For six days, a man we’ll call Martín walked across a remote stretch of the Sonoran Desert between Mexico and southern Arizona with a guide and six other migrants. It was February 2023, and the nights were frighteningly cold. One morning, he awoke to the desert painted white—the first time he had seen snow. They walked and walked. It snowed again, and they kept walking—until Martín couldn’t walk anymore.

Three months earlier, the 23-year-old had left his home in Guatemala’s western highlands. A father of three, Martín (whose name has been changed to protect his identity) had never finished elementary school, and good jobs were hard to come by. So he did what so many others from his region have done: He headed north, hoping to cross the border undetected and find better opportunities in the United States.

Martín’s journey ended on a hillside in the Baboquivari Mountains, 26 miles north of the US-Mexico border. When he began suffering chest pains and stopped to rest, the group continued without him, leaving him with a gallon of water and no food. High on the mountain, his cellphone had enough service to call 911. He kept calling—11 times in total over the ensuing three days. But help never came from official channels—not from the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, which has a team of search and rescue deputies, or the US Border Patrol, which has specialized search and rescue–trained agents. Instead, upward of 14 volunteers initiated a chaotic three-day mission to rescue Martín. In their multiple attempts to reach him through locked gates and terrain too punishing to navigate, one question kept surfacing: Why had the agencies tasked with rescue work along the world’s deadliest migration route failed to act? Why had they left this man to potentially die on a mountain?  

Martín’s case is just one example of how the search and rescue system in the borderlands often fails migrants caught up in the US’s decadeslong efforts to deter unauthorized migration. It is symptomatic of a scattershot emergency response system with little accountability, in which responsibility for saving migrants’ lives is divided among Border Patrol agents whose primary duty is law enforcement, not search and rescue; overtaxed county search and rescue teams; and unpaid volunteers from humanitarian groups who take it upon themselves to come to migrants’ aid when no one else will. The result is a system in which stranded migrants like Martín can fall through the cracks—sometimes with deadly consequences.

Migrants crossing the Southwest border have faced particularly perilous conditions since the 1990s, when the Border Patrol began implementing an immigration enforcement strategy known as “prevention through deterrence,” which closed off popular crossing points near urban ports of entry, pushing migrants into more remote parts of the Sonoran Desert. In theory, the harsh natural environment of the desert was supposed to discourage unauthorized migration. But instead of deterring migrants, these policies only made the journey more dangerous—a reality that even the Border Patrol could not ignore. From the mid-1990s, when the prevention through deterrence policies were implemented, to 2005, the number of migrant deaths approximately doubled, with the majority of the increase occurring in the Border Patrol’s Tucson, Arizona, sector, which includes a large swath of the Sonoran Desert.

The federal government created a search and rescue training program called BORSTAR in 1998. Since then, the Border Patrol has conducted thousands of rescues along the Southwest border: In 2022, agents rescued 22,075 people, up from 12,857 in 2021 and 5,336 in 2020. That increase partly reflects overall trends in migration—border crossings surged after 2020 in large part due to Title 42, a Trump administration policy that immediately expelled migrants seeking asylum at the border, prompting more repeat crossings. It also reflects improved search and rescue infrastructure in the borderlands: Cellphone coverage has expanded in some remote parts of the Sonoran Desert, and the Department of Homeland Security has invested more money into resources like rescue beacons and placards instructing migrants to call 911 if they are in trouble. Despite these investments, migrant deaths have remained high. The Border Patrol recorded 895 deaths along the Southwest border in 2022, compared with 568 in 2021 and 254 in 2020. Given that the Border Patrol has long struggled to collect complete data on migrant deaths, those numbers are likely a significant undercount.

Martín’s call for help came from a remote corner of Pima County, which sees the majority of migration-related distress calls in the Sonoran Desert, averaging four to five per day. Throughout the US, county sheriff’s offices are typically responsible for providing search and rescue services for anyone in their jurisdiction, a norm codified under Arizona state law. But unlike neighboring Cochise and Yuma counties, which respond directly to migrants calling in distress, dispatchers at the Pima County Sheriff’s Department refer all calls they suspect are migration-related to the Border Patrol—a practice that critics allege is discriminatory and results in an often-substandard emergency response.

Pima County has significant resources at its disposal to respond to those calls, including seven dedicated search and rescue deputies, the volunteer-run Southern Arizona Rescue Association, helicopters, infrared cameras, drones, and a trained canine team. But according to Deputy Adam Schoonover, a public information officer for the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, the Border Patrol can respond faster to lost or injured migrants in remote parts of the borderlands. “It’s all about getting the person help as quickly as possible and that has many variables to it,” he said in an email, noting that the department’s search and rescue deputies often are out on a call and may be unavailable. “BORSTAR units can respond faster and are well equipped to handle calls for service in the border area.”

The data, however, often suggests otherwise. A recent investigation by Tanvi Misra for High Country News and Type Investigations found that of the 3,000 emergency calls handled by the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector in 2022, 38 were categorized as medical emergencies, but only six appeared to have triggered a search and rescue operation. Another 299 callers routed to the Border Patrol were never found.

In the absence of a reliable emergency response from local law enforcement and the Border Patrol, an informal network of volunteers with local nonprofits has for years been navigating the difficult and dangerous work of conducting search and rescue operations themselves.   

The call came at 1 p.m. to the hotline run by an Arizona humanitarian aid group: A man’s brother was stranded somewhere on the US side of the border and needed help. It was Martín’s brother calling. After Martín had called 911 and no one had come for him, he tried his brother, who lives in the US and knew about the hotline. The hotline dispatcher called the Border Patrol, as is the group’s protocol, and relayed the information about Martín, including his location. Hours later, the hotline dispatcher received another call from Martín’s brother. Martín was still out there, his brother said. “Didn’t you call Border Patrol? What’s going on?”

The dispatcher passed the case to the Frontera Aid Collective (FAC), another group that conducts search and rescue missions and water drops along the border. Taylor Leigh and Scott Eichling, two FAC volunteers, decided to mobilize immediately to try to rescue Martín. It was 9 p.m., and as Leigh got ready, she called the Border Patrol, “freaking out,” she said. Temperatures were already below freezing, and Martín had been out there for a night and a day.

As Leigh and Eichling loaded supplies into the FAC vehicle, Leigh was transferred five times to different Border Patrol stations. She finally reached an agent, who she said told her that the Border Patrol couldn’t do anything about Martín. Eichling called back and got the same response from that agent. He called again and said another dispatcher laughed at him.

Although the Border Patrol often touts the existence of BORSTAR and a more recent initiative called the Missing Migrant Program as proof of its commitment to providing search and rescue services, the reality is more nuanced. The agency’s Missing Migrant Program, which began in 2017, was responsible for installing the thousands of 911 signs and more than 170 emergency beacons along the border to facilitate rescues, but many migrants in distress are reluctant to use them until the situation is dire, knowing that contacting the Border Patrol will lead to arrest and deportation. Not only that, neither BORSTAR nor the Missing Migrant Program are independent entities with dedicated personnel to help migrants in distress.

Rather, the Missing Migrant Program is a set of protocols governing how the agency responds to 911 calls from migrants and families inquiring about loved ones who have gone missing while trying to cross the border. For instance, agents first check whether the missing person is in the custody of US Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol’s parent agency, before instructing a family to call their consulate for more information (as agents are typically barred from providing direct information on specific cases to civilians).

Similarly, BORSTAR is not the equivalent of a dedicated search and rescue team, ready to mobilize for any emergency call. Rather, it is a relatively tiny initiative, employing roughly 300 agents spread out among the nine Border Patrol sectors along the Southwest border. Essentially, BORSTAR agents are regular Border Patrol agents with specialized training: They attend a five-week BORSTAR Academy, where they learn various search and rescue skills and become certified emergency medical technicians. Despite that training, they actually spend most of their time out in the field performing regular enforcement duties.

Calls from or about lost or injured migrants forwarded to the Border Patrol by 911 dispatchers or humanitarian groups are first categorized and assessed for their urgency, then forwarded to the local Border Patrol station with details like GPS coordinates or a last known location. Rescues—which the Border Patrol also conducts for lost or injured US citizens—are handled by individual stations and often are collaborative endeavors among BORSTAR agents, regular Border Patrol agents, and Air and Marine Operations, another branch of Customs and Border Protection that deploys the helicopters and small planes patrolling the Southwest border, which can also be used for search and rescue. Occasionally, the Border Patrol will also ask local officials for assistance.

