Across the United States, from the southern border to interior cities far from it, a painful and recurring question surfaces in immigrant communities: why are so many of the people enforcing deportation, detention, and family separation Latino themselves? Why do Border Patrol and ICE agents often speak Spanish, share our surnames, and come from immigrant families, yet participate in a system that harms the very communities they come from?
Some call it betrayal or shameful. Others call it survival. The truth is older, deeper, and far more uncomfortable than either explanation allows.
To understand what is happening today, we must revisit one of the most misunderstood figures in Mexican and Indigenous history: La Malinche.
La Malinche was an Indigenous woman enslaved and forced into service as a translator for Hernán Cortés during the Spanish conquest of Mexico. For centuries, nationalist narratives portrayed her as a traitor who helped foreigners destroy Indigenous civilizations. Her name became shorthand for betrayal, giving rise to the term malinchismo, used to describe loyalty to a foreign power over one’s own people.
Modern historians and feminist scholars have dismantled this caricature arguing that la Malinche was not a powerful decision-maker who acted freely but rather a young, enslaved woman navigating a violent colonial system that offered no real moral escape. She did not design the conquest. She was used by it. Colonial systems have always worked this way: they recruit insiders, reward compliance, punish resistance, and then allow individuals to be blamed rather than the structures that coerced them.
U.S. border enforcement did not emerge as a neutral or apolitical institution. It was built to regulate labor, control movement, and police racialized populations. From its earliest days, the border functioned as a space where constitutional protections were weaker and state power more aggressive. What has changed over time is not the core mission, but the faces enforcing it.
Today, Latinos make up a substantial portion, and in some regions, the majority of Border Patrol and ICE agents. This demographic shift is often cited as evidence of progress or inclusion. But representation alone does not transform an institution’s purpose. An unjust system does not become humane because it hires people who resemble those it harms. A deportation carried out in Spanish is still a deportation. A family separation enforced by someone with an immigrant background is still a family separation.
The presence of Latino agents can even make enforcement more efficient. Familiarity reduces resistance. Shared language lowers barriers. The violence becomes less visible, less shocking, and therefore easier to normalize. Colonial power is most effective when it convinces communities that harm is coming from “one of our own.”
The economic context matters. Across the country, many regions that supply border enforcement personnel are places where opportunity is scarce and public investment is thin. Federal law enforcement jobs offer steady pay, benefits, pensions, and a sense of status in an economy that increasingly denies stability to working-class families. For many young Latinos, enforcement is not framed as a moral choice but as one of the few available ladders out of economic insecurity.
This is not a coincidence. It is by design.
Colonial systems do not simply dominate through force. They dominate by narrowing choices until participation feels inevitable. When education, healthcare, housing, and community investment are underfunded, law enforcement becomes one of the few institutions offering security. The system then points to individual participation as proof of legitimacy, absolving itself of responsibility for the conditions that made participation attractive.
This does not mean that individual agents are free of moral conflict. Many experience deep internal struggle, emotional burnout, and pressure to conform to aggressive enforcement cultures. Some leave. Some attempt to soften the edges of enforcement from within. But history offers another hard truth: participation in an unjust system still carries responsibility, even when participation is shaped by economic coercion.
La Malinche’s tragedy was not that she was evil. It was that she was trapped, and later blamed, while the architects of conquest escaped scrutiny. We repeat that mistake today when public debate fixates on individual “betrayal” while ignoring the political, economic, and historical structures that profit from any type of enforcement.
The more honest question is not why Latino agents “turn against their people.” The real question is why American society continues to force marginalized communities to choose between survival and solidarity. Why are enforcement budgets expanded while schools, healthcare systems, and social infrastructure remain fragile? Why does the state invest more readily in detention centers than in pathways to dignity?
If we want fewer Latinos enforcing harm, the solution is not to shame individuals. It requires structural change. It requires building real alternatives: education that leads to power, jobs that strengthen communities rather than police them, and immigration policy rooted in humanity rather than fear. Until then, the system will continue producing new “Malinches,” only to condemn them afterward for surviving within the confines it imposed.
La Malinche’s story should not be used as a weapon of accusation. It should be understood as a warning. When systems of power offer marginalized people a narrow escape hatch and call it opportunity, we must ask who benefits, who bears the cost, and who is blamed when the damage is done.
The border is not just a geographic boundary. It is a moral test. And what it reveals about America’s values should unsettle us enough to demand something better.
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