The latest violent imagery to emerge from Border Patrol’s actions at the U.S.-Mexico border warrants not only outrage and immediate action, but also deep reforms to an entrenched culture of abuse at Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the federal law enforcement agency that includes the sub-agency Border Patrol. One video from Del Rio, Texas shows a Border Patrol officer telling a Haitian migrant, “This is why your country’s shit, because you use your women for this!” This abhorrent comment is not an aberration: CBP has long had a pervasive culture of cruelty and dehumanization of migrants that includes this kind of — often anti-immigrant and racist — verbal abuse. The Biden administration must ensure CBP personnel treat people with dignity and humanity.

Narrow investigations and hollow assurances are not an adequate response to Border Patrol’s horrifying treatment and verbal abuse of Haitian migrants in Del Rio, Texas. President Biden must immediately prioritize a systemic overhaul of CBP, including fundamental reforms of its use of force policies, hiring and disciplinary practices, and complaint mechanism. In light of Border Patrol’s long-standing failures, President Biden should oppose any move to reward the agency with increased funding. And Congress, for its part, should also be shrinking the agency’s budget, not contemplating any increase.

Every day, CBP carries out U.S. border policy and interacts with migrants through the filter of an agency culture steeped in cruelty, xenophobia and racism, violent inhumanity, and impunity. On rare occasions, the agency’s abusive actions are caught on camera. But images of CBP tear gassing families, surveillance video of a child dying on the floor of a Border Patrol facility, or horse-mounted agents menacing migrants captured on camera tell only a small part of the long history of the agency’s violent actions, and the lack of accountability with which they have been met.

The Border Patrol, initially a small agency, was established in an anti-immigrant atmosphere in 1924. It employed white supremacists, including Ku Klux Klan members, from the outset, and its early history included regular beatings, shootings, and hangings of migrants. Now, after rapid expansion in the early 2000s due to unprecedented funding, Border Patrol’s ranks include nearly 20,000 agents, making it the nation’s largest law enforcement agency. It is also the least accountable.

At least 191 people have died following encounters with Border Patrol in the last decade. Six of these deaths were caused by Border Patrol agents shooting across the border into Mexico — yet no agent was held accountable for the killings. The agency lacks basic accountability practices: No agent has ever been convicted of criminal wrongdoing while on duty, despite deaths in custody and uses of excessive, deadly force. The agency’s discipline system is broken. As James Tomsheck, CBP’s former internal affairs chief, has described, the agency “goes out of its way to evade legal restraints” and is “clearly engineered to interfere with [oversight] efforts to hold the Border Patrol accountable.”

Between just 2019 and 2020, the ACLU filed 13 administrative complaints with internal oversight bodies, documenting hundreds of cases of CBP abuse–including of asylum seekers, families, pregnant persons, and children, among other misconduct. Existing accountability mechanisms have failed to prevent abuses or adequately hold agents to account in ways that would deter future misconduct.

Border Patrol’s abuses are also not limited to the border itself–and have particularly targeted communities of color in the United States. The agency deploys its massive police force across the country where agents profile, surveil, and militarize U.S. communities. Just last year, Border Patrol agents terrorized and kidnapped protesters from the streets of Portland after deployment to Black Lives Matter protests sparked by George Floyd’s murder, and sent sniper units to George Floyd’s burial service with authority to use deadly force.

Verbal abuse of migrants is not unique to the mistreatment documented in Del Rio. In 2019, the ACLU received reports from migrants that detailed verbal abuse by Border Patrol agents. The abuse included bullying, harassment, threats, racism, and misstatements about U.S immigration law. Reported abuse was in line with that in the Del Rio video: For example, migrants described Border Patrol agents calling them derogatory terms and making comments such as, “I’ve fucking had it with you, this is why you guys don’t advance in your country.”

As the disturbing videos from Del Rio show, verbal abuse often accompanies agents’ physical violence. For example, a Border Patrol agent who pleaded guilty in 2019 to repeatedly hitting a migrant with a truck sent text messages in which he described migrants as “disgusting subhuman shit unworthy of being kindling in a fire.” His attorney defended the xenophobic messages as “part of the agency’s culture” and “commonplace.”

Border Patrol’s abuse often targets those who are particularly vulnerable. In 2014, more than 50 children reported verbal abuse. “You’re the garbage that contaminates this country,” one agent told a child. Children have reported that CBP has called them a wide range of derogatory names Migrants also have reported numerous highly derogatory anti-LGBTQ comments.

The agency’s long-entrenched culture of violence and abuse toward migrants is completely contrary to the basic dignity and respect with which all migrants — and anyone who encounters law enforcement — should be afforded.

The Biden administration cannot reward these kinds of human rights abuses by federal law enforcement officers nor allow them to continue. The administration must reject Border Patrol efforts for increased funding and must undertake a complete overhaul of CBP policy and practices, including:

• Reforming CBP’s use of force standards, including through public policies and robust transparency requirements for use-of-force incidents and investigations;
• A moratorium on new Border Patrol hires;
• Expanded training, particularly cultural competence and bias/anti-racism training;
• New public disciplinary guidelines that mirror best practices in other law enforcement agencies; and
• The creation of a publicly accessible national database of complaints and written resolutions.

We laid out these and other detailed recommendations before the start of this administration. CBP’s rampant abuses are doomed to repeat themselves absent robust reforms.

Agents domineered over migrants, menacing them with horses and lariats and making derogatory comments in Del Rio with the eyes of the country upon them. But agents have acted this way with impunity for many years out of the public view — and it is past time for these racist and anti-immigrant abuses to end.

When President Joe Biden came into office, he promised to end the cruelty and inhumanity of President Trump’s immigration policies.

