This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
Yes, it was little short of pathetic. Remember the "big, fat, beautiful wall" that, from the first moment of his 2015-2016 election campaign, Donald Trump swore he'd build to keep Mexican "rapists" out of this country? He insisted that it would be "impenetrable." And he did indeed spend a taxpayer fortune (though he had promised that Mexico would pay for it) building 450 miles of wall to little effect. It had already been breached more than 3,000 times by Mexican smugglers who had also used cheap, disposable ladders to climb it before Joe Biden shut down the effort, swearing during his campaign for the presidency that he would never build "another foot" of that barrier.
And he was as good as his word until recently, when his administration suddenly announced that it would indeed spend money Congress had ponied up in the Trump years to build a new 20-mile stretch of (meaningless) border wall in Texas. It didn't matter, it seemed, that the president was still insisting that such walls don't work. How truly strange.
Stranger yet, as TomDispatch regular and border expert Todd Miller, author of Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders, points out today, in the coming election campaign, Biden will be attacked by both progressive Democrats for building any of the wall and Republicans for not building enough of it. Few on either side will grasp, however, just how many taxpayer dollars have, in the Biden years, been wasted on what Miller labels the Border-Industrial Complex to create what could indeed now be thought of as Joe Biden's (as well as Donald Trump's) border of death. But let him explain. Tom
Biden's Border
Record Contracts for Private Industry on the World's Deadliest Land Border
By Todd Miller
On September 23rd, at about 2:30 a.m., a Border Patrol surveillance camera captured two people crossing the international boundary between Mexico and the United States on the outskirts of Nogales, Arizona. A Border Patrol vehicle arrived quickly, but not before one of them had fled back into Mexico. When an armed agent stepped out, dressed in a forest-green uniform, he found a 16-year-old girl from Mexico softly crying, while holding her month-old baby swaddled in a blanket.
The agent commanded her to get in the vehicle. As they then drove to the Nogales Border Patrol station, the girl, he later reported, tried to speak to him in Spanish through the security partition that separated them. Her tiny daughter, she was telling him, was in distress. Cameras showed that the vehicle stopped for all of 10 seconds before continuing. The agent later claimed he couldn't understand what she was saying and that he wanted to find a fluent Spanish speaker at the station. He didn't realize, he insisted, that the infant was struggling to breathe, though the child soon died.
This hellish story of suffering at our border is but one of hundreds of similar tales of horror from 2023. They illustrate a fundamental truth about that border: it neither is, nor ever was, an "open" one in the Biden years, nor does the president faintly have an open-border policy, though prepare yourself to hear otherwise over and over again in Trumpublican campaign ads next year. They'll repeat what party officials are already saying all too repetitively: that "President Biden's radical open borders policies" have created "the worst border crisis in American history." (While those are the exact words of House Oversight Committee chair James Comer, similar sentiments are already being offered by countless members of the GOP.)
Comer's claim is, of course, no less predictable than the hardships migrants like that girl are suffering as they try to reach this country. While such border narratives traffic in the unreal, what is real either isn't effectively reported or gets lost amid all the politically motivated noise. Loud fantasies are expansively covered, while life-and-death stories, like those of that infant and her mother, are seldom reported and, if they are, quickly disappear.
Barely a week before that 16 year old was desperately trying to communicate to the agent in Spanish, the United Nations International Organization for Migration (IOM) labeled the U.S.-Mexico border the world's "deadliest migration land route." In 2022, a record 853 remains of dead border crossers were recovered (and this is the U.S. Border Patrol's figure, which is even higher than the IOM's), dwarfing the record of 568 set the previous year. Such numbers, the IOM stresses, are known to be distinct undercounts, leaving all too many families pining for lost loved ones.
But those border fatalities weren't the only record breaker. Another was confirmed just a week after medical personnel at the Nogales station rushed to treat that girl's baby. The number of border contracts issued to private industry also set a new record. Like those deaths, such contracts soared in fiscal year 2023 to $9.96 billion, instantly stripping the previous high, also set last year, of $7.5 billion.
And mind you, those gifts to industry were made from the highest budget ever (including in the Trump years) for border and immigration enforcement: $29.8 billion. So, don't for a second think that the U.S. has an "open" border. In fact, it's never been more fortified or something few even bother to mention more profitable, if you happen to be part of the border-industrial complex.
Biden and the Border-Industrial Complex
If you count all the contracts for private industry from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since Joe Biden took office for, that is, 2021, 2022, and 2023 the number comes to $23.5 billion. And though you'd never guess it, given what we normally hear, that already beats Donald Trump's total for his full four years in office, $20.9 billion. Or, to put the matter in a more historical perspective, private contracts for the Biden years already top the cumulative $22.5 billion spent in border and immigration enforcement budgets from 1975 to 1997. That's 22 years if you weren't counting.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
