San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Small towns are loaned big firepower
Refugio County Sheriff Raul “Pinky” Gonzales was worried. In the days after George Floyd’s death in Minnesota, protests were breaking out across the country — and many were turning violent.
A Black Lives Matter protest was set to take place in his South Texas county June 6, and the small-town sheriff wasn’t about to let things go south.
“We had gotten word there were going to be some activists coming in from Houston,” Gonzales said. “We didn’t know how many.”
The Sheriff ’s Office called U.S. Customs and Border Protection and asked for help.
Gonzales was one of many police leaders who made such calls. Customs and Border Protection fielded requests from many of the nation’s police agencies during the Floyd protests.
It provided drones, helicopters or planes to 10 of the nation’s largest police departments or federal agencies around the country.
In Texas, documents obtained
by Hearst Newspapers show the agency coordinated with nearly a dozen Texas departments in response to planned protests against police brutality
The records give the clearest picture yet of the agency’s interactions with police departments and law enforcement’s perception of the protests.
They also show the new role of Customs and Border Protection, which has seen supercharged growth and become the nation’s largest federal law enforcement agency since 9/11.
Agents trained to work in isolated border regions targeting drug cartels and human smugglers now are being deployed to quell unrest in dense, urban cities far from the border, opposing U.S. citizens on city streets engaging in First Amendment-protected protests — deployments where critics and local leaders say CBP’s presence actually made the situation worse and more violent.
The agency says it responds to requests of all kinds from law enforcement agencies around the country and that it’s not restricted to border areas or duties associated with border protection.
Heavy equipment
Among the documents are text records of Kingsville Police Chief Ricardo Torres, including messages between the top cop of the town of 25,000 and Duke Canchola, the Border Patrol agent-incharge of CBP’s Kingsville Station, discussing a planned June 2 Black Lives Matter and George Floyd Memorial rally.
Emails between the two agencies dated June 1 show Canchola offered the services of dozens of agents, including 10 day-shift agents and seven “riot-trained” members of a mobile response team.
Customs and Border Protection said the department could have the use of a drone, mobile vehicle surveillance systems and a grenade launcher that could shoot projectiles filled with mace or pepper balls or hand-thrown grenades.
It also offered a slew of crowdcontrol weapons, including FN-303s, less-than-lethal riot guns that other police departments have stopped using after officers accidentally killed protesters with them.
According to the Kingsville Record, the rally drew about 225 marchers and protesters.
“Organized by recent graduates and students at Texas A&M University-Kingsville, the peaceful protest in Kingsville began at 1 p.m.,” the paper reported.
After prayers and speeches, the gathering marched to the Kleberg County Courthouse and disbanded about 2:30 p.m.
Customs and Border Protection officials said the agency responds to incidents across the country at the request of federal, state and local partners, including response to civil unrest and in support of Homeland Security’s Protecting American Communities Task Force.
It was created in July to coordinate law enforcement agencies in protecting U.S. historic monuments, memorials, statues and federal facilities.
Customs and Border Protection teams have assisted other agencies during mass shootings, manhunts for wanted fugitives, as well as for natural disasters and high-profile events such as presidential inaugurations and the Super Bowl, the agency said.
“Personnel deployed have specialized training for operations in chaotic environments such as the ones we have recently faced across the country,” the statement said.
But when CBP sent its elite Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC) unit to Portland, a site of heated unrest, members of the unit were filmed roaming the city confronting protesters and pulling some into unmarked vans — enraging demonstrators, who accused them of kidnapping.
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown said the agents’ actions put “both Oregonians and local law enforcement officers in harm’s way.”
Former Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Gil Kerlikowske said that while the tactical unit previously had responded to civil unrest, the unit’s skill lay in tracking fugitives in deep wilderness.
“I’d call it way beyond mission creep. I’d call it totally inappropriate and ineffective use” of CBP resources, he said.
Critics say the response from law enforcement also is troubling because it showed Customs and
Border Protection and local departments treating First Amendment-protected protests on the same level as potential acts of terrorism.
“When you have the deployment of such militarized agencies to First Amendment-protected protests, you’re going well beyond best police practices for crowd control,” said Shaw Drake, a policy specialist at the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas’ Border Rights Center.
Free federal help
In Texas, the agency assisted or offered to assist about a dozen smaller agencies.
Customs and Border Protection sent sniper teams and dozens of members of its tactical team to help monitor George Floyd’s funeral in Pearland, southeast of Houston.
It offered “aerial assets” to Val Verde County on the border as well as drones and riot weaponry to police in Kingsville, and called the Ector County Sheriff’s Office to see if it could help there.
In Refugio, the agency sent 10 officers and patrol vehicles, records show, though an official from the Refugio County district attorney’s office said the agents guarded the interior of the courthouse and didn’t interact with protesters.
Local departments do not have to reimburse federal agencies for such assistance.
In the years following 9/11, President George W. Bush overhauled the nation’s immigration and border protection agencies. Customs and Border Protection was born when officials fused the Border Patrol, Customs Service, and the Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service into one agency, overseen by the Homeland Security Department.
The agency patrols the northern and southern borders, oversees the nation’s ports-of-entry, and collect tens of billions of dollars every year through the enforcement of trade and tariff laws.
The agency employs more than 45,000 armed personnel and has a budget of more than $20 billion, larger than the combined strength of the FBI, Secret Service, Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the U.S. Marshals Service.
“Since about 2010, the apprehensions have been going way down, but it’s a sexy agency to throw money at for boots on the ground,” said Marco Lopez, another high-ranking former official at Customs and Border Protection. “So if you’re not catching people at the border, but have to justify your budget, you begin to open offices inside the U.S. This is how you end up with offices further north.”
Unrestrained workforce?
As it has grown, Customs and Border Protection has come under increasing criticism as civil liberties watchdogs and others complain of human rights abuses that go unchecked and misconduct from an unrestrained workforce.
More than 1,300 agents were arrested for misconduct from 2014-18. A 2015 government audit found the agency lacked sufficient internal investigators and that CBP’s arrests for corruption “far exceed” such statistics at other federal law enforcement agencies.
And over the past decade, more than 100 people have died in encounters with Border Patrol agents, according to information from the ACLU, including incidents where agents shot at migrants or suspects across national borders without consequence.
Customs and Border Protection’s expansion beyond its traditional role comes “without a policy debate about what is the appropriate role of CBP and what it should be,” said John Sandweg, former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“When you deploy Air/Marine or BORTAC, those guys all exist for a reason, to make our country more secure,” he said. “To deploy where they have no training, where they are going to cause trouble … it’s outrageous. You can talk about being ‘tough on the border,’ but this isn’t tough, it’s stupid.”
Gonzales, the Refugio County sheriff, didn’t see it that way. In the midst of the protests elsewhere, he didn’t want to take any chances.
“I didn’t want to wait until the last minute to call for troops,” Gonzales said. “If I had dealings with these aggressive people, I’d get ready with snipers or whatever I needed to protect my people.”