While the Biden administration has halted some of the former administration’s cruelest policies, far too many unjust anti-immigrant policies remain, and thousands of immigrants are paying the price. On Biden’s watch, Border Patrol agents are now attacking Haitian asylum-seekers and migrants in Del Rio, Texas — including small children. The government is using the illegal Title 42 program to fly people to Haiti, a country reeling from political unrest and severe natural disasters, without the opportunity to apply for asylum or other protections. Almost twice as many people are detained on an average day by Immigration and Customs Enforcement than at the start of this administration, many in prisons run by private corporations that are profiting from human misery. Only two out of more than 200 ICE detention sites have been closed.

On too many fronts, the Biden administration is failing to deliver on its promises to end the inhumane treatment of immigrants. That’s why today, we’re joining the Detention Watch Network, FIRM Action, Mijente, United We Dream, and the We Are Home Campaign’s “Communities Not Cages” National Day of Action.

We are calling on the Biden administration to shut down detention sites where thousands of people languish for months or even years. Many of these sites have well-established records of horrific conditions, reports of abuse and serious medical neglect. Detention conditions have grown even worse during the COVID-19 pandemic as detained people are left with few options to properly protect themselves from the virus.

Even if a government takes steps to improve detention conditions, detention itself is simply cruel and unnecessary. Immigration detention tears people away from their families and loved ones — when instead, they could navigate their legal proceedings while living in and continuing to contribute to their communities. Indeed, until the 1980s, most immigrants were not detained while navigating the legal process.

Today, immigration detention has become the norm, not the exception, and anti-immigrant politicians continue to seek more detention in a bald-faced attempt to ensure that the U.S. government punishes people for coming here — despite their legal right to seek asylum and other forms of relief in the United States.

The White House could have — and should have — started to dismantle this system of mass incarceration from the outset of this administration. Doing so would have been amply justified. As highlighted by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), this system ballooned under the Trump administration and squandered millions of taxpayer dollars, to the benefit and profit of private prison corporations. At the same time, ICE detention has grown increasingly unpopular, as is evident from the recent passage of anti-detention legislation in New Jersey, Washington state, and Illinois.

It’s not too late: Our movement has the momentum and the opportunity to push the Biden administration for transformative change. We must move away from using detention to punish and deter migration. We must start welcoming immigrants with dignity.

When Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 8 (SB 8) into law in May, I felt an unwelcome sense of déjà vu. In January of 2016, I was dialing every phone number I could find, trying to locate a clinic where I could receive abortion care in Austin, where I live. After many phone calls, some of which I accidentally made to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers, I finally found one of the last open abortion clinics and got an appointment. I was seven weeks pregnant, and their schedule was packed; the earliest opening they had was more than two weeks later. This was the wreckage of House Bill 2, a restrictive abortion law passed in 2013 that forced approximately half of all abortion clinics in the state to close. The U.S. Supreme Court would ultimately overturn the law in June 2016, just months after I had my abortion, bringing relief to Texans seeking basic health care.

This month, Texans like me hoped our rights might be protected by the Supreme Court again. Instead, they let us down by allowing the most restrictive abortion law in the country to take effect. Now, in my work with a fund supporting Texans’ access to abortion, I’m hearing every day from panicked, confused patients who are trying to get an appointment as I did in 2016, and facing wait times as long as a month — too late for many to access care under SB 8. I’ve been reminding some patients to do what I did: keep calling each day to see if any cancellations open up earlier appointments. And then we work together to come up with a plan for out of state care to avoid delaying their abortion further.

SB 8 bans abortion as early as six weeks into pregnancy — before many people even know they’re pregnant; roughly 85 to 90 percent of people who get abortions are at least six weeks into pregnancy. This law has decimated abortion access in the state, and I’m watching it happen in real time.

This law is cruel, and it’s violating.

I’ve been hearing from many people with housing insecurity who are struggling to quickly figure out how to travel hundreds of miles out of state to access abortion care. And it was already difficult to access abortion as a Texan, especially for people with low incomes, Black women, Indigenous folks, people of color, undocumented folks, our queer and trans communities, disabled people, and youth. SB 8 is racist, classist, and ableist, and these communities are the first to experience the impacts of abortion restrictions. Some folks living in Southern Texas have no way to even leave the state because of border patrol checkpoints. Getting abortion care is hard for everyone in Texas, but now it can be outright impossible, and will continue to be hardest for these Texans.

While this assault on our rights would be terrible at any time, it’s especially dangerous during a pandemic. Texans were already forced to jump through these political hoops last year when our governor deemed abortion non-essential and banned it for over a month at the beginning of COVID-19. Patients were turned away from the clinic at the last second and forced to travel as far as Oklahoma and Colorado, much like now. At a time when Gov. Abbott should be protecting Texans, he is more concerned with regulating our bodies and putting our health and lives at risk — again. He is more concerned with making sure I don’t have an abortion — by all means necessary — than he is with protecting the two children I have by not requiring masks inside public schools.

Though things may feel isolating and scary right now, I want Texans to remember that abortion is still legal in all 50 states. SB 8 may restrict abortion to before around six weeks, but make sure to keep in touch with abortion funds and advocates; things can often change quickly and misinformation surrounding SB 8 is spreading. We are here to help you sort through the confusion and get the resources you need.

Although it was difficult to access abortion in Texas, the staff at my clinic and the abortion fund that helped me were wonderful, and that was powerful for me. Everything I am as a person now is because I had an abortion. It allowed me to be the parent I wanted to be, led me to a career I love, and it was the first time I really understood what it meant to be a supporter of abortion rights. We may have a right to a legal abortion, but that doesn’t mean it’s accessible. Under SB 8, that’s more true than ever, but we are going to continue to fight for our right to safe and legal abortion, regardless of our zip code, and regardless of how much money we make, no matter what.

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Follow Paige on Twitter at @palexa_dria