Tomgram: Todd Miller, The Great Mexican Wall Deception
By Todd Miller
Posted on August 23, 2016, Printed on August 23, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176179/ ;
These days, were in what seems like an election campaign of one. Its Trump
vs. Trump. Does Hillary even exist? Theres conflicting evidence on that. If
Trump loses, I suspect we'll all be able to say that never has a candidate
trounced himself quite so efficiently. All his opponent evidently has to do
is not give press conferences, stay out of the spotlight, and wait for Trump
to tromp Trump.
At the moment, his polling figures are looking increasingly dismal and he's
shaken up his campaign team (yet again!) -- the Ukrainians having lost out
to Breitbart News and American "nationalism." Still, The Donald rumbles on.
Hes a figure the usual journalistic crew is essentially incapable of
covering. For that, you need a coterie of cartoonists and, of course, New
Yorker satirist Andy Borowitz.
Only recently, for instance, The Donald gave a speech in which he suggested
that a new Cold-War-style ideological screening test for immigrants be
developed to keep... well, you know whom out. Hes referred to the process
he imagines putting in place as extreme vetting. The goal, he says, is to
ban those who support bigotry and hatred (of whom he perhaps feels we
already have our fill without the aid of immigrants) and, above all, those
who believe that Sharia law should supplant American law. He hasnt yet
suggested just what that screening test might be like, but TomDispatch has a
few obvious suggestions.
The first question for any prospective immigrant would surely have to be:
Do you belong to ISIS? The answer to that one will obviously eliminate
many of the most dangerous potential infiltrators. Youd then follow up
with the surefire extreme-vetting question: Do you believe that Sharia law
should be imposed on the United States? And if that doesnt eliminate the
rest of the potential Islamic terrorists, youd finish off the process with
a trick question. Best suggestion at present: Death to America: Yea or
Nay?
Those who pass will obviously be ready to receive their visas and, as The
Donald so movingly puts it, embrace a tolerant American society.
Let me just add that Trump supporters shouldnt feel complete despair if, in
the course of this election campaign, The Donald goes down in electoral
flames. As TomDispatch regular Todd Miller suggests in his latest report
from the U.S.-Mexican border, when Hillary Clinton emerges from the shadows
to take the oath of office, she will find herself presiding over far more
Trumpian American borderlands than many of us might assume. And for that
well have to offer thanks not only to the inspiration of Trump but to the
actions of two other figures on the American political landscape: Bill and
Hillary Clinton. Tom
No Need to Build The Donald's Wall, Its Built
Trumps America Already Exists on the Border
By Todd Miller
At the federal courthouse, Ignacio Sarabia asks the magistrate judge,
Jacqueline Rateau, if he can explain why he crossed the international
boundary between the two countries without authorization. He has already
pleaded guilty to the federal misdemeanor commonly known as illegal entry
and is about to receive a prison sentence. On either side of him are eight
men in the same predicament, all still sunburned, all in the same ripped,
soiled clothes they were wearing when arrested in the Arizona desert by
agents of the U.S. Border Patrol.
Once again, the zero tolerance border enforcement program known as Operation
Streamline has unfolded just as it always does here in Tucson, Arizona.
Close to 60 people have already approached the judge in groups of seven or
eight, their heads bowed submissively, their bodies weighed down by shackles
and chains around wrists, waists, and ankles. The judge has handed out the
requisite prison sentences in quick succession -- 180 days, 60 days, 90
days, 30 days.
On and on it goes, day-in, day-out. Like so many meals served in fast-food
restaurants, 750,000 prison sentences of this sort have been handed down
since Operation Streamline was launched in 2005. This mass prosecution of
undocumented border crossers has become so much the norm that one report
concluded it is now a driving force in mass incarceration in the United
States. Yet it is but a single program among many overseen by the massive
U.S. border enforcement and incarceration regime that has developed during
the last two decades, particularly in the post-9/11 era.
Sarabia takes a half-step forward. My infant is four months old, he tells
the judge in Spanish. The baby was, he assures her, born with a heart
condition and is a U.S. citizen. They have no option but to operate. This is
the reason, he says, that Im here before you. He pauses.
I want to be with my child, who is in the United States.
Its clear that Sarabia would like to gesture emphatically as he speaks, but
thats difficult, thanks to the shackles that constrain him. Rateau fills
her coffee cup as she waits for his comments to be translated into English.
Earlier in April 2016, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, still
in the heat of his primary campaign, stated once again that he would build a
massive concrete border wall towering 30 (or, depending on the moment, 55)
feet high along the 2,000 mile U.S.-Mexican border. He would, he insisted,
force Mexico to pay for the $8 billion to $10 billion barrier. Repeatedly
throwing such red meat into the gaping jaws of nativism, he has over these
last months also announced that he would create a major deportation force,
repeatedly sworn that he would ban Muslims from entering the country (a
position that he regularly revises), and most recently, that he would
institute an extreme vetting process for foreign nationals arriving in the
United States.
