History Analytical essay

AMERICAN CROSSROADS Edited by Earl Lewis, George Lipsitz, Peggy Pascoe, George Sanchez, and Dana Takagi

Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol

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Kelly Lytle Hernandez

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London

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“The Day of the Wetback Is Over”

"The day of the wetback is over,” declared Commissioner Swing in January 1955. Swing’s proud victory rested on a broken Bracero Program, changes in US. Border Patrol practice, and a statistical sleight of hand, but his proclamations of triumph along the U.S.-Mexico border announced an end to the crises of consent and con­ trol that had consumed U.S. Border Patrol practice for a decade. For all the smoke and mirrors. Swing and the triumphs of 1954 closed a chapter in the history of the Border Patrol and opened a series of questions regarding the future of migration control in the United States. What would be the practices and priorities of U.S. mi­ gration control in the years after the “wetback crisis”? This chapter examines why the U.S. Border Patrol continued to concentrate upon policing unsanctioned Mex­ ican immigration despite confident pronouncements that the “the so-called wet­ back problem no longer exists. The southern border has been secured.”^ In many ways, the Border Patrol’s continued focus on the U.S.-Mexico border emerged from a deeply rooted infrastructure and an unquestioned goal of deporting Mexican nationals. Most important, however, the patrol’s dogged dedication to policing unsanctioned Mexican immigration in the post-wetback era is a story about how officers, officials, and the shifting conditions of border enforcement redefined the need to control unsanctioned Mexican border crossings as an issue of crime con­ trol rather than as a matter of migration control. This chapter explores how the politics and practices of crime control breathed new life into Border Patrol’s con­ centration in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands during the quiet years that followed Operation Wetback of 1954.

THE DAY OF THE WETBACK IS OVER I97

IMMIGRATION CONTROL IN THE POST-WETBACK YEARS

Regardless of how it was won. Swing’s victory at the Mexican border opened space to consider new possibilities for the priorities and practices of migration control in the post-wetback era. As early as December 1954, Swing discussed turning atten­ tion toward the forgotten Canadian border. There, he argued, unwanted immigrants, dangerous saboteurs, and “restless Canadian immigrants” had long taken advan­ tage of an ignored border to gain illicit entry into the United States.^ In 1957, Swing transferred fifty-three officers from the Southwestern Region to the northern bor­ der.^ When Fidel Castro seized Havana, Cuba, in January of 1959, Swing moved one Hundred Border Patrol officers to the Florida Gulf Coast region to prevent “hos­ tile flights from the U.S. mainland to Cuba.””^ Officer Bob Salinger attributed his many details to Florida to Commissioner Swing’s efforts to insert the INS within the broader apparatus of federal law enforcement. “General Swing,” explained Sa­ linger “jumped in and volunteered the Border Patrol for any shitty job that came along [because] Swing, he’d jump in on anything to make points with the Attorney General.”^ While it is doubtful that Swing assigned Border Patrol officers to addi­ tional duties without requests or instructions from the Attorney General, Salinger certainly recalled the Swing years as a period of integrating the U.S. Border Patrol into a broad spectrum of federal law-enforcement projects. Most notable, in addi­ tion to patrolling the Florida border region, a project at least tangentially related to immigration control. Swing sent Border Patrol officers to quell civil rights distur­ bances in the sduth. Once again, Salinger was assigned to take on an extra duty.

On a Sunday morning in May 1961, Salinger received a call instructing him to “alert fifty men to go to Montgomery, Alabama.” Thirty minutes later he received another call increasing the detail to seventy-five men. Another half-hour passed and Salinger received a third call: one hundred men were needed immediately in Montgomery, Alabama. “Well, if you’re going to take the whole sector, I don’t think we can get them all up there,” protested Salinger, but the call was from James P. Greene, the assistant commissioner of enforcement in the Southwest Region, and refusal was not an option. Instead, Greene authorized Salinger to “take the pilot. [We had a Cessna 310.] Take the 310 and take the radio tech [and] ... get on it right now.”^ When the officers arrived in Montgomery, they learned that “Old Mar­ tin Luther King was going to preach downtown at one of the churches, and all we were doing at the time was finding out if any riots were going to go on.” The Bor­ der Patrol officers, however, were not alone. When they entered their detail head­ quarters at the Maxwell airfield in Montgomery, Alabama, officers from other agen­ cies within the Department of Justice were already there. “They had Alcohol, Tobacco and Tax people, U.S. Marshalls, prison guards, and I think Post Office people” recalled Salinger.^ This detail was emblematic of the Border Patrol’s in-

198 OPERATION WETBACK AND BEYOND

creasing involvement in federal law enforcement and, in particular, its use as a “go­ to” force for on-the-ground federal police activities in the years to come. Through­ out the turbulent 1960s, Border Patrol officers would participate in some of the era’s most significant federal law-enforcement efforts. In 1962, for example. Bor­ der Patrol officers were assigned to stand guard outside of the University of Mis­ sissippi when white students and community members rioted to prevent an African-American student named James Meredith from integrating the university. And, in 1973, Border Patrol officers assisted the Bureau of Indian Affairs and an assortment of federal officers when members of the American Indian Movement occupied Wounded Knee, South Dakota.

While these episodes clearly indicate the Border Patrol’s integration into the multiple and scattered projects of federal law enforcement. Border Patrol opera­ tions still remained centered on patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border and policing persons of Mexican origin. In part, the patrol’s continued concentration upon the U.S.-Mexico borderlands was the result of an institution with strong roots in the region. The U.S. Border Patrol emerged from the wetback decade with a massive infrastructure that had been built around the singular focus of apprehending and deporting unsanctioned Mexican nationals. In addition to assigning the majority of Border Patrol officers to offices in the U.S.-Mexico border region, by 1953, the INS had built and staffed three new, large detention facilities in south Texas and southern California. Located within several miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, these detention centers were oriented toward deporting large numbers of people into Mexico. A fleet of transport aircraft based in El Paso, Texas, moved migrants to and from these detention centers.® Further, Commissioner Swing insured that El Paso would continue to be a hub of Border Patrol activity by establishing a per­ manent home for the Border Patrol Training School at the Fort Bliss military base just outside of the El Paso city limits. The proliferation of Border Patrol buildings, personnel, and institutional resources along the U.S.-Mexico border gave the or­ ganization deep roots in the region.

