Empathy, Morality, and Criminality: The Legitimation Narratives of U.S. Border Patrol Agents

Abstract

Border enforcement is morally ambiguous and politically contentious due to the inherent tension between national security, rule of law, and the humanitarian treatment of individuals seeking entry. It often involves difficult ethical dilemmas for frontline agents.
Frontline enforcement agents routinely experience threats to their moral authority, stemming from public criticism, media scrutiny portraying them as inhumane, and internal cognitive dissonance when their experiences contradict political narratives.
The article examines legitimation work through in-depth interviews with U.S. Border Patrol agents. This "legitimation work" refers to the active process by which agents construct narratives to justify their actions, maintain a positive self-perception, and uphold the perceived moral rightness of the immigration control system.
Agents deploy justificatory narratives to restore their own moral authority and secure the broader legitimacy of the immigration control system in the face of widespread public and personal challenges.
Two primary strategies observed among agents:
- Disputing immigrants’ morality (via criminalization and uncertainty): Agents often portray migrants as increasingly criminal or untrustworthy, thereby justifying a more punitive approach and reducing the perceived moral obligation to offer compassion.
- Establishing agents’ morality through compassionate discourses (caring control): Agents emphasize their humane actions and care for migrants' basic needs, which serves to counter negative public perceptions and reinforce their own sense of moral integrity, even within an exclusionary system.
Findings highlight significant racial dynamics, particularly how Latino agents disproportionately cluster in the caring control narrative. This suggests that racial identity may influence how agents frame their enforcement actions and express empathy, possibly as a way to manage internal identity conflicts or external expectations.
The analysis offers valuable insights into the normative principles, both explicit and implicit, that guide agents' actions and interactions with migrants, revealing how these principles are negotiated amidst contradictory demands.

Article History

Received: January 16, 2017
Accepted: October 19, 2017

Keywords

Legitimacy; emotion; borders; morality; bureaucracy

Policy Implementation Process

Characterized by a significant tension between bureaucratic rationality (adherence to formal rules and procedures) and emotion (the human responses and moral judgments of agents in real-time interactions).
Immigration agents are constantly balancing their moral judgments with formal procedures when interacting with clients (Maynard-Moody and Musheno, 2003). This involves making decisions that are ostensibly rule-bound but are heavily influenced by individual interpretation and ethical considerations.
Immigration agents wield the state’s coercive power in an exclusionary manner, determining who is granted rights, access, or detained. This authority places them in a position of significant power over individuals' lives and destinies.
Decisions made by agents are far-reaching, including territorial entry, assessing the deservingness of asylum seekers, and verifying the authenticity of marriages to U.S. citizens (Villegas, 2015; Wettergren and Wikström, 2014; Satzewich, 2014). These decisions have profound impacts on individuals and families.
Agents often take pride in guarding the state from perceived criminals, a sentiment frequently reinforced by political rhetoric that conflates unauthorized immigration with broader threats like terrorism and drug trafficking (Andreas, 2009). This rhetoric serves to dehumanize migrants and justify strict enforcement.

Disjuncture at the U.S.-Mexico Border

The daily reality of immigration control on the ground often dramatically contradicts prevailing political rhetoric. While politicians may emphasize stopping dangerous criminals, agents frequently encounter different populations.
Agents commonly encounter non-criminal, repeat immigration violators who are primarily seeking economic opportunities, and more recently, an increasing number of asylum seekers fleeing violence and instability. These demographics challenge the simplistic “criminal” narrative propagated by political discourse.
Statistical data indicates that recent border crossers exhibit some of the lowest rates of criminality among all individuals removed from the U.S. annually (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 2016), further highlighting the discrepancy between rhetoric and reality.
One agent offers a poignant counter-narrative, stating: "Ninety percent of people you catch are people that want to find a better way of life." This illustrates the internal conflict and personal observations that undermine the official narrative.
The scarcity of archetypal criminals, as depicted in political discourse, profoundly challenges agents' moral authority and legitimacy. This discrepancy can lead to internal cognitive dissonance and external criticism, forcing agents to reconcile their roles with perceived public expectations.

Purpose of the Study

The study explicitly uses semi-structured interviews with active U.S. Border Patrol agents to deeply explore their legitimation narratives and emotional responses to pervasive public and internal criticism regarding their perceived lack of compassion for migrants. Semi-structured interviews allow for flexibility in exploring nuanced perspectives while ensuring key themes are covered.
The narratives serve dual, interconnected functions: firstly, they aim at restoring agents’ personal moral authority, allowing them to internalize the “rightness” of their work; secondly, they benefit the state by maintaining a compliant and morally stable workforce, crucial for the consistent application of enforcement policies.

