'These are his people': inside the elite border patrol unit Trump sent to Portland

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'These are his people': inside the elite border patrol unit Trump sent to Portland

Bortac, a quasi-militarised outfit equivalent to the Navy Seals, has been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan

by Ed Pilkington

Federal officers use chemical irritants and projectiles to disperse Black Lives Matter protesters on 24 July 2020, in Portland. Photograph: Noah Berger/AP

Published onMon 27 Jul 2020 05.00 EDT

In January 2011, James Tomsheck, then a top internal affairs investigator inside US Customs and Border Protection, attended a meeting of about 100 senior CBP leaders in a hotel in Irvington, Virginia.

Amid the sanitized splendor of the hotel ballroom, he vividly recalls hearing the nation’s then highest-ranking border patrol agent, David Aguilar, laying out his vision for the future. Border patrol, the former CBP deputy commissioner said, was to become the “marine corps of the US federal law enforcement community”.

Another leading CBP figure remarked that border agents were not required to adhere to the same constitutional restraints on the use of force as other law enforcers. “We are not cops,” he said.

Fast forward to this month, when Tomsheck absorbed with mounting foreboding the images of federal officers – led by border patrol agents – wielding teargas and flash bangs against protesters in Portland, Oregon.

As news circulated of demonstrators being shot in the face with “less lethal” munitions, and of unidentified masked agents in camouflage strong-arming civilians into unmarked vans, the nightmare scenario Tomsheck had heard expressed by his bosses almost a decade ago – of border patrol becoming a nationwide militarized force operating outside constitutional constraints – was becoming real.

“Border patrol has always seen itself as a militarized force, and that aspiration is now being enabled by the current administration,” Tomsheck told the Guardian.

On Thursday, Trump ramped up his threat to send border patrol agents into US cities to tackle what he claims is an epidemic of violence and anarchy sweeping urban areas. He told Fox News he was prepared to send in 75,000 federal officers, warning: “We’ll go into all of the cities, any of the cities. We’re ready.”

Protesters hold cellphone lights as they gather at the justice center and courthouse as feds attempt to intervene after weeks of protests in Portland. Photograph: Amy Harris/REX/Shutterstock

Trump has made what he depicts as crime-ridden inner cities under the control of incompetent Democratic mayors a running theme of his hyper-partisan presidency since its inception. He famously invoked “American carnage” in his 2017 inauguration speech.

By dispatching federal agents to Portland, and potentially rolling out the exercise to other cities such as Chicago, New York and Albuquerque, the US president has turned his dystopian oratory into political reality.

That he should have selected the US border patrol as the lead agency in his new reality-TV bid to seize control of civilian streets is especially alarming to those who are familiar with the agency’s track record. The most comprehensive tally of its fatal abuses, recorded by the Southern Border Community Coalition, has found at least 111 people have died as the result of an encounter with a border agent since 2010.

Tomsheck investigated numerous cases of what he concluded to be inappropriate use of lethal force resulting in needless death during his time at CBP internal affairs from 2006 to 2014. “Time and time again I saw incidents unfold where people – always Latinos, almost always Mexican citizens – lost their lives at the hands of border patrol agents.”

In the same period, the Bush administration drastically expanded the border patrol, almost doubling the number of agents to its current 20,000 and boosting its budget from $1.5bn in 2006 towards the $5bn it is today. The CBP now prides itself at being what it calls “one of the world’s largest law enforcement organizations”.

While the size and scope of the agency has mushroomed, its accountability has lagged behind. Daniel Martinez, a sociologist at the University of Arizona, analyzed the how abuse complaints are handled and found that the body acts with relative impunity.

His research led him to the conclusion there is “a culture of cruelty towards migrants and border crossers that dehumanizes and demeans border crossers. So to see border agents who have already been desensitized by the mistreatment of immigrants redirected to engaging with protesters in the interior is very concerning.”

A border patrol agent detains an undocumented immigrant near a section of privately-built border wall under construction on 11 December 2019 near Mission, Texas. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images

More concerning still is that the federal officers deployed in Portland, ostensibly to protect federal property, were spearheaded by an elite unit, the border patrol tactical unit. Better known as Bortac, it is a quasi-militarised outfit equivalent to the Navy Seals.

