The violence, racial profiling and disregard for the Constitution that has burst into public view in Minneapolis is not new or unusual for the Border Patrol. This is how the agency has operated since it was created, though for decades those activities have been hidden in the remote borderlands. If you are uncomfortable with what the Border Patrol is doing in Minneapolis, you are uncomfortable with the Border Patrol, full stop.
While Immigration and Customs Enforcement has become the umbrella term for all immigration agents, the Border Patrol is the larger force with a longer history. ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations agents have the job of finding, detaining and deporting people. Border Patrol agents police areas in between ports of entry. Alex Pretti was shot by the Border Patrol; Renee Good was shot by ICE.
The Trump administration’s decision this week to replace the Border Patrol commander in Minneapolis, Gregory Bovino, suggested the problem was limited to leadership mistakes. But this move, and other possible solutions offered by the Trump administration and Democrats alike, does not adequately address the depth of the problem.
The tactics in Minneapolis have been used both on the border and beyond — to immigrants and citizens alike — during the Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden presidencies.
Today, there are about 20,000 Border Patrol agents, compared to some 1,500 agents in the 1970s. As the agency grew, it began to extend its policing methods far from the border itself. Some 50 million vehicles are screened every year at internal Border Patrol checkpoints miles from a border. From 2016 to 2020, 91 percent of drug seizures at interior checkpoints involved only American citizens. Americans have accused officers of assaulting and racially profiling them, even before Minneapolis. The Border Patrol has also raided religious and humanitarian organizations that provide aid to immigrants.
The Southern Border Communities Coalition counted 364 fatal encounters with Customs and Border Protection agents since 2010. Border Patrol agents have killed Mexican teenagers on the Mexican side of the border. In April, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights found that the U.S. government was responsible for torturing, killing and covering up the death of Anastasio Hernández Rojas while he was in Border Patrol custody.
How the Border Patrol operates can be traced back to the agency’s origins in Wild West frontier policing. The United States Border Patrol was established in May 1924, days after the signing of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which set very small quotas for immigrants from most of the world except Northern Europe. According to the Times headline at the time, the law was meant “to preserve racial type as it exists here today.”
Senator David Reed, a Pennsylvania Republican who sponsored the immigration act, explained in a 1925 Senate debate: “They have no right to go into an interior city and pick up aliens in the street and arrest them, but it is just at the border where they are patrolling that we want them to have this authority.” He reassured his concerned colleagues, “We are all on the alert against granting too much power to these officials to act without warrant.”
His promises proved empty. The first agents were hired from frontier law enforcement and brought with them a frontier ethos. One agent bragged in his memoir that he had killed 27 people, but that was just whites; he didn’t bother to count Black and brown people. Another agent, angered when a smuggler shot his partner, went to the Rio Grande and indiscriminately shot at every Mexican he could see on the other side of the river.
In the mid-20th century, Congress revisited the Border Patrol’s authorization, allowing agents to operate within “a reasonable distance” of external boundaries but leaving it up to the agency’s leadership to decide what a reasonable distance was. “Reasonable distance” was later interpreted to mean 100 miles from borders and coastlines, a decision that has remained unchanged since.
Still, at the time, the Border Patrol remained a relatively small group focused on racial policing near the Mexican border. The agency’s most high-profile moment was Operation Wetback, which ejected approximately a million people in the mid-1950s.
A decade later, the 1965 Immigration Act removed the racial national origins quotas but added new restrictions to Mexicans’ entry to the United States. The number of Border Patrol apprehensions soon increased. Moreover, the courts have allowed race and appearance to justify stops by immigration agents as long as they were paired with at least one other factor. Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s 2025 concurrence in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo confirmed again that immigration agents can use apparent race and ethnicity as a “relevant factor” to profile people far from the border itself.
The Border Patrol’s funding expanded as immigration and drugs became national issues. From 1994 to 2000, the number of agents more than doubled. Then it exploded. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the Border Patrol repositioned itself as the front line against terrorist infiltrations, even though none of the hijackers had crossed irregularly at a land border.
Founded to enforce a racist law, the Border Patrol has long held extraordinary powers to stop and interrogate citizens and immigrants alike in vast stretches of the country. The Border Patrol was not the creation of Gregory Bovino, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller or even Donald Trump. All the Trump administration has done is draw attention to what always existed. Once the Border Patrol operated primarily in the shadows of the borderlands. Perhaps before it was possible to not really know what the Border Patrol was doing, but after watching neighbors tear gassed, pepper-sprayed and beaten while exercising their right to observe police activity, it is impossible to look away.
While we grieve the killing of Alex Pretti, we must also vow to rein in the Border Patrol. That means banning the use of race in the agency’s policing, getting its agents out of American cities and sending them back to the border — and shrinking the border zone substantially.
Reece Jones is the author of “Nobody Is Protected: How the Border Patrol Became the Most Dangerous Police Force in the United States” and, with Greg Boos, the forthcoming “Smuggler.”
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