This reporter says Border Patrol has been given extensive reach, not surprised by Minnesota deaths

Democrats in Washington struck a deal with President Donald Trump to end a prolonged government shutdown and fund the government while they negotiate reforms for immigration officers and the Department of Homeland Security.

Since the shooting deaths of two U.S. citizens at the hands of federal officers in Minneapolis, Democrats have refused to fund the Department of Homeland Security until reforms are put in place — including that agents remove their masks, wear body cameras and obtain warrants before entering people's homes or cars.

The whole debate is shedding light on what Melissa del Bosque said most people who don’t live near the border probably don’t realize: Border Patrol doesn’t have the same level of oversight that your local police department has, despite having one of the largest federal budgets in Washington.

"They don't reveal the names of their agents or details of their internal proceedings and fatality or misconduct investigations. They haven't widely adopted dash border body cameras. They even kept their use of force policy secret until several years ago, and they investigate themselves."

Del Bosque is a longtime border journalist and co-founder of the Border Chronicle — and she told The Show, in that time she’s covered many Border Patrol-related deaths and was not surprised by what happened in Minnesota.

Full conversation

MELISSA DEL BOSQUE: In watching these terrible shootings in Minneapolis, I was thinking of Raymond Mattia, who was shot and killed in 2023 by a Border Patrol agent on Tohono O'odham land, and he was shot outside of his home. That hasn't been properly investigated. The family has a civil case against Border Patrol, but that, you know, that death is still there. And, you know, we had another terrible case in Arizona back in 2012 where an agent shot through the fence into Mexico and killed a 16-year-old teenager.

And the Supreme Court ruled that if you were killed in Mexico by a U.S. agent, you had no bearing in a U.S. court because you're not on U.S. soil. But can you imagine, you've got a U.S. agent shooting through the border fence, killing somebody in Mexico. I mean, just imagine If that happened in reverse, and somebody from Mexico did that to somebody in the U.S., you know, that would be, you know, hell to pay.

LAUREN GILGER: Let me ask you, Melissa, about the culture of agencies like Border Patrol. You've done a lot of reporting on this and the reason why there's less accountability, as you're saying. And also, you know, just they function differently. They see themselves differently.

I think we've seen a lot of talk about how, you know, local law enforcement, local police departments, for example, are coming out right now and saying, you we will always identify ourselves. We will not cover our faces.

Like, these are the differences between how we will comport ourselves as opposed to these federal law enforcement operations that are coming into our cities. But I think it sounds like the differences go deeper than that?

DEL BOSQUE: Yes. I mean, Border Patrol very much sees itself as a paramilitary organization, not as like a law enforcement organization. And actually, Border Patrol, they have trainers that go around the world to different countries and train border guards. And so they have this very extensive reach.

And I think, I think Congress has just looked at it in the past as like, these agents are dealing with people who are trying to cross the border illegally. So, you know, we need to let them do whatever they think they need to do. There's been this sort of hands-off attitude towards border patrol since their creation. And they've also been highly politicized as well. They came out very publicly in favor of Donald Trump before his first administration, supporting his campaign.

And the Border Patrol Union became very powerful during the first Trump administration, essentially setting border policy and bypassing the Department of Homeland Security. It was the head of the Border Patrol Union, Brandon Judd, who had Trump basically on, you know, speed dial on his cellphone.

And he is now actually the ambassador to Chile, the former head of the Border Patrol Union. So they endorsed Trump very strongly and continued to support him through the Biden administration. And they were very, you know, against the Biden administration and very vocal about it.

GILGER: So taking a political kind of tact, what's the difference between Border Patrol and ICE, not just in their given roles, but in the cultures of those organizations?

DEL BOSQUE: Well, ICE is, it's broken down into a few different layers. There's the HSI, which is their investigative, Homeland Security Investigations arm, which was actually trying to separate itself from the ERO and the deportation part of ICE. And, you know, ICE has been, their jurisdiction has been the interior of the country.

So they would be more coming into contact with long-term residents, people with, you know, immigration status, whereas Border Patrol is supposed to be confined within the border regions, but they see their jurisdiction as the entire circumference of the United States within 100 miles.

GILGER: OK.

DEL BOSQUE: So they have quite a range, Border Patrol. And the issue there is that they've been moving further and further and further into the interior. They have these interior checkpoints that you'll see in Arizona, you know, we have them, and in Texas.

And so there's been this call over the last several years to sort of restrain them from going further into the interior, because ICE is already in the interior, so you don't need Border Patrol in the interior.

GILGER: Right, but we are seeing exactly that now, Border Patrol in Chicago and Minneapolis, right?

DEL BOSQUE: Yeah, I think with the DHS Secretary Kristi Noem giving Greg Bovino, who was the El Centro Sector chief for Border Patrol in California, giving him the sort of roving commander position and allowing him to go wherever he wanted and bringing, you know, special Border Patrol tactical teams with him into places where Border Patrol, typically that would not be their jurisdiction.

GILGER: Let me ask you about hiring practices for agencies like Border Patrol, right? Like, we're seeing the Trump administration attempt to, I think, double, maybe more the force, the number of people who are going to be in these agencies as they carry out this mass deportation campaign. How much of this has to do with who's hired, what kind of training they receive, that kind of thing?

DEL BOSQUE: It has a lot to do with the training. So, in my long career, I've been reporting on the border since the late-90s, there were quite a spate of fatal Border Patrol shootings around 20, you know, between 2010, 2012. That's when Jose Elena was killed in Nogales.

And that was because they had done a very rapid hiring of agents with, you know, little training and, you know, not much in background checks. And so they they had this very rapid expansion of their agents. And then we saw this uptick in shootings and violence because these agents hadn't been properly trained. And that took several years to fix.

And now we're just we're going to start that over again because they're doing this again. They're repeating the same mistakes.

GILGER: Let me ask you lastly, Melissa, I mean, most Americans will still say, right, like, that they support immigration enforcement broadly. They support the idea of, you know, deporting criminals who are here without documents, things like that. I mean, is there a way to do this right in terms of immigration enforcement throughout the country?

DEL BOSQUE: Yeah, I mean, immigration is an administrative civil law, right? So the system needs to be invested in. We need judges, we need asylum officers, we need, you know, people who can process cases. A lot of this can be handled through interviews and paperwork. You don't need to be in full commando out there with an AR-15, throwing tear gas at people. That has nothing to do with immigration enforcement, really, at all.

So that investment needs to be made in having a 21st century immigration system that provides the labor that our economy needs, that allows families to remain united. And that acknowledges our economy, our current economy, because the immigration system has not been really updated since the '90s, the '80s and the '90s. It's very outdated. And until Congress can really agree on this in a bipartisan manner, it's just going to continue to get worse.