Introduction

How does the short length video format enable border policing agencies of the United States to conceal human rights violations?

This essay argues that the United States Customs and Border Protection produces informational videos of exceptional and humanitarian usefulness of the agency in order to divert attention away from human rights violations. Since its establishment in 2003 as an agency under the Department of Homeland Security, the CBP’s progression from border control entity to militarized enforcement is visualized in moving images. Intentional in its production of non-fiction, informational videos, the agency reaches a broad audience with the goal of refuting criticism on human rights abuses.

As the eminent scholar of immigration studies Kelly Lytle Hernández explains of the many iterations of the border patrol force, a notable element remains consistent across the twentieth century, “the rise of the U.S. Border Patrol as a story of race and inequity is powerfully signified by the increasing number of undocumented immigrants joining African Americans” in sites of incarceration.¹ In turn, border policing “provided a new logic of impunity that justified even the most egregious acts of violence committed by Border Patrol officers.”² The history of border policing violence on migrants and refugees persist into the twenty-first century, even if the CBP attempts to polish its image. Though anti-immigrant sentiment and stringent immigration policy is foundational of settler colonialism, U.S. Congress’ formal establishment of the Border Patrol in May 1924, coincided with the passage of the National Origins Act.³

The earliest moving image on the Border Patrol reflects the rhetoric following the 1924 National Origins Act. Produced by Paramount News in 1936, the “Guard Border to Stop Alien Smuggling” newsreel dramatizes a narrative of border security.⁴ Mounted on a guard tower, the high angle placement of the camera captures a shot of an agent scaling the ladder, as if making his way towards the spectator. Subsequently, a point-of-view shot through the silhouette of binoculars invites spectators to stake out the border landscape for “smuggling aliens.” Soon after follows a staged performance of officers apprehending smugglers hiding behind a bush. This dramatization of the U.S.-Mexico border as a narrative element, along with the sensationalist headlines of the mainstream press of the time, delivered to the public a spectacle of law and order. These sentiments also led to the creation of the 1959 television show, Border Patrol. Though short-lived for a season, the show gained the support of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization bureau of the Department of Justice, that the bureau sent a border patrol agent on a national tour to accompany the star of the show, Richard Webb.⁵ A series that drew inspiration from press coverage of immigration cases at the border, the show reflected the policy shifts in regard to international policy and immigration in the Post-World War II era. These non-government produced moving images helped with the transmission of anti-immigrant propaganda. Walter Benjamin presciently cautioned against wedding aesthetics and politics.⁶

By taking into consideration the formal elements of the CBP videos of the twenty-first century, this essay identifies how the CBP contrives narratives that represent border patrol officers as heroic and altruistic, thereby creating a revisionist story that hides human rights abuses.⁷ To achieve this revisionist project, the CBP seeks out spectators unequivocal in their endorsement of the agency’s policing approach.⁸

In contrast to the limited distribution and access of the Paramount newsreel and the fictionalized show Border Patrol, the short digital videos give CBP the advantage of reaching a broader audience connected to digital platforms. In addition, the online permanence and searchability of the videos allows convenient access. Since its inception, the CBP manages its video distribution via online streaming, mostly through its government website. On occasion, the agency uploads the videos to its YouTube channel. This allows the agency the power to self-represent as civically useful beyond logics of the border apparatus.⁹ On the CBP’s digital library, the videos fall in several categories: “careers/recruiting,” “leadership,” “preparedness and emergency response,” and “people.”¹⁰ For the sake of brevity, I cohere videos along three overarching themes: canine training program; volunteer work of CBP officers; and the agency’s self-described “humanitarian” efforts.

