Would Patrolling With The Border Patrol Change Your mind About The Border?

Some Border Patrol agents think that if liberal Americans saw what they saw, they’d change their mind about the border.

- Mattathias Schwartz

On the outskirts of McAllen, Texas, a few miles north of the Rio Grande, a dun-colored warehouse squats on the corner of West Ursula Avenue and South Ware Road. Formally known as the Central Processing Center, it is surrounded by a chain link fence and numerous signs prohibiting photography. A few years ago, it was occupied by an injection-molding company. Since then, it has been retrofitted by the federal government to lock up as many as 1,000 individuals at one time.

The Central Processing Center is a monument to “deterrence,” the idea that undocumented immigrants will stop showing up at the border if the punishments inflicted upon them there are severe enough. Deterrence dates back to Bill Clinton’s presidency, but it reached an unprecedented level of harshness in 2018 inside the Central Processing Center and at least two other facilities, where hundreds of children were forcibly taken from their parents under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy. The forced separation lasted from April until mid-June, when Ginger Thompson of ProPublica obtained a now-infamous audio file from the interior of a processing center with the sounds of children wailing in Spanish for their parents. Two days later, Trump signed an executive order that effectively ended across-the-board family separations.