Immigration spying has inglorious past

In the early 1900s, the US Bureau of Immigration created a special “Chinese Division" to enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was the first major US immigration law to ban entry based on race and nationality.

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Federal agents were sent to Mexican border towns and tasked with secretly photographing, tracking and cataloging Chinese migrants — in a word, to spy on them.

Years before the Border Patrol was formally created in 1924, federal officials began patrolling the US-Mexico border to catch Chinese migrants attempting to enter the country. Immigration officers and “mounted Chinese inspectors” on horseback rode through deserts and borderlands, detaining people based on appearance and perceived foreignness, according to the Tribune News Service.

These mounted officers, often deputised cowboys or former soldiers, were the precursors to today’s militarised border enforcement, practicing racial profiling and exclusion through surveillance and force. The “Chinese Division” later expanded to the “Oriental Division” and the 1917 Immigration Act created a further ban on migrant arrivals from Asia. The vigilante agents used racial profiling to detain migrants from South Asia, Korea and Japan.