'Somewhere People Just Accepted What's Going On as Normal'
'Somewhere People Just Accepted What's Going On as Normal'
A family is placed in a Border Patrol vehicle near McAllen, Texas. (Eric
Gay / AP)
The Border Patrol agent, a veteran with 13 years on the job, had been
assigned to the agency's detention center in McAllen, Texas, for close to a
month when the team of court-appointed lawyers and doctors showed up one day
at the end of June.
Taking in the squalor, the stench of unwashed bodies, and the poor health
and vacant eyes of the hundreds of children held there, the group members
appeared stunned.
Then, their outrage rolled through the facility like a thunderstorm. One
lawyer emerged from a conference room clutching her cellphone to her ear,
her voice trembling with urgency and frustration. "There's a crisis down
here," the agent recalled her shouting.
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At that moment, the agent, a father of a 2-year-old, realized that something
in him had shifted during his weeks in the McAllen center. "I don't know why
she's shouting," he remembered thinking. "No one on the other end of the
line cares. If they did, this wouldn't be happening."
As he turned away to return to his duties, the agent recalled feeling sorry
for the lawyer. "I wanted to tell her the rest of us have given up."
It's rare to hear from Border Patrol agents, especially since the Trump
administration has put them at the front lines of its sweeping immigration
crackdown. Public access to them is typically controlled and choreographed.
When approached off duty, agents say they risk their jobs if they speak
about their work without permission. As a result, much about the country's
largest federal law enforcement agency - with some 20,000 agents policing
the borders and ports - remains shrouded in secrecy, even from congressional
oversight, making it nearly impossible to hold it accountable.
Disturbing glimpses of some agents have recently begun to fill the void,
including some that were published recently after ProPublica obtained
screenshots from a secret Facebook group for current and former Border
Patrol agents that showed several agents and at least one supervisor had
posted crude, racist and misogynistic comments about immigrants and
Democratic members of Congress. The posts raised questions about whether the
deplorable detention conditions on the border were out of the control of
Customs and Border Protection, as the agency had asserted, or a reflection
of its culture.
Other reports followed, including one from CNN that described agents
attempting to humiliate a Honduran immigrant by trying to force him to be
photographed holding a sign that read in Spanish, "I like men." The
Intercept published more degrading posts from the secret Facebook group, and
it reported that it appeared that Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost had once
been a member. Provost has not commented.
But there was some nuance. An account of life inside a Border Patrol
detention facility outside El Paso, Texas, by The New York Times and The El
Paso Times, revealed that two agents there had expressed concerns about the
conditions to their supervisors.
The agent who spent June in McAllen doesn't see his reality in any of those
depictions. He's in his late 30s and is a husband and father who served
overseas in the military before joining the Border Patrol. He asked not to
be identified because he worried that his candor could cost him his job and
thrust him and his family into the middle of the angry public debate over
the Trump administration's border policies.
His comments come at a particularly fraught moment, as politicians on the
left compare the Border Patrol's detention facilities to "concentration
camps" and senior Trump administration officials, including most recently
Vice President Mike Pence, dismiss descriptions of the inhumane conditions
as "unsubstantiated."
When asked about Pence's comments, the agent said the damning descriptions
of the facilities are "more substantiated than not." And, while he didn't
embrace the term concentration camp, he didn't dispute it either. He
searched out loud for a term that might be more accurate. Gulag felt too
strong. Jail didn't feel strong enough.
He came around to this: "It's kind of like torture in the army. It starts
out with just sleep deprivation, then the next guys come in and sleep
deprivation is normal, so they ramp it up. Then the next guys ramp it up
some more, and then the next guys, until you have full blown torture going
on. That becomes the new normal."
Referring back to the grim conditions inside the Border Patrol holding
centers, he said: "Somewhere down the line people just accepted what's going
on as normal. That includes the people responsible for fixing the problems."
He spoke at length in several interviews, making clear that the views and
motivations he articulated were his alone. He said he's not on Facebook,
much less a member of any secret Border Patrol social media groups. He also
said he did not witness any egregious behavior by his colleagues during his
time in McAllen. But he said the agents who were permanently posted there
had the shortest fuses, and he'd heard them launch into condescending
harangues at the young migrants, blaming them for crossing the border
illegally and denying their requests for extra food, water or information
about when they'd be released.