Perpetuating the imbalance of U.S. Border Patrol resources in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands were changes that Commissioner Swing instituted in INS adminis­ tration. In 1956, Swing split the INS into four independent regional units: South­ west Region, Northwest Region, Northeast Region, and Southeast Region. Each re­ gion had two main divisions. Immigration and Enforcement. The Enforcement Division comprised the U.S. Border Patrol and Immigration Investigators. The re­ gional model discouraged redistribution of officers and resources across regions because it encapsulated each region as a nearly autonomous unit of operations, au­ thority, strategic planning, and resource sharing.^ Regionalization, in other words, gave the institution sticky feet in the U.S.-Mexico border region, where more officers, more resources, and more facilities were located when Swing split the na­ tional police force into four unequal parts.

THE DAY OF THE WETBACK IS OVER I99

THE MIND-SET OF MIGRATION CONTROL

The Border Patrol’s concentration in the U.S.-Mexico border region did not ne­ cessitate a focus on policing unsanctioned Mexican immigrants. Confirming Swing’s suspicions that the post-wetback era would bring new challenges to mi­ gration control, officers working along the U.S.-Mexico border routinely reported in the late 1950s and early 1960s that there was no “large build up of potential il­ legal [Mexican laborer] entrants adjacent to the border area.”^° Officers working the traffic checks along roads and highways leading from the border to the inte­ rior reported that apprehensions of unsanctioned Mexican immigrants “were few and far between.”^ As one officer recalled, “more often than illegal aliens,” officers found cars carrying unexpected contraband such as fireworks, liquor, and parrots.^^ At the same time. Border Patrol intelligence reports warned that nontraditional groups such as British Hondurans and Cubans were arriving in Mexican border towns and trying to cross illegally into the United States.^® As the number of Mex­ ican nationals removed from the United States plunged to a post-wetback low of only 29,651 in i960, new possible targets for migration control emerged. But officers in the southwestern region continued to focus their attention upon policing un­ sanctioned Mexican immigrants.

Border Patrol officers working during the post-wetback era often described their focus upon policing Mexican nationals as a “mind-set.” Recounting a 1957 raid in the Sacramento, California, area Border Patrol officer Ralph Williams explained that “we went in a bar and... we cleaned the bar out... except for one albino.” Williams had walked right by the albino and intended to leave him sitting there, until another officer asked, “What about this guy here?” In a crude example of the very narrow intersection of class, color, and national origins that U.S. Border Pa­ trol officers policed, Williams responded “Ah, hell, he’s just an albino!” Like many other officers, Williams had narrowly focused his suspicions upon brown-skinned Mexicanos. His colleague, however, wondered, “An albino in here with a bunch of Mexicans?” and walked up to the man. "Where are you from?” he asked, and when the albino answered “I’m from Mexico,” he was quickly arrested for illegal entry into the United States. Many years later, Williams was still amused by the incident and laughed about how “we caught us an albino wetback.” The idea of a white­ skinned illegal was ludicrous and illogical to Williams, who admitted that “I think I would have passed him up, as I recall.”^^

In striking similarity to the officers working in the 1920s, Williams considered any connection between whiteness and illegality to be laughable because, as Patrol Inspector Chester Courtney had explained in 1927, it was “absurd to say they be­ lieved the [white] Americans to be aliens.”^® The bonds between whiteness and American citizenship reached back to the Naturalization Act of 1790, which re­ stricted the right to naturalization to whites, but the particular linkages between

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THE DAY OF THE WETBACK IS OVER' 201

Mexican Browns and the caste of illegals were constructed across three distinct gen­ erations of Border Patrol work. In the first generation, local boys who had become federal officers enforced U.S. immigration restrictions according to the customs of borderland communities built upon and around the interests of the agribusiness economy. During the second generation, Border Patrol officers developed prac­ tices of aggressive migration control in conversation and coordination with the Bracero Program as a cross-border system of managing labor migration. By the late 1950s, the patrol’s narrow focus upon policing poor and brown-skinned Mex­ icans operated according to an unquestioned logic of migration control that, many believed} had been naturahzed by the test of time. As one officer explained, “after 13 years of doing this, I can’t really describe, it’s a gut feeling, a hunch. I can walk downtown El Paso and walk by a lot of people and know they are legal,” he ex­ plained, and “all of a sudden, one will be by me or passing in front of me, that I just know doesn’t have documents.”^^

DETENTION AND DEPORTATION CAPACITIES

The racialization and regionalization of U.S. Border Patrol work did not persist into the post-wetback era on hold-overs and hunches alone. In these years, the officers’ focus upon policing persons of Mexican origin was also structured by new and old migration control strategies. The ongoing lifts into the interior of Mexico, for ex­ ample, continued to place a premium upon apprehending unsanctioned Mexican nationals. The buslifts and trainlifts operated with rare breaks during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. When the boatlift was cancelled after the riot aboard the S.S. Mer- curio in August of 1956, the INS reintroduced the airlift program from Reynosa, Tamaulipas, to Leon, Guanajuato. At times, the airlift also ran between Mexicali, Baja California, and Leon. Between November 29, 1957, and June 30, 1964, U.S. and Mexican officials airlifted 56,301 adult Mexican males to Leon and trainlifted another 53,914 Mexican nationals, including men, women, and children, to Chi­ huahua City, Chihuahua.^^ These 110,215 Mexicans lifted into the interior of Mex­ ico represented 38.7 percent of the total number of Mexicans returned to Mexico between fiscal years 1957 and 1964. Men, however, experienced higher rates of re­ moval to the interior because of the gendered restrictions that generally prohib­ ited women and children from being removed via planelift. For example, of the 18,901 adult Mexican males apprehended during fiscal year 1964, 83.5 percent of them were relocated to the interior via plane or train: 11,200 were airlifted to Le6n, and another 4,579 were removed via the bus-trainlift from Presidio, Texas, to Chi­ huahua, Mexico.^® In an era when unsanctioned Mexican immigrants were difficult to find and hard to hold onto, officers struggled to fill the planes, trains, and buses waiting to take them to the interior of Mexico. In January 1959, the Mexican air­ line that was contracted by the INS to carry male deportees from Reynosa to Leon

202 OPERATION WETBACK AND BEYOND

complained that, although they had been hired to conduct daily flights, the pilot and staff were routinely stranded in Reynosa for up to a week at a time while wait­ ing for sets of deportees to be ready for removal. Officers were under pressure to supply the cross-border system of deportation that moved Mexican deportees across the U.S.-Mexico border. One inspector recalled taking unusual measures to fill the buses. We usually only worked the skid row to fill up the buses when we [came] in with half a busload;... we would go down and work skid row and get up enough to fill the bus,” he explained of his work in the Sacramento, California, area.^® Still, INS supervisors and Border Patrol officials often reminded officers in the field that they should not equally police all unsanctioned Mexican immigrants. Women and children, they instructed, were not priorities for the U.S. Border Patrol and should be let alone, notwithstanding extenuating circumstances.

