The timeline of events was perfectly Trumpian. Last weekend, Easter weekend, the president of the United States was at his resort in Mar-a-Lago, hanging out with his right-wing friends, watching cable news, and getting mad about immigrants. Multiple Fox News hosts and Stephen Miller, the White House adviser behind many of the administration’s aggressive efforts to deplete the nation’s immigrant population, were in attendance. The crew had at least two pieces of bad news for the president: One, Ann Coulter was calling him out for not being tough enough on immigrants; and two, a caravan of said immigrants were marching north toward the border. In a move that any sentient observer of the administration would expect, the commander in chief responded to the news by tweeting a series of deeply misleading statements to his 45 million followers and the rest of the world over multiple days. Along the way, he made a series of eye-opening vows. By the time the dust settled three days later, President Donald Trump and the departments of Justice and Homeland Security had all put out statements telling the country that the National Guard was being deployed to secure the border between the U.S. and Mexico.

On Wednesday afternoon, while news of the purported deployment was still developing, I was on the phone with a retired border lawman, chatting about another story. Before we hung up, I asked him what he thought of the president’s comments. He told me about a case from years back, in which the National Guard shot and killed an American teen — a high school student, in fact — while he was out hunting. The details were fuzzy, but clearly the case had stuck with him; it was an example, he said, of what, predictably, happens when the military is sent to do the work of law enforcement. “That was the first thing I thought of,” he told me.

As soon as we got off the phone, I started Googling the facts he had described. He had gotten some of the details wrong. The shooter in the case was actually a U.S. Marine, not a member of the National Guard. And the boy who died was not hunting, he was walking his family’s goats. But the broad strokes of the case were right. The boy had just turned 18, but he was still in high school, and he was killed during one of the country’s traditional bouts of demands to bring the border under control by military means. His name was Esequiel Hernández, and, as Trump pushes for another round of border militarization, the story of his tragic killing, and the politics that led to it, are worth revisiting. At the time, the killing of Esequiel Hernández, in West Texas, in 1997, was a major national news story. In the years that followed, it would become the focus of multiple congressional and law enforcement investigations, including three grand juries, and the subject of scores of news articles and magazine stories. In 2007, director Kieran Fitzgerald released a documentary about the case, “The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández,” to critical acclaim. A decade later, as Trump came into power, the story garnered renewed focus, and with good reason — it is a devastating example of how demands for militarization born in Washington manifest in border communities, and how lessons that should have been internalized years ago are routinely discarded.

Rather than announcing their presence and blowing their mission, the Marines stayed hidden, tracking Hernández as he made his way back to his house.

The people of Redford, Texas, then a town with a population of 107, had no idea that the Marines were in their community. Neither did the local law enforcement, or anyone, for that matter, with the capacity to explain to the military that kids in rural West Texas carry guns when they go out, and that Esequiel Hernández, a teenager with a Marine Corps poster tacked to his bedroom wall, was one of those kids. The four Marines on the ground that day were only a few years older than Hernández. They had no clue that in the afternoon, when he got home from school, Hernández would walk his goats, and that, recently, some wild dogs had been harassing his animals, so he was taking his 70-year-old, .22-caliber rifle to run them off.

An abandoned adobe house is seen on July 26, 2008, in Redford, Texas, near where Esequiel Hernández was killed. Photo: Guillermo Arias/AP