In June 2015, when he rode a Trump Tower escalator into the presidential
campaign, among his initial promises was the building of a great and
beautiful wall on the border. (And no one builds walls better than me,
believe me. I will do it very inexpensively. I will have Mexico pay for that
wall.) As he pulled that promise out of a hat with a magicians flair, the
actual history of the border disappeared. From then on in Election 2016,
there was just empty desert and Donald Trump.
Suddenly, there hadnt been a bipartisan government effort over the last
quarter-century to put in place an unprecedented array of walls, detection
systems, and guards for that southern border. In those years, the number of
Border Patrol agents had, in fact, quintupled from 4,000 to more than
21,000, while Customs and Border Protection became the largest federal law
enforcement agency in the country with more than 60,000 agents. The annual
budget for border and immigration enforcement went from $1.5 to $19.5
billion, a more than 12-fold increase. By 2016, federal government funding
of border and immigration enforcement added up to $5 billion more than that
for all other federal law enforcement agencies combined.
Operation Streamline, a cornerstone program in the Consequence Delivery
System, part of a broader Border Patrol deterrence strategy for stopping
undocumented immigration, is just one part of a vast
enforcement-incarceration-deportation machine. The program is as no-nonsense
as its name suggests. It's not The Wall, but it embodies the logic of the
wall: either you crossed illegally or you didnt. It doesnt matter why,
or whether you lost your job, or if youve had to skip meals to feed your
kids. It doesnt matter if your house was flooded or the drought dried up
your fields. It doesnt matter if youre running for your life from drug
cartel gunmen or the very army and police forces that are supposed to
protect you.
This system was what Ignacio Sarabia faced a few months ago in a Tucson
court. His tragedy is one that plays out so many times daily a mere seven
blocks from where I live.
Before I tell you how the judge responded to his plea, its important to
understand Sarabias journey, and that of so many thousands like him who end
up in this federal courthouse day after day. As he pleads to be with his
newborn son, his voice cracking with emotion, his story catches the already
Trumpian-style of border enforcement -- both the pain and suffering it has
caused, and the strategy and massive build-up behind it -- in ways that the
campaign rhetoric of both parties and the reporting on it doesnt. As
reporters chase their tails attempting to explain Trumps wild and often
unfounded claims and declarations, the on-the-ground border reality goes
unreported. Indeed, one of the greatest secrets of the 2016 election
campaign (though it should be common knowledge) is that the border wall
already exists. It has for years and the fingerprints all over it aren't
Donald Trump's but the Clintons', both Bill's and Hillary's.
The Wall That Already Exists
Twenty-one years before Trumps wall-building promise (and seven years
before the 9/11 attacks), the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began to replace
the chain link fence that separated Nogales, Sonora, in Mexico from Nogales,
Arizona, in the United States with a wall built of rusty landing mats from
the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars. Although there had been various
half-hearted attempts at building border walls throughout the twentieth
century, this was the first true effort to build a barrier of what might now
be called Trumpian magnitude.
That rusty, towering wall snaked through the hills and canyons of northern
Sonora and southern Arizona forever deranging a world that, given
cross-border familial and community ties, then considered itself one. At the
time, who could have known that the strategy the first wall embodied would
still be the model for todays massive system of exclusion.
In 1994, the threat wasnt terrorism. In part, the call for more hardened,
militarized borders came in response, among other things, to a never-ending
drug war. It also came from U.S. officials who anticipated the displacement
of millions of Mexicans after the implementation of the new North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which, ironically, was aimed at eliminating
barriers to trade and investment across North America.
And the expectations of those officials proved well justified. The ensuing
upheavals in Mexico, as analyst Marco Antonio Velázquez Navarrete explained
to me, were like the aftermath of a war or natural disaster. Small farmers
couldnt compete against highly subsidized U.S. agribusiness giants like
Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland. Mexican small business owners were
bankrupted by the likes of Walmart, Sams Club, and other corporate powers.
Mining by foreign companies extended across vast swaths of Mexico, causing
territorial conflicts and poisoning the land. The unprecedented and
desperate migration that followed came up against what might be considered
the other side of the Clinton doctrine of open trade: walls, increased
border agents, increased patrolling, and new surveillance technologies meant
to cut off traditional crossing spots in urban areas like El Paso, San
Diego, Brownsville, and Nogales.
This administration has taken a strong stand to stiffen the protection of
our borders, President Bill Clinton said in 1996. We are increasing border
controls by fifty percent.