Arresting women and children was as politically unsavory as always, and gen­ der segregation with INS detention facilities and the gendered systems of cross- border deportation limited the INS’ institutional ability to handle female and ju­ venile deportees. Further, the gender and age limitations of the Bracero Program prohibited the option of turning unsanctioned women and children into legal bracero workers. Arresting women and children, therefore, would only drive up Border Patrol apprehension rates and bring unfavorable media attention at a time when Commissioner Swing was busy boasting about having brought calm and con­ quest to the U.S.-Mexico border. Accordingly, Border Patrol officials actively dis­ couraged officers from apprehending women and children. For example, when INS officials in the Central Office received reports that women and children represented 63 percent of the total number of apprehensions in the El Paso region during Jan­ uary of 1956, the assistant commissioner of the Enforcement Division inquired as to the reason for the high number of apprehensions of women and children. The chief enforcement officer (CEO) of the Southwest Region explained that more women and children had recently been apprehended in the El Paso sector because the El Paso Border Patrol office had begun to pay rewards of one to two dollars to El Paso City Police officers for each undocumented Mexican woman or child that they delivered to the U.S. Border Patrol office in El Paso.^^ The incentive caused a spike in the number of undocumented women and children arrested by the El Paso Police Department. The CEO of the Southwest Region assured the anxious Cen­ tral Office officials that the number of women and children being apprehended would soon drop. The El Paso Border Patrol was deporting two large groups of women and children each day, and the officers expected that the El Paso police would soon clear out the area. Further, the head of the Mexican Immigration Ser­ vice in Ciudad Judrez had recently renewed his efforts south of the border to “re­ duce the number of illegal entries of women and children.”^^ By February of 1957, women and children represented only 22 percent of the persons arrested for ille­ gal entry in the El Paso region, and the Central Office applauded the reduction.^^

The day of the wetback is over” 203

When apprehensions of Mexican women and children began to rise in the Lower Rio Grande Valley region during the early 1960s, the new assistant commissioner of enforcement in the Southwest Region, James Greene, repeated the concern re­ garding the large number of women and children being apprehended. To address the issue, he reminded officers that “the Border Patrol... is not concentrating on maids and children” and instructed them that “maids should be worked only on a complaint basis, and crews should not be assigned to a ‘maid detail.’

The hands-off policy regarding maids and children exemplifies how law en­ forcement is negotiated. In this case, law-enforcement practices focused on per­ sons of Meccan origin split upon an axis of gender according to the gendered lim­ itations of INS detention space and deportation policies. Overlooking the daily crossings of domestic workers who lived in Mexico but worked in homes north of the border most likely dampened the number of apprehensions that Border Patrol officers made in the post-wetback era, when a good number of the men who had been illegals became braceros, but the women and children excluded from the Bracero Program continued to cross illegally. As the chief patrol inspector in El Centro, California, noted, “The wives and children of contract laborers... are at­ tempting to enter the United States in increased numbers to join their husbands on farms in the area.”^^

Still, instructiohs to let women and children alone and the general retreat from aggressive migration control in the post-wetback period were not part of a transi­ tion from concentrating upon policing persons of Mexican origin. At the same time that Border Patrol officials directed officers to not apprehend Mexican maids and children, they warned'that a new level of vigilance was needed along the U.S.-Mexico border. In countless memos and agency publications, officials of the Enforcement Division of the INS explained, analyzed, and proffered evidence that Mexican na­ tionals had developed new techniques of Ulegal entry since the conquest of 1954. Soon after the close of Operation Wetback, one immigration investigator in the Los Angeles area explained, “The most difficult problem we have encountered is the de­ tention of illegal Mexican aliens who have assumed the identity of United States cit­ izens and have acquired documents showing birth in the United States.”^^ Illegal Mexican immigrants, he cautioned, had switched from illicit border crossings be­ tween official ports of entry to legal entries on the basis of fraudulent documents.^^

FRAUDULENT CITIZENS

In July i960, Edgar C. Niehbur, once an anthropology student at the University of Texas, was the assistant chief of the Border Patrol, and he used his research skills to improve immigration control. On the basis of research conducted with birth and immigration records, Niehbur informed officers that in the state of Texas alone, one in four filings for birth certificates between May of 1954 and April of 1957 were

204 OPERATION WETBACK AND BEYOND

fraudulent claims to American birth or citizenship. Considering that between 1940 and i960 the state of Texas issued one hundred and ninety thousand birth certifi­ cates to persons of Mexican origin, Niehbur argued that a considerable number of persons claiming to be Mexican Americans were actuaUy false claimants and, thereby, fraudulent citizens. Niehbur examined the consequences of such false claims for migration control efforts in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Citing a re­ cent case of a false claimant who had gained legal entry for his wife, eleven chil­ dren, and twenty-five grandchildren, Niehbur provided a dramatic example of how one false claimant to U.S. citizenship could open the pathway to illegal entry and fraudulent citizenship for an unlimited number of family members.^®

The Border Patrol’s identification of illegal entry by fraudulent documentation provided a new way to interpret the quiet along the U.S.-Mexico border in the post­ wetback years. According to INS and Border Patrol analysis, the drop in appre­ hensions of Mexican nationals was not a reflection of the Border Patrol’s retreat from task forces, nor did it necessarily indicate a decrease in the number of Mex­ ican nationals effecting iUegal entry. The iUegals who once swam, climbed, and hiked across the border had not vanished. Instead, they slipped through official ports of entry under the cover of false documents. Border Patrol officials, in other words, interpreted the low number of apprehensions in the post-wetback period as a reflec­ tion of the U.S. Border Patrol’s failure to detect and deport the illegal immigrants masquerading as U.S. citizens of Mexican origin.

The Border Patrol’s identification of the “fraudulent citizen” problem after Op­ eration Wetback of 1954 carried implications for Border Patrol work. In particu­ lar, officials instructed officers to find the frauds who were hiding among the citi­ zens and legal immigrants. Officers in the field, however, were struggling with this objective. In April 1957, officers in Los Angeles reported difficulties in finding un­ documented Mexican immigrants among the city’s large resident Mexican Amer­ ican population.2^ Officials instructed them to look again. Still, in 1957 Border Patrol officers arrested a total of only 181 persons making false claims to U.S. citizenship. In 1958, to address problems in locating false claimants, the INS established the Fraudulent Document Center in Yuma, Arizona, to collect and analyze informa­ tion regarding individuals using or trafficking in false immigration papers and cit­ izenship records, such as birth certificates. In particular, the Fraudulent Document Center was established as “a reservoir for data relating to documented false claims to United States citizenship by Mexican nationals.” Beginning in 1964, all officers were trained in document analysis.®*^ With special training and incredible diligence, therefore, the Border Patrol continued to find unsanctioned Mexican immigrants in the years after Operation Wetback of 1954.