“Unless you have family who’s advocating for you and is really good at calling a million people, you’re kind of screwed.”

According to Steven Davis, a former volunteer with Pima County’s Southern Arizona Rescue Association who now volunteers with the humanitarian group the Tucson Samaritans, the Border Patrol does, in theory, have more search and rescue resources than Pima County, particularly in the remote regions of the border where people tend to run into trouble. The problem, he said, is their response is hampered by a lack of personnel to conduct large ground searches. And the Border Patrol is seen primarily as a law enforcement organization. “People often won’t call until it’s too late,” he added.

Leigh echoed Davis’ observations. “Border Patrol is supposed to send out BORSTAR—or just whatever agents are in the field—to go help somebody,” she said. “But it seems like that doesn’t really happen very often or effectively. Unless you have family who’s advocating for you and is really good at calling a million people, you’re kind of screwed.”

I asked Robert Daniels, a public affairs specialist for the Border Patrol, how the agency decides whether to respond to someone in distress. He denied that the Border Patrol ever declines to initiate a rescue. “We don’t do that,” he said, emphasizing that no one deserves to die crossing the desert. “We don’t tell somebody that they’re too far away, that we can’t get to them. If we can’t get to them on the ground, then we’re going to fly.”

When Daniels did not respond to further calls and questions about Martín’s case, I reached out to another public affairs specialist, who spoke to me on background, reiterating that the Border Patrol will always respond to a call for help but that the agency does triage calls. If the person isn’t injured, has food and water, and is in no immediate danger from weather conditions, the Border Patrol might wait to initiate a rescue. “You’re not going to send agents up a mountain overnight in order to get somebody, or fly an aircraft into the mountains to get somebody, when they’re perfectly content and capable of being walked down the next morning,” the specialist said.                       

That night, Leigh and Eichling drove south on State Route 286, a lonely two-lane highway that leads to the border. As the darkened mass of the Baboquivaris blotted out the skyline ahead, the magnitude of what they’d set out to do began to set in. Leigh and Eichling turned down a ranch road, but they kept running into locked gates, blocking their way forward. It was past midnight and they were alone on private property, so they decided to turn back. Another rescue effort that night mounted by members of the Phoenix-based Abolitionists aid group, along with another FAC duo, also proved unsuccessful. Martín would spend his second night out in the cold.

In the morning, Leigh and Eichling set out again with two other FAC members, having finally identified a better route up the mountain where Martín lay. They reached a locked gate. A tense discussion ensued; one volunteer was nervous about trespassing and risking arrest. Kyle Richardson, another FAC member, was adamant they continue. “We’re not going to let this abstract law get in the way of saving him,” Richardson said. The group dismantled part of the gate to get through.

Soon, the road grew so rough that they had to abandon their vehicle and walk down the private ranch road. Past a creepy-looking abandoned cabin, they finally came to a cattle tank at the base of the canyon that led up to Martín. There, they saw a Border Patrol agent sitting in his truck.

Leigh explained what they were doing, and the agent pointed to the mountain in front of them. Martín, he said, was “just on the other side.”

“Why aren’t you going up to him?” Leigh asked. The agent told her that his orders were to stay put. According to the Border Patrol public affairs specialist I spoke with, Border Patrol dispatchers initially had trouble locating Martín, and it was dark by the time they were able to establish contact. “We determined that he was stable and didn’t need immediate evacuation,” the specialist said, before acknowledging that humanitarian aid groups and Martín’s family might not have agreed.

The group headed up the canyon. Between them and Martín lay 4 to 5 miles of dense brush and boulders. The terrain was so steep that at times they had to climb on their hands and knees. A helicopter whirred in the distance and they saw it approach, assuming it had come to rescue Martín. Instead, it hovered near the top of the mountain where they were aiming for 20 seconds and then flew away.

After five or six hours, they reached a grassy saddle between two peaks. They crawled under a barbed-wire fence and walked along the trail, calling Martín’s name. Finally, they heard him. A faint yell in the distance, and then again.

When they reached him, he was lying in the middle of a bare grassy hillside, extremely dehydrated and in the early stages of shock. Richardson was struck by how visible he was—his black faux leather jacket and personal belongings scattered around him stuck out vibrantly against the light green backdrop.

The mood was somber as they slowly made their way back down the steep canyon, Eichling piggybacking Martín when he grew too weak to walk. Martín and his family had scraped together the equivalent of about $16,000 to pay for the journey in the hope that he would make it to the US and find work. Instead, once they reached the Border Patrol agent at the bottom of the mountain, he would be deported.

In the year and a half since Martín’s rescue, volunteers in southern Arizona and along other parts of the border have continued to mount search and rescue operations for migrants, some of whom had called 911 and been transferred to the Border Patrol multiple times, but received no response. There was the woman who called for help deep in the Ironwood Forest National Monument, 25 miles northwest of Tucson. To try to find her, FAC volunteers drove on some of the worst roads they had seen in the middle of the night, far from cell service. She had moved, so they never found her, but two days later, workers on a ranch did. She was nearly dead, but they brought her to a hospital and she survived. And a few weeks after FAC rescued Martín, a 23-year-old woman, also from Guatemala, called for help from the Baboquivari Mountains. Like Martín, her family had called 911 with her exact coordinates more than 60 times, but according to Leigh, every time, the dispatcher would say, “Not Spanish,” and hang up. Frantic, the woman’s family called the hotline for help. When volunteers located the woman, she had already died.

It’s difficult to know how many cases like these never received a response. A report from another humanitarian group, No More Deaths, audited 911 calls in Pima County from June 2022 and found that of 64 emergency cases received by the county and transferred to the Border Patrol during that month, there were 17 in which the distressed person was never located. In at least 10 of those cases, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department took no further action upon learning that the Border Patrol had not found the 911 caller. 

“They have been tasked with stopping an ‘invasion’ at the border. In reality, they’re interacting with people who need basic aid, who need their asylum applications processed.”

The Border Patrol does not disclose how many emergency calls it receives or fails to act on, or the outcome of its search and rescue efforts. This lack of transparency and accountability in efforts to reduce migrant deaths has been well-documented for decades. In 2006, the federal government’s watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, issued a report that found that the Border Patrol’s efforts to reduce migrant deaths could not be fully evaluated due to insufficient data. The report also pointed out that the Border Patrol’s primary role as an enforcement agency often occurred simultaneously with its search and rescue activities, making it difficult to assess their efficacy. More recent GAO reports on the Missing Migrant Program have found that its recordkeeping on migrant deaths has long been incomplete and that Customs and Border Protection has not been transparent about disclosing those data limitations to Congress, though its data collection efforts have improved in recent years.  

Reece Jones, a political geographer at the University of Hawaii who has written extensively about the Border Patrol, attributes the agency’s unreliable response to migrants in distress to a disconnect between its mission and the actual needs it encounters at the border. “They have been tasked with stopping an ‘invasion’ at the border,” he said. “In reality, they’re interacting with people who need basic aid, who need their asylum applications processed.” In the years since 9/11, when the agency’s mission was reframed around terrorism, the Border Patrol has grown increasingly militarized, Jones said. That militarization has only exacerbated the conflict of interest between enforcing border policies and reducing the death toll created by those same policies. “The Border Patrol hired Rambo when they needed Mother Teresa,” Jones said, paraphrasing journalist Garrett Graff. “That’s essentially the problem that’s happened over the last 20 years.”

When I last spoke to Martín, he was back in his hometown, struggling to find a job. What he wants most, he told me, is the opportunity to buy a house and give his children a better future. After what happened to him, Martín has no immediate plans to cross the border again. But he has entertained other possibilities. He had heard that adults who arrive at the US-Mexico Border with their children to seek asylum, handing themselves over to the Border Patrol directly, faced an easier pathway into the United States. “Maybe it will be better with one of my children,” he told me. “Maybe I would do it.”