Todd Miller, the author of Empire of Borders, has dubbed Bortac as “the robocops of US border patrol”.

Operating largely in secret, Bortac agents are trained for Swat-style raids on organized gangs smuggling immigrants or drugs across the US border. They have been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in many Latin American countries.

Their frontline role in Portland was controversial because they have no apparent training in crowd control or the policing of protests. It built upon the Trump administration’s decision in February to dispatch Bortac into the US interior to work alongside Ice immigration officers in apprehending undocumented immigrants in Democratically-controlled “sanctuary cities”.

Jenn Budd spent six years working as a senior border patrol agent until 2001 when she blew the whistle on a station chief who was himself smuggling drugs. She was offered promotion in exchange for her silence on the subject, but resigned in disgust.

In her years as an agent she got to know Bortac well. She remembers them as the “biggest guys, like the jocks in a football team. They live in tight groups like the Navy Seals, spending their time in military-style training.”

In Budd’s experience, Bortac agents are among “the most violent and racist in all law enforcement”.

The quasi-military nature of the unit goes beyond their training, percolating into their state of mind. “They don’t exist within the realm of civilian law enforcement,” Budd said. “They view people they encounter in the military sense as enemy combatants, meaning they have virtually no rights.”

That strain of extra-judicial aggression runs through everything Bortac does, Budd said. “They don’t do normal vehicle stops. They will rip drivers from their seat, throw him against the side, put him in handcuffs – the same tactics you are now seeing Bortac agents use in Portland.”

Under the rules of the border patrol they are allowed to operate within 100 miles of any US border, including those with Mexico and Canada as well as both coasts. As a result, their writ covers almost two-thirds of the population of the country – some 200 million people – and embraces nine of the nation’s 10 largest cities, many of which Trump is now targeting.

Inside the 100-mile zone, border patrol agents are to some degree free of constitutional restraints that apply to other law enforcers. “They can set up checkpoints up to 100 miles from the border, as they have at Gila Bend and Casa Grande in Arizona,” Tod Miller said. “They consciously operate as though they were above the fourth amendment prohibitions on unreasonable search and seizures, though civil rights groups fiercely contest that.”

Two other aspects of the culture of border patrol are relevant to the current furor over their mobilization in inner cities. Racism and Donald Trump.

Racism has plagued the institution for decades. Jenn Budd recalled that when she signed up for service in 1995 her Spanish instructor blithely informed her that Latino migrants were referenced within the agency as “tonks” and “wetbacks”.

“There’s a prevailing view that all migrants are criminals, and that if you stop someone in their vehicle who looks Latino and speaks Spanish, they are probably criminal too,” she said.

Last year ProPublica exposed a secret Facebook group for current and former border patrol agents whose posts were riddled with violent, racist and sexist language including jokes about migrant deaths. One of the posts exhorted agents to throw a “burrito at these bitches”, referring to Democratic congresswomen calling for an investigation of border facility abuses.

The Intercept went on to reveal that both the current chief of border patrol, Rodney Scott, and his predecessor Carla Provost, were among the group’s almost 9,500 members – almost half the entire force.

While the Facebook group was hidden from public view, there has been no attempt to obscure the passionate, almost obsessive, support that border patrol offers Trump. In March 2016 the then Republican presidential candidate received a boost to his bid for his party’s nomination when the union representing border patrol agents endorsed him.

The US-Mexico border fence is seen at sunset on 22 July 2018 in Nogales, Arizona. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images

Since then, the relationship has grown ever tighter. Border patrol has enthusiastically followed Trump’s executive orders, even when they mired the agency deep in controversy such as when its agents removed infants from their mothers’ arms under Trump’s 2018 policy of family separation.

The National Border Patrol Council, the agents’ union, is in lock-step with Trump. Of the top 20 posts on its Twitter feed, all but three are retweets of Trump’s personal or campaign messages.

In a video statement embedded on the feed, the union’s president, Brandon Judd, declares that “President Trump is the right candidate for the safety and security of this great nation, not Joe Biden. Please join me in supporting President Trump.”

The Trump-border patrol partnership bears all the hallmarks of a classic quid pro quo. On one side of the deal, the border patrol union lavishes praise on the president and supports his pitch for re-election.

