Jesús Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez, the 2 federal immigration brokers who killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, are Latinos from South Texas—Ochoa a Border Patrol agent, Gutierrez a Customs and Border Safety officer. Statistically talking, this could come as no shock. Over the previous half century, Latinos went from making up a negligible fraction of Border Patrol brokers to constituting half of your complete power. Latinos have been central to the work completed by the Border Patrol for many years.
However when ProPublica first revealed the brokers’ identities, again in February, I seen progressives recoiling on-line on the thought that Latinos would take part in Donald Trump’s mass-deportation marketing campaign, and in probably the most violent manner attainable. That impulse, I believe, stems from a still-common inclination to see Latinos as one-dimensional actors motivated primarily by their sense of solidarity with different Latinos. An accompanying, often unstated, perception is that emotions of ethnic solidarity should be extra vital than individuals’s differing views of what’s proper and simply. The identical dangerous considering led many People to imagine that Latinos may by no means vote for Trump.
Teachers, too, have handled the phenomenon of Latino border brokers as one thing of a puzzle. The anthropologist Josiah Heyman on the College of Texas at El Paso has argued that Latino Border Patrol officers don’t establish with the Latino neighborhood. The political scientist David Cortez at Notre Dame has written that the officers be part of the power primarily for the wage and advantages. Most lately, the sociologist Irene Vega at UC Irvine argued that these Latinos come to embrace the mission of the Border Patrol by way of the method of socialization throughout coaching.
A less complicated clarification is that Latinos who be part of ICE imagine within the enforcement of immigration legal guidelines and that they’re defending, not antagonizing, their communities. Border Patrol recruitment movies characteristic Latinos and goal them with tales concerning the pleasure of the job, the medication they’d intercept, the criminals they’d arrest, the self-discipline and sense of mission they’d purchase at coaching camp. Throughout his first time period, Trump honored one Latino Border Patrol officer on the White Home for locating nearly 80 migrants trying to enter the USA behind a semitruck, and he invited one other as a visitor to a speech he gave throughout a joint session of Congress in 2025. Latino Border Patrol officers have testified because the company’s leaders earlier than Congress, the place they’ve highlighted its accomplishments, defended it in opposition to criticism, and expressed their agency conviction in its mission. Claudio Herrera, a Mexican immigrant who grew to become a Border Patrol officer, mentioned in an interview with CNN late final yr that typically individuals ask him, “Aren’t you ashamed of apprehending your personal?” to which he responds, “In fact not, as a result of I’m defending my neighborhood.”
Silvestre Reyes, who represented a border district as a Democrat within the Home from 1997 to 2013, joined the Border Patrol in 1969 after serving in Vietnam. He grew to become the power’s first Hispanic sector chief in 1984. A number of Latino sector chiefs succeeded Reyes: Gustavo de la Viña, who later grew to become the primary Latino nationwide chief; Victor Manjarrez Jr.; Raúl Ortiz, who additionally grew to become nationwide chief; and Gloria Chavez, the primary lady to turn out to be a sector chief.
The trail that Latinos take to a profession in regulation enforcement regularly begins at universities within the Southwest border area. California State College at Lengthy Seaside, California State College at Los Angeles, San Diego State College, Arizona State College, the College of New Mexico, New Mexico State College, Texas State College, and different colleges provide majors in prison justice.
The criminal-justice-studies program on the College of Arizona has about 800 college students, Alex Braithwaite, the director of the college’s Faculty of Authorities & Public Coverage, informed me. Greater than 40 % of criminal-justice majors at his college establish as Latino, and a majority are ladies. Braithwaite guessed that the share of criminal-justice majors who’re Pell Grant–eligible and first-generation faculty college students is increased than the share for the federal government college as a complete, through which 30 % are Pell eligible and 35 % are first-generation. So is the share of Latino college students majoring in prison justice in contrast with that of different tracks: About 30 % of scholars within the college’s different concentrations establish as such.