In the post-wetback years, the concentration of Border Patrol personnel and resources in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands positioned the national police force to focus most of its attention upon the problems of migration control that were par-

THE DAY OF THE WETBACK IS OVER 205

recular to the southwestern United States. There, the racialization of U.S. migra- ifton control was carried into the post-wetback era by the combination of the officers’ pnind-set that illegal immigrants were persons of Mexican origin with instructions |ftp find the false claimants of Mexican origin and demands to supply the ongoing I ^sterns of deportation into the interior of Mexico. At the same time, however, en- Iforcement officials warned Border Patrol officers against apprehending too many lunsanctioned Mexican women and children, who could easily swell, the ranks of deportees and end the impression of victory along the U.S.-Mexico border.

' FROM WETBACKS TO CRIMINALS

: Other than the explicit search for fraudulent citizens and the demobilization of the , task forces, the bulk of Border Patrol practices in the post-wetback period were ; scaled-down versions of what officers had been doing for many years along the bor­ der. Line watches complemented by traffic checks, city patrols, and the lifts into the interior of Mexico were all familiar tactics. But from the earliest days after the close of Operation Wetback of 1954, Border Patrol officials began to script a new meaning for the familiar practices of migration control in the post-wetback era. In particular, officials embraced the politics and practices of crime control along the U.S.-Mexico border. Linking the Border Patrol’s mandate for migration control with a more generalized objective of crime control infused the racialization and re­ gionalization of Border Patrol practices with a renewed urgency, despite the ap­ parent end of the crisis of control along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Leading up to Operation Wetback of 1954, Border Patrol officers had spun sym­ pathetic tales of the undocumented Mexican immigrant. Jose Garcia, a poor and pitiable character, was the archetype of the so-caUed Mexican wetback. Against the farmers’ accusations that they fomented communism, officers of the U.S. Border Patrol mustered evidence from the living and working conditions of unsanctioned Mexican immigrants to argue that the conditions on southwestern farms approx­ imated those of slavery. Accordingly, aggressive migration control was a liberation movement that did not deport workers so much as free the enslaved. In 1954, the patrol triumphed over the problem of slavery in the fields by deporting the virtual slaves firom the borderlands, making braceros out of the remaining illegals, and se­ curing the U.S.-Mexico border against the hordes of unsanctioned Mexican work­ ers that had once flooded the southwest. Those who dared to return, argued Bor­ der Patrol officials, were members of a new breed.

In November of 1956, the chief enforcement officer of the Southwest Region instructed officers in his region that “the word ‘wetback’... should be deleted from the vocabulary of all Immigration officers.” As he explained, “We have been aware for sometime that the name ‘wetback’ creates a picture in the minds of the public and the courts of a poor, emaciated, Mexican worker, entering the United States

2o6 OPERATION WETBACK AND BEYOND

illegally to feed a starving family at home.... There may have been some justifica­ tion to this view a few years ago when we were invaded by hordes of just such people, but today it is no longer true.” He asserted that “today’s apprehensions consist in the main part of criminals, often vicious in type, and of hardened and defiant re­ peaters.” To defeat the sympathetic attitude engendered by the term wetback, the officer suggested that “in its place a true designation should be used, both orally and otherwise, in our contacts with each other, the public, and the press.” His rec­ ommendation was that “whenever a criminal record exists, we use the words, crim­ inal alien’, and when no criminal record exists, the words, ‘deportable alien.’ I feel this change wiU have a psychological effect on the public and courts that wiU benefit the Service. National and local level officials agreed with his assessment, but re­ placed deportable alien with the term border violator?^

The terms criminal alien and border violator indicated that the Border Patrol was assuming new responsibilities. The patrol’s mandate may have been migration control, but its mission was crime control in general by preventing the entry of crim­ inal aliens and deporting border violators. The Border Patrol disseminated the new terminology to the general public via a network of public information officers as­ signed to individual stations beginning in 195 5. While Public Information Officers stationed throughout the country collected stories and tidbits for the local press regarding Border Patrol achievements (with an emphasis on anti-smuggling and narcotics activities), Robert J. Seitz of the Central Office launched an effort to “give the American youth a new American hero—the Border Patrol.”^^ Seitz pitched the idea that “one possible means of obtaining nationwide publicity and good will for the Border Patrol would be through the huge give-away programs conducted by cereal manufacturers.” Seitz believed that General MiUs would have an interest in promoting the Border Patrol by “having children send in box tops to receive a ‘Ju­ nior Border Patrol badge’ and whatever accompanying toys or articles might be appropriate.” Excited about the possibilities, Seitz argued that “there [was] no limit to which such a program could be carried.” For example, “a boy who receives his Junior Patrol Inspector badge could, by organizing a group of 5 or 6 others, then become eligible to send in another couple of box tops and receive a Senior Patrol badge and, after organizing 2 or 3 such groups, would then be eligible for a ‘Sector Chief badge.’”^3

Hoping to build admiration and goodwill among the next generation, the INS took Seitz’s idea to General Mills, but the company declined to include the Border Patrol in its bonanza and box-top programs. “The turn-down has not discouraged us in the least, wrote Richard A. GoUing, an INS regional commissioner. “There are many other ways and means of focusing attention on the objectives of the Bor­ der Patrol and its fine record of accomplishments.”^'* One of the methods was to establish Junior Patrol Clubs for boys in communities with Border Patrol stations. The basic objective of the Junior Patrol Clubs was to promote the Border Patrol

THE DAY OF THE WETBACK IS OVER” 20/

and its many crime-control activities and thereby to preserve the goodwill of the communities in which officers worked and lived. As its recruitment materials ad­ vised, the Border Patrol was America’s first line of defense against crime because “the alien who violates our border is breaking the laws of this country and his own. Having broken one law, it is easier for him to break another.”^^

The Border Patrol’s new law-enforcement image was accompanied by a dramatic shift in Border Patrol activities toward a more generalized program of crime con­ trol along the U.S.-Mexico border. In August 1956, the Southwestern Region launched the Criminal, Immoral, and Narcotics (CIN) program. The basic objec­ tive of the CIN program was the “identification and location of persons excludable from the United States under those sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act dealing with the Criminal, Immoral, and Narcotic classes. Targeted persons were immigrants, namely Mexican nationals, already living within the United States, and “persons residing in contiguous territory who are likely to be applicants for admission.”^^ The adoption of the CIN program altered Border Patrol objec­ tives and operations in the U.S.-Mexico border region.