Over the next 20 years, that border apparatus would expand exponentially in
terms of personnel, resources, and geographic reach, but the central
strategy of the 1990s (labeled Prevention Through Deterrence) remained the
same. The ever-increasing border policing and militarization funneled
desperate migrants into remote locations like the Arizona desert where
temperatures can soar to 120 degrees in the summer heat.
The first U.S. border strategy memorandum in 1994 predicted the tragic
future we now have. Illegal entrants crossing through remote, uninhabited
expanses of land and sea along the border can find themselves in mortal
danger, it stated.
Twenty years later, more than 6,000 remains have been found in the desert
borderlands of the United States. Hundreds of families continue to search
for disappeared loved ones. The Colibri Center for Human Rights has records
for more than 2,500 missing people last seen crossing the U.S.-Mexico
border. In other words, that border has become a graveyard of bones and
sadness.
Despite all the attention given to the wall and the border this election
season, neither the Trump nor Clinton campaigns have mentioned Prevention
Through Deterrence, nor the subsequent border deaths. Not once. The same
goes for the establishment media that can't stop talking about Trumps wall.
There has been little or no mention of what border groups have long called a
humanitarian crisis of deaths that have increased five-fold over the last
decade, thanks, in part, to a wall that already exists. (If the people dying
were Canadians or Europeans, attention would, of course, be paid.)
Although wall construction began during Bill Clintons administration, the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) built most of the approximately 700
miles of fencing after the Secure Fence Act of 2006 was passed. At the time,
Senator Hillary Clinton voted in favor of that Republican-introduced bill,
along with 26 other Democrats. "I voted numerous times when I was a senator
to spend money to build a barrier to try to prevent illegal immigrants from
coming in, she commented at one 2015 campaign event, "and I do think you
have to control your borders."
The 2006 wall-building project was expected to be so environmentally
destructive that homeland security chief Michael Chertoff waived 37
environmental and cultural laws in the name of national security. In this
way, he allowed Border Patrol bulldozers to desecrate protected wilderness
and sacred land.
Imagine a bulldozer parking in your family graveyard, turning up bones,
Chairman Ned Norris, Jr., of the Tohono Oodham Nation (a Native American
tribe whose original land was cut in half by the U.S. border) told Congress
in 2008. This is our reality.
With a price tag of, on average, $4 million a mile, these border walls,
barriers, and fences have proven to be one of the costliest border
infrastructure projects undertaken by the United States. For private border
contractors, on the other hand, its the gift that just keeps on giving. In
2011, for example, the DHS granted Kellogg, Brown, and Root, a subsidiary of
Halliburton, one of our warrior corporations, a $24.4 million upkeep
contract.
In Tucson in early August, Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence
looked out over a sea of red Make America Great Again caps and t-shirts
and said, We will secure our border. Donald Trump will build that wall.
He would be met with roaring applause, even though his statement made no
sense at all.
Should Trump actually win, how could he build something that already exists?
Indeed, for all practical purposes, the Great Wall that Trump talks about
may, by January 2017, be as antiquated as the Great Wall of China given the
new high-tech surveillance methods now coming on the market. These are
being developed in a major way and on a regular basis by a booming border
techno-surveillance industry.
The twenty-first-century border is no longer just about walls; its about
biometrics and drones. Its about a layered approach to national security,
given that, as former Border Patrol Chief Mike Fisher has put it, the
international boundary is no longer the first or last line of defense, but
one of many. Hillary Clintons promise of comprehensive immigration
reform -- to be introduced within 100 days of her entering the Oval Office
-- is a much more reliable guide than Trumps wall to our grim immigration
future. If her bill follows the pattern of previous ones, as it surely will,
an increasingly weaponized, privatized, high-tech, layered border regime,
increasingly dangerous to future Ignacio Sarabias, will continue to be a
priority of the federal government.
On the surface, there are important differences between Clintons and
Trumps immigration platforms. Trumps wildly xenophobic comments and
declarations are well known, and Clinton claims that she will, among other
things, fight for family unity for those forcibly separated by deportation
and enact humane immigration enforcement. Yet deep down, the policies of
the two candidates are far more similar than they might at first appear.
Navigating Donald Trumps Borderlands Now
That April day, only one bit of information about Ignacio Sarabias border
crossing to reunite with his wife and newborn child was available at the
Tucson federal courthouse. He had entered the United States near Nogales.
Most likely, he circumvented the wall first started during the Clinton
administration, like most immigrants do, by making his way through the
potentially treacherous canyons that surround that border town.
If his experience was typical, he probably didnt have enough water or food,
and suffered some physical woe like large, painful blisters on his feet.
