You may have seen this map of the 100-mile border zone making the rounds recently. Did you ever wonder why they chose 100 miles? There must be a good reason for it, right? Well, actually no. Here's a short thread on it ...

The Border Patrol was established two days after the eugenics-derived national origins quotas in the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act was signed, in order to enforce the new restrictions 2/9

The original authorization for the Border Patrol was meant to keep the agents at the border line itself. Senator David Reed explained: "They have no right to go into the interior city and pick up aliens on the street and arrest them" 3/9

Nevertheless, the agents did go into the interior. In 1930 Treasury Undersecretary Ogden Mills proposed a new law to stop it "you will not have a Border Patrol operating 20 miles inside the United States. You will have a border patrol where it belongs, and that is on the border"

Mills' and other efforts to rein in the Border Patrol failed in the 1930s. In 1946, Congress revised the Border Patrol's authorization and clarified (kind of) how far inside the US they could go: “within a reasonable distance from any external boundary of the United States” 5/9

At the time, the Border Patrol was part of the Department of Justice. In July 1947, the DoJ released a routine update to its policies in the Federal Register. In tiny print on p. 5071, they defined the term reasonable distance ... 6/9

Without public comment or consultation, the Department of Justice defined the reasonable distance for the Border Patrol as “a distance not exceeding 100 air miles from any external boundary of the United States” 7/9

And... that's it. Since 1947, the reasonable distance has remained unchanged at 100 miles from borders and coastlines. If DHS Secretary Mayorkas wanted to change it, he could do so immediately himself 8/9

I tell the history of the Border Patrol from their racist Wild West origins to their assault on the 4th Amendment in my new book Nobody is Protected: How the Border Patrol Became the Most Dangerous Police Force in the United States @CounterpointLLC 9/9 https://www.counterpointpress.com/dd-product/nobody-is-protected/

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