Robert Evans and Caitlin Durante expose the U.S. Border Patrol as a systemic nightmare, detailing child deaths like Jacqueline Call's and alleging CIA-trained death squads in Guatemala under Operation Wetback. They argue the agency protects whiteness through torture and "ice box" confinement, noting post-9/11 expansion from 9,000 to 21,000 agents with minimal vetting despite failing to stop terrorists. With corruption ranging from hiring cartel members to killing 97 people since 2003 without accountability, the hosts conclude the force evolved into an armed right-wing wing under Trump, fulfilling a legacy of Harlan Carter and exposing deep institutional rot. [Automatically generated summary]
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Financial Literacy Month Kickoff00:03:34
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
It's Financial Literacy Month and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they've failed.
Listen to Eating Wall Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Bajanista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
If you're watching the latest season of the Railhouse Wise of Atlanta, you already know there's a lot to break down.
Marcia accusing Kelly of sleeping with a married man.
They holding Kay Michelle back from fighting Drew.
Pinky has financial issues.
On the podcast, Reality with the King, I, Carlos King, recap the biggest moments from your favorite reality shows, including the Railhouse Wise franchise, the drama, the alliances, and the tea everybody's talking about.
To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Ernest, what's up?
Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
On each episode of the podcast, Earn Your Leisure, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship.
From stocks and real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, our goal is simple.
Make financial literacy accessible for everyone.
Because when you understand the system, you can start to build within it.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Earn Your Leisure, and listen now.
Hello, world, but specifically Australia.
This is Robert Evans, hosted Behind the Bastards.
And I just wanted my Australian listeners in particular to know that I stood up for you against Caitlin's cruelty just a minute ago.
She pronounced the name of your greatest city, Melbourne.
Melbourne, like a savage.
Yeah, I said Melbourne.
And then, okay, well, what about the people who live in Sydney or other cities in Australia?
There's one city in Australia.
Its name is Melbourne, and that's the end of this digression.
Hello, Caitlin Durante, guest for today's episode.
How are you doing?
Well, I would be doing better if you would pronounce my last name correctly.
Speaking of mispronunciation.
Durante.
Caitlin Durante.
Durante.
I think we've all learned a lesson about maybe not judging each other because it's impossible to ever know how words are supposed to be said.
Yeah, he thinks Ariana Grande's name is Ariana Graham.
You know, Sophie, you've been giving me guff about that one for a while.
Guatemala Death Squad Origins00:15:55
As it deserves.
Well, now I'm sad.
Don't be sad, Robert.
This is part two.
If we didn't get to pick on a white man at the beginning of an episode, then like, what's the point?
Yeah, this is a whole episode about I don't know.
It's part two of our Border Patrol series.
Let's pass the Bechto test right now, Sophie.
Oh, Caitlin, I'm really enjoying the bluish shirt you're wearing right now.
Oh, my gosh.
Well, I'm so glad you brought it up because it's a Paddington shirt that says migration is not a crime, which is relevant to today's episode.
Oh, wow.
It really is relevant to today's episode.
That we're bordering.
But then I said Paddington, and that messed up the Bechel test.
I was like, are we gendering Paddington right now?
Because that does.
Paddington is a non-binary asexual icon.
Yes, yes, yes.
So kind of passed the Bechdel test.
Okay, Robert, you want to go to your show behind the bastards right now?
I don't actually know if we passed the Bechdel test there, but you know what test we did pass is the writing for many hours about the Border Patrol test.
Yes.
Which is a more important test, I think.
So, you know, this one we're splitting up a little bit weirdly over the course of two weeks because my entire life and schedule has been continually thrown into chaos.
So I do apologize for this one being done a little bit differently than others are done.
On December 6th, 2018, seven-year-old Jacqueline Call crossed the U.S.-Mexico border near a place called Antelope Wells, New Mexico.
She was with her father, 29-year-old Neri Call.
Both were Kekchi Maya, and they'd lived most of their lives in the Alta Vera Paz region of Guatemala.
Starving and desperate, she and her family turned themselves into the Border Patrol.
When Jacqueline was taken into their custody, she was already beginning to show signs of illness, what would turn out to have been a streptococcal infection.
DHS maintains that they conducted an initial screening and that there was no evidence of health issues in the little girl.
Jacqueline was placed on a Border Patrol bus, feverish and vomiting from severe dehydration.
Eight hours after being taken into custody, she began to suffer seizures.
She died the next day.
Gomez Alonzo, age eight, crossed the AOS-Mexico border sometime around December 18th.
He and his father, Augustin, were members of the Chuzh people, another Mayan group who came from the Huehuetenango region of Guatemala.
Gomez spent six days in Border Patrol custody, shuttled around from New Mexico to El Paso, and then back to New Mexico to be interned in a detention facility named near Alamogordo.
He started to show symptoms of sickness on the 24th.
He was taken to the hospital where he was tested for the cold, but not for influenza, which he had.
He was given medicine that could not help him and sent back to jail, where he died on Christmas Eve, 2018.
Oh, no.
Yep.
Good times.
That's awful.
Yeah, it's real bad.
The deaths of Gomez and Jacqueline were briefly very big news in the United States.
It was believed that the two were the first child immigrant deaths in Border Patrol custody since 2010.
In 2019, though, it was revealed that another child, Darilyn Cordova-Vall of El Salvador, had actually died back in September 2018 under similar circumstances.
The Trump administration received a lot of blame both for covering this death up to try to influence the midterm elections and for their failure to push DHS to take any meaningful action to stop kids from dying at the border.
Three dead children is a tragedy, but their little corpses are actually just the top of an iceberg of dead people, many of them Guatemalan, that we can lay at the feet of Border Patrol agents.
And you might be surprised to learn how that whole situation came about.
You want to hear about this, Caitlin?
Excited?
I have to.
Also, what colorful language you used in terms of the corpses are at the top of an iceberg?
I mean, well, yeah, you know, I think if you're going to talk about dead kids, you should do it with a little bit of Panaz.
Pizaz, Panache.
All right, I'm ready.
Keep going.
All right.
So let's talk about the Border Patrol and Central America.
We're going to talk about something I don't think a lot of people know about because usually, as a rule, when we talk about how bad the Border Patrol is, we talk about how mean they are to people who come up to the border.
But we don't talk about what a lot of Border Patrol guys did in the countries that these people are fleeing from before people started fleeing from those countries.
So this is going to be fun.
Okay.
This is going to be a good time for everybody.
So, John P. Longan was a U.S. Border Patrol agent in the 1940s and 50s.
He worked near the Mexican border, close to where both Jacqueline and Gomez crossed over.
Most sources you find on the matter will note that he had a reputation for violence, but this was not at all uncommon among the men of the Border Patrol, nor is it uncommon now.
During Operation Wetback, when the Border Patrol reformed itself into a paramilitary force to wage war on Mexican immigrants, Longan ran the patrol's equivalent of a military intelligence service.
Longan's base was an unmarked building near Alameda.
He and his men interrogated captured migrants, extracted information, and used it to find and capture other groups of migrants.
Few of the men who endured these interrogations ever spoke about it, but a lot of what happened in those cells probably verged on what we'd considered torture.
Longan was good at his job, and his performance in Operation Wetback earned him a transfer to the State Department's public safety program.