Certainly, he wasnt atypical in trying to reunite with loved ones. After
all, more than 2.5 million people have been expelled from the country by the
Obama administration, an average annual deportation rate of close to 400,000
people. This was, by the way, only possible thanks to laws signed by Bill
Clinton in 1996 and meant to burnish his legacy. They vastly expanded the
governments deportation powers.
In 2013 alone, Immigration and Customs Enforcement carried out 72,000
deportations of parents who said that their children were U.S.-born. And
many of them are likely to try to cross that dangerous southern border again
to reunite with their families.
The enforcement landscape Sarabia faced has changed drastically since that
first wall was built in 1994. The post-9/11 border is now both a war zone
and a showcase for corporate surveillance. It represents, according to
Border Patrol agent Felix Chavez, an unprecedented deployment of
resources, any of which could have led to Sarabias capture. It could have
been one of the hundreds of remote video or mobile surveillance systems, or
one of the more than 12,000 implanted motion sensors that set off alarms in
hidden operational control rooms where agents stare into large monitors.
It could have been the spy towers made by the Israeli company Elbit Systems
that spotted him, or Predator B drones built by General Atomics, or VADER
radar systems manufactured by the defense giant Northrup Grumman that, like
so many similar technologies, have been transported from the battlefields of
Afghanistan or Iraq to the U.S. border.
If the comprehensive immigration reform that Hillary Clinton pledges to
introduce as president is based on the already existing bipartisan Senate
package, as has been indicated, then this corporate-enforcement landscape
will be significantly bolstered and reinforced. There will be 19,000 more
Border Patrol agents in roving patrols throughout border enforcement
jurisdictions that extend up to 100 miles inland. More F-150 trucks and
all-terrain vehicles will rumble through and, at times, tear up the desert.
There will be more Blackhawk helicopters, flying low, their propellers
dusting groups of scattering migrants, many of them already lost in the
vast, parched desert.
If such a package passes the next Congress, up to $46 billion could be
slated to go into more of all of this, including funding for hundreds of
miles of new walls. Corporate vendors are salivating at the thought of such
a future and in a visible state of elation at homeland security tradeshows
across the globe.
The 2013 bill that passed in the Senate but failed in the House of
Representatives also included a process of legalization for the millions of
undocumented people living in the United States. It maintained programs that
will grant legal residence for children who came to the United States at a
young age and their parents. Odds are that a comprehensive reform bill in a
Clinton presidency would be similar.
Included in that bill was, of course, funding to bolster Operation
Streamline. The Evo A. DeConcini Federal Courthouse in Tucson would then
have the capacity to prosecute triple the number of people it deals with at
present.
After taking a sip from her coffee and listening to the translation of
Ignacio Sarabias comments, the magistrate judge looks at him and says shes
sorry for his predicament.
Personally, Im mesmerized by his story as I sit on a wooden bench at the
back of the court. I have a child the same age as his son. I cant imagine
his predicament. Not once while he talks does it leave my mind that my
child might even have the same birthday as his.
The judge then looks directly at Sarabia and tells him that he can't just
come here "illegally, that he has to find a legal way (highly unlikely,
given the criminal conviction that will now be on his record). Your son,
she says, when he gets better, and his mother, can visit you where you are
in Mexico.
Otherwise, she adds, he'll be visiting you in prison -- not exactly, she
points out, an appealing scenario: seeing your father in a prison where he
will be locked away for a very long time.
She then sentences the nine men standing side by side in front of her for
periods ranging from 60 days to 180 days for the crime of crossing an
international border without proper documents. Sarabia receives a 60-day
sentence.
Next, armed guards from G4S -- the private contractor that once employed
Omar Mateen (the Pulse nightclub killer) and has a lucrative
quarter-billion-dollar border contract with Customs and Border Protection --
will transport each of the shackled prisoners to a Corrections Corporation
of America private prison in Florence, Arizona. It is there that Sarabia
will think about his childs endangered heart from behind layers of coiled
razor wire, while the corporation that runs the prison makes $124 per day
for incarcerating him.
Indeed, Donald Trumps United States doesnt await his presidency. Its
already laid out before us, and one place its happening every single day is
in Tucson, only seven blocks from my house.
Todd Miller, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of Border Patrol Nation:
Dispatches From the Front Lines of Homeland Security. He has written on
border and immigration issues for the New York Times, Al Jazeera America,
and the NACLA Report on the Americas and its blog Border Wars. You can
follow him on twitter @memomiller and view more of his work at
toddwmiller.wordpress.com.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turses Next Time Theyll Come to Count the Dead, and
Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars,
and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Todd Miller
© 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176179
Tomgram: Todd Miller, The Great Mexican Wall Deception
By Todd Miller
Posted on August 23, 2016, Printed on August 23, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176179/ ;
These days, were in what seems like an election campaign of one. Its Trump
vs. Trump. Does Hillary even exist? Theres conflicting evidence on that. If
Trump loses, I suspect we'll all be able to say that never has a candidate
trounced himself quite so efficiently. All his opponent evidently has to do
is not give press conferences, stay out of the spotlight, and wait for Trump
to tromp Trump.
