Who's Really Causing the Chaos at the Border — and in Your City?
Bellingcat published an investigation this month titled “Border Patrol: Agents of Chaos.” It’s a long, well-produced piece — 85 hours of footage analyzed, agents identified by name, former DHS officials offering grave commentary about “Orwellian” tactics and violations of de-escalation policy. The production values are excellent. The framing is almost entirely backwards.
I want to walk through why — not because Bellingcat is uniquely dishonest, but because this piece is a perfect specimen of a genre: the investigative report that treats enforcement of the law as the problem, and organized interference with law enforcement as a sympathetic backdrop. Once you see the structure, you can’t unsee it.
Who Exactly Are the “Agents of Chaos” Here?
The headline frames Border Patrol agents as the source of disorder in American cities. The article documents incidents in Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Bakersfield — chemical irritants deployed, people tackled, a gun briefly unholstered. Serious-sounding stuff.
But here’s the question Bellingcat never quite gets around to asking: what were people doing immediately before these things happened?
Throwing snowballs at federal officers. Physically blocking law enforcement vehicles. Surrounding and mobbing active arrest scenes. Screaming at agents from inches away. Positioning bodies between officers and detainees. This isn’t speculation — it’s in the same footage Bellingcat spent 85 hours reviewing.
Law enforcement operates on a simple principle that seems to have gotten lost somewhere in the editorial process: agents don’t generate chaos spontaneously. They respond to situations. Border Patrol officers weren’t dispatched to Minneapolis to hassle random pedestrians. They were executing authorized enforcement operations under lawful orders. The chaos variable in every single incident Bellingcat documents is the organized presence of people whose explicit goal was to obstruct those operations.
If you pour water on a grease fire and then write a 10,000-word investigation into why there was so much steam, you’ve produced journalism of a kind. It’s just not the useful kind.
These “Protesters” Have a Logistics Budget
Here’s where the piece accidentally makes my argument for me.
Bellingcat notes, almost in passing, that agents from the El Centro sector appeared in Bakersfield in January, Los Angeles in June, and Chicago in October. They flag this as evidence of a suspicious federal deployment pattern. But the same geographic spread applies to the protest networks opposing them — and the article treats that as entirely unremarkable.
Think about what you’re actually looking at. The same organized groups show up in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis. They arrive in numbers. They have communications infrastructure that allows them to respond to enforcement operations rapidly. Some are clearly trained in how to physically position themselves relative to agents and detainees. They know which cameras to stand next to.
That is not spontaneous community outrage. That is a coordinated counter-enforcement infrastructure, and it has funders, organizers, and operational leadership somewhere upstream. The article never asks who’s paying for it — not the flights, not the buses, not the legal support that inevitably follows these confrontations, not the media training that makes certain protesters so much more photogenic than others.
When federal agencies show up in multiple cities with a coordinated presence, Bellingcat calls it an investigation. When activist organizations do the same thing, it’s “community members pushing back.” The asymmetry is instructive.
I’m not saying protest is illegitimate. People have every right to demonstrate peacefully. But there’s a difference between neighbors who are genuinely alarmed and an organized network executing a counter-operations playbook. Bellingcat, an organization that built its reputation on following money and mapping networks, somehow loses that instinct entirely when the networks in question are on the right side of their politics.
The Experts They Chose
Former DHS Inspector General John Roth calls the masked deployments “unusual and beyond the pale” and “Orwellian.” Former DHS General Counsel Steve Burnell says agents were engaged in “dominance displays.” These are the voices Bellingcat selected to contextualize what they’re seeing.
Here’s what the article doesn’t tell you: these men held senior positions at DHS during an administration that presided over the most chaotic period in the history of American border enforcement. John Roth served as Inspector General through 2019. The DHS general counsel’s office during the Biden years produced the legal frameworks under which CBP was essentially reoriented from enforcement to processing.
These are not neutral observers of “what appropriate enforcement looks like.” They are, to varying degrees, architects of the policy environment that produced the crisis this enforcement surge is trying to address. Asking them whether current enforcement is too aggressive is like asking the city planners who approved 40 years of bad zoning decisions whether the new building codes are unnecessarily strict.
Former officials make great sources when their expertise is relevant and their interests are disclosed. In this piece, neither is quite true. They provide credentialed-sounding criticism of enforcement, with no acknowledgment that their own tenures are part of the story.
The Chaos Bellingcat Doesn’t Cover
The piece opens with the implicit premise that there was a stable, orderly baseline before this enforcement surge began — and that Border Patrol has introduced chaos into that order. This is the most consequential assumption in the entire article, and it’s never examined.