Most of his colleagues, he said, fall into one of two camps. There are the
"law-and-order types" who see the immigrants in their custody, as, first and
foremost, criminals. Then, he said, there are those who are "just tired of
all the chaos" of a broken immigration system and "see no end in sight."
"The only possible end to this that I see is if there's some change after
the next election," he said, referring to what might finally end the
stalemate in Washington over how to reform the system. "Either this
president will win again, and Congress will be forced to work with him. Or a
new president will get elected and do things a different way."
In addition to the interviews, the agent shared a journal entry about his
time in McAllen, which he wrote in a tentative attempt to sort through what
he described as the "roughest" experience of his career; a month that he
said revealed a disturbing capacity for detachment.
"What happened to me in Texas is that I realized I had walled off my
emotions so I could do my job without getting hurt," he said. "I'd see kids
crying because they want to see their dads, and I couldn't console them
because I had 500 to 600 other kids to watch over and make sure they're not
getting in trouble. All I could do was make sure they're physically OK. I
couldn't let them see their fathers because that was against the rules.
"I might not like the rules," he added. "I might think that what we're doing
wasn't the correct way to hold children. But what was I going to do? Walk
away? What difference would that make to anyone's life but mine?"
When asked whether he simply stopped caring, he said: "Exactly, to a point
that's kind of dangerous. But once you do, you feel better."
Part of that feeling, the agent said, comes from experience. He's served
Republican and Democratic administrations, each one with its own border
crisis and wildly unpopular responses. Other people might find it hard to
view his agency outside the context of their political leanings, but he said
that he didn't join because he feels strongly one way or the other. He has a
criminal justice degree and was looking for a federal law enforcement job
that would provide him financial security, without requiring him to go
overseas.
What keeps him in now, even as his job has morphed into one he and his wife
are uncomfortable talking about in public, is that he earns about $100,000 a
year, including overtime and holiday pay. He has a top-of-the-line health
insurance plan that, among other things, covered nearly the entire cost of
his child's birth. In a little more than a decade, when he turns 51, he'll
be eligible to retire with a full pension that probably won't cover the cost
of a house on the beach, he said, but will give him the freedom to "do just
about anything else I want, and not have to worry."
The agent, tall and fit with dirty blond hair, said he thinks of his time
left in the Border Patrol like the home stretch of a marathon. He does his
work with blinders on to everything but his family and the finish line. "I'm
already starting to attend retirement seminars," he said. "All I'm trying to
do is get through the next decade."
That was his mindset, he said, when he landed in McAllen. It was his first
time on the border since he was a rookie. He'd spent most of his career
posted in the eastern part of the United States, investigating smuggling
organizations rather than intercepting undocumented immigrants. But as huge
numbers of Central American migrants came to the Rio Grande Valley, he and
hundreds of agents across the country were summoned to help.
In his journal entry, the agent described what he saw when he arrived at the
Border Patrol detention center as a "scene from a zombie apocalypse movie."
His colleagues, he said, wore surgical masks and rubber gloves because there
was "sickness and filth everywhere." And he said the facility "looked like a
walled-off compound where the government had the last safe zone and was
taking in refugees fleeing the deadly zombie virus."
The scene that struck the agent the hardest that first day was the sight of
dozens of children being held in cages - an image publicized this year to
widespread condemnation. The children seemed about the same age as his
2-year-old son, but that's where the similarities ended. "My kid would have
been running laps around that entire building, nonstop," the agent said.
"But the boys my kid's age, they were just there. They weren't running or
playing, even though they had been pent up all day."
The agent said he suspected that the kids were lethargic because they hadn't
been given enough to eat. He said he wondered, "Why are things like this?"
He said he didn't look for answers because he didn't expect he'd find any.
"I decided not to dwell on it, and just do my job."
