The Border Patrol has a history of tough enforcement along the U.S.-Mexico border. Now they’re using the same tactics in cities across the country.
Here’s how to tell the difference between ICE and Border Patrol.
Learn how to identify Border Patrol and ICE agents and understand their tactics and role in immigration enforcement.
Federal immigration agents stopped a Hispanic high school football coach driving his players to a game and held a pistol to his head.
They swarmed the high school parking lot and questioned Hispanic students about their citizenship. After the teens explained that they were U.S. citizens, officials placed them in a Border Patrol vehicle anyway.
Agents drove around high school baseball and football fields. And they questioned the citizenship of a school clerk on his way home from work.
For the past few months, this hasn’t been Minneapolis or Los Angeles or Chicago. It was 1992 in El Paso, Texas.
At the time, U.S. Border Patrol agents operated with impunity, aggressively pursuing people who appeared to be Hispanic living near the U.S.-Mexico border.
The rights movement gained momentum in the wake of the community’s lawsuit, and grassroots organizers soon began warning other parts of the country that the tactics used at the U.S.-Mexico border could eventually spill over into every city in the country.
“We were saying: borders will become nations,” said Fernando Garcia, executive director of the Human Rights Border Network. “And it happened.”
Strengthening authority in border areas
The 19 million people living in the southwest border region, which stretches 160 miles inland, are under constant surveillance. They are at risk of getting in the way of Border Patrol high-speed vehicle pursuits. And they are surrounded on all sides by federal highway checkpoints where they must verify or prove their American citizenship.
Sito Negron, 59, from the Bronx, New York, moved to El Paso as a teenager in the 1980s and quickly learned about the exceptions to “normal” American life at the border.
“The first time I went through a national checkpoint, I thought, ‘What is this?'” he said. He had previously believed that “Americans are free because there are no armed, uniformed militia members walking around to verify my identity and ability to move.”
But in border states, laws allow federal officials to push the boundaries of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments in ways they cannot at home. (The Fourth Amendment prevents unreasonable searches, and the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees equal protection under the law regardless of race.)
What many people don’t know is that the 100-mile zone doesn’t just include border cities and towns like San Diego in California, Tucson in Arizona, or El Paso and Brownsville in Texas. It stretches 160 miles inland from all coasts and includes Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, New York, Miami, New Orleans, and Houston along its northern border. It includes more than 200 million people, almost two-thirds of the country’s population.
Within that vast zone, much of which has traditionally been largely unenforced as a “border,” U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents and agents can board public transportation, set up checkpoints and question people about their immigration status without a warrant or probable cause, according to the Southern Border Communities Coalition. ACLU affiliates are protesting the actions in Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Minneapolis, more than 400 miles from the Canadian border.
Despite the distance and history of rights violations documented by authorities, Garcia said the executive branch, with support from the courts, is beefing up the Border Patrol with “extraconstitutional powers.”
“Currently, trained Border Patrol agents at the U.S.-Mexico border are the leading immigration enforcement agency in other parts of the country,” he said.
Immigration officers, two different agencies
ICE has emerged as a prominent enforcer of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign. The ICE Watch group in Minneapolis and other major cities tracks the movements of immigration agents. Demonstrators chant slogans calling for the abolition of ICE. Hollywood stars are holding up ‘ICE out’ pins on the red carpet.
But videos and photos of violent encounters on social media, including in Minneapolis, often show officers wearing Border Patrol patches conducting the crackdowns.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection is the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, with more than 25,000 Customs agents and 19,000 Border Patrol agents.
ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement), the agency tasked with enforcing immigration in the interior of the country, was smaller than its roughly 6,000 deportation officers before the recent hiring surge. Historically, ICE has targeted immigrants who have committed serious crimes, surveilling them and quietly arresting them.
In Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans and Minneapolis, Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino is leading enforcement operations with support from the elite El Paso, Texas-based Border Patrol known as BORTAC.
Art Del Cueto, a former Border Patrol agent, said it is imperative that Border Patrol agents find and apprehend migrants who arrived during the Biden administration and were not properly screened.
“It’s not a great look to have these people in camouflage and heavily armed on the streets, but they’re there because of the incompetence of the previous administration,” he said.
