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8
street roots
April 11, 2014
I
9
street roots
April 11, 2014
BORDER, fro m page 1
P H O T O B Y R E U T E R S / R IC K W IL K IN G
U.S. Border Patrol agent Jesus Garcia looks
at a wall o f surveillance camera videos from
cameras looking at the US.-Mexico border in
Texas. The cameras capture daytime video
and also have night vision and infrared
capabilities. Some o f the names at the bottom
of the screens have been blurred by Reuters
at the Border Patrol’s request.
Joanne Zuhl: That’s what you would see
physically, but there’s also a lot that you don’t
see.
T.M.: The wall is one of many different
aspects. Not only the wall, but a
concentration of Border Patrol agents, which
you’ll see all over the place, in any
community, any urban area and anywhere
along the 2,000-mile border. There is also all
kinds of technology. You’ll see high-powered
cameras on posts. There are lots of things
you won’t see, such as motion sensors that
are implanted in the ground. There are
12,000 of those motion sensors along the
U.S. Mexico border.
Yes, the Border Patrol has been
concentrating agents and technology since
the mid 1990s. But then there’s a separate
post-9/11 era.
It’s the Homeland Security era. Border
Patrol is now under the department of
Homeland Security, which is under another
agency called Customs and Border Protection.
The kind of resources and the kind of
technologies they have, and the amount of
agents they have, is unprecedented. Never
before in the history of the United States
have we had so many agents, so much
technology, so much money just poured into
this border enforcement apparatus, that now
we don’t only see it in the southern border,
we see it on the northern border as well.
Many people call it an occupation, the
influx of agents and their surveillance powers.
And not only surveillance powers at the actual
border line but way into the interior, 15-25
miles, up to possibly 100 miles into the
interior of the country. That’s Border Patrol’s
jurisdiction, they can work within 100 miles
of the international border. So where I live in
Tucson, you see Border Patrol agents
regularly. They can patrol. They can pull
people over. They collaborate with local
police. So within the 100 miles, you have
resources to put toward lobbying. If you
have an immigration reform bill that passed
in the Senate with $46 billion — and that’s
on top of what they already did — I would
imagine that there is influence in
Washington.
J.Z.: I would think also that the detention
policies and incarceration practices are taking
a cue from the industry.
IK S "
T.M.: In that case, too. With the private
prison industry, there has been thorough
documentation of their lobbying. It’s been
the deportation apparatus that has gone
from 2,000 deportations in the early 1980s
to almost 400,000 a year these days. So it’s
significantly increased, and one thing that’s
behind this for sure is the private prison
industry.
Corrections Corporations of America,
CCA, which has several facilities here in
Arizona, they get paid approximately $150
per bed per day. They’re making money off
the fact that undocumented people will be
detained in their facilities. And there’s a
Congressional mandate of 34,000 beds for
immigration detention that have to be filled
for immigration detention at any given time.
It’s a civil violation. They’re not in
detention for any criminal behavior. It’s just
so they make it to their deportation hearing.
layer upon layers of mini-borders, with
That this amount of people are in detention
surveillance technology and checkpoints. I
just went through one today as I was driving.
If there's anything that gives them reasonable
suspicion within their three missions:
national security, immigration enforcement
and drug interdiction. If anything sets off a
suspicion, they can pull you over and tear
apart your car. In other words, your Fourth
Amendment right are kind of mangled.
at any given time, it means a lot of money.
J.Z.: Some people would say, why shouldn't
we use the best equipment we have to protect
our borders?
has become one of terrorism and stopping
terrorists and weapons of mass destruction
from crossing the border. But when you look
for any sort of documentation of any
so-called terrorist being detained crossing
the border, there is none. There’s possibly a
few cases they could bring up but they’re
shakey at b e st
J.Z.: You talk about their capacity being
unprecedented. Do you have numbers to give
people an idea o f how many agents and how
much money we’re talking about here?
T.M.: One of the most telling numbers is if
you look at the fiscal 2012 federal budget, and
the money dedicated to border and
immigration enforcement by the U.S. federal
government is $18 billion. That is more than
the money given to all other federal law
enforcement agencies combined. It’s more
than the DEA, the FBI, the U.S. Marshalls.
