The $46 billion border security price tag in the immigration reform bill will simply expand on what has already been built. After all, $100 billion was spent on border "enforcement" in the first decade after 9/11. To that must be added the annual $18 billion budget for border and immigration enforcement, money that outpaces the combined budgets of all other federal law enforcement agencies. In fact, since Operation Blockade in the 1990s, the U.S.-Mexico border has gone through so many surges that a time when simple chain link fences separated two friendly countries is now unimaginable.
To witness the widespread presence of Department of Homeland Security agents on the southern border, just visit that international boundary 100 miles south of Border Security Expo. Approximately 700 miles of walls, fences, and barriers already cut off the two countries at its major urban crossings and many rural ones as well. Emplaced everywhere are cameras that can follow you -- or your body heat -- day or night. Overhead, as in Afghanistan, a Predator B drone may hover. You can't hear its incessant buzzing only because it flies so high, nor can you see the crew in charge of flying it and analyzing your movements from possibly hundreds of miles away.
As you walk, perhaps you step on implanted sensors, creating a beeping noise in some distant monitoring room. Meanwhile, green-striped Border Patrol vehicles rush by constantly. On the U.S.-Mexican border, there are already more than 18,500 agents (and approximately 2,300 more on the Canadian border). In counterterrorism mode, they are paid to be suspicious of everything and everybody. Some Homeland Security vehicles sport trailers carrying All Terrain Vehicles. Some have mounted surveillance cameras, others cages to detain captured migrants. Some borderlanders like Mike Wilson of the Tucson-based Border Action Network, a member of the Tohono O'odham Nation (a Native American people and the original inhabitants of the Arizona borderlands), call the border security operatives an "occupying army."
Checkpoints -- normally located 20-50 miles from the international boundary -- serve as a second layer of border enforcement. Stopped at one of them, you will be interrogated by armed agents in green, most likely with drug-sniffing dogs. If you are near the international divide, it's hard to avoid such checkpoints where you will be asked about your citizenship -- and much more if anything you say or do, or simply the way you look, raises suspicions. Even outside of the checkpoints, agents of the Department of Homeland Security can pull you over for any reason -- without probable cause or a warrant -- and do what is termed a "routine search." As a U.S. Border Patrol agent told journalist Margaret Regan, within a hundred miles of the international divide, "there's an asterisk on the Constitution."
Off-road forward operating bases offer further evidence of the battlefield atmosphere being created near the border. Such outposts became commonplace during the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they were meant to house U.S. soldiers deployed into remote areas. On the border, there are high-tech yet rudimentary camps that serve the same purpose. They also signal how agents of the Department of Homeland Security are "gaining, maintaining, and expanding" into rural areas traversed by migrants and used by smugglers, though to this point never crossed by a known international terrorist.
These rural areas, especially in Arizona, are riddled with migrant causalities. More than 6,000 "remains" have been recovered since the mid-1990s, deaths not for the most part from bullets but from exposure. The U.S. borderlands, according to sociologist Timothy Dunn, started to become a militarized zone as early as the 1970s -- in part, in response to the Pentagon's low-intensity conflict doctrine. With Congressional immigration reform, if it passes the House of Representatives, it may very well become a full-fledged war zone.
Since the 1990s, the strategy of the Border Patrol has been termed "prevention by deterrence" and has been focused on concentrating agents and surveillance technologies in urban areas, once the traditional migrant routes. The idea was to funnel migrant flows into areas too dangerous and desolate to cross like the triple-degree-temperature desert in Arizona. Deadly yes; impossible to cross, no. Although unauthorized border-crossings have slowed down in recent years, tens of thousands continue to cross into the United States annually from Mexico and Central America, thanks in part to the continued havoc of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which left more two million Mexican farmers unemployed.
I met Adira, a 21-year-old from Oaxaca, Mexico, in early June. She told me a story all too common in Arizona. As she described her experience, I realized that I was talking to somebody who had probably died and been brought back to life. We were only a few blocks from the border. Homeland Security had formally deported her only days before. Still reliving the trauma of her experience, she stared down, her face colorless, as she talked.
I had heard the basics of her story so many times before: to avoid the militarized surveillance apparatus, she and her companions walked for at least five days through the southern Arizona desert with little -- and then no -- water or food. By the fourth day, the mountains began to talk to her, so she told me, and she suspected she was coming to the end of her young life. After she couldn't walk any more, the guide dragged her, telling her constantly: "We just have to make it to the next point."
When they reached a road on the American side of the border, she remembers convulsing four times (just as she remembers blood bursting spontaneously from the noses of her companions). And then she remembers no more. She woke up in a hospital. There were scars on her chest. Medics must have used a machine, she thought, to shock her back to life. She found out later that somebody had lit a fire to attract the Border Patrol. She's lucky not to be among those remains regularly found out in that desert.
In other words, each further tightening of the border is a death sentence passed on yet more Latin Americans. According to a statement by a group of Tucson organizations, including No More Deaths and the Coalicià ³n de Derechos Humanos, the border build-up in the immigration reform bill promises more of the same: "Make no mistake: this bill will lead to more deaths on the border."
The Laboratory
In early March, DRS Technologies set up its integrated fixed-tower technology at the University of Arizona's (UA) Science and Technology Park, just south of Tucson, an hour from the border, and very close to where Adira almost lost her life. The company was eager to show off the long-range surveillance technology it had been developing for borders in places like Egypt and Jordan.
It set up a mock operational control room to do a dog-and-pony show for the local media. Four of its IT guys then focused their cameras on an elevated railroad spur more than four miles away in the middle of the desert where two men were approaching each other to consummate a fake drug deal. One handed the other a backpack. It was all vividly watchable on DRS's video screens. Although the odds of such a scenario actually happening ranged from slim to none, the demonstration was a reminder of just how fertile the U.S.-Mexico borderlands are for defense- and surveillance-related companies. It's here that new generations of surveillance technology are regularly born and developed.
For almost a decade, the Department of Homeland Security has been attempting to build a "virtual wall" along the border -- not a physical barrier but a high-tech surveillance masterpiece, a complex web of technology, radar, unattended ground sensors, and camera systems meant to detect anyone crossing the border anywhere. The last attempt to install such an experimental system along part of the border was in 2006. Then the Department of Homeland Security awarded Boeing Corporation a multi-billion-dollar contract to develop such a "wall," known as SBInet. That contract was abruptly cancelled in 2011, after the costly and delayed program advertised as offering "unprecedented situational awareness" misfired regularly in the rugged terrain of the Arizona borderlands. Now, companies like DRS are standing in line for the next round of potentially lucrative contracts, as Homeland Security wants "to finish the job."
The UA Tech Park is one place in the southern borderlands where surveillance technology can be developed, tested, evaluated, and demonstrated. It has 18,000 linear feet of fencing surrounding its "solar zone," a solar-technology-centric research area ideal for testing sensor systems along a future border wall. On any of the roadways in its 1,345 acres, it can set up mock border-crossings or checkpoints to test new equipment and methods. It draws on faculty and graduate students from the college of engineering. In "rapid-response teams," they offer third-party evaluations of border control technology. Some of this same technology is also being created on the UA campus, thanks in part to millions of dollars in DHS grants.
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