The Story Behind Bill Barr's Unmarked Federal Agents<quote>
What is surprising is that those two agencies now facing down Black Lives Matter and crowds protesting systemic racism historically have been enlisted by the federal government to
protect blacks against white protesters. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, for instance, deputized officers from the Border Patrol and the Bureau of Prisons to work as U.S. marshals and secure the University of Mississippi in 1962 to protect James Meredith as he enrolled at the school after desegregation. Similarly, the Border Patrol once watched over the Freedom Riders in Alabama and Mississippi in the 1960s.
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On the lighter side, few tourists know, for instance, that the National Gallery of Arthome to some of the world's most famous artworkhas a
shooting range for its police tucked away above its soaring central rotunda. On the darker side, the roughly 20,000 federal prison guards known formally as the Bureau of Prisonswhose riot units make up a sizable chunk of the officers imported to D.C. and who represent the single largest component of federal officers in the Justice Departmentare concerning to see on the streets in part because they're largely untrained in civilian law enforcement; they normally
operate in a controlled environment behind bars with sharply limited civil liberties and use-of-force policies that would never fly in a civilian environment.
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Concerningly, under the Trump administration, many of these agencies have been rudderlessoverseen by rotating series of acting officials. More than half of all federal civilian law enforcement right now is being led by temporary acting officials, everything from ICE and CBP to DEA. (That calculation doesn't even count the thousands of special agents in inspectors general offices that have recently seen an
administrationwide purge of the government's watchdogs.) The Bureau of Prisons was being overseen by an
acting director last summer when Jeffrey Epstein managed to commit suicide while supposedly under strict monitoring. The DEA, with its special temporary powers for the protests, is currently led by an
acting administrator who has been on the job for just days.
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