ONLINE: Carceral Country: Border Patrol: The Most Dangerous Police Force in America
CARCERAL COUNTRY - An Event Series
Carceral: “of, relating to, or suggesting a jail or prison.” However, the carceral system has been extended outside of physical prison walls and into minoritized communities in the form of predictive and surveillance policing.
Scuppernong Books presents a new Fall series investigating issues of social justice and the Carceral State, called Carceral Country. We’ll bring authors, journalists, and activists from a variety of disciplines together to discuss policing and incarceration in North Carolina and across the country and we invite the community to be a part of these conversations.
We want to reconsider how we might shift the way we approach policing, the criminal justice system, and incarceration by bringing together not only experts, but those who have worked in these systems as well as those victimized by them.
PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS AN ONLINE EVENT
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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.
“If you wondered how it could be possible for the U.S. Border Patrol to pull activists off the streets in Portland, Oregon during the summer of 2020, Nobody is Protected is the book for you. Reece Jones's rigorously researched book analyzes the Border Patrol’s extraconstitutional powers and explains the legal precedents behind it. It's also one hell of a page-turner that twists and turns from the 'Wild West' to the modern halls of power. It is a book with a purpose: always seeking to answer how the U.S.’s 'most dangerous police force' presently operates and how it impacts us all." —Todd Miller, journalist and author of Build Bridges, Not Walls
"This courageous and compelling book by a Border Patrol agent-turned immigration-activist is essential reading to understand how today's heartless and abusive Border Patrol culture came into being and what needs to be done to transform immigration policy in America."
- Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present
JENN BUDD was a Senior Patrol Agent with the U.S. Border Patrol in San Diego and an intelligence agent at San Diego Sector Headquarters from 1995 to 2001 when she resigned in protest. Since 2015 she speaks out on national and local news, community panels, podcasts and radio. She regularly is consulted by academics, journalists, humanitarians, and lawmakers. She is often interviewed for outlets such as The New York Times, Newsweek, The Guardian, Washington Post, NPR, Telemundo, and many more. She is an ambassador for Define American and the Southern Border Communities Coalition (SBCC).
