When the Choices Boil Down to Concentration Camps or Mass Detention, One Thing is Clear:

The system is Rotten to the Core and should be torn to the ground

From Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands …

The story of the living link between today’s US Border Management Regime and yesteryear’s institution of human chattel slavery:

Jefferson Davis Milton (1861-1947)

Jefferson Davis Milton was the son of a Florida governor, who was also a Confederate general and a Southern plantation owner — “plantation” being a euphemism for a prison labor camp. Plantation prisons were surveilled by humans, called Slave Patrols. Deputized to enforce “plantation law” through the cruelest of means, they were emboldened to “kick ass and ask questions later,” which they did for multiple generations.

When the Civil War finally put an end to the practice of humans owning and torturing other humans, Milton’s father was so distraught he took his own life. The Slave Patrols morphed into the Ku Klux Klan. Many went west as did young Jeff, who migrated as a boy to Texas to live with a sister.

In Texas, Klansmen joined the Rangers, a paramilitary force created to provide “security” for Anglo-colonial settlers of the Republic of Texas (1836-1846); then deputized to police the region once Texas became the 28th US state. The Rangers brought to their job the same methods used by their Slave Patrol forbears. Leaning on racial profiling and violence, they “kicked ass first and asked questions later.”

Milton joined the Rangers at the age of 17. The minimum age was then 21. So, he lied about his age.

A few years later, in 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which didn’t even try to hide US racism beneath a fancy euphemism. It legalized the hunting down and expulsion of those people who’d labored under oppressive conditions to build the US railroad. An armed militia was needed to enforce the legislation, and a bureaucracy was needed to manage the militia. Thus was born the US Bureau of Immigration and, in 1904, the Mounted Guard of Chinese Inspectors. 

Made up of former Slave Patrollers, Klansmen, and Texas Rangers, including Jeff Milton, the Mounted Guard also “kicked ass first and asked questions later.” Their enforcement tools, too, were racial profiling and violence, which they wielded with impunity as they suffered no accountability from policymakers in far-away Washington.

The year 1919 brought the Volstead Act, leading to the 1920 Eighteenth Amendment, which criminalized the sale and consumption of alcohol. It was the era of Prohibition – the US’s second Drug War. (The first was the Smoking Opium Exclusion Act, which also targeted the Chinese.)

Hot on its heels came the 1921 Emergency Quota Act, which dehumanizes people of certain origins, referring to them as “aliens,” and seeking to limit their numbers.

Then came the 1924 Immigration Act (aka National Origins Act). This is when we first see humans being labeled “illegals,” specifically those who’d been traversing the borderlands “without inspection” forever. It’s also when we start to see penalties levied for what was suddenly and without warning considered “unlawful” entry — the beginning of deterring migration through cruelty, necessitating yet another enforcement arm. 

Enter the US Border Patrol.

In 1924, Jefferson Davis Milton was named the very first Border Patrol agent. For the next decade or so, he rode the line from Nogales to Yuma, Arizona, hunting down, arresting, and expelling whomever Congress deemed unworthy of inclusion as well as interdicting those daring to traffic in illicit elixirs. His methods were – you guessed it – racial profiling and violence, which he passed down to the younger recruits in his change.

This is how Jefferson Davis Milton bequeathed to today’s Border Patrol the culture of impunity he learned from former Slave Patrollers. 

By the time Milton retired, the Border Patrol had added yet a third arrow to its enforcement quiver: opening the border when cheap labor was needed to harvest Imperial Valley plantations or slaughter Texas cattle; then closing the border and chasing laborers south again when it was not. The US Border Patrol, therefore, has traditionally served as the people hunters, herders, and henchmen for the white wealthy, especially if their undocumented laborers ever complained of the dreadful exploitation they were forced to endure.

From its inception, the US Border Patrol was rotten to its core: a system of oppression built on the legalization of exclusion, racial profiling, and expulsion through the cruelest of means. Today, little has changed except the size of the force and its ever-ballooning budget. 

Today’s US Border Patrol is part of just one agency within the twenty-two-tentacled US Department of Homeland Security, which contains the largest armed force in the world: 80,000 agents, 95 percent male, who need only a high school degree to apply and receive less than sixty days of training. Even now, they are trained to “kick ask first and ask questions later.” Even now, these so-called “security” forces suffer little to no accountability.

Under Trump, they were deployed to tear apart families seeking safety, tear gas peaceful protesters expressing their First Amendment rights, and disappear documented citizens into unmarked vans.

Under Biden, the US border enforcement regime will receive 29.8 billion taxpayer dollars, topping the previous record spending year of $25.4 billion in 2020.

And if the bipartisan border deal presented to Congress on February 4, 2024, had won the day, another $20.23 billion would be on the way to the Department of Homeland Security right now, some of it to help shore up the beleaguered asylum system. But most of it for more of the same: enforcement of arcane and clearly racist laws.

From its inauguration in 2003 to 2022, the Department of Homeland Security gobbled up $333 billion of our money, reports Juan González of Democracy Now! The vast majority of it went to more officers and guns, as well as for-profit detention and deportation. Far less has been spent to support Asylum Officers, immigration lawyers, resettlement services, and the work of welcome.

Indeed, if Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton get their way, their Texas Senate Bill 4 will criminalize humanitarianism. The two have already diverted billions from their state’s coffers, deputizing vigilantes to “kick ass first and ask questions later” under their legally questionable Operation Lone Star. They’ve deployed the National Guard against an unarmed “foe” and booby-trapped river buoys to maim safety seekers with razor wire and circular saw blades. They’ve stood by and watched as women and children have drowned in the Rio Grande.

In the face of such illegality, the Biden administration seeks only to appease: They offer reduced due process and increased incarceration under ICE as a “compromise,” while the former guy promises to bring us right back to pre-Civil War times with concentration camps; oppressive surveillance; and mass deportations in chains to places as many as 11 million fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, and valued long-term members of our communities have never known, separating incalculable numbers of families in the process. 

Call to Action

For those of us who value human rights and condemn racism and cruelty for cruelty’s sake in all its forms…

• We must recognize the myriad ways in which our institutions were built upon the foundations of white supremacy and perpetuate attitudes and actions we abhor.

• We must understand that people move. Always have, always will, whether seeking opportunity or fleeing harm.

• We must concede that deterring migration through cruelty has never worked.

• We must demand that our elected officials stop shoveling our money to law enforcement agencies that know no accountability and rely on racial profiling and violence to do their jobs, in the image of the Slave Patrols.

Most urgently, we must make Democrats care about this issue before November 2024 and Stop Trump & Co at all costs. We know what he, Stephen Miller, and their ilk are capable of. We’ve lived through it already. And what’s coming will be much worse.

Then, once we’ve stopped them, we must tear the current system down. 

We are better than concentration camps and mass incarceration. These methods and more have crossed the line. We can do better.

We. Must. Do. Better

Stay tuned for me. In the meantime, I’d be most grateful if you would…