For decades after its founding in 1924, the Border Patrol was a bureaucratic backwater: poorly funded and largely left to its own devices. Then came 9/11, and a flood of federal resources to “secure our borders” and add thousands of new agents. Yet the oversight necessary to manage a huge federal agency—let alone one that long had made its own rules—never really caught up, and scandals quickly followed: infiltration by cartels, corruption, assault, rape, murder. Within a few years, the Border Patrol had become one of the nation’s largest, and least accountable, law enforcement agencies. At the same time, the US-Mexico border became even more politicized. And then Donald Trump entered the fray.
For our September+October issue, we shined a light on the Border Patrol’s growth, its troubling record on civil liberties, its culture of impunity, and its role in shaping the current political moment—one that echoes the anti-immigrant fever that led to the agency’s creation a century ago, and that could once again put the Border Patrol at the center of Trump’s nativist plans.
The Border Patrol Is an Engine of Crisis—and Has Been Since the Beginning
Meet the forgotten cowboy-congressman who pushed it into existence a century ago.
Why the Border Patrol Went MAGA
Agents always skewed conservative. But then their influential union fully leaned into a Trump presidency.
Inside Trump's Plan to Deport Millions...
Experts explain how the former president would realize his vision of mass removal.
“He’s an Agent. No One Will Believe Me Over Him.”
The case of an alleged rape at the Border Patrol Academy, and the culture of silence that helped keep it from public view.
Border Creep
The Border Patrol covers far more territory than you think—and agents enjoy wide latitude to justify stopping vehicles.
