Reece Jones

In the United States, people look overseas, puzzled at the numerous national police forces used by corrupt or ideological governments to control the citizenry or foist a reign of terror on everyone. This could never happen in the USA, as police are constitutionally local or state institutions. Federal forces like the FBI and the National Guard have very specific and limited mandates and jurisdictions. But in Nobody is Protected, Reece Jones shows that the USA is building a national police force, already nearly 20,000 strong, which has the self-delegated mandate to completely ignore the constitutional rights of citizens and in particular the 4th amendment on unreasonable search and seizure.

The poster child for this ominous mess is the Department of Homeland Security and it border patrol, the CBP (Customs and Border Protection). Mandated to find undocumented entrants to the USA, it has spread itself to the interior of the country, expanded its purview to spying, drugs and protesters, and multiplied its staff out of all proportion to its needs. In a thorough and intensive (not to mention engrossing) examination of its operations, Jones found that most agents have all but nothing to do all day long except doomscrolling. And hassling people. But they’re ready to crack skulls on demand.

In order to make some use of all those agents, the force has been expanding its role, without any basis. It now operates drones, for example, to track the movements and meetings of environmentalists within the country, as well as political protesters. It sells the video to other forces. It encircled the funeral of George Floyd in Texas with a shoot-to-kill mandate if it received violent pushback. It has set up a good hundred highway checkpoint blockades, where agents eyeball drivers and passengers. The slightest suspicion (from avoiding eye contact to staring at the officer) will cause them to pull the vehicle over, and set drug-sniffing dogs on it and in it.

Worse possibly, it has spread this unconstitutional interference in daily life to its ever-expanding territory, currently 100 miles inland from any border or shore. This takes in two thirds of the population of the country. This is not border protection by anyone’s definition. And it involves absolutely anyone just driving to work. Asked at the Supreme Court if they could stop and search the president’s car, the answer was yes. It was at that point that Justice Thurgood Marshall said, then “no one is protected,” giving this book its title.

During the Trump administration, the president encouraged the CBP to interfere in protests in cities like Portland, Oregon. It rented unmarked vans that non-uniformed and non-identifiable officers kidnapped people off the streets, drove them far away from the action, and dumped them. Without charges, due process, identification, or anything. In crystal clear violation of the 4th amendment on unreasonable search and seizure by the government. Not to mention the interruption or curtailment of free speech. This is exactly why a national police force is to be avoided.

In the case of the highway checkpoints, the CBP often invites local police to participate, handing out tickets for anything they feel like, and nothing at all to do with illegal immigrants, who are few and far between. This annoys literally millions of Americans every day, subject to this neverending harassment.

And when I say harassment, Jones gives an extraordinary example. Terry Blessi is an astronomer at the University of Arizona. Using a university-marked truck, he drives up to the observatory, and must stop at the CBP checkpoint. On his 283rd stop, he had had enough. He refused to answer the silly questions, and was eventually waved through anyway because he was holding up the line. An officer then chased him, stopped him and arrested him for it. For holding up the line. By this time Blessi had long stopped using the university’s truck, and equipped his own with cameras. He had been posting the videos on Youtube, and the arresting officer complimented him on them. He enjoyed them, just like he enjoyed his job arresting people. In court, as elsewhere, the officer explained he just loved stopping as many cars as he wanted and giving out tickets. Plus, this was a wonderful opportunity to do it for additional pay.

It seems the CBP obtained huge funding from the federal government to pay local police to staff their blockades for them. It has co-opted and dragged local forces into manning and operating its facilities, even though the local cops aren’t there for immigration infractions. Just like the CBP is not there for drug busts. That’s how twisted the whole thing has become. The story of Blessi the astronomer goes on for ten pages, getting ever more surreal as it goes. It’s a cross between 1984 and Brazil, but it’s live in the USA. A daily insult to all.