The select videos represent the officers, the labor practices, and the agency writ large, as utilitarian in addressing social matters beyond policing without drawing attention to its human rights abuses.¹¹ The videos are not instructional, nor are they meant to professionalize personnel in the agency. Instead, these informational moving images offer spectators carefully curated information on border operations.¹² In most videos, migrants and refugees are conspicuously absent from view, and more so is an acknowledgement of the agency’s human rights violations. Emerging in a number of contexts—such as the criminalization of racialized peoples, exponential rates of deportation, and family and kinship separation—the videos chart a visual history of the agency’s evolution from policing entity to militarized force, between 2009 and 2022.¹³

Studies of twentieth century nontheatrical media of the U.S. government generally focus on the military.¹⁴ Haidee Wasson and Lee Grieveson examine the role of cinema in the military industrial complex by delving into the networks and aesthetics of film and media production in support of imperial propaganda.¹⁵ Absent from these are immigration and border agencies. However, recent scholarship such as Juan Llamas-Rodriguez’s study of mainstream media’s cooperation with border policing in reality television series such as Border Wars, investigates the ecology of border operations as media entertainment. As Llamas-Rodriguez illustrates, these shows spectacularize tunnel raids and border control through a slight degree of closeness and liveness mediated by handheld camera shots.¹⁶ These formal techniques invite spectators to partake in the action despite being removed from the actual event on screen. More than often, these reality series humanize CBP officers by representing them as engaging in “socially conscious missions.”¹⁷

The essay first examines the CBP canine program videos as the agency’s narrative construction of exceptionality when it comes to training. Following the canine videos, I shift to study CBP officers who volunteer as animal therapy handlers and who mount a performance of generosity for the camera. Lastly, the essay considers how the agency attempts to cast itself as humanitarian in order to distract from public charges of human rights violations.

Videos of Fauna

The CBP videos featuring fauna distracts spectators from the agency’s human rights violations. In the first category of CBPs animal videos, canines stand in as symbols of national security and soft power diplomacy.¹⁸ In the second, the agency’s “CBPeople” series features officers who volunteer as animal therapy handlers outside of their contractual obligations. The officers volunteer with veterans, the elderly, and children with disabilities, thereby allowing the agency to provide a revisionist narrative by filming scenes of the convivial interactions.

Framed as a national security asset, the canine training program includes disciplines such as narcotics detection, search and rescue, trailing humans, recognition of currency and firearms, and detection of human remains.¹⁹ Donna Haraway calls the state’s exploitation of fauna a “lively capital” project. These scenes of police terror “produce definite value in lively capital,” writes Haraway, as the mere presence of canines on the side of the policing institution is a display of power and discipline.²⁰ As lively capital, the canines become sentient, biological arsenal of the state.²¹

Spectators may not initially detect the CBP’s use of fauna as a distraction from the human rights violations since the appearance of canines on screen typically elicit from viewers a pleasant affective response.²² Moreover, the videos dismiss questions regarding the agency’s unethical placement of fauna in compromising situations.²³ Suitable in the informational form, the videos function as a behind-the-scenes access of border patrol operations while foreclosing discussion on human rights violations.²⁴

Canines and the Spectacle of Security

In considering Donna Haraway’s concept of lively capital, a short informational video from May 2010, “Focus on: CBP Canine Program,” buttresses the crux of her argument in that the CBP objectifies canines as commodities of the state. The video chronicles the genesis of the Canine Enforcement Program in 1969 following the institutionalization of the 1956 Criminal, Immoral, and Narcotics (CIN) program. In the video, Gene McEathron, a former director of the Canine Training Program, explains that David Ellis, then Assistant Commissioner of the U.S. Customs Service, proposed the inclusion of canines into the surveillance campaign against the trafficking of narcotics in 1969.

The video includes black and white photographs from the early days of the program, and stock footage of officers and canines performing vehicle inspections at the border. The black and white visuals, in conjunction with the stock footage, intimates toward what Hayden White calls “historiophoty.” White maintains that historiophoty acknowledges the photograph’s capacity to function as visual evidence of history because the public confers value and veracity to indexed images of the past, despite the contention on the production of truth and veracity.²⁵ In portraying the history of the canine program, the video’s informational format, and the inclusion of photographs and footage from earlier decades, endows the border patrol with historical value, thus making a case for the CBP’s existence in the new millennium as a continuity of national security (fig. 1). The challenge of this video’s function in the broader scheme of propaganda is that the moving images do not recount a nuanced story about the agency’s discrimination of racialized people. The border patrol’s secondary random inspection with the help of canines is a selective assignment that disproportionately targets racialized border crossers.

Figure 1.

A CBP officer and canine inspect a vehicle.

