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When Walls Are the Only Answer, We’re Asking the Wrong Question
Border barriers respond to only one question: How do we stop them? Our starting point should be: Why are so many people on the run?
Aug 08, 2024
The U.S. Border Patrol turns 100 this year, marking a century of hunting people; stoking vigilante violence; and erecting physical, technological, and bureaucratic barriers—many lethal—against human beings in need. But walls have never been the solution. Indeed, they are the reason cruelty, chaos, and corruption prevail at our crossroads, especially along the U.S. frontier with Mexico. Patrols and checkpoints, gateways and guns, militarization—in lieu of humanitarian mobilization—these represent the real crisis at our borders today: the hardening of the human heart, a world in which empathy has seemingly expired.
Border barriers respond to only one question: How do we stop them?
Our starting point should be: Why are so many people on the run?
Over the last 40 years, a deterrence-to-detention-to-deportation pipeline that daily flouts legal due process has grown up all around us, hiding in plain sight just outside our privileged view.
History matters, and this history is no exception because much of what we’re dealing with today was Made in the USA. It is the legacy of climate breakdown, driven largely by our stubborn dependence on fossil fuels. It is the consequence of U.S. economic imperatives that incentivize corporations to migrate south in search of low wages, little taxation, and no environmental controls. It is the heritage of a foreign policy perspective wherein Latin America and the Caribbean exist for U.S. enrichment.
From the Banana Wars to the Dirty Wars, through the so-called Wars on Drugs and Terror, the U.S. role in rendering whole regions unlivable, thus forcing human displacement, is little discussed. While there is significant and excellent academic scholarship documenting this reality, it is kept swept under the rug, out of sight and out of mind, as if the powers that be don’t want us to know.
So here’s what you should know.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the power and wealth accumulated by the Cold War iron triangle at the intersection of bureaucracy, industry, and self-interest was threatened. So the military-industrial complex pivoted to managing and maintaining borders worldwide. A border-industrial complex was born, and the betrayal of the international refugee protection regime began.
There were about a dozen walls around the world when Berlin’s came down. There are now close to 90 built or in the works. And while erected much as their medieval counterparts had been—to divide and exclude—modern walls are no longer exclusively physical. They extend to the outer limits of linked surveillance systems and troop movements. As a result, the U.S. southern border of 2024 stretches as far as Colombia; Fortress Europe can be felt throughout North Africa, deep into the Sahara Desert.
Though the militarization of the U.S. southern border began well before the shattering events of September 11, 2001, that event propelled the border-industrial complex into overdrive, with the wealthiest and most privileged nations already primed to turn their backs on post-WWII human rights commitments. Favoring a security-first paradigm, 21st-century profiteers and demagogues are now making bank—or political hay—in thwarting the movement of humans fleeing hunger, horror, and harm.
The foot soldiers in this cruel war against the world’s most vulnerable people—those who’ve been forced to leave home because home has become too dangerous to stay—include the U.S. Border Patrol.
A sub-agency of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection since 2003, the U.S. Border Patrol became official 100 years ago, on May 28, 1924. The first appointed agent, Jefferson Davis Milton, was the son of a Confederate governor and enslaver. Offspring of an era when Slave Patrols carried out the dictates not of law, but of plantation “justice,” Milton became a Texas Ranger in the late 1870s, when still a teen. Tasked with the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous peoples, the recapture of formerly enslaved Black people, and the suppression of Mexican-origin property holders who took issue with white colonial settlers moving in and moving them off their land, the Texas Rangers of Milton’s day relied on the same raw, physical violence and brutality bequeathed to them by their Slave Patrol forebears.
Then came the 1875 Page Act, Congress’ second-ever legislation restricting immigration. It sought to check the numbers of Chinese laborers lured to the U.S., first by the discovery of California gold, then by the construction of the transcontinental railroad. The subsequent Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made it harder for expelled Chinese to get back into the U.S.; and impossible for new Chinese arrivals to gain entry at all.
Of course, Congress needed an armed guard to enforce this legislation as well as an office to maintain the force. So, in 1904, the first U.S. immigration police force was born: the Mounted Guard of Chinese Inspectors. It was made up of former Slave Patrollers, Klansmen, and Texas Rangers, like Milton. The human link between yesteryear’s slave and today’s border patrols, Milton brought to the Mounted Guard of Chinese Inspectors the same “shoot first and ask questions later” attitude he learned as a ranger. From 1924, he passed that culture of impunity to his new Border Patrol recruits just as U.S. lawyer, conservationist, and hardened eugenicist, Madison Grant, became a household name with his 1916 publication, The Passing of the Great Race. Claimed by Hitler as “my Bible,” the book is the bedrock of the Fox News/Breitbart/MAGA-party “Great Replacement Theory” today.
