'These are his people': inside the elite border patrol unit Trump sent to Portland

[Judi Lynn]

Bortac, a quasi-militarised outfit equivalent to the Navy Seals, has been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan

by Ed Pilkington
Mon 27 Jul 2020 05.00 EDT

In January 2011, James Tomsheck, then a top internal affairs investigator inside US Customs and Border Protection, attended a meeting of about 100 senior CBP leaders in a hotel in Irvington, Virginia.

Amid the sanitized splendor of the hotel ballroom, he vividly recalls hearing the nation’s then highest-ranking border patrol agent, David Aguilar, laying out his vision for the future. Border patrol, the former CBP deputy commissioner said, was to become the “marine corps of the US federal law enforcement community”.

Another leading CBP figure remarked that border agents were not required to adhere to the same constitutional restraints on the use of force as other law enforcers. “We are not cops,” he said.

Fast forward to this month, when Tomsheck absorbed with mounting foreboding the images of federal officers – led by border patrol agents – wielding teargas and flash bangs against protesters in Portland, Oregon.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/27/trump-border-patrol-troops-portland-bortac

[aquamarina]

1. This shit needs to be top

Of the list on Jan 2021 of things that need to be ended. Period.

[Igel]

2. Could have been ended in 2011. n/t

[Midnight Writer]

3. These fellas are not, have never been, and never will be "equivalent to the Navy Seals".

They look largely out of shape and undisciplined to me.

More the equivalent to our Beer Belly Brigade.

[JI7]

4. That's what I notice also. They remind me of those people at the Charlottesville

Hate gathering where the guys were dressed up in what Trump wears during golfing.

Just a bunch of out of shape losers.

[Kaiserguy]

5. What we need is the equivalent of the Nuremburg Trails

With all of the Trump Brownshirt put on trail for their crimes.

[riversedge]

6. Trump basically has his own private army

Trump has made what he depicts as crime-ridden inner cities under the control of incompetent Democratic mayors a running theme of his hyper-partisan presidency since its inception. He famously invoked “American carnage” in his 2017 inauguration speech.
Advertisement

By dispatching federal agents to Portland, and potentially rolling out the exercise to other cities such as Chicago, New York and Albuquerque, the US president has turned his dystopian oratory into political reality.

That he should have selected the US border patrol as the lead agency in his new reality-TV bid to seize control of civilian streets is especially alarming to those who are familiar with the agency’s track record. The most comprehensive tally of its fatal abuses, recorded by the Southern Border Community Coalition, has found at least 111 people have died as the result of an encounter with a border agent since 2010.

Tomsheck investigated numerous cases of what he concluded to be inappropriate use of lethal force resulting in needless death during his time at CBP internal affairs from 2006 to 2014. “Time and time again I saw incidents unfold where people – always Latinos, almost always Mexican citizens – lost their lives at the hands of border patrol agents.”

In the same period, the Bush administration drastically expanded the border patrol, almost doubling the number of agents to its current 20,000 and boosting its budget from $1.5bn in 2006 towards the $5bn it is today. The CBP now prides itself at being what it calls “one of the world’s largest law enforcement organizations”..............

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/27/trump-border-patrol-troops-portland-bortac