Now, this was in reality a CIA operation, geared at providing counterinsurgency training and advice to allied nations combating communist insurgencies.
The CIA handpicked a number of Border Patrol agents to travel to places like Venezuela, Thailand, the Dominican Republic, and Guatemala.
They particularly liked recruiting guys like Longan because they were likely to speak Spanish.
Now, the way the State Department framed this program was training law enforcement.
So, yeah, the State Department framed this program as training law enforcement.
The reality, though, is that Longan and his fellow Border Patrolmen were sent over to places like Guatemala to create and train death squads.
During Operation Wetback, Border Patrol administrators had described their work as fighting back against an invasion.
In Guatemala, where Longan arrived in 1965, he was finally able to wage a real war using real weapons.
I'm going to quote now from an article in The Nation.
Quote, Longan taught local intelligence and police agencies how to create death squads to target political activists, deploying tactics that he had earlier used to capture migrants on the border.
He arrived in Guatemala in late 1965, where he put into place a paramilitary unit that, early the next year, would execute what he called Operación Limpieza, or Operation Cleanup.
Within three months, this unit had conducted over 80 raids and multiple extrajudicial assassinations, including an action that, over the course of four days, captured, tortured, and executed more than 30 prominent left opposition leaders.
The military dumped their bodies into the sea while the government denied any knowledge of their whereabouts.
According to Stuart Schrader in his up forthcoming Badges Without Borders, How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing, it was common practice during the Cold War to send former Border Patrol agents like Longan to train foreign police through CIA-linked public safety programs, since they were more likely to speak Spanish than agents from other branches of law enforcement.
In countries like El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, they did the dirty work that Reagan's envoys said needed doing.
Until the early 1970s, the United States, according to a 1974 Los Angeles Times report, was flying its Latin American death squad apprentices up to the Border Patrol Academy in Los Fresnos, Texas to receive training from CIA instructors in the design, manufacture, and potential use of bombs and incendiary devices.
Longan himself in 1957 clearly described what he thought he was doing at the border.
We're fighting a war on a wide battlefront.
So that's good.
So they're just basically training kill squads.
They're just getting people to murder people.
Yeah, and they're pulling Border Patrol guys off the line to do some of the training, to be like, oh, you already are good at like tracking down these groups of people who are trying to facilitate movement of migrants through the United States.
You can use those skills to track down political activists, except that, you know, since it's in a foreign country, you can just have them brutally murdered by death squads.
And these guys are happy to do it because they want to be murdering people anyway.
They just can't quite usually murder people, you know, at the border.
I mean, they do it a lot anyway, but like they have to be a little bit careful.
But you don't have to be careful at all in Guatemala.
So that's great.
Oh, gee whiz.
Have you ever been to Guatemala, Caitlin?
I have not.
Have you?
It rules.
Yeah, I spent a lot of time there.
It's a great country, beautiful place, completely dysfunctional government.
And you can see like signs of the horrible civil war there all over the place.
Just like you'll cross the street and there'll just be a bunch of guys who are all missing arms and legs.
You'll be driving through the middle of nowhere and you'll see like businesses that have been like, were shot up decades ago with mortars and stuff.
And it, you know, it all kind of descends from this, the series of political conflicts that launch in this period of time, particularly in the early 1980s, that are backed by the United States and supported enthusiastically by the Reagan government and these kind of networks of right-wing murder crews that were trained up and sent out by the CIA and their buddies and groups like the Border Patrol.
This all starts now and it's cool.
It's great.
And it's probably, it's, I mean, it's refugees from these conflicts that are seeking refuge in the U.S.
And then they get here and they're like, well, sorry, fuck you.
We're either going to murder you or be negligent and let you die in our custody or send you back to this, you know, war-torn country you're in.
Yeah, if you listen to right-wingers, they'll usually say something like, oh, they should go back to their own country and fix its problems.
And the reality is that, like, well, some of them tried to do that, and then we trained death squads to murder them and throw their bodies in rivers and stuff and the ocean.
And that's why people are less willing to try to fix problems because they get killed and so do their children because of the guys that we hired and trained to kill them and their children when they attempt to fight for economic justice.
Oops.
It's good.
It's really good, is what I'm getting at.
So Operation Olympiesa, which, you know, Longen, the Border Patrol guy, orchestrated himself, was a major moment in the history of Guatemala's collapse into a nightmare.
The military intelligence system he helped to build would eventually eliminate tens of thousands of leftist activists, sympathizers, and random people mistaken for either.
More than 200,000 people were massacred openly.
Tens of thousands more were tortured.
In this way, the brave men of the Border Patrol wound up at both sides of a tragedy.
The genocide they trained right-wing Guatemalan militants to execute fell heavily on various Maya peoples of the region, including the Kekchi and the Chuj.
The right-wing dictator who helped to organize much of this violence was General Afran Rios Montt.
He rose to power in 1981 and 1982, cooing his way into command with the help of his good friends, the U.S. Ronald Reagan described him as a man of great integrity who was totally dedicated to democracy.
The nation's write-up continues, quote, On June 17th, 1982, Guatemalan soldiers under the command of Rios Montt entered the San Francisco Cattle Estate immediately adjacent to Yalamboloc.
The estate's owner, a military colonel, had fled because of guerrilla activity in the area.
Soldiers went house by house, rounding up workers and their families, whom they accused of supporting the guerrillas.
They separated children from their parents and killed them by slashing their stomachs or smashing their heads against poles.
Women were raped and then burned alive.
The soldiers killed them in with bullets or by beheading.
After a day of slaughter, 350 people were dead.
A lone survivor made his way into Mexico, where Guatemalan anthropologist and Jesuit priest Ricardo Fala interviewed him.
The San Francisco massacre was highlighted in Guatemala's 1999 Truth Commission report.
After the massacre, Yalambaloc residents fled along with thousands of others, leaving the border corridor between Guatemala and Mexico completely depopulated as government troops razed their villages.
Some were captured and killed by the army as they fled.
Others ended up in refugee camps or dispersed throughout Mexico's southern states.
Still others continued on to the United States, beginning the great movement of Guatemalans to El Norte.
All told, 1.5 million people were displaced by the Guatemalan army's scorched earth campaign in 1981 and 1982.
Guatemala's Commission for Historical Clarification called the violent displacement in the Mayachuj region an act of genocide.
Young Felipe Gomez Alezano's father, he was the little kid, one of the little kids who died, Agustin Gomez-Perez, was a child of 11 during that execute.
Yalambaloc's villagers stayed away for 14 years, returning only after the signing of the peace accords in 1996.
So that's cool.
What can you say besides that's horrible?
You can say that we're focusing on Guatemala right here because it's one where there's a bit more documentation, but like this shit happened in El Salvador.
It happened in a bunch of different parts of Latin and Central America where, you know, refugees come from all the time now.
It was, it was, it's still in a lot of ways going on today.
If you want to read about like Plan Columbia and stuff, like there's aspects of this that are very much still occurring and that the Border Patrol still winds up getting tied up in from time to time.
And that's great.
Oh, good grief.
Yeah.
This is like the stuff that part of me that like is optimistic wants to believe that, oh, if people just knew this, like knew how this all, how U.S. policy and U.S. plotting played into the tragedy being suffered by these people and like the insecurity of these regions, they would have better attitudes towards, you know, Guatemalan migration and whatnot into the United States.
