3.

Closing the Back Gate

IN 1924, THE UNITED STATES CONGRESS PASSED A MASSIVE overhaul of the immigration system that was designed, in the words of President Calvin Coolidge, to “Keep America American.” The law, often referred to as the National Origins Quotas, was based on the prevailing racial pseudoscience of the era that claimed that whites from Northern Europe were racially superior to people from everywhere else around the world. Senator David Reed of Pennsylvania, one of the authors of the bill, explained, “Our incoming immigrants should hereafter be of the same races as those of us who are already here.”¹ While the law’s supporters took victory laps in the press, it was less clear how exactly the rules would be enforced at the thousands of miles of unguarded and unmarked borders and coastlines of the United States. At the time, Jeff Milton and the seventy-five Mounted Inspectors were the only federal officials tasked with patrolling the borders of the United States away from ports of entry.

Although the 1924 Immigration Act severely restricted immigration from most places in the world through low entry quotas, it was also notable for the immigrants that it continued to allow. The non-quota immigrant categories included “An immigrant born in the Dominion of Canada, Newfoundland, the Republic of Mexico, the Republic of Cuba, the Republic of Haiti, the Dominican Republic, the Canal Zone, or an independent country of Central or South America.”² In the context of today’s immigration debates, it might seem surprising that immigration from Mexico, the Caribbean, and all of Central and South America was not restricted. This exemption was fought for by agriculture interests in the west, which relied heavily on migrant workers. The land reclamation acts of the early twentieth century turned California into the breadbasket of the country by building dams and irrigating the land. The only limitation was the availability of labor. White workers tended to demand higher wages and were unwilling to do the most grueling jobs. Workers from China were banned in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, and workers from Japan were restricted after the Gentleman’s Agreement of 1907. There was local racist resistance to bringing Black workers to the fields, so most agricultural businesses relied on labor from Mexico. By the 1920s, 80 percent of California’s farm labor were seasonal migrants from Mexico. In 1900, there were 100,000 Mexican citizens residing in the United States; by 1930 it was 1.5 million.³

The implications of open immigration along the Mexican border were already under discussion before the Immigration Act even passed. In April 1924, Representative Cyrenus Cole of Iowa introduced a letter written by Secretary of Labor James Davis into the congressional record. Cole had asked Davis about the impact that restrictions on European migration might have on the land borders of the United States. Davis replied on April 15, 1924: “The greater the restriction against Europe, the greater will be the number of Mexican and Canadian admissions, unless the same restriction is made to apply to the countries of this hemisphere. If a demand exists for common labor and that labor is not permitted to come in from Europe, the employers of labor are going to look toward Mexico and Canada as a source of supply.”⁴

Davis explained that Mexicans were crossing the border easily because “From El Paso west there is only an imaginary line through a thousand miles of desert, and many people find it convenient to cross to the states from Mexico at points where there is no human habitation for a hundred miles.” The labor secretary concluded his letter: “I know you will agree with me that we should not lock the front door without supplying some means of closing the back gate.”⁵

The secretary’s wish was granted just two days after President Calvin Coolidge signed the National Origins Quotas into law. Tucked into the Labor Appropriation Act of 1924 was a provision to establish the United States Land Border Patrol. The Land Border Patrol’s sole mission was to enforce the new eugenics-derived rules about who could enter the United States.⁶ Their job was to patrol the borders of the United States and prevent the entry of non-white people banned by the Immigration Act. Jeff Milton was sixty-two years old when he was appointed as the first Border Patrol agent in 1924, and he remained on the force until he was seventy.⁷

The Border Patrol

The fledgling Land Border Patrol’s task was immense. The United States had a 1,954-mile border with Mexico as well as a 5,525-mile border with Canada to the north. In 1925, coastlines were added to the Border Patrol’s assignment and “Land” was removed from their name. The United States had 2,069 miles of Atlantic coastline, 1,631 miles of Gulf of Mexico coastline, and 1,293 miles of Pacific coastline. Alaska and Hawai‘i were still territories in 1924, but they add an additional 6,330 miles of coastline, and Alaska also has a 1,538-mile border with Canada. In total, that is 20,340 miles of border to patrol. Most of these borders were imaginary lines, as Labor Secretary Davis suggested, that existed on maps but were not inscribed into the physical landscape in any meaningful way.

When the Border Patrol was established, it had a tiny budget, no clear mission, and uncertain authority.⁸ The initial budget was $1 million ($14 million in 2022, adjusted for inflation). That is the equivalent of less than one-tenth of 1 percent of Customs and Border Protection’s 2020 budget of $15 billion. The agency’s job was to enforce the new prohibition on “smuggling, harboring, concealing, or assisting an alien not duly admitted by an immigrant inspector or not lawfully entitled to enter or reside in the United States.” The appropriation, however, did not actually give the agency law enforcement authority. Nevertheless, it was established quickly, and 104 agents were on duty by July 1, 1924.⁹ The agents had to have their own horse and saddle but were provided with a badge, an old-model revolver, and feed for their horses. Their annual salary was $1,680 ($25,000 in 2022, adjusted for inflation).¹⁰ There was no training. Many of the newly hired agents were not sure exactly what they were supposed to do.