Literature Review

Existing literature on immigration law implementation has largely overlooked the nuanced "legitimation work" undertaken by bureaucrats themselves. This study aims to fill that gap by focusing on how agents construct and maintain their moral standing.
Research aligns closely with street-level bureaucracy theory, which posits that immigration agents, through their daily exercise of discretion, effectively create de facto policies on the ground, often altering or shaping official policy through their individual judgments and actions (Calavita, 1992; Gilboy, 1991; Heyman, 1995).
The concept of 'moral economies' – systems of moral norms and values that guide and legitimate social practices – is highly relevant, reflecting the unwritten, normative values shaping agents’ work practices and their interactions with migrants (Fassin, 2005).
Emotional labour, defined as the management of one's own emotions to present a certain public face or meet job requirements, is a key mechanism for agents to balance rational bureaucratic procedures with the often-distressing moral decision-making inherent in complex immigration control contexts.

Immigration Agents’ Emotional Labour

Immigration agents experience a wide range of intense emotions, particularly complex moral emotions like compassion, frustration, and even guilt, which arise from their daily encounters with vulnerable individuals and the enforcement of often harsh policies.
Significant emotional conflicts routinely arise between the agent's prescribed role of exclusion and the natural human potential for empathy towards migrants. This conflict can lead to internal moral distress.
Agents engage extensively in emotional labour, requiring them to actively emphasize certain feelings (e.g., professionalism, strictness) while suppressing others (e.g., sympathy, personal distress) in order to effectively manage their duties and perform their roles as expected.
- For instance, detention officers are known to maintain strict emotional boundaries between themselves and detainees (Puthoopparambil, Ahlberg, and Bjerneld, 2015). This boundary work helps them avoid emotional burnout and maintain a detached professional stance necessary for their role.
Similarly, asylum bureaucrats tend to adopt a professional detachment in decision-making processes (Wettergren, 2010), rationalizing their decisions through legal frameworks to mitigate personal moral responsibility and potential bias.
To cope with emotional strain, border guards often suppress their immediate emotional reactions and find solace in political rhetoric that frames undocumented migration negatively (Heyman, 1995; Pallister-Wilkins, 2015). This rhetoric provides a convenient moral framework that legitimizes their actions and reduces internal conflict.

Public Perception and Emotional Regimes

Intense public criticism regarding agents' purported lack of compassion significantly shapes their emotional labour, forcing them to actively manage their feelings and public presentation to counteract stigmatization.
Agents may develop various strategies to manage the perceived stigma associated with their demanding and often controversial job (Goffman, 1963). These strategies can involve adopting specific narratives, emphasizing certain aspects of their work, or forming internal social bonds for support.
Racial dynamics critically affect expectations of empathy in interactions with agents. For example, Latino agents may face heightened expectations from the public for greater leniency or understanding towards migrants, while white agents might be expected to enforce rules more rigidly (Watkins-Hayes, 2011; Huo and Tyler, 2000).

Dialogic Account of Legitimacy

The concept of legitimacy has a long and interdisciplinary history, drawing from sociology, political science, and criminology. Bottoms and Tankebe’s (2012) approach is particularly relevant here because it views legitimacy not merely as formal rule-following, but as a dynamic, interactive process.
Defined as possessing moral authority, legitimacy, in this context, centrally confirms the perceived "rightness" of power, permitting the continued, often uncritical, performance of roles by agents and the acceptance of the immigration control system by various audiences.
This approach significantly differs from purely procedural justice views, which focus solely on fair processes. Instead, it emphasizes ideological alignment (shared beliefs about what is right and just) and continuous audience engagement, meaning legitimacy is constantly negotiated and reaffirmed through communication and interaction.

Case Study: U.S. Border Patrol

The U.S. Border Patrol was established in 1924, initially as a low-budget outfit with a primary focus on patrolling racial and national boundaries, particularly targeting Mexican laborers. Its origins are deeply entwined with racialized enforcement.
The modern Border Patrol has undergone significant militarization, leading to an increase in agent numbers, advanced surveillance technology, and more aggressive tactics. This militarization has drastically impacted migration patterns, often pushing migrants into more dangerous and remote areas, thereby increasing the risk of injury and death (Cornelius, 2005; Dunn, 1996).
Racial violence against Mexicans and other migrants by Border Patrol agents remains an ongoing and deeply problematic issue within the U.S.-Mexico border region, frequently characterized by unpunished abuses and a lack of accountability (Martínez, Slack, and Heyman, 2013; Martínez, Cantor, and Ewing, 2014).

