Felix Marquez/AP Photo
U.S. Customs and Border Protection mounted officers attempt to contain migrants as they cross the Rio Grande from Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, into Del Rio, Texas, September 19, 2021.
They were called the Mounted Guards. In 1904, the U.S. Immigration Service deputized the first federal agents with an explicit mission to patrol the border and capture those crossing it. Based in El Paso, these inspectors rode on horseback as far as California, hunting down Chinese migrants who had been racially excluded from immigrating to the United States. While the explicit goal of policing immigrants was new, the policing of Black, brown, and indigenous peoples had long played a crucial role in Texas, enforcing white settler supremacy with terror and brutality.
Some of the earliest law enforcement entities created by the Republic of Texas were local slave patrols and the Texas Rangers, founded as a paramilitary force to seize land from Native Americans. When the U.S. Border Patrol was founded in 1924, many of its first recruits came from the Ku Klux Klan and the Rangers, who only a few years earlier had massacred 15 unarmed Mexican American men and boys in Porvenir, Texas.
Last week, Border Patrol agents on horseback charged at Haitian asylum seekers in Del Rio, Texas. Photographs of the attack, showing agents brandishing reins like whips against defenseless families, horrify our collective conscience. For Texans, the attack on Black migrants is a painful reminder that white supremacist state violence along the U.S.-Mexico border is still very much alive. Even worse, the state of border policing in Texas has expanded under President Biden’s watch.
White supremacist state violence along the U.S.-Mexico border is still very much alive.
The Biden administration put out perfunctory statements condemning the use of force by its own agents on horseback, but has not addressed the larger issue of its horrific treatment of Haitian migrants. The hostility from the administration toward Haitian migrants led to the resignation of Daniel Foote, a career diplomat who had been serving as the special envoy to Haiti since July.
Since Friday, the Department of Homeland Security has also closed the migrant camp in Del Rio and expelled thousands of Haitians and Black migrants back into Mexico, putting their lives at risk and denying them their right to apply for asylum. In response to the abuse and expulsions, immigrant rights and humanitarian organizations, in particular those led by Black advocates, are demanding answers, accountability, and humane treatment of Haitian migrants.
This should be a wake-up call for the Biden administration that the Border Patrol, in Texas and across the country, remains true to its roots as a racist paramilitary that exists to police the very existence of people of color. Not only must the practice of terror by horseback end, but so should the career of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, under whose tenure systemic oppression along the border has taken a turn for the worse as he has overseen the deportation of thousands of Haitian migrants.
In March, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott created Operation Lone Star, the early framework of a state-based border patrol focused on terrorizing and imprisoning Black and brown men (regardless of citizenship). He quickly expanded the operation by usurping disaster authorities, manipulating state criminal trespass laws, and colluding with landowners to prosecute recently arrived asylum seekers. These actions, backed by $1.8 billion in recently appropriated funds, are harming people of color across the state. And along the border, these policies have fortified a police state to the point of occupation. In Starr County alone, traffic citations for the violation of having anything on your car windshield have increased by 1,060 percent since Operation Lone Star has taken effect.
Instead of challenging Gov. Abbott head-on, Secretary Mayorkas is following his lead. He has maintained the Trump administration’s inhumane use of Title 42, which erroneously invokes the pandemic as an excuse for turning away asylum seekers, violating their human rights by sending them back to the very countries from which they have fled. And instead of instituting a comprehensive refugee plan across the Western Hemisphere, he has promoted officials who oversaw human rights violations under the previous administration, like Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz and Homeland Security Chief of Staff Jennifer Higgins. Personnel is policy, so as long as the Department of Homeland Security is led by those who abuse asylum seekers—and those who enable them—there can be no justice on the border.
Texans are tired of having to wait for justice to be served. Texas was the last state to hear the Emancipation Proclamation, and so Black Texans have long celebrated a holiday on the anniversary of it being read in Galveston: Juneteenth. President Biden recently made it a national holiday, acknowledging the importance of extending freedom to every last person, no matter how distant they are. Those words ring hollow when DHS has responded to a humanitarian issue with mass deportations of Haitians, all while Haiti’s leaders pleaded for a moratorium. It is time for the president to make good on his commitment to reimagine the asylum system and root out the history of human rights abuses inherent in the Department of Homeland Security. Like a rising phoenix, to restore the “soul of America,” the systems rooted in racist mounted border patrols must be dismantled. Only then may the hope of freedom and justice stretch all the way to the Rio Grande.
