸⁹ Within days of applying for the position, Perkins was behind the desk at the El Paso Post Office.

      The monotony of the work quickly frustrated Perkins, who “finally popped off one day about being sick and tired of [his] job to May Brick, the middle-aged spinster who relieved [him] at the registry window.”⁹⁰ She suggested that Perkins apply for a job with the Immigration Service. He did not know what the Immigration Service was, but when his co-worker explained that officers for the Immigration Service dealt with “immigration, exclusion, deportation and expulsion of aliens” and that the starting salary was twice what he was earning at the Post Office, Perkins recalled, “that was enough for me.”⁹¹ He signed up for and passed the Immigration Service’s next civil service exam. On January 4,1911, the Immigration Service appointed Perkins as a Mounted Chinese Inspector within its Chinese Division.

      In 1904, the U.S. Immigration Service had established a small force of officers assigned to enforce the Chinese Exclusion Acts along the nation’s borders. Never numbering more than seventy-five men for the Mexican and Canadian borders, the Mounted Guard monitored border towns and patrolled the borderlands to apprehend undocumented Chinese immigrants. As a Mounted Chinese Inspector, Clifford Perkins worked from Nogales, Arizona, to Brownsville, Texas, looking for, questioning, and deporting undocumented Chinese immigrants. He quickly moved up within the Immigration Service and in 1920 became inspector-in-charge for the Chinese Division. When Congress provided funds for a land-border patrol in May of 1924, the U.S. Immigration Service drew upon its resources in the Mounted Guard and promoted the head of the Chinese Division, Clifford Perkins, to build the small police force that could broadly enforce U.S. immigration restrictions along the massive U.S.-Mexico border.

      The U.S.-Mexico border stretches more than two thousand miles, crosses five ecological zones, spans four states, includes twenty-eight counties, and binds two nations. As a political boundary, it is a physical space that twists in the Rio Grande and turns in the sands along specific points of longitude and latitude. This is the line that the U.S. Congress had defined as unlawful to cross without authorization. But the Border Patrol’s jurisdiction also extended far north of the U.S.-Mexico border, and Perkins’ job entailed developing a police force capable not only of enforcing a line in the sand but also of patrolling a massive territory composed of multiple small localities. The path he pursued effectively regionalized and localized the enforcement of U.S. immigration restriction.

      Perkins’s first act was to divide the U.S.-Mexico border jurisdiction into three Border Patrol districts.⁹² The Los Angeles Border Patrol District stretched from the Pacific Ocean to about fifty miles east of Yuma, Arizona, and extended northward in California to San Luis Obispo. The El Paso Border Patrol District picked up where the Los Angeles District left off and extended to Devils River, Texas. The San Antonio Border Patrol District reached from Devil’s River to the Gulf of Mexico at Brownsville, Texas. Each District was then divided into subdistricts.⁹³ Each subdistrict was further divided into several stations to which a chief patrol officer and several senior patrol officers and patrol officers were assigned.⁹⁴

      Perkins anticipated that the various district directors for the Department of Immigration would closely manage the Border Patrol, but their many administrative responsibilities and the isolation of Border Patrol stations prevented them from keeping a close eye on the new patrol force. The lack of formal training or clear directives were an indication of the distance between Immigration Service supervisors and the officers of the U.S. Border Patrol. For example, when Edwin Reeves joined the Border Patrol, he laughed at the early training. All he received was a “.45 single-action revolver with a web belt—and that was it.”⁹⁵ Therefore, outside of the broad directive provided by Congress, the new patrol force was left without any substantial direction. In the breaches of command, the distances between stations and headquarters, and the absence of regional coordination, patrol officers exerted significant control over local Border Patrol strategies.

      The first men hired as Border Patrol officers were transfers from the Mounted Guard of Chinese Inspectors. Twenty-four percent of the original 104 Border Patrolman hired by July 1, 1924, were transfers from the Mounted Guard.⁹⁶ These officers carried their experiences with enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Acts into the formation of the U.S. Border Patrol. Among them was Jefferson Davis Milton, a legendary officer who is still remembered as the father of the U.S. Border Patrol.

      Born at the dawn of the Civil War to a large slave-owning family, Jefferson Davis Milton grew up in the defeated South. His father died soon after his birth, but had been the governor of Florida and named his son after his close friend and the president of the Southern Confederacy, Jefferson Davis. After the war, the Milton family struggled to live life as they always had; the end of slavery had broken the foundations of their world. In the past, they had lived lives of leisure and plenty, but after the war, many of their black field hands fled the plantation, forcing the Milton family to take to the fields. At the age of sixteen, Jeff decided he wanted more adventure than plantation life could offer, so he headed west to Texas.⁹⁷

      There, Jeff began a law-enforcement career that spanned more than fifty years, crossed four states, straddled two nations, and made him a legend among officers of the U.S. Border Patrol. In 1879, at the age of eighteen, he joined the Texas Rangers. Three years later, Jeff moved to the New Mexico territory, where he served as a deputy sheriff and a peace officer. As the Indian Wars raged around him, Jeff joined the “hunt for Victorio and Geronimo.”⁹⁸ After helping to settle the nomadic nations of what was becoming the American West, Jeff roamed the region. He was chief of police in El Paso, Texas; a fireman on the Southern Pacific Railroad; a U.S. marshal in Texas, Arizona, and Mexico; a prospector in California; and deputy sheriff for Santa Cruz County, Arizona. Whether working as a Texas Ranger, an Indian fighter, or the chief of police, Jeff developed a reputation as a fearless officer who dared to venture alone into the desert lands, a vigilant enforcer of the law at the outskirts of society. He chased down bank robbers and cattle thieves, bandits and СКАЧАТЬ