Last November, I drove with members of FAC along a section of the border wall near Sasabe, a town straddling the border. Hundreds of migrants—many of them young children—had been arriving there, climbing through holes in the wall or walking across the border where the wall ends. They would wait for hours and sometimes days for Border Patrol agents to pick them up so they could claim asylum, a legal right under US and international law. That day, we came across two groups of 100 people or more, waiting in the shade of the wall. Twenty-five-year-old Sharon Mishell Valderramos had traveled 20 days with her son, Esquin, a smiley 6-year-old wearing a tie-dye baseball cap. “The government doesn’t protect us,” she said, when I asked her why she had left. All she wanted was to work and for Esquin to get an education.

A few miles west of Sasabe, the border wall ends in a canyon known colloquially as Smuggler’s Canyon. No fence exists there, just trails crisscrossing an invisible line in the scrubby desert, where a child’s jacket hung from a bush next to the trail. I thought of how Martín had left open the possibility of another journey north, this time with his children, and what might happen if they needed help.

For decades after its founding in 1924, the Border Patrol was a bureaucratic backwater: poorly funded and largely left to its own devices. Then came 9/11, and a flood of federal resources to “secure our borders” and add thousands of new agents. Yet the oversight necessary to manage a huge federal agency—let alone one that long had made its own rules—never really caught up, and scandals quickly followed: infiltration by cartels, corruption, assault, rape, murder. Within a few years, the Border Patrol had become one of the nation’s largest, and least accountable, law enforcement agencies. At the same time, the US-Mexico border became even more politicized. And then Donald Trump entered the fray.

For our September+October issue, we shined a light on the Border Patrol’s growth, its troubling record on civil liberties, its culture of impunity, and its role in shaping the current political moment—one that echoes the anti-immigrant fever that led to the agency’s creation a century ago, and that could once again put the Border Patrol at the center of Trump’s nativist plans.

For our September+October issue, we investigated the Border Patrol’s sharp growth, its troubling record on civil liberties, its culture of impunity, and its role in shaping the current political moment—one that echoes the anti-immigrant fever that led to the agency’s creation a century ago. Read the whole package here.

In February, as the state of Texas went to court to defend itself from an “invasion,” and a far-right convoy calling itself “God’s army” hosted anti-immigrant rallies throughout the Southwest, Fox News repeatedly turned to one of Donald Trump’s trusted emissaries to explain to viewers what was happening at the US-Mexico border.

Over multiple appearances that month, Brandon Judd—the pugilistic president of the Border Patrol union and, according to the Wall Street Journal, someone who could have “an important administration role” in a future Trump White House—blasted President Joe Biden every chance he got.

“He is not going to listen to voices of reason,” Judd said on one show. “Everything he does is too little, too late,” he said in another. Biden has “never given any rationale for anything he does,” he added in a third. In a FoxNews.com op-ed, Judd wrote that “the agents who have worked under both Trump and Biden have experienced first-hand the competent, caring leadership of Trump and the deadly, disastrous ‘leadership’ of Joe Biden.”

A sampling of how fellow agents and colleagues described Judd to me goes like this: “a joke,” “a bobblehead with a badge,” a “used car salesman.”

It was quintessential Judd: combative, hyperbolic, and unabashedly political. On May 18, the 50-year-old stepped down as president of the National Border Patrol Council after a decade in power, having spearheaded the Border Patrol’s transformation from a largely nonpolitical backwater agency into one of the most influential, and divisive, law enforcement groups in the country. The union’s full-throated support for Trump’s immigration policies has inextricably tied the agency’s roughly 19,000 agents to MAGA politics, while Judd became a right-wing media darling and de facto spokesman for the agency. His tenure as union chief is key to understanding the politics of the border in the 2024 election—and the type of person who could wield power in a second Trump administration.

A dozen interviews with former agents and Trump administration officials reveal a complex picture of Judd and his legacy. While the Border Patrol union has become more powerful than ever, the agency has become notorious for recklessness, and rank-and-file agents are leaving en masse. Internally, Judd has a mixed reputation, at best. A sampling of how fellow agents and colleagues described him to me goes like this: “a joke,” “a bobblehead with a badge,” a “used car salesman.” “He is a political hack,” says retired Border Patrol agent Gil Maza, who runs the popular Instagram account OldPatrolHQ and says he receives up to 100 messages daily from current Border Patrol agents. “He is burning on all cylinders for a political future, a political position, or simply to be in the circuit after he retires as a contributor for Fox News or whatever.” (Judd would not answer many of my questions, but told me he is “happily retired and will not be returning to public life.” The National Border Patrol Council did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

Born in Arizona, Judd began his career as a field agent in California’s Imperial Valley in 1997. He served stints in Arizona and Maine and took on various leadership roles in the union before being elected its president. From 2015 to 2020, Judd worked in Montana, about an hour south of the Saskatchewan border. He retired from the Border Patrol in May 2023, but stayed on as union president.

Judd became part of Trump’s transition team, a close confidant to Miller, and a frequent presence at the White House.

The 2016 presidential election put Judd on the political map when, under his guidance, the union endorsed Trump—the first time in its history it had picked sides in a presidential campaign. It believed Trump would “embrace the ideas of rank-and-file Border Patrol agents rather than listening to the management yes-men who say whatever they are programmed to say,” according to a statement. The decision was presented as a collective choice, but it was ultimately made by Judd and the union’s 11-member executive board.

Just one week before the endorsement, Stephen Miller, the adviser who orchestrated Trump’s hardline immigration policies, told Breitbart News that Trump would “work closely, directly, and intimately with the National Border Patrol Council to develop a border policy for this nation.” That promise quickly became reality. Judd became part of Trump’s transition team, a close confidant to Miller, and a frequent presence at the White House. When Trump demanded Congress allocate $5.7 billion toward building a border wall, at the cost of a government shutdown, Judd aligned himself with Trump, even as Border Patrol agents worked without pay. (They were later paid back.) Judd’s position that border walls are an “absolute necessity” was all the more remarkable given that only a few years earlier, the union had opposed them. In a since-deleted FAQ posted in 2012, it asserted that border walls would be “wasting taxpayer money.”

Judd’s proximity to Trump was unprecedented. He stood by his side in January 2017 when Trump called for hiring thousands more Border Patrol agents. In an agency where chain of command is paramount, Judd’s influence underscored Trump’s willingness to flout norms. “He bet early on the Trump train and it paid off,” says Ron Vitiello, who served as Border Patrol chief in 2017 and whom Trump later nominated as head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “That changed his profile in the government.” (As recently as June of this year, Trump appeared to name-check Judd in the first presidential debate, noting the union endorsement and claiming, “We had the safest border in history.”)

“He became this sycophant for the president and Stephen Miller,” says a top Homeland Security official under Trump.

While the union maintained a modicum of political independence—in 2018, it endorsed three Senate Democrats whom it considered strong on border security—Judd supported virtually anything Trump wanted, says Andrew Meehan, a top official at the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration. “He became this sycophant for the president and Stephen Miller,” he says. “He sat on the sidelines and tried to create more opportunities for himself to be elevated and sit next to the president and deliver on nothing.”

As the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants ramped up, an embarrassing scandal put the agency and the union on the defensive. When ProPublica reported in 2019 that agents were posting racist and sexually offensive comments to a secret Facebook group, Judd minimized the story by saying “it was a very small number of people” and “those individuals must be held accountable.” (In the end, most of the agents involved received only light penalties and were allowed to remain in their posts, according to a congressional investigation.) Later, in 2021, after agents aggressively responded to Haitian migrants crossing the border near Del Rio, Texas—including a now-infamous image of an agent on horseback appearing to strike a migrant with his reins—a 511-page federal investigation concluded that while agents had not struck migrants, there were “failures at multiple levels,” including inappropriate language and lack of supervision. In response, Judd said the investigation was flawed because Biden administration officials had spoken out against the abuse. “Those investigators have no choice but to find wrongdoing,” he told NPR.