And then the part of me that has been paying attention for the last several decades knows that, like, no, actually, people would cheer the murders of the folks and the destruction of these areas.
Because Americans have been so thoroughly broken by propaganda that the people who are still on the right and still broadly pro-American can't be convinced by any reason that any amount of murder or violence is not justified by the fact that America.
is cool as hell.
It is this, oh, what a toxic mentality that we as Americans, or at least some of us have, because like, and this is, I'm not about to say anything new or profound here,
but the fact that, you know, the white European settlers were escaping the same, you know, kind of civil unrest or religious persecution or whatever it was that caused them to fled their countries.
And then we settled here by killing millions of indigenous people.
And now we're like, well, our borders are closed now.
Sorry, everyone.
And it's like, how can you live?
How can these people live with the hypocrisy of that simple fact?
Because they're shit.
Training Terrorists Abroad00:09:06
Anyway, so most of these death squads were trained in the United States because like, hey, if you're going to build a death squad for a foreign country, you don't want to like train it there.
That's kind of gauche.
So you bring them into your country to train them there because you're good at training death squads.
So, the facility where they actually trained a lot of these death squads, and again, not just in Guatemala, but for places like Colombia and El Salvador, all throughout the fucking world, the place where they would like take these men to teach them how to be terrorists, how to make bombs and all this shit, was the Los Fresnos, Texas Border Patrol Facility.
It was an existing base, it was in a good location, and the Border Patrol was perfectly happy to have men over there to learn how to become murderous guerrillas and then set off terrorist bombs in the middle of their own countries.
Because they were like, that sounds like a thing the Border Patrol should be involved with.
Now, the technical investigations course that was given to foreign police there was taught by CIA instructors.
It lasted for weeks and it included curriculum like terrorist concepts, terrorist devices, fabrication, and functioning of devices, improvised triggering devices, incendiaries, and assassination weapons, a discussion of various weapons which may be used by the assassin.
And when you read it like that, you can kind of trick yourself into thinking it might not be like, like it might be a reasonable thing for cops to learn, right?
Of course, cops might need to learn about terrorist concepts and the kind of weapons assassins use.
But these were not just informational courses.
They were instructed.
So the police who attended weren't just learning, oh, here's weapons that assassins sometimes use.
They were learning like, if you're going to assassinate somebody, here's a variety of different weapons that you can use to assassinate people.
They weren't just learning like, here's different ways terrorists build triggers for bombs.
They were learning, here's how to build triggers for the bombs you're going to make to kill people.
The reality of the whole program came out during congressional investigations in the 1970s.
And I'm going to quote now from a book titled Instruments of Statecraft, U.S. Guerrilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and Counterterrorism, which is available in full for free online right now.
Quote, during congressional investigations led by Senator James Albaresk in 1973, eight officials admitted that the Los Fresnos sessions, what the press would call the bomb school, offered lessons not in bomb disposal, but in bomb making.
The course is not designed to, nor does it prepare the student to be a bomber explosive technique disposal technician.
The thrust of the instruction introduces trainees to commercially available materials and home laboratory techniques and the manufacture of explosives and incendiaries.
Different types of explosive techniques and booby traps and their construction and use by terrorists are demonstrated.
And again, all these classes were taught at a border patrol facility.
And while the main instructors were CIA agents, it was not just the convenient location that made the agency use Los Fresnos.
The Border Patrol had always had within it the seeds of a national secret police force.
Decades before CBP agents were operating in unmarked snatch vans on the streets of Portland, and it was Customs and Border Patrol who was doing that.
They helped to train foreign police to do the exact same thing and much worse besides.
So that's fun.
Very good.
Like wanting to say, like, ah, what a fun thing.
What a, because I don't know what else to say.
It's just like this kind of litany of horrors that we've all just kind of blithely funded our entire lives, even though a great deal of information exists on how bad this agency has always been.
Because the only real, if you actually get into it as we are today, the only real conclusion is that, oh, maybe when you have people whose job it is to police the border, they're just going to be the worst people.
And maybe you shouldn't police the border at all because this happened.
Maybe borders are completely arbitrary and mean nothing.
And why have we decided that crossing them is a crime?
Yeah, it's bad.
And the kind of people who decide that they want to make their whole lives about punishing desperate people for the quote-unquote crime of crossing the border are monsters.
And when you start giving them guns and power, they use it to enable genocides and political oppression abroad.
And then inevitably do so back at home, which is what's happening now.
So, when it comes to government agencies that Americans, particularly liberals, rage against, Customs and Border Patrol has spent most of its history kind of sliding under the mainstream radar.
But liberals who only started paying attention to the agency after Trump took office might be surprised to know that NYT reporter New York Times reporter John Crudson won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for a series of articles about the Border Patrol whose titles would not look at all out of place in 2020.
Titles like Border Patrol Sweeps of Illegal Aliens Leave Scores of Children in Jails.
That sounds a little familiar.
The Intercept, summarizing his work, notes: Patrollers, he reported, regularly engaged in beatings, murder, torture, and rape, including the rape of girls as young as 12.
Some patrollers ran their own in-house outlaw vigilante groups.
Others maintained ties with groups like the Klan.
Border Patrol agents also used the children of migrants, either as bait or as a pressure tactic to force confessions.
When coming upon a family, agents tried to apprehend the youngest member first, with the idea that relatives would give themselves up so as not to be separated.
It may sound cruel, one patroller said, but it often worked.
Separating migrant families was not official government policy in the years Crudson was reporting on abuses, but left to their own devices.
Border Patrol agents regularly took children from parents, threatening that they would be separated forever unless one of them confessed that they had entered the country illegally.
Mothers, especially, an agent said, would always break.
Once a confession was extracted, children might be placed in foster care or left to languish in federal jails.
Others were released into Mexico alone, far from their homes, forced to survive, according to public defenders, by garbage can scrounging, living on rooftops, and whatever.
10-year-old Sylvia Alvarado, separated from her grandmother as they crossed into Texas, was kept in a small cinder block cell for more than three months.
In California, 13-year-old Julia Perez, threatened with being arrested and denied food, broke down and told her investigator that she was Mexican, even though she was a U.S. citizen.
The Border Patrol released Perez into Mexico with no money or way to contact her U.S. family.
Such cruelties weren't one-offs, but part of a pattern encouraged and committed by officers up the chain of command.
The violence was both gratuitous and systemic, including stress techniques later associated with the war in Iraq.
I mean, wow.
What kind of truly inhuman monster do you have to be?
Yes.
And more specifically, to use children as bait or to like snatch them first as just like I can't even form a sentence.
That is.
Yeah, it's not great.
I mean, the sentence that you said, like, I got teary-eyed, the mother, the mothers broke first or whatever.
Oh, yeah, that was horrible.
No, it's, I don't know.
You know, when I talk about how this all actually makes me feel there's no way to do that without repeatedly urging other people to commit federal crimes up to and including assault and murder.
So I'm just like gonna stop right there and continue talking about the Border Patrol instead.
Because we shouldn't do that on a podcast.
One tactic the Border Patrol came to adore was the locking of migrants in freezing cold rooms called Gilieras or ice boxes.
This goes back at least to the 1980s, according to Crudson.
Agents would tell prisoners, In this place, you have no rights.
Since these people had committed no crime beyond crossing a line in the dirt, their detention served no real purpose beyond cruelty.
