From Peshawar to Portland: US Fascism Already Has a Standing Army
This 2020 piece, now Chapter 16 of CROSSING THE LINE, Shouts about the danger of encroaching US Fascism as it Outs the potential personal presidential army hiding in plain sight. This is real people.
It was beautiful, fresh, blue-sky day. The fall season and its sense of new beginnings were in the air. As I walked my then 5-year-old to her third day of kindergarten in downtown Brooklyn, she stretched an arm upward, pointing. “Look, Mama,” she said. “What’s that funny cloud?”
“Oh no!” I exclaimed, on seeing the steel-gray streak cleave the firmament like the mark of an angry Sharpie. “There must be a terrible fire in lower Manhattan.” I did not know that just moments before, at 8:46 am, terrorists linked to al-Qaeda turned American Airlines Flight 11 into a missile and drove it into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
As I exited the school building at roughly 9:03 am, United Airlines Flight 175 rammed the South Tower. That’s when I realized the “terrible fire” was not the result of a tragic accident. Within 1 hour and 42 minutes, both 110-story towers collapsed, killing nearly 3,000 people, including 343 firefighters, 72 law enforcement officers, and everyone on board both planes. Forty-four more people died when a third hijacked plane crash-landed in Pennsylvania, and 184 people lost their lives when a fourth aircraft struck the Pentagon. Another 25,000 or more were physically injured. But no one would escape the fallout of the single deadliest terrorist attack in human history.
Watching the buildings come down from the roof of the Victorian-era brick-and-brownstone where we lived at the time, I felt the shockwaves that would reverberate around the globe. Two decades later, they reverberate still.
One week after September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush signed into law a joint resolution authorizing the use of force against those responsible for attacking the US, thus launching the “War on Terror.” A week later, he announced the federal government’s intention to create a comprehensive national security framework to safeguard the US against future terrorism. The term “homeland” came into vogue, expanding the battlefield of the warriors who toted their hardware closer to Brownsville than Baghdad.
Thus was birthed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Operational from March 2003, it encompassed an alphabet soup of agencies that replaced the Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS), given the “death penalty” for having approved visas for two of the 9/11 hijackers:
USCIS (Citizenship & Immigration Services);
ICE (Immigration & Customs Enforcement); and the color-coded
CBP (Customs & Border Protection):
Blue-uniformed officers to police legal ports of entry, i.e., airports and bridge crossings;
Brown-uniformed officers to manage Air and Marine Operations; and the
Green-uniformed Border Patrol to surveil a jurisdiction stretching 100 miles inward from land borders and seacoasts between legal points of entry.
The martial defense of the US border marked a total break from well over 100 years of managing both commercial and nativist interests at the border. Without warning, strategic impulses gave rise to a militarized police force weighed down by institutional racism, sexism, and corruption.
The perfect instrument for an administration with authoritarian tendencies to turn into its private security force.
Birth of the US Border Patrol
Like the convicted felon who once occupied the White House, the agency tasked with patrolling US borders has a huge chip on its proverbial shoulder. Called La Migra in Spanish, it was established in 1924, following the passage of the bluntly racist Immigration Act that same year.
The original force was made up of poor non-land-owning whites and self-identifying Spanish-Americans, who’d sooner shoot you than tolerate being called a ‘Mexican.’ Men were hired because they owned their own gun; were recruited from the Mounted Guard of Chinese Inspectors, who’d been tasked with enforcing the 19th-century Exclusion Acts; or were plucked from the vestiges of the Texas Rangers, itself a legacy of the Slave Patrols cum Ku Klux Klan.
The Rangers helped to shape Anglo-American settlement in the Wild, Wild, West by battling Native Americans, expelling the Chinese who’d built the US railway system, chasing down runaway Black slaves, and settling scores on behalf of their land-owning bosses. They functioned as a paramilitary force at the service of both the Texas Republic (1836–1845) and the State, once it joined the Union. They relied on raw, physical violence.
It was precisely this pedigree, and these tactics, that birthed the original US Border Patrol.
From the start, the Patrol played a twin role in post-Civil War US society. With the Emancipation Proclamation and the abolition of slavery, the land barons of the American Southwest needed another source of cheap labor to ensure maximum profits off their tens of thousands of acres of grains, fruit, vegetables, and cotton. They sent scouts across the border to encourage Mexicans to come sow their fields and harvest their crops. But this came into conflict with the nation’s nativists and eugenicists, who were hell-bent on keeping the country white. They marched into the hallowed halls of Congress to sound the alarm, as expert “advisers,” regarding the threat of “inferior stock.”
A political compromise was forged: the southwestern farmers and ranchers could have their cheap labor as long as it was kept temporary and marginalized. From its inception, therefore, the Border Patrol acted as the private police for the descendants of America’s white colonizers, on the one hand. And on the other, they patrolled the border to keep out the Chinese and other Asians, while monitoring the seasonal flow of Mexican farmhands and produce pickers.