The agency has a toxic, undisciplined culture, according to a high-ranking Border Patrol agent who retired in 2022. He says agents often acted as if they were in a college fraternity. “They liked being recognized as military,” says the former agent. “But when it came to the discipline of their agents, the union would fight everything.”Another high-ranking former agent says the union resisted efforts to make the agency more accountable. “There are no fitness standards in the Border Patrol,” he says. “As management we wanted to enforce fitness standards. And the union fought that tooth and nail.” Instead, he and others say, Judd and other union leaders were obsessed with changing the rules so agents could show tattoos and have beards, which they believed would improve morale and recruitment. (Since the rule change in 2019, the bald Judd is often seen with a stubble beard, giving him the look of a scruffy Telly Savalas.)

Despite the looser grooming standards, agency morale has since plummeted, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General, former Border Patrol agents, and even Judd—who testified before Congress that, in 25 years, he had “never seen the morale lower.” A massive number of agents who were brought on during a hiring spree in the early 2000s are expected to retire soon. Amid a record level of migrants entering at the southern border—apprehensions have more than doubled since 2019—workloads have increased dramatically as staffing has stayed consistent, according to the inspector general. As the union predicted years ago, the border wall hasn’t deterred anyone, and immigration is once again one of the top issues on voters’ minds.

The same day the union endorsed Biden’s legislation, Trump posted that “only a fool, or a Radical Left Democrat, would vote for this horrendous Border Bill.”

So when in February a border bill that would have tightened asylum rules and beefed up enforcement came up for a vote in Congress, the Border Patrol union endorsed the legislation and Judd made impassioned appearances on Fox News promoting the bill. In a widely shared statement, he said that the bill would reduce ­illegal border crossings and that “while not perfect, the Border Act of 2024 is a step in the right direction.”

There was one major problem: Trump, who wanted to showcase border chaos as part of his reelection campaign. The same day the Border Patrol union endorsed the legislation, Trump posted on Truth Social that “only a fool, or a Radical Left Democrat, would vote for this horrendous Border Bill.”

The bill failed.

Within weeks, Judd was back at Trump’s side. He accompanied Trump to the southern border and alleged agents were “pissed” at Biden. He also made the dubious assertion that Trump’s opposition to the bill had “nothing to do with politics.” Trump “understands that if a bill were to be passed today, that there would be no appetite to pass a better bill when he’s in office,” Judd told Fox News in March from the State of the Union, where he was a guest of bill co-sponsor Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.).

Now, eight years after the union first endorsed Trump, many agents question the political turn the agency has taken. “As a law enforcement administration, employees at all times should be apolitical in nature,” says Rodolfo Karisch, who retired in 2019 as the chief patrol agent of the Rio Grande Valley. “It’s the mission of what we signed up for; good, bad, or indifferent, we have a job to carry out.”

Even Maza, a Trump supporter, laments the union’s endorsement of the former president. “I have good friends in the Border Patrol who are staunch and dedicated Democrats,” he says. “The union should not be involved in endorsing candidates because that does not adequately represent the agency.”

The union hasn’t yet endorsed Trump again, perhaps an indication of discontent over its embrace of right-wing politics. Or perhaps the union is just playing it safe, in case Democrats win the White House again. Still, it seems unlikely it will return to its nonpartisan roots. The executive vice president, Paul Perez, also an ardent Trump supporter, will fill the remainder of Judd’s term.

Meanwhile, Trump’s anti-immigrant stance has gotten even more extreme. On the stump, he has called immigrants “animals” and “not humans,” and promised to deport millions of them. Should he win, the Border Patrol—and perhaps Judd—will be on the front lines, carrying out his vision.

Read the rest of our Border Patrol investigation here.

Image credits: Adam Gray/Getty; Vadzim Mashkou/Shutterstock, Lev Radin/Shutterstock

For our September+October issue, we investigated the Border Patrol’s sharp growth, its troubling record on civil liberties, its culture of impunity, and its role in shaping the current political moment—one that echoes the anti-immigrant fever that led to the agency’s creation a century ago. Read the whole package here.

The desert around Artesia, New Mexico, had cooled to a comfortable 79 degrees by the time local police officer Beth Hahn steered her black-and-white Chevy Tahoe into the parking lot of the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. It was just after 9:40 p.m. on September 15, 2019. She surveyed the scene in front of her.

Half a dozen people encircled a young woman in a parking lot near the dorms where hundreds of paid Border Patrol recruits stayed during their four-month training. Before getting out, Hahn clicked on her pocket recorder. She also left the Tahoe’s dashcam rolling, just in case.

The call to Eddy County 911 dispatch had come earlier that night from Claude Claflin, a supervisory agent at the Border Patrol Academy. In a Texas drawl, Claflin said there’d been a rape. He identified the victim as a trainee. He didn’t know her name, he said, and also wasn’t sure “how long this victim is going to be able to talk.”

As Hahn approached the group in the parking lot, she introduced herself, making small talk before turning to the trainee. “There are a lot of people here,” Hahn said quietly. “Can we talk privately?”

The pair climbed into the Tahoe. The interior stank of a blend of confiscated marijuana and old broccoli. It had been a busy day; Hahn’s lunch remained untouched. “I’m sorry it smells like feet in here,” Hahn said sheepishly.

Violet was focused on the immediate surroundings: Had anyone seen her get into the car? Would her classmates think she was a snitch?

The trainee, whom I’ll call Violet, didn’t reply. She was a 25-year-old Latina single parent who’d left her daughter at home in California to attend training. She’d been working convenience store jobs while trying to get into the Border Patrol Academy.

Violet’s answers were clipped. Hahn tried various tactics to build rapport: I know it can be tough, as a woman in law enforcement. This doesn’t have to define you. This doesn’t have to follow you in your career. Nothing worked. Violet was focused on the immediate surroundings: Had anyone seen her get into the car? Would her classmates think she was a snitch? Almost all the supervisors, instructors, and training center officials in the parking lot were men. They all held rank over her.

When Hahn returned to talk with the group, she asked if anyone knew the perpetrator. A few agents mumbled affirmatively. No one offered details or a name. Finally, she asked directly. According to Artesia police records, they identified the suspect as a fortysomething instructor and midcareer agent from Texas. (Due to the sensitive nature of the case, Mother Jones has decided not to name the man.)

Hahn paused. She’d already called her department to confer about what to do next—local police investigating federal law enforcement was always delicate. She asked the agents whether the suspect was on the premises, and none of them seemed to know. She asked where he resided. Same result. The trainee wasn’t cooperating, she told them, and hadn’t said anything about pressing charges.

Claflin, the supervisor who’d called 911, accompanied Hahn back to her truck. Approaching Violet, he asked her for “a favor.” Would she text him early the next morning, before entering any of the main buildings on campus? “That way, I can make sure that we don’t have any run-ins,” he said. “I just want to know that I know where you’re at and I know where our detail instructor is at. I don’t want you bumping into him in the hallway or ­anywhere else. Okay?”

“Yes, sir,” Violet answered flatly. She gave him her number and waited while Claflin bungled saving it in his phone.

Nearly an hour had passed. The suspect was still unaccounted for.

The first federal investigation into Border Patrol corruption and “excessive violence” was launched in 1930; by 1933, the government had fired every single working agent.

At its start in 1924, the Border Patrol was a small outfit, so underresourced and isolated that agents adopted an ethos of scrappy self-reliance. Recruits brought their own horses and saddles. Uniforms didn’t exist. Almost immediately, their autonomy—and a lack of centralized oversight—emboldened bad behavior.

Three years after the agency’s founding, the first “full-scale house cleaning” took place in South Texas, after an investigation into immigrant smuggling “forced just under half of Laredo’s twenty-eight border patrol inspectors and the chief patrol inspector to quit or be fired,” UCLA professor Kelly Lytle Hernández writes in her 2010 book, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol. The first federal investigation into Border Patrol corruption and “excessive violence” was launched in 1930; by 1933, the government had fired every single working agent and forced them to reapply in an effort to weed out bad apples.

Throughout the 20th century, the Border Patrol remained a minor agency. By 1975, it had about 1,700 agents; by 1991, a little more than 3,600. But the terrorist attacks of 9/11 changed that trajectory, as politicians started looking at the border through the lens of national security. With the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, the Border Patrol was placed under the umbrella of one of DHS’s new divisions, Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The Bush administration mandated more boots on the ground, and the agency complied by lowering its hiring standards. “The Border Patrol grew incredibly fast,” says sociologist Robert Lee Maril, whose book Patrolling Chaos: The U.S. Border Patrol in Deep South Texas chronicles his two years of being embedded with agents in the early 2000s. “The first victim of that rapid growth was their professional recruitment and training.”

