{"id":19424,"date":"2025-10-24T16:04:22","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T16:04:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/19424\/"},"modified":"2025-10-24T16:04:22","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T16:04:22","slug":"decades-after-el-paso-beat-profiling-supreme-court-sets-us-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/19424\/","title":{"rendered":"Decades after El Paso beat profiling, Supreme Court sets us back"},"content":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0U.S. Supreme Court has greenlit<\/a>, at least temporarily, ethnic-racial profiling as a core tool for immigration enforcement in Los Angeles and beyond. This sanctioning of discrimination means a person\u2019s apparent race, the accent with which they speak English, the use of another language, their field of labor, or their location can become grounds for suspicion and deportation.<\/p>\n

The court has effectively ruled that looking or sounding Hispanic is a valid pretext for the government to question, detain and expel.<\/p>\n

This is not the first time communities have faced such targeting. The faculty, staff and students of El Paso’s Bowie High School\u00a0took a stand decades ago<\/a>\u00a0against harassment and racial profiling by Border Patrol agents. Their court fight for community dignity and their legal victory forced a powerful federal agency to change.<\/p>\n

More: Paul Strelzin successfully battled Border Patrol to protect Bowie staff, students<\/a><\/p>\n

During the 1980s and early 1990s, El Paso\u2019s Mexican American community endured profiling and harassment from Border Patrol. The situation escalated to agents routinely targeting Bowie High School, located just blocks from the border.<\/p>\n

In one incident, agents stopped a student who was carrying books and heading to class, demanding to see immigration papers or proof of citizenship simply because of their Hispanic appearance. This incident was not isolated. Border Patrol agents had repeatedly stormed onto school grounds, even entering locker rooms, harassing students and staff alike.<\/p>\n

Such intimidation created an atmosphere of fear that disrupted teaching and learning.<\/p>\n

The breaking point came when two Border Patrol agents\u00a0stopped Bowie football coach Benjamin Murillo\u00a0while he was driving several football players to a game. The coach and the football players were U.S. citizens, and one of the teenagers was the son of a Navy service member. During the stop, a Border Patrol agent approached Murillo\u2019s vehicle by pointing a gun at his head. Murillo was searched and the Bowie students were initially questioned in Spanish, a language they did not understand.\u00a0Murillo later said, “I began to see that they constantly violate our kids’ civil rights.”<\/p>\n

More: Harassment suit settled; Border Patrol won\u2019t detain people for looks alone<\/a><\/p>\n

Murillo, five students and a school secretary\u00a0decided to take legal action<\/a>. With representation from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), they\u00a0filed a federal class-action lawsuit<\/a>\u00a0in 1992 against Border Patrol sector chief Dale\u00a0Musegades, other unnamed agents and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. After reviewing an extensive amount of evidence, a federal district court found that Border Patrol agents had illegally engaged in a consistent pattern of racial profiling and harassment, and ordered the agency\u00a0to cease targeting the Hispanic community<\/a>\u00a0in its enforcement actions in the border city.<\/p>\n

The victory in court and\u00a0the subsequent 1994 settlement<\/a>\u00a0mandated concrete changes that included guidelines requiring reasonable suspicion for any stop, mandatory retraining for all El Paso sector agents on constitutional law, and the appointment of a community liaison officer to address complaints. The case also likely influenced a policy directing immigration officials\u00a0to avoid arrests at schools<\/a>, places of worship or funerals \u2014 a policy the\u00a0Trump administration\u00a0rescinded this year<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Border Patrol actions at El Paso’s Bowie High School, the subsequent court case and the 1994 settlement exposed how easily federal power can be\u00a0weaponized against entire communities under the guise of immigration enforcement. Today, as courts and lawmakers again weigh how far immigration authorities may go, Bowie High School\u2019s story is a warning.<\/p>\n

If we allow racial-ethnic profiling to become normalized, we risk corroding the very principles of justice and equality as well public trust. The Supreme Court, and everyday Americans, must remember this lesson.<\/p>\n

Joel Zapata is an assistant professor of history and the Cairns K. Smith Faculty Scholar at Oregon State University.<\/p>\n

This article originally appeared on El Paso Times: Decades after El Paso beat profiling, Supreme Court sets us back: Joel Zapata<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The\u00a0U.S. Supreme Court has greenlit, at least temporarily, ethnic-racial profiling as a core tool for immigration enforcement in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":106,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[1818,14887,138,140,139,1830,14889,1049,14888],"class_list":["post-19424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-el-paso","tag-border-patrol","tag-bowie-high-school","tag-el-paso","tag-el-paso-headlines","tag-el-paso-news","tag-immigration-enforcement","tag-racial-profiling","tag-students","tag-u-s-supreme-court"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19424"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19424\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}