At the moment, his polling figures are looking increasingly dismal and he's
shaken up his campaign team (yet again!) -- the Ukrainians having lost out
to Breitbart News and American "nationalism." Still, The Donald rumbles on.
Hes a figure the usual journalistic crew is essentially incapable of
covering. For that, you need a coterie of cartoonists and, of course, New
Yorker satirist Andy Borowitz.
Only recently, for instance, The Donald gave a speech in which he suggested
that a new Cold-War-style ideological screening test for immigrants be
developed to keep... well, you know whom out. Hes referred to the process
he imagines putting in place as extreme vetting. The goal, he says, is to
ban those who support bigotry and hatred (of whom he perhaps feels we
already have our fill without the aid of immigrants) and, above all, those
who believe that Sharia law should supplant American law. He hasnt yet
suggested just what that screening test might be like, but TomDispatch has a
few obvious suggestions.
The first question for any prospective immigrant would surely have to be:
Do you belong to ISIS? The answer to that one will obviously eliminate
many of the most dangerous potential infiltrators. Youd then follow up with
the surefire extreme-vetting question: Do you believe that Sharia law
should be imposed on the United States? And if that doesnt eliminate the
rest of the potential Islamic terrorists, youd finish off the process with
a trick question. Best suggestion at present: Death to America: Yea or
Nay?
Those who pass will obviously be ready to receive their visas and, as The
Donald so movingly puts it, embrace a tolerant American society.
Let me just add that Trump supporters shouldnt feel complete despair if, in
the course of this election campaign, The Donald goes down in electoral
flames. As TomDispatch regular Todd Miller suggests in his latest report
from the U.S.-Mexican border, when Hillary Clinton emerges from the shadows
to take the oath of office, she will find herself presiding over far more
Trumpian American borderlands than many of us might assume. And for that
well have to offer thanks not only to the inspiration of Trump but to the
actions of two other figures on the American political landscape: Bill and
Hillary Clinton. Tom
No Need to Build The Donald's Wall, Its Built
Trumps America Already Exists on the Border
By Todd Miller
At the federal courthouse, Ignacio Sarabia asks the magistrate judge,
Jacqueline Rateau, if he can explain why he crossed the international
boundary between the two countries without authorization. He has already
pleaded guilty to the federal misdemeanor commonly known as illegal entry
and is about to receive a prison sentence. On either side of him are eight
men in the same predicament, all still sunburned, all in the same ripped,
soiled clothes they were wearing when arrested in the Arizona desert by
agents of the U.S. Border Patrol.
Once again, the zero tolerance border enforcement program known as Operation
Streamline has unfolded just as it always does here in Tucson, Arizona.
Close to 60 people have already approached the judge in groups of seven or
eight, their heads bowed submissively, their bodies weighed down by shackles
and chains around wrists, waists, and ankles. The judge has handed out the
requisite prison sentences in quick succession -- 180 days, 60 days, 90
days, 30 days.
On and on it goes, day-in, day-out. Like so many meals served in fast-food
restaurants, 750,000 prison sentences of this sort have been handed down
since Operation Streamline was launched in 2005. This mass prosecution of
undocumented border crossers has become so much the norm that one report
concluded it is now a driving force in mass incarceration in the United
States. Yet it is but a single program among many overseen by the massive
U.S. border enforcement and incarceration regime that has developed during
the last two decades, particularly in the post-9/11 era.
Sarabia takes a half-step forward. My infant is four months old, he tells
the judge in Spanish. The baby was, he assures her, born with a heart
condition and is a U.S. citizen. They have no option but to operate. This is
the reason, he says, that Im here before you. He pauses.
I want to be with my child, who is in the United States.
Its clear that Sarabia would like to gesture emphatically as he speaks, but
thats difficult, thanks to the shackles that constrain him. Rateau fills
her coffee cup as she waits for his comments to be translated into English.
Earlier in April 2016, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, still
in the heat of his primary campaign, stated once again that he would build a
massive concrete border wall towering 30 (or, depending on the moment, 55)
feet high along the 2,000 mile U.S.-Mexican border. He would, he insisted,
force Mexico to pay for the $8 billion to $10 billion barrier. Repeatedly
throwing such red meat into the gaping jaws of nativism, he has over these
last months also announced that he would create a major deportation force,
repeatedly sworn that he would ban Muslims from entering the country (a
position that he regularly revises), and most recently, that he would
institute an extreme vetting process for foreign nationals arriving in the
United States.
