In the context of the border wall debate, politicians and pundits across the political spectrum conveniently omit the grim realities millions of migrants face.
Billions of dollars go from U.S. taxpayers to the U.S. border immigration enforcement regime and Israeli Defense Forces, while children are dehumanized with the same cold efficiency that deports, or even kills them.
A scathing report on the U.S. Border Patrol's use of deadly force reveals warzone conditions—the result of more than 25 years of Mexico-U.S. border militarization.
According to DHS’s numbers, apprehensions of Central American migrants increased by 55 percent in 2013 over the previous year, with data that indicates an exodus coming primarily from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.
"What we’ve been doing for a long time is trying to raise awareness about these official actions, whether they be by the state police, local police, or Border Patrol—law enforcement agencies that are roving around, knocking on doors, pulling cars over, taking people off the steps of churches, taking people out of grocery stores, drug stores, or following kids home from school."
Imagine the sort of metal police barricades you see at protests. These are unevenly lined up like so many crooked teeth on the Dominican Republic’s side of the river that acts as its border with Haiti. Like dazed versions of U.S. Border Patrol agents, the armed Dominican border guards sit at their assigned posts, staring at the opposite shore.
Efforts to overhaul the nation’s border security and immigration policies are revving up again in Washington. That means a renewed push for enhanced border policing, such as the $46 billion in the reform bill the Senate passed in June. That kind of spending would bring the Border Patrol’s creeping militarized mission further into the interior of the United States. The United States currently has 60,000 border guards, more than double the size of Ecuador's army.
The U.S. borderlands are today ground zero for the rise, growth, and spread of a domestic surveillance state. On June 27th, the Senate passed an immigration bill and the result, as Senator John McCain proudly said will be the “most militarized border since the fall of the Berlin Wall.”
The pathway to citizenship outlined in the Senate's immigration reform bill would benefit a great number of people, but before those provisions can come into effect, certain border security triggers must first be met. NACLA’s Border Wars writer Todd Miller was interviewed on Berkley’s KPFA about the potential consequences of further border militarization.
A photo essay of the 10th annual Migrant Trail Walk through the southern Arizona borderlands. The walk happened during a time of intense debate regarding immigration reform and border enforcement, yet the thousands of migrant deaths that have occurred over the last 20 years have not been mentioned.
In less than one week, two Guatemalan citizens committed suicide in the privately-run immigration detention center in Eloy, Arizona. It is another horrifying glimpse into an ever-expanding U.S. immigration control complex where death has become very much a part of the equation.
With border policing an important component of the comprehensive immigration reform package proposed by the so-called Gang of 8, this photo essay offers a glimpse of how this intensley border controlled universe looks from two distinct vantage points. The first perspective comes from businesses that want to make a profit, and the other is seen through the lens of binational protesters six months after the killing of 16-year-old Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez by a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
Against the backdrop of drones and surveillance towers on the Northern Border, CBP agents repeatedly handcuff border-crossers, often brandishing weapons, conducting invasive body searches, and detaining people for up to 12 hours.
On a particularly dark stretch on the two lane road that traverses the reservation, a group of men appear in the opposite lane in the headlights of our vehicle and are waving at us to stop. They are a group of people without papers from Chiapas—hungry, thirsty, and visibly injured—migrating north through the Tohono O'odham Nation. This Native American reservation is increasingly becoming ground zero for the Border Patrol on the Arizona-Mexico border.
If you are a U.S. American Muslim crossing the international border into Michigan from Canada, be prepared for Customs and Border Protection officers to handcuff, detain, and interrogate you for perhaps two, but possibly ten, hours. The U.S.-Canada border is quickly becoming one of the hot spots of the post-9/11 homeland security era in the United States.
Border Patrol forces are increasing at an astounding rate on the U.S.-Canadian border, and there are calls for more resources and personnel in the halls of Congress. Sodus, New York—located in the farmlands right off Lake Ontario near Rochester, is a vivid example of how this post 9/11 build-up is clamping down on rural areas.
As the Border Security Expo 2012 shows, the Arizona-Mexico border region is Ground Zero for the development of an immigration enforcement apparatus which soon enough may travel from the U.S. southern border to a neighborhood near you.
This collection of photographs, taken on the U.S.-Mexico border between Arizona and Texas, depicts the story of an often silent and often deadly war. The photo essay is in memory of Alfonso Martinez Sanchez who lost his life to this war in the Arizona desert in early May, trying to reunite with his family in California after his deportation in March.
In this first-hand account of a back-and-forth between a federal judge and a young shackled migrant is a vivid look into the Border Patrolization processes happening in the country that will be a significant part of the new 2012-16 strategy, revealed to the public on May 8 with great fanfare.
In February, I visited the American Border Patrol (ABP), the vigilante group that claims to be the first to have used an unmanned aerial vehicle for surveillance on the U.S.-Mexico border. Though labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, ABP has much in common with the U.S. border enforcement policy, especially as the United States renews its call for surveillance technology and a "virtual wall."
On February 26, I was driving with a friend in an isolated region of the U.S.-Mexico border in New Mexico when we saw a military tank positioned to be pointed toward the south. A lot has been said, written, and documented about the degree and ongoing process of border militarization, but I had never seen anything like this. This wasn't any old tank, it was a Stryker—used extensively in both Iraq and Afghanistan by the U.S. military.
