When Jenn Budd graduated from Auburn University with a law degree, she “felt deeply that I had to serve my country, put on a uniform, and sacrifice some of myself for our democracy, our freedoms, our rights.”
As Budd describes in her memoir Against the Wall: My Journey from Border Patrol Agent to Immigration Rights Activist, she chose to serve her country by joining the U.S. Border Patrol. She hoped the organization would live up to its motto of “Honor First,” but what she experienced instead necessitated the book’s content warning: “This book describes in detail many subjects associated with trauma: rape, suicide, child abuse, racism and police brutality.”
The memoir covers a lot of ground, just like the Border Patrol itself (which can patrol any territory 100 miles from any land or maritime border, an area which includes two-thirds of the American population). In three sections, Budd outlines her work as a Border Patrol agent, how she left the agency in 2001, her 2015 suicide attempt, and the past seven years she has spent listening to migrants and other victims while working as an immigration rights activist.
Budd began her career in 1995, when she trained in the 288th Session of the U.S. Border Patrol Agency at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Georgia. The few women training for different federal agencies there informally shared warnings about sexual harassment and rape that happened at the facility—much of which were never officially reported because trainees were told the Feds “preferred to handle issues like disagreements or fights between agents within the agency.”
Heliotrope Books
Budd would learn the truth of all of this firsthand. When she was raped by a fellow Border Patrol trainee, she was forced to spar with him in a training exercise the next day and then told by her instructors to file a federal Equal Employment Opportunity complaint. Budd knew that an investigation of any complaint she made would interrupt her training and take years. She told her instructors she wouldn’t file; she needed the job.
After graduating from the academy, Budd was assigned to the Campo border station near San Diego. At that time, before the Clinton Administration’s Operation Gatekeeper went into effect, families who lived practically next to one another but on separate sides of the border could visit one another during the day and kids played on a soccer field on the border.
As the agency became more militarized and the focus on “prevention through deterrence” intensified, Budd could increasingly see that new policies were not deterring migrants so much as they were pushing them into trying to cross in increasingly remote and dangerous areas. Although a 2020 study found that nearly 50 percent of Border Patrol agents are Latinx, Budd also became troubled by the racism within the organization.
Agents (herself included) routinely referred to Latinx people they apprehended as “Toncs” or “Tonks.” The name referenced the sound agents’ flashlights made when they hit the people they were apprehending on the heads with them.
Budd is honest throughout her memoir that she craved to belong: “If I was just physically fit enough, was great at shooting and hiking, if I apprehended enough people, if I spoke their language and repeated their lies enough, maybe they would accept me, maybe I would be a part of their family.”
She endured regular harassment, writing that “my station mail drawer was often stuffed with used condoms and magazine pictures of women fully spread.” Despite this harmful environment, she tried to focus on performing solid case work rather than violating individuals’ civil rights. In 1999, she decided to come out as a lesbian at work and became the first Border Patrol agent to march in uniform in the San Diego Gay Pride parade.
As she witnessed more and more corruption within the agency, however, it became clear that she could not stay. After she became an intelligence agent at the San Diego Sector Headquarters, she was responsible for monitoring smuggling patterns. That’s when she discovered that the head of the Campo station was actively facilitating smuggling. Budd continued to gather intelligence on the officer, who admitted his involvement to her and told her to back off.
Budd then tried to report him and his threat to her immediate supervisor, who encouraged her to view the situation as a “misunderstanding,” and offered a promotion if she did so. She refused this offer and went home, only to be called immediately back into work on an overnight shift.
Once back at work, she was sent to an isolated location. While there, she came under automatic gunfire from the other side of the border. She called for back-up, but the only agent who responded was the station chief she had been monitoring, who asked, “’Have you learned your lesson? They might not miss next time.’”
Budd requested sick leave. As she says in the memoir: “The time had come when putting on my green armor, my gun and baton, my badge and cowboy hat could no longer protect me. In my time as an agent, that armor had meshed with my personal wall, but it was crumbling around me faster than I could rebuild it.”
“These things did not just happen under Trump. Yes, they were worse under Trump, but they happened before him and after his administration as well.”
Although the U.S. Customs and Border Protection history page notes that “mounted watchmen of the U.S. Immigration Service patrolled the border in an effort to prevent illegal crossings as early as 1904,” the Border Patrol agency was officially established in 1924. While Budd served in the agency from 1995 to 2001, its mandate and number of personnel both drastically expanded after the events of September 11, 2001, and the founding of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2003. At that time, the U.S. Border Patrol moved under the jurisdiction of that agency and became part of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
One part of the Border Patrol’s history that had remained hidden until Budd revealed it to Andrea Guerrero, director of the community empowerment organization Alliance San Diego, was its method of investigating its own use-of-force incidents and other crimes—something it has no legal right to do.
Guerrero had requested Budd’s assistance in reviewing the San Diego Police Department’s investigation of the 2010 death of Anastasio Hernandez-Rojas, a Mexican citizen who had lived in the U.S. for more than twenty-five years. Budd detailed the Patrol’s practice of dispatching its own Critical Incident Teams (CIT) to crime scenes involving agents. Those teams were ostensibly sent to assist other law enforcement agencies investigating use-of-force incidents but instead compromised evidence and witness statements.
Although she notes in her book that the CBP Commissioner Chris Magnus ordered the abolishment of such CIT teams on May 3, 2022, she told The Progressive that she does not see the agency taking many other steps toward accountability.
“Accountability does not mean shutting down CITs and walking away,” Budd says. “True accountability means the airing of dirty laundry. It means releasing all of the CIT reports. All of them…It means holding upper management who created these groups, used these units and is now trying to pretend they knew nothing about them, accountable.”
Budd now works as an immigrant rights activist to provide humanitarian services along the Southwestern border. She admits that a large part of the problem with the nation’s immigration policy is how poorly it is understood by the public and presented by the mainstream media. In speaking with The Progressive, she refers to the immigration system as a “criminalization and deportation system,” and cautions that “These things did not just happen under Trump. Yes, they were worse under Trump, but they happened before him and after his administration as well.”
Budd’s memoir is appropriately titled, referring at turns to the brick wall against which she was raped, the walls built to mark borders, and the walls she raised within herself to lock away trauma. But the book is also more subtly about the choices and decisions that those walls force. What will migrants risk to flee violence and extreme poverty? And what will individuals risk to escape organizations in which sexism, racism, and violence rule?
Against the Wall was published by Heliotrope Books in June 2022, and Budd has pledged that a minimum of 10 percent of any profits she receives from the book will be donated to organizations assisting migrants.