An 8-Point Plan to Repair the US-Mexico Border

Huffington Post: Ten years ago, in 2005, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security introduced its Secure Border Initiative (SBI). Today, the Mexico-U.S. wall is a fact of everyday life for millions of people who live in its shadow.

Disagreements persist about how effective the border fortifications have been, but two outcomes are certain: the SBI intervention has massively disrupted community, commerce, and environment along the border zone; and created a bloated 'border industrial complex,' consisting of surveillance infrastructures and enforcement personnel that intervene in the lives of U.S. citizens even though they are intended to target undocumented migrants, smugglers, and terrorists. Read more.

Drug Tunnels Along the U.S.-Mexico Border: High Costs, High Rewards

Newsweek: More than 80 tunnels have been discovered between Mexico and the United States since 2006, most recently this past Thursday after a six-month investigation by the U.S. government resulted in a large smuggling tunnel being uncovered, as well as 22 arrests and the recovery of 12 tons of marijuana.

The tunnel, about 32 feet underground, runs about 2,880 feet, between the Otay Center Warehouse in San Diego and another warehouse in Tijuana. In a statement, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Finn said the tunnel is believed to have a railroad system, lighting and electricity throughout.

U.S. to Continue Racial, Ethnic Profiling in Border Policy

NYTimes: The Obama administration will soon issue new rules curtailing the use of profiling, but federal agents will still be allowed to consider race and ethnicity when stopping people at airports, border crossings and immigration checkpoints, according to several government officials.

The new policy has been in the works for years and will replace decade-old rules that banned racial profiling for federal law enforcement, but with specific exemptions for national security and border investigations. Immigration enforcement has proved to be the most controversial aspect of the Obama administration’s revisions, and law enforcement officials succeeded in arguing that they should have more leeway in deciding whom to stop and question.  Read more. 

The Creeping Expansion of the Border Patrol

Aljazeera America 
By Belén Fernández
May 7, 2014

A couple of years ago, a chatty Border Patrol Agent in Texas told me about a recent experience he had near El Paso, a West Texas city near the U.S.-Mexico border. While he was visiting a particular stretch of the border fence that was normally outside his area of operation, he said, a potential threat to homeland security was detected by colleagues on surveillance duty. Attack helicopters were summoned.

The cause for alarm turned out to be a goatherd on the Mexican side of the fence wielding a stick that had been mistaken for a weapon. The helicopters were sent back. As the saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Created in 1924 to secure the borders of the United States, the Border Patrol is now part of the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency. It currently boasts more than 21,000 agents, up from 8,500 in 2001. (If certain members of Congress have their way, that number will continue to multiply.) Read more.

New urgency to cross along tougher U.S. border

The Washington Post

That’s when many of these men crossed over for the first time, in their late teens or early 20s.

Today the area is perhaps the toughest part of one of the most heavily guarded and closely watched international boundaries in the world. The Department of Homeland Security has doubled border security and immigration enforcement spending since 2006 to $18 billion a year, deploying sensors, cameras, fencing, surveillance drones and federal agents.

The immigration overhaul proposals from Congress and the White House promise to harden the border even more.

The Department of Homeland Security does not estimate how many illegal migrants make it across, but researchers and the migrants themselves say the odds of getting caught are greater than ever.

Since 2005, the United States has doubled the number of Border Patrol agents deployed along the Mexico boundary to 18,516, an all-time high.  Read more. 

Border Patrol Opens Unmanned Crossing on U.S.-Mexico Border

ABC/Univision 

Get ready for the very first "unmanned" border station on the U.S.-Mexico border. Slated to open at the end of this month, the Big Bend National Park in Texas will be staffed by, you guessed it, computers.

The station will be equipped with machines that can scan citizenship documents and conduct live video interviews with U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents at a station in El Paso, Texas, Tech News Daily reports. While Mexican citizens will be able to use the crossing, U.S. officials maintain that Americans tourists to the national park are more likely to do so. When a similar CBP crossing was open in the same location more than a decade ago, few Mexicans used it. In 2002, because of increased security measures, U.S. officials closed the original crossing, forcing tourists to travel more than 100 miles to the next nearest crossing to get to Mexico, according to Nextgov.

For anyone worried about the effectiveness of an unmanned station, federal officials maintain that the technology is both effective and cost-efficient, given the number of border crossers in the area. Natural barriers, such as the Rio Grande river, already make illegal crossings more difficult in the region than in other segments of the border, Nextgov reports. Cameras and surveillance tools will be set up in the vicinity, like at any other border station and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials will also be able to travel from the El Paso station should the need arise. Read more. 