The resulting problems shouldn’t have surprised anyone. There weren’t enough supervisors to oversee the crush of new hires. Agents with little training and less management experience were promoted as a stopgap. And because the workforce was divided into 20 distinct geographic sectors, each run by a chief who operated with little outside oversight, what happened in Texas could easily stay in Texas.

The consequences became clear soon enough. Between 2001 and 2011, the number of agents more than doubled, and misconduct proliferated. Crisis after crisis emerged, most notably cross-border shootings that hit children and teenagers in Mexico, drug smuggling by agents on behalf of cartel bosses, overtime fraud that swindled taxpayers out of $9 million, and an inability to retain female agents due to an often sexist and hostile work environment.

One of the many reports from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) during this time stated that the Border Patrol had no plan or strategy to improve workforce integrity and cited the agency’s “significant cultural resistance” to oversight. By 2014, CBP leaders estimated that 1 in 5 agents were corrupt. An advisory panel was convened at the request of then–Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson. Among its recommendations: Double the number of criminal investigators evaluating internal misconduct.

That same year, an FBI assistant director, Mark Morgan, was named chief of the Border Patrol. The appointment was supposed to send a message: time to clean things up. His outsider status was unprecedented and, Morgan tells me, one of his “most significant hurdles.”

“I came in at a really challenging time, and with that came a lot of angst among the workforce, a lot of trepidation,” he says, recalling how he’d been given a pair of cowboy boots stamped with the Border Patrol insignia as a welcome present. “You know, he never had the uniform. He didn’t go through our academy.”

That mattered.

In Violet’s dorm room, Officer Hahn worked quickly to bag and tag a set of white government-issued sheets. Violet had confided, reluctantly, that the black dress she’d been wearing remained in the room. Hahn found the dress and also entered into evidence underwear that was stuffed among the bed linens.

As she worked, agents hovered in the doorway. Artesia cops knew enough to protect their investigations from Border Patrol meddling. The reason was simple: The agents didn’t know what they were doing.

Basic police procedure like crime scene preservation isn’t generally taught at the Border Patrol Academy. Instead, recruits study immigration law, participate in fitness training, and learn high-speed vehicle pursuit and conversational Spanish. Training is proudly militaristic: Recruits shine their boots and jog in formation, barking out cadence and carrying class flags. Students take oaths to protect America’s borders from enemies and pledge loyalty to each other and the Border Patrol family.

As Hahn prepared her report, she wrote down what the Border Patrol officials had told her. A small group of students and instructors had gone out drinking at Epiq Night Club in nearby Roswell. Fraternization is forbidden at the academy, but the agents who rotated in and out as instructors had a history of partying with their trainees at clubs, bars, restaurants, and residences.

According to dozens of former agents, the Border Patrol’s highly sexualized workplace leads to pervasive harassment and assault.

Later that night, Hahn wrote in her report, the suspect brought Violet, intoxicated, back to her dorm room. She passed out. When she awoke, the officer continued, “[redacted] was on top of her, having penetrative sex. [He] did not wear a condom.” This information, Hahn noted, was relayed to her by supervisor Claflin and a CBP peer support counselor: “The student was very reluctant to talk to me. She is worried about her job…She just wants the whole incident over.”

Violet hadn’t even reported the rape; a classmate had. She was unfamiliar with sexual assault investigations. Hahn carefully explained what a rape kit is. She assured Violet that the Artesia police were entirely independent of the Border Patrol and urged her to get a sexual assault exam. That way, she’d be covered if she later changed her mind about pressing charges. The statute of limitations gave her five years. The evidence would be secured in a police storage locker.

Violet’s case is not an isolated one. According to dozens of former agents, the Border Patrol’s highly sexualized workplace leads to pervasive harassment and assault. Indeed, the first Latina ever hired as an agent, Ernestine Lopez, said she was raped by an academy classmate in the 1970s. After speaking out, Lopez was fired. She later filed suit and settled with the agency. Forty years later, former CBP internal affairs chief James Tomsheck became a whistleblower, publicly accusing the agency of covering up lethal shootings, creating a culture of evasion and deceit, and failing to conduct adequate training or investigate misconduct. Sexual misconduct, Tomsheck later told me, was “a very disturbing pattern and practice of abuse that appeared to be part of the Border Patrol culture.”

But determining the frequency of crime and misconduct within the agency can be next to impossible. It’s difficult to obtain such data without a lawsuit—and even then, compliance is spotty and haphazard, in part because the Border Patrol relies on agents to self-report their arrests. Even if they do so, an allegation such as rape could fall under more than one of the many arrest categories described in CBP’s annual employee integrity report, including Domestic/Family Misconduct, Sexual Misconduct, Violent Crimes, Crimes Involving Children, and Drug/Alcohol Related Misconduct.

According to records I received through a Freedom of Information Act request, CBP claims there were 186 alleged incidents of sexual harassment, sexual assault, rape, and/or sex discrimination committed by or perpetrated against Border Patrol agents between 2000 and 2022. At least four occurred at the academy. (CBP didn’t say whether the incidents were included in its annual misconduct reporting.)

Yet the list CBP sent me contained glaring omissions, including cases of reported sexual misconduct involving trainees at the academy from 2021, 2019, 2008, and 2007 that were unearthed in records from local court systems, the training center, or media reports. The list also failed to include Violet’s September 2019 incident at the academy, a case that has now been investigated by the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, DHS’s Office of the Inspector General, the Border Patrol’s Office of Professional Responsibility, and the local police. (CBP said OPR is still investigating but offered no further details.)

Even as Hahn was collecting evidence from her dorm, Violet was still unsure about pressing charges. “He’s an agent,” she told Hahn. “No one will believe me over him.”

The insular culture of the Border Patrol, observers say, creates a shroud of silence around allegations of wrongdoing—a cultural aversion to oversight that stands as a barrier to reform. “I think that most people in leadership positions who have a moral compass don’t want to admit there are systemic problems,” says former agent Kathleen Scudder, who retired this past March. “Because that would mean that they would be on the hook to address them, weed them out, change culture—really hard things to do.”

While Scudder was employed as a supervisor at the Border Patrol station in McAllen, Texas, an agent kidnapped, tortured, and sexually assaulted three Honduran migrants and later fatally shot himself in a standoff with the FBI. It was one of a string of high-profile crimes involving the agency; another Texas agent and his allegedly Gulf Cartel–affiliated brother, for example, were charged with working with drug traffickers and decapitating a “snitch.”

After Scudder transferred to the San Diego sector, she helped lead the response after a male supervisory agent planted a video camera in a work bathroom and recorded female colleagues. “It makes you angry when someone tarnishes the honor that you feel [as an agent],” she says. “Every time, I’d be like, ‘No, that’s not how the agency is. There are a lot of good people.’ And then someone goes and murders a prostitute…How do you defend that?…I don’t want to admit it, to be honest. I was a loyal agent and employee for 27 years and I see the good in the agency. But I can’t deny that the worst that I’ve seen has come at the hands of agents, and not the criminals we’re supposed to arrest.”

In 2019, ProPublica exposed a secret 9,500-member Border Patrol Facebook group in a report that triggered a full congressional investigation. Agents had been posting disturbing images and memes, including videos of migrant deaths, photos of dead migrant children, and rape fantasies featuring doctored images of elected officials such as Democratic Reps. Veronica Escobar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “These posts are completely inappropriate and contrary to the honor and integrity I see—and expect—from our agents day in and day out,” then-Chief Carla Provost said. “Any employees found to have violated our standards of conduct will be held accountable.”

Days later, the Intercept outed Provost as having been a member of the same Facebook group for years. So were at least nine investigators from the Border Patrol’s Office of Professional Responsibility, according to an ensuing investigation by the House oversight committee. The Border Patrol refused to share details of its internal investigation with Congress. But of the 60 agents involved in the probe, only two were terminated.

“I see the good in the agency. But I can’t deny that the worst that I’ve seen has come at the hands of agents, and not the criminals we’re supposed to arrest.”