In masking the canine training program as a harmless operation part of the history of non-violent policing, the CBP includes commentary from CBP Officer and trainer, Barbara Wilson-Weaber. She shares that canines are “part of the future” because “using a dog to do it [detection and prevention], I think it’s a wonderful job, and a wonderful opportunity.” The video includes an insert shot of a younger Wilson-Weaber and a dog posing for a photograph, thus inflecting her narrative as exceptional service to the agency despite the unethical use of animals for policing. Wilson-Weaber’s story allowed the CBP to capitalize on her labor, and in the process, the agency also manufactured a story of gender equity of a job that has traditionally upheld exclusionary practices along race and gender.²⁶

The video arrives two years after the election of Barack Obama, at a time when optimism for immigration reform began to falter. As the data administered by the Obama administration shows, the administration helped facilitate the deportation of more than 392,000 people in fiscal year 2009.²⁷ Moreover, Wilson-Weaber’s story creates a dissonance between her narrative of exceptionalism as a woman in the policing agency with the reports from human rights organizations that detail how women migrants and refugees receive insufficient healthcare access, especially prenatal resources.²⁸

Other videos in this category show the state conditioning the canines into dexterous training regimes, while representing the animals as “cute” and “loyal” biological arsenal of the border apparatus.²⁹ For instance, in the September 2013, video “CBP Canine Center Front Royal,” the staff at the facility in the state of Virginia arranged a photoshoot that featured puppies. Unlike the videos of longer length, and others produced in the 2000s, the length reduction in videos produced in the 2010s and beyond average five minutes. The short form gives the agency the autonomy to package a select narrative that relies on rapid cuts and the omission of historical context. The 2013 video is shot on-location, outside the kennel, in the foreground of the greensward. The photoshoot results in the production of digital souvenir collectible cards (fig. 2). Despite the staged, jocund photoshoot, Acting Assistant Director of the Canine Training Center Timothy Spitter offers an unsettling perspective on the usefulness of canines in sharing that the agency invests in canines “that will almost work himself [the canine] to death.” His remarks appear as trivial when including close-up shots of a frolic scene with the puppies. The agency’s interspersion of shots where agents train and play with canines distracts from the numerous ethical problems by representing the agency as exceptional in canine treatment.

Figure 2.

Sample of CBP Canine trading cards.

During the production of the video in 2013, the Obama administration faced intense scrutiny for neglecting to address mass deportations as promised during his presidential campaigns. The exacerbation of critiques against a lack of immigration reform increased after the failed passage of the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013, which would have created a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented migrants. Further, in that year, nineteen people died in the custody of immigration officials.³⁰ Along with these problems, the video’s focus on its canine facilities beyond the U.S.-Mexico border created a distraction from the questionable deaths of migrants and it allowed the agency to control the narrative through their media production.

The agency’s video propaganda includes narratives on the exportation of border operation efficacy for international contexts. Though the canine training videos generally include shots of officers playing with the animals, by the mid-2010s there is a shift in narrative presentation of canine training as a serious matter. For example, the 2017 video “CBPrime: CBP Trains K-9s to Detect Illegal Ivory in Tanzania,” attempts to persuade spectators of the so-called success and usefulness of U.S. border operations as an ideal model for developing countries to adapt, especially for major trade hubs. Shot in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, the video highlights the agency’s transnational collaboration for the interception of illegal ivory.

The video’s opening title sequence, composed of photographic montage showing police at work on a variety of tasks—such as patrol and surveillance duty and mechanical maintenance of vehicles—positions the agency as an exceptional partner for global customs control. Following the introduction sequence, the video begins with establishing shots of wildlife that include wildebeest, giraffes, and elephants, which reanimates a series of visual clichés of the East African landscape. The video’s aesthetic choice activates an aura of exoticism characteristic of Western imaginaries of untamed, perilous regions in need of civilization. Engineered as a program for shared global security, the transnational partnership establishes condescension by implying Tanzanian officials lack competency in upholding regional and global security, that Tanzania requires help from U.S. canine training experts.

The final scene of the video concludes with a diplomatic ceremony. Filmed at a seaport, a canopy in the color of the Tanzanian flag provides shelter for the representatives of both countries as they share remarks on the program’s usefulness. In the background, the shipping containers stand out, reminding spectators that the CBP’s transnational collaboration benefits trade and capital circulation (fig. 3).

Figure 3.

