Today, Explained - Quitting the Border Patrol

Episode Date: March 30, 2018

Mexican-American Francisco Cantú never expected to become a U.S. Border Patrol Agent. But for nearly four years, Cantú both detained and rescued migrants stranded in the desert. He tells Sean Rameswaram about his experiences policing a border his own grandfather illegally crossed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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in between the mountains. It can be intensely quiet. You know, that quiet like slows you down. If you're out there at night, you hear like the scampering of little like kangaroo rats and rodents and like beetles and lizards, snakes. Depending on what part of the desert you're in, there's deer and jaguar and mountain lion. So yeah, you can hear a lot, but it's a different kind of sound.

One of my first days out on my own, you know, like, tossed the keys to a Border Patrol truck and was, like, told to drive up to the top of this hill and sort of, like, man this, like, observation post. And I remember looking out at this landscape and just feeling overwhelmed. It was like when you look out at the ocean and you're like, wow, what a place that is vast and full of incomprehensible, unknowable things.

And that was made all the more impactful by the realization that there was people crossing. That as we talk right now, there are people crossing that landscape. Like out there in the desert, on foot, in the middle of nowhere for all intents and purposes. Like risking their life. Customs and Border Protection is the largest law enforcement agency in the United States. Over 40,000 agents. So what does it look like? And who are these Border Patrol agents? Francisco Cantu was one of them. You know, almost, I think, six years ago now, I left a job with the U.S. Border Patrol. I was a

border patrol agent for three and a half years. Was being a border patrol agent something you wanted to do when you were a kid? Was it like something you dreamed of? No, totally not, actually, at all. You know, for most of my life, I lived in Arizona. And then I left, you know, the small town where I grew up, like a lot of people leave the small town where they grew up, you know, just like, kind of wanting to get out. And, you know, wanting to have like broader horizons. And I went to study like international relations, want to like travel the world, be a diplomat or something like that. But a lot of the book learning that I did, it felt very disconnected from the realities of the like cultural realities of the Southwest and of the borderlands that I knew. I was hyper obsessed with what happens in that landscape, like out in the desert on the line. And I wanted to be there day in and day out. And the Border Patrol seemed like one of the only ways to do that. So you enter Border Patrol. What's it like?

What are your first impressions? It's funny because even entering with all of those questions, like as soon as you show up at the Border Patrol Academy, like this training is designed the same way that most military and law enforcement training is designed to sort of break down your idea of who you are as an individual and rebuild you in the image of a law enforcement training is designed to sort of break down your idea of who you are as an individual and rebuild you in the image of a law enforcement agent. You know, what is alarming when I look back on it is how quickly I set aside a lot of those questions that I entered in with. Are you telling me that like you set aside your personal ideology in order to sort of submit

yourself to the training of becoming a border patrol agent? Like you kind of forgot who you were? Yeah. I mean, I don't think this is uncommon. I think, you know, like if you read a lot of the books that are written by veterans, they talk about the same thing. I mean, you know, the training is designed that way. What does a day of border patrolling look like? What's a day in the life? Honestly, the most likely day in the life of scenario is one of great boredom. You're quite often, you know, given the keys to a truck and your job is to literally drive back and forth down a long dirt road looking for footprints in the dirt or you're you know assigned to like a lookout tower or

a roadside checkpoint or you're quite literally like sitting in front of the fence like watching it rust but then of course you know those those days can be punctuated by moments of extreme adrenaline. Like chasing people or what? Tracking people on foot across the desert or there's car chases or drug busts, things like that. But again, 80-90% of it's sort of sheer boredom. And that's, you know, a lot of people are enticed into that job as like this job of action. You know, when you look at the recruiting materials, it's like Border Patrol agents on ATVs and like with like huge dust trails behind their dirt bikes and stuff like that. There aren't a lot of pictures of people looking at fences. I mean, you know, I knew a lot of agents who would just like do a crossword puzzle or like watch Game of Thrones on their iPad. Was that you? What were you doing? So I signed up to

