Happy Birthday, Border Patrol!

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, the Bureau of Immigration and the Bureau of Naturalization into the Immigration and Naturalization Service were united, and in 1940 the patrol moved out of the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice.  Now, it has been transferred into the Department of Homeland Security (along with the Secret Service and the Coast Guard) and not-so-ably overseen by our friend, Janet the Clueless.