All those combined add up to $14 billion. And
it increases year after year after year. So it
has become high priority for the federal
government to be
putting tons of money
into this. There’s an
"They're repurposing
Associated Press
technology for border
report that the U.S.
government, since
security. One vendor even
9/11, has spent $90
told me quite explicitely, 'we billion
on the U.S.-
are bringing the battlefield
Mexico border. And if
you look at some of
to the border.'"
the reform bills, one
that passed the
Senate — which
probably won’t ultimately pass —had $46
billion designated for border security, which
is an increase in agents and technology.
You’re talking a significant uptick in
resources. For example, Border Patrol in the
early 1990s, in the whole country, there were
fewer than 4,000 agents. And now it has
increased to 21,000. And they’re part of
Customs and Border Protection, which is
actually 60,000, and they have an air and
marine division. Sixty thousand — it’s the
largest federal law enforcement agency in the
country, and it’s double the size of Ecuador’s
J.Z.: Well, to be fair, would you be the one to
know if there were any?
army. It’s gigantic.
J.Z.: Is there an accountability concern here
with these 60,000 - and growing - agents out
there?
T.M.: There’s a significant accountability
concern, especially in recent years there have
been a number of shootings by Border Patrol
agents who have shot both U.S. citizens and
across the border into Mexico killing
Mexican citizens. There’s been a pretty
fervent call for accountability, especially from
independent Congressional oversight, instead
of what seems to occur now which is the
Department of Homeland Security doing its
own investigations.
So there’s also a call out now around
allegations of abuses — from short-term
detention and people not getting enough
food, to people detained in a room where the
air conditioning is hiked up. They call them
freezers. So you’re in a T-shirt and jeans for
the desert, but all of a sudden you’re in a
room and it’s freezing. You hear about that a
lo t The organization No More Deaths did a
report called the Culture of Cruelty about
these detainments, and they have more than
10,000 testimonies that went into this report.
And there are all kinds of reports of abuse at
checkpoints and roving patrols.
The Tohono O’Odham reservation near
Tuscon — their original land was bisected by
the border. Their reservation has so many
Border Patrol agents on it now that it seems
like they’ve literally taken over the entire
reservation. Accusations of abuse there are
rampant, including home invasions: Border
Patrol has the power to enter a home without
a warrant within 25 miles of the border.
J.Z.: Given the dichotomy here — that border
security in the age of terrorism may be a valid
concern, but there’s also the fact that so many of
the people crossing the border from Mexico are
poor Latinos looking to find work and a better
living in the United States - what is your
assessment of the real threat along our borders?
T.M.: On one hand, the priority mission
P H O T O C O URTESY OF
U .S . C U S T O M S A N D
B O R D E R P R O T E C T IO N
One o f many drones
U.S. Customs and
Border Protection is
currently using to
patrol the
Canadian and
Mexican borders.
T.M.: There’s a possibility that there has
been and it has not been revealed to the
public. However, there’s also the side of it
that if they were actually catching people
with ties to a terrorist organization crossing
the border — as with other cases when they
catch someone or kill someone abroad —
they would make a big deal of it. Maybe
there are cases that, for whatever reason,
that officials are not revealing to the public.
So I’ll give them that. But in the more than
10 years since the priority mission has
shifted toward that — and it’s a huge
justification for all of this money being put
into this influx of agents — it seems like
there should be more cases or examples of
why we need all of these resources on the
border for this threat; a physical example.
And there is none.
With all these new resources, the vast
majority of people they’re catching are
undocumented people crossing the border
looking for work — tens if not hundreds of
thousands of these people every year.
Border Patrol apprehensions in 2013 were
around 400,000. And these are numbers
that are lower than previous years. But it’s
mainly people coming from southern
Mexico, and now they’re showing an
upsurge of people coming from Central
America, a 55-percent increase if you look at
Border Patrol arrests. That’s the people
being caught by this national security border
perimeter that we’ve formed in the South.