In June 2015, when he rode a Trump Tower escalator into the presidential
campaign, among his initial promises was the building of a great and
beautiful wall on the border. (And no one builds walls better than me,
believe me. I will do it very inexpensively. I will have Mexico pay for that
wall.) As he pulled that promise out of a hat with a magicians flair, the
actual history of the border disappeared. From then on in Election 2016,
there was just empty desert and Donald Trump.
Suddenly, there hadnt been a bipartisan government effort over the last
quarter-century to put in place an unprecedented array of walls, detection
systems, and guards for that southern border. In those years, the number of
Border Patrol agents had, in fact, quintupled from 4,000 to more than
21,000, while Customs and Border Protection became the largest federal law
enforcement agency in the country with more than 60,000 agents. The annual
budget for border and immigration enforcement went from $1.5 to $19.5
billion, a more than 12-fold increase. By 2016, federal government funding
of border and immigration enforcement added up to $5 billion more than that
for all other federal law enforcement agencies combined.
Operation Streamline, a cornerstone program in the Consequence Delivery
System, part of a broader Border Patrol deterrence strategy for stopping
undocumented immigration, is just one part of a vast
enforcement-incarceration-deportation machine. The program is as no-nonsense
as its name suggests. It's not The Wall, but it embodies the logic of the
wall: either you crossed illegally or you didnt. It doesnt matter why,
or whether you lost your job, or if youve had to skip meals to feed your
kids. It doesnt matter if your house was flooded or the drought dried up
your fields. It doesnt matter if youre running for your life from drug
cartel gunmen or the very army and police forces that are supposed to
protect you.
This system was what Ignacio Sarabia faced a few months ago in a Tucson
court. His tragedy is one that plays out so many times daily a mere seven
blocks from where I live.
Before I tell you how the judge responded to his plea, its important to
understand Sarabias journey, and that of so many thousands like him who end
up in this federal courthouse day after day. As he pleads to be with his
newborn son, his voice cracking with emotion, his story catches the already
Trumpian-style of border enforcement -- both the pain and suffering it has
caused, and the strategy and massive build-up behind it -- in ways that the
campaign rhetoric of both parties and the reporting on it doesnt. As
reporters chase their tails attempting to explain Trumps wild and often
unfounded claims and declarations, the on-the-ground border reality goes
unreported. Indeed, one of the greatest secrets of the 2016 election
campaign (though it should be common knowledge) is that the border wall
already exists. It has for years and the fingerprints all over it aren't
Donald Trump's but the Clintons', both Bill's and Hillary's.
The Wall That Already Exists
Twenty-one years before Trumps wall-building promise (and seven years
before the 9/11 attacks), the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began to replace
the chain link fence that separated Nogales, Sonora, in Mexico from Nogales,
Arizona, in the United States with a wall built of rusty landing mats from
the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars. Although there had been various
half-hearted attempts at building border walls throughout the twentieth
century, this was the first true effort to build a barrier of what might now
be called Trumpian magnitude.
That rusty, towering wall snaked through the hills and canyons of northern
Sonora and southern Arizona forever deranging a world that, given
cross-border familial and community ties, then considered itself one. At the
time, who could have known that the strategy the first wall embodied would
still be the model for todays massive system of exclusion.
In 1994, the threat wasnt terrorism. In part, the
callhttp://www.democracynow.org/2008/6/20/joseph_nevins_on_dying_to_live for
more hardened, militarized borders came in response, among other things, to
a never-ending drug war. It also came from U.S. officials who anticipated
the displacement of millions of Mexicans after the implementation of the new
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which, ironically, was aimed at
eliminating barriers to trade and investment across North America.
And the expectations of those officials proved well justified. The ensuing
upheavals in Mexico, as analyst Marco Antonio Velázquez Navarrete explained
to me, were like the aftermath of a war or natural disaster. Small farmers
couldnt compete against highly subsidized U.S. agribusiness giants like
Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland. Mexican small business owners were
bankrupted by the likes of Walmart, Sams Club, and other corporate powers.
Mining by foreign companies extended across vast swaths of Mexico, causing
territorial conflicts and poisoning the land. The unprecedented and
desperate migration that followed came up against what might be considered
the other side of the Clinton doctrine of open trade: walls, increased
border agents, increased patrolling, and new surveillance technologies meant
to cut off traditional crossing spots in urban areas like El Paso, San
Diego, Brownsville, and Nogales.