Immediately after it was created, the Border Patrol realized that agents like Jeff Milton had not been given authority to do, well, anything. Congress had appropriated funding for the new agency but had not given them police powers to stop vehicles or to use force. The commissioner-general of the Bureau of Immigration wrote to a field office over the summer of 1924 explaining the problem: “If the bureau is right in its understanding of the matter, the border patrols are now without the slightest authority to stop a vehicle crossing the border for the purposes of a search, or otherwise, nor can they legally prevent the entry of an alien in violation of the law. In other words, they possess no more powers than does the ordinary citizen.” If they did use force, he concluded, “They would be guilty of assault.”¹¹

Congress gave the Border Patrol law enforcement authority on February 27, 1925.¹² Although it took nine months, the authority the agents received was broad and has remained largely unchanged since. The law allows agents to “arrest any alien who in his presence or view is entering or attempting to enter the United States in violation of any law.” Additionally, agents can “board and search for aliens any vessel within the territorial waters of the United States, railway car, conveyance, or vehicle, in which he believes aliens are being brought into the United States.”

The agents finally had police authority, but many specifics in the legislation were vague. The legislation implied that Border Patrol agents could operate to some extent inside the United States but provided no guidance on how far into the interior they could go. The second clause gave agents the ability to detain and search vehicles based only on a belief that someone is undocumented. While the legislation allowed the agents to detain an individual for interrogation while they “board and search,” it did not indicate how long the detention could last. It was also unclear whether they could look for other illegal items during the search of the vehicle for undocumented immigrants. Finally, the legislation gave the Border Patrol a much lower standard of evidence compared to other police. They needed neither probable cause nor a warrant to board and search a vehicle. The legislation does not elaborate on what level of certainty is necessary to have the reasonable suspicion that someone is undocumented. Can the race of the individual justify that belief, as had been the practice of the Chinese Inspectors?

Focus on Mexicans

Even though there was no cap on Mexican immigration, the Border Patrol heavily patrolled Mexicans in the United States from the start. The Border Patrol was underfunded, and it was expensive to detain Chinese or European people while their status was adjudicated in the courts. Although Mexicans were allowed to enter the United States, there was a head tax of $8 per person ($120 in 2022, adjusted for inflation), which was a large sum at the time, particularly for manual laborers. Additionally, there were sanitation checks at the border posts that were demeaning. Crossing at an official point often meant stripping naked and being sprayed with chemicals or doused with kerosene to kill lice. Since the border with Mexico was long and open, many people opted to cross without paying the tax and without undergoing the humiliation.

In 1929, Congress made it illegal to cross the border between crossing points.¹³ The Border Patrol also established a voluntary return policy for Mexicans in which they agreed to return to their home country in exchange for not being officially charged. In most cases, the agent would simply drive them to a checkpoint within a few hours of being detained. This practice continued well into the 2000s.

Operating in the remote border zone away from scrutiny of the media or most citizens, and with broad police authority to stop people without a warrant, the early Border Patrol agents continued the pattern of frontier law enforcement officers like Jeff Milton and the Texas Rangers, who filled their early ranks. The result was numerous racist and violent incidents involving Border Patrol agents that were never investigated or prosecuted. Many of the stories are recounted in the autobiographies of the agents themselves—not as embarrassing indiscretions, but rather as funny anecdotes and proud achievements.

In the 1920s, local agents wondered whether they were allowed to search vehicles for alcohol during the Prohibition era, even though their primary duty was to look for people. In response, the acting chief inspector for the U.S. Border Patrol in El Paso assured the agents that as long as they were using racial profiling and only targeting people of Mexican appearance, the seizures were fine. He wrote, “as long as Patrol Inspectors use their heads when stopping Mexicans to inquire into their alienage and later find liquor, the arrests will be upheld. Had the two persons been white Americans, the case would have been thrown out on account of illegal search, as it would have been absurd to say they believed the Americans to be aliens.”¹⁴

Clifford Perkins, a Border Patrol agent from 1924 until 1953, wrote in his memoir about a trip to the Dallas area to conduct immigration checks in 1926.¹⁵ At the time, Perkins was the chief patrol inspector in San Antonio, but he did not know any officials in Dallas or Fort Worth, where he was hoping to raid brothels and round up prostitutes who lacked papers. Without contacts in the city, he asked officials in San Antonio to write letters of introduction for their counterparts in Dallas. He went to only two people for these letters: the bishop of the San Antonio Diocese and the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in San Antonio.

On the same trip, when Perkins realized that many of the prostitutes had been tipped off about the raids, he arrested a prostitute of Mexican heritage who he knew was an American citizen. He threatened to deport her if she did not give up the other prostitutes’ location. When she protested that Perkins knew she was a citizen, he said he did not see any documents right now and told another officer to take her away. Perkins gleefully explains in his memoir that the threat to deport the American citizen worked and she gave up the location of the other women.

In the ethos of the early Border Patrol, only whites were of value. Everyone else was something lesser that could be killed without consequences. When Border Patrol Agent Jack Cottingham’s brother Jim was shot by a Mexican liquor smuggler, Jack went to the edge of the Rio Grande and “killed every person that came in sight on the Mexican side of the river.”¹⁶ Agent Charles Askins wrote in his book Unrepentant Sinner that in his lifetime he had killed twenty-seven people, but that only included whites. He bragged that he did not even bother to count Black and Brown people.¹⁷

Jeff Milton and the other early Border Patrol agents brought a frontier policing mindset to the new job of immigration law enforcement, drawing on their previous experience as Texas Rangers and sheriffs in the Wild West. The Border Patrol’s 1925 congressional authorization said that agents had special authority to board and search vehicles when they observed someone crossing the border or en route to the interior. While the legislators meant for the Border Patrol to remain close to the border itself, the agents understood it broadly and began to patrol deeper inside the United States. That approach appalled legislators in Washington, D.C., who became concerned that the aggressive and violent actions of the agents were spilling into the interior of the county and affecting American citizens.