On his side, Trump has repeatedly pushed for more resources for the agency and for its staff union, and is now actively promoting the fulfillment of its dream of becoming a militarized presence on America’s streets. Under his presidency, the brutalized and violent politics of the border are being extended across the nation.

“Trump has ratcheted up political ties to border patrol to another level,” Miller said. “He based his whole 2016 campaign around this, and it is now at the core of his 2020 re-election bid. These are his people.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/27/trump-border-patrol-troops-portland-bortac

The Russia report shows we have a security problem. He lives in No 10

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The Russia report shows we have a security problem. He lives in No 10

Carole Cadwalladr    

The prime minister’s silence on the findings of the intelligence and security committee speaks volumes

Sun 26 Jul 2020 09.15 BST

 Illustration: Dom McKenzie/The Observer

If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, is it a duck? Or, more pertinently, at the moment, if Boris Johnson acts like a Russian asset and talks like a Russian asset, is he a Russian asset?

This isn’t a cute Johnsonian provocation. An “asset” in intelligence terms is not necessarily someone who actively works for a foreign state. It’s someone who’s used by a foreign state. It’s someone who acts – knowingly or unknowingly – to further that state’s interests.

I’m not making allusions to Johnson’s meeting at an Italian palazzo with the former London KGB chief weeks after Russia had released a chemical weapon on Britain’s streets, which I reported on last autumn, as gobsmacking as that was. Or his relationship with Alexander Temerko, a Russian oligarch, who happens to both try to influence Tory policy and give the party money. Because Johnson almost certainly does only what is in Johnson’s best interests.

It’s just that in the case of Russian interference in our elections, and specifically the EU referendum, Johnson’s best interests are Russia’s best interests. And it was in both of their interests last week to disregard the findings of the report published by the intelligence and security committee (ISC).

“This is about pressure from Islington Remainers who had seized on this report to try to give the impression that Russian interference was somehow responsible for Brexit,” Johnson said, in response to a question that had nothing to do with Brexit.

It doesn’t matter why Johnson who, until 2016 was an Islington Remainer, made these remarks. Or what motivated him or what he seeks to gain from them. But by politicising a report from the ISC he has done something dark and dangerous. Because the ISC does not act like other committees. It is scrupulously non-partisan and proudly independent. The findings of the report were endorsed by its current and previous Conservative chairs. And to reject its findings is not just a foreign policy win for Russia – and all other states that could benefit from interfering in our elections – it’s a fork in the road for Britain, the parliamentary democracy.

“This committee has been subject to unprecedented delay and dislocation,” Julian Lewis, the committee’s new chair, said on Tuesday. “This must never happen again.” But what can be done to prevent it? Nothing.

What did Johnson know, when? What role did he play in MI6’s lack of action? Is he negligent? Is he complicit? And will someone ask Sir Alex Younger, the head of MI6? Because in December 2016, a month after the US election, he made a rare public speech. The internet had changed everything, he said, and the “connectivity at the heart of globalisation” had created a “fundamental threat to our sovereignty”. It was a warning. But to whom? The prime minister, Theresa May? Or his boss? Boris Johnson.

It took nearly a year for any kind of response at all. Then, in November 2017, May made a landmark speech: “Russia, we know what you are doing,” she said.

The timing of this was not an accident. It was two weeks after the first of Robert Mueller’s indictments were unsealed. Many threads of his investigation ran through London. The Russian ambassador was a key conduit between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin in the summer of 2016, when Johnson was foreign secretary. And WikiLeaks, based in London’s Ecuadorean embassy, was revealed to be “Organisation A”, a channel for Russian intelligence. It was no longer credible to ignore British involvement in a transatlantic web of Kremlin-influenced operations.

And yet that’s exactly what we did. That’s the revelation of last week. “In stark contrast to the US handling of allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election,” the report notes, “where an intelligence community assessment was produced within two months.” Hundreds of FBI agents, lawyers and prosecutors worked for more than three years on Mueller’s investigation in the US. Here, on the other hand, when asked by the committee for its assessment on Russian interference in the referendum, MI5 initially handed over six lines. Six lines!

