Nobody Is Protected
How the Border Patrol Became the Most Dangerous Police Force in the United States
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- USD 12.99
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- USD 12.99
Descripción editorial
An urgent look at the U.S. Border Patrol from its xenophobic founding to its assault on the Fourth Amendment in its quest to become a national police force
Late one July night in 2020, armed men, identified only by the word POLICE written across their uniforms, began snatching supporters of Black Lives Matter off the street in Portland, Oregon, and placing them in unmarked vans. These mysterious actions were not carried out by local law enforcement or even right-wing terrorists, but by the U.S. Border Patrol. Why was the Border Patrol operating so far from the boundaries of the United States? What were they doing at a protest that had nothing to do with immigration or the border?
Nobody Is Protected: How the Border Patrol Became the Most Dangerous Police Force in the United States is the untold story of how, through a series of landmark but largely unknown decisions, the Supreme Court has dramatically curtailed the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution in service of policing borders. The Border Patrol exercises exceptional powers to conduct warrantless stops and interrogations within one hundred miles of land borders or coastlines, an area that includes nine of the ten largest cities and two thirds of the American population.
Mapping the Border Patrol’s history from its bigoted and violent Wild West beginnings through the legal precedents that have unleashed today’s militarized force, Guggenheim Fellow Reece Jones reveals the shocking true stories and characters behind its most dangerous policies. With the Border Patrol intent on exploiting current laws to transform itself into a national police force, the truth behind their influence and history has never been more important.
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Political geographer Jones (White Borders) examines in this incisive legal history how the U.S. Border Patrol became a "sophisticated paramilitary force... that claims the legal right to sweep people off the streets of an American city without a warrant or even probable cause that a crime was committed." Established in 1924, the Border Patrol's "zone of operations" went undefined until 1947, when the Department of Justice determined that the agency's "special authority" extended to within 100 miles of any "external boundary," including coastlines. Noting that this area includes "nine of the ten largest cities in the United States and two-thirds of the American population," Jones delves into the 1970s court cases that affirmed the Border Patrol's authority to set up interior checkpoints, conduct warrantless stops, and use racial profiling, in spite of the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against "unreasonable searches and seizures." According to Jones, these and other court rulings have fostered an air of impunity among Border Patrol agents, who "are arrested for criminal activity at a rate five times higher than regular police officers." Enriched by the author's brisk prose and lucid analysis of complex legal matters, this is a troubling look at what Americans have sacrificed in the name of border security.
