Trump Uses Border Patrol to Implement Police State

In the early morning hours of July 15, Mark Pettibone was walking home from a Black Lives Matter protest in Portland when unidentified federal agents grabbed him.

“Without warning, men in green military fatigues adorned with generic ‘police’ patches jumped out of an unmarked minivan and approached me,” Pettibone, twenty-nine, states in an affidavit. “I did not know whether the men were police or far-right extremists, who, in my experience, frequently don military-like outfits and harass left-leaning protesters in Portland.”

“The intent is to intimidate, to silence, and try to quell these protesters. People are protesting police violence and are met with police violence.”

The affidavit is part of a lawsuit recently brought against the Customs and Border Protection component of the Department of Homeland Security, as well as two other federal agencies, by Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum. It alleges that these agencies are violating the constitutional rights of protesters in Portland.

“No one told me why I had been detained,” says Pettibone, who tells of being taken—without explanation—to a holding cell in Portland’s federal courthouse. After refusing to waive his Miranda rights, he was released without any charges filed against him.

Rosenblum’s lawsuit seeks a restraining order against the kind of strong-arm tactics  experienced by Pettibone and others. Such tactics, the lawsuit charges, inhibit “the First Amendment right of Oregonians to peacefully protest racial inequality.”

Trump’s deployment in early July of what amounts to a federal strike force came after weeks of protests over the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Trump’s rapid deployment team sent to Portland includes U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents—the foot soldiers in the President’s war against immigrants.

“ICE and Customs and Border Protection have been wreaking havoc on people in the United States since almost the day Trump was inaugurated,” Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, tells The Progressive.

Before the federal agents were dispatched, the abusive practices of Portland police were the subject of protests and concern. But a class-action lawsuit resulted in a restraining order and a subsequent agreement in June to curb the use of tear gas and other weaponry, including police projectiles.

Arrival of the federal agents brought a new and more vicious violence to Portland.

“The intent is to intimidate, to silence, and try to quell these protesters,” says J. Ashlee Albies, a Portland civil rights lawyer who has represented activists in the class-action lawsuit. “People are protesting police violence and are met with police violence.”

The federal agents are purportedly protecting federal property, but they have not confined their presence to the few areas in Portland where federal property exists.

These agents, says Jann Carson, interim executive director of the ACLU of Oregon, “rush out and begin firing gas canisters and sometimes begin pushing the crowd. And, of course, these are armed people. They all have their batons out.”

The agents’ heavy-handed response is having its intended effect of inflaming tensions. “The more violent the federal agents have become, the bigger the turnout at the protests,” says Carson.

This outpouring includes the Wall of Moms—women locking arms in front of the agents, serving as a buffer between them and protesters.

The deployment of CBP, which includes agents from the Border Patrol’s BORTAC tactical unit, and ICE to Portland is a scary reminder how much Homeland Security’s bloated bureaucracy has grown since it was created in 2002, in the aftermath of 9/11.

The track record of the roughly 20,000 Border Patrol agents is abysmal. They were instrumental in implementing Trump’s cruel family separation policy. Now, they routinely turn back asylum seekers at the border under the administration’s closure of the borders to “non-essential” traffic.

Both CBP’s and ICE’s annual budgets have almost tripled in recent years. The Migration Policy Institute found that from fiscal year 2005 to fiscal year 2020, CBP’s budget mushroomed from $6.3 billion to $17.4 billion, while ICE’s budget grew from $3.1 billion to $8.4 billion.

As local police departments have become more militarized, so too have CBP and ICE, with funding going toward such items as drones, enforcement aircraft, mobile video surveillance, and intelligence activities.

Even before Portland, Homeland Security provided drones, helicopters, and airplanes to conduct surveillance on protesters in fifteen cities, according to The New York Times.

ICE and CBP agents were already slated to be stationed in sanctuary cities earlier this year to put more enforcement pressure on them, although it’s unclear if the plan has been slowed by the COVID-19 crisis.

ICE’s leadership, as The New York Times reported, had requested at least 500 of its agents be assigned for this purpose. They were to work with 100 agents from Border Patrol’s BORTAC tactical unit, which is like a SWAT team.

The track record of the roughly 20,000 Border Patrol agents is abysmal. They were instrumental in implementing Trump’s cruel family separation policy. Now, they routinely turn back asylum seekers at the border under the administration’s closure of the borders to “non-essential” traffic.

But Border Patrol’s flagrant abuses go far beyond the border.

In 1952, Congress gave federal agents “within a reasonable distance from any external boundary” the authority to question and detain immigrants without a warrant.

But a “reasonable distance” has subsequently been defined by regulations as 100 miles from a border.

What has become known as the “border zone” describes this area, which extends into the interior, well beyond the United States’ borders with Mexico, Canada, and the coasts. Entire states, such as Michigan and Florida, along with New England and most major cities, fall within this zone.

And Border Patrol abuses in this “zone” have been rampant.

“They basically do things without a warrant,” says Nancy Morawetz, co-director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at New York University Law School. “They frequently do things on tips. And law enforcement people assist them in doing that. It adds up to a lot of profiling.”

Matt Adams, legal director of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project in Seattle, adds that agents have disregarded legal standards, such as needing “reasonable suspicion” to permit stopping and questioning people.

A prime example is the way Border Patrol agents have routinely boarded Greyhound buses—selecting passengers for questioning based on how they look.

In January 2019, for example, Mohanad Elshieky boarded a Greyhound bus in Spokane, Washington, and was singled out for questioning.

Elshieky, a Libyan-born comedian, had been granted asylum in the United States three months earlier.  He showed the agent his driver’s license, as well as a federally issued employment authorization document—but to no avail.

Ordered off the bus, Elshieky tells The Progressive that—no matter what he said— he was met with disbelief, with such comments as “illegals say that all the time.” Finally, after about twenty minutes of harsh questioning, Elshieky was told, “We’ll let you go this time.”

This past February, Elshieky filed a federal lawsuit seeking damages for illegal detention and discrimination.

“Someone has to stand up to them,” he says.

Elshieky’s lawsuit came three weeks after then-Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost issued an internal January 28 memo—obtained by the Associated Press—telling all chief patrol agents that they must have “consent” of the bus company or one of its employees before agents can board a bus. She issued the memo days before retiring.

As a result, Greyhound issued a statement in February saying it would inform Homeland Security that the company does “not consent to warrantless searches on our buses and in terminal areas that are not open to the general public.”

Asked on July 21 if Greyhound has implemented these changes, company spokeswoman Crystal Booker told The Progressive that it has done so but would not answer additional questions because of pending litigation.

Customs and Border Protection did not respond to requests for comment from The Progressive.

Sara Curtis, a spokesperson for the Rochester Rapid Response Network in western New York, says that, in the aftermath of the Greyhound announcement, she was told by a local Border Patrol official ethat agents would not board a bus if the driver didn’t want them on.

How extensively Border Patrol and other Homeland Security agents will be used in Trump’s law-and-order show of force is just beginning to play out. But Warren of the Center For Constitutional Rights doesn’t expect the public to buy into Trump’s fear-mongering and racism.

“He is taking a page out of past presidential playbooks—but the ground has shifted under President Trump,” Warren says. “What he is going to find out is that most people feel the greatest threat to this country is Donald Trump himself.”