Ricardo Chavira Chicano

The Los Angeles Times and the Border Patrol: Two Peas In a Pod

Fifty-one years ago, I was handed my master’s degree.  My thesis was a comparative analysis of the Los Angeles Times and La Opinion’s coverage of immigration. The latter is a Los Angeles Spanish-language newspaper.

As you might expect, the coverage differed considerably. The Times typically acted as a mouthpiece for the government.  La Opinion included government statements, but it often added interviews with those affected.

To be sure, 1974 was a long time ago, but it was in my adulthood and first years as a journalist.  The excerpt from the thesis references “Operation Wetback,” a 1954 campaign to arrest and deport Mexican migrants.  An estimated 300,000 were expelled in a few months.  Here’s the excerpt.

A story reported in both La Opinion and The Times in March 1974 sounded much like a pre-Operation Wetback” press release. The Spanish-language paper quoted Richard Batchelor, deputy chief patrol agent in the San Diego area, as saying that the Border Patrol had caught 19,000 “illegals” during February, “and each month the problem grows.”

The Times’ version of the story was much longer, more detailed, and somewhat alarmist. The Border Patrol in San Diego, it was reported, was apprehending as many as 600 illegal aliens a night this year, as compared with an average of 300 a night in 1973 … The 19,000 caught was a record high for February. Batchelor reportedly said,

 ‘People think there has to be a limit, but the number of illegal immigrants keeps rising every year. ‘  Another agent added, ‘It’s just about getting to the point where they run over us every night.”

 Batchelor concluded that there had been “no significant increase in the number of border patrol agents since early last year. The only thing we can do is work as hard as we can to contain the flow.’ ”  The Times, just as it had in the early 1950s, by using only ‘authorities’ as sources, made it seem as though the state was being inundated by ‘wets.·”

In April 1974, it was reported in The Times that a Mexican woman, a government witness in the trial of an accused smuggler of “illegal aliens, ” had been in jail for 37 days because an assistant U.S. attorney feared she would go back to Mexico if set free. The Times, in its editorial of April 28, agreed with the judge’s decision to free the woman and claimed that by jailing her, she “was treated like an object stored in a warehouse.

In the following excerpt, compare what ICE is doing today to 1974 events.  We have regressed. 

Judging from news accounts in the Los Angeles press, wide scale roundups of undocumented Mexicans began within the first few months of 1973. A report in The Los Angeles Times told of a class action suit by the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund and The American Civil Liberties Union “seeking to halt alleged indiscriminate roundups of persons suspected of being illegal immigrants.

Four days later, on June 27, The Times took a stand on the issue of alien round-ups.” The editorial said that the Supreme Court action of placing some restrictions on the INS’s search operations was a “good decision.”

It continued, “The decision coincides with widespread complaints in the Los Angeles area of excesses by the Immigration and Naturalization Service during a recent round-up of aliens.

“There have been charges that Mexican Americans have been abused, that constitutional rights have been violated, that illegal searches and arrests have been effected. It will take time to sort out the truth of these accusations. But the court decision will serve to remind all involved in the enforcement of the law that the Constitution must not be set aside amid the enthusiasm for that enforcement.”