Methodology

Data Collection

Semi-structured interviews were conducted primarily in Arizona and California from September 2014 to October 2015. These states were chosen due to their significant roles as major points of entry and enforcement along the U.S.-Mexico border.
A diverse sample of 60 agents was interviewed, ranging from upper management to frontline agents. This diversity in rank and experience was crucial for capturing a broad spectrum of perspectives and understanding how legitimation narratives manifest across different levels of the organization.

Data Analysis

Data analysis utilized open coding in HyperResearch. This technique involves breaking down qualitative data into discrete parts, closely examining them, and comparing them for similarities and differences, thereby facilitating the identification of key concepts, categories, and themes within agents’ responses to critiques about their lack of compassion.

Sample Characteristics

Gender: The sample consisted of 78% male and 22% female agents.
Race/Ethnicity: A significant portion (62%) identified as Latina/o, 27% as White, with no Black or Asian participants. The overrepresentation of Latina/o agents is notable and relevant to the study's findings on the "caring control" narrative.
Education and experience level varied, with 40% of interviewees having over 10 years of experience. This range ensured that the study captured perspectives from both newer recruits and seasoned agents, offering different insights into the evolution of legitimation narratives over careers.

Findings: Agents’ Legitimation Narratives

1. Criminalisation as Corrective

Agents frequently perceive a significant shift in migrant character, moving from what they term "economic migrants" to an increasing number of individuals they categorize as "criminals." This perceived shift provides a moral justification for harsher enforcement tactics.
They utilize narratives to describe a perceived increase in the criminality of those apprehended, often linking this change to specific policy amendments, such as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and subsequent changes, which they argue inadvertently attracted more illicit activities.
An example quote from an agent illustrates this: they might describe early encounters with "good migrants" simply seeking work, contrasting them with later experiences involving individuals engaged in drug trafficking, human smuggling, or gang affiliation, thereby emphasizing a perceived change in the demographic and intentions of border crossers over time.

2. Uncertainty of Immigrant Identities

Agents justify treating all immigrants with an initial level of suspicion, implicitly or explicitly, classifying them as potentially dangerous because of the inherent difficulty in immediately assessing their true identities, intentions, or backgrounds until biometric data (e.g., fingerprints, facial scans) becomes available.
Agents frequently share intense, sometimes traumatic, stories about past experiences where individuals who initially seemed harmless were later identified as dangerous criminals. These anecdotal experiences play a critical role in shaping their collective worldview and daily operational practices, reinforcing a blanket caution.

3. Caring Control

Despite their enforcement duties, many agents frame themselves as deeply compassionate while enforcing deportations. They actively offer comfort items like blankets, water, and food, and engage in humane interactions, demonstrating personal care even within a punitive context.
This "caring control" narrative serves a crucial psychological function, allowing agents to feel better about their roles and maintain a positive self-image without actually changing the legal consequences (detention, deportation) for the migrants. It’s a way to perform empathy within the confines of established policy.
Compassionate practices, such as providing clothing for cold nights, offering medical aid, or giving food to hungry migrants, are often highlighted by agents as evidence of their humanity. This occurs even while maintaining the fundamentally punitive and exclusionary nature of their work, presenting a paradox in their occupational identity.

Discussion and Conclusion

Agents establish and reaffirm their moral authority through two primary narrative strategies: first, by disputing immigrants’ morality through criminalization and fostering uncertainty over identities; and second, by actively emphasizing their own humane treatment and compassionate actions toward migrants.
These legitimation narratives are essential for agents as they help to resolve deep-seated moral ambiguities that arise from their enforcing exclusionary policies, and critically, they protect agents' occupational identities from internal erosion and external criticism, allowing them to continue their work with a sense of purpose.
Findings strongly suggest the necessity of further comprehensive research into the complex, dynamic relationships between compliance (with rules and orders), legitimacy (perceived moral authority), and the discretionary power exercised by agents in specific immigration contexts. This could include examining how these factors influence policy outcomes and migrant experiences.
The study highlights the powerful influence of the moral economy – the values, emotions, and norms – that shapes interactions and decisions within the entire immigration enforcement system, ultimately revealing profound issues of justice and fairness that impact both agents and migrants alike.