Jones also provides a remarkable list of celebrities who have been stopped and charged – not with illegal entry, but with drugs or paraphernalia - on their road tours, or just personal trips, such as Snoop Dogg on his way to his son’s football game. The checkpoints bring in lots of drugs charges, but precious few illegal immigrants, which is supposedly their sole purpose and the only reason they are even allowed. There are so many drug charges that local police have changed their systems to simply ticket offenders because they can’t handle the trials of all the cases the CBP unloads on them hourly.

At one such stop called Sierra Blanca, on Interstate 10, 80% of the arrests are of American citizens, not immigrants. And 88% of the charges are for minor drug possession, not illegal entry. And while the town has a population of less than 800, 2500 arrests are made annually. Jones does not say whether the town has been able to stop collecting taxes from its residents.

Similar blockades now appear in New England, to guard against all the infiltration by Mexicans from Québec. With similar results. In one study of the blockade in Woodstock, Vermont, none of those arrested on any charge had crossed from Canada. Jones says overall at Woodstock, less than one quarter of one percent of those arrested is Canadian.

Jones does not venture into the economics of it, but it is pretty obvious that millions of cars slowing and stopping on interstate freeways cost a huge amount in lost time, wasted gas, worn brakes, air pollution and general frustration over infringement of the freedom of movement inside the country.

The CBP has been aided in no small part by the US Supreme Court. In three key cases, Jones portrays the justices and their clerks, many of whom have since become well known in their own right, as they alone decided what powers the CBP should have and how they could use them. It is very detailed and character-driven, a fascinating look at the inner workings of the court and the mindset of its movers and shakers. And, unfortunately, how really bad decisions are made at the very top.

Specifically, Justice Potter Stewart, with no experience or expertise in such matters, wrote two of the key decisions, forever confusing the issues and leaving gaps the CBP could drive its trucks through. There is also the conflict with the Ninth Circuit (west coast), where the blockades in question are located, and the conflicts between those who try to uphold the Bill of Rights and those who ignore it at the Supreme Court. It makes for compulsive reading, a totally unexpected immersion and an additional reason why Nobody is Protected is an important and valuable book.

These ill-thought decisions, openly criticized by Justice William Brennan precisely for their unconscionable unconstitutionality, built on each other, giving the CBP the absolute right to racially profile at will. The result has been extreme discrimination against Latin Americans, in a police force not just comfortable with it but enjoying the racially specific work. Agents who don’t use the slurs for different nationalities become outcasts themselves, Jones quotes a former agent as saying. It’s that bro kind of atmosphere, nationwide.

They also kill with impunity. Again, courts have created absurd frameworks whereby officers cannot be held liable for shooting someone on the Mexican side of the border if the officer was on the US side. And unless both were on the US side, the victim’s family has no standing to sue at all. No surprise then that not a single CBP officer has been convicted of killing any of the 119 people it has murdered since 2010.

CBP agents sport other disappointing stats too. They themselves are arrested at five times the rate of regular police officers, Jones says. And about one a day is arrested for child pornography or domestic violence while off-duty. And while on-duty officers get charged for sexual shenanigans with detainees, the agency ignores 95% of those cases. This is not the A-Team.

One of the problems, the big one, is there is little or no need for the CBP at all. Arrests of illegal immigrants have plunged to microscopic levels as the number of agents has rocketed. Today, Jones says, the average CBP agent brings in one illegal immigrant every 11 shifts. That means barely two a month. Meanwhile, total arrests have sunk by 75%. (The agency called ICE handles the actual border crossings where most of the detentions take place.) So management needed to find things for their people to do.

The stories of agents swarming cities in Wisconsin with nothing to do are not legend; they are accurate. Jones tells the story of an agent there who overheard two Hispanic women actually speaking Spanish to each other, right in public, and detained them for it. He called for backup and supervision and caused a whole scene in the parking lot of the store while the women, one born in Texas and the other in California, were grilled until there was nothing to hold them for, except having the nerve to speak Spanish in Wisconsin. So yes, the CBP needed to somehow justify its unjustifiable staffing and budget.