In the North, officials are calling for more
resources along the Northern border.
The justification is that it is more likely
that a terrorist will cross through the
northern border than the southern border.
But when I’m in Detroit, for example, not
many people in the suburbs know the
Border Patrol are there. But if you go into
southwest Detroit, which is the Latino
community, primarily Mexican, it seems like
they’re everywhere, and you see them
actually patrolling the neighborhoods. You
hear about cases of people getting arrested
while they’re waiting for a bus to go to work,
or that agents are staking out the Spanish-
language mass at a Catholic church. You
hear it in western New York State, the same
church situation, dining the Spanish-
language mass with Border Patrol outside,
and they question people at checkpoints.
Again, as the rhetoric turns to terrorism,
the same people on the southern border are
being targeted on the northern border. And
these aren’t border crossers. In one place
it’s farmworkers who pick apples, and they
have to go through Border Patrol
checkpoints just to get to work.
J.Z.: What is it if it’s not terrorism? Is this
as simple as a case o f big business getting
bigger? Our military industrial complex
expanding?
T.M.: It’s a variation on the military
industrial complex. Some analysts have
called it the border security industrial
complex. That’s got to play into it to a
degree. All the market projections for the
border security market describe it as
between a growing and a booming industry.
Part of my research is going to trade shows
around the country to talk to some of the
companies, and they’re big ones such as
Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, who
are all involved in tailoring some of their
technologies used in wars abroad for border
security purposes. They’re repurposing
technology for border security.
J.Z.: Finding a new market for old goods.
T.M.: One vendor even told me quite
explicitely, “We are bringing the battlefield
to the border.”
J.Z.:
suggested that the implications
for this technology go well beyond the border,
the border being a representative barrier
between haves and have-nots, with a share of
racism built into it. Do you see this trend
going further into the civilian world, in terms
of whom this surveillance is focused on?
T.M.: I think you hit the nail on the head
there. You have to look at this in term s of
the haves and have nots. Any sort of
surveillance technology, cameras and
drones, is to look at people who might be a
th re a t And if the main threat is not the
so-called terrorists as we’ve been told,
they’re really the have nots who are coming
to this country. Or it could be another
border and another place. It could be a
gated community. It’s the same sort of idea.
J.Z.: Do you see our social policies around
immigration and naturalization being driven
by this industry?
T.M.: There hasn’t been a rigorous report
about the lobbying money from these
surveillance companies on border security
in Washington, but there are all kinds of
anecdotal evidence of different companies
spending money for military purposes.
They’re in Washington for sure. They have a
lobbying arm. The big ones have significant
T.M.: There are many ways to answer
that one. I’m actually originally from
Niagara Falls New York. Now, when I go to
my hometown, it’s a town that’s been
significantly affected by the 2008 recession,
but it was in great decline before then. A lot
of the tourism is in Niagara Falls, Canada.
Niagara Falls New York banked on industry,
which all the factories are shuttered now.
What used to be a town where people had a
secure job, now basic services are getting
cut. And one of the things that gets cut
constantly is housing. And I go to Niagara
Falls and I see so many collapsing homes.
There are whole neighborhoods that have
been razed, where once were homes. So if
you’re going to think about security, and
what security really is, isn’t security really
somebody’s home, that they know they can
come to at night? Where they can have a
family and not have to worry. If you want to
think of the cornerstone of security, I think
it’s the home. We live in a country where so
many foreclosures have happened, and still
happen to this day, and yet in my hometown
of Niagara Falls, now, for the first time in
my life, I’m seeing Border Patrol. Border
Patrol in shiny vehicles. I see the high-
powered cameras. I see them on their bikes,
on their ATVs. They have a new control
center on Grand Island where they have a
huge video wall, and all this super expensive
technology, while when you drive through
the streets of Niagara Falls you could
basically fall into the potholes. Health care
is getting c u t Education is getting c u t The
summer programs for children are getting
cut. Everything is getting cut. So when this
case is made that we need this security for
our borders. Is that really true or would the
money be much better invested in other
things that we’re cutting that give people
real security.
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