Sounding the Alarm: Nobody is Protected
A Genie Unleashed Is Not Easily Stuffed Back In Its Bottle
When our rights to Freedom of Speech and Assembly become labeled as “domestic terrorism” by Homeland Security, no one is “safe” anymore.
In April 1989, unarmed pro-democracy protesters gathered at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. They were there to mourn the death of Communist Party leader Hu Yaobang, a vocal advocate for Chinese liberal reform. Their grief turned to grievance, leading to a demonstration of over one million people that spread across China. Their demands included access to such hard-won democratic rights as legal due process and freedom of speech and assembly.
By the end of May, then-Paramount Leader of the People’s Republic Deng Xiaoping had had enough. He declared martial law, mobilized 300,000 troops, and ordered them to clear Tiananmen Square. In the wee hours of June 4, troops armed for battle marched behind tanks that rolled through Beijing, killing an estimated 10,000 Chinese citizens. No one knows for sure how many because tyrants invent their own reality.
Decent people around the world recoiled. And then there was Donald Trump.
The then-casino mogul was impressed with the “law and order” tactics of China’s leadership: “They were vicious, they were horrible, but they put [the protests] down...That shows you the power of strength,” he told Playboy in 1990.
Fast-forward thirty years, and the same man ordered the same agency responsible for tearing families asunder at the US southern border to clear Lafayette Square, just across the street from the White House.
It was the summer of 2020. Men in uniform marched on peaceful protesters with tear gas and flash bangs so Trump could have his picture taken in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, which neither invited nor welcomed him. The violent escort services were provided, in part, by agents of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The largest federal law enforcement agency in the land, then boasting 60,000 personnel, had been conscripted—alongside National Guard reservists, Park Police, and specially trained prison guards—to act as a US president’s personal security detail.
The peaceful protest was part of the Black Lives Matter movement that erupted after George Floyd lost his life under the knee of a Minnesota cop. That is when CBP Predator drones, unmanned aircraft intended for spying on suspected enemies, could be seen circling the skies of US cities where Black Lives Matter demonstrations were ongoing, including Minneapolis.
But Minneapolis lies outside CBP jurisdiction.
Though little known, the US is encircled in a 100-mile policing zone that emanates inward from east-west sea coasts and north-south land borders. More shocking still, this zone contains nine of the US’s ten largest cities and two-thirds of the country’s population. Even more disquieting is that, owing to a series of dubious Supreme Court decisions beginning in the 1970s, everyone’s Fourth Amendment rights to protection from unreasonable searches and seizures have long ceased to exist in this vast borderlands region, especially if you are a person of color.
In the summer of 2020, it appeared that Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall’s 1973 prediction—that nobody was protected from law enforcement overreach—had come true. The Border Patrol Tactical Unit, BORTAC, wielded stun grenades, projectiles, and chemical irritants against Black Lives Matter demonstrators in Portland, Oregon; it was suspected of being the unidentified force disappearing protesters into unmarked vans.
Considered the Marine Corps of the Homeland Security enforcement apparatus and deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, BORTAC is allowed to function without oversight or accountability. Under Trump, it was unleashed, as Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping’s military had been, against its own people.
“The history of ruthlessness by federal agents on the US-Mexico border was already well documented,” says immigration attorney Charlene D’Cruz. “But their impunity was ratcheted up many times since Trump’s inauguration.”
And that is a genie not easily stuffed back into its bottle.
Charlene lived and worked for twenty-three years in the town where George Floyd begged for, and was denied, his life’s breath. A teacher and legal aid attorney, she defended vulnerable people whose rights were routinely violated by landowners, schools, and the government. Growing up surrounded by the stories of her own family’s struggle to get out from under the knee of British imperialism, Charlene is no stranger to the savage inequalities that Black and Brown people face daily, in the US and elsewhere. She is well versed, personally and professionally, in the reality of injustice on the part of US law enforcement. But CBP, she says, is in a class all its own.
“They have eviscerated due process and the rule of law at the border.”
Charlene’s immigrant advocacy dates back to the 1980s when Central Americans were running from the violence caused by the US-supported Dirty Wars. Right out of college, she aided refugees detained at the site of a former Japanese internment camp, in the Arizona desert, to obtain asylum protections—what would become the Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project. At the height of the 2018 family separation crisis, she was back at the border, working to reunite families ripped apart by Trump & Co’s “zero tolerance” policy.
When their Migrant “Protection” Protocols, aka the Remain in Mexico (RMX) program, trapped approximately 70,000 men, women, and children, indefinitely, in dangerous cartel-control Mexican border towns from January 2019, Charlene pivoted again. She relocated to the Rio Grande Valley that October, setting up a legal clinic in a former Matamoros, Mexico dental office, just across from Brownsville, Texas. There, she tapped local attorneys to facilitate “know your rights” workshops in shelters and tent encampments south of the line. She coordinated a nationwide legal defense system intended to pair every person and family forced into peril with a pro bono attorney.
I learned about Charlene in January 2020, while volunteering in the Matamoros tent city, one of many that popped up on the doorstep of the world’s richest nation under Trump. It was my first stop on a 2,000-mile road trip across the line to see for myself what demagogues and the media refer to ad nauseam as the “crisis at the border.” In what would become a journey of discovery into the immigration debate now dividing the US nation—what I liken to Heart of Darkness meets Wild—the only crisis I found was the hardening of the human heart.