The CIN program was, at heart, a system of information-gathering and shar­ ing. Immigration investigators and Border Patrol officers were charged with recording the illicit activities of persons living in Mexico who were expected to apply for entry into the United States. The officers worked with Mexican police officers and judicial officials to gain access to the arrest and court records of sus­ pected persons. They perused Mexican newspapers for crime reports. They mon­ itored the movements of prostitutes working in bordertown brothels. Above all. Border Patrol officers depended upon a cadre of immigrant informants for infor­ mation on the activities and whereabouts of potential immigrants engaged in crim­ inal activities south of the border. In exchange for information, the patrol either paid the informants or, as one report explained, offered them “entry into the United States as parolees ... as an inducement to obtain and insure the continuous coop­ eration of certain informants who may not otherwise be permitted to enter the United States.”^®

Among the primary targets of the CIN officers were drug smugglers and per­ sons convicted of violent crimes, yet the officers seemed to spend most of their time gathering information on prostitutes working south of the border. “Normally” re­ marked one officer, “the operators of the houses furnished the Border Patrol a cur­ rent list each month of the girls in their employ, and kept the Border Patrol ad­ vised of the girls’ activities (plans on leaving, for how long, where they [were] going, and new girls coming in).”®® In Naco, Sonora, brothel owners worked with the lo­ cal chief of police to “fingerprint the girls, identify, and mug them.” Copies of the prostitutes’ fingerprints and mug shots were shared with the U.S. Border Patrol office in Douglas, Arizona. North of the border, officers kept an eye out for the women identified as prostitutes by immigrant informants, brothel owners, and

208 OPERATION WETBACK AND BEYOND

Mexican police officers. Tlie CIN program, therefore, demonstrates that the gen­ dered discretions of Border Patrol practices were negotiable according to the vary­ ing moralities of women’s work along the U.S.-Mexico border. Not all Border Pa­ trol officers were assigned to conduct investigations for the CIN program, but its establishment shifted Border Patrol operations toward arresting criminal aliens rather than apprehending undocumented immigrants. By 1958, the El Centro, Cali­ fornia, CIN unit alone held “10,000 cards containing the correct names and aliases, and usually a photograph, of persons of the immoral classes in Mexico ... ap­ proximately 1,000 cards pertaining to known criminals, and 1,300 cards pertain­ ing to known narcotic or suspected narcotic violators in Mexico.”^®

The switch to looking for criminals instead of migrants had consequences for a wide range of practices and policies. On patrol, officers assigned to the CIN pro­ gram searched for criminal aliens instead of undocumented workers. Although the INS detention centers along the U.S.-Mexico border had been established to func­ tion as staging centers to prepare detainees for either voluntary departure or de­ portation, the turn toward crime control sparked the invention of new tactics to handle criminals rather than migrants. In Aprft 1956, the INS instituted a newpol- icy of strip-searching all detainees upon entrance to the immigrant detention fa­ cilities, because, as officer Don Coppock advised all chief patrol inspectors, “they were not dealing with docile aliens as in the past, but were dealing with an increasing number of desperate criminals.”^^ Further, instead of simply prepping migrants for departure, INS facilities began to function as holding centers where migrants were kept until investigations into their possible criminal backgrounds could be completed. In the late 1950s, the INS began to fingerprint detainees with repeat immigration offenses. Ihe fingerprints were forwarded to the FBI.'^^ if within fifteen days the INS did not receive a “kick-back” from the FBI—a positive identification of an immigrant with a criminal record—then the detainee would be processed for deportation. If the FBI positively identified a detainee as having a criminal record, INS and Border Patrol officers at the detention facilities initiated prosecution pro­ ceedings. This practice linked the relatively marginal and underfunded efforts of U.S. immigration control to the institutional heart of U.S. federal law enforcement, the FBI. Collaborating with the FBI to identify felons and miscreants among the undocumented not only emphasized the importance of migration control in the quiet post-wetback period but also further integrated the U.S. Border Patrol into a broader fabric of federal law-enforcement initiatives. In January 1965, the process of searching for criminals among detainees intensified when the associate deputy regional commissioner of operations in the Southwest Region extended the policy to first-time immigration offenders along the Mexican border."^^ The changes in INS detention practices and policies meant that Border Patrol officers spent increas­ ingly more time working criminal cases because, as Commissioner Swing explained, since the close of Operation Wetback, the INS had a role to play in identifying un-

THE DAY OF THE WETBACK IS OVER 209

Sanctioned migrants with criminal records “so that the orderly and vigorous cam­ paign for law enforcement on the border can be further improved.”'^'^ I The INS identified few persons with criminal records among the detainees be- ling held along the border. A 1957 internal report suggested that only three people ^3'jper day qualified for criminal prosecution.^^ But in his budget request for fiscal year i: 1958, INS Commissioner Joseph Swing argued that the criminal threat within the undocumented Mexican community demanded that U.S. Border Patrol efforts

I along the U.S.-Mexico border be adequately funded as a form of crime control. “I ■ would like to read carefully this next paragraph. I am still talking about Mexicans, . Mr. Chairman,” he began his testimony before the Subcommittee of the Commit­ tee on Appropriations in the House of Representatives (John J. Rooney-NY, chair). Then, drawing upon an unarchived study. Swing stated that “of the aliens 'currently apprehended, over 50 percent have been previously arrested for various crimes. For example, a survey of results obtained from fingerprint records of aliens apprehended during the period July 8 to October 31, 1956, disclosed that out of 14,980 records examined, prior arrest records existed as follows: 1,022 for crimes involving moral turpitude—and they went all the way from rape to carnal knowl­ edge of young girl children—136 for violation of the narcotics laws; 16 for prosti­ tution; 50 for alien smuggling; 91 for false claims to citizenship; 6,131 for previous expulsion, and 1,278 for other crimes.”"^^ Setting aside the Swing-era tendency to inflate Border Patrol statistics. Swing’s testimony before the appropriations sub­ committee argued that Border Patrol work should be considered as an arena of crime control. When placed alongside the procedures developed at INS detention centers, the piractices of Border Patrol officers and the emergent priorities such as the CIN program, along with the various details to Florida and the American South made it clear that, in the post-wetback years, the Border Patrol had retired its lim­ ited mandate for migration control at the nation’s margins and had remade itself into a full participant in crime control and federal law enforcement.