This administration has taken a strong stand to stiffen the protection of
our borders, President Bill Clinton said in 1996. We are increasing border
controls by fifty percent.
Over the next 20 years, that border apparatus would expand exponentially in
terms of personnel, resources, and geographic reach, but the central
strategy of the 1990s (labeled Prevention Through Deterrence) remained the
same. The ever-increasing border policing and militarization funneled
desperate migrants into remote locations like the Arizona desert where
temperatures can soar to 120 degrees in the summer heat.
The first U.S. border strategy memorandum in 1994 predicted the tragic
future we now have. Illegal entrants crossing through remote, uninhabited
expanses of land and sea along the border can find themselves in mortal
danger, it stated.
Twenty years later, more than 6,000 remains have been found in the desert
borderlands of the United States. Hundreds of families continue to search
for disappeared loved ones. The Colibri Center for Human Rights has records
for more than 2,500 missing people last seen crossing the U.S.-Mexico
border. In other words, that border has become a graveyard of bones and
sadness.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0872866319/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0872866319/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20Despite all
the attention given to the wall and the border this election season, neither
the Trump nor Clinton campaigns have mentioned Prevention Through
Deterrence, nor the subsequent border deaths. Not once. The same goes for
the establishment media that can't stop talking about Trumps wall. There
has been little or no mention of what border groups have long called a
humanitarian crisis of deaths that have increased five-fold over the last
decade, thanks, in part, to a wall that already exists. (If the people dying
were Canadians or Europeans, attention would, of course, be paid.)
Although wall construction began during Bill Clintons administration, the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) built most of the approximately 700
miles of fencing after the Secure Fence Act of 2006 was passed. At the time,
Senator Hillary Clinton voted in favor of that Republican-introduced bill,
along with 26 other Democrats. "I voted numerous times when I was a senator
to spend money to build a barrier to try to prevent illegal immigrants from
coming in, she commented at one 2015 campaign event, "and I do think you
have to control your borders."
The 2006 wall-building project was expected to be so environmentally
destructive that homeland security chief Michael Chertoff waived 37
environmental and cultural laws in the name of national security. In this
way, he allowed Border Patrol bulldozers to desecrate protected wilderness
and sacred land.
Imagine a bulldozer parking in your family graveyard, turning up bones,
Chairman Ned Norris, Jr., of the Tohono Oodham Nation (a Native American
tribe whose original land was cut in half by the U.S. border) told Congress
in 2008. This is our reality.
With a price tag of, on average, $4 million a mile, these border walls,
barriers, and fences have proven to be one of the costliest border
infrastructure projects undertaken by the United States. For private border
contractors, on the other hand, its the gift that just keeps on giving. In
2011, for example, the DHS granted Kellogg, Brown, and Root, a subsidiary of
Halliburton, one of our warrior corporations, a $24.4 million upkeep
contract.
In Tucson in early August, Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence
looked out over a sea of red Make America Great Again caps and t-shirts
and said, We will secure our border. Donald Trump will build that wall. He
would be met with roaring applause, even though his statement made no sense
at all.
Should Trump actually win, how could he build something that already exists?
Indeed, for all practical purposes, the Great Wall that Trump talks about
may, by January 2017, be as antiquated as the Great Wall of China given the
new high-tech surveillance methods now coming on the market. These are being
developed in a major way and on a regular basis by a booming border
techno-surveillance industry.
The twenty-first-century border is no longer just about walls; its about
biometrics and drones. Its about a layered approach to national security,
given that, as former Border Patrol Chief Mike Fisher has put it, the
international boundary is no longer the first or last line of defense, but
one of many. Hillary Clintons promise of comprehensive immigration
reform -- to be introduced within 100 days of her entering the Oval Office
-- is a much more reliable guide than Trumps wall to our grim immigration
future. If her bill follows the pattern of previous ones, as it surely will,
an increasingly weaponized, privatized, high-tech, layered border regime,
increasingly dangerous to future Ignacio Sarabias, will continue to be a
priority of the federal government.
On the surface, there are important differences between Clintons and
Trumps immigration platforms. Trumps wildly xenophobic comments and
declarations are well known, and Clinton claims that she will, among other
things, fight for family unity for those forcibly separated by deportation
and enact humane immigration enforcement. Yet deep down, the policies of
the two candidates are far more similar than they might at first appear.
Navigating Donald Trumps Borderlands Now
That April day, only one bit of information about Ignacio Sarabias border
crossing to reunite with his wife and newborn child was available at the
Tucson federal courthouse. He had entered the United States near Nogales.
Most likely, he circumvented the wall first started during the Clinton
administration, like most immigrants do, by making his way through the
potentially treacherous canyons that surround that border town.