In a post on social media site X, the Department of Homeland Security, The agency, which oversees both ICE and the Border Patrol, said Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis has resulted in the arrest of 2,500 suspected “murderers, fraudsters, looters and gang members.”
The Department of Homeland Security denied a request from USA TODAY for a breakdown of the roughly 3,000 federal agents deployed to Minneapolis, including Border Patrol agents and ICE agents.
Minneapolis City Councilman Jason Chavez said immigration agents being sent to inner-city areas are causing more problems than they are solving, regardless of who is doing the enforcement.
“My immigrant neighbors are driving to work… They’re shaking behind the wheel, praying to God that they can get to work and go home safely,” Chavez said.
On January 15, the ACLU filed a complaint against the Border Patrol, its commanders, and other federal agencies, alleging an “alarming pattern of abuse” in Minneapolis that included “violently stopping and arresting countless Minnesotans solely because of their race and perceived ethnicity.”
The state of Minnesota has also sued the Department of Homeland Security, calling it a “federal invasion” and seeking to halt ongoing immigration enforcement. On January 14, a federal judge refused to issue a temporary restraining order to halt operations.
The next day’s front page headline in the Minnesota Star Tribune could have been ripped from an old El Paso newspaper: “Citizens file suit, seek ruling to curb operatives’ tactics.”
Border Patrol actions ‘did not make communities safe’
El Pasoans won relief in a 1992 lawsuit that opened the door to better communication and cooperation between the community and Border Patrol.
“The judge recognized that the limits are being pushed,” said Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-El Paso). “The Border Patrol’s actions at the time had a chilling effect on the community, but it didn’t make the community safer. It created mistrust.”
El Paso borders Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez, and Bowie High School, the center of a law enforcement controversy in the 1990s, overlooks the border. Currently, the city is more than 80% Hispanic and majority Democratic, but Trump gained momentum in the last election.
The region is full of contradictions, where immigration is militarized but Border Patrol agents coach local soccer teams. Here, the majority of residents can trace their roots to Mexico, including the Border Patrol agents themselves. There, racial profiling by agents who are also Hispanic is an unpleasant reality of daily life for many.
Ruby Montana, 44, grew up in El Paso. Her father was a Border Patrol agent in the 1980s and ’90s. She recalled saving photos of herself posing over handcuffed migrants “as if I were hunting a trophy.” She fights with him about it, reminding him that his own parents came from Mexico without permission.
Now a professor of Chicano studies at the University of Texas at El Paso, Montana works closely with the Border Patrol to rescue animals found along the border. She sees two aspects of the agency: institutional biases that can lead to heavy-handed policing, but also individuals who come forward to help with abandoned animals.
“People will say, ‘Border Patrol is just following the law,'” she says. “Technically, the people here are breaking the law illegally, a misdemeanor, and the agents are following their orders. Slavery was the law of this land. It was against the law to hide Jews from the Nazis. Many people confuse law with morality.”
After the 1992 lawsuit, Garcia’s Human Rights Border Network became a conduit for an engagement model that included regular roundtable discussions with Border Patrol leadership, leading to a sharp decline in complaints about Border Patrol tactics.
Garcia said that cooperation largely ended under the Trump administration.
“There have been success stories in the past,” he says. “Right now, the relationship is at an impasse.”
Federal agents raided two construction sites on the eastern outskirts of town on January 15th. Concerns about the traditional blanket execution led local Democratic Party officials to hold a press conference and call for restraint.
“During that time, we were actively occupied,” Negron said. “The federal government listened to the community and recognized that it was a mistake. Now the federal government is doing the same in other parts of the country.”
He added that “Americans should not get used to living under these conditions.”
Lauren Villagran covers immigration for USA TODAY. Contact him at lvillagran@usatoday.com.
Investigators stopped the two teens on their way home from school, asked them about their citizenship, and both said in English that they were U.S. citizens, before slamming one of the teens against a fence and searching them.
A federal agent jumped the curb, crashed into a high school baseball diamond and went through center field.
Out of this movement was born the El Paso Human Rights Border Network, which has fought for decades against border militarization, human rights abuses, and impunity.
The coach asked the agent to put it in his gun holster. The following assistant coach stopped his car, got out, and informed the deputy that he had stopped the soccer coach. of
Nearing the end…
Affected residents formed a class and sued the federal government and won.
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