The fear-mongering Madison’s book kicked up in the 1920s might have been the country’s first Culture War. It certainly played an active role in Congress passing the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, with humans still referred to as “aliens,” even in the modern era. The follow-up Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the National Origins Act; authorized the creation of the Border Patrol; further tightened the quotas; and stiffened punishments for what was now called “illegal” entry," criminalizing the act of crossing the line “without inspection” by a border official. The National Origins Act would remain in place until the 1960s, as would the blatant exploitation of Mexican laborers.
Mexicans had moved throughout the borderlands without issue for centuries. They helped to expand and grow the U.S. economy; they turned California’s Imperial Valley into some of the most productive land on Earth. From 1924, when the U.S. southern border was closed and Mexican migration thwarted, treaties had to be negotiated when labor was needed to keep crops from dying in the furrows and factory assembly lines from failing to meet their projected yields. A political compromise was forged between Congress and the southwestern land barons: They could have their cheap labor as long as it was kept temporary and marginalized. This is when the Border Patrol went from merely hunting people to herding folks for the captains of U.S. corporate agriculture, too.
Fast-forward to the 2010s. When whole families as well as unaccompanied children began to arrive at the U.S. southern border—fleeing violence, starvation, climate breakdown, and other repercussions of U.S. political interference, military operations, and economic exploitation—that might have caused us to consider the human costs of our global adventurism; it should have triggered a humanitarian response at our southern border and a rethink of our outmoded immigration and asylum systems. But it didn’t.
Instead, the model of “prevention through deterrence”—unleashed 10 months after NAFTA became official in January 1994 and built on thwarting human migration through the cruelest of means—hardened. Over the last 40 years, a deterrence-to-detention-to-deportation pipeline that daily flouts legal due process has grown up all around us, hiding in plain sight just outside our privileged view. It is now the global behemoth that many decry as “broken” but which is working just fine for the demagogues and profiteers that benefit from it. In their world, where the outsider is to be feared and our so-called “security” reigns paramount, the 20th-century promise of the universality of human rights no longer applies.
But when home becomes too dangerous to stay, people move. We always have, and we always will—part of the human story since the dawn of time.
That is why deterring humans with walls has never worked, except to inflict misery and to kill. And why the 100-year birthday of a federal agency tasked with people-hunting and herding; prone to stoking vigilante violence; and intent on erecting physical, technological, and bureaucratic barriers—many lethal—against human beings in need is nothing to celebrate.
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Biden’s Border Isn’t Open to Anyone But Contractors
The all-too-profitable border apparatus is designed to make people suffer and let some die.
Nov 11, 2023
On September 23, at about 2:30 am, a Border Patrol surveillance camera captured two people crossing the international boundary between Mexico and the United States on the outskirts of Nogales, Arizona. A Border Patrol vehicle arrived quickly, but not before one of them had fled back into Mexico. When an armed agent stepped out, dressed in a forest-green uniform, he found a 16-year-old girl from Mexico softly crying, while holding her month-old baby swaddled in a blanket.
The agent commanded her to get in the vehicle. As they then drove to the Nogales Border Patrol station, the girl, he later reported, tried to speak to him in Spanish through the security partition that separated them. Her tiny daughter, she was telling him, was in distress. Cameras showed that the vehicle stopped for all of 10 seconds before continuing. The agent later claimed he couldn’t understand what she was saying and that he wanted to find a fluent Spanish speaker at the station. He didn’t realize, he insisted, that the infant was struggling to breathe, though the child soon died.
This hellish story of suffering at our border is but one of hundreds of similar tales of horror from 2023. They illustrate a fundamental truth about that border: It neither is, nor ever was, an “open” one in the Biden years, nor does the president faintly have an open-border policy, though prepare yourself to hear otherwise—over and over again—in Trumpublican campaign ads next year. They’ll repeat what party officials are already saying all too repetitively: that “President Biden’s radical open borders policies” have created “the worst border crisis in American history.” (While those are the exact words of House Oversight Committee chair James Comer, similar sentiments are already being offered by countless members of the GOP.)