Cruelty was the point.
Border Patrol agents throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s were repeatedly documented torturing migrants.
A popular method was handcuffing them to squad cars and then making them run alongside the video as it half-dragged them to the border.
Outright murder was common as well.
One patrol agent told Crudson that agents commonly pushed illegals off cliffs so it would look like an accident.
Much of the agency's behavior was indistinguishable from that of a straight-up gang.
Agents with INS, Border Patrol's parent agency at the time, were caught trading Mexican women to the Los Angeles Rams in exchange for seasoned tickets.
What?
Yeah, that's the thing that happened.
Yeah.
I can't help it.
Brave men and women of the Border Patrol.
We're in the green.
Oh my God.
It's time for an ad break so that I can go vomit.
Yeah, you know who doesn't trade women for you can't even do it.
Vomit, vomit.
It's an advanced break.
It's an ad break.
Products.
And services.
Ad Break Vomit Confessions00:04:03
On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Bajanista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
That's great.
It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hey, Ernst, what's up?
Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
On each episode of the podcast, Earn Your Leisure, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship.
From stocks and real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, we translate complex financial topics into real conversations everyone can understand.
Because the truth is, most people were never taught how money really works.
But once you understand the system, you can start to build within it.
That means ownership, smarter investing, and creating opportunities not just for yourself, but for the next generation.
If you want to learn how to build wealth, understand the markets, and think like an owner, Earn Your Leisure is the podcast for you.
Listen to Earn Your Leisure on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and iHeart Podcast presents soccer moms.
So I'm Leanne.
This is my best friend Janet.
Hey, and we have been joined at the hip since high school.
Absolutely.
Now a redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip, just a little bit bigger, hips, wider.
This is a podcast we're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey with all the snacks and drinks.
Sidebar, why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer?
Oh, they had a BOGO.
Well, then you got it.
You want a white cloth or something here?
Just hang on.
What are y'all doing?
Microphones?
Are you making a rap album?
I was.
I would buy it.
Cuts through the defense like a hot knife through sponge cake.
That sounds delicious.
Oh, you're lucky.
I'm not a drug addict.
You're lucky.
I'm not an alcoholic.
You're lucky.
I'm not a killer.
I love this team, and I'm really trying to be a figure in their lives that they can rely on.
Oh.
Listen to soccer moms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello, gorgeous.
It's Lala Kent, host of Untraditionally Lala.
My days of filling up cups at sir may be over, but I'm still loving life in the valley.
Life on the other side of the hill is giving grown-up vibes.
But over here on my podcast, Untraditional Ila, I'm still that Lala you either love or love to hate.
I've been full-on oversharing with fans, family, and former frenemies like Tom Schwartz.
I had a little bone to pick with Schwartzy when he came on the pod.
You don't feel bad that you told me I was a bootleg housewife?
I must flipped a pizza in your lap.
Oh, God, I literally forgot about that until just now.
Sorry, I don't want to blame all of that.
I got to blame that one on the alcohol.
This is about laughing and learning when life just keeps on laughing.
Because I make mistakes so that you guys don't have to.
We're growing, we're thriving, and yes, sometimes we're barely surviving, but we do it all with love.
Listen to Untraditional Le La on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
And we're back.
Oh, we're having a good time.
Border Patrol Incompetence Exposed00:15:41
Jeez.
So INS agents were also caught supplying Mexican prostitutes to congressmen and judges in exchange for political favors.
Over time, the Border Patrol found ways to get over their long-standing conflicts with Texan ranchers.
In numerous cases, they worked out deals with ranch owners whereby they would hold off on immigration raids until right before payday, giving ranchers the use of migrant bodies without the need to pay them.
Border Patrol men got to hunt and fitch for free on their ranches as payments.
This is kind of how they worked out that little set of disagreements, the uprising in Texas that had been sparked by us.
They would exploit the labor and then have an agreement with the Border Patrol and be like, okay, seize them on this day.
Yeah.
So that I don't have to pay.
Oh my God.
It's good.
Yeah.
Krudzen, that New York Times journalist, even documented that one of the ranger, the ranches Border Patrol worked out an arrangement with was owned by President Lyndon B. Johnson while he was president.
Oh, holy shit.
Good stuff.
Between 1985 and 1990, federal agents gunned down 22 migrants just in the area around San Diego.
The intercept reports, quote, on April 18th, 1986, for instance, patroller Edward Cole was beating 14-year-old Eduardo Carrillo Estrada on the U.S. side of the border's Chain Link fence when he stopped and shot Eduardo's younger brother, Humberto, in the back.
Humberto was standing on the other side of the fence on Mexican soil.
A court ruled that Cole, who had previous incidents of shooting through the fence at Mexicans, had reason to fear for his life from Humberto and used justifiable force.
Such abuses persisted through the 1990s and 2000s.
In 1993, the House Subcommittee on International Law, Immigration, and Refugees held hearings on Border Patrol abuse, and its transcript is a catalog of horrors.
One former guard, Torney Hefner, at the INS Detention Center in Port Isabel, Texas, reported that a young Salvadoran girl was forced to perform personal duties like dancing the lumbata for INS officials.
In 2011, Hefner published a memoir with more accusations of sexual abuse by, as Hefner writes, the INS brass.
Roberto Martinez, who worked with the San Diego-based U.S.-Mexico border program for the American Friends Service Committee, testified that human and civil rights violations by the Border Patrol run the gamut of abuses imaginable, from rape to murder.
Agents regularly seized original birth certificates and green cards from Latino citizens, leaving the victim with the financial burden of having to go through a lengthy process of applying for a new document.
Rapes and sexual abuse in INS detention centers around the United States, Martinez said, seem to be escalating throughout the border region.
Okay, I have to talk through something here.
So in theory, law enforcement is there to prevent crime, stop crime, find criminals, etc.
We know that that's barely what they do, right?
But that's, in theory, the purpose of law enforcement.
And so by extension, Border Patrol, if it is for it, since it is for some reason illegal to cross a border undocumented or without the proper documentation, that is, quote, a crime according to ridiculous standards, right?
And I also understand in theory the concept of like punishing things that are actual crime.
That makes sense to me as long as it's done responsibly, which it never is.
The idea of seeing crossing a border without the proper documentation and deciding that the punishment for that crime warrants things like human trafficking, murder, sexual assault, all manner of other horrible, horrible, unmentionable things.
Like where, I just, it is the most disgusting thing.
I think the problem here that you're having is in thinking that the goal, the purpose is ever to prevent crime, whereas the reality is the purpose is to is to protect, it's to protect whiteness.
Exactly, yes.
Yeah, and it's to provide an outlet for fascists in this country to do horrible violence on people in a way that is rather than being disorganized and sort of being anti-state and being something that like causes disorder,
being violence that they are allowed to carry out that enforces the kind of the state itself that like that like backs up the existence of the state.
Right.
Like you have all these you have all these tremendously violent people, right?
And you can do a couple of things to them, but they're there.
So either you try to like deal with them and de-radicalize them and make them less dangerous, you kill them, or as we do, you give them guns and make them unaccountable and allow them to do horrible violence to large groups of people who have no political agency.
Yes, that is exactly what it is.
It's like people who are like, well, the general population thinks that, you know, being a member of a hate group like the KKK is bad.
