Heath Haussamen
U.S. Border Patrol agents boarded a charter bus on Friday that was transporting members of Las Cruces High School’s swim team to a competition in Albuquerque, school officials say.
Swim coach Pamela Quiñones, who is also the school’s choir director, said she has never experienced anything like what happened Friday at the checkpoint on Interstate 25 north of Las Cruces.
As the bus pulled up to the checkpoint around 7:15 a.m., an agent motioned to the bus driver to pull over, Quiñones said. He complied. Two agents walked around the front of the bus and headed for the door. The driver opened it.
One agent asked in English how many people were on the bus. The driver didn’t speak English, so Quiñones answered that there were 12 passengers.
Those were Quiñones, an assistant coach, and 10 students who are on the swim team. They were headed to the state tournament.
The agent responded forcefully, according to Quiñones.
“Without hesitation he jumped on the bus and didn’t ask the adults any more questions,” she said. “He just started walking in the bus and started yelling in Spanish, demanding documentation from all the passengers.”
The second agent stepped into the bus and stood at the front. Quiñones said she told him that the students speak English and didn’t understand the questions the other agent was asking. She explained that they were members of a swim team.
She heard the first agent yelling behind her, where the students were seated, but couldn’t see what he was doing.
After a moment, the first agent returned to the front of the bus. “Ok, we’re all good here,” Quiñones recalled him saying. The two agents left the bus. They never asked the adults about their citizenship.
“It was all very aggressive, nothing normal that I’ve ever seen at a checkpoint,” Quiñones said.
Welcome to life under Donald Trump’s regime.
Power and pressure
A 1953 regulation creates the zone within 100 miles of U.S. borders that lets Immigration and Customs Enforcement set up so-called interior checkpoints. Dozens are built along roads near the United States’ southern border to help catch immigrants without legal status and illegal drugs. Several checkpoints surround the region that includes Las Cruces and El Paso, Texas to the east, west, and north.
Racial profiling is the norm at such checkpoints. Those who pass through them encounter armed agents and drug-sniffing dogs, surveillance cameras, and devices that capture license-plate numbers, location, date and time.
These checkpoints have always been problematic. At the same checkpoint on I-25 north of Las Cruces, an agent intimidated and berated my partner in 2016, while Barack Obama was president.
But I’ve worried that under Trump 2.0 things could get much worse. It certainly did the first time Trump was president. Trump has more aggressively and cruelly enforced federal immigration law than other presidents, though his promised mass deportations aren’t happening — yet.
Trump, who is reportedly “angry” about the pace of deportations, removed the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement last week. Agents at what are essentially militarized checkpoints have massive power. They are under immense pressure to deliver.
‘There’s so much that could happen’
Quiñones “strongly” believes the agents boarded the charter bus on Friday because of the appearance of the driver. He was “on the darker shade of brown skin,” she said.
As the driver transported the swim team away from the checkpoint toward Albuquerque, Quiñones moved to the back of the bus to check on her students. They were confused and didn’t understand what the agent was asking them, she said.
Most members of the swim team are “very light-skinned,” Quiñones said. Two are Mexican-American. Quiñones doesn’t carry identification on trips because she’s not driving. The students don’t either, she said.
In her search to make sense of the situation, she read articles. That led to worry that agents could remove a student they suspected of being undocumented from the bus.
“There’s so much that could happen if they think they can keep doing these types of stops,” Quiñones said. “…Now is the Border Patrol expecting that these kids carry their ID on them all the time?”
‘Our students must be safe’
Julie Wojtko, the president of the National Education Association-Las Cruces, said such action by the Border Patrol threatens travel around New Mexico.
“This behavior was traumatizing to our students and educators and cannot continue. We have several field trips in upcoming weeks, and our students must be safe to travel around their own state,” Wojtko said.
That’s true not only of students living within the checkpoint zone in communities like Las Cruces, Sunland Park and Chaparral who need to travel for school activities: This could also impact students who travel from outside the area to competitions in these places. They will have to pass through checkpoints on their way home.
The Las Cruces High swim team was traveling Friday to its last tournament of the season. Their competitions this season required travel through checkpoints to Hobbs, Artesia, Albuquerque and Farmington.
Following Friday’s events, Quiñones said she worries that students won’t participate in school programs if they or their parents don’t feel safe about travel through checkpoints.
Quiñones has been in touch with school district officials, including the superintendent. The district is taking additional steps to make the educational nature of trips clear to the Border Patrol. Wojtko said those include printing magnetic signs to put on charter buses identifying them as carrying students and sending chaperones with official letters stating the purposes of trips.
Wojtko also reached out to state and federal elected officials, urging them to speak with the Border Patrol “about proper behavior when addressing minors and educators.”
