Border Patrol Chief Was Member of Secret Facebook Group | Hacker News Reader

Border Patrol Chief Was Member of Secret Facebook Group

theintercept.com

43 pointsjbegley18 comments

Chinese and American are now strikingly consistent in condemning people's integrity through obviously private activity. I am certainly feel dismayed that the aspect of freedom turns out to be diminishing, as was admired when I am coming to this country.

Disclaimer: Chinese national holding a US permanent residency

I think I understand your objection that this is a private forum, but we (some Americans, and unfortunately inconsistently) hold our public law enforcement officials to a high standard of appearing impartial. The impartiality is important because law enforcement is supposed to enforce the law equally and fairly. Activities like this Facebook group suggest ulterior motives and loyalties to a particular party or ideology other than the oath they took to protect and serve, which undermines public trust and respect of LEO. It feeds into a harmful narrative of Us vs Them which harms all enforcement’s effectiveness.

It is absolutely in the public interest to understand the character of someone they are hiring for a public job that has community trust as a requirement.

Edit: This is also news because she effectively mislead the public about her involvement by condemning it and implying she only recently learned of it’s existence.

You're right about needing to hold law enforcement to a higher standard, but honestly these people should face consequences even by civilian standards. If you work at McDonald's, and you go on a forum for McDonald's employees and brag about screwing up customer's orders all the time for fun, there is nothing wrong with McDonald's firing you for that.

When an employer releases an employee, the rationale imposed upon the employer ought not be ones motivated by social punishment, but rather pure business pragmatism. It's not the employer's job to punish individuals that society doesn't like, such as firing them for racism at McDonalds.

Should a racist never have a job?

These are people whose job duties are, in part, protecting the lives of immigrants, and they're laughing about the deaths of those same immigrants. Their specific bigotry clearly makes them unsuitable for this specific job.

I would think racism would affect their ability to do jobs that have interacting with the public and representing a brand as key responsibilities. So in the Mcdonald’s case, no I wouldn’t hire a racist for Mcdonald’s. I’m sure there are jobs that don’t require that, and then maybe it wouldn’t be relevant. In any case, racists aren’t a protected class, and I believe racism is a changeable set of beliefs and behaviors.

In this specific case, LEO interacts with the public and they represent the executive branch of the government of the United States of America. I’m pretty sure racism would be a problem.

Doing heinous but legal things in private isn't a get-out-of-consequences free card if your bad behavior gets exposed. If I discover my spouse is cheating on me, she can't say, "But I was doing it in secret so it doesn't count!" Well I guess should could say it, but most people wouldn't think that's a reasonable excuse.

Private or not, the kind of attitudes shown in the group are directly associated with their employment and the people they interact with through that. They condemned their own integrity when the individuals decided to engage in such awful behavior while simultaneously attempting or pretending to have any sense of actual professionalism in said line of work.

Not only that, it's not as if it's just a few bad apples. This Facebook Group consisted of roughly ~9000 members of current and former agents. US Border Patrol employs roughly 20,000 agents.

The real problem is it ultimately taints their actual police / law enforcement work.

There's now direct, firsthand evidence that they've expressed intent to use excessive force, lie, and otherwise disobey the codes and procedures they're expected to follow.

Our legal system - particularly the judiciary - is predicated on very human-centric trust and credibility - our criminal verdicts are based on a standard of "reasonable doubt", for example, and of course "due process", "fair trial", and "jury of one's peers..." are all subject to human interpretation etc

So when they are later required to testify about their actions or statements in court, the cross-examination will be brutally effective in order to create the reasonable doubt needed.

So now they can no longer effectively do their job, because their very involvement ensures that it will be impossible to prosecute or punish any offenders - the very thing they're hired to do.

I don't follow. Your argument is anything someone does in private is free from judgement?

There's never been an exception for private activity that flies in the face of your public responsibilities.

The more power you hold, the higher standards you will be expected to meet.

Isn't moral beauty kind of a natural job requirement for positions of power, whether you're Chinese or American?

Should this be "Secret Facebook Group"?

More evidence that social media drives people to be cruel, stupid, and callow. How is it possible so many people post publicly, or semi-publicly, content which would be considered crass, childish, and un-professional at best and fireable at worst.

I'd say it's more evidence that (many) people are cruel, stupid, and callow, and social media gives them the chance to expose who they really are. (It may also encourage their worse impulses rather than their better ones, but I think that they are bringing out who they already are. Social media isn't really changing them.)

We all have it in us to be monsters. It's just social media encourages and rewards people who show their monstrous side.

People were always this way. Saying social media caused this is about like saying that ubiquitous video cameras in phones led to a rise in police brutality.

I know this post is going to turn into a partisan debate, but I strongly urge everyone to read up about this disturbing group and recent CBP behavior and decide if this is acceptable for a armed and increasingly unaccountable federal police force, one that has had gained influence away from the border to regular citizens over the past decades.

This is not a problem exclusive to this administration, these attitudes and actions have been going on for years and are wholly unacceptable for a nation that claims to respect human rights:

https://www.propublica.org/article/secret-border-patrol-face...

https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone

https://theintercept.com/2019/07/05/border-patrol-facebook-g...

> On the topic of dead children, Eric Castillo separately posted a video of a large, child-sized portion of meat being wrapped in foil and then roasted over an open flame. The foil resembles the mylar blankets that unaccompanied children are given in Border Patrol custody.

> “Little tonk blanket ideas!” Castillo wrote. ["Tonk" referring to the sound of beating someone in the head with a flashlight]

>When a member of the group raised the point that “’I was just following orders’ hasn’t been an effective defense in about 72 years,” Bob Wilkinson, who lists his former occupation as Border Patrol supervisor and his current occupation as a U.S. government contractor, replied, “Are you a PA or a fucking snowflake.” Wilkinson went on to write that while he had “never killed anyone,” he had “used my share of force.”

“The fact that the President recognizes rocks as deadly weapons is a good thing,” he wrote.

> At that point, Castillo joined the conversation, lamenting about missing an opportunity to shoot a migrant while on the job. “Bro im gonna go home alive to my family and stop the threat!!” he wrote. “See it how you will. Ive been rocked before and missed my chance to pop a round before due to me falling to avoid the rock.. Fucker ran back to the river..But I learned for next time.. Don’t be a freaking debbie downer bro..”

> Before long, group members, including Gabriel Gonzalez, Zack Smith, Anthony Ramos, Rick Mora Jr., and Michael Scherer, were sharing photos of documents — including what appears to be intake forms — that showed migrants’ names. Christian Macias added photos of government IDs belonging to five different individuals to the comment thread.

> On May 31, a user shared an image of the U.S. embassy in Honduras on fire. “Easy enough to do the same thing to all their asylum paperwork…” Gamel Lechner commented.

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