For Border Patrol officers, the rise of crime-control discourses and initiatives offered a new way to analyze what some explained as the moral tensions in their work. “If you look at the humane aspects, we are stopping starving people from coming in to work, [and] it is not pretty to look at,” explained officer Joe Aubin, who described his job as “not too great” because “I’m really the go-between that prohibits this poor man from finding work to take groceries home.”'^^ Like many officers, Aubin still understood the problem of unsanctioned Mexican immigra­ tion to be an economic issue, and he empathized that “if I had a wife and five or six, seven, eight, nine, 12,15 kids to support, and could only make a dollar in my own country, I would do the same thing. All they really want to do is come in and earn enough money to feed their families.”^® On the literal front line between un­ deremployed Mexican workers and jobs in the United States, Border Patrol officers often struggled with being in the business of policing workers and families whose

210 OPERATION WETBACK AND BEYOND

crimes of unsanctioned migration were driven by poverty and want. Out on the line, Aubin admitted, he "sympathize [d]... with the poor man... who simply [wants to] cross over here to pick cotton and support his family.” But, Aubin ex­ plained, “We have a job to do. I’m paid to do a job in the U.S.” His own livelihood was predicated upon stopping unsanctioned migration to the United States, re­ gardless of the plight of Mexico’s migrants. StiU, if preventing a hungry mi^ant trom reaching work and wages north of the border was difficult, the intersection of migration control and crime control provided officers with a new way of un­ derstanding their work. In routine comparisons made between the wetback and post-wetback years, officers commented that in the earlier period the unsanctioned Mexican immigrant was “an honest, easygoing guy (and that was true in the ear­ lier days, there was a lot of people like that), [but] in later years, you ran into a more militant type of people.

For officers in the field, the new militant character of unsanctioned Mexican immigrants was manifested in the escalating hostility of migrants toward Border Patrol officers. “Ihey gradually became more defiant and gave you a little more run for your money,” explained officer Walter Bradley about his work in Chula Vista, California. The poor workers continued to cross, and, as they had increasingly done smce the early 1950s, they ran to escape arrest. But with the easygoing laborers, he explained, arrived an increasing number of militants and criminals who flipped the dynamics of the border by placing the officers under siege.^o “Here in El Paso,” explained Aubin, “I’ve had people throw rocks and bricks at me from the Mexican side. I was hit in the head about two years ago. It aU started when they took sling shots away from the Border Patrol. It was declared an unprofessional weapon Now they have the sling shots, David and Goliath slings, and we are bombarded with rocks and bricks on a daily basis.” Aubin described line-watches along the levy as runnmg a gauntlet. If you get 20 or 30 Mexicans with slings, chunking rocks at you, you got your hands full just getting out of there.’’^^ For Aubin, the brick- lobbmg Mexicans confirmed that a new generation of border crossers had arrived. Among the workers walking through the deserts, scaling the fences, and wading across the increasingly toxic New River was a cast of dangerous individuals. These were the criminal aliens that his senior advisors had warned him about.

The rise of the criminal alien within Border Patrol rhetoric, the explicit search or unsanctioned migrants engaged in illicit activities, and the adoption of safety

procedures designed to handle criminals in INS detention facilities aU indicate the evolution of U.S. migration control toward a more generalized program of crime control in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Undoubtedly, Border Patrol and INS at­ tempts to refashion migration control as a means of preventing crimes other than unsanctioned migration was a strategy designed to defend the relevance of the bloated Border Patrol bureaucracy in the post-wetback era. The Border Patrol’s budget had jumped from $7,114,147 in 1954 to $11,530,947 in 1955 and increased

THE DAY OF THE WETBACK IS over” 211

|tgain to $12,168,698 in 1956. The more generalized crime-control strategies and i::priori|;ies emerged from within the patrol as a matter of self-preservation after /Swing’s triumphant declaration of victory at the U.S.-Mexico border. Yet the Bor­ der Patrol’s turn toward crime control at the U.S.-Mexico border complemented and occurred in the context of a rising urgency regarding drug control.^^

DRUG CONTROL, MIGRATION CONTROL

Since the 1930s, Harry Anslinger had led the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and di­ rected a powerful publicity campaign regarding the many threats of the domestic and iinfernational drug trade. In the 1930s, he reached beyond public health argu­ ments regarding the dangers of individual drug use and highlighted the role of or­ ganized crime in the drug trade. Drug control, Anslinger argued, was a critical com­ ponent of policing mafiosos and organized crime.^^ His campaign played a pivotal role'in shaping the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, which placed the first tax on the sale of cannabis, hemp, and marijuana. In the early years of the Cold War, Anslinger consolidated his campaign into a deeply consequential and widely accepted social project. These years, as David F. Musto has argued, represent “the high point of federal punitive action against narcotics.”^^ In particular. Congress aggressively took up me project of punishing drug users and suppliers. For example, between 1947 and 1950, changes in the Uniform Narcotic Drug Acts created mandatory mini- miims for drug convictions. In 1951, the Boggs Act applied a mandatory minimum penalty of two years in prison for first-time drug offenders. The ascent of drug con­ trol climaxed with the passage of the Narcotics Control Act of 1956, which imposed life imprisonment or even the death penalty for certain drug offenses that involved niinors.^^ Further the Narcotics Control Act of 1956 translated the increasingly punitive dimensions of drug control to migration control by establishing drug addiction and drug-law violations as grounds for deportation. Drug control, there­ fore, applied the state’s ultimate sanctions—life in prison, death, or banishment— to drug violations.

The U.S. Border Patrol was deeply affected by the rise of drug control as a fed­ eral law-enforcement initiative. Although the U.S. Customs Service had long led interdiction efforts along U.S. land borders and coastlines, in 1955, all U.S. Border Patrol officers were officially cross-designated as customs inspectors.^^ As such. Bor­ der Patrol officers were granted the authority to include drug interdiction among their top priorities while policing the crime of unsanctioned entry.^^ By the mid- 1950s, therefore, drug control was no longer a side issue in migration control. Ac­ cordingly, in 1958, the Border Patrol began to keep detailed records of the volume and value of narcotics seized by its officers. The patrol’s official participation in drug interdiction deepened its roots in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as the illicit drug trade moved progressively toward the border after World War II.

