The year is 1924, and the Immigration Act has just passed. The Ku Klux Klan is in its heyday. White supremacists use both the law and vigilante action to maintain racial hierarchy and outright push nonwhite people out of the country.
This is the environment in which the Border Patrol was founded.
A century later, the agency, which is under the umbrella of Customs and Border Protection (CBP), is playing a major role alongside Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda. This was perhaps never clearer than last Saturday, when two Border Patrol agents shot and killed VA nurse and observer Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
New directives from ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division suggest that the Border Patrol has been moved to a “support role” in Minnesota, after months of high-profile incidents featuring its commander-at-large Gregory Bovino, who has been sent back to his post in El Centro, California, before an expected retirement. But if the Border Patrol’s presence has actually been downgraded in the interior of the country, the legacy of its aggressive and brutal tactics serves as a reminder of what’s been happening at the border for decades, advocates say.
The history of the Border Patrol offers insights into the cruelty that has marked the first year of the Trump administration. According to many experts, violence and impunity are baked into the agency’s culture. Now, we’re all seeing—and feeling—what border communities have known for decades.
ADAM ISACSON, DIRECTOR FOR DEFENSE OVERSIGHT at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), has visited the U.S.-Mexico border over 30 times and studies the U.S. security apparatus along it. He described the Border Patrol as a roving band of vigilantes, like something out of an old Western.
“They had a real cowboy mentality,” he said. “They were operating on horseback, looking for people to deport.”
In the southern borderlands, this meant (and still means) traversing the empty desert: cacti, darkness, silence punctuated by the strange noises of animals. That environment breeds suspicion, Isacson said, and often means that the odds of a dangerous encounter are higher than in cities.
They’re “operating in wilderness areas, in deserts in the middle of the night, in places where nobody’s scrutinizing what [they] do. Nobody can see it,” he said. “So they’re used to being very untargeted in how they work.”
Also as a consequence of the Border Patrol’s history and typical setting, agents aren’t taught to “serve and protect,” as many other law enforcement officials ostensibly are.
“It’s a culture that has really encouraged and rewarded that confrontational approach,” Isacson said. Border Patrol agents don’t tend to assume that “the person you might find could be a regular civilian who just needs help. It’s really treating those you interact with with a lot of suspicion.”
As a consequence of the Border Patrol’s history and typical setting, agents aren’t taught to “serve and protect,” as many other law enforcement officials are.
It didn’t help that the Border Patrol was moved between agencies until it found its permanent home in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) after the department’s creation in 2002. Before that, it was under the authority of the Department of Labor and, later, the Department of Justice. This lack of a long-term home allowed the Border Patrol to avoid scrutiny and maintain some of its vigilante cowboy culture, Isacson said.
The post-9/11 incorporation into DHS made the Border Patrol the force it is today. Under the Clinton administration, the agency was already undertaking a major recruitment push. In 1992, the number of Border Patrol officers stationed along the southern border was 3,555. By 2002, it had almost tripled to 9,239. In the aftermath of 9/11, the agency went on another hiring spree and reached a peak of 18,501 officers at the southern border in 2013.
With these massive hiring surges came decreased vetting and too many new recruits for leadership to effectively manage. In the 2010s, use-of-force incidents jumped sharply, according to a Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s report; advocates told the Prospect that denial of medical care and reckless vehicle chases rose as well. The Border Patrol was violent, well funded, and untrained.
Groups like WOLA and the Southern Border Communities Coalition (SBCC) have been tracking these violent (and sometimes deadly) incidents for years. WOLA’s database identifies a whopping 455 cases of alleged abusive agent conduct just from 2020 to 2024. SBCC has tracked fatal encounters with the Border Patrol since 2010; it has found 364 lives lost. Alex Pretti is the most recent name on the list.
The incidents these organizations track range from constant dehumanization of migrants to heinous instances of abuse against minors. Border Patrol agents are known to call migrants “tonks,” a slur that purportedly originates from agents mimicking the sound a flashlight makes when they hit a migrant’s head. As recently as 2024, reports surfaced of agents describing migrants as “tonks” and “an influx of rats” from “whatamala, el salvado, and hondodas.”
