1/ Trump's deployment of Border Patrol storm troopers to repress protests on the streets of US cities isn't happening in a vacuum. Here are several instances where the Border Patrol has conducted or trained for political repression in the US interior, starting in the Obama admin.

2/ In fall 2016, Customs and Border Protection furnished North Dakota cops with the agency’s drone to conduct surveillance of the uprising against DAPL @ Standing Rock. I reported on this in this @intercept story and will provide more detail in an upcoming piece.

3/ In Nov. 2016, Border Patrol started operating checkpoints near Bismarck, around 200 miles from the northern border, and arresting DAPL opponents, as @memomiller (who has tirelessly chronicled the interiorization of border policing for years) reported.

4/ In 2017, the Montana Legislature considered a bill to give Border Patrol agents qualified immunity in case they were called upon to suppress protests against the Keystone XL pipeline. https://www.greatfallstribune.com/story/news/local/2017/02/23/bill-give-border-patrol-qualified-immunity/98328876/

In 2017, Cass County, ND Sheriff Paul Laney (an architect of Standing Rock police ops) trained Border Patrol agents in San Diego on protest repression. He followed up with another training of Border Patrol agents in TX's Rio Grande Valley, as I reported in
@shadowproofcom

6/ In March 2018, 19 Border Patrol agents took part in a "field force operations training" by the Federal Emergency Management Administration in Washington State to prepare for protests against the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, as @AlleenBrown and I reported in @intercept.

7/ In sum, the Border Patrol has been training for years to integrate seamlessly into domestic repression of political protest. Since Trump's election, ICE and CBP have also increasingly functioned as Trump’s private army, doing his political bidding whenever called upon.

8/ As @GregGrandin describes in his great book The End of the Myth, the "nationalization of border brutalism" is deeply rooted in broader crises of US imperialism and neo-liberal capitalism, which fuels nativist fanatiscism within the US. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/nativism-empire-blowback-trump/