get trained as an EMT because the Border Patrol is involved in a lot of like search and rescue work, especially during the summer. I see now that I was sort of desperate for like a way to feel good about the work that I was doing. But, you know, I never felt good about it because at. It's sort of like the fire chief going out and like starting a fire in the backyard. And then, you know, individual fire agents showing up and putting it out and like being praised for their work. Who's the fire chief in that metaphor? Is that the president? Yeah, or just US policy, right? Like US border policy. So the search and rescue element seems like one of like the more noble aspects of the job. And you were right there on the front line, I guess, as an EMT, someone who's trying to save lives and help people recover.

What are some of the nastier aspects of the job? There is sort of a culture of destruction. And I think that there is a Wild West mentality. A couple months ago, in January, No More Deaths released this video of border agents smashing water bottles or dumping out water bottles that had been left by humanitarian aid groups. All you do is tell me, is it yours? It's not yours.

And I remember it was like one of my first days in the field. You know, we were tracking this group, some marijuana smugglers. They, you know, we caught up to them. They like dropped their bundles and all their backpacks and like scattered into the desert. And the like training agents who were with us, we were, you know, fresh out of the academy, kind of just like set us loose. And like I remember just like watching all of these agents just sort of like rummaging through people's backpacks and like strewing their clothes across

the desert floor and like on cactus and plants and like stepping on people's food and like, you know, just like, like ransacking everybody's belongings. And I remember like, I didn't partake in any of that, you know, which I thought absolved me. Yeah. After you've been doing the job and like you look back at it, you're like, well, no, like I'm wearing that uniform every day. Like I'm part of that. You talk about these agents destroying food and, you know, wasting water. And it becomes very easy to characterize Border Patrol as sort of like heartless and faceless. But who were your colleagues when you were a Border Patrol agent for four years? I was surprised when I showed up at the academy.

Half of my classmates were, you know, Hispanic or Latino from immigrant backgrounds. My grandfather crossed the border, like, with his family fleeing the violence of the Mexican Revolution. I mean, he was a kid. He was brought across by his parents in, like, you know, 1912 or 1910 or something like that. Like, without authorization? Yeah, yeah. I mean, they quite literally jumped a train. So you're, like, literally policing yourself.

Yeah. And a lot of Border Patrol agents are. Wow. There's a lot of agents that are from border communities. Growing up in those communities, you know, if you're looking in your community at like who's doing well in like a small town in Arizona, a lot of times it's like law enforcement. And so I think for a lot of these people, it's kind of an it's an easy choice. Right. It's like, oh, like Border Patrol. Like that's if I want to like to own a house and support my family,

that's a great job with great benefits. The state has to create a very enticing situation to recruit people to police their own. I mean, that's as old as colonialism itself. How do you go from there, from I want a house, I want a pool, I want two cars, to destroying people's food. One way it happens is with rhetoric and language.

In a military standpoint, you're using words like enemy. In border patrol or a lot of law enforcement, it's only slightly more subtle than that. You know, you're talking about criminals, right? Like that's the word. But, you know, when that gets turned on its head is when you show up in the field and you're actually like quite a few of the encounters if not most of the encounters that you're having are with people who are in like you're encountering them in the most vulnerable moment of their life you know you're encountering women and children and old people they're in the middle of the desert. They're lost.

They've been abandoned by their guide. I mean, I just, I saw that like time and time again. You know, to use the language of warfare and like criminality to talk about those people, it's by design. The United States border with Mexico is just shy of 2,000 miles long. There are major cities, there's water, and then there's a deadly desert. So why cross there? That's coming up. This is Today Explained. What would a platform resting on a cloud even look like? I don't know. But Google does.

It's digital. And it can help you be better at business. Survey your digital landscape from high up above in the Google Cloud Platform. Rest. Recline. Oversee from the Google Cloud Platform. Start in a series of tubes. g.co slash get cloud AI.