CBP and Tanzanian officials at a ceremony in Dar es Salaam.

Though the video promotes an illusion of diplomacy, the 2016 administration’s executive order, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States,” known as the Muslim ban, aggravated an already tenuous human rights crisis. In a sense, the CBP’s propaganda of transnational collaboration functioned as a deterrent in that racialized migrants and refugees would also undergo surveillance and detection at national borders. This is the agency’s illusion of diplomacy and amenability.

Despite the agency’s attempts at polishing its image from criticism of human rights violations, the agency’s use of animals for border security is inextirpable from logics of carcerality, even through the CBP’s exploitation of animals in contexts of philanthropy.

Therapy Animals

Another way the CBP embellishes its narrative of exceptionalism while omitting reference to its human rights violations includes the representation of officers who exhibit altruistic qualities. In the agency’s CBPeople series, the videos focus on officers who volunteer with socially vulnerable groups as therapy animal handlers. These videos are part of the propaganda through which the agency conceals its enactment of human rights violations. Historically, animal rights and philanthropy have been mobilized as apolitical distractions from human rights injustices.³¹ For example, at the time of the series’ production, the diametrically opposed debates on the CBP’s mistreatment of Central American migrants and refugees at the border included critiques on the criminalization of the more than 60,000 unaccompanied children in fiscal year 2016.³² This begs the question: which children does the agency consider human enough to receive appropriate care?

A March 2017 video from the series focused on equine handler Officer Katie Griffith. An agent with the CBP’s Horse Patrol Unit in San Diego, the agency leans on Griffith’s equine handling skills and volunteering with children with disabilities as a distraction from the larger problem of migrant and children human rights abuses.

In a medium shot talking head interview, Griffith describes finding “freedom” and a “rewarding” experience in providing children with disabilities an opportunity to engage with therapy horses. Primarily filmed in the enclosure of a paddock, the footage of the spatial containment through long shots, along with Griffith’s amicable interaction with the children, invokes a sense of safety and care. The medium close-up shots capture Griffith and the children in pleasantry exchange. Kneeling at the children’s height level, Griffith strikes a commonplace conversation on the topic of education, thereby representing her as an interested, softhearted person outside the context of policing. For instance, in a medium shot, the camera captures Griffith guiding a young girl with one hand and steering the horse with the other. This image enkindles an affective warmness that suggests a mutual entrustment (fig. 4).

Figure 4.

CBP officer Griffith guides a young girl and horse.

Another notable aesthetic choice of the “CBPeople” series is the costuming. Similar to Griffith’s polished representation, officers are out of their uniform when performing volunteer work. Such is the agency’s aesthetic choice to humanize officers. However, when filmed in talking head interviews, the officers wear their CBP uniform as a reclamation of authority. The encoded narrative propounds that the agency should not bear liability for the misconduct of abusive officers, since after all, there are “good” officers like Griffith.

The video stages a performance of generosity that ultimately transmits a contrived narrative of exceptionalism that does not reflect the critiques of the time. For example, during the 2016 administration, journalists, politicians, and human rights representatives, visited detention centers and witnessed inhumane conditions. Solicitous social workers recorded clandestine audio of children crying out for their caretakers. In an audio recording, a CBP officer is heard comparing the children’s sobs of despair to an “orchestra.”³³ Metaphorically, to this officer, the children’s suffering is music to his ears.

This seemingly altruistic representation does not mean one should bowdlerize the CBP’s history of weaponizing horses against migrants and refugees.³⁴ In 2022, five years after the release of Griffith’s video, images circulated in the media of CBP officers mounted on horses obstructing Haitian migrants from crossing the Rio Grande. Those images captured an officer flailing the horse reins, allegedly failing at whipping a Black person.³⁵

A stark contrast to the video representing Griffith’s exceptional volunteer work, the non-government media producers capture CBP carrying out human rights abuses.³⁶ The video of the officers on horses at the Rio Grande and the audio recording of distressed children is incommensurate with the agency’s contrived narratives. If the CBP represents itself through video as a resourceful entity, how does the agency distort discourses of humanitarianism?³⁷

Conditional Humanitarianism

The state constricts humanitarian assistance to migrants and refugees by devising conditional terms of hospitality as evidenced by the convoluted application process for asylum protection.³⁸ With unrestrained discretion, the state is authorized to rescind and limit humanitarian assistance. In writing about the state’s performance of humanitarian compassion, Michael Barnett notes that though society expects its own government to provide humanitarian support to nations in distress as a gesture of global unity, when crises erupt within the state’s own borders, the nation’s response to those challenges is not a humanitarian act because the state is duty-bound to the people.³⁹ In this regard, the U.S. is obligated to protect everyone in its jurisdiction, especially when the crises are of the government’s own design and neglect.

