Migra!. Kelly Lytle Hernandez

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СКАЧАТЬ Herbert C. Horsley, and his supervisor, district director of the Immigration Service in El Paso, Texas, Grover C. Wilmoth. Wilmoth had spent years struggling with a rag-tag group of officers in his district. He repeatedly issued circulars requiring officers to wear their uniforms, to stop drinking, gossiping, and sleeping on the job, to cease their cavorting in Mexican border towns, and to stop over-reaching their authority by conducting random traffic checks. But nobody seemed to listen. The culture of immigration law enforcement in the far-flung offices seemed resistant to his interventions by memo. In February of 1928, for example, Wilmoth found it necessary to recirculate a memo dated September 2, 1924, which asserted that “employees must not while on duty indulge in the use of intoxicating liquors in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, or elsewhere.”⁹⁹ In October 1929, incidents of officers “accept[ing] gifts of small value” prompted Wilmoth to instruct officers as to the “impropriety of any officer or employee of the Immigration Service accepting gratuities of any sort from any alien or from any person in any way interested in the immigration status of an alien.”¹⁰⁰ The next month Wilmoth wrote that “despite frequent warnings . . . certain officers and employees have continued to indulge in useless and harmful talk to outsiders . . . concerning official matters,” and he advised his staff that “upon proof of receipt of a copy of this formal warning, no leniency will be shown one who offends in the respect indicated.”¹⁰¹

      In 1930, Wilmoth attempted to forge a measure of uniformity and a culture of professionalism within his district by providing a detailed welcome letter for all new recruits. “You are congratulated on having been selected as a member of the U.S. Immigration Service Border Patrol, which we . . . believe to be the finest law-enforcing agency of the Federal Government,” the letter began.¹⁰² After listing a series of “don’ts”—don’t fail to tell the truth, don’t drink, don’t gamble, don’t grumble, and so forth—the letter explained the Border Patrol’s on-the-ground training process by urging the new recruits to submit themselves to the more experienced officers. “For the next few months your attitude should be that of a student,” advised the letter.¹⁰³ “You should show a desire and willingness to learn this business from officers who have served long and faithfully and who KNOW IT. You may have had excellent training in other lines of police work but bear in mind that you are expected to learn to do things the Border Patrol way.”¹⁰⁴ Wilmoth spoke of a “Border Patrol way” but, as he well knew, the El Paso District was fraught with disorder. From his office in El Paso, Wilmoth had little direct control over Border Patrol officers working in stations spread from Nogales, Arizona, across New Mexico and over to the western edges of the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. There was no consistency or uniformity that amounted to a “Border Patrol way”; rather, there was an assortment of localities that received and trained new recruits, each in their own way. If Wilmoth doubted the disorder in his district, he was reminded in March 1931, when he toured stations along the border and found that officers did not regularly wear their uniforms. “It is a matter of regret for the writer,” explained Wilmoth “that it is again necessary for him thus formally to call attention to the wide-spread disregard of the uniform regulations. He recently noted that some of the officers were on duty without any pretense of wearing the uniform; that some of the uniforms were unbelievably shabby; and that some of the officers, both on and off duty, violated instructions by wearing merely a portion of the uniform.”¹⁰⁵

      One decade after the establishment of the U.S. Border Patrol, G. C. Wilmoth attempted to impose order and uniformity on his region by establishing the El Paso District Training School.¹⁰⁶ The first session of the three-month training course was held at the El Paso headquarters on December 3, 1934. During the morning, the trainees received instruction in the Spanish language, immigration law, conduct, rights of search, seizure, evidence and court procedure, firearms, fingerprinting and identification, line patrolling, and equitation. After listening to lectures by instructors such as Charles Askins, who served as the firearms instructor, the trainees spent their afternoons working alongside experienced patrolmen for a ground-level education in the application of U.S. immigration law. On patrol and in the classroom, the new recruits learned from the old-timers how U.S. immigration law was interpreted on a daily basis in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Wilmoth’s efforts to impose uniformity and discipline therefore simply formalized the localization of immigration law enforcement in the El Paso District. Without improving lines of ongoing supervision and training, Wilmoth allowed the old-timers to continue to exert significant control over the development of U.S. Border Patrol practices.

      In 1937, the Immigration Service renamed the El Paso District Training School the Border Patrol Training School (BPTS) and began requiring all new recruits, nationwide, to attend. The establishment of the BPTS in El Paso, Texas, represents an important moment in the history of the U.S. Border Patrol. The informalism, disorder, and regionalism that characterized the patrol’s first ten years were certainly reduced by the adoption of a national training program. But the establishment of the BPTS is most remarkable in the ways that it centralized the Texas-Mexico borderlands in the making of U.S. immigration law enforcement.

      The year that the BPTS opened, the U.S.-Mexico border was not the epicenter of Border Patrol activity. That year, 325 officers worked along the U.S.-Canada border, while 234 worked along the U.S.-Mexico border; another 34 worked in Jacksonville, Florida, and there was 1 officer in New Orleans, Louisiana.¹⁰⁷ However, requiring all officers to attend the BPTS and to conduct their first patrol activities in the El Paso district forged uniformity and commonality around the particularities of the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Further the establishment of the BPTS in El Paso, Texas, greatly empowered the officers of the turbulent El Paso District to shape the definition of the “Border Patrol way.”¹⁰⁸ The establishment of the BPTS, therefore, was significant for the Border Patrol’s focus on the U.S.-Mexico border, with an area of concentration in the Texas-Mexico borderlands.

      Among the first officers to be trained at the BPTS was Harlon B. Carter. Harlon grew up in Laredo, Texas, where the disjointed structure of U.S. immigration law enforcement had once allowed the city’s Mexicano majority and elite to dominate the development of local Border Patrol operations. In 1927, however, Clifford Perkins made an inspection trip to the area and was alarmed by the development of U.S. immigration control in the city. “Laredo was strictly a Mexican town. . . . probably ninety-percent of the people were either Mexican or of Mexican descent,” wrote Perkins, who distrusted the Laredo sector’s ability to enforce U.S. immigration restrictions independently. “The only Anglo on the police force was the chief himself,” which distressed Perkins. During his two-week investigation, Perkins waged a “full-scale housecleaning.” He charged local officials, the chief patrol inspector, and Border Patrol officers in the Laredo station with immigrant smuggling and forced just under half of Laredo’s twenty-eight Border Patrol inspectors and the chief patrol inspector to quit or be fired. Perkins then transferred select Border Patrolmen who had all been Texas Rangers into the Laredo sector because “all were experienced, well-disciplined fighters who knew the country well.”¹⁰⁹

      Detailing former Texas Rangers to Laredo was a strategy used to divorce the Border Patrol station from the local Mexican-American political elite. Tension quickly mounted between the ex-Rangers and the Laredo community, particularly the Laredo Police Department. While the Border Patrol enjoyed close relations with the local police in most borderland communities, in 1927 several officers of the Laredo Border Patrol “got in their Model T automobiles and spent about a half hour circling and shooting up the police station.”¹¹⁰ The 1927 cleanup of the Laredo station reflected the limits of Border Patrol disorganization that allowed for local management of immigration law enforcement. Although most local stations developed their own strategies, policies, and procedures, the Laredo station was exempt until the men and the infamously brutal racial violence of the Texas Rangers slashed away at the bonds between the Laredo Border Patrol and local Mexican-American leadership. The cleanup transformed the Laredo Border Patrol into a refuge for white violence within Mexican-dominated Laredo. One of the men who found sanctuary in the U.S. Border Patrol was Harlon B. Carter.

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