212 OPERATION WETBACK AND BEYOND

drug interdiction at the u.s.-mexico border

Prior to World War II, most of the opium and heroin consumed in the United States came from Italy, France, and the Middle East. When World War II cut offlicit and micit European trade routes with the United States, Mexico emerged as a core pro­ ducer of opium and heroin. The increased production of opium poppies in Mex­ ico was a response to the vacuum created in the illicit international market, but it

so developed because the U.S. government encouraged Mexico to produce opium and hemp for the war effort. The United States wanted opium to make morphine for medical purposes and hemp to make strong fibers and ropes. Production in­ creased rapidly; by 1943, opium had become the primary cash crop in Mexico’s northern state of Sinaloa. After the war, the United States caUed for an end to opium and hemp production in Mexico, and the Mexican government obeyed these de- mands. In 1948, the Mexican military began chopping down poppy plants and ma­ rijuana fields in the critical triangle” of Sinaloa, Sonora, and Durango-the three northern states where heroin and marijuana production was most intense. The erad- ication campaign was slowandlimited as soldiers hackedawayatthousandsofacres o Ulicit crops, but the United States was satisfied with Mexico’s progress, given toat its share of the heroin market in the United States remained at 10-15 percent

roughout the 1950s and 1960s. Mexico, however, continued to be a primary source of marijuana destined for the United States, and Mexico emerged as the pri- ma^thoroughfare between theUnitedStates-theworld’slargestdrugconsumer- and burgeoning drug cartels in South America.^® The shift of the drug trade to the

. .-Me^co border (a shift that would only deepen over time), the rise of drug con­ trol as a federal crime-control priority, and the official cross-designation of U.S.

order Patrol officers as a federal interdiction agents reinforced the Border Patrol’s concentration in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

Richard Nixon elevated federal drug control to a new high, ereas crime control had yet to operate as a core issue in national politics, Richard

Nixon s 1968 presidential campaign focused on "law and order” issues and prom­ ised to increase the federal involvement in crime control. Once in office, Nixon be­ gan his confrontation with crime by targeting drug trafficking at the U.S.-Mexico border. In particular, to reduce the amount of marijuana available within the United States and to strong-arm Mexico into doing more to eradicate marijuana fields, PresidentNixonlaunchedOperationInterceptonSeptember2i,i969. During Op- eration Intercept U.S. officers stopped aU pedestrian and vehicular traffic at the TT check for drugs being smuggled into the United States. The A A sixty-nine hundred pounds of marijuana, three hun­ dred and fifty thousand dangerous pills, and a half ounce of heroine, but the seven- week campaign confirmed the U.S.-Mexico border as a primary site of the war on

THE DAY OF THE WETBACK IS OVER” 213

drugs and affirmed the general broadening of Border Patrol operations to include crime control in the post-wetback years.^^

By the early 1970s, U.S. Border Patrol officers reported that the line between drug interdiction and migration control had become almost too difficult to deci­ pher as it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between illegal immigrants and drug smugglers. Border Patrol officers, for example, would often find unsanc- ti'oned border crossers “carrying big sacks of marijuana.”^® The men carrying the sacks of narcotics across the border were officially categorized as drug smugglers, but, as officer Mario Chamberlain explained, “They’re just what we call mules. They’re usually not really the guy who’s the smuggler, so to speak.”^^ The smug- gler^ made the deals north and south of the border, he explained, while the person bringing the drugs across was “just an old working man, really what he is, usually

make a few bucks.But in his official capacity, he arrested the old work­ ingmen as both unsanctioned immigrants and drug smugglers.

Crime control and, in particular, drug control were thus critical dimensions in the making of U.S. Border Patrol policy and practice after Operation Wetback of 1954. The Bracero Program and the Border Patrol’s participation in the misman­ agement of Mexican labor migration to the United States remained important fac­ tors, but in an era when the Bracero Program swept an increasing number of Mex- ito s male labor migrants into legal migration streams. Border Patrol officials were forced to think in new ways about their efforts in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Whil^e U.S. Border Patrol officers were not busy enforcing international labor agree­ ments or domestic labor law, they expanded their practices, policies, and priori­ ties to participate in projects of federal law enforcement and crime control, espe­ cially drug control. The post-wetback period, therefore, was a period of quiet but dramatic transformation in which Border Patrol officials and the dictates of the emerging war on drugs shifted the orientation of U.S. immigration law enforce­ ment toward a broader program of crime control. In this period, the Border Pa­ trol devised new practices and policies to police unsanctioned migration as a crime committed by drug smugglers, prostitutes, and fraudulent citizens. The post-wet- back era, in other words, was a regenerative period during which the fusion of mi­ gration control with crime control altered the basic mechanics and meaning of Bor­ der Patrol work, but the racialization and regionalization of U.S. migration control remained the same.

THE END OF THE POST-WETBACK ERA

Many INS officials believed that the quiet post-wetback era would come to an end with the termination of the Bracero Program on December 31,1964. The Border Patrol prepared for an onslaught of unsanctioned Mexican migrants in the months

214 OPERATION WETBACK AND BEYOND

after the doors shut at bracero recruitment centers south of the border. In antici­ pation of a quick and dramatic return to the days of the wetback, the Southwest- ern Regional headquarters in San Pedro, California, distributed a document enti- K ^ j Bolster the Border” to all Border Patrol offices along the U.S. -Mexico border/Ihe plan outlined a program for detailing 216 additional officers to the Cali- ornia border region in the case of an emergency. When the Bracero Program ended,

however, there were only minor increases in unsanctioned border crossings. U.S. apartment of State officials in Baja California forwarded memos regarding a large

number of ex-braceros and their famUies waiting and hoping for new contracts, and some crossed iUegally into the United States.^ But apprehensions of Mexican nationals did not spike as expected. Without signs of a crisis, the regional office never dispatched the special detaft of officers. Ihe post-wetback era did not begin

TT'fr Mexican economy headed into a tailspin, an^e U.S. Border Patrol returned to using aggressive migration control tactics.

Ihe underside of Mexico’s postwar industrialization program began to show during the late 1960s. Although the Mexican economy had grown an average of 3.2 times annually between 1940 and i960, and another 2.7 times between i960 and 1970, the distribution of wealth was negligible.^^ The percentage of income available to the poorer half of society feU from 19 percent in 1950 to 16 percent in 1957- t dropped again to 15 percent in 1963 and 13 percent in 1975. The wealth- lest 20 percent of Mexican society, however, claimed a near steady 60 percent of the available income.^^ What had been dubbed the “Mexican Miracle” of economic expansion after World War II was not a miracle for all. When the global recessions and panics of the mid- 1970s hit the Mexican economy, Mexico’s poor suffered enor­ mous losses In 1975, the Mexican economy experienced zero per capita growth, real wages fell, and underemployment plagued 45 percent of workers.^^ time, the country was experiencing another population boom. Beginning in 1940, Mexico s population had increased at the rate of 3 percent per year. Whereas the population was only 19.6 million in 1940, by 1977 it had increased to 67 million By 1980, the Mexican population stood at 70 miUion.^^ omy was contracting, more Mexicans were entering the. workforce.