SBCC, ALONG WITH THE RIGHTS ORGANIZATION Alliance San Diego, has spent years advocating for victims of some of Border Patrol’s most violent acts. Lilian Serrano, SBCC’s director, pointed to the murder of Anastasio Hernández Rojas in 2010 as an example of the Border Patrol’s cruelty. Hernández Rojas was a longtime San Diego resident with family in the city. After being deported to Mexico, he tried to re-enter the United States and was attacked by officers at a CBP station. “He stood up for his dignity,” Serrano said. “There’s even notes that he dared to look at the guards in the eyes, so he was already labeled as a hostile person by the agents just because he refused to look down.”
Border Patrol agents eventually tortured Hernández Rojas to death in full view of multiple witnesses, tasing and beating him until he was taken to a hospital and declared brain-dead.
Thomas Mockaitis, a professor of history at DePaul University, studies violent extremism and military history across the world. He described the Border Patrol as a paramilitary force comparable to the Praetorian Guard of ancient Rome, the B Specials in Northern Ireland, or the Stasi in East Germany.
“Both militaries and police operate [under] what are called rules of engagement,” Mockaitis said. “In other words, under what conditions [you are] allowed to use lethal force or any kind of force.” But the Border Patrol, he argues, lies somewhere between a military and a police force. Thinking of them as a paramilitary force helps explain the tragedies in Minneapolis and elsewhere.
“You’ve taken a body that has, essentially, limited police power, and given them body armor and military-style weapons. And then [you’ve] essentially given them a very permissive mandate. So they really are neither under the discipline of being the police nor the discipline of being the Army,” he said.
This paramilitary-esque behavior has caused even some ICE agents to balk.
“ICE agents aren’t puppy dogs or anything, but their history and their MO is not to rove around on fishing expeditions,” Isacson said. “And they’re used to operating in cities, so they’re at least usually somewhat more cognizant of the need to maintain community relations and not treat everyone as a suspect.”
Though Border Patrol spends the majority of its time within 100 miles of the U.S. border, its incursions into the interior—as in Chicago and Minneapolis—have precedent. In early 2025, when Bovino, the former Border Patrol commander-at-large, was the leader of the El Centro Sector, he presided over “Operation Return to Sender” in Kern County, California, which is roughly 200 miles from the nearest land border and 100 miles from the coast. The operation was highly aggressive and publicized, in the style of Chicago’s “Operation Midway Blitz” and Minneapolis’s “Operation Metro Surge.” Border Patrol agents arrested 78 people, 77 of whom had no criminal record. On Facebook, Bovino wrote: “Here in the #PremierSector we go the extra mile—or 500 of them—to protect our nation and communities from bad people and bad things.”
“That was really the blueprint,” said Isacson of Operation Return to Sender. “And it also made Bovino, who always had, like, five videographers on the El Centro sector staff anyway, much more visible to Kristi Noem and to Trump and [Stephen] Miller.”
LONGTIME ADVOCATES LIKE SERRANO empathize deeply with the people of Minneapolis, who are now experiencing the violence the Border Patrol has wrought on their communities for over a century.
“We have been raising the alarm for many, many years about the situation at the border, about the violence and the way in which Border Patrol operates without accountability,” Serrano said. “And it was always justified that ‘Well, it only happens [at] the border,’ ignoring that there are millions of people who call the border home.”
She hopes that the spread of Border Patrol violence into the interior will spark conversations and change to hold the agency accountable. Under Trump, of course, that task may be harder than ever. Though there are four oversight agencies within DHS, two of them—the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman and the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties—have been almost completely gutted. The Office of Professional Responsibility and the Office of Inspector General could hold agents accountable for abuses, but only if their leaders actively work to do so.
Isacson, for one, is pessimistic about the odds that DHS will properly police its own employees. He pointed to DHS’s inspector general, Joseph Cuffari, who in 2024 was found to have committed multiple abuses of authority in the role, including giving false information at his nomination hearing and hiring a law firm to retaliate against former employees. A committee of inspectors general and federal investigators sent their findings to President Biden for “appropriate action, up to and including removal.”
But Biden did not fire Cuffari.
“The Biden administration, they loved their norms, and they wouldn’t set a bad precedent by firing an inspector general,” said Isacson. “Which, of course, Trump has now done several times.”
Serrano has one suggestion for well-meaning Democrats: Focus on comprehensive change, not just getting Border Patrol out of the interior.
“We are very worried about some folks perceiving the solution to just send back the Border Patrol to the border,” she said. “What folks fail to see is that this agency brings violence everywhere they go. So if you just send them back to the border … what you’re really saying is that our border communities should go back to that violence and that the lives taken in our communities don’t matter, or aren’t as important.”