U.S. Rep. Gabe Vasquez, D-N.M., said his office is in contact with federal immigration agencies to better understand protocol at inland checkpoints and border crossings under the Trump administration’s “more intensified and targeted deportation approach.”
“We’re on it and we are pursuing the best avenues to both inform the public and also make sure folks have the legal representation and help they need to fight back,” Vasquez told me.
‘Follow proper protocol’
The Trump administration recently rescinded longstanding prohibitions against ICE and Border Patrol enforcing immigration law at “sensitive locations” including schools, churches and hospitals. This means agents can, for example, wait outside a school and arrest a parent who is dropping off their child. Or even arrest a child.
The Trump administration has let loose the worst impulses of the nativists within the Border Patrol’s ranks. Wojtko said Border Patrol agents “are usually kind and courteous at checkpoints, but this administration is emboldening the few who would bully and harass children when given the opportunity.”
That puts folks in impossible situations. Quiñones said she didn’t know what to do when agents boarded the bus.
Quiñones has family in Ciudad Juárez and travels there for visits. “I can deal with the Border Patrol harassing me whenever I come in and out of Mexico, but when I see it happening to kids that don’t expect it because they’re American citizens, it gets to a point of just being ridiculous,” she said.
The first agent who boarded the bus “didn’t look around and did not use his best judgement,” Quiñones said. He should have noticed the students and realized he wasn’t on a bus full of immigrants. He should have remained calm.
“I would just like to see them follow proper protocol,” Quiñones said.
Force and chaos
I’m not convinced the Trump administration cares about protocol. After all, the examples are the commander in chief and Elon Musk, who are acting without regard for laws and regulations in an attempt to dismantle our existing societal structure. Trump doesn’t show restraint. He isn’t calm.
He’s also preparing to use military bases to house immigrants who lack legal status, which is another escalation. The hub of that plan would be Fort Bliss, which is sandwiched between El Paso and Chaparral.
The administration’s mass deportation efforts require force and chaos. To remove the millions of people Trump says he’s determined to kick out of the United States, agents will have to act with the aggression and impatience school officials say the Border Patrol displayed on Friday. They will have to play fast and loose with the rules.
I fear this may be the new norm at checkpoints, which can be powerful tools for Trump’s mass deportation efforts.
In addition, these checkpoints could be used to identify and harass (or worse) opponents of the Trump administration including activists, elected Democrats and journalists. They could be used to track women traveling from other states to New Mexico to seek abortions.
In the extreme, these checkpoints could be locked down — say, if Trump declared martial law along the border. Communities inside them could be cut off from the rest of the state.
Regardless, every incident like what happened Friday could convince more people to self-isolate inside the checkpoints.
Word will spread among high-school students about what happened to the swim team. Some will be afraid.
Fear is exactly what the Trump administration wants and has the power to create.
‘Any assets necessary’
Rumors were circulating a couple of weeks ago that federal immigration agents were visiting schools around Doña Ana County. Then someone I know saw the Border Patrol outside Arrowhead Park Early College High School in Las Cruces. I decided to check it out.
Las Cruces Public Schools spokeswoman Kelly Jameson told me the agent was visiting a school security guard.
“It was a personal visit and not related to anything on campus, but unfortunately the optics are bad in our current climate,” she said.
I was glad to know the district was on top of such incidents.
Wojtko and Quiñones said the action taken by the school district since Friday has been strong and swift. Quiñones said she feels supported.
But there’s only so much the district can do. Will schools have to stop using charter buses? Would that help? Will agents start boarding yellow school buses?
The Trump administration plans to bring everything it has to this effort. Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, pointed out on Thursday that the president “has opened up Guantánamo Bay and he’s using military aircraft to carry out deportations all across this country,” according to The New York Times.
“You do not come here illegally,” Miller said. “You will not get in.”
Fort Bliss was chosen to house detained immigrants after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visited the border at Sunland Park and the military base in El Paso earlier this month. “Any assets necessary at the Defense Department to support the expulsion and detention of those in our country illegally are on the table,” The Times quoted him as saying.
Pushing back
All of this will make life in the borderlands more difficult. Those of us who are surrounded by these checkpoints have some tough choices to make.
Vasquez pointed to Southern New Mexico’s “rich legacy and history of immigration,” including the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American war in 1848 and brought much of this region into the United States, and, a few years later, the Gadsden Purchase, which brought the final portion of what is today Southwestern New Mexico and Southern Arizona into the United States.
“So many of our constituents tell me that the border crossed them; it wasn’t the other way around,” Vasquez said. “We want to preserve that culture, the humanity, the richness, the traditions without being targeted or deported.”
“I think there’s only so far this administration can take this before folks in this district and other Hispanic districts… really start to push back,” Vasquez said.
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