So I'm going to do the same exact things that the KKK does, but it's being masked as a government agency.
Like basically this terrorist organization, this hate group is protected and quote, justified because it is a government agency.
Even though they're committing the same heinous acts in the name of under the guise of some kind of protection, but truly, it's the, like you said, protection of whiteness and criminalizing being not white.
Yeah.
And that's the only way it's ever been.
And that's the only way it ever will be as long as we have a border and we consider there to be some sort of fundamental value in the sanctity of that border.
Right.
And that's good.
I want to cry about it.
Yeah, it's good to do that sometimes.
Other times, it's good to continue reading a podcast script.
Yes.
Which I will now do.
Okay.
Because this is how I deal with problems.
This is the only way that I deal with problems is by reading podcast scripts.
I mean, informing the people helps.
Yeah, that's a way that you can describe this is informing the people.
I don't know.
You know, in 1979, Maria Contreras, nine months pregnant, crossed back into the United States from Mexico legally after shopping for food.
Border Patrol agents found this suspicious, and they tortured her to try to get her to reveal information about undocumented migrants.
She died under interrogation, leaving six children behind.
This sort of thing happened all the time.
You know, we have documentation about Maria Contreras' case, but this is maybe even a daily matter.
And it's something that continues to this day in dark and terrifying corners of the border where such things are not documented most of the time, but which we all pay for.
Throughout all of this, the Border Patrol and INS were sort of the red-headed stepchild of federal agencies with law enforcement powers.
They were barely funded because, if you can imagine this, illegal immigration was not something people cared about.
So for most of this period, while all of the horrible things we've been talking about have been happening, Border Patrol has basically no money and very few agents, considering what it's supposed to be watching in its purview.
It's just kind of a place where we keep all of our most violent law enforcement officers, and they don't have the money to do much, but nobody's watching them.
So they can carry out horrific acts of violence.
And that's the Border Patrol and really INS too, for the most part.
Yeah.
Border states probably had, you know, not probably, border states had debates on the matter of illegal immigration.
It was certainly like, you know, a political issue in Texas and New Mexico and stuff.
But random people in Duluth, random Americans in Duluth or, you know, Wichita or Bumblefuck, Montana, or whatever, didn't really care about the border, right?
80s and 90s, it was not a big vote-getter for most of that period of time.
Now, at the start of the Clinton administration, there were only about 4,000 Border Patrol agents watching both Canada and Mexico, which is not a lot if you think about how big both of those borders are.
They're many miles long.
Yeah, they're pretty big.
In 1993, NAFTA became a thing, the North American free trade thing-ama-jigger.
And illegal immigration grew by leaps and bounds, alongside right-wing fear-mongering about illegal immigration.
The Border Patrol more than doubled in size by the turn of the millennium.
So, this is like the first thing that really leads to a massive surge in the Border Patrol: NAFTA becomes a thing, and suddenly a shitload more people are trying to cross the border.
Illegal immigration by the end of the 1990s is a major national political issue, and the Border Patrol more than doubles under Clinton.
In the year 2000, our nation's peak year for illegal immigration, Border Patrol agents apprehended 1.6 million people.
This, though, was just a fraction of the total that got through.
Border Patrol agents were unhappy about the fact that most undocumented migrants were still getting through the border, and that the many rules and that there were many rules in place to stop them from, you know, doing Operation Wetback type stuff and basically carrying out an ethnic cleansing to get rid of non-white people from border areas.
From an article in Politico, quote, near the top of the Border Patrol's list of complaints was the policy known internally as CARP or the catch and release policy.
By the end of the Clinton administration, 80% of people who were caught and released with a notice to appear at a deportation hearing never showed up in court.
But despite millions of border crossings, the Border Patrol had the financing in 2001 for just 60 detainees a day across the entire country.
They could turn themselves in and have a high confidence that they wouldn't be returned to their home countries, recalls Michael Cherdoff, who would go on to become President George W. Bush's second Secretary of Homeland Security.
Mostly agents just asked border violators for their names and then did a cursory background check before returning them to Mexico or releasing them into the United States.
Sometimes they ran fingerprints, sometimes they didn't.
In June, 1999, agents captured one of the FBI's 10 most wanted fugitives, a rapist and serial killer named Angel Materino Resindez, aka the railway killer, and unknowingly released him back into Mexico.
Whereupon Rescindez promptly sneaked back into the United States and murdered four more people before being apprehended by Texas Rangers.
So the story of the railway killer was, of course, used to justify the need for more funding to the Border Patrol.
What the whole story really illustrates is that even when the Border Patrol had occasional chances to actually protect Americans by apprehending people, they were as likely to fuck up as anything because most of them were shit-ass incompetent in anything besides doing violence.
So 9-11 happens.
You remember 9-11?
I remember.
It's good.
You're not supposed to forget it.
Now, 9-11 happens.
And if you were alive and cognizant at the time, you might remember that basically everybody and their grandma was obsessed with the imminent possibility that Al-Qaeda might drive a regiment of terrorist nuclear tanks or whatever across the Texas border.
As someone who lived in Texas at the time, there were a bunch of people freaking out about how terrorist hit squads were going to be making their way up through the border.
Kids at my suburban Texas high school were certain that Al-Qaeda was going to be sending people to shoot up our school because like Plano, Texas was real high on fucking Osama bin Laden's hit list.
Wait, did they think they were going to like go to Mexico first and then cross the border?
Is that what they thought?
Yeah, it didn't really scan a lot.
I mean, I'll say this.
I think that it's maybe not talked about enough the degree to which guys like John Milneus and movies like Red Dawn prepared everybody to believe the bullshit the Bush administration said about how terrorists were going to be sneaking through the border.
But like, yeah, whatever.
It was very dumb.
It was a very dumb time.
But also like, you know, a bunch of guys had worked together to ram planes into the Pentagon and destroy two skyscrapers in New York City.
People were willing to believe a lot of terrible things were possible.
And because the border, you know, right-wing pundits had been convincing everybody that the border was this dangerous and unmonitored place for so long, people were like, oh my God, of course the terrorists will try there.
They never did.
But, you know, they still might.
Any day now, Caitlin.
Any day, Al-Qaeda's going to finally get a squad up there.
Nobody will notice.
All of the...
Anyway, whatever.
So, yeah, Tom Ridge, the former governor of Pennsylvania, was made President Bush's homeland security czar.
Now, this was before the Department of Homeland Security existed.
That came about in like November of 2002.
But as soon as 9-11 is a thing, Bush is like, oh, we got to have somebody whose job is to think about safety for the country, which like there were already a bunch of people doing that, and it hadn't helped.
But anyway, whatever.
So Tom Ridge is like, is made the czar of homeland security.
And he made border control one of his priorities.
He realized pretty much immediately that the Border Patrol was going to be an issue for him.
Robert Bonner, who worked with Ridge and later became the first head of Customs and Border Patrol, told Politico, quote, within the INS structure, they were the poor stepchild.
That was how most of INS viewed them at every level.
They weren't appreciated and weren't viewed with respect.
And that created this defensiveness and insularity within the Border Patrol.
There was a lot of debate about what to do with the organization and whether or not to just take all the different groups that handled various border-related things and merge them into one border agency.
But that would have meant several different cabinet secretaries would have each lost tiny amounts of power and money because, you know, you have this group that's like, you know, your job is to look for war criminals who might have like accidentally gotten citizenship or green cards.