Dressed in ghillie suits, the shrub-like outfits snipers wear to conceal their location, the Marines were officially there to offer support for a Border Patrol unit that was attempting to run down a tip about a smuggler coming into the U.S. through an informal crossing point known as “El Polvo” — Spanish for “the dust.” The deeper story behind their presence is rooted in the drug war and Washington’s never-ending quest to bring order to the border through overwhelming force. The Marines were part of an outfit known as Joint Task Force 6, or JTF-6, stood up by then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney in 1989 and championed by then-Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Colin Powell. Their mission was counternarcotics, and their closest partner was the U.S. Border Patrol. The rhetoric behind JTF-6’s operations was much like the rhetoric today. In a stated effort combat to crime and disorder, President Ronald Reagan declared drugs a threat to national security and opened a flow of military equipment and training from the Pentagon to any federal law enforcement involved in drugs, customs, or immigration enforcement. Reagan’s efforts pushed the limits of the Posse Comitatus Act, the 1878 law limiting the federal government’s power to use the military in domestic law enforcement. When former CIA Director George H.W. Bush came to the presidential office at the end of the decade, he embraced the ethos of the drug war with equal vigor, putting counternarcotics at the top of his agenda and, with the support of lawmakers in both parties, beefed up the military’s presence on the border. Through the early 1990s, as immigration became an increasingly heated political issue, stopping the flow of bodies coming across the border bled into the effort to combat drug trafficking, with bipartisan support. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., for example, proposed a “$1 border toll to pay for more border control agents,” the New York Times reported in 1994, while former Sen. Barbara Boxer, also a Democrat, made her own call to send the National Guard to the border that same year. Two years later, more than 4,000 Marines and Green Berets would rotate through San Diego in support of California National Guard operations, with an emphasis on immigration enforcement. By 1996, with the drug war torch passed from Bush to President Bill Clinton, JTF-6 was “one of the longest running task forces in U.S. military history,” according to a 1998 article in the Austin Chronicle. Professor Timothy Dunn, a sociologist at Salisbury University in Maryland and author of a book on U.S. border militarization, was working on his dissertation in El Paso, Texas, during the heyday of JTF-6 and would devote years into studying the task force and, ultimately, the Hernández killing. JTF-6 was responsible for coordinating operations and overseeing units ranging from the National Guard to more elite, highly trained military units, Dunn explained. The task force was responsible for 19 types of missions, he said, in three categories: operational, engineering, and general support. A majority of the task force’s missions were operational. “That included the deployment of ground troops for surveillance,” Dunn told me. “They were doing something on the order of 300 to 500 missions a year.” Dunn pointed out that the vast majority of drugs were coming through major ports of entry — which remains true today — not impoverished communities like Redford, where Hernández and his family lived. Sure, he said, there was illicit trafficking there, of all sorts of goods, but nothing of serious scale. But cracking down on ports is complicated, because doing so invites interruptions in millions of dollars in legal, daily trade. And so, remote areas become grounds for operations. Dunn recalls JTF-6, for years, being a fairly secretive outfit. “They had a PR arm,” he said, but “they kept a pretty low profile.” In the late 1990s, that began to change. The task force seemed to be in the early stages of a public relations campaign, inviting the media to join them on operations to illustrate how the troops were helping the Border Patrol interdict drugs and people. “That was in that spring, that same April-May time period,” Dunn said. “And by the end of May — May 20 — that young man was killed. And that stopped everything cold.” It was late in the afternoon when Hernández and the Marines crossed paths. They had been tracking the teenager along the Rio Grande after, they claimed, he fired two shots in their direction. Rather than announcing their presence and blowing their mission, the Marines stayed hidden, tracking Hernández as he made his way back to his house — this, investigators would later say, was a violation of the rules the men had been given. Hernández was nearly home when he was killed. The Marines claimed Hernández had again raised his weapon in their direction and, consistent with their interpretations of the rules of engagement and orders they received at the time, Cpl. Clemente Banuelos let loose a single shot. Hernández fell into a well, where he bled to death in the dirt. His death would soon become the most high-profile military killing of an American on U.S. soil since the Kent State massacre in 1970, when members of the Ohio National Guard opened fire on unarmed college students, leaving four dead. (Though, it should be noted, the National Guard had also used lethal force during the 1992 Los Angeles riots and other moments of racial unrest throughout history.) The Marines’s description of events came under intense scrutiny in the years that followed. For one, Hernández was right-handed and the bullet that killed him entered his right side, suggesting he could not have been pointing his gun at them. The Marines Corps’s official investigation, which found multiple faults in the JTF-6 mission, would later determine that the team, dressed in their camouflage, was laying down when the fatal shot was fired. “Esequiel Hernández never knew there was anyone out there,” Terry Kincaid, an FBI supervisory agent said in the documentary film about his killing. Maj. Gen. Mike Coyne, a Marine Corps investigator, added, “Clearly he didn’t think he was shooting at humans, certainly not Marines.”

Esequiel Hernández’s family walks outside a Marfa, Texas, courthouse on Aug. 14, 1997, after a grand jury declined to indict Marine Cpl. Clemente Banuelos, who shot and killed the 18-year-old on May 22, 1997. Photo: Walter Frerck/AP