The Conversation: Beefing up Border Patrol is a bipartisan goal, but the agency has a troubled history of violence and impunity by Ragini Shah

In Beefing up Border Patrol is a bipartisan goal, but the agency has a troubled history of violence and impunity in The Conversation, Ragini Shah writes that, created in 1924 to enforce new immigration quotas,  the Border Patrol recruited its first agents from the Texas Rangers, giving it a kind of rogue, cowboy culture that persists today.  And little has changed in the last century.

Nonetheless, as Shah observes,

“on border policy, Trump and Harris have remarkably similar positions: They want to send more money, Border Patrol agents and technology to the U.S.-Mexico border.

These ideas may sound reasonable enough. Yet, as my research on the history of border enforcement reveals, flooding the zone with funding, law enforcement and technology will not necessarily make the border safer.”

KJ