Migra!. Kelly Lytle Hernandez
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something on their shoulders . . . from the direction of the river.”92 When the smugglers got within fifty feet of the officers, Patrol Inspector John V. Saul stepped out from behind the tree and told the men to halt. Two of the men—Anselmo Torres, a U.S. citizen, and José Sandoval, a Mexican national—stopped and raised their hands. The third smuggler, a U.S. citizen and resident of Mercedes, Texas, named Miguel Navarro “half turned and threw his right hand to his body reaching under the sack he had across his left shoulder,” according to Saul, who was “sure he [Navarro] was drawing a gun and fired.”93 Navarro fell to the ground, shot in the leg. With the help of the “other two Mexicans,” the officers loaded Navarro into the back of their car and drove him to the nearest hospital in Mercedes before they took the other two men to the jail in Weslaco, Texas. The officers then returned to the scene of the shooting with their chief patrol inspector, a U.S. Customs officer, at least two deputy sheriffs of Hidalgo County, and the assistant supervisor of the Customs Border Patrol.94
At daylight, the officers “began searching for a gun which we believed must be there for we were certain the Mexican wounded had attempted to draw one.”95 Saul depended upon his brother officers to exonerate him of excessive force by locating Navarro’s gun. After a short search around the “pool of blood there on the road where the Mexican fell,” one of the deputy sheriffs called out, “Here it is,” and “picked up a 32 double-action revolver . . . about five or six feet from where the Mexican fell.”96 The officers passed the gun around for inspection and agreed that it was the one carried by Navarro. With no further investigation, the deputy sheriff’s discovery of the gun allowed the Border Patrol to find Saul’s shooting of Navarro justifiable and close the case.
Within a few days, Navarro died from the gunshot wound. During the external investigation by local law-enforcement authorities, the sheriff assured the Border Patrol that he was “entirely satisfied the matter was a justifiable homicide and that they [saw] no reason . . . to investigate or proceed with the matter any further.”97 The local justice of the peace followed suit and declared that “the deceased came to his death from shock and hemorrhage caused by a bullet wound inflicted on him while resisting lawful arrest with a deadly weapon.”98 In the end, Miguel Navarro—the “Mexican” born in Mercedes, Texas—was dead, and Patrol Inspector Saul was exonerated without further inquiry.
Quick exonerations by a brotherhood of local and state officers shielded the men of the Border Patrol from the potentially less sympathetic scrutiny of a federal grand jury or even the Benzene Board. Such impunity fortified the localized structure of Border Patrol operations. Still the broader effort to professionalize federal police practice during the 1930s did prompt the establishment of the Border Patrol Training School (BPTS) in 1937, which brought a new level of uniform training into the Border Patrol project.
THE BORDER PATROL TRAINING SCHOOL
The BPTS was actually the expansion of a training program first developed in 1935 by the chief patrol inspector of the El Paso District, Herbert C. Horsley, and his supervisor, district director of the Immigration Service in El Paso, Texas, Grover C. Wilmoth. Wilmoth had spent years struggling with a rag-tag group of officers in his district. He repeatedly issued circulars requiring officers to wear their uniforms, to stop drinking, gossiping, and sleeping on the job, to cease their cavorting in Mexican border towns, and to stop over-reaching their authority by conducting random traffic checks. But nobody seemed to listen. The culture of immigration law enforcement in the far-flung offices seemed resistant to his interventions by memo. In February of 1928, for example, Wilmoth found it necessary to recirculate a memo dated September 2, 1924, which asserted that “employees must not while on duty indulge in the use of intoxicating liquors in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, or elsewhere.”99 In October 1929, incidents of officers “accept[ing] gifts of small value” prompted Wilmoth to instruct officers as to the “impropriety of any officer or employee of the Immigration Service accepting gratuities of any sort from any alien or from any person in any way interested in the immigration status of an alien.”100 The next month Wilmoth wrote that “despite frequent warnings . . . certain officers and employees have continued to indulge in useless and harmful talk to outsiders . . . concerning official matters,” and he advised his staff that “upon proof of receipt of a copy of this formal warning, no leniency will be shown one who offends in the respect indicated.”101
In 1930, Wilmoth attempted to forge a measure of uniformity and a culture of professionalism within his district by providing a detailed welcome letter for all new recruits. “You are congratulated on having been selected as a member of the U.S. Immigration Service Border Patrol, which we . . . believe to be the finest law-enforcing agency of the Federal Government,” the letter began.102 After listing a series of “don’ts”—don’t fail to tell the truth, don’t drink, don’t gamble, don’t grumble, and so forth—the letter explained the Border Patrol’s on-the-ground training process by urging the new recruits to submit themselves to the more experienced officers. “For the next few months your attitude should be that of a student,” advised the letter.103 “You should show a desire and willingness to learn this business from officers who have served long and faithfully and who KNOW IT. You may have had excellent training in other lines of police work but bear in mind that you are expected to learn to do things the Border Patrol way.”104 Wilmoth spoke of a “Border Patrol way” but, as he well knew, the El Paso District was fraught with disorder. From his office in El Paso, Wilmoth had little direct control over Border Patrol officers working in stations spread from Nogales, Arizona, across New Mexico and over to the western edges of the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. There was no consistency or uniformity that amounted to a “Border Patrol way”; rather, there was an assortment of localities that received and trained new recruits, each in their own way. If Wilmoth doubted the disorder in his district, he was reminded in March 1931, when he toured stations along the border and found that officers did not regularly wear their uniforms. “It is a matter of regret for the writer,” explained Wilmoth “that it is again necessary for him thus formally to call attention to the wide-spread disregard of the uniform regulations. He recently noted that some of the officers were on duty without any pretense of wearing the uniform; that some of the uniforms were unbelievably shabby; and that some of the officers, both on and off duty, violated instructions by wearing merely a portion of the uniform.”105
One decade after the establishment of the U.S. Border Patrol, G. C. Wilmoth attempted to impose order and uniformity on his region by establishing the El Paso District Training School.106 The first session of the three-month training course was held at the El Paso headquarters on December 3, 1934. During the morning, the trainees received instruction in the Spanish language, immigration law, conduct, rights of search, seizure, evidence and court procedure, firearms, fingerprinting and identification, line patrolling, and equitation. After listening to lectures by instructors such as Charles Askins, who served as the firearms instructor, the trainees spent their afternoons working alongside experienced patrolmen for a ground-level education in the application of U.S. immigration law. On patrol and in the classroom, the new recruits learned from the old-timers how U.S. immigration law was interpreted on a daily basis in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Wilmoth’s efforts to impose uniformity and discipline therefore simply formalized the localization of immigration law enforcement in the El Paso District. Without improving lines of ongoing supervision and training, Wilmoth allowed the old-timers to continue to exert significant control over the development of U.S. Border Patrol practices.
In 1937, the Immigration Service renamed the El Paso District Training School the Border Patrol Training School (BPTS) and began requiring all new recruits, nationwide, to attend. The establishment of the BPTS in El Paso, Texas, represents an important moment in the history of the U.S. Border Patrol. The informalism, disorder, and regionalism that characterized the patrol’s first ten years were certainly reduced by the adoption of a national training program. But the establishment of the BPTS is most remarkable in the ways that it centralized the Texas-Mexico borderlands in the making of U.S. immigration law enforcement.
The year that the BPTS opened, the U.S.-Mexico border was not the epicenter of Border Patrol activity. That year, 325 officers worked along the U.S.-Canada border, while 234 worked along the U.S.-Mexico border; another