Let me offer a different baseline.
From fiscal year 2021 through fiscal year 2024, U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded over 8 million encounters at the southwest border. That’s encounters — people who were apprehended, processed, and in enormous numbers released into the United States pending immigration proceedings that a significant percentage never attended. The “got-away” population — people who crossed without being apprehended at all — is estimated at over a million additional individuals during that same period, by definition people about whom we know almost nothing.
During those same years, fentanyl seizures at the southern border increased dramatically — and fentanyl, unlike most drugs, kills at microgram doses, meaning even small quantities that slip through represent significant body counts. The drug kills roughly 70,000 Americans a year. The border was a major vector.
Human trafficking networks — actual criminal enterprises moving actual human beings — operated openly in corridors where Border Patrol was overwhelmed, undermanned, and under explicit political pressure to process rather than enforce. There are women and children in the specifics of that story that don’t appear anywhere in Bellingcat’s 85 hours of footage.
The agents Bellingcat is documenting didn’t cause any of that. They spent years watching it happen while policy prioritized management over enforcement. The “chaos” Bellingcat is covering is what enforcement looks like when you’re playing catch-up after years of deliberate neglect. That context isn’t in the piece because it would complicate the narrative considerably.
On the Masks
Bellingcat’s former-DHS expert calls masked federal agents “Orwellian.” It’s a good line. It implies state power hiding itself from accountability, secret police aesthetics, government operating beyond the law.
Here is the less cinematic explanation: Bellingcat is, literally, in the business of identifying law enforcement officers by name. This article names five of them specifically, with their sector assignments, their travel patterns, and details drawn from their social media presence. Some of that social media presence was apparently not hard to find.
Federal officers’ families live somewhere. Their kids go to school somewhere. The same networks that coordinate multi-city protest operations also coordinate doxxing — publishing personal information about officers with the predictable downstream effect of harassment, threats, and in some cases worse. This has happened repeatedly to ICE and Border Patrol agents over the past several years. The masks exist in direct response to a documented threat.
You can believe that public accountability for law enforcement is important — I do — and still notice that “accountability” in this context sometimes functions as the opening move in a harassment campaign rather than a check on state power. Bellingcat naming these agents is, in a real sense, part of the same ecosystem that makes the masks feel necessary.
An Orwellian dynamic, to be sure. But the direction of the power imbalance is not quite what the article suggests.
What Bellingcat Is
This is probably the context that most readers of the piece don’t have, so it’s worth laying out briefly.
Bellingcat presents itself as an independent open-source investigative outlet. Its funding includes grants from the National Endowment for Democracy, the Open Society Foundations, and various European government-linked bodies. It has done genuinely useful work — the MH17 investigation, for instance, was real journalism with real consequences. It is not a neutral actor.
The NED and Open Society are not secret organizations with nefarious hidden agendas. But they do have political orientations, and those orientations are not randomly distributed. Organizations funded through those networks tend to produce investigations that point in certain directions and not others. “Border Patrol agents are aggressive” is an investigation that gets funded and published. “Who is funding the counter-enforcement protest networks?” is an investigation that doesn’t get written.
That’s not conspiracy. That’s how editorial priorities work in every newsroom, and understanding who’s paying for which journalism is the kind of source analysis Bellingcat itself would apply to, say, a Russian state media outlet.
The Actual Question
Here is what I think is actually being debated underneath all of this, and what the Bellingcat framing deliberately obscures:
Should the United States enforce its immigration laws?
If the answer is yes, then the people obstructing that enforcement are the chaos agents. Agents who respond with force to people physically blocking federal law enforcement operations are operating — however imperfectly, with whatever individual failures the footage may reveal — within a legitimate system doing a legitimate job. Individual accountability for excessive force is appropriate and should happen. But the framework of enforcement itself is not the problem.
If the answer is no — if you believe, as the protest networks clearly do, that immigration enforcement is inherently illegitimate and should be obstructed wherever it occurs — then the framing makes sense. The agents are the problem because the whole enterprise is the problem.
Bellingcat would like to have it both ways: present itself as doing neutral accountability journalism while operating entirely within the second framework. The masked agents are Orwellian. The protesters are community members. The former officials who enabled the crisis are experts. The crisis itself is invisible.
Bottom Line
The chaos in American cities over immigration enforcement has a clear origin point — and it isn’t the agents wearing masks. It’s eight years of policy that deliberately chose not to enforce the law, followed by organized networks that are now trying to prevent enforcement from resuming. Bellingcat documented the wrong story. The interesting investigation is the one they didn’t write.