They were essentially henchmen for the wealthy, people herders, and vigilantes, too; an agency established on oppression that, even when formalized by the US government, attracted those who couldn’t get into regular law enforcement. The Patrol gave second-class citizens a leg up out of poverty, a way to rise above, making its foundations classist too. Having grown up surrounded by sanctioned white violence toward people of color, the Patrol crafted itself into a vigilante-style law enforcement agency.
By the end of its first decade as a force, the Patrol added another arrow to its quiver. Prohibition gave rise to organized crime and the need to intercept smugglers at the border. Of course, some Border Patrol agents saw the opportunity in this. Corruption began to work its way through the ranks. It thrived because the Patrol has always operated in the nether reaches of society with minimal, if any, oversight, and under a vow of silence — then as now.
As the 20th century started to wind down, a border agent’s only law enforcement trappings were a revolver, a baton, and a pair of handcuffs. There was no wall to speak of, just some barbed wire in places. Mexican kids crossed the border during the day to play soccer on the flatter US land; folks on both sides crossed for work, school, to see the doctor; binational families socialized on either side of the porous and fluid frontier.
A border fence was under construction, however. But that was not then the most meaningful development in the borderlands. Refugees fleeing the devastation and persecution wrought by the US-funded Dirty Wars were starting to move northward in search of safety. But the border cops resisted change: they never pivoted to re-view and see anew the needs and character of this late-century generation of border crossers.
A humanitarian crisis was unfolding throughout Central America, which would extend into Mexico as the Dirty Wars gave way to the Drug Wars in the 1990s. But the Border Patrol continued to perceive those with legitimate asylum claims, as “illegals,” “criminals,” and “drug runners and dealers.” Then as now, they saw people in motion as guilty until proven innocent.
Then came the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which crashed the peso, spurring another northward mass migration of Mexican workers. With the numbers of border crossers spiking, Congress doubled down on enforcement, passing two notoriously restrictive immigration policies in 1996, and expanding the agency that, until then, had been little more than a congressional afterthought. The eastward traveling border barrier was just another example of the US government and Border Patrol agency bringing a hammer to bear on a humanitarian crisis — and one of its own making.
The fence created an obstacle course for safety seekers — a Devil’s Highway, in the words of Luis Alberto Urrea — pushing them into less populated and more inhospitable territory. That, plus an increase in agents, from fewer than 5,000 in 1996 to roughly 9,000 in 1998, made it harder and harder for folks in search of safety and a life of dignity to cross. The number of dead began to grow larger each year. They were succumbing to the weather: dehydrating to death in summer; freezing to death in winter.
Agents and resources were funneled to the vast desert region of the US borderlands, expanding the field office in remote Douglas, Arizona — then considered the most corrupt town on the 2,000-mile US-Mexico border. It grew big, and it grew fast, with little managerial oversight. Left to their own devices, agents there developed a sprawling kickback scheme; abused migrants in detention, especially women, without recourse; and possibly went into business with for-profit detention operators, earning them the moniker: the Douglas Mafia.
Then came 9/11, and a bottomless purse that turned the once congressional afterthought into a robust Cabinet-level department tasked with “coordinating and unifying all national security efforts involved in anti-terrorism, border security, immigration and customs, cyber security, and disaster prevention and management.”
Note: not a word about managing the unique needs of refugees or asylum seekers appears in the agency’s job description.
The post-9/11 Border Patrol christened itself the “premier US federal law-enforcement agency” — “the marines of CBP.” This institutional narcissism was reinforced by its state-of-the-art toys, from sophisticated surveillance cameras and automatic weapons to helicopters, planes, ATVs, and predator drones.
The Perils of Precipitous Hiring
Congress literally threw money at the first Secretary of DHS, Tom Ridge, to create this new army. A hiring surge ensued that shoveled new recruits through the academy and into the field faster than the time it took to complete the requisite background checks. As a result, the agency already infamous for its abbreviated and questionable training tradition — which it further shortened from four months to 52 days — added 17,000 agents: half the total force by the end of the Bush 45 administration.
Many of these were unfit to carry a badge and gun, according to James F. Tomsheck, an eight-year CBP Assistant Commissioner of Internal Affairs turned whistleblower. The lax hiring practices created a “perfect storm for corruption and misconduct to develop,” Tomsheck stated in 2014, adding that 5–10% percent of Border Patrol agents and officers are actively stealing government property, leaking sensitive information, and taking bribes from drug- and people-smugglers to look the other way.
Other high-ranking CBP officials pegged the corruption rate at closer to 20%.
Between 2005 and 2012, at least one officer was arrested for misconduct every single day. The conservative CATO Institute found that from 2006 to 2016, CBP and Border Patrol disciplinary infractions outstripped all other federal law enforcement. Even CBP Commissioner Ralph Basham admitted, in 2014, “We found out later that we did, in fact, hire cartel members.”
