The early months were defined by disorganization and an overarching lack of clarity. From Spokane, Washington, the regional district director admitted that “not being familiar with the provisions of the Congressional Act establishing the Border Patrol and having received no definite information from the Bureau, considerable doubt and uncertainty exists as to the authority vested in the Border Patrol officers and the scope of their duties.”80 He followed with a request for guidance from the Bureau of Immigration regarding what the districts were supposed to do with this new patrol force. “It would therefore seem that the work would be greatly facilitated, and more in conformity in the different Districts, if the Bureau would issue some specific instructions,” he wrote.81 The commissioner-general of the Bureau of Immigration responded with little substantive guidance when he explained, in August of 1924, that he, too, was unsure of the new patrol force’s authority and function. “If the Bureau is right in its understanding of the matter,” he wrote, “the border patrols are now without the slightest authority to stop a vehicle crossing the border for the purpose of search, or otherwise, nor can they legally prevent the entry of an alien in violation of law. In other words, they possess no more powers than does the ordinary citizen, who can exercise police powers only at the request of a duly constituted officer of the law, or to prevent the commission of a felony.”82 Without any clear authority to enforce U.S. immigration restrictions, the commissioner-general of Immigration advised the district director in Spokane that Border Patrol officers “would be guilty of assault” if they used any amount of physical coercion while attempting to “prevent a violation of the immigration laws.”83 With no authority to act in the enforcement of U.S. immigration restrictions, the new patrolmen were little more than ordinary citizens. The confusion among top administrators regarding what to do with these new ordinary citizens on the Immigration Bureau’s payroll naturally spread to the new recruits in the summer of 1924. Wesley Stiles, for example, entered on duty as a U.S. Border Patrol officer on July 28,1924, in Del Rio, Texas. “No one knew what we were supposed to do or how we were supposed to do it . . . . So we just walked around and looked wise,” recalled Stiles of his early days on patrol in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.84
With neither direction nor authority, the Border Patrol officers stammered through the summer and fall of 1924. In December of 1924, the Immigration Bureau took the first step toward distinguishing Border Patrol officers from the “ordinary citizen” by providing uniforms for the officers.85 The uniforms flagged the U.S. Border Patrol as an emergent police force, but two more months passed before Border Patrol officers were invested with police powers to enforce U.S. immigration laws. Congress established the Border Patrol’s law-enforcement authority with the passage of the Act of February 27,1925 (43 Stat. 1049–1050; 8 U.S.C. 110). According to this act, a Border Patrol officer was authorized to “arrest any alien who in his presence or view is entering or attempting to enter the United States in violation of any law or regulation made in pursuance of law regulating the admission of aliens, and to take such alien immediately for examination before an immigrant inspector or other official having authority to examine aliens as to their rights to admission to the United States.” In the case of Lew Moy vs. the United States (1916), the U.S. Supreme Court had determined that an “alien is in the act of entering the United States until he reaches his interior destination.”86 The 1925 Act and the Lew Moy decision gave Border Patrol officers broad authority to interrogate, detain, and arrest any person they believed to be engaged in the act of illegal entry, a violation of U.S. immigration law that extended from the moment unauthorized immigrants crossed the border until they reached their interior destination. The 1925 Act also authorized a Border Patrol officer to “board and search for aliens any vessel within the territorial waters of the United States, railway car, conveyance, or vehicle, in which he believes aliens are being brought into the United States, and such employee shall have power to execute any warrant or other process issued by any officer under any law regulating admission, exclusion, or expulsion of aliens.”87 As such, the 1925 Act invested Border Patrol officers with broad powers of arrest without warrant in the pursuit of U.S. immigration law enforcement and defined a massive jurisdiction for Border Patrol work.
Over the years, there would be many shifts in the policies guiding the interpretation of the Border Patrol’s jurisdiction and authority, but the 1925 Act defined the substance and limits of the Border Patrol’s law-enforcement capacities until 1946. According to the 1925 Act, Border Patrol officers could chase unsanctioned immigrants and search vessels within the broader borderlands and, without a warrant, arrest those they suspected of being engaged in the act of unlawful entry. Border Patrol officers also held the power to serve warrants in the enforcement of all U.S. immigration laws. These powers defined the U.S. Border Patrol as the uniformed, law-enforcement wing of the U.S. Immigration Service. Still the patrol’s job remained mired in questions and complexities.
Given the various classes of exclusion, the many methods of unlawful entry, and the extended periods during which immigrants were subject to deportation, the United States Border Patrol was confronted with forging a manageable program for U.S. immigration law enforcement. In particular, from the long list of U.S. immigration restrictions, Border Patrol officers needed to prioritize the many possibilities of migration control and develop everyday practices of U.S. immigration law enforcement. The rapid localization of U.S. Border Patrol personnel and supervision allowed the officers of the U.S. Border Patrol to direct this project.
THE MEN OF THE U.S. BORDER PATROL
Clifford Alan Perkins first arrived in El Paso, Texas, in 1908. He needed a job, but—as he recalled—“nobody seemed to be interested in hiring an inexperienced, nineteen-year-old semi-invalid.”88 A suspected case of tuberculosis had forced Perkins to move away from his family in Wisconsin and seek out relatives in Texas. The dry El Paso climate improved his health, but finding work in the border town was difficult. Fortunately, low pay and bad hours caused the Post Office to have “trouble filling an opening in the registered mail division.”89 Within days of applying for the position, Perkins was behind the desk at the El Paso Post Office.
The monotony of the work quickly frustrated Perkins, who “finally popped off one day about being sick and tired of [his] job to May Brick, the middle-aged spinster who relieved [him] at the registry window.”90 She suggested that Perkins apply for a job with the Immigration Service. He did not know what the Immigration Service was, but when his co-worker explained that officers for the Immigration Service dealt with “immigration, exclusion, deportation and expulsion of aliens” and that the starting salary was twice what he was earning at the Post Office, Perkins recalled, “that was enough for me.”91 He signed up for and passed the Immigration Service’s next civil service exam. On January 4,1911, the Immigration Service appointed Perkins as a Mounted Chinese Inspector within its Chinese Division.
In 1904, the U.S. Immigration Service had established a small force of officers assigned to enforce the Chinese Exclusion Acts along the nation’s borders. Never numbering more than seventy-five men for the Mexican and Canadian borders, the Mounted Guard monitored border towns and patrolled the borderlands to apprehend undocumented Chinese immigrants. As a Mounted Chinese Inspector, Clifford Perkins worked from Nogales, Arizona, to Brownsville, Texas, looking for, questioning, and deporting undocumented Chinese immigrants. He quickly moved up within the Immigration Service and in 1920 became