You have this other group whose job is to like, you know, handle customs enforcement.
You know, you have the Border Patrol.
You have like the group that's job is to go around and look for people who might be violating immigration law.
You have all these different groups that are like under different sort of people's purview.
And putting them all in one organized Border Patrol that does everything would have meant that all of the different cabinet secretaries lost a little bit of money and power.
So they all vetoed that idea in unison.
No, no, no, no, fuck that shit.
Instead, the decision was made to dissolve INS and put the Border Patrol under the purview of the new Customs and Border Patrol, which would itself be part of the brand new Department of Homeland Security.
The final nail in INS's coffin was the fact that the agency had approved visas for two of the 9-11 hijackers after 9-11.
So this is kind of what, like, yeah, that's the wrong time to do that.
Somebody probably should have like gotten on the phone immediately after that and been like, hey, we should run these names.
Like, just make sure we're not going to embarrass everybody.
But they did.
And when the news kind of came out that INS had approved visas for two of the people who had just carried out the biggest terrorist attack in U.S. history, the Bush administration was really not happy with INS.
And that kind of spelled their doom.
The Green Uniform Identity Crisis00:02:38
And in fact, when they dissolved the agency, no one from the White House even thought to call the INS commissioner and tell him.
I'm going to quote again from Politico's article.
INS was such a broken bureaucracy that it would be the single agency in the entire U.S. government to receive the ultimate death penalty after 9-11 in the wide-ranging bureaucratic reorganization that led to the Department of Homeland Security.
INS was completely disbanded.
Its responsibilities removed from the Justice Department and its duties reassigned among three new DHS agencies: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, Citizenship and Immigration Services, CIS, and Customs and Border Protection, CBP.
And the newly created DHS would be a reality in less than a year.
So that's the situation.
Now, the man tasked with creating the CBP was Robert Bonner, a federal judge and a former DEA head.
His first and most pressing decision was whether or not to change the agency's famous green uniform, which is obviously more important than like the rapes and the training of women for sports tickets and stuff.
Why is that the first order of business?
Why are there any orders of business?
Look, Caitlin, these brave men of the Border Patrol, who only occasionally commit mass rape and sex trafficking, that includes sex trafficking of 12-year-olds, and only occasionally torture pregnant women to death, those brave men have a lot of pride in their uniform, and they want to know that that uniform's not going to change.
You know, they have to be presentable.
That's the most important thing.
The most important thing is that they get to still feel like they're part of the old Border Patrol that they love.
You know, the old Border Patrol that lets them torture all those people and throw kids into dank freezing cells for months on end, many of whom are actually American citizens.
That's just how it's important, you know?
Yeah.
So, from Politico, quote, weeks before the new agency officially launched, on March 1st, 2003, he invited all of the Border Patrol's 20 sector chiefs to Washington to discuss the transition.
They all arrived in D.C. in full-dress green uniforms, shoes polished, brass buttons gleaming.
As Bonner walked into the room, everyone stood and snapped to attention.
The new commissioner began his remarks simply: The Border Patrol will remain green.
The room erupted in applause and cheers.
They're proud of the green.
They were very proud of that uniform, Bonner recalls today.
They were concerned about losing that identity.
Who cares about your green uniform?
Oh, the Border Patrol cares.
Snapping to Attention in D.C00:04:54
Fuck off and fucking losers.
See, this is why, as I've always said, and Sophie can back me up on this, Caitlin, you would be a terrible head of the Border Patrol.
Because I don't respect the green.
Exactly.
Well, I don't even understand.
I don't wear green, but it's because I hate the Celtics.
So I couldn't have a game either.
Okay.
Yeah, see, Sylvie, you'd be bad at this too because as a Border Patrol agent, you should be trading kidnapped women to the Celtics in exchange for season tickets.
Oh my God, can we just go to an ad break?
Jesus Christ.
Speaking of the Celtics, you know who else supports this podcast?
Hey, hey, hey, you know who else is horrified?
Nope, nope, nope.
Preduves.
And services.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Bajanista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
That's great.
It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hey, Ernst, what's up?
Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
On each episode of the podcast, Earn Your Leisure, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship.
From stocks and real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, we translate complex financial topics into real conversations everyone can understand.
Because the truth is, most people were never taught how money really works.
But once you understand the system, you can start to build within it.
That means ownership, smarter investing, and creating opportunities not just for yourself, but for the next generation.
If you want to learn how to build wealth, understand the markets, and think like an owner, Earn Your Leisure is the podcast for you.
Listen to Earn Your Leisure on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and iHeart Podcast presents soccer moms.
So I'm Leanne.
This is my best friend Janet.
Hey, and we have been joined at the hip since high school.
Absolutely.
Now a redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip, just a little bit bigger, hips, wider.
This is the podcast we're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey with all the snacks and drinks.
Sidebar, why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer?
Oh, they had a BOGO.
Well, then you got it.
You want a white cloth here?
Just take off.
What are y'all doing?
Microphones?
Are you making a rap album?
I will not.
I would buy it.
Cuts through the defense like a hot knife through sponge cake.
That sounds delicious.
Oh, you're lucky.
I'm not a drug addict.
You're lucky.
I'm not an alcoholic.
You're lucky.
I'm not a killer.
I love this team and I'm really trying to be a figure in their lives that they can rely on.
Oh.
Listen to soccer moms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello, gorgeous.
It's Lala Kent, host of Untraditional Ila.
My days of filling up cups at sir may be over, but I'm still loving life in the valley.
Life on the other side of the hill is giving grown-up vibes.
But over here on my podcast, Untraditional Ila, I'm still that Lala you either love or love to hate.
I've been full-on over sharing with fans, family, and former frenemies like Tom Schwartz.
I had a little bone to pick with Schwartzy when he came on the pod.
You don't feel bad that you told me I was a bootleg housewife?
I must flipped a pizza in your lap.
Oh god, I literally forgot about that until just now.
Sorry, I don't want to blame all of that.
I got to blame that one on the alcohol.
This is about laughing and learning when life just keeps on laughing.
Because I make mistakes so that you guys don't have to.
We're growing, we're thriving, and yes, sometimes we're barely surviving, but we do it all with love.
Listen to untraditionally la la on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
And we're back.
That Celtics dig, I just would like to denote that I will keep doing that.
Turning Into an Armed Wing00:15:16
And also, hi prop.
Yeah, it's I don't understand who the Celtics are.
Celtics, I don't understand any of this.
This is all Sophie's fault.
If you love that team, if you love that team, send your death threats to Sophie.
Yeah, if you love that team, just unfollow me.
Because we will never be friends.
Also, once again, hi prop.
Soccer.
If you don't give a shit about any sports teams in existence, tennis.
They follow me.
Yeah, except for soccer.
Soccer is allowed.
Soccer is cool.
Soccer is the only sport.
No, soccer is definitely not allowed.
What?
Soccer, soccer is allowed.
There is one sport allowed in my ideal world, and it's that game they play in Afghanistan, where they all ride around on horseback with a goathead and people get killed sometimes because they it's it's yeah you, just you just fully robbed this entire thing.
Anyways, follow Caitlin on twitter and instagram.
She's a great follow.
Continue with your podcast.
Go to Afghanistan to play sports anyway.
