Migra!. Kelly Lytle Hernandez

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СКАЧАТЬ and since I had my own shooting irons I did not draw the old .45 Colt Model 1917 nor one of the next to worthless Enfield rifles.”⁸³ With his own weapon and a U.S.-issued Border Patrol badge, Askins headed out for his first “tour of duty.” That evening, at about 9:30 P.M., Patrol Inspectors Jack Thomas and Tom Isbell “ran into an ambush and killed a smuggler.” Askins had not been at the fight, but he arrived soon after and helped to collect the body of the dead contrabandista.“I was enthralled, I’ll tell you!” exclaimed Askins, “I hadn’t fired a shot but I’d been close to the smell of gunpowder and I thought, ‘Boy, this is for me!’ ”⁸⁴

      Askins eagerly pursued gunfights with the smugglers and reveled in the Border Patrol’s besting of the contrabandistas. He estimated that while Border Patrol officers killed five hundred smugglers between 1924 and 1934, the Border Patrol’s Honor Roll listed only twenty-three officers lost in the process.⁸⁵ Askins so enjoyed the sport of battling the liquor smugglers that he seemed to forget the primary function and authority of the United States Border Patrol. “Actually the primary job of the Border Patrol was not alcohol at all but illegal aliens,” he said.⁸⁶ “The BP was part of the Immigration Service and, believe it or not, was part of the Department of Labor.”⁸⁷

      When Askins did engage in immigration law enforcement, his methods were rough. “I was really in favor of banging a suspect over the ears with a sixshooter and then asking him when he crossed out of Mexico,” explained Askins, “This I found reduced the small talk to a few syllables and got a confession in short order.”⁸⁸ Although he was transferred from the El Paso station after the district director read one too many gunfight reports that included his name, Askins believed that his chief patrol inspector sanctioned his excess and aggression because “only those jazbos who had not been raised along the border, were not happy with this system.”⁸⁹

      Over the years, Askins was promoted for his enthusiasm, expertise, and knowledge in firearms. First, he was tapped to organize a pistol team. Under his tutelage, the Border Patrol Pistol Team won multiple regional and national competitions. While Askins routinely complained about the average patrolman’s inexperience with guns, the success of the Border Patrol Pistol Team helped brand the organization as an outfit of straight shooters. In 1937, Askins was appointed as the firearms trainer at the Border Patrol Training School in El Paso, Texas, boasting that this position made him the highest paid officer in the U.S. Border Patrol. That Askins not only survived but prospered in the patrol during the 1930s is particularly significant because it was an era of reform in federal law enforcement.

      In 1929, widespread concerns regarding crime and crime control, focused on issues emerging from Prohibition, prompted President Herbert Hoover to establish the National Committee on Law Observation and Enforcement, popularly known as the Wickersham Commission. The Wickersham Commission assessed the causes of crime, concentrating on the rise of organized crime and efforts to stem liquor consumption and trafficking, and examined the many problems of enforcing Prohibition. As the Wickersham Commission examined the enforcement of Prohibition, it uncovered patterns of police corruption and brutality that exposed all arms of federal law enforcement to increased scrutiny.

      In 1930, the Department of Labor began to investigate corruption and excessive violence within the Border Patrol by compiling a list of all criminal charges that had been filed against Border Patrol officers since July 1, 1924.⁹⁰ The officers had been convicted of everything from murder to speeding. Then, in 1933, the Department of Labor reorganized the Immigration Service and Naturalization Service by forming the joint Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and attempted to clean out the Border Patrol by firing all officers and rehiring them on a temporary basis. To secure a permanent position with the Border Patrol, the officers had to appear before a board of officials from the Department of Labor and the Immigration Service, popularly remembered as the Benzene Board. Dogie Wright explained that the board’s function was “to cut out the men who were doing a lot of gun fighting, too prone to use their guns.”⁹¹ Some were removed, but many of the officers, including Charles Askins, made it through.

      As suggested by Askins’ retention, the impact of the Benzene Board was limited. The country was in the depths of the Great Depression, and jobs were hard to come by. The board made a quick pass over Border Patrol personnel, but even someone as unrepentant as Charles Askins must have spoken wisely and judiciously before the Benzene Board. Further the board depended upon local law-enforcement systems to expose and document cases of corruption and brutality. However, as in the case of Gregorio Alanis, local law enforcement typically buried incidents of Border Patrol violence.

      Just a few months before the Benzene Board began, the death of Miguel Navarro exemplified how local law enforcement concealed Border Patrol violence. On August 18, 1932, two patrol inspectors and a special state ranger heard that some liquor smugglers were going to try to cross the border illegally that evening at the Las Flores crossing near La Feria, Texas. At around 9 P.M., they hid behind a tree and waited for the smugglers to cross. The inspectors had been waiting about forty-five minutes when they “saw three men carrying something on their shoulders . . . from the direction of the river.”⁹² When the smugglers got within fifty feet of the officers, Patrol Inspector John V. Saul stepped out from behind the tree and told the men to halt. Two of the men—Anselmo Torres, a U.S. citizen, and José Sandoval, a Mexican national—stopped and raised their hands. The third smuggler, a U.S. citizen and resident of Mercedes, Texas, named Miguel Navarro “half turned and threw his right hand to his body reaching under the sack he had across his left shoulder,” according to Saul, who was “sure he [Navarro] was drawing a gun and fired.”⁹³ Navarro fell to the ground, shot in the leg. With the help of the “other two Mexicans,” the officers loaded Navarro into the back of their car and drove him to the nearest hospital in Mercedes before they took the other two men to the jail in Weslaco, Texas. The officers then returned to the scene of the shooting with their chief patrol inspector, a U.S. Customs officer, at least two deputy sheriffs of Hidalgo County, and the assistant supervisor of the Customs Border Patrol.⁹⁴

      At daylight, the officers “began searching for a gun which we believed must be there for we were certain the Mexican wounded had attempted to draw one.”⁹⁵ Saul depended upon his brother officers to exonerate him of excessive force by locating Navarro’s gun. After a short search around the “pool of blood there on the road where the Mexican fell,” one of the deputy sheriffs called out, “Here it is,” and “picked up a 32 double-action revolver . . . about five or six feet from where the Mexican fell.”⁹⁶ The officers passed the gun around for inspection and agreed that it was the one carried by Navarro. With no further investigation, the deputy sheriff’s discovery of the gun allowed the Border Patrol to find Saul’s shooting of Navarro justifiable and close the case.

      Within a few days, Navarro died from the gunshot wound. During the external investigation by local law-enforcement authorities, the sheriff assured the Border Patrol that he was “entirely satisfied the matter was a justifiable homicide and that they [saw] no reason . . . to investigate or proceed with the matter any further.”⁹⁷ The local justice of the peace followed suit and declared that “the deceased came to his death from shock and hemorrhage caused by a bullet wound inflicted on him while resisting lawful arrest with a deadly weapon.”⁹⁸ In the end, Miguel Navarro—the “Mexican” born in Mercedes, Texas—was dead, and Patrol Inspector Saul was exonerated without further inquiry.

      Quick exonerations by a brotherhood of local and state officers shielded the men of the Border Patrol from the potentially less sympathetic scrutiny of a federal grand jury or even the Benzene Board. Such impunity fortified the localized structure of Border Patrol operations. Still the broader effort to professionalize federal police practice during the 1930s did prompt the establishment of the Border Patrol Training School (BPTS) in 1937, which brought a new level of uniform training into the Border Patrol project.

      THE BORDER PATROL TRAINING SCHOOL

      The BPTS was actually the expansion СКАЧАТЬ