“Tireless in her efforts to defend the rights of asylum seekers,” I was told, “Charlene is perennially overworked and understaffed.” I decided to go and see if I could help her out.
At 9:00 a.m. on Epiphany Monday, a line of 50 people—at least— snaked from the reception area of Charlene’s upper-floor suite, down and around the landing of two half-flights of stairs, then spilled out the door and onto the street between building and encampment. They did not appear to be moving.
I climbed the stairs, gingerly dodging the knees of people seated on the steps. “Lo siento,” I was told. “I’m sorry. But Charlene’s gone to the bridge.” For as early as November 2019, Charlene’s responsibilities had expanded to include arguing for the rights of the critically ill and infirm who, by CBP’s own field guidance, should have been exempted from RMX and allowed to pursue their asylum claims in the US.
Though RMX rendered all safety seekers vulnerable to homelessness and hunger as well as cartel kidnapping, extortion, and violence, CBP officials were expected to grant those with urgent or documented health issues and mental or physical disabilities a “vulnerability exemption.” It should have worked like oil to lubricate the rusted doors of welcome, permitting at-risk and defenseless individuals and their caregivers entry under humanitarian parole.
But Customs and Border Protection officials refused to play by their own rules.
So, in addition to preparing asylum seekers for their day in court, Charlene was also expending precious hours walking the sick, pregnant, injured, and chronically impaired to the CBP offices on the Brownsville-Matamoros Gateway International Bridge to argue for their exemption rights. To bolster her points, she brought along consultants from the team of Global Response Medicine (GRM), a then-burgeoning NGO that stepped into Trump & Co’s war against the world’s most vulnerable people when two national governments, the United Nations, and the usual players in international healthcare looked away from the humanitarian fallout caused by the “leader of the free world.”
Always made to wait, sometimes for hours, they seldom achieved first-time success.
“I would present the paperwork. I would make the legal arguments. And we’d get pushback. Every. Single. Time.”
The legal-medical partnership began when a refugee family presented at GRM with a two-year-old so sick she looked more like a child of eight months. GRM doctors diagnosed acute and chronic malnutrition, and worse: a recent illness had led to septic shock. The child needed medical attention, stat. And appropriate care could not be found in Matamoros. A GRM doctor alerted Charlene, who pulled together the paperwork. The two crossed the child together to argue for an emergency “vulnerability exemption” to get her into a Brownsville hospital right away.
It was a cold day for Texas: 44°F and raining. The CBP supervisor took a look at the child dying in her mother’s arms and said, We’re not taking them.
Charlene persisted. She insisted. She refused to leave. Finally, a government-affiliated nurse practitioner showed up at the bridge. She confirmed a major sepsis manifestation within seconds.
“This kid has to get in,” she agreed. But as soon as her back was turned, the bridge supervisor denied the child entry again.
It was now two hours and ten minutes since they’d first made their appeal and the little girl was crashing. Charlene picked up her phone and called everyone she knew, begging them to contact Brownsville Port Director Tater Ortiz to demand that mother and child be let through, imploring them to spread the word, by word of mouth and on social media.
“In maybe ten to fifteen minutes, 1,000 people had called the port director. They let us in,” Charlene recounted. The entire process took three hours and 37 minutes, “and a year off my life,” says Charlene. It was neither legal, moral, necessary, nor fair. It was US federal agents playing politics—or God—with a child’s life.
“They are indifferent to human life,” states Charlene. Fortunately, this life was saved.
US Customs and Border Protection, which includes the Border Patrol, is not only the largest law enforcement agency in the land. It is also the most dangerous. It suffers neither oversight nor accountability. From an underfunded frontier agency, it has grown “into a modern, sophisticated paramilitary force” that operates outside the reach of the US Constitution.1
From Brownsville to San Diego and 100 miles north, the terror the Homeland Security Border Protection regime incites in the US borderlands has only increased with the decades. Its agents assert the power to board public transportation and to stop and interrogate people without warrants or reasonable suspicion. They search children on their way to school; parents on their way to work; families en route to doctor’s appointments. When the Obama administration tried to curtail racial profiling by law enforcement officers, the so-called “security” agencies pushed back. Hard.
“We can’t do our job without taking ethnicity into account,” one official told the New York Times.2 “We are very dependent on that.”
Yet, the agency remained essentially invisible to folks living beyond the southwest borderlands until the Trump-era crises of family separation and “kids in cages.” It was further unmasked when it used tear gas on peaceful protesters in the US capital, disappeared Portland demonstrators into unmarked vans, and surveilled the skies over US cities beyond its jurisdiction.
As with Deng Xiaoping turning tanks on his own people in 1989, Trump’s deployment of CBP as a national police force is nothing short of chilling.
In this context, as Justice Thurgood Marshall warned, “Nobody is protected.” For wherever armed officers are given free rein to act with impunity, the results are never good for democracy and the rule of law. All our rights are put at risk. Now, with two in every three US residents living under CBP’s knee, the borderlands are everywhere.
Jones, Reece (2022). Nobody is Protected: How the Border Patrol Became the Most Dangerous Police Force in the United States. Counterpoint.
U.S. to Continue Racial, Ethnic Profiling in Border Policy. (2014, December 5). The New York Times, by Matt Apuzzo and Michael S. Schmidt.
Thank you, for the update on the continuing "static" in our everyday lives.