Border Patrol Brutality, An American Tradition
I was a reporter for the San Diego newspaper from 1979 to 1983. My full-time assignment was coverage of the United States-Mexico border. I was a witness to the fact that the border was heavily patrolled in the San Diego Sector.
There was a no-man’s land about a quarter mile wide and approximately eight miles long. It separated San Diego from Tijuana. The Border Patrol’s strategy was to heavily patrol everything just north of no-man’s land. Migrants who ventured beyond the strip walked into a Border Patrol net.
Hundreds of agents were deployed. They rode ATVs, vehicles, and traveled horseback. Some were on foot, posted to strategic, heavily trafficked spots. Helicopters using spotlights were sometimes employed.
Back then, as now, many Americans and politicians cried out that the United States was being invaded by bad people. Then, as now, they ignored the important fact that undocumented migrants were a vital labor force for many sectors of the American economy. Without a hefty supply of undocumented Mexicans, the economy would sputter. Even Trump is learning that fact.
Here is an excerpt from my book, We Were Always Here: A Mexican American’s Odyssey: It recaps a story I wrote back in the day.
The official procedure for returning immigrants was to book them at a detention center nearby. Detainees would be asked if they wished to be formally deported, which required a hearing or an agreement to a VR, “voluntary repatriation,” which would have agents immediately return them to Mexico. However, some ex-officials told me they sometimes applied a “fence VR.” These entitled agents would administer a beating away from the detention center and send immigrants back on foot.
Vernon Jaques, a retired Border Patrol agent, was candid. “You have an officer arresting forty to fifty aliens a shift,” he told me, “and that’s dehumanizing. You don’t view them as humans. It gets easy to haul off and whack someone alongside the head.”
The “fence VR” also meant no paperwork.
Jaques added that many agents were Vietnam vets who found parallels between the war and securing the border. They saw both as unwinnable struggles, which bred anger and frustration.
“Now, instead of calling the enemy ‘slopes,’ they called them ‘tonks.’”
Border Patrol agents still use the term today.
Ricardo Chavira update: Tonk derives from the sound of a flashlight striking a migrant’s head. It’s used in internal and external communication. Some agents wear T-shirts with an image of a flashlight with the derogatory word. While Border Patrol brass officially banned the use of tonk, it has become normalized in Border Patrol culture.
Donald Cameron, a Border Patrol officer with years of experience, voiced the “few bad apples” argument, telling me that abuse was rare and misconduct was punished. He recalled an incident in which an immigrant ran away after being arrested. “An agent chased him, caught him, and ended up getting in a fight with the guy. After the agent subdued him, he socked the alien one more time. It was one sock too many, and so I suspended the agent.”
In one of several Border Patrol shootings, agent Daniel Cole arrested and handcuffed undocumented immigrants Efrén Reyes and Benito Rincón. A scuffle ensued, and Cole shot the men, killing Reyes and wounding Rincón. Cole was not prosecuted.
I had witnessed and reported on police abuse, but the Border Patrol’s culture of savagery was worse than what I had previously encountered.
Ricardo Chavira Chicano 