Border Patrol Mentality

Guest blogger: Tyler Stokes, student at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law

Yesterday, we toured the border region between San Diego and Tijuana with the U.S. Border Patrol. While the images from the trip were both striking and, in some ways, unsettling to me, I found the commentary provided by our guide, a longstanding Border Patrol Agent, to be a very informative aspect of the experience.

From Agent Hernandez’s narration, I learned much more about the state of mind of border enforcement, the mentality that really drives the regime. For example, the Agent at one point said that he

would love to live in a world where a fence was unnecessary, where people were just coming over to pick fruit or start businesses, and mean us no harm, but that’s not the world we live in anymore. There are people who intend to do us harm, and security is vital to protect ourselves.

There is a lot to unpack here, but foremost, it struck me as pocket synopsis of the Agent’s personal justification for the work he’s gotten up every morning to do for the last twenty years, which I believe could be a similar credence for his peers. Within that though, there appears to be an inlaid assumption of a serious danger element on the other side of the fence, in fundamental contrast to the concept of most southern border immigrants simply moving to seek out job opportunity or a better life generally.

If we ever lived in a “world” where the migrants only “meant no harm,” that time has surely passed. This is very much a militaristic sort of “us vs. them” mentality, which seems as though it would make it much easier to qualify pointing your gun at someone with just a rock in their hand, or stand in tandem to fencing with six foot tall doubled spools of razor wire.

-KitJ