If his experience was typical, he probably didnt have enough water or food,
and suffered some physical woe like large, painful blisters on his feet.
Certainly, he wasnt atypical in trying to reunite with loved ones. After
all, more than 2.5 million people have been expelled from the country by the
Obama administration, an average annual deportation rate of close to 400,000
people. This was, by the way, only possible thanks to laws signed by Bill
Clinton in 1996 and meant to burnish his legacy. They vastly expanded the
governments deportation powers.
In 2013 alone, Immigration and Customs Enforcement carried out 72,000
deportations of parents who said that their children were U.S.-born. And
many of them are likely to try to cross that dangerous southern border again
to reunite with their families.
The enforcement landscape Sarabia faced has changed drastically since that
first wall was built in 1994. The post-9/11 border is now both a war zone
and a showcase for corporate surveillance. It represents, according to
Border Patrol agent Felix Chavez, an unprecedented deployment of
resources, any of which could have led to Sarabias capture. It could have
been one of the hundreds of remote video or mobile surveillance systems, or
one of the more than 12,000 implanted motion sensors that set off alarms in
hidden operational control rooms where agents stare into large monitors.
It could have been the spy towers made by the Israeli company Elbit Systems
that spotted him, or Predator B drones built by General Atomics, or VADER
radar systems manufactured by the defense giant Northrup Grumman that, like
so many similar technologies, have been transported from the battlefields of
Afghanistan or Iraq to the U.S. border.
If the comprehensive immigration reform that Hillary Clinton pledges to
introduce as president is based on the already existing bipartisan Senate
package, as has been indicated, then this corporate-enforcement landscape
will be significantly bolstered and reinforced. There will be 19,000 more
Border Patrol agents in roving patrols throughout border enforcement
jurisdictions that extend up to 100 miles inland. More F-150 trucks and
all-terrain vehicles will rumble through and, at times, tear up the desert.
There will be more Blackhawk helicopters, flying low, their propellers
dusting groups of scattering migrants, many of them already lost in the
vast, parched desert.
If such a package passes the next Congress, up to $46 billion could be
slated to go into more of all of this, including funding for hundreds of
miles of new walls. Corporate vendors are salivating at the thought of such
a future and in a visible state of elation at homeland security tradeshows
across the globe.
The 2013 bill that passed in the Senate but failed in the House of
Representatives also included a process of legalization for the millions of
undocumented people living in the United States. It maintained programs that
will grant legal residence for children who came to the United States at a
young age and their parents. Odds are that a comprehensive reform bill in a
Clinton presidency would be similar.
Included in that bill was, of course, funding to bolster Operation
Streamline. The Evo A. DeConcini Federal Courthouse in Tucson would then
have the capacity to prosecute triple the number of people it deals with at
present.
After taking a sip from her coffee and listening to the translation of
Ignacio Sarabias comments, the magistrate judge looks at him and says shes
sorry for his predicament.
Personally, Im mesmerized by his story as I sit on a wooden bench at the
back of the court. I have a child the same age as his son. I cant imagine
his predicament. Not once while he talks does it leave my mind that my child
might even have the same birthday as his.
The judge then looks directly at Sarabia and tells him that he can't just
come here "illegally, that he has to find a legal way (highly unlikely,
given the criminal conviction that will now be on his record). Your son,
she says, when he gets better, and his mother, can visit you where you are
in Mexico.
Otherwise, she adds, he'll be visiting you in prison -- not exactly, she
points out, an appealing scenario: seeing your father in a prison where he
will be locked away for a very long time.
She then sentences the nine men standing side by side in front of her for
periods ranging from 60 days to 180 days for the crime of crossing an
international border without proper documents. Sarabia receives a 60-day
sentence.
Next, armed guards from G4S -- the private contractor that once employed
Omar Mateen (the Pulse nightclub killer) and has a lucrative
quarter-billion-dollar border contract with Customs and Border Protection --
will transport each of the shackled prisoners to a Corrections Corporation
of America private prison in Florence, Arizona. It is there that Sarabia
will think about his childs endangered heart from behind layers of coiled
razor wire, while the corporation that runs the prison makes $124 per day
for incarcerating him.
Indeed, Donald Trumps United States doesnt await his presidency. Its
already laid out before us, and one place its happening every single day is
in Tucson, only seven blocks from my house.
Todd Miller, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of Border Patrol Nation:
Dispatches From the Front Lines of Homeland Security. He has written on
border and immigration issues for the New York Times, Al Jazeera America,
and the NACLA Report on the Americas and its blog Border Wars. You can
follow him on twitter @memomiller and view more of his work at
toddwmiller.wordpress.com.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turses Next Time Theyll Come to Count the Dead, and
Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars,
and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Todd Miller
© 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176179
