The Ballad of Ramos and Compean

Salon.com  has a new story “The ballad of Ramos and Compean: How the anti-immigration right — and Lou Dobbs — turned two rogue Border Patrol agents into heroes and got Congress on their side,” by Alex Koppelman.  It analyzes how conservatives have capitalized on an incident two years ago, in the Texas desert in which two U.S. Border Patrol agents fired 15 bullets at a suspected drug dealer who was fleeing on foot toward the border. The man, a Mexican national, was hit once in the buttocks but made it across the Rio Grande. The agents who fired their weapons, Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, were sentenced to more than a decade in prison for firing on an unarmed man and then trying to cover up the crime. 

As readers of this blog know, the conviction of Ramos and Compean was just the beginning of the agents’ story.   Koppleman writes:

“Within months, they had become the center of a dubious political crusade that would energize the furthest reaches of the right, dominate one of CNN’s most popular news programs, and persuade a quarter of the U.S. House of Representatives — and one prominent Democratic senator — to reject the findings of a federal court. With the help of reporters and activists promoting — and embellishing — the defense’s version of the case, the two convicted agents were transformed into martyrs for the battle against illegal immigration. Instead of rogue officers who shot a fleeing, unarmed suspect and then lied about it, they became stand-up cops who were forced to shoot an armed drug dealer and then sent to prison by a legal system run amok. After they went to prison in January 2007, they even became the tragic heroes of a country song called `Ramos and Compean.'”

KJ