U.S. Grows An Industrial Complex Along The Border

NPR: TED ROBBINS

September 12, 2012

The United States' southern border bristles with technology and manpower designed to catch illegal immigrants and drug smugglers. Since 1986, the government has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on fences, aircraft, detention centers and agents.

But even as federal budgets shrink and illegal immigration ebbs, experts say that there's no end in sight for the growth of the border-industrial complex.

A Growing Investment On The Border

Stocked with equipment like Blackhawk helicopters — hundreds of aircraft fly daily missions — much of the southern border has grown into an industrial complex that is fed by the government and supplied by defense contractors and construction companies.

The infrastructure includes a border fence that in some places has been built and rebuilt several times. And up to 25 miles north of the border, towers, sensors and permanent checkpoints spread across the landscape.

The border-control efforts have spread even farther into the country, into cities where Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents pursue illegal immigrants and visa violators. Nationally, it extends to roughly 250 immigrant detention centers.

Some of those centers are run by the government, some by private prison corporations. The government spends an estimated $5 million each day to house detainees awaiting deportation.

All of this effort takes manpower; roughly 80,000 federal employees work in immigration enforcement.

"It is safe to say that there has been more money, manpower, infrastructure, technology, invested in the border-protection mission in the last three years than ever before," says Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. Read more. 

U.S. and Mexican officials identify needed border-crossing projects

El Paso Times: U.S. and Mexican officials are coming together to figure out where new border crossings and connecting roads may be needed in the region.


Representatives at the first Border Master Plan meeting Wednesday at UTEP will work on identifying projects needed in the future, setting priorities and developing timelines for them.

"All sorts of transportation projects and issues will be discussed," said Bob Kaufman, a spokesman for Texas Department of Transportation. "It will be a binational, multi-government agency meeting.

"There will be federal, state and local officials that have responsibilities for transportation. The end result will be a list of transportation infrastructure priorities."

Besides U.S. and Mexican federal officials, the gathering will include representatives from the Metropolitan Planning Organization, City of El Paso, the Texas Department of Transportation and the New Mexico Department of Transportation.
Read more

U.S.- Mexico Border: Texas gunboats to patrol Rio Grande border with Mexico

Reuters: "Texas unveiled the second of six new 'interceptor' gunboats on Thursday, similar to Navy swift boats that plied the rivers of Vietnam during the Vietnam War, to patrol the waterways of the Mexico border.

The Texas Department of Public Safety, which oversees the Texas Highway Patrol and the Texas Rangers, said the 34-foot shallow water crafts would be deployed on the Rio Grande and the Intercoastal Waterway, which separates the Texas mainland from Padre Island.

"They have night vision capabilities, they have ballistic shielding, and the first couple of boats have fully automatic machine guns," department spokesman Tom Vinger told Reuters." read more

Border Control: Texans On Wrong Side Of Border Fence Grow Anxious

AP/Fox News: "Max Pons is already anticipating the anxiety he'll feel when the heavy steel gate shuts behind him, leaving his home isolated on a strip of land between America's border fence and the violence raging across the Rio Grande in Mexico.

For the past year, the manager of a sprawling preserve on the southern tip of Texas has been comforted by a gap in the rust-colored fence that gave him a quick escape route north in case of emergency. Now the U.S. government is installing the first gates to fill in this part of the fence along the Southwest border, and Pons admits he's pondering drastic scenarios." read more

Border: Military to bolster presence on border

tucsonsentinel.com: "The military's presence along the Mexican border will be bolstered this month when more troops and equipment are deployed to Southern Arizona, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol said Thursday. Joint Task Force-North, which oversees military operations along the U.S.-Mexico border, will send additional troops, vehicles and equipment to Arizona and New Mexico in mid-February, the Border Patrol said." read more

Border Control?: Border Patrol Overtime up as arrests drop

San Jose Mercury News: "Border Patrol agents have racked up daily overtime at a cost of about $1.4 billion in the past six years while the number of arrests of illegal border crossers has fallen to the lowest level in nearly 40 years, an Associated Press analysis of agency records finds." read more