To qualify for humanitarian assistance, the state must first recognize the humanity of migrants and refugees. The CBP’s misunderstanding of humanity and humanness is tied to Eurocentric ideas of Man. If the CBP were to decenter Eurocentric ideas of humanity (and Man) by engaging in a project that Sylvia Wynter described as “unsettling the coloniality of power,” the agency would upend its own power and march right into an existential crisis.⁴⁰ Under the paternalistic pretense of saving migrants and refugees from danger, the CBP mounts a performance of humanitarianism that pretends taking a politically neutral position. The display of so-called humanitarianism entraps the spectators through an allure of compassion, while shifting attention away from state violence in the background.

For instance, the opening credit sequence of the video “Humanitarian Agency: CBP Report” from July 2022 begins with rapid montage and collage of photographs depicting officers in action. The opening sequence departs from the other informational videos in that this piece draws on the formal elements hallmark of the action and suspense film genres. This includes fast-paced, dynamic music to establish conflict. In addition, by incorporating visuals of the agency’s preparedness to emergency and human crises, the CBP casts itself in the role of savior. This savior role is emphasized when a male figure in a position of power assures spectators of the agency’s so-called generosity in emergency support. In the video, Acting Chief Operating Officer Benjamine “Carry” Huffman states, “The sanctity of human life is paramount. And we always place that above all other priorities in our day-to-day duties and jobs that we do.” He drives this bold assertion by stating, “it’s important for the American people to know that the men and women at U.S. Customs and Border Protection are the most humane law enforcement agency in the country.” Huffman’s rhetorical hyperbole of care is a revisionist act that absolves the agency from the violence it commits on migrants and refugees.

The narrative structure of this video is designed to substantiate Huffman’s claims. For instance, in the “Life Saving Efforts” [sic] and “Care Assistance” sections, the CBP distorts its policing apparatus as a humanitarian project by constructing a narrative of usefulness. For instance, in the latter section of the video, a CBP agent transports a water jug mounted on his right shoulder, with superimposed numerical data on the agency’s use of tax-payer funds for rendering assistance to migrants and refugees. These forms of help include medical care, protections against COVID-19, and agents stationed at the border (fig. 5)

Figure 5

CBP officer carries a water cooler at a CBP emergency station.

The shot invokes savior iconography through water distribution, which becomes a performance of humanitarian goodwill. As such, the video represents CBP officers as uncorrupted purveyors of migrant and refugee humanitarian assistance. However, the video omits reference to the agency’s act of deliberate resource destruction. Advocacy groups such as No More Deaths have collected and disseminated visual evidence of CBP officers in the act of destroying gallons of water that activists install in the desert for displaced people to access.

Under Title 8, signed into law in 1940, the Department of Justice brings charges against anyone who renders humanitarian assistance to migrants and refugees. The alleged offender is then subject to prosecution for “encouraging” and “inducing” migrants to enter the U.S.⁴¹ Hence, activists who offer provisions for sustenance are labeled as threats to national security.⁴² The video suggests that only the CBP can provide humanitarian aid because it wields the power of immunity.

Even though Huffman reassures that, “The benefactor of our humanitarian efforts is all of us. It’s us as a country because that’s who we are,” he further disavows the feigned humanitarian project with a glaring contradiction. Says Huffman, “We benefit the migrants who may be in stress…because of a bad mistake they made…” In a paradox, Huffman’s remarks expose the CBP’s conditional humanitarian help, while reproaching migrants and refugees for fleeing life-threatening conditions. At the time of the video’s release, images of humanitarian response and social compassion due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, coupled with condemnation of institutional violence on racialized people in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, circulated within all reaches of the media landscape. The agency participates in this so-called collective, social compassion and kindness by reframing its policing operation as humanitarian in order to avoid further scrutiny.