Uh, they were not particularly concerned, the Border Patrol, with making any changes to reduce the number of migrants killed by border patrol agents.
Uh, since 2003, border patrol agents have killed at least 97 people.
Six of those people were children.
They've also taken repeated action to stop other people from saving lives.
As summers grew more brutal, more and more migrants started dying in the Sonoran desert.
In 2004, the faith-based organization NO MORE Deaths started leading gallon, leaving gallon jugs of water out near common footpaths in the desperate hope that it might stop a few people from dying horribly in the desert.
They soon noticed that their water bottles were being slashed open.
NO MORE Deaths set up hidden cameras.
They found in every case border patrol agents destroying water caches, almost with visible glee.
You can see one of these videos for yourself in the PBS documentary need to know.
Salon.com's description is quite good.
Quote, three border patrol agents, two men and a woman, are walking along a migrant trail and, approaching a half, half a dozen, one gallon jugs of water.
The female agent stops in front of the containers and begins to kick them with force down a ravine.
The bottles crash against rocks, bursting open.
She's smiling one of the agents watching her smiles as well, seeming to take real pleasure in the spectacle.
He says something under his breath and the word tonk is clearly audible.
Do you know what Tonk means?
I don't.
So we talked about wetback in episode one and how.
That was the Border Patrol's kind of old term for for particularly Mexican immigrants because of the, the river they have to cross.
Tonk is uh new, the new slur that the Border Patrol uses for undocumented immigrants, and it comes from the sound that a flashlight makes when you hit Someone in the head.
Oh my God.
You'll hear this if in any article you read about the modern Border Patrol, that the word tonk is like their standard term for migrants.
And it's a term because of what it sounds like when they beat these people with flashlights.
Well, okay.
Let me just process that.
New slurs were, of course, far from the only changes to hit Border Patrol during the Bush years.
By the time President Obama took office, the Border Patrol had gone from an underfunded force of about 9,000 to a 21,000-person army, the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country.
There are actual armies smaller than the Border Patrol and less well-equipped.
They're the largest law enforcement agency in the country now.
So that's good.
All those new officers had to be trained up quick, and this did not leave time for rigorous vetting and background checking that other federal agents go through.
Border Patrol agents today still have the least average years of experience of any federal law enforcement agency.
They also have the lowest standards for new recruits.
This may have something to do with the fact that Border Patrol agents are involved in more fatal shootings than any other federal law enforcement agency.
Yeah, you know, probably.
It's not like any federal law enforcement agency is good about giving us numbers about how many people they shoot, but probably they kill more than any of the others.
Okay, I believe it.
Yeah.
One senior DHS official even admitted to Politico, quote, the agency has created a culture that says, if you throw a rock at me, you're going to get shot.
Between 2005 and 2012, roughly one CBP officer was arrested for misconduct every single day.
During President Obama's first term, things got so bad that DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano ordered the CBP to change its institutional definition of the word corruption so they wouldn't have to admit to as many problems when they were questioned by Congress about all of the murders.
It's yeah.
Wow.
Again, under Obama.
Under Obama.
It's pretty much impossible.
No, I just, yeah.
Like, we're not even really going to get into the Trump years in this two-parter because that's like a whole nother thing to start talking about.
Yeah.
Like most of this that we're talking about today, I mean, it's Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, Bush Jr., and Obama, right?
Those are the guys that this is happening under.
Those are the guys funding this, right?
Enthusiastically.
All of the politicians that everybody thinks are fine now because Trump is such a dick.
Anyway, yeah, it's pretty much impossible to exaggerate how bad Border Patrol is and was.
Like, I'm going to guess that most of our listeners come from a broad position that feds are not good, which is fine and accurate.
But even among that company, even if you're like, oh, federal agents are pretty much all bad, it's shocking how bad the agents of the CBP are.
Like, it's like, it's staggering how shitty they particularly become in the aughts.
And I'm going to quote from Salon again.
There was the Miami CBP officer who used his law enforcement status to bypass airport security and personally smuggle cocaine and heroin into Miami.
There was the green uniformed agent in Yuma, Arizona, who was caught smuggling 700 pounds of marijuana across the border in his green and white Border Patrol truck.
The brand new 26-year-old Border Patrol agent who joined a drug smuggling operation to distribute more than 1,000 kilograms of marijuana in Del Rio, Texas.
The 32-year-old Border Patrol agent whose wife would tip him off on which buses filled with illegal immigrants to let through his checkpoint on I-35 in Laredo, Texas.
Some cases were more obvious than others, like the new Border Patrol agent who took an unusual interest in maps of the agency's sensors along the border and was arrested just seven months into the job after he sold smugglers those maps for $5,500.
In November 2007, CBP official Thomas Winkowski wrote an agency-wide memo citing numerous incidents, or as he called them, disturbing events, saying that the leadership was concerned about the increase in the number of employee arrests.
The memo, never made public but obtained by the Miami Herald, reminded officers and agents, it is our responsibility to uphold the laws, not break the law.
Now, right around that time, internal CBP investigations uncovered that the agency had, in dozens of cases, hired members of Mexican drug cartels and gangs like MS-13 to be agents.
They'd also hired at least one serial killer, Juan David Ortiz, who murdered five women during his time as an intelligence analyst for the agency.
He is also suspected of kidnapping a woman.
We'll never really know the exact extent of his crimes.
And in that regard, he fits in with another Border Patrol veteran, Esteban Manzanares.
It is possible that Esteban Manzanares was not a serial killer.
He hasn't been convicted of any murders, but he was caught abducting three migrant women, a mother and her two teenage daughters.
He attempted to bury one alive and he raped another.
And yeah, earlier this year, an appeals court ruled that his victims could not sue the federal government as Manzanares was not acting in his official capacity as a Border Patrol agent when he assaulted those women.
Sure, he arrested them during his duties as a Border Patrol agent and he took them to a Border Patrol processing facility before taking them to a gated compound to assault them, but he wasn't acting as a Border Patrol agent.
Oh, wow.
The mental gymnastics people do.
Just legal ones.
Yep.
Okay.
Yeah.
Now, the good news is that a few bad apples like Manzanares and Ortiz and also all of the thousands of agents who got arrested on a nearly daily basis for seven straight years didn't stop the Orchard from detaining more migrants than ever before.
During the Obama years, DHS deported more undocumented migrants than ever, 400,000 a year.
As President Obama said in 2011, the presence of so many illegal immigrants make a mockery of all those who are trying to immigrate legally.
Now, yeah, that's good.
Obama.
It's pretty cool.
It's pretty cool what a problem this was.
Yeah, so, and again, all of these illegal immigrants make a mockery of everyone trying to immigrate illegally.
The data shows that during this period, this like fucking seven-year period, an average of one Border Patrol agent per day almost was arrested for serious crimes, like ranging from like rape and sexual assault to attempted murder to, you know, drug smuggling.
Like every day, a Border Patrol agent basically was getting arrested during these years.
But that's not, that's not making a mockery of like law enforcement or whatever.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, there were a number of reasons why things got so bad in Border Patrol.
We've talked about some of them, just sort of like the inherent racist nature of the existence of the Border Patrol.
But there are also just sort of some reasons that you would describe as kind of broadly bureaucratic.
There were a bunch of bureaucratic reasons why it happened too, right?