A week after the scandal broke around Arizona sheriff Paul Babeu's threat to deport his ex-lover, Mexican Jose Orozco, I traveled to Pinal county to a community meeting where the sheriff was recruiting a volunteer armed posse for law-enforcement duties. It was here I caught whiff of the real scandal, the one that is pervading Arizona and, in many ways, the entire United States.
Customs and Border Protection can transport the intense U.S.-Mexico border surveillance and security apparatus to anywhere in the country, including the Super Bowl. As with the border, this comes accompanied with an ever-tightening and strict enforcement web, that reverberates well past the actual boundary into the surrounding area.
In the late 1990s, Oaxacan artist Alejandro Santiago set to repopulate his town with 2,500 individual human sculptures, each representing a person who had left San Pedro Teococuilco to migrate elsewhere. Right now these sculptures are alive in the streets of Oaxaca city, documenting a strong sense of pain that rarely makes it into comprehensive immigration debates in the United States.
The Border Patrol Santa appeared again this year in Sonoita, Arizona. This Santa Claus agent has had a long history of helping the Border Patrol with its mission and strategy.
Shortly after Border Patrol agent Bryan Gonzalez questioned U.S. drug enforcement policy to a colleague, he received a letter of termination that said that he held “personal views that were contrary to core characteristics of Border Patrol Agents, which are patriotism, dedication and spirit de corps.”
There is a disconnect in Washington of the correlation between free trade agreements and increased migration. Instead of an effort to renegotiate agreements that are impacting countries in Latin America, U.S. officials continue to put more and more resources into border enforcement, including a proposed possibility of using war-zone equipment from Iraq, and new surveillance technologies to create a "virtual" wall.
At an event at the Homeland Security Policy Institute called “The Hybrid Threat: Crime, Terrorism and Insurgency in Mexico,” Daniel Brito, of the Drug Policy Alliance, asked keynote speaker General Barry McCaffrey if there was complicity between the Mexican government and the drug trafficking Sinaloa Cartel. McCaffrey's answer offered a powerful glimpse into the drug war.
Politically powerful officials are saying the U.S. counternarcotic program towards Mexico has not worked, and are calling for a counterinsurgency strategy to replace it. The organized crime "raging along our southern border," they claim, is waging a "strategic-level" of war against the United States.
Over the weekend, the Department of Homeland Security issued a warning that there was a “specific, credible, yet unconfirmed” threat of a “terrorist” attack in New York and Washington D.C.. This is the permanent state of things on the U.S.-Mexico border. The 10th anniversary of 9/11 has produced many reports that speak to this reality.
On August 30, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that deportations would continue to be "very robust." Why? Because of a recent federal decision to impose the controversial Secure Communities program on the entire country by 2013—a program, opponents say, that is tearing families apart.
A lot of media attention has been given to the Arizona state government's latest anti-immigration ploy—to build its own border wall, in defiance of the federal government, on the boundary between the state and Mexico. Much less attention has been given to an emerging corporate-state nexus which is both obscured by, and a result of, this type of heated anti-immigrant rhetoric found in Arizona.
This NACLA audio interview with the Center for Biological Diversity looks at the myriad environmental and Native American heritage laws that the Department of Homeland Security waived in 2008 to construct 470 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border. While environmental groups and Native Americans say that waiving these laws has done tremendous damage to ecological and human communities along the border, this law-waiving-fervor has gone in vogue in some sectors in Washington, all in the name of "securing our borders."
A personal narrative of an encounter with the Border Patrol on the Tohono O'odham Nation in Southern Arizona. This close encounter with the Homeland Security state gives a glimpse into a place where anything and everything can be justified under the guise of national security and "securing our borders," trumping any impediment in its way. It is this that inspired six Native American activists to lock themselves down at Border Patrol Headquarters in Tucson in May 2010, and who finally won the subsequent court battle on June 29.
There have been different responses to increased immigration over the Arizona-Mexico border on the Tohono O'odham Nation. One has been the dramatic increase of federal immigration enforcement agents and technology on the Nation. The other has been an attempt to put water along migrant routes, in attempt to stop migrant deaths. All of this has taken place on a Native American reservation, whose aboriginal land has been divided by the U.S.-Mexico border.
On June 10, a new movement was born in Mexico. A peace caravan of hundreds of people from all over the country arrived to the border city of Ciudad Juárez to sign a national social pact with the goal of ending the militarized drug war in Mexico. This drug war has killed approximately 40,000 people since Mexican president Felipe Calderón took office in December 2006. This pact was appropriately signed in brutalized Ciudad Juárez, an epicenter of drug war-related violence, where 7,000 of these killings have taken place.
From May 30 to June 5, I participated in the Migrant Trail Walk, a 75 mile walk from the U.S.-Mexico border to Tucson, Arizona, traversing the Altar Valley, one of the hottest stretches in the Sonoran desert during the summer months. This eighth annual walk was done in solidarity with the thousands of migrants who cross into the United States clandestinely, and in remembrance of the thousands whose bodies have been recovered, many in the same vast desert where we walked.