It settled on scope creep.

Now that the border patrol is being used to corral protesters, environmentalists and natives, subdue riots and snarl highway traffic, their own training comes in for examination too. Jones says straight out “What they are not trained for are de-escalation strategies or civilian interactions, as DHS memos warned prior to the summer 2020 deployments to U.S. cities to deal with crowd control.” They are trained to look for Mexicans and bring them in, one at a time.

The past was no better, by the way. The book details the glorious history of the force, tracing it right back to the out of control Texas Rangers in the time of The Alamo. Jones makes it colorful and vivid. Whatever its name, the force has always been home to racists and bigots, looking for a way to live out their Wild West fantasies, ruining the lives of others at will. As much as Bressi the astronomer was hassled in his 300 encounters with the CBP, he is white. He was not strip-searched, beaten, raped or killed. He was driving a marked University of Arizona truck to work. Imagine how many times and in how many ways anyone who fit the racial profile has to put up with, daily. It is a motorized version of the also justifiably hated Stop and Frisk of local police.

The force is a clear case of ethnic cleansing in the USA. In 1882, Congress passed the first law focused entirely on ethnic cleansing, when it banned any Chinese from immigrating. This added a legal shine to the ethnic cleansing of Mexicans and native American Indians that was already well entrenched.

In 1934, Senator David Reed of Pennsylvania was proud to shepherd a bill formalizing the border patrol specifically to prevent the mix of races then in the USA from ever changing. That was its raison d’être, preventing a change in the racial mix. The Supreme Court then specified who the agents could profile, according to their skin color and “Mexican-style” haircuts. This is about as overt as American governmental racism gets. And it came directly from the top.

The conclusion of Nobody is Protected is bit surprising. Jones focuses on the border and how it would be better to have a border police that was humane and even-handed, instead of racist and automatically against and suspicious of everyone it encounters. I mean, this is the same Reece Jones who points out early on that one of the reasons for the 2nd amendment regarding the right to bear arms was to support slave patrols. State militias spun out these patrols, whose officers could invade any locale or home without a warrant, looking for escaped slaves, and seizing contraband like pencils and paper that were dangerous in the hands of Negroes. Unreasonable search was their pleasure. The Ku Klux Klan was a legitimate expression of those slave patrols enshrined in the 2nd amendment of the Bill of Rights. The CBP is their direct descendant.

His conclusion misses his whole point. The border police are redundant. America doesn’t need a shakeup and better hiring practices for the border police. It needs to rein in the uncontrolled growth of the border police into a national police force that nobody wants or needs or has approved. Stop using tax dollars for illegal search and seizure across the country.

The US also needs a mechanism whereby the constitution cannot be ignored by conflicting laws and outlandish court decisions. Things are so out of alignment that someone as organized and perceptive as Reece Jones seems to have been numbed by the insanity of how Washington works. And this is his third book on the subject.

So if you think personal freedom is under attack, you are correct, and Nobody is Protected lays it out for me like nothing else yet has. If anything needs corralling, it is the CBP.

David Wineberg… (more)

Nobody is Protected by Reece Jones is a much-needed examination of how the Border Patrol has become a major arm of the white supremacist enforcement forces, which now includes every police department in the country since they are now actually amateurs formed into paramilitary units with powers well beyond what they need or warrant.

Between the Border Patrol and ICE the United States has, in the past few decades in particular, made it explicit that it is a white supremacist country and will use whatever means they can to maintain that hold. This book, while perhaps not stating everything quite as blatantly as I am, makes the case that as the powers have expanded for police in general they have been exponentially applied to make the Border Patrol into a racist paramilitary unit that cares nothing about rights, justice, nor human life.

I want to suggest another book to read along with this one. Not in place of, they cover some of the same ground but not all, and they come from different perspectives, but alongside. The book is Unreasonable by Devon W Carbado and addresses specifically the way the 4th amendment has been destroyed by the courts to serve the larger purpose of white supremacy. Carbado is a legal scholar and together with Jones' book they paint a grim picture of what passes for justice in this country.