This has been staring us in the face for four years. We know the big tech platforms have created a vulnerability at the heart of our democracies. We can no longer feign ignorance. And yet we do. Perhaps at the heart of it all is the infected abscess that is the EU referendum. We need to understand what happened in it, the MPs said last week, to have any hope of protecting our elections in the future. This is an urgent matter of our national security, uncomfortably overlapping with our politics. Because what else might an inquiry find? 

The Russians stand accused of exploiting with disinformation and lies the same platform that Johnson’s chief aide, Dominic Cummings, exploited with disinformation and lies.

Perhaps at the heart of it all is the infected pustule that is the EU referendum

And then there’s Arron Banks. Or “page 13, footnote 50”, as Kevan Jones, the MP for North Durham, told the press conference when asked if Banks was in the report. The only individual named in the 44 pages, as a tweet from Leave.EU pointed out, “and cleared”, and who had threatened to sue the committee before it had even published.

By the time Theresa May made her speech in November 2017, I’d been working for a year on my investigation into big tech and the EU referendum and was disturbed by the lack of investigation in Britain. That week, I wrote an angry piece: “Theresa May has finally acknowledged that Britain is not insulated from fake news and lies from the Kremlin, but what is the government going to do about it?’

Nothing, it turned out. Not a thing.

Earlier this year, I spent days writing a chronology of this investigation. It’s for the court case that Mr [REDACTED] footnote 50, p13 continues against me.

November 2017 was an inflection point, not just for me but Britain too. Just three months later, Russia would use a nerve agent on our streets and kill a British citizen. “Russia, we know what you are doing,” May said. But we didn’t. We still don’t. And, under Boris Johnson, we refuse to look.

This is a vital report that demands a response. That it hasn’t got one from the man who is leading the country is a source of profound disquiet. This is a critical moment and the decisions we make now will affect our future.

If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it is a duck. Britain has a national security problem. And his name is Boris Johnson.

• Carole Cadwalladr is a reporter and feature writer for the Observer

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/26/the-russia-report-shows-we-have-a-security-problem-he-lives-in-no-10


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My comments :

1. Since (post-Gladio) NATO and (at least a number of) the security services of its members (and some even beyond NATO) have already been deeply involved in using "the social media" in order to organise regime change (by software versus by military hardware) in third world countries - and notably do even partly use the very same firms (like SLC) as many (also western) political parties have been entertaining for a number of years now, in order to win elections / referenda on many levels - it is extremely hard to congest, why these security services had not been (early) warning the public about the dangers of purposely stealthily manipulated election results.

2. Are (sections within, at least a number of) those security services complicit in this election fraud (for example) because of possible political bias and / or have they been afraid of limiting legislation to be introduced as soon as they might have rung the alarm bells, that might compromise their political / geo-political objectives elsewhere in the world. 

3.  Given the deep involvement of (NATO related) security services in the manipulation of elections (and public opinion in general) one would be forgiven to assume that especially Facebook and its main shareholder Zuckerberg c.s. might have been deeply involved into the works of those security services; maybe even to a degree of (near) total dependence on those security services....... 

4.   

   

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Forget Putin, it's meddling by America's evangelical enforcer that should scare us

Simon Tisdall

Secretary of state Mike Pompeo has a track record of pursuing the worst impulses of the US political right

Sun 26 Jul 2020 07.00 BST

Mike Pompeo speaking at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in California on 23 July. Photograph: David Swanson/EPA

U

S sheriff Mike Pompeo rode into town last week, telling whoppers as is his wont. The secretary of state – Donald Trump’s top enforcer – accused Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the World Health Organization chief, of cutting a secret pre-pandemic deal with China. Because of this, “you’ve got dead Britons,” he claimed. Pompeo offered no proof. It was an outrageous smear. But Tedros is a wanted man in Washington. He verbally gunned him down.

Pompeo justified January’s real-life assassination of Iran’s Gen Qassem Suleimani by saying he posed an “imminent” threat to US interests.

Declaring the killing unlawful, the UN investigator, Agnès Callamard, ruled this month there was not a shred of evidence to support this. Iran hawk Pompeo had reportedly urged the hit for months. It was he who finally convinced Trump to order the killing.

Pompeo was caught out again last year before Trump’s impeachment. He initially denied detailed knowledge of the phone call in which Trump tried to persuade Ukraine’s president to investigate the son of his White House rival, Joe Biden, saying he had not read the transcript. It later emerged Pompeo had listened in on the call. Democrats accused him of obstructing justice.

