Militarism for Hire in Texas

Operation Border Star constitutes what Rick Perry calls the “Texas model of border security.” Since 2006 Perry and Steve McCraw, Perry’s longtime chief of the state’s homeland security office (located in the governor’s office who also has served since 2009 as the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), have boasted of the model’s success.

McCraw prefers the term “paradigm of border security.” The report declares that the “success of border operations by the Texas Rangers should serve as a template for the future.”

But they have offered little evidence to back up their repeated claims that Operation Border Star has played a central role in improving public safety, obstructing transnational crime, and securing the nation.

Texas Border Security: Strategic Military Assessment echoes the assertions of Perry and McCraw. The report’s authors, Ret. Generals Robert Scales and Barry M. McCaffrey, write:  “Five years of effort to curtail narcoterrorist intrusion has given the Texas DPS and its state and local partners enormous and hard-won experience in the art and science of fighting the southwest border war."

As its title indicates, the report describes the border as a war zone and recommends military-type responses.  It recommends that Texas should reach out to other border state and the federal government to teach them “how Texas border operations work.”

The report calls the Texas border the “operational ground zero” in the alleged invasion of Mexican narcoterrorists, echoing the alarmist threat assessments of Perry and McCraw. According to the generals- turned-consultants:

America’s fight against narcoterrorism, when viewed at the strategic level, takes on the classic trappings of a real war. Crime, gangs and terrorism have converged in such a way that they form a collective threat to the national security of the United States.

The military-assessment report was published by Colgen LP, which is a “defense consulting firm” directed by Ret. General Robert Scales. McCaffrey runs his own security consultancy, BR McCaffrey Associates LLC.

Colgen’s motto is “America’s Premier Land Power Advocate.”

Credibility of McCaffrey in Question

Pointing to military reputations of the report’s authors and to their status as “independent consultants,” the Texas agricultural commissioner vouched for the integrity and certitude of the alarming conclusions of their strategic military assessment.

Yet the report was commissioned to bolster a political position, and the consultants were hired to boost the credibility of the widely contested assessments of border security and government border security operations.

The consultants came through with a product that met the government’s specifications and also met the standards of the military consultants – in the case of Colgen and General Scales, being a premier advocate of militarized solutions through land power.

In the case of McCaffrey Associates and General McCaffrey delivering what the firm promises: “Our purpose is to get specified results for clients who want action” -- hardly the hallmark of an “independent” consultant.

McCaffrey’s credibility – and his own familiarity with the Texas border – came into question immediately upon the release of the report. He asserted that “hundreds of people are murdered on our side of the frontier" by the drug cartels and transnational gangs targeted in the report. McCaffrey couldn’t come to supporting the assertion. The only approximation of this scenario is that over the past decade hundreds of immigrants have tied from exposure and dehydration during their arduous trips through the Texas borderlands.

However, those who have followed McCaffrey’s career know that the general is widely considered a war criminal for massacres during his command during the first Gulf War, and is also well known for his mercenary punditry.

(See Hired Gun Comes to Texas for more about McCaffrey.)

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Border Security is Food Security in Texas, & Public Records are only for Generals

Threat to Texas as presented in Strategic Military Assessment 