“Nobody is Protected” from Border Patrol: My Conversation with Reece Jones (Repost)
Border Patrol is one of the most controversial yet misunderstood law enforcement agencies in the country. Fellow geographer Reece Jones unpacks this agency is his latest book.
This post was first published in June 2022 at Politics & Prose’s virtual book launch for Reece Jones’s book “Nobody is Protected: How the Border Patrol Became the Most Dangerous Police Force in the United States.” With immigration enforcement agencies back in the headlines, this conversation is as relevant as ever. Listen to my conversation with Reece below and thanks to Politics & Prose for hosting us.
Reece Jones and I sat down in 2022 to talk about his new book “Nobody is Protected” at his book launch event hosted by Politics & Prose in Washington, D.C. I encourage you to get (and read) his book, because it’s a compelling deep dive into the Border Patrol, one of the most important and misunderstood law enforcement agencies in the country.
We touched on many of the main themes of his book in our discussion, including the troubling history of why civil rights protections don’t exist in the same way along the border, how much of Border Patrol’s activity actually has nothing at all to do with immigration and border enforcement, and why the agency is now also getting involved in policing in places far from the border.
Dr. Reece Jones is professor of geography and current chair of the geography department at The University of Hawaiʻi - Mānoa. If you’re waiting on his latest book to arrive in the mail, I would encourage you to check out his other influential works including:
Violent Borders, an examination of the deadly effects of borders around the world.
Open Borders, an edited volume of very thoughtful critiques of borders from various moral, historical, and geographical perspectives.
And of course, White Borders, a close critical reading of the role that racism has played (and continues to play) in shaping the US immigration system.
All of Reece’s books are thoughtfully written and very accessible while also being richly informed by his scholarly work.
Politics and Prose is one of my favorite bookstores, so being a part of the event was a special experience for me. Moreover, it’s rare to see two geographers together in a non-geography space like this, so hopefully this talk also gives viewers some perspective on the exciting and relevant field of human geography.
If you weren’t able to join us, you can watch or listen to that video on YouTube below. There are no real visuals, so you could easily treat this like a podcast. You can purchase his book directly from the publisher Counterpoint Press.
About the Book
Late one July night in 2020, armed men, identified only by the word POLICE written across their uniforms, began snatching supporters of Black Lives Matter off the street in Portland, Oregon, and placing them in unmarked vans. These mysterious actions were not carried out by local law enforcement or even right-wing terrorists, but by the U.S. Border Patrol. Why was the Border Patrol operating so far from the boundaries of the United States? What were they doing at a protest that had nothing to do with immigration or the border?
Nobody Is Protected: How the Border Patrol Became the Most Dangerous Police Force in the United States is the untold story of how, through a series of landmark but largely unknown decisions, the Supreme Court has dramatically curtailed the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution in service of policing borders. The Border Patrol exercises exceptional powers to conduct warrantless stops and interrogations within one hundred miles of land borders or coastlines, an area that includes nine of the ten largest cities and two thirds of the American population.
Mapping the Border Patrol’s history from its bigoted and violent Wild West beginnings through the legal precedents that have unleashed today’s militarized force, Guggenheim Fellow Reece Jones reveals the shocking true stories and characters behind its most dangerous policies. With the Border Patrol intent on exploiting current laws to transform itself into a national police force, the truth behind their influence and history has never been more important.
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Looking forward to reading the whole article. Thanks for writing & researching.