But cartel members weren’t the half of it. Polygraph exams, implemented only after the hiring surge, discovered that drug users and smugglers, kidnappers and sexual abusers had also been added to the force. And then there were the avowed white supremacists, who rose from the 20 regional “fiefdoms,” like the “Douglas Mafia,” to ride the hiring wave to Border Patrol chiefdom.
The agents’ union, the National Border Patrol Council, endorsed Trump in 2016, the first time the agency had backed a presidential candidate, ever. It endorsed him again this election cycle. Its representatives are regulars at agency conventions and frequent speakers on the Breitbart-sponsored podcast: The Green Line | The Truth Straight From The Border. The CBP website is peppered with resources for agents and their families produced by such right-wing organizations as NumbersUSA, Center for Immigration Studies, and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).
The misnamed FAIR was subsequently labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center due to its “ties to white supremacist groups and eugenicists.” Its rhetoric sounds, word for word, like that of Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump & Co’s racist and draconian immigration strategy. (Though perhaps that sentence is better written the other way around.)
The Green Monster
By 2015, the US CBP had evolved into the nation’s largest law enforcement agency. The army of 46,000 gun-carrying officers and agents (today it is 60,000) had a massive $12.4 billion annual budget (which ballooned to $30 billion in 2024) and more allegations of excessive force than any other police force in the land — though even that number is undercounted because the agency protects its own.
CBP’s corruption is matched only by the lengths it will go to distort facts to cover up internal criminality. Then as now, the agency operates beyond “constitutional constraints.” Rejecting outside scrutiny has allowed the historical culture of impunity within the Border Patrol to penetrate and flourish throughout its grandparent agency.
“The Green Line of silence is higher and wider than it’s ever been before,” states James Tomsheck.
Then, there’s the problem of the long-running unresolved mismatch between the agency’s perceived and actual missions.
Most Border Patrol agents who joined the force after 9/11 signed up for a tough job in a quasi-military agency protecting the country against terrorists and drug dealers. In reality, they are the front-line “greeters” of the traumatized and destitute seeking safety at the Southern border, who they’ve been indoctrinated to suspect, at best, and at worst, to hate.
A report released by the Center for Migration Studies cites that of 1,109 deported Mexican migrants surveyed, nearly a quarter report having been verbally abused by US government employees, primarily Border Patrol. In 2017, a CBP agent or officer was arrested every 36 hours, among them a serial killer. And amid scandal after scandal of its treatment of asylum seekers in the early years of the Trump administration — from separating families to holding kids in crowded cages to letting people die in agency custody to sexual abuse of migrant children to trafficking firearms to running down border crossers with their trucks — the agency was outed, in 2019, for its racist, sexist, and xenophobic attitudes. A secret 9,500-member Facebook group, which included then-Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost, who cut her teeth in Douglas, was exposed. Even Black and Hispanic US diplomats are reporting increased CBP discrimination and harassment on re-entering their own country.
This is now the group poised to serve as Trump & Co’s personal army. The evidence? It has already been deployed: unleashed against US citizens peacefully protesting police brutality under the banner of Black Lives Matter in the wake of the 2020 death of George Floyd.
Can He Do That?
That summer, unidentified masked and camouflaged agents in full tactical gear patrolled the streets of Washington, DC, Portland, OR, and Seattle, WA, lobbing tear gas, bloodying protesters, and pulling activists into unmarked vans. They were members of the Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC) — CBP’s quasi-militarized SWAT team, considered “…the most violent and racist in all law enforcement,” by Jenn Budd, former Border Patrol agent turned whistleblower and now fierce immigrant rights advocate.
It was a “blatant abuse of power,” stated Oregon Governor Kate Brown.
It was an “attack on our democracy,” added Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler.
It was a dress rehearsal by a president and an administration with an “authoritarian impulse,” wrote Charles Pierce.
It’s “the kind of thing we see in authoritarian regimes,” says Mary B. McCord, Georgetown Law Professor and former National Security Official at the US Department of Justice.
And while some current members of the US House of Representatives believe that no US president has “unfettered authority to direct thousands of federal law enforcement personnel to arrest and detain American citizens exercising their First Amendment rights,” an un-named former senior intelligence officer states that DHS agents are not required to wear identifiers when conducting arrests. This is the same agency that willingly pulled asylum-seeking families apart; that holds asylum seekers of all ages in crowded cells for weeks, with 100 people to one toilet; that looks away as children die of dehydration and flu in their custody; that fails to see the level at which their violence, impunity, and ability to dehumanize others have been normalized.
These forces operate with impunity in a now “constitution-free” policing zone 100 miles within all US land and sea borders. This area includes nine of the 10 largest US cities and six whole states as well as the District of Columbia. Some 200 million people fall under this jurisdiction — almost two-thirds of the entire US population.
No, Trump & Co should not be able to harness the Green Monster for their use as personal police. But they have. And that’s exactly what makes this story so troubling. The “Forever Wars” triggered by 9/11 are still being fought, from Peshawar to Portland. They’re just being fought by different armies. And their targets could be us.
Please consider this when you pull the lever this November 5th. Please.