I would recommend this to anyone who wants to know how and why citizens can be picked up off the street with no explanation, how and why some people can be stopped while others aren't even when they are all doing the same thing, and especially how and why justice has long been absent from the US justice system.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (more)

"This book disputes the idea that borders are a natural part of the human world and that migration is driven primarily by traffickers and smugglers. Instead, the existence of the border itself produces the violence that surrounds it. The border creates the economic and jurisdictional discontinuities that have come to be seen as its hallmarks, providing an impetus for the movement of people, goods, drugs, and weapon across it. The hardening of the border through new security practices is the source of the violence, not a response to it."

This book is necessary reading if you care even marginally about the increasingly desperate issue of violence that happens at borders. It's a well-researched, historically situated book that manages to do a lot in just 180 pages. Reece Jones is very careful to talk about the current epidemic happening at the borders as something that is the continuation and intensification of nationalism and the desire for the privileged to protect their wealth. When it comes to the movement of capital, of products especially of wealthier states, borders are pried open for their benefit even against the protest of locals. But when it comes to people, to labourers in search of better lives, and those fleeing violent conditions, borders are increasingly solid, hostile and even deadly.

"This is a collective, structural violence that deprives the poor of access to wealth and opportunities through the enclosure of resources and the bordering of states."

If people were to be able to move to seek a better life, who would be around to labour for $1.50 per hour in Bangladesh? The violence that happens at borders then is not a result of migrants or refugees, but by the increasing militarization and funding to its enforcement that allow for more punitive actions to be taken against migrants that had not existed before. There have been more deaths at borders in our current times than at any other time.

It was interesting to read parts where Reece historically traces how our relationship to land changes because of how borders got more and more prominent. The demarcation of borders even out at sea so that countries can have access to the oil reserves and other natural resources deep underground was the final frontier in enforcing borders on most of the globe.

I remember watching a short documentary about a man in India who singlehandedly saved a diminishing barren land by planting a tree on it every day. In 30 years a huge forest had already emerged and he continues to make the journey every day to plant new trees. My first thought was that this action could not be possible in countries such as mine where such areas would most certainly be sectioned off to be private property or the property of the government. As Reece describes it borders "..changed the relationship between people and the environment by redefining land and oceans as closed areas of ownership that can be exploited for economic gain, not common spaces to be shared or conserved. As individuals, corporations, and states gained ownership over land, the ability to make decisions on how to use the land shifted from a public to a private concern."

A final quote:

"Today almost all of the land in the world is claimed by states that possess the authority to use its resources and limit the movement of people. The boundaries that enclosed land into private property and established state sovereignty within territories and seas are treated as if they have always existed eternally, but even the oldest political borders are only a few hundred years old; most are only a few decades old. They are not the result of a transparent sorting of historical peoples into their own territories. Instead, borders are an efficient system for maintaining political control of an area through agreements and documents that are backed up with the threat of violence.

Although direct violence was used to impose these regulations, as the deaths at the end of the Midlands revolt attest, these enclosures are more clearly examples of the structural violence of borders. They changed the relationship between people and the environment by redefining land and oceans as closed areas of ownership that can be exploited for economic gain, not common spaces to be shared or conserved. As individuals, corporations, and states gained ownership over land, the ability to make decisions on how to use the land shifted from a public to a private concern.

The current violence at borders that targets migrants fleeing war and economic inequality in search of a better life is the latest stage in the long-term conflict between states and rulers–who control land and want to protect their rights to the wealth and opportunity captured there–and people who move in order to gain new opportunities or leave repressive conditions. The enclosure of common lands and the lack of coherence within many decolonized states often result in violence and war as control over the mechanisms of power are contested, as is currently occurring in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and South Sudan. The irony is that migrants from these disorderly artificial states, which are the remnants of European colonialism, are denied the right to move to Europe to escape the artificial boundaries Europe left behind."… (more)