THE CORROSION OF THE SOUL:

During Lenihan's training for the US Border Patrol, a drill sergeant yelled at him for 69 days. In role-playing scenarios, he was assaulted and beaten as part of his training. Police-grade pepper spray was shot into his eyes as he did jumping jacks. He underwent 77 hours of intensive firearms training, often using outlines of human torsos and heads as targets. The lines of good and bad, innocent and evil, legal and illegal were drawn clearly every day.

Yet when Agent Brendan Lenihan clasped Rogelio's callused hands in their common struggle to carry Roberto to safety, for a fleeting moment, the border was gone. With it went his uniform, badge, laws, and gun. In their place was a bridge, across which he could see and feel the world from Rogelio's side--his longing, his love, his family, and his anguish and despair. As the black bile continued to ooze out of the boy's mouth, Rogelio looked at Brendan with a terrified grimace. Then the radio crackled, calling Lenihan back to the US Border Patrol once again. For Roberto, in the agent's arms, the border had never left. It continued to kill him.

The helicopter wouldn't be able to safely land by the car. They landed instead at a nearby clearing. As Brendan snapped back to protocol, the previous moment remained with him--a transformative moment, a bridge to another reality. "I usually have hands-on contact with someone just long enough to put on handcuffs and send them away, and there I was, holding hands with someone I'd usually just arrest."

"As a border patrol agent," Lenihan said, "you have a muted sense of empathy because you see so much all the time that you just don't know how to cope."

Brendan's empathy transcended Border Patrol training and culture. No More Deaths, a humanitarian aid organization that compiled thousands of testimonies of people who were abused during short-term detention, charged the Border Patrol with producing "a culture of cruelty" in a 2011 report. Sean C. Chapman, the lawyer of Agent Matthew Bowen, who in 2019 faced federal charges for hitting a Guatemalan man, Antolín López Aguilar, with his Border Patrol truck, gave a glimpse into this culture during the trial. Chapman was forced to explain the trove of text messages from Bowen uncovered by prosecutors, one of which described migrants as "disgusting subhuman shit unworthy of being kindling for a fire."

Throughout his text conversations, Bowen used the word "tonk"--onomatopoeia for the sound of an agent's flashlight striking a person's head. Chapman made a startling claim, throwing the "bad apple" narrative to the wind: In Bowen's defense, he stated that the denigrating language used by his client was "commonplace throughout the Border Patrol's Tucson sector, and that it is part of the agency's culture." All of this underscores what Greg Grandin wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The End of the Myth: The U.S. Border Patrol has been "a frontline instrument of white supremacist power" since its founding in 1924.

Over the years, I have interviewed many agents in many settings, from government offices to private homes. While these interviews and other reporting confirm the existence of a top-down, violent, and dehumanizing culture among border enforcement personnel, it is much more difficult to generalize about the agents themselves. Talking one on one, I have met agents whose attitudes span a wide spectrum. For example, one agent attempted to justify using snipers to shoot at "aliens" if they were suspected of smuggling. When I asked the agent how he could identify who was a smuggler, he replied that smugglers have phones, and pointed to his hip.

While these interviews and other reporting confirm the existence of a top-down, violent, and dehumanizing culture among border enforcement personnel, it is much more difficult to generalize about the agents themselves.

Another agent I interviewed was an expert marksman in charge of conducting trainings at a shooting range, but admitted that he hated guns. He told me he had vowed to write a scathing account of the Border Patrol when he retired. A former agent was a thoughtful historian who, while working for the Border Patrol, spoke critically about US drug laws and advocated for legalization. His mother was from Chihuahua, Mexico, and he joined the Border Patrol after he lost his job at Circuit City when the company went under in 2007. But the Border Patrol job did not last either. His pride in his Mexican ancestry and his advocacy for marijuana legalization ended up drawing the attention of those in higher command, who fired him. Even though 50 percent of the Border Patrol agents are Latinx, when they show pride in their heritage, if they dare, their loyalty to the United States is questioned.

After a long interview at another agent's house, the man invited me to join him for dinner. His openness and hospitality, as with many of my other interviewees, challenged my preexisting expectations and biases. Becoming sympathetic to Border Patrol agents, even liking some of them, has had an odd effect on me. I began to see that the agents were the most visible elements, yet only a small part of a much bigger system that included paper pushers, policy-makers, politicians, and private corporations that sell bullets and weapons and high-tech cameras for a profit.

Focusing solely on the agents obscures this vast and hidden world of the border-enforcement apparatus--a world funded by everybody in the United States who pays taxes. And through taxes, my own connection to this apparatus is direct. I pay the agents' salaries, I pay for the drones, I pay for the groundsweeping radar systems and aerostats, I pay for the detention centers, I pay the administrators who sign into policy the most heinous treatment of our fellow human beings. I play a part in perpetuating a system that sustains a world of catastrophic inequalities where 2,153 billionaires have more money than 4.6 billion people--60 percent of the world population. Our taxes enforce such hierarchies of inequality and determine who can move across certain lines of division and who cannot, who serves and who is served. Individual agents are cogs in a complex machine made of disposable parts. If they do not sufficiently conform to this system, if they do not conform to the militant enforcement of US borders, they get fired. This grander theater spares no one, including the agents, in its inhumanity. And, as Francisco Cantú writes about in The Line Becomes a River, the theater doesn't spare the agents from the nightmares and the trauma.

Another blockade to empathy fits right into this. According to Krznaric, it is "the human tendency to obey authority." He uses the example of one of the administrators of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, who claimed no responsibility for his actions during his 1961 trial. Eichmann's defense was that he was simply "doing his job." Part of that job was to abide by the Nazi classifications of people such as Untermenschen--subhumans--the category given to Jews, Roma, Slavs, and people of color. It is also worth remembering that Adolph Hitler praised US immigration law in 1936 by saying that the United States was "making progress toward a healthy racial order."

As political theorist Hannah Arendt famously pointed out, there was nothing psychopathic about Eichmann: He was a fairly typical person who "did his duty" and "not only obeyed orders but obeyed the law." He was, Arendt said, "terribly and terrifyingly normal." The same is true for most of the Border Patrol agents I've met and interviewed. Once, in a weekly birthing class, I was awkwardly paired for weeks with an agent who was also expecting a child. When we shared what we did, he said he worked for the Border Patrol. I said I wrote about the border. And we just left it at that. Most agents want to enjoy their days off with their families and friends. Yet all must obey the top-down command structure. If they do not obey authority, they lose their jobs.

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