Budgets and private-sector contracts tell an all-too-familiar story in which the border-enforcement apparatus only continues to grow ever larger, regardless of who’s president.
Comer’s claim is, of course, no less predictable than the hardships migrants like that girl are suffering as they try to reach this country. While such border narratives traffic in the unreal, what is real either isn’t effectively reported or gets lost amid all the politically motivated noise. Loud fantasies are expansively covered, while life-and-death stories, like those of that infant and her mother, are seldom reported and, if they are, quickly disappear.
Barely a week before that 16 year old was desperately trying to communicate to the agent in Spanish, the United Nations International Organization for Migration (IOM) labeled the U.S.-Mexico border the world’s “deadliest migration land route.” In 2022, a record 853 remains of dead border crossers were recovered (and this is the U.S. Border Patrol’s figure, which is even higher than the IOM’s), dwarfing the record of 568 set the previous year. Such numbers, the IOM stresses, are known to be distinct undercounts, leaving all too many families pining for lost loved ones.
But those border fatalities weren’t the only record breaker. Another was confirmed just a week after medical personnel at the Nogales station rushed to treat that girl’s baby. The number of border contracts issued to private industry also set a new record. Like those deaths, such contracts soared in fiscal year 2023 to $9.96 billion, instantly stripping the previous high, also set last year, of $7.5 billion.
And mind you, those gifts to industry were made from the highest budget ever (including in the Trump years) for border and immigration enforcement: $29.8 billion. So, don’t for a second think that the U.S. has an “open” border. In fact, it’s never been more fortified or—something few even bother to mention—more profitable, if you happen to be part of the border-industrial complex.
Biden and the Border-Industrial Complex
If you count all the contracts for private industry from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since Joe Biden took office—for, that is, 2021, 2022, and 2023—the number comes to $23.5 billion. And though you’d never guess it, given what we normally hear, that already beats Donald Trump’s total for his full four years in office, $20.9 billion. Or, to put the matter in a more historical perspective, private contracts for the Biden years already top the cumulative $22.5 billion spent in border and immigration enforcement budgets from 1975 to 1997. That’s 22 years if you weren’t counting.
In other words, it’s essentially guaranteed that the Biden administration will break all records for paying border contractors. And, in truth, if it weren’t for the “open borders” political mania of the moment, this wouldn’t be a surprise at all. Remember, while running for president in 2020, Biden received three times more campaign contributions than Trump from members of the top companies in the border industry. (The Donald talked a good game, of course, and received his share of the industry pie over the years, but that same border-industrial complex was right if it thought Biden would all too literally pay off for them.)
And keep in mind as well that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas represented some of the top border companies like Leidos and Northrop Grumman at a private law firm (where he earned $3.31 million) before joining the Biden administration. While the president has certainly traded in the hostile rhetoric associated with the bombastic Trump for a far more sterile and bureaucratic language, while adding in a healthy dose of the “humane,” budgets and private-sector contracts tell an all-too-familiar story in which the border-enforcement apparatus only continues to grow ever larger, regardless of who’s president.
One gets the impression that the border and immigration enforcement regime is its own civilization, with its own infrastructure and ever more expensive rhyme and reason.
As 2023 nears its end, there have simply never been as many opportunities to make a killing (figuratively as well as literally) by surveilling, arresting, caging, and expelling people from this country. In 2023, there were 8,033 such opportunities—and I’m speaking here about contracts in play—or about 22 contracts a day.
Among this year’s top border companies is Classic Air Charter, a former CIA contractor that is now getting $793 million to provide flights expelling people from the United States. Since Biden took office, deportation flights for Immigration and Customs Enforcement Air Operations have increased, as have the number of people detained, while private prison companies like CoreCivic and Geo Group continue to receive plenty of contracts to lock up migrants.
Among border contract stand-outs, Fisher Sand and Gravel was recently awarded $259.3 million for “border infrastructure,” presumably the same sort of border wall construction it did in the Trump years (for which it received $2 billion in contracts). That company also got one from the scandal-ridden, Steve-Bannon-led “We Build the Wall,” a private outfit that solicited donations to construct portions of Trump’s wall. And, mind you, that September contract for border infrastructure came just before the Biden administration announced that it would waive 26 laws protecting people and the planet, including the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act, to put up a new section of border wall in Starr County, Texas.
