How the Road to Impunity is Paved: A Podcast with Reece Jones

The Smuggler Inn was a bed-and-breakfast on the U.S.-Canadian border in Blaine, Washington. Each room was named after a famous smuggler. The owner, a conservative businessman named Bob Boulé, was hoping to make a buck, and he was also an informant for the U.S. Border Patrol. But Boulé’s story became one of transformation: by the end, he gave up everything—including, eventually, even his bed-and-breakfast—to help asylum seekers cross the border. 

In this podcast, we discuss the story behind prolific author and geographer Reece Jones’ fifth book, which he co-authored with attorney Greg Boos: Smuggler: Drugs, Gangs, and Refugees at America’s Northern Border. If you were wondering, this book is a page-turner and reads like a vivid novel. At the same time, it follows the path of Jones’s other insightful and deeply reported books that include Nobody is Protected: How the Border Patrol Became the Most Dangerous Police Force in the United States, White Borders: The History of Race and Immigration in the United States from Chinese Exclusion to the Border Wall, and Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move.

We discuss not only Boulé’s story of transformation, but also the all-too-often underreported enforcement of the U.S.-Canada border, including how a Border Patrol helicopter would fly over the Smuggler Inn when Boulé cut his lawn, which was partially in Canada. 

This eventually led to a violent incident and the 2022 Supreme Court ruling, Egbert v. Bob Boulé, that paved the way for Border Patrol and ICE impunity. “In effect, the 2022 decision makes it impossible to sue a federal agent for violations of your constitutional rights,” Jones says in our conversation. “And so in the year after that decision, NBC News did an analysis, and they found that” every claim “against a Customs and Border Protection agent was thrown out. And that, of course, takes us to 2026, when we see ICE and the Border Patrol rampaging through the streets in the United States in places like Minneapolis, clearly violating people’s constitutional rights, by entering houses without a warrant, by smashing windows on vehicles, and literally killing people in the streets.”