At Texas A&M Worldwide College, within the border metropolis of Laredo, the criminal-justice program has 705 undergraduate college students, nearly all of whom are Latino. The coed physique as a complete is greater than 95 % Hispanic or Latino. This system’s co-directors, Brittany Hood and Daniel Scott, informed me of their college students in an electronic mail: “Rising up on the border, they see up shut that the work—particularly on the federal stage—is advanced and human, involving commerce, public security, and immigration enforcement all of sudden. Many see these careers as a option to serve, to construct stability for his or her households, and to convey their bilingual expertise, judgment, and sense of duty into roles the place they imagine their presence actually issues.”
Customs and Border Safety declined to make any present brokers accessible for interviews, however one window into their considering is likely to be a 2021 documentary referred to as On the Prepared. The draw for some Latinos to a profession in regulation enforcement, together with with the Border Patrol, begins after they’re younger. If Latinos are socialized to establish with regulation enforcement, that course of begins lengthy earlier than they turn out to be an agent. Many Latinos within the Border Patrol grew up within the communities the place they now work.
There are nearly 1,000 criminal-justice scholar golf equipment at excessive colleges in Texas. The movie tells the story of some Latino college students within the membership at Horizon Excessive Faculty, half an hour east of downtown El Paso. Horizon’s lecturers are former officers of the regulation; the varsity holds profession festivals the place native, state, and federal brokers stand by tables with promotional literature and clarify the advantages of working in regulation enforcement. The scholars put together for a contest in opposition to comparable golf equipment at different colleges. In it, they take part in a simulation of a real-life crime situation, sporting tactical gear and armed with pretend pistols and pretend semiautomatic weapons.
One scholar’s dad emigrated from Mexico and spent years working as a chauffeur, hoping for a greater life for his daughter. When he hears her discuss working for the Border Patrol, he proudly remarks that every one of his onerous work is starting to repay. Round their dinner desk, she reveals him and her mother job advertisements touting beginning salaries of about $50,000.
A Border Patrol agent tells a scholar that it’s onerous to be a Latino officer in a border metropolis the place civilians “see us because the enemy, they usually don’t see the nice we do for the neighborhood”—presents for low-income households for Christmas, turkeys for Thanksgiving. “They see us as household wreckers,” he mentioned, including that he has been “yelled at, cursed at, spit on, and punched at, simply due to what I do.” The dialog causes the coed to have some misgivings about her profession targets, however ultimately she nonetheless aspires to work for the Border Patrol.
The 2 lecturers who lead Horizon Excessive’s Legal Justice Membership in the present day, Victor Perez and David Falin—each Latino, and each former law-enforcement officers themselves—have labored on the college for only a few years every. They weren’t round when the documentary was made and, they informed me, haven’t watched it. The membership attracts 15 to twenty college students yearly, and lots of pursue a profession in regulation enforcement. Perez and Falin urge them on this route, partially as a result of they fear that their college students may get in bother with out the construction and self-discipline that careers in regulation enforcement can present.
Whether many younger Latinos who be part of the Border Patrol imagine that they’re saving their neighborhood, not betraying it, in fact doesn’t imply that different Latinos settle for their logic. After the discharge of ProPublica’s report that exposed the identities of the brokers who shot Alex Pretti, some critics resorted to language about self-hatred and betrayal of neighborhood.
A commenter wrote on Instagram, about Ochoa and Gutierrez, that in South Texas, “vendidos abound” (vendidos means “sellouts”). One other mentioned, “White supremacy has a protracted historical past of encouraging individuals of all races to promote out their very own in change for its protections.” One commenter on the ProPublica publish revealing the identities of Ochoa and Gutierrez referred to as every agent “Uncle Tomás.” One other responded to a publish by PurosLatinosTV, which has 240,000 followers on Instagram: “Lack of loyalty inside our personal is a big no no.”
For a really very long time, some Latinos have referred to as different Latinos race traitors for appearing in methods they disagree with. Liberal Latinos tagged conservative Latinos with such monikers after they voted for Trump. Phrases like these mirror long-standing divisions inside the Latino neighborhood—and present that individuals inside a neighborhood could be simply as proof against its complexity as individuals exterior it.