The latest available CBP statistics (for the 12 months ending September 30, 2022) show 3,468 allegations of misconduct involving the Border Patrol, a 44 percent increase from fiscal year 2018. And the 131 arrests of agents during the 2023 fiscal year represented an increase of 27 percent over the previous year.

Recent media reports on misconduct have involved some of the top brass. In February, Acting Deputy Chief Joel Martinez was suspended after several female CBP employees accused him of sexual improprieties. In October 2022, the patrol’s third-ranked official, Tony Barker, resigned after he was accused of pressuring female employees for sex, which he has denied doing.

The GAO’s latest report on CBP, released in May, noted that the people evaluating claims of critical misconduct for the Border Patrol are often retirement-eligible agents working in the Office of Professional Responsibility as a last hurrah. According to the report, many of them found the investigative work “incompatible with their skills and what they wanted in a job.” The office only had about half the number of investigators recommended by the CBP Integrity Advisory Panel in 2014, and more than half of those hired in 2022 came from within the agency, creating “increased risks for impairment to independence.”

The day after Officer Hahn collected the evidence at Violet’s dorm, another Artesia cop, Thomas Frazier, was assigned to the case. He didn’t have much better luck. Violet “stated that she did not want to talk to anyone about the incident,” he wrote in his case notes.

Frazier, too, had tried to reassure her that his work was independent, both of the Border Patrol and the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, a separate DHS division that CBP had alerted to the “possible sexual assault.” A FLETC investigation report stated that the trainees and four instructors had been called into a senior staff building and “were giving written memorandums regarding the incident,” though it wasn’t clear what the memos said. The rape allegation was also reported to the Joint Intake Center.

Violet had no interest in talking with FLETC’s investigator: “[redacted] asked if she wanted to proceed with reporting the sexual assault. She sat quiet with no answer.” She remained unresponsive when asked whether she wanted to undergo a sexual assault exam. As for pressing charges, according to the investigation memo, Violet initially said no “and then stated she wanted to think about it, but did not want to talk to us and just wanted to go home.” By the end of that day, less than 24 hours after Claflin called 911 to report the rape, Violet had quit the academy and was on a plane back to California.

The Artesia police kept checking in with her periodically to see whether she’d changed her mind about pressing charges. (The case notes don’t mention the suspect.) In an April 2020 follow-up report, Frazier wrote that he’d spoken with CBP Special Agent Christina Barrera, who was also working the case. She’d told him that FLETC had obtained footage from the night of the alleged rape “and would be getting me the video,” he wrote. “I also spoke to [Violet] on this date. She wanted to get a copy of the report and would contact me back after she reviewed it.”

That’s when the investigation seemed to go dormant. A year later, in May 2021, Frazier was killed when his pickup struck a big rig. The Border Patrol Academy saluted him on Instagram: “All law enforcement is family.” “RIP Det. Frazier,” Barrera commented.

The final entry in Violet’s case file, dated June 2021, was from Artesia Police Commander Pete Quinones, a supervisor who’d been closing cold cases to reduce the number of open investigations. “Due to the victim not wanting to cooperate with the investigation, this case will be closed out,” he wrote. “[It] can be reopened if the victim desires.” There’s no mention in the file of Violet ever being contacted again.

Citing privacy protections, neither CBP nor the Border Patrol would speak with me about the case—or about the suspect, who hasn’t responded to my phone calls. Violet, whom I reached by phone, said she didn’t want her real name associated with what had happened.

I also spoke with Claflin, who at first insisted he had “no idea” about an alleged rape during his time in Artesia. “I don’t ever recall calling 911 about anything from the academy,” he said. He changed his mind after I emailed him the 911 transcript. “I do remember the situation,” he said in an email, copying another Border Patrol official, “and cannot provide you with any other information.”

We may never know what happened that night. Without the 911 dispatch record, the case would have been invisible to the public. Violet never pressed charges, and the suspect wasn’t interviewed by Artesia police. Her alleged rape was never reported in the press and didn’t appear to show up in the Border Patrol’s employee integrity reports. Without a victim, there’s no crime. And without a crime, there’s no problem.

When Donald Trump visited South Texas after taking office in 2017, his administration called for 5,000 new agents and proposed loosening background checks on some Border Patrol applicants, modifying the entrance exam, and waiving the mandatory polygraph test (which two-thirds of recruits were failing) for veterans and former police. During his campaign, Trump had earned the endorsement of the Border Patrol union, and these moves—and his inflammatory rhetoric—sent a signal to agents: It was time to take the gloves off.

The outcry against the proposed changes, though, was immediate. The Cato Institute, a Koch-backed libertarian think tank, crunched numbers from the preceding decade and found that Border Patrol agents were twice as likely as their Immigration and Customs Enforcement counterparts to have been terminated for disciplinary infractions or poor performance. Former CBP Commissioner R. Gil Kerlikowske told the Associated Press that expediting hiring to meet quotas was “just a huge mistake,” and former internal affairs head Tomsheck wrote an op-ed for the Hill titled “Why Is Congress Proposing to Increase Customs and Border Protection Corruption?”

Veteran agents warn rookies against putting agency bumper stickers on their personal vehicles lest they get keyed or graffitied.

Trump’s executive order stood. The polygraph test—the validity of which has long been disputed—was “streamlined,” and applicant pass numbers shot up 88 percent. Yet, recruitment still floundered: In 2017, the Border Patrol had 1,800 unfilled agent positions; in 2018, it was short by more than 2,000. By 2019, it was clear that adding 5,000 new positions was more easily said than done.

“Law enforcement has this black-and-white narrative: You’re the good guys and you’re catching bad guys,” explains El Centro agent Guadalupe “Tiny” Valenzuela. After six months on the job, that perspective shifts, he says. The bulk of agents’ work has nothing to do with bad guys. “It was when I started seeing dead bodies—really, really bad injuries. When we see infants, beet red from the sun out in the desert, and people who walked for miles, sometimes abandoned. You start seeing the suffering. And it starts to weigh on you.”

Raising concerns or asking for help is frowned upon by many of his colleagues, Valenzuela says, and people who do these things run the risk of being seen as unfit for duty. Instead, troubled agents turn further inward­—to the green family. Veteran agents warn rookies against wearing Border Patrol T-shirts or hats to the grocery store or putting agency bumper stickers on their personal vehicles lest they get keyed or graffitied.

Being a Border Patrol agent is one of the least lethal jobs in law enforcement, but agents kill themselves at higher rates than local police. In 2021, CBP hired its first-ever staff suicidologist, Kent Corso, who launched a suicide awareness podcast with episodes on meditation and survivor loss. Domestic violence and substance abuse among agents have been high for years, though here, too, the agency’s statistics largely rely on self-reporting.

At the end of May, the Border Patrol celebrated its 100th birthday in El Paso with a week of events, but a black-tie centennial gala (with sponsors reportedly paying up to $100,000 for a table) was abruptly canceled. Pictures had emerged on social media of top Border Patrol officials—including Chief Jason Owens and sector boss Gloria Chavez, one of the agency’s top-ranked women—­attending swanky parties in Mexico hosted by a tequila manufacturer and an uberwealthy customs magnate. The posts—which sparked questions about disclosures, ethics, and contracts—prompted yet another internal investigation. (CBP said in a statement, “We thoroughly investigate all allegations,” but did not comment on the outcome of its inquiry.)

Things have been a good bit quieter over in the Texas Border Patrol station where Violet’s alleged rapist seems to still work as an agent. CBP won’t confirm or deny his employment due to its policy of keeping agent names secret, but he is listed as a union rep on a National Border Patrol Council website.

The union’s member guide talks a lot about the privileges members enjoy, including access to a legal defense fund and union representation in administrative, civil, and criminal investigations and disciplinary proceedings—the kinds of protections that aren’t afforded to new trainees. “[I]n your specific time of need,” the guide promises, “you will have the collective voice of a strong union behind you, and you’ll never stand alone!”

Read the rest of our Border Patrol investigation here.

For our September+October issue, we investigated the Border Patrol’s sharp growth, its troubling record on civil liberties, its culture of impunity, and its role in shaping the current political moment—one that echoes the anti-immigrant fever that led to the agency’s creation a century ago. Read the whole package here.

