Our Southern Border and Illegal Crossings

I joined the Border Patrol in June of 1995 not knowing a thing about it as I was raised in Alabama in the 1970s. Rare for an agent, I hold a Bachelor of Science with honors in Criminal Law and Policing Organizations from Auburn University. I was an award-winning agent; my records can be seen on Substack under my blog. I rose to the highest non-management rank at the time of senior patrol agent within four years with the agency.

Stationed in Campo, California back in the day when the Pine Valley I-8 checkpoint was just getting started, I spent many days hiking and tracking groups from Tecate to Camp Laguna, from Canyon City to the Cowboy Camp, from Tierra del Sol into the Laguna Mountains. I guarded our borders without GPS, just a .357 revolver, a baton and a radio that didn’t work much of the time. And I did it alone cause that is how we did it back then. I worked on narcotics task forces, sector prosecutions and was a senior Intelligence agent at sector headquarters and an acting supervisory Border Patrol agent.

By the time I made it to my duty station in the east county mountains in November of 1995, deterrence polices were a year old. Deterrence policies are things like walls, cameras and sensors that were designed by the US military and then used by the Border Patrol to force migrants who entered the country illegally to cross in the most dangerous of places instead of the cities. A fundamental aspect of these policies is that deterrence requires us to knowingly push human beings to their deaths.

According to then Immigration and Naturalization Commissioner Doris Meissner, for deterrence to work, the migrants would have to be pushed out to the most dangerous mountains, deserts and rivers. They must suffer emotionally, mentally and physically when crossing so that after we return them to their countries, they will then tell the others not to come.

As the years went by, the number of deaths increased in Campo as migrants were pushed to the east mountains, but the demographics of the bodies we were finding began to change. In the beginning it was mostly Mexican men looking for work or Mexican drug smugglers. With climate change and various wars, more were coming for asylum than season work. For the average field agent, that meant dead women and children, that meant live births on snow covered trails, that meant entire groups of a dozen or more dying in the sweltering heat of a smuggling truck or train car. Sometimes it meant entire families died together, watching each other take their last breathes in search of safety. That meant we deservedly dealt with the aftermath of our actions.

Most migrant bodies are never found. These are those that have been. Of the ones found, many are never identified or returned to loved ones.

But instead of investing in legal asylum pathways, instead of creating jobs that assist asylum seekers with finding their way in our country, instead of recognizing we were intentionally killing people for seeking what is a right under US law, we chose…we chose…to go the punitive route because that is the path the lobbyists paid our leaders to go. This is a system based in making money with little to do with national security.

For thirty years, I have watched migrants of all types die by US immigration policy. Some asylum seekers fall from the walls intentionally designed and built thirty feet high to cause them to lose their balance. Thousands have been swept away in the Rio Grande River. Tens of thousands are buried by the sandstorms of the California and Arizona deserts. For three decades they have suffered physically, mentally, emotionally simply because we chose this for them…and they still come. This is because deterrence does not work when your only option is to die there or maybe die here. If deterrence worked, we would not have had the last four years of record illegal crossings.

Essentially, the problem we have today is that as demand for asylum went up, the federal government was not willing to increase nor build an asylum system that addressed that need. In fact, the government continued to narrow who could legally apply. It’s a case of supply and demand. People have come to our borders since we created them. The gap between the demand, that is the need for asylum, and the supply or legal avenues with which to apply, naturally allowed the cartel to step in and meet that demand or need. When I was an agent in 1995, the cartel was not even involved in smuggling of migrants. A decade of deterrence and eliminating all of the legal avenues for asylum created the market we have today for the cartel which in turn now feeds the market for further militarization.

What the immigration enforcement agencies learned by 2010 was that deterrence policies and narrowing who could even apply for asylum was not just big business for the cartels, it was also big business for them and their contractors. Border Patrol, CBP and ICE management work hand and glove with private detention companies, defense contractors, surveillance companies (many of whom are foreign), and anti-immigrant hate groups who then hire them as advisors after they retire.

Then came the propaganda. The Border Patrol Union and others in media began promoting racist and false phrases such as “catch and release” and “invasion” or promoted the white supremacist idea of replacement theory in order to create the false narrative of a war zone filled with mostly violent criminals. No matter where you get your media from, this was likely the only view you had of the southern border for the last decade. This is because the Border Patrol Union escorted only right-wing news outlets to where the migrants were. This access was not afforded to other media outlets. The only way they could have found the groups in roughly two thousand miles of border was to have the union act as escorts to each crossing. The union is cozy with right-wing media to the point of creating fake crossings for their cameramen.