For many of Mexico’ poor, migration was a strategy for economic survival, but as the Mexican Miracle unraveled, changes in U.S. immigration law closed more options for legal Mexican immigration. In 1965, the United States Congress passed the Immigration Reform Act, which ended the era of raciaUy restrictive national quotas launched by the National Origins Act of 1924 and placed the first numeri­ cal limit upon legal immigration into the United States fi-om Mexico. According to t e Immigration Reform Act of 1965, immigration from the Western Hemi­ sphere, including Mexico, was capped at 120,000 annually (excluding quota ex­ emptions). The 120,000 cap was too low to accommodate the volume of Mexican labor migration to the United States.^« In fiscal year 1967.43,034 Mexican nation-

THE DAY OF THE WETBACK IS OVER 215

; were legally admitted to the United States, and another 86,845 were apprehended rthe Border Patrol, and a total of 108,3 27 were forcibly returned to Mexico.^^ The imigration Reform Act of 1965 became effective on July 1,1968, meaning that the end of the Mexican Miracle began to move through the Mexican country-

i^ide and urban areas, the opportunities for Mexican nationals to legally enter the pUnited States were capped by quota limitations. Mexicans fleeing the collapse of |lhe Mexican Miracle crossed the border without inspection or entered with false

I documents. Accordingly, U.S. Border Patrol apprehension rates along the U.S.- Mexico border began to climb out of their post-wetback lows. The number of Mex­ ican hationals apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol crossed the 100,000 mark in 1968 and inched toward 500,000 in 1973.

Yet, as always, the rising apprehension rate along the U.S.-Mexico border re­ sulted both from trends in unsanctioned Mexican migration and from changes in Border Patrol practice. Unfortunately, precisely what happened in terms of Bor­ der Patrol practice is less clear. Many U.S. Border Patrol correspondence records for the post-1965 period remain closed to public inquiry. But public documents, such as INS annual reports, congressional appropriations hearings for the U.S. De­ partment of Justice, and published ethnographies conducted with Border Patrol assistance aU indicate a return to aggressive migration control tactics directed to­ ward detecting and deporting unsanctioned immigrants of Mexican origin during the late 1960s.

In 1967, the INS expanded the capacity for cross-border deportations into the interior of Mexico by supplementing the ongoing trainlifts to Chihuahua City and ffie airlifts to Le6n, Guanajuato, with buslifts that ran from Ciudad Judrez to Jimenez, Chihuahua.Two years later, the INS opened new staging centers for de­ portation along the U.S.-Mexico border. The new lifts and staging centers allowed the INS to process and deport greater numbers of unsanctioned Mexican immi­ grants, and the Border Patrol resumed regular raids that again had the singular ob­ jective of apprehending unsanctioned Mexican immigrants. By the early 1970s, the patrol had returned to conducting mass raids on farms and ranches throughout the southwest, but Border Patrol officials also intensified the search for fraudulent citizens assumed to be hiding in urban areas with large Mexicano communities, such as Los Angeles, California, and San Antonio, Texas.^^ In 1972, the urban raids produced at least one-quarter of the apprehensions made that year in the South­ ern California region.^^ The next year, the INS annual report boasted that “in a sin­ gle operation of 20 workdays in the Los Angeles area, a special force of 75 Service officers located and processed 11,500 deportable aliens.”^.^ In 1973, raids in the Los Angeles area escalated as immigration investigators and officers of the U.S. Bor­ der Patrol conducted raids on factories and Mexicano residential communities.^"^ The massive jump in apprehensions of Mexican nationals from just 44,161 in 1965 to 616,630 in 1974, therefore, was largely due to the wave of unemployed Mexican

THE DAY OF THE WETBACK IS OVER” 21/

workers heading to jobs north of the border, but it also reflects an increase in INS capacities along the U.S.-Mexico border, marks the U.S. Border Patrol’s return to aggressive migration control practices, and signals the adoption of urban raids as a key method of increasing apprehension rates. These were the days when Jorge Lerma sang his song, “Superman Is an Illegal Alien,” protesting the aggressive en­ forcement of U.S. immigration restrictions against Mexicanos in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

After twenty years of relative quiet along the U.S.-Mexico border, the steady increase in the number of apprehensions of unsanctioned Mexican nationals prompted the new commissioner of the INS, Leonard F. Chapman, to declare that 1974 was the year when the post-wetback era officially ended. Chapman confessed that “the virtual flood of illegal entries across the Southern Border” had returned, and the crisis of control was worse than it had ever been. Chapman estimated that an estimated six to twelve million illegal immigrants lived in the United States, more than 90 percent of whom were Mexican nationals.^^ Other sources disputed his claim. The U.S. Census Bureau estimated that, by the end of the 1970s, only five million undocumented immigrants lived in the United States, with Mexican na­ tionals comprising less than one-half of the total.But Chapman maintained that illegal immigration was again at crisis levels and that, this time, the immigrants were criminal aliens, prostitutes, and drug smugglers rather than the simple and easygoing “wetbacks” of the past.^^

At the close of the post-wetback period, the primary targets of U.S. migration control remained the same. What had changed was the expansion of Border Pa­ trol’s mandate for migration control to include the broader objective of crime con­ trol. From this process of transformation, the U.S. Border Patrol emerged more closely interwoven with federal law-enforcement institutions and initiatives. The patrol was no longer an outlier with a narrow agenda along the nation’s borders; its new fociis on drug control and crime control folded the Border Patrol into the expanding systems of federal law enforcement. In the years after Richard Nixon unleashed an era of strategic consolidation of federal law enforcement operations, Border Patrol work routinely included policing immigrants, policing criminals, and policing drugs. Officers experienced dissonance in their simultaneous efforts to po­ lice the U.S.-Mexico border as a pathway for illegal migrants seeking escape from poverty in Mexico and as a theater of drug interdiction in the United States. How­ ever, the chaotic intersections of migration control and drug control along the bor­ der would increasingly structure the making and meaning of U.S. Border Patrol work in the last decades of the twentieth century.