What Tucson is seeing today and what to expect from law enforcement

Thankfully, I’ve never had to participate in a mass deportation as a Border Patrol agent. I’ve never even participated in a so-called raid. When Donald Trump was declared the winner, I went to my giant file of Border Patrol research and organized the Operation Wetback file.

Yes, that was the actual name of the last mass deportation.

What I discovered from these old newspaper clippings is pretty similar to what we are seeing today: some large raids where the feds take along media and make a big show of it claiming they are arresting only violent criminals, but mostly it was local and state law enforcement assisting the feds in stopping people who were driving while Brown. I say this because as we have seen time and again, immigration agencies claim their arrests are the worst of the worst, yet they end up being people who have already seen a judge allowing them to stay in country or they are barbers with basketball tattoos or agricultural workers.

The immigration agencies lie constantly to the American people.

Today and every day, I am in contact with people in Tucson who are monitoring the events. This mass deportation so far has looked like feds entering a Mexican market to serve court papers but making it look like an immigration raid. They could have just walked in and served the papers, but no. They had to have a handful of agents dressed for a drug bust, standing outside suited up for war to scare the neighborhood. The targeting of Latino businesses for ICE inspections has increased in Tucson. This often bankrupts small family businesses and terrorizes their families and can lead to a form of dehumanization Mo Goldman calls economic deprivation and it is a form of dehumanization.

All over the southern border, gangs of cops and feds are rolling up on Brown people. I don’t know what else to call this when you see masked, not in uniform or even showing badges, who consistently fail to even identify themselves surround typically Brown or Black people and whisk them to another state before they can even talk to a family member or an attorney. Kidnapped? Forced disappearance? Extrajudicial abduction? As practiced in authoritarian regimes this tells us, we are there my friends. What we are seeing all across the country and here in Tucson are gangs of federal, state and local cops working together even though they do not have cross training or legal authorities granted to them to do so.

Your local and state cops and the feds such as FBI, ATF, DEA and Marshals have what is generally called peace officer authorities. To stop someone or even enter someone’s property without a warrant, they must see or have some cause to believe that you have committed a crime. This is called probable cause. These peace officers are not allowed to stop or enter people’s property without probable cause or a warrant. If they do, the evidence can and should be thrown out. The 4^th amendment and prior decisions have guaranteed this.

It is different in immigration. The Supreme Court has decided that if you live within 100 miles of any land or sea border, immigration agents can stop you or enter your property, though not your dwelling, without a warrant. Immigration agents only need reasonable suspicion, and not probable cause. The court stated this reasonable suspicion must include two factors and that one of those factors could be that you appear to not be white. They justified this based on the majority of people crossing the southern border back then were Mexicans. I’m not sure if they ever took into account that there are millions of Native people living in this 100-mile rule. Today, two-thirds of Americans live within this area that allows racial profiling.

Chicago is a border city. D.C. is a border city. Detroit is a border city.

If your peace officers are now taking on immigration duties, well then that means they can stop you and use whichever cause or suspicion they need. They do not even need to see you breaking the law to stop you now if you are not white. I think it is important to say that out loud. If your local and state cops are doing immigration duties, they do not need a warrant to go on your property and search. They just need two causes to justify it, and the color of your skin and the proximity to the border gets it every time.

Tucsonians and everyone living within this 100-mile border zone does not have full 4^th Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. You just ran to the store for milk. Tucson PD pulls you over just because you are Brown and live within 100 miles of any land or sea border. Since Arizonans passed HCR2060, your local and state police can now use reasonable suspicion to stop you because you have the wrong skin color.

And now they can ask you what your citizenship is which brings us to the other constitutional amendment that does not exist in this constitutional free border zone, the 5^th amendment. When a law enforcement officer demands someone state their citizenship, this violates the protection of all “persons” from self-incrimination. Yet, the Supreme Court has decided that over 100 immigration checkpoints scattered within this constitutional free border zone can somehow just ignore this amendment.

But this is not just a mass deportation operation like the one America saw in the 50s. It is also a training operation meant to teach the regular cops, your peace officers, your FBI, ATF, DEA, Marshals how to do immigration style policing. That means no probable cause, no crime, nothing but being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They are teaching cops who normally either have to provide probable cause or they must investigate, develop evidence, obtain warrants when enforcing the law…immigration agents are teaching them they can gang rush a guy gassing up, not identify themselves, beat him so badly they break his occipital bone in three places, fuck up his knee, give him two surgeries on the taxpayers’ dime, hold him in Eloy Detention and Florence Detention for four months, not allow him to file a complaint and then dump him back in Mexico with nothing. Meanwhile his family had no idea where he was, and his truck and tools were stolen.

Forced disappearance.

For years I have warned about this Border Patrol-ification of the other federal services, and now it is here. What can you expect? Border Patrol intends to become a national police force. I expect ICE and Border Patrol, maybe even CBP to combine. Right now, CBP owns the feds in surveillance and that is on purpose. The military will be doing much of the border line work, agents will be coordinating the mass deportations that will turn into mass round ups of whomever they decide.

You see, they are getting them used to violating people’s rights by forcing the regular cops to learn immigration policing. They are teaching them that there is no accountability in this constitutional free border zone.

There is no one willing to hold them accountable. Not even when Border Patrol agents like Tucson local Deputy Commander Efren Cornejo molest and sexually abuse their daughters for over eleven years will they be held accountable. Your local judges like Pima County Judge Casey McGinley believe they are heroes and will give them lifetime probation with no requirements to register as a sex offender. He’s now roaming around Tucson maybe looking for his next victim.

If there is no one to stop them from abusing their own children, no one to keep them from busting people’s faces open, no one to stop them from performative violence when serving documents….well, then there is no one to stop them from disappearing your neighbor, your friend, your loved one or even you.

That is what you should expect. If you are of color, if you write anything they disagree with, if you say something they do not like, you may be forcibly disappeared too. This is why I say what happens on the border does not stay on the border. We should expect this to happen to citizens soon, which is why we must stand up for the undocumented now.

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