In other words, just a glance at 2023 border contracts suggests that more walls, detention centers, and expulsion flights are coming. And don’t forget military monoliths like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman that also command hefty contracts to maintain CBP’s fixed-wing aircraft; or San Diego-based General Atomics that continues to make money off the Predator B unmanned drones it began selling to CBP in the early 2000s. No wonder some people think our borderlands are under military occupation.
In short (or long), that list of contracts speaks to anything but a “radical open-border policy.” Funds are being handed out for “unaccompanied alien children and family units transportation,” data centers, medical staffing services, infrastructure construction (lots of it), “soft-sided facilities” (meaning tent detention camps), surveillance system upgrades, software support, “travelers processing vetting software,” a “low energy non-intrusive inspection system” (whatever that may mean), detention centers, radios, data and analytical support services, guard and transport services—the list only goes on and on and on. Reading through it, one gets the impression that the border and immigration enforcement regime is its own civilization, with its own infrastructure and ever more expensive rhyme and reason.
And that fortification process is only poised to become yet more intensive. In October, buried in an emergency supplemental funding request addressing “key national security priorities” (included military assistance to Ukraine and Israel), the Biden administration included a whopping $14 billion in supplemental funding for that border and immigration apparatus. Added to a 2024 budget, which, at $28.2 billion, represented a slight decrease from 2023, if passed by Congress, that addition will further “bolster our nation’s border enforcement,” paving the way for an even more profitable 2024 for those border companies and, if that account of the mother and her baby is any indication, more suffering and death.
The “Radical Open Borders Policy” Does Not Exist
Near where that 16-year-old mother had crossed into the United States stood a Remote Video Surveillance System, a tower that the Border Patrol possessed courtesy of the military monolith General Dynamics.
Keep in mind that there was a reason that mother and daughter crossed in such grim terrain, near but not into the city of Nogales. Thanks to those hundreds of billions of dollars spent building up the “infrastructure” of border enforcement year after year after year, it’s become essentially impossible for migrants to cross directly into most border cities, forcing them out to the desert or to the sea and to far greater personal danger.
Since 2008 (as far back as you can see contract records at USAspending.gov), CBP and ICE have issued 115,484 contracts worth $68.7 billion, while their cumulative budgets since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002 add up to about $400 billion. If Representative Comer’s investigative team went to the city of Nogales to investigate Biden’s “radical open borders policy,” they could walk right up to a 20-foot-high border wall draped from top to bottom with rows of coiling razor wire. There, they might even see shreds from clothes caught in their barbs and imagine that people were still crossing at that spot (though few are anymore).
Consider this amid all the Republican open-border charges: 1,421 remains of dead people were recovered along the border during Biden’s first two years in office, higher in other words than the 1,133 during Trump’s full four years.
They would also immediately see green-striped Border Patrol vehicles like the one that picked up that mother and infant “sitting on their Xs” (meaning in stationary position) right up against the border. They’ve been doing so since the deterrence strategy was first officially implemented 30 years ago. If you want to enter this country unauthorized, in other words, you’re likely to have to risk your life.
And so, to return to where I began, a little after 3 am, the agent, young woman, and baby arrived at the Nogales Border Patrol station. Another agent spoke with the mother and quickly escorted her and her child to the medical screening area. According to the mother, her daughter “was not breathing and almost looked dead.” Medical personnel rapidly began resuscitation efforts, using an automated external defibrator, but sadly to no avail.
That infant joined the hundreds of human beings who perished crossing the border this year, a number still being tallied, but that, according to the Washington Office on Latin America, had hit about 650 in August.
And remember what planet we’re now on: This summer, relentless, record-breaking heat was the reality in the Southwestern U.S. (At one point, Phoenix, Arizona, had a record-breaking 31 consecutive days above 110°F and hit that temperature on a record 55 days in all.) The impact of such heat, only likely to increase in the years to come, on border-crossers remains to be determined, but migrant deaths in the Border Patrol’s El Paso, Texas, sector recently reached 148, more than doubling from the year before.
Consider this amid all the Republican open-border charges: 1,421 remains of dead people were recovered along the border during Biden’s first two years in office, higher in other words than the 1,133 during Trump’s full four years. Imagine the national news stories, if the remains of nearly 1,500 hikers had been found in the Southwest during a two-year period (and many more had simply disappeared). But for migrants in those ever more profitable, ever deadlier borderlands, mum’s the word.
The details of that young mother’s desert border crossing are sparse. I don’t know how long she had been there, who the other person she was with might have been, if she had ever before tried to cross, where in Mexico she was from (though she was a Mexican citizen), or why she was leaving. According to Border Patrol interviewers, she had been with a group of migrants, but when she saw her baby laboring to breathe, she crossed ahead of them.
Once CBP’s medical staff realized the infant was in distress, they worked fast, but it was too late. The child died like 10,400 other migrants, if you count deaths from 1994-2022, according to sociologist and border scholar Timothy Dunn, who stresses that “many, many more were never found.”
With such figures in mind, it should become more difficult to ignore a simple reality: that the all-too-profitable border apparatus is designed to make people suffer and let some die. It may, in fact, be the world’s deadliest land border. That, however, is a “crisis” you’re not likely to hear much, if anything, about over the next year, even as candidates, officials, and congressional representatives like Comer continue to insist that we’re facing the “worst border crisis in American history” and a disastrously “open” border.
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Report Details 'Shocking Pattern' of Abuse by US Agents at Mexico Border
"The lack of accountability is so widespread that it helps cement in place a culture that enables human rights violations. The abuses keep coming because impunity is so likely."
Aug 02, 2023
A report published Wednesday by a pair of advocacy groups details rampant human rights abuses against migrants and some American citizens allegedly perpetrated by Department of Homeland Security personnel at the U.S.-Mexico border in recent years under both the Trump and Biden administrations.
The report—entitled Abuses at the U.S.- Mexico Border: How To Address Failures and Protect Rights—was published by the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) and the Kino Border Initiative (KBI) and reveals "frequent and severe alleged abuses" of migrants by members of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), including Border Patrol agents.
"We have documented a shocking pattern, including cases of misuse of lethal force, intimidation, sexual harassment, and falsifying documents," WOLA director for defense oversight Adam Isacson said in a statement. "The lack of accountability is so widespread that it helps cement in place a culture that enables human rights violations. The abuses keep coming because impunity is so likely."
Some of the alleged rights abuses in the report are severe, and resulted in serious injuries and even deaths. The publication details 13 deaths in which the authors say there is reason to believe that CBP officers or Border Patrol agents "may have used deadly force under circumstances in which it is unclear whether they faced an imminent threat of death or bodily injury, or failed to prevent the death of an individual in custody."
These include numerous cases of Border Patrol agents fatally shooting migrants and U.S. citizens including a member of the Tohono O'odham Native American tribe, as well as what critics call the medical neglect death of Anadith Tanay Reyes Álvarez, an 8-year-old Honduran girl, at a Harlingen, Texas Border Patrol facility in May.
The report states that "many other examples of cruelty and victimization take place on a daily basis, such as unprovoked violence during arrests, abusive language, denial of food or medical attention, family separations, non-return of documents and valuables, dangerous deportations, racial profiling, and falsifying migration paperwork."
"Marco Antonio," a migrant who filed a complaint after he was struck and run over by a Border Patrol all-terrain vehicle, said in the report that "Border Patrol has the right to apprehend someone, but in the proper way, not wrongfully. Many people are afraid of the Border Patrol."
"People do not have to put up with Border Patrol's abuses," he added. "If the Border Patrol hits you, demand your rights, because we all have rights."
The publication tracks the outcome of 78 complaints KBI filed on behalf of migrants between 2020 -22, 95% of which prompted no proper investigation or disciplinary action, according to the report.
"It is hard to tell someone who has just experienced an abuse by Border Patrol that they should file a complaint, only to explain to them that in the vast majority of cases, we never hear anything back and agencies take no accountability action," said KBI advocacy coordinator Zoe Martens. "First, a migrant person experiences this abuse, and then the detailed testimony they gave explaining the mistreatment disappears into an opaque web of accountability offices and their databases."
The report offers over 40 recommendations "on how to improve the accountability process within DHS, including reforms to the process for complaints, investigations, and discipline, more energetic congressional oversight, and reforms to the CBP and Border Patrol organizational culture."
"We believe that it is possible to enact commonsense reforms that stop cruelty and align border governance with democratic values, even at a time when larger national debates on border and immigration policy are polarized," the authors asserted.
During both the Trump and Biden administrations, migrants and asylum-seekers have been subjected to human rights violations including denial of due process under pretext of public health protection, brutal and often life-threatening repulsion at the border, beatings and other violence, sexual abuse of adults and children, forced sterilization, retaliatory deportations, and duplicitous flights to states and cities with sanctuary policies.
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