This election cycle, former President Donald Trump has made one campaign promise the most prominent: Mass deportation. It is a long-standing vow. In 2016, Trump said he would deport the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. Once in the White House, he ordered sweeping worksite raids, enacted a ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries, and deliberately separated migrant families, many of whom have yet to be reunited.

But thanks to outside resistance, internal opposition, sanctuary policies, legal guardrails, and sheer ineptitude, the Trump administration removed fewer than 1 million people from the country—far behind the number Barack Obama deported during his first four years in office.

In a second term, Trump has pledged to fulfill his promise and conduct “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” His acolytes, led by hardliner Stephen Miller, have spent years devising legal workarounds to prevent their extreme proposals from being curtailed or killed in the courts.

This time around, they plan to invoke an infamous 18th-century wartime law, deploy the National Guard, and build massive detention camps—and intend on reshaping the federal bureaucracy to ensure it happens, drafting executive orders and filling the administration with loyalists who will quickly implement the policies. “No one’s off the table,” said Tom Homan, the former acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Trump. “If you’re in the country illegally, you are a target.”

If Trump and his allies have it their way, armed troops and out-of-state law enforcement would likely blitz into communities—knocking on doors, searching workplaces and homes, and arbitrarily interrogating and arresting suspected undocumented immigrants. The dragnet would almost certainly ensnare US citizens, too.

The nation’s undocumented immigrants grow and harvest the food we eat, construct our homes, and care for our young and elderly. They pay billions in taxes, start businesses that employ Americans, and help rebuild in the wake of climate disasters.

Not only would Trump’s plan rip families and communities apart, but it also would have devastating effects for years to come, including on US citizens who perhaps have overlooked how integral undocumented immigrants are to their everyday life. Trump frames immigration as an existential threat to the United States. He has said immigrants are “taking our jobs,” are “not people,” and are “poisoning the blood of our country.” The reality is that if his plan were implemented, American life as we know it would be ruined—even for those cheering for mass deportation.

Here’s how this “mass deportation” agenda would fundamentally reshape the country:

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According to a 2016 report by the Center for American Progress, deporting 7 million workers would “reduce national employment by an amount similar to that experienced during the Great Recession.” GDP would immediately contract by 1.4 percent, and, eventually, by 2.6 percent. In 20 years, the US economy would shrink nearly 6 percent—or $1.6 trillion. Trump’s plan would lead to a dire shortage of low-wage workers, which would “bring on a recession while reigniting inflation,” predicts Robert J. Shapiro, a former undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration.

“Mass deportation will be a labor-market disruption celebrated by American workers,” Miller told the New York Times last November. Most economists disagree. “The only reason a politician would say such a thing is that they think that lots of people believe it,” says Michael Clemens, an economist at George Mason University. “It’s certainly not based on any research or empirical fact whatsoever.”

Instead of freeing up employment opportunities, findings from one study suggest that the deportation of 11 million undocumented immigrants could result in 968,000 fewer jobs available for US citizens, losses that would be compounded each year the policy remained in effect.

 

A recent study projected that if 7.5 million workers were deported, inflation would rise by 3 percent in two years.

The price of services would be almost 10 percent higher by 2029.

 

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Food

Half of all farmworkers in the United States are undocumented. A mass deportation program would lead to reduced domestic production and increased reliance on imports. Pierre Mérel, an agricultural and resource economics expert at the University of California, Davis, says labor-intensive fruit and vegetable harvesting would be most affected. Based on a 2022 study he co-authored, Mérel estimates that a 50 percent decrease in the farm labor supply could result in a 21 percent increase in the prices of hand-picked crops. “If [immigrant workers] just disappeared overnight,” says Andrew Mickelsen, whose family operates a potato farm in Idaho, “[the sector] would be devastated...I do not think that we in this country could grow enough food.”

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Care

Some 350,000 undocumented immigrants work in health care, with more than two-thirds employed as providers or in supporting jobs. On top of that, more than 160,000 are employed as cleaners and housekeepers. “They are the people that pick our crops, prepare our foods, clean our hotel rooms, and empty our bedpans,” says Rebecca Shi, executive director of the American Business Immigration Coalition. “When former President Donald Trump talks about mass deportations and enforcement, he’s talking about eradicating the type of quality of life that Americans enjoy right now.”

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Infrastructure

One in five undocumented workers—1.4 million people—are ­employed in construction. That’s more than 10 percent of the entire labor force, and 32 percent of roofers. With the industry already facing a shortage of about 500,000 workers, Trump’s deportation scheme would grind the construction of new housing to a halt, turbocharging the affordability crisis. Joshua Correa, a builder in Dallas, estimates a $300,000 house might cost anywhere from $40,000 to $45,000 more if just a fraction of the immigrant workforce is deported. “You can’t build things in the United States,” says Brian Turmail of the Associated General Contractors of America, “without people to build them.” Democratic Rep. Greg Casar of Texas put it more simply: “The economy would collapse.”

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In Arizona, there are roughly 100,000 undocumented homeowners.

If they were all deported—and their homes foreclosed on—it would result in a $44.2 billion hit to the state’s housing market.

 

Some immigration experts and former government officials have questioned the feasibility of Trump's radical plan, citing logistical and legal obstacles. But, even if he only attempts to unleash the full force of the federal government to uproot millions of noncitizens, there could be a lasting toll on immigrants and Americans. The effects of Trump's cruel practice of separating families at the border, known as "zero tolerance," are still felt today even though the policy was eventually reversed. Six years after its implementation, children and parents remain apart.

[Related: The Migrant Families Separated Under Trump Are Still in Legal Limbo]

Children would almost certainly be hurt again. More than 3.4 million unauthorized immigrants have a US-born minor child. Eighty percent of unauthorized immigrants entered the country before 2010, and almost 10 million citizens or lawful residents live in mixed-status homes. One study found a mass deportation program would slash the median income of mixed-status households by almost half, plunging millions of families into poverty.

Even if not fully realized, Trump's plot would crash the economy, leave food fallow in the fields, target vulnerable neighbors, and hurt the very population he claims to want to uplift—the American worker.

Read the rest of our Border Patrol investigation here.

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For our September+October issue, we investigated the Border Patrol’s sharp growth, its troubling record on civil liberties, its culture of impunity, and its role in shaping the current political moment—one that echoes the anti-immigrant fever that led to the agency’s creation a century ago. Read the whole package here.

The Border Patrol’s jurisdiction isn’t confined to southwestern deserts or isolated northern checkpoints: Federal law empowers agents to board vehicles and vessels “within a reasonable distance from any external boundary of the United States,” whether inland or offshore. “Reasonable” is 100 miles as the crow flies—meaning some 200 million people live within an expansive border zone.

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Approximately 60 percent of Americans live within the 100-mile border zone

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37 states have at least some of their population covered by the border zone

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A CBP manual outlines 21 “articulable facts” agents can use to justify stopping a vehicle in the border zone, including if it:

• is close to the border
• is on a known smuggling route
• could have been trying to avoid a checkpoint
• appears to be heavily laden
• is from out of the area
• looks unusual in some way
• appears to have been altered or modified
• has a covered cargo area
• is being driven in an erratic or unsafe manner
• looks as if it has recently been driven off-road
• is coming from an area of a sensor alert

Or if the vehicle’s driver and/or passengers:

• avoid looking at the agent
• are paying undue attention to the agent’s presence
• try to avoid being seen or exhibit other unusual behavior
• slow down after seeing the agent
• appear dirty

For our September+October issue, we investigated the Border Patrol’s sharp growth, its troubling record on civil liberties, its culture of impunity, and its role in shaping the current political moment—one that echoes the anti-immigrant fever that led to the agency’s creation a century ago. Read the whole package here.

It was dawn and we were in Sunland Park, New Mexico, a few hundred feet from the border, watching the US government surveillance towers that watch all of us. They were positioned atop a bald hillside, taking in a constant stream of images from all angles. One tower, a sleek, 33-foot telescoping pole built by Anduril Industries, the defense contractor run by Oculus founder Palmer Luckey and funded by PayPal co-founder and GOP megadonor Peter Thiel, was capable of recording night-vision images and spotting human beings up to 1.7 miles away.