He went on that way for weeks, seeing things without dwelling on them. His
interactions with individual immigrants, he said, are a blur. He vaguely
recalled a government staffer combing lice out of a little girl's hair; 7-
and 8-year-olds pacing in circles and sobbing inconsolably because they'd
been separated from their parents; a teenage mother who'd swaddled her baby
in a filthy sweatshirt that she'd borrowed from another detainee because
she'd been forced to throw away the clothes she brought.
Only a few of those encounters are mentioned in the agent's written account
of his experiences in McAllen. Most of it reads like a chronicle of a
mundane work trip. He got Memorial Day off. He bought groceries and stopped
drinking soda. A colleague who was staying at the Residence Inn shared
enough free gym passes to last the entire trip, and his waist size went from
33 inches to 32. He started listening to music again: "Not a specific style,
language or rhythm rather music that expressed passion." And he tried
meditation.
The visit by the team of lawyers to the facility near the end of June seemed
to shake up the agent. The team, led by a California attorney named Hope
Frye, had arrived to interview children being detained in McAllen. The
agent's duties placed him close enough to them to observe their work.
Frye said that typically during such visits, the agents tend to blend into
the background; silent and straight-faced, in their badges and drab green
uniforms. They didn't engage much with her because they were instructed not
to. She said years of hearing immigrant children tell her how badly they'd
been treated in detention had long made her worry about the agents'
humanity. "I'll look at them and wonder sometimes, 'What kind of a parent
are you when you spend your entire day filled with hate and victimizing
other people?'"
But to get her work done, Frye said, she tries to keep such thoughts to
herself. At some point in McAllen, however, she let a comment slip to the
agent about a young child who had been separated from his family. The agent,
she said, blurted out that he knew of another woman who was separated from
her family and raising a 2-year-old on her own.
Frye, 68, said she asked the agent if he was referring to his own family.
Her question started a series of exchanges that didn't diminish her
suspicions about the Border Patrol, Frye said, but did change her thinking a
bit about the agent.
"If what happened was a film, you'd see an older woman with many years of
experience, her eyes lined from seeing these poor children, and a young man,
with a young family, seeing this nightmare for the first time," Frye said,
recalling her encounter with the agent. "What I thought to myself was, 'How
sad is it that this young man who probably wants to be of service to his
country is stuck doing this.'"
Referring to the agent's initial outburst, she said, "I think he was trying
to tell me, 'Hey, I'm human too.'"
Katherine Hagan, a Spanish interpreter who worked alongside Frye, also
interacted briefly with the agent, and, although he didn't say it in so many
words, she felt he was struggling to reckon with his role at the facility,
as if, she said, "he had become so accustomed to seeing children behind wire
cages that he had assimilated it as normal and necessary."
At one moment, she said, she recalled him scrambling to find clothes for the
baby girl wrapped in the sweatshirt. The baby was so dirty that Frye wiped
away rings of black dirt from around her neck. But at another point the
agent lectured Hagan about indulging the immigrant children, warning her not
to let "the aliens" use the officers' bathrooms.
"I'm trying to find the right words to describe his demeanor," Hagan, a
graduate of the Harvard Divinity School, said of the agent. "I could tell he
felt embarrassed and potentially kind of exposed. I don't know whether he
was having some kind of epiphany. But it was clear he knew that I saw him -
really saw him - in the middle of this horrible situation."
When asked about the interactions, the agent said he was trying to
communicate to the lawyers that the detainees were not the only ones at the
facility who felt trapped. Walking away, at least in his mind, was not an
option. Trying to change things on "a macro level," the agent said, was for
fools.
"The most I felt I could do was make sure toilet paper was stocked. Or if
someone wanted an extra juice, I'd give them an extra juice. Or maybe do
something to make someone's day a little nicer; maybe smile and treat them
with respect. That's all I felt I had the power to do," the agent said. "The
ones that try to save the world, they're the ones who either get burned out
or put on a leash."
The agent compared himself to the cynical donkey in George Orwell's "Animal
Farm" who survives by never sticking his neck out.
"I've decided that I'm not interested in advancement," he said. "I'd rather
be a full-time father than a full-time Border Patrol agent."
But now that he's home, he feels the experience has somehow followed him.
"I go to the playground with my kid, and I say to myself, 'Why am I not
enjoying this?'"
Ginger Thompson / ProPublica
