Book review: Border Patrol Nation, by Todd Miller

by Todd Miller
City Lights
3 stars
Tony Perry

In his scathing examination of the US Border Patrol, Todd Miller says the agency has gone rogue since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, trampling on the dignity and rights of the undocumented with military-style tactics.

"The US Border Patrol is not just the 'men in green', it is a much larger complex and industrial world that spans from robotics, engineers, salespeople and detention [centres] to the incoming generation of children in its Explorer [programmes]," he writes.

Miller is not an armchair theorist. He has reported on border issues for a decade, and writes of the people he sees as the victims of the Border Patrol's abrasiveness and also of the cruel deportation policy of the Obama administration that breaks up families.

In the chapter on that policy, "Feeding the Monster", Miller writes that one of its victims is a 12-year-old boy in Tucson who watched in horror as his father was taken away for deportation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. His father's only crime was that he did not have the appropriate documents to remain in the United States.

In the fear that descended on the US after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Miller argues, elected officials called for greater enforcement and greater intelligence gathering with little thought of the consequences. The result is that the agencies under the Homeland Security umbrella have become out-of-control growth industries.