Activist Vicky Hamlin, a retired tradeswoman, shop steward, and painter, shines the light — in her art and in this column — on the lives of working people and the world they live in.
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Against the Wall: My Journey from Border Patrol Agent to Immigrant Rights Activist by Jean Budd.
https://www.jennbudd.com/blog
“I was a Senior Patrol Agent with the US Border Patrol in San Diego, a Senior Intelligence Agent at San Diego Sector Headquarters and an Acting Supervisory Border Patrol Agent from 1995 to 2001 when I resigned in protest due to the rampant corruption and brutality I witnessed on a daily basis.”
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Like Jenn Budd, I was a gay woman in non-traditional work, the Border Patrol for Budd, Building and Construction trades for me. Both traditionally white, male, straight, conservative fields.
I flew through this book. It took my breathe away. It brought up things I had stuffed, reminded me of my own personal rage, rage for humanity, rage for the exploited, the forgotten, the discounted. Stifling angry back-talk when someone calls someone else out of their name, when someone is “just joking”. Or when we are put in danger, or our work is sabotaged. To deny our identity, our worth, our sexuality. To deny our rage. Stifle yourself.
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This takes its toll. Women have long internalized the need to be liked, to go along to get along. For the paycheck, for the job that comes with respect, for the initial sense of pride and accomplishment, we stay. We do harm to ourselves, to others. We stifle.
And we brutalize.
To try to understand what turns us feral, Budd describes her own experience —
“The truth was that the wall of green gave me a false sense of security, made me lose my sympathy, my compassion, my humanity and prevented me from seeing the dangers I faced from other agents and helped me excuse their behavior and my own.” (p 172)
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Campo, CA, Acting Supervisory Border Patrol Agent, 2000
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“I had joined a racist, corrupt, woman-hating law enforcement agency that, to me, resembled an organized crime family. They backed each other to the end.“ (p 173)
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from Budd’s x post: This is a senior citizen group from the Green Valley Samaritans with No More Deaths, who are the only people feeding these asylum-seeking families.
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“I noticed that I was changing too. I hated coming to work and felt like a fraud. The agency called us heroes when we returned migrants bodies. …. I certainly wasn’t a hero." (pp.141, 142)
“…I lost myself and my soul became untethered.” (p 218)
To grow up within and be subjected to the world of brutality described here is horrific. To know that no one cares will either bring you to your knees, or turn you into a warrior.
We are pack animals. Our first instinct is to be communal. Jenn Budd describes doing things that went against her own best interests and her deep gut feelings, all in the name of her pack, the Border Patrol.
And then she became a warrior.
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“I needed to look at the pain I’d caused migrants… this would be the answer to healing my soul.” (pp 217-218)
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Calexico, CA border wall/Campo. CA railroad tunnel leading to Mexico
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But is this art? Yes, yes, yes. The stories flow, they have rhythm, they paint a vivid picture, have images that get implanted in your brain. There is urgency, drama, deep feeling. Art. Here, Jenn Budd is not just a reporter, she is an artist, weaving her personal story with tales of the border patrol and her experience with it. And she tells secrets.
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After we hear about the cages, children ripped from their parents, barbed wire in the Rio Grande, after all this, as a nation we still are in some kind of denial. Stifle yourself. This couldn’t really be happening. Or worse yet, understanding that it is happening and approving this genocidal horror.
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From Budd’s x post: “ Out of nearly 8,000 asylum seekers, they found 1 criminal.”
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How did we get to this place? The art of this book is in the relentless telling, over and over, of the trauma that makes individuals (and institutions like the Border Patrol) become inhuman. This deliberate dehumanization is hard to fathom, and Budd makes it all too real. She traces the steps, tells the stories that make us understand how people are manipulated into becoming, well, like monsters. Understanding the incomprehensible — that is the art here.
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Campo, CA, returning to my old patrol area with water for migrants, 2021
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San Diego Pride, first Border Patrol agent to march in Pride in uniform, 1999
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When in doubt, stifle yourself? No, fight back!
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