What the immigration enforcement agencies learned in those years was that most Americans and many in Congress have no idea what is going on down here, and they could use that to their advantage. When the Border Patrol, CBP and others talk about a closed border, they mean closing the asylum system. Americans think they mean preventing illegal crossings in between the ports. Leaders of the immigration agencies mean only persons of wealth, higher education, or highly sought after skills, or political opinions that align with their ideology can legally seek asylum. They are not referring to “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

Today, we know what happens when we “close” the border, meaning closing the asylum system, from the Covid 19 pandemic when Title 42 was used. CBP’s own statistics showed that closing the asylum system had the direct effect of causing asylum seekers to cross illegally. This graph shows the average number of arrests per Border Patrol agent per year since 1996. Note how the number of apprehensions per agent each year drastically dropped from 261 during the time I was an agent to an average yearly arrest rate of 17 in 2012. That is because the agency was able to triple their workforce. Also note that in the height of recent illegal crossings in 2022, the average number of arrets per agent was at 114. This is literally less than half the number of arrests we made in 1996 with a third of the agents.

The number of illegal crossings were incredibly low and stable from 2012 to 2018 until the enactment of Migration Protection Protocols that partially closed the asylum system. Then CBP began metering at the portswhich means severely limiting appointments. During this time, the San Ysidro Port of Entry claimed they only had enough personnel to process about ten people a day. Yet in 2022, the same port with the same number of staff was processing about 165 Ukrainians a day. As the graph shows, this metering during the Migration Protection Protocols that required applicants to wait in Mexico for three months to a year or more caused illegal crossings to rise.

In March of 2020, Title 42 was enacted and completely shut down the asylum system further demonstrating this point that limiting legal avenues for inspection causes illegal crossings. This massive increase in illegal crossings overwhelmed the Border Patrol until the program was ended in March of 2023. Once legal avenues to be inspected opened, illegal crossings decreased to manageable levels for Border Patrol and allowed them to return their focus to criminals and not processing asylum seekers.

Title 42 essentially created a backlog of three years’ worth of asylum seekers waiting to be inspected and broke the already failing system. That was the plan: close the asylum system to break it. By the time the system was opened back up in 2023, the federal government did not just have 2023 asylum seekers to process, but people from 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. What we just saw during the last four years was the result of shutting down an essential part of our national security. Shutting the asylum system down will cause people to cross illegally.

Today, the federal government and the Border Patrol claim the border is closed. Again, this does not mean people are not illegally crossing but means that the asylum system is closed. There are less Border Patrol agents patrolling the border right now because they are now in charge of this mass deportation. Today’s border in between the ports of entry is as open as it was during the last four years. Rest assured; the numbers of illegal crossings will go up again. In general, it takes two or more months for the migrants to change tactics. Families must decide if they will return to their countries, try and make a life in Mexico or cross illegally. Most will cross illegally and thus, more people seeking asylum will die. These victims are no longer counted as intentional casualties of deterrence policies by the US government, preferring instead to ignore the tens of thousands who have intentionally been pushed by our policies to their untimely deaths simply for seeking safety.

What have we created?

Our current immigration enforcement system consist of three agencies: ICE for the interior, CBP for the ports and Border Patrol in between the ports. In the last 30 years, this system has been characterized by five elements:

• The US government’s deterrence policies have killed tens of thousands of migrants.
• We are intentionally forcing migrants to seek safety by crossing deserts, rivers and snow-covered mountains which causes them serious bodily harm and mental anguish.
• The US has intentionally closed the only safe and legal avenues for asylum creating these conditions that we know will maim or kill.
• The US government has imposed detention for civil immigration offenses where forced sterilization and hysterectomies on migrant women were occurring.
• The US government has forcibly taken children from asylum seeking families and adopted some of them out to American families.

The US and the UN agreed decades ago that these are the five elements of genocide. The only thing missing is the that they belong to one national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Perhaps it is not a genocide, but it certainly seems we are committing serious human rights violations.

As a former agent, I am not in favor of open borders because of the threats we face in today’s world. There are people and goods that can harm our citizens that come across illegally. At the same time, I have witnessed the immigration agencies and politicians mislead the public and press by insisting that a closed border is somehow more secure and that we are being invaded. None of that is true. A secure border is a fluid thing. It changes just as the demographics of who is at our southern border has changed, but it must involve the humanitarian concept of asylum for those in need.

A robust and humane asylum system where families can wait in safety and be inspected by our immigration officials is an essential part of our border security apparatus. With it, cartels have less business and people are safer. If we continue to use deterrence policies, we will continue to commit serious human rights violations, the cartel will continue to have customers, we will continue to fill the mass grave that our southern border has become, agents will continue to suffer moral injuries and attempt suicide just as I have, our political leaders will continue to use asylum seekers as a scapegoat for their failures as leaders and the immigration enforcement agency leaders will continue to control billion-dollar contracts and secure lucrative retirement gigs with those same companies while making our country less safe.

I am deeply concerned for the soul of our country as we continue these policies that have created a mass extermination of tens of thousands of human beings in our own backyard for what is a legal right by our own laws. As Americans, we are responsible for intentionally causing these deaths. As a survivor of attempted suicide like many of my fellow agents, I can assure you that many of us joined with the goal of protecting our country. Intentionally sending families, non-criminal asylum seekers to their inevitable deaths was not one the jobs we signed up for, but it is what we have done.

Whether you care for migrants or agents, deterrence must stop, and a humane and robust asylum system must be created for all the violence and trauma to end.

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