Border Patrol Nation?

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

When U.S. Border Patrol agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, they were 300 miles from the U.S.-Canada border. That’s well outside the “border zone”—an area extending 100 miles inland from the border, which the U.S. established in the late 1940s as defining a “reasonable distance” for patrol purposes. In December, the Border Patrol’s Operation Metro Surge deployed 3,000 federal agents, 1,000 of them from U.S. Customs and Border Protection and...