My companions were Tucson-based photographers documenting the growing landscape of border surveillance mechanisms. They were working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to map all such towers along the border—a vast, expensive, and increasingly automated network that is now effectively an electronic wall.

Less than 10 miles away, in El Paso, the importance of automated surveillance and artificial intelligence was the theme of the annual Border Security Expo, a massive conference that drew roughly 1,700 attendees in 2023. Many of them were employees of the “industry partners” that market and sell such technology to representatives from 46 state agencies; they were joined by overseas buyers and a handful of academics. “Border Security Expo [is] the best place to gain access to this hard-to-reach, highly qualified audience,” the exhibitor prospectus boasted.

Inside the exhibition hall, visitors were met by a Verizon-built robot dog performing an uncanny march: forward like an old-timey soldier, side to side like a jittery crab.

“This is a partnership,” Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens said during the opening panel. “We’re expressing to you the things that we need and relying on the big brains in this room and your companies to come up with the next way forward.”

The conference featured panels such as “Border of the Future” and “DHS Acquisition: Tone From the Top.” Inside the exhibition hall—a large, fluorescent-lit chamber resembling the belly of a colossal blimp—visitors were met by a Verizon-built robot dog performing an uncanny march: forward like an old-timey soldier, side to side like a jittery crab.

Automated ground surveillance vehicles, as the dogs are known, can lend “a helping hand (or ‘paw’) with new technology that can assist with enhancing the capabilities of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) personnel, while simultaneously increasing their safety downrange.” These dogs are ready to be outfitted with cameras, sensors, and radio.

Other exhibitors featured “No BS” canine food to help optimize real-life working dogs; virtual reality training systems that sharpen law enforcement’s shooting skills; all-terrain tanks; heavy-duty cargo e-bikes; mobile fences; and guns, of course. Occasionally, the displays reminded attendees of the true adversary most border technologies targeted: people. A heat-­sensing camera that works from miles away, for instance, and sensors that can detect a human heartbeat hidden in a vehicle.

Like nearly everyone else, CBP leadership has a serious case of AI fever, and officials make clear that this kind of technology acts as a “force multiplier” to Border Patrol agents themselves. Surveillance tower cameras and drones can alert agents when a vehicle or person comes into view and help CBP ascertain the threat level. AI tools also help screen cargo coming into the country and scour data from CBP One—a notoriously glitchy app that asylum seekers must use to navigate their legal process—to detect cases of suspicious identity.

Just last year, CBP’s AI monitoring system flagged “a suspicious pattern in the border crossing history” of a car in Southern California. Upon further review, 75 kilos of drugs were found in the vehicle, and the driver was arrested.

The Biden administration has insisted on the responsible use of AI. Yet such guidelines rarely have any teeth—and could be easily dismantled under a new administration.

AI and machine learning at the border aren’t entirely new. The first autonomous towers were installed in 2018, and two years later, the Trump administration brokered a deal with Anduril. (Luckey, the brother-in-law of Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, donated $100,000 toward Trump’s inaugural celebrations in 2017.) Trump’s bombastic rhetoric has always focused on mass deportations and his cherished border wall. But all along his administration was building a surveillance apparatus that the Biden White House has since expanded—and that could be the single most powerful tool in the hands of a second Trump administration to carry out extrajudicial exclusion at the US border. One that could be used against its citizens, too.

But this would first require Border Patrol to effectively analyze all the data it’s collecting. At the Expo, Border Patrol officials routinely noted that AI surveillance tools have amassed so much information that CBP needs machine learning tools to make any sense of it. “In the past we were looking at hundreds of millions of nodes of data,” said Ray Shuler, DHS’s assistant director of cyber and operations technology. “Now we’re looking at multibillion-node graphs.” Shuler says his unit alone is running up to 400 servers at any given time and is constantly in need of more storage capacity.

But managing this data, said Joshua Powell, CBP’s director of AI implementation, is what “will give us the advantage over our adversary. They have the resources. They have the money. They have connections.” Officials invoked the “adversary” repeatedly throughout the convention—a militarized villain, and a mushy one at that. But who, exactly, was this well-heeled, tricked-out, tech-savvy enemy amassing at our gates? It could be anyone—which is why we need constant surveillance.

For its part, the Biden administration has insisted on the responsible use of AI. In 2023, DHS named tech specialist Eric Hysen as the department’s first chief AI officer, issued a departmental framework for responsible AI, and launched the AI Corps, a team of 50 experts to better monitor and implement the technology. “AI is going to make us bigger and faster and stronger—it’s not going to make us any less accountable,” Hysen claims. Yet as EFF investigations director Dave Maass points out, such administrative guidelines and bodies rarely have any teeth—and could be easily dismissed or dismantled under a new administration.

At the Expo, Border Patrol officials insisted that their work is saving lives—and that the latest technological acquisitions support this mission. But some border tech is inherited from war zones or inspired by them; notably, many of the vendors also contract with the Department of Defense. As Harvard researcher Petra Molnar, author of The Walls Have Eyes, argues, border zones are perfect test sites for technologies with questionable human rights applications, since they’re often obscured from public view. Once refined and normalized at the border, they can more easily slip into the mainstream—iris scans at airports, for instance, or automated traffic tickets issued to anyone who runs red lights (which the Texas legislature outlawed in 2019). Maass argues that surveillance reliant upon algorithmic technology can make mistakes—with consequences that can be dangerous for the person on the other end.

The future of the border is one of endless expansion and externalization—well staffed and automated, optimized by artificial intelligence, and implemented by men in green.

Those of us who live far from the border might imagine surveillance towers situated in remote swaths of the desert. Some of them are. But often they are positioned in border towns near schools and downtown shopping centers, on Native American reservations, and alongside the highways where we all drive. “We are actually talking about a surveillance network that monitors communities…that have nothing to do with transport or crime,” Maass told me. “They are just living their lives, doing their thing, but they’ve got the CBP tower looking in their window.”

US border defense is ever-expanding in reach—moving not just deep into our country’s interior, but also far beyond our own walls. “Most people don’t know there are Border Patrol agents today deployed around the globe in dangerous areas,” Chief Owens explained to the crowd on the Expo’s opening day, “with the express purpose of making sure that they can stop the threat from ever reaching our borders in the first place.”

Powell, too, spoke of the need to “[push] our borders out beyond what we’ve traditionally been focused on, an outline of the United States…out through Western and Eastern hemispheres to identify who is thinking, planning, and attempting to make entry into the US and then why.” By collecting and sharing data with intelligence agencies across international borders, the thinking goes, we’ll be better able to defend our own. Ultimately, the future of the border is one of endless expansion and externalization—well staffed and automated, optimized by artificial intelligence, and implemented by men in green.

When he was in El Paso for the Expo, Dugan Meyer, a graduate student and one of the photographers contributing to EFF’s countersurveillance map, headed out in the late afternoon to New Mexico’s Mount Cristo Rey—a bare, rugged peak adorned with a giant white statue of Christ from the 1930s. Here, the insistent advance of the border wall is briefly broken by the base of the mountain and becomes a major hotspot for Border Patrol activity, migrant crossings, and deaths. That night, Meyer hung out near the wall in the brush, watching as helicopters patrolled the skies while Border Patrol trucks scoured the dark. At one point, Meyer heard someone climb the wall from the Mexican side and drop down into the United States. Meyer saw the man step carefully over railroad tracks and then disappear into the scrub.

Patrol forces reappeared within minutes, as if something had alerted them to the crossing. Perhaps something had. For the next hour, Meyer watched the hunt. The Border Patrol has access to heat-­seeking cameras, surveillance towers, drones, helicopters, and ground sensors. The man was racing this vast, mechanized force, all odds seemingly against him, and yet every day, in spite of the billions of dollars spent to stop them, people like him manage to get through. For Border Patrol authorities, however, this becomes one more piece of evidence that they need more of everything: funding, agents, towers, robot dogs.

This endless expansion is the reality the Expo was selling—and, maybe more importantly, banking on.

This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center. Read the rest of our Border Patrol investigation here.

Image credits: Allison Dinner/AFP/Getty; Rebekah Zemansky/Shutterstock, Shutterstock (3)