Speaking at Texas A&M University last year, Pompeo cheerfully confessed to telling lies when it suited him during a political career that began with election to Congress as a far-right Tea Party member in 2010 and took him to the CIA and state department. “I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. It was like we had entire training courses,” he said, as if reprising Marlon Brando’s role in The Ugly American.

In a week when parliament’s report into Russian interference in British life provoked deep soul-searching, the behaviour of Britain’s best friend bears closer examination, too.

In terms of overt and covert influence-peddling, arm-twisting and behind-the-scenes meddling, the US leaves Russia in the shade. And by hook or by crook, Washington, unlike Moscow, usually gets its way.

The US government shows two faces to the world. One is benign, open, and high-minded. The other is darkly dominated by selfish calculation, ultimately reliant on brute force. Pompeo, Trump’s most influential adviser and possible successor, is the undisguised, snarling face of this latter form of manipulative, intrusive and mendacious American power.

He once told Israelis Trump was sent by God to save the Jews from the Persians

In less turbulent, less polarised times, the “special relationship” brought advantages for Britain. In many respects, the opposite is now true. The latest example of US pressure tactics, detrimental to the national interest, was Pompeo’s hysterical appeal last week for a united front of “free nations” to battle China’s “new tyranny”. Manufacturing a cold war with Beijing may suit Trump and the Republicans as they cling to office. It does not suit Britain.

Similarly ill-judged and unwelcome is the Trump administration’s attempt to destroy the International Criminal Court, a part-British creation of which the late Labour foreign secretary, Robin Cook, was rightly proud. Pompeo has imposed sanctions and launched a bogus corruption probe. The ICC’s offence? It dared to investigate alleged US war crimes in Afghanistan.

Pompeo and fellow hawks have done all in their power to prevent Britain and its European allies keeping lines open to Iran after Trump reneged on the 2015 nuclear deal.

They now appear embarked, with Israel, on a covert war of sabotage against Tehran. If it comes to a fight, they will expect UK support. The US has dismissed British views on the climate emergency and the Paris treaty, undermined the UN and Nato, ducked its obligations in Syria and the joint fight against Isis, and sought to drag the UK into half-baked regime-change plots in Venezuela and Cuba.

None of this double-dealing will surprise those who recall Ronald Reagan’s secret deployment of nuclear-armed cruise missiles in Britain in the 1980s.

Clement Attlee’s government quickly discovered the high cost of American friendship after 1945. The Suez humiliation confirmed it. Today, Britain is still paying for the damaging impact of the US “war on terror” and its Iraq adventurism on national security, human rights and international law.

Pompeo’s evangelical faith and apocalyptic “End Times” views help explain US efforts to thwart another long-held British aim: a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine. The support for Israel of Pompeo and fellow Christian Zionists is unconditional and uncompromising. He once told Israelis Trump was sent by God to save the Jews from the Persians. “I am confident the Lord is at work here.”

A recent Pompeo speech elevating religious and property freedoms over other human rights, such as on abortion, was seen in Washington as a further fleshing out of an ultra-conservative platform in preparation for a 2024 presidential bid. Pompeo is an energetic networker. He has been investigated for using taxpayer-funded state department “Madison dinners” to cultivate wealthy political donors. In London last winter, he attended an “off-the-books” meeting of the Hamilton Society, a private US-UK group of well-connected business leaders.

Days before last week’s UK visit, when he condescendingly praised Boris Johnson for dumping China’s Huawei and again ignored calls for justice for British hit-and-run victim Harry Dunn, Pompeo was in backwoods Iowa, a key state for any future presidency. Lauding what he called his “100% pro-life foreign policy”, he declared: “This administration appreciates and knows that our rights come from God, not government. Can I get an amen to that?”

Some Americans may put their hands together. But ungodly Britons who value hard-won, not divinely conferred, democratic rights should beware. Here was an unscrupulous, ambitious and dangerous man – far smarter than Trump – feeding the prejudices, fears and schisms of an alien, alienated society. With friends like these, who needs Russia?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/26/forget-putin-its-meddling-by-americas-evangelical-enforcer-that-should-scare-us