Immigration and the Border: Tearing down the walls of hostility

Beautiful, powerful statement from the peaceful Mennonites

Mennonite Weekly: "I stood on the hill in the twilight in Nogales, Ariz., looking down over the U.S.-Mexico border wall into Mexico. How broken our relationships must be in order to make necessary a wall like this one, 20 feet high for hundreds of miles. I was with a group of staff from Mennonite Central Committee from all over the Americas who had gathered in Tucson to strategize our future work together to help tear down this wall." read more

Border Control: U.S. Senate unanimously approves anti-border tunnel bill

Nogales International News: "The U.S. Senate this week unanimously approved a bill meant to combat illegal tunnel activity along the Southwest border. The Border Tunnel Prevention Act of 2011, authored by U.S. Sens. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) builds on a related law that the two legislators authored in 2006 and that was signed into law in 2007.

... The Border Tunnel Prevention Act of 2011 specifically makes the use, construction, or financing of a border tunnel a conspiracy offense; includes illegal tunneling as an offense eligible for wiretaps; and makes it easier for U.S. authorities to seize assets in tunneling cases." read more

Drug War Weapons Traffic: Slain border agent's family files $25M claim against U.S.

Slain border agent's family files $25M claim against U.S. – USATODAY.com: "The family of slain Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry filed a $25 million wrongful death claim Wednesday against the federal government, saying he was killed because U.S. investigators allowed murder weapons into the hands of criminals.

Terry died Dec. 14, 2010, when his special-operations unit got into a shootout with border bandits in a remote canyon area near Rio Rico. At the scene, investigators found two AK-47s that were traced back to a gun-smuggling probe by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives." read more

Border Control: New Fences Block Access To U.S.-Mexico Border Monuments

An interesting article about another unforeseen consequence of barricading the border with Mexico.

Fronteras Desk: "Before there was a fence, all that marked the border between Mexico and the United States were stone and steel monuments, 276 of them dotting the southwestern landscape. They were installed by Mexican and American surveyors starting in 1850, after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War and the two countries agreed to define their shared border.

But as the U.S. Border Patrol has reinforced the boundary with a new fence, many of these bi-national monuments have been left entirely on the Mexican side of the barriers." read more

Border Lines: Drones Hunt Immigrants and Marijuana Backpackers -- and Wind-triggered Ground Sensors

Border Lines: "The Department of Homeland Security says it needs a fleet of two-dozen Predator and Guardian drones to protect the homeland adequately. Designed for military use, 10 of these unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are already patrolling U.S. borders in the hunt for unauthorized immigrants and illegal drugs.

DHS is building its drone fleet at a rapid pace despite its continuing inability to demonstrate their purported cost-effectiveness. The unarmed Predator and Guardians (the maritime variant) cost about $20 million each. Yet DHS has little to show for its UAV spending spree other than stacks of seized marijuana and several thousand immigrants who crossed the border without visas." read more

Immigration Crackdown: Border Patrol to toughen policy

The Associated Press: "The U.S. Border Patrol is moving to halt a revolving-door policy of sending migrants back to Mexico without any punishment. The agency this month is overhauling its approach on migrants caught illegally crossing the 1,954-mile border that the United States shares with Mexico.

... The Border Patrol now feels it has enough of a handle to begin imposing more serious consequences on almost everyone it catches,.... The "Consequence Delivery System" — a key part of the Border Patrol's new national strategy to be announced within weeks — relies largely on tools that have been rolled out over the last decade on parts of the border and expanded. It divides border crossers into seven categories, ranging from first-time offenders to people with criminal records." read more

Border Politics: A border debate that counters sense with nonsense

A Washington Post editorial on the nonsense of border politics

Washington Post: "Mr. Obama is now reported to have decided to slash the number of (national) guardsmen on the border, whose deployment was paid for by the Pentagon. His decision is sensible. The deployment was intended to be temporary, and at $10 million a month, it was a luxury the Pentagon, facing billions of dollars in cuts, could hardly justify.

Still, the logic of the president’s decision has not dampened an outcry from Republicans who see political advantage in fanning hysteria on the issue of illegal immigration." read more

Border Impossible To Secure, Experts Says

And this is from Fox News--Latino! 

Fox News Latino: "A border that is sealed off to all undocumented immigrants and drugs flowing north is a promise none of (the Republican candidates) could keep. "Securing the border is a wonderful slogan, but that's pretty much all it is," said Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute. "Even to come close would require measures that would make legal commerce with Mexico impossible. That's an enormous price for what would still be a very leaky system."" read more