May 28, 1924: Congress establishes United States Border Patrol
http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/daybyday/05-28-003.html
On this day in 1924, the U.S. Congress established the United States
Border Patrol as part of the Immigration Bureau, an arm of the
Department of Labor.
Its duties included the prevention of smuggling and the arrest of
illegal entrants into the United States. During Prohibition smuggling
absorbed most of the attention of the border patrol, as bootleggers
avoided the bridges and slipped their forbidden cargo across the Rio
Grande by way of pack mules. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt
united the Bureau of Immigration and the Bureau of Naturalization into
the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and in 1940 the patrol
moved out of the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice.
>From 1942 to 1964, the border patrol recruited Mexican nationals,
called braceros, authorizing them to visit the United States for
specific periods of time as legal agricultural workers. In 1954,
however, as illegal immigration along the Mexican border soared, the
patrol inaugurated Operation Wetback, a large repatriation project.
The 1980s and 1990s saw an influx of thousands of immigrants, both
legal and illegal, from Mexico and Central America to the Rio Grande
Valley.
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