Sean Ramos from Today Explained. I'm talking to Francisco Cantu. He's a former border patrol agent, and he mostly spent his time on the border patrolling the desert because every day people choose to risk their lives to cross it. It didn't always used to be like that. What we have done since the 1990s is we've had this policy of, you know, enforcement through deterrence that has sought to build fences and heavily enforce crossing, border crossing in the towns and cities and in the sort of like flat, easy to cross parts of the border. What that has done has over time like pushed crossings out into the most remote, dangerous, rugged parts of the border. And so, you know, like beginning in the 2000s, you start to see like hundreds of people dying

in the desert every year. And that trend is a trend that continues. So last year, for example, how many times did you hear the president and his administration brag about the fact that border crossings were down to their lowest level in something like 14 years or even more. But what you didn't hear and didn't read about was the fact that deaths along the border actually went up from the year before. So although less people are crossing the border, that crossing is still becoming more dangerous. People will endure whatever version of hell you put in front of them when, you know, their family is on the other side. I'm sure you encountered thousands of people in your years working as a border patrol agent.

I'm wondering if one person sticks out as sort of an encounter you'll never forget. Yeah, I mean, one that really stands out to me, it was during those first weeks and months when I was, you know, allowed to like patrol out on my own. And one of the jobs that you're given as a junior agent is to just, you know, go pick people up who've been apprehended and bring them back to the station. And so I was called to this village where a couple of people were knocking on people's doors, trying to get picked up. And it was a man and his wife. They had fallen asleep in this little church.

The woman was pregnant. Her husband sort of like really eagerly was telling me that she speaks English. And so I started talking to her in English. And it turned out she spoke perfect English with an American accent. She had grown up in Iowa. She went to high school there. She was a kindergarten teacher there. And she had left Iowa when, you know, a family member died back, like, she wanted her child to have the life that she had had, the opportunities that she had had. You know, she had convinced her husband to cross. And she was telling me, you know, like, it's my fault. Like, I was the one who made the decision to cross. Her husband sort of asked me if I would, you know, kind of like do them a solid.

Just can you, can we skip the whole deportation thing? Can you just drive us back to the border? You know, I said no, of course. I was like, you know, this is my job. I have to take you guys in. I told them my name and I asked them for their names. You know, like repeated their names out loud so that I would remember. And I sort of told them to be safe, to think about

their child. And then a couple hours later, I was back on patrol, like back in the van, and I realized I had totally forgotten their names. Looking back on it, you know, that stands out to me because I think that's one of the first steps in dehumanization, right? Is you forget someone's name, what makes them an individual? And this is what our rhetoric nationally does. You know, when we read about migrants, we read about a wave of immigration, a tide, an uptick, as if like these individual people's lives can be plotted on a graph or something like that and that language encourages us to to think of people as part of this indistinguishable mass now that you're years out of being in the border patrol do you ever wish that you had

done what her husband asked and just taken them back to the border or even just let them continue? Man, I don't know. That's like, I try not to spend too much time thinking about, you know, what I could or should have done different, you know, because I think that's already happened. So like the question becomes, what do we do now? Do you feel like you know something now years out of this that like, oh, the easy fix to this is just this? Why don't we do this? Or are you still just as confused? I mean, I think acknowledging the complexity and the humanity of this situation in and of itself is huge. And that's something that we have not done.

You know, like if you live in Ohio and you've never been to the border, you've never really thought about it, and somebody's like, oh yeah, like build a wall across this landscape that for you might as well be the ends of the earth. It's like the frontier of the nation. It's easy, right? But it's not. We just had a huge conversation about immigration reform, but we didn't ever talk about the idea that there is a humanitarian crisis unfolding on our border that has been occurring over the course of many decades. You know, to me, that's the place to start. The place to start is saying it's unacceptable for people to lose their lives.

That's the first thing that needs to be fixed. Let's make sure that people stop dying on our doorstep, and then we'll come up with the rest. Francisco Cantu is the author of a new book. It's called The Line Becomes River, Dispatches from the Border. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained. Before we bounce, we want to explain the gender wage gap on our show, and we could use your help.

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