Kind of outside of the inherent problems of policing a border.
For one point, like they were increasing the size of the Border Patrol faster than any law enforcement agency had ever been increased.
And that meant bringing in a shitload of people who weren't qualified.
They had all of this money and they did not have enough people who could actually responsibly do the jobs.
They were just throwing people in chairs and giving them guns and badges.
Now, the issues of hiring a bunch of people for an agency based on assaulting non-white people and giving them broad powers were compounded by structural problems within the board, like the way the Border Patrol was set up.
Most Border Patrol men are agents.
This differs from special agents, which are the cool dudes like Fox Mulder that everyone who becomes a fed wants to be.
Special agents can both arrest people and investigate crimes.
Agents only have arresting powers.
They cannot investigate crimes.
Now, because CBP is seen as the shittiest federal law enforcement agency, the dumping ground for all of the violent assholes, our government doesn't like to make them special agents.
According to Politico, quote, in many ways, the difference between the two is CBP's original sin, a seemingly minor technical distinction made in the harried heat of DHS creation a decade ago that would allow hundreds of cases of corruption in CBP's Office of Field Operations and use of force abuses in the Border Patrol to fester for years.
The problem was that no one at CBP received what's known as 1811 authority.
When DHS was set up, ICE was given exclusive 1811 authority to conduct investigations in the border region.
CBP was only given so-called 1801 authority, a lesser classification that allowed Border Patrol agents and customs officers to make arrests and enforce federal law, but not investigate.
They could be cops, but not detectives.
This didn't particularly matter in the daily performance of CBP's duties.
The borders were patrolled, the ports of entry watched, except that CBP was legally prohibited from policing its own workforce.
Yeah.
And it's, again, one of these things every single person who's ever been involved in running the CBP agrees, like, yeah, this is a real big problem because it means that they're even less accountable than other law enforcement agencies.
Those ones are barely accountable.
And those ones are barely accountable.
But like, even when Border Patrol agents commit a crime that other Border Patrol agents think is horrible, like they can't investigate it.
Wow.
No accountability.
Holy crap.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Other law enforcement agencies look at Border Patrol and go, Jesus Christ, those people are unaccountable when they commit acts of unspeakable violence.
That is bleak.
It's bleak.
Very bleak.
By 2012, the problems in Border Patrol were obvious enough that they spilled out into the public sphere.
The Arizona Republic conducted an investigation which showed that agents had killed at least 42 people, 13 of whom were citizens, since 2005.
In none of these killings was any agent known to have faced consequences of any kind.
Congressional pressure forced the agency to submit to an investigation by the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington, D.C.-based law enforcement think tank.
The PERF investigated 67 cases of lethal force by Border Patrol agents.
They found, among other things, cases of agents firing at fleeing vehicles.
The report concluded: too many cases do not appear to meet the test of objective reasonableness with regard to the use of deadly force.
The PERF report advised, among other things, that agents should not use lethal force on unarmed drivers or rock throwers.
The agency rejected this out of hand, with the head of Border Patrol saying in an interview, I've known agents who have almost died from being rocked along the border, and I think it was completely ridiculous that they wanted that prohibition.
I should note here that no Border Patrol officer has ever been killed by Iraq, and I can't really find evidence of one being seriously injured by Iraq either.
What I can find is that in 2014, CBP leadership estimated a A full 20% of their force was corrupt.
Attempts at reform were made in the last two years of the Obama administration.
And in 2016, it looked like things might finally be headed in a less murdery direction.
But then Donald Trump became the president.
And here we are.
A presidential administration filled with literal Nazis was handed a vast, heavily armed force of sociopaths and rapists who just spent the last two years being told that they had to rape and murder less.
And then all of a sudden, they were told, whatever you want to do is fine.
Just get these brown people out of the United States.
And that's kind of where things stand today with the Border Patrol as sort of the turning into the official armed wing of the racist right with these CBP and Bortak units set up using Border Patrol men being sent into American cities to police dissent because they're the most dedicated and least accountable and most violent law enforcement officers the country has.
And yeah, there's a lot more I could and should get into about where things are at the moment with Border Patrol.
But this is, it took me this long just to get us up to the fucking Trump administration.
Right.
And yeah, we're not even at the, you know, the whole frenzy around build the wall and just like yuck.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I guess that's another podcast.
Yeah, it's another kind of podcast.
And I guess if I'm going to lead leave somewhere, I or are in this somewhere, I probably it would probably be good to end by talking again about Harlan Carter for just a little bit.
Harlan Carter and the NRA00:06:00
You remember Harlan Carter?
He was the former Border Patrol head who was in charge during Operation Wetback and who was a convicted murderer.
In 1931, he shot a Mexican boy in the chest.
So yeah, the young Mexican boy that he murdered was named Raymond Cassillano.
And there's actually a really good song about the Border Patrol and about Raymond Cassiano by a band I quite like called Drive-By Truckers.
And there's a line in it about Harlan Carter, you know, this former head of the Border Patrol, who goes on, by the way, to become the head of the NRA and is like one of the guys in charge of the NRA when it turns into the NRA we all know today from the organization that was like, oh, people should learn how to shoot accurately so they can hunt deer, right?
Like the NRA used to just be like a normal, pretty normal thing, and then it turns into this crazy thing that it is today, this quasi-military, or not quasi-military, but like this explicitly fascist organization urging political violence.
Anyway, Harlan Carter is the guy behind that too.
So not somebody we'd want to get a drink with.
Not somebody you'd want to get a drink with.
And there's a couple lines about him in this song, Raymond Cassiano, which is named after the guy that Harlan Carter killed.
And it's a song, yeah, really about not just Harlan Carter, but about the kind of men who become Border Patrol agents.
He had the makings of a leader of a certain kind of men who need to feel the world's against him, out to get him if it can.
Men whose trigger pull their fingers of men who'd rather fight than win, united in a revolution, like in mind and like in skin.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a good song.
I'll give it a listen.
So, Caitlin, you wanna plug your pluggables?
Sure.
Well, thank you for enlightening me with this information.
A lot of it I did not know.
So I appreciate now knowing.
Depressing and upsetting though it may be, it's good to be informed.
You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Caitlin Durante.
And you can check out my podcast on this network called The Bechtel Cast.
So, you know, that little conversation that Sophie and I had at the beginning was a reference to that.
We talk about the representation of women in film.
And yeah, check it all out.
Check it all out.
And you can follow Robert on Twitter at iWriteOK.
You can follow this podcast on Twitter and Instagram at BastardsPod.
You can now email us at behindthebastards at iHeartMedia.com.
And you can buy merch at our TeePublic store.
You can also buy merch from Caitlin and Jamie's TeePublic store, which has some of my absolute favorite items in the entire planet.
Feminist icon.
How's that for a plug?
That was great.
Thank you, Sophie.
Feminist icons.
You know who else is a feminist icon?
I can't wait to see who's here.
Caitlin Durante.
Oh, thank you.
All right.
This ended very, warmly.
Thank you.
That's the episode.
Bye, guys.
That is the motherfucking episode.
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So I'm Leanne.
This is my best friend Janet.
Okay.
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Absolutely.
A redacted amount of years later.
We're still joined at the hip.
Just a little bit bigger hips.
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Oh, they hit a BOGO.
Well, then you got it.
Listen to soccer moms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.