In the September 2022 video, “Volunteer Workforce Helps CBP During Migrant Surge,” the so-called altruism of CBP officers is the case in point, in addition to spotlighting personnel from the DHS.⁴³ In the video, Michael Champness, the Deputy Director of the volunteer force, points out that the two-hundred volunteer force was activated in March 2021 in response to the surge of Central American migrants and refugees at the border. The footage over his commentary includes a cohort of staff helping with meal preparation, material packaging and distribution, and coordination of legal assistance. Furthermore, Champness highlights that the volunteer force extended its altruistic efforts by helping process Afghan refugees in the summer of that year when the Biden administration withdrew the U.S. military from Afghanistan.

Designed to gain the support of spectators during the administrative chaos at the border, the informational video includes generic uplifting music overlaid with the talking head interviews of select DHS employees. In its self-representation as a humanitarian force, the agency includes footage of officers escorting children and their caretakers, whose faces are blurred, to vehicles and detention facilities. Other footage includes border agent apprehension of children and adults, and in other scenes they are placed in a sterilized holding space, a non-place where the agency disavows their humanity in recognition of biometric data creation and extraction.⁴⁴ With the agency’s increased implementation of biometric authentication technology at the border, the CBP abstracts migrants and refugees as data points, thus “measuring the living body” in a dehumanizing fashion that serves the state.⁴⁵ These images do not serve the agency’s contrived humanitarian narrative. On the contrary, the footage incriminates the agency for spectacularizing migrant and refugee suffering.

The CBP’s artifice of humanitarianism disciplines and punishes migrants and refugees. Michel Foucault remarked that the sovereign entity possesses the biopolitical power to regulate and administer punishment to the subject, and this entity—the CBP—invents the prerequisites that determine which migrants and refugees have the right to life based on their usefulness to the state.⁴⁶A “good” refugee and migrant, it appears, is an incarcerated one who keeps in business the private, for-profit commercial entities of the immigration industrial complex.⁴⁷

Though the CBP may labor endlessly to assemble moving image propaganda to represent itself as civically useful, the accessibility of digital technologies outside these policing institutions of power, and the production of migrant and refugee video narratives, contest the agency’s performance.

Conclusion

If the CBP videos of fauna and their handlers, or the agency’s misrepresentation of humanitarianism, exposes the agency’s attempt to forge an aesthetic of exceptionalism and humanitarianism, what function do these images serve beyond addressing a receptive audience? When considering that the videos are government property, one sees how the CBP it tasked with the creative license to help preserve the state’s illusion of democracy and human rights. In the process, these state media moving images replenishing the government archive with contrived narratives and revisionist histories.

Right-wing desires for severe punition against migrants and refugees set the foundation for the structures of draconian immigration policy, and it reveals the propaganda behind the CBP’s videos of diplomacy, compassion, and care. The 2024 authoritarian regime’s mass deportation actions, illegal detentions of people, targeting of pro-Palestine international students, and shuttling of migrants and refugees to detention camps outside of the U.S., reanimates a troubling history. It is not speculation nor hyperbole to argue that the U.S. creates catastrophic and lethal immigration consequences. As the media sources of the early twentieth century already documented, the media’s circulation of sensationalist headlines on disease, criminality, and racial politics exacerbated social anxieties that scapegoated racialized and Eastern European migrants and refugees.⁴⁸ The anti-immigrant animus precipitated the mass deportation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans between 1930–1933, and it cleared the way for Japanese internment camps during World War II. The 2024 regime readapts these methods with the help of media.

Anti-immigrant sentiment pulsates through the veins of the U.S. settler-colonial empire. What all of this this means for film and media studies, and adjacent fields, is for vigilance and denunciation of propaganda. Relatedly, this requires redesigning critical methods and approaches to study how nation-states across the world exploit moving images to advance their interests while concealing juridical violence and human rights violations.

Teaching and learning to dissect propaganda in media texts of the contemporary era will require revisiting how scholars approach media literacy methods for the sake of inviting non-academics to identify and reject fascist and authoritarian narratives. The field has an opportunity to take a leading role in promoting responsible media usage and literacy skills to reinforce and protect principles of inalienable human rights.