Mary Jo McConahay, a contributing editor for New America Media , covers the border for the Texas Observer.
A tragic failure in the lead-up to the events of 9/11 was the lack of intelligence coordination to detect and capture potential terrorists entering the United States from anywhere. Since 9/11, however, the U.S. border has become a special focus of the “war on terror,” even though no terrorists have been known to enter from the south. It’s a framework that’s politically expedient in Washington and plays well to voters who can be convinced we have “lost control” of the border. But it means the language of the terror war has replaced the language of immigration enforcement and drug interdiction, and the consequences are increasingly grave.
Every would-be border-crosser becomes a would-be terrorist. For millions who reside in border communities, the shift in focus creates an unsettling sensation of living in a conflict zone, complete with the appearance of soldiers in camouflage, and a dangerous fog that obscures the line between local and federal authority. It puts residents on the spot in a way they never were before.
Treating border policing as a front in the terror war is an approach that may divert attention from the great national failure in Iraq by attempting to look tough militarily on our own soil. But it hampers sober discussion about immigration reform, says nothing about how to pull millions of undocumented persons out of limbo—including many with deep roots in communities—and doesn’t address at all the concrete need for low-paid labor to which we have become addicted. Meanwhile, militarizing the border is a beautiful sell.
After 9/11, the Border Patrol, housed over the years in the Departments of Treasury, Labor and, most recently, Justice, became part of Homeland Security. In May President Bush—who once stood for immigration reform and bilateral policy—announced the deployment of 6,000 National Guard soldiers to the border. The “most advanced technology” was also headed south, Bush said, including the kind used in Afghanistan and Iraq, meaning more infrared cameras, motion sensors and unmanned aerial vehicles. In Texas, the state with the longest frontier with Mexico, Republican Gov. Rick Perry launched Operation Linebacker, distributing $10 million to border sheriff’s departments within a security plan that began by claiming that al-Qaida leadership planned “to bring terrorist operatives across the border.”
Today armed soldiers man skyboxes that rise on hydraulic legs above the desert, and scan screens in windowless camera rooms in hidden locations. Because of rotations, the number of National Guard expected to serve on the border in the next two years will reach into the tens of thousands. Units use the desert landscape for training on their way to the Middle East, sometimes combining training—even including tanks in New Mexico —with “force protection” and other support for the Border Patrol.
President Bush claims the United States “is not going to militarize the southern border.” But it is militarized. For someone who covered Central America in the 1980s, West Texas can feel somewhat like the communities caught up in the wars of those years, when the Reagan administration used low-intensity conflict doctrine to assist governments in El Salvador and Nicaragua to fight insurgents. There’s no insurgency here, but there are drug runners and unlawful immigrants. A low-intensity conflict doesn’t have to involve car bombs exploding every week, but does involve military deployment, like the National Guard, and tolerates or promotes paramilitary presence, like the Minutemen, who have appeared locally with names like the “Border Regulators.” Low-intensity conflict doctrine is characterized by subtle or ham-handed militarization of communities to detect and defeat the “enemy.” But it’s more. It’s a doctrine that blurs the lines between civilian and military, and between local and federal authorities. It calls for militarization in the name of national security, turns civilians into suspects, puts rights at risk, uses fear as a tool of control.
There’s no doubt local law enforcers in West Texas, historically a laboratory for the border wars, have jumped the firewall between local and federal authority. The El Paso Sheriff’s Department says its primary objective has become the same as that claimed by the Border Patrol post-9/11: “stopping terrorism.” (What happened to “public safety”?) Between January and June deputies detained more than 800 undocumented persons at roadblocks, mostly in communities where residents are a mix of citizens, legal residents and undocumented relatives, and turned them over to the Border Patrol. A chill fell over those American towns. Churches and clinics stood empty, neighbors brought food and diapers to houses where fathers had been taken by authorities and mothers didn’t dare venture to corner stores. Deputies asked U.S. citizens to present papers. After a lull, the sheriff says the “traffic stops” will begin again. Residents trust authorities less; they’re more hesitant to report crime now, including domestic abuse, for fear of being asked for documents.
Nearly half the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States didn’t sneak across any border but entered legally, and overstayed visas. Most illegal drugs enter in otherwise legitimate cargo and traffic. Meanwhile, the poor of Mexico and Central America continue to regard work in the United States as a lifeline for themselves and their families, and the jobs are here.
The fence is not a policy. Militarization is not a policy. Using the terror lens to look at the border not only distorts the picture, but roils borderland communities, spreading fear, jeopardizing rights on our own soil. Tony Payan, a University of Texas El Paso political scientist and author of a new study, "The Three U.S.-Mexico Border Wars: Drugs, Immigration, and Homeland Security," puts it this way: “It’s like two tsunamis, one coming up from the south, and increased militarization coming from the north, set to clash at the border. There is a need for a way to accommodate the flow.”
Without a coherent domestic policy, and multilateral policy that includes the countries from which immigrants come, the war on the border becomes as endless and ambiguous as the “terror war” itself.
