Migra!. Kelly Lytle Hernandez
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provided funds for a land-border patrol in May of 1924, the U.S. Immigration Service drew upon its resources in the Mounted Guard and promoted the head of the Chinese Division, Clifford Perkins, to build the small police force that could broadly enforce U.S. immigration restrictions along the massive U.S.-Mexico border.
The U.S.-Mexico border stretches more than two thousand miles, crosses five ecological zones, spans four states, includes twenty-eight counties, and binds two nations. As a political boundary, it is a physical space that twists in the Rio Grande and turns in the sands along specific points of longitude and latitude. This is the line that the U.S. Congress had defined as unlawful to cross without authorization. But the Border Patrol’s jurisdiction also extended far north of the U.S.-Mexico border, and Perkins’ job entailed developing a police force capable not only of enforcing a line in the sand but also of patrolling a massive territory composed of multiple small localities. The path he pursued effectively regionalized and localized the enforcement of U.S. immigration restriction.
Perkins’s first act was to divide the U.S.-Mexico border jurisdiction into three Border Patrol districts.92 The Los Angeles Border Patrol District stretched from the Pacific Ocean to about fifty miles east of Yuma, Arizona, and extended northward in California to San Luis Obispo. The El Paso Border Patrol District picked up where the Los Angeles District left off and extended to Devils River, Texas. The San Antonio Border Patrol District reached from Devil’s River to the Gulf of Mexico at Brownsville, Texas. Each District was then divided into subdistricts.93 Each subdistrict was further divided into several stations to which a chief patrol officer and several senior patrol officers and patrol officers were assigned.94
Perkins anticipated that the various district directors for the Department of Immigration would closely manage the Border Patrol, but their many administrative responsibilities and the isolation of Border Patrol stations prevented them from keeping a close eye on the new patrol force. The lack of formal training or clear directives were an indication of the distance between Immigration Service supervisors and the officers of the U.S. Border Patrol. For example, when Edwin Reeves joined the Border Patrol, he laughed at the early training. All he received was a “.45 single-action revolver with a web belt—and that was it.”95 Therefore, outside of the broad directive provided by Congress, the new patrol force was left without any substantial direction. In the breaches of command, the distances between stations and headquarters, and the absence of regional coordination, patrol officers exerted significant control over local Border Patrol strategies.
The first men hired as Border Patrol officers were transfers from the Mounted Guard of Chinese Inspectors. Twenty-four percent of the original 104 Border Patrolman hired by July 1, 1924, were transfers from the Mounted Guard.96 These officers carried their experiences with enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Acts into the formation of the U.S. Border Patrol. Among them was Jefferson Davis Milton, a legendary officer who is still remembered as the father of the U.S. Border Patrol.
Born at the dawn of the Civil War to a large slave-owning family, Jefferson Davis Milton grew up in the defeated South. His father died soon after his birth, but had been the governor of Florida and named his son after his close friend and the president of the Southern Confederacy, Jefferson Davis. After the war, the Milton family struggled to live life as they always had; the end of slavery had broken the foundations of their world. In the past, they had lived lives of leisure and plenty, but after the war, many of their black field hands fled the plantation, forcing the Milton family to take to the fields. At the age of sixteen, Jeff decided he wanted more adventure than plantation life could offer, so he headed west to Texas.97
There, Jeff began a law-enforcement career that spanned more than fifty years, crossed four states, straddled two nations, and made him a legend among officers of the U.S. Border Patrol. In 1879, at the age of eighteen, he joined the Texas Rangers. Three years later, Jeff moved to the New Mexico territory, where he served as a deputy sheriff and a peace officer. As the Indian Wars raged around him, Jeff joined the “hunt for Victorio and Geronimo.”98 After helping to settle the nomadic nations of what was becoming the American West, Jeff roamed the region. He was chief of police in El Paso, Texas; a fireman on the Southern Pacific Railroad; a U.S. marshal in Texas, Arizona, and Mexico; a prospector in California; and deputy sheriff for Santa Cruz County, Arizona. Whether working as a Texas Ranger, an Indian fighter, or the chief of police, Jeff developed a reputation as a fearless officer who dared to venture alone into the desert lands, a vigilant enforcer of the law at the outskirts of society. He chased down bank robbers and cattle thieves, bandits and Indians. After countless battles in the backcountry, Jeff always returned alive, while many of his adversaries did not.99
During his tenure in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Jeff earned many admirers, but made few friends. He was a nomad who moved often, spent long periods of time working alone in remote places, and spoke little when he came to town. Still, his name was a “byword and his exploits legendary.”100 The favored memory of Jeff is the time he disappeared after pursuing three bandits. Confident in his skills as a law-enforcement officer, but worried for the man who alone dared to challenge three train robbers, anxious borderlanders began to wonder if Jeff had fought his last fight. Their worries subsided when Jeff sent a characteristically simple telegraph message, “Send two coffins and a doctor. Jeff.”101
In 1904, Jeff joined the Immigration Service of the Labor Department as a Mounted Chinese Inspector. When Congress established the Border Patrol in 1924, Jeff was sixty-three years old and had already spent twenty years enforcing immigration restrictions. Still, he was not a wealthy man and joined the new organization out of a love for law enforcement and, most likely, because he needed to work. To this day, Jefferson Davis Milton—a man born in the shadow of slavery, hardened by the battles to settle the American West, and a pioneer in the enforcement of Chinese Exclusion laws—is remembered as the father of the U.S. Border Patrol. He is often referred to as the “one-man Border Patrol,” and generations of U.S Border Patrol officers focus less on Jeff’s long career and prefer to remember him as a legendary loner and social nomad who represents their origins in a “hardy band of border law enforcement officers.”102 Yet the representation of Jeff as a man without deeply consequential historical entanglements is, most likely, as much a myth as it is a misleading representation of the men who served as Border Patrol officers in the 1920s and 1930s. The officers who worked along the U.S.-Mexico border were not legends, nomads, or loners. They did not aggressively enforce the law or secure the border without compromise. Like Jeff, most early officers joined the Border Patrol because they needed a job, and the new organization offered steady work.
The position of U.S. Border Patrol officer was subject to civil service regulations, but the quick organization of the Border Patrol between May 28 and July 1,1924, did not allow time for the Border Patrol to draft and administer an exam for new recruits. Perkins, therefore, began to hire men who had passed the railway mail clerk civil service exam instead. Recruits from the railway civil service exam filled the majority of Border Patrol positions in 1924, but they did not remain in the organization for long. Turnover of Border Patrol officers in the first three months hovered around 25 percent and did not settle until 1927. “So fast did resignations occur that the register soon became exhausted,” recalled the commissioner of immigration, who admitted that the Border Patrol was quickly forced to hire patrol inspectors “without regard to civil-service regulations.”103 The main benefactors of the Border Patrol’s dire need to fill positions quickly were men already in the borderlands looking for work—men such as Dogie Wright.104
Despite Dogie’s rich family history in the Texas borderlands, in September of 1924 he was out of work and roaming about in El Paso, Texas. There he ran into Grover Webb, an old family friend with whom he had served in the Texas Rangers and who had become the head of the U.S. Customs Mounted Patrol in El Paso. Webb suggested that Dogie go see the new Border Patrol chief, Clifford Perkins, saying “Tell him I sent you.”105 Two months after the U.S. Border Patrol began policing the border, Perkins was still scrambling to hire officers with law-enforcement or military experience. Dogie walked straight to the Border Patrol office, and upon the recommendation of Webb and another friend, Sheriff Jeff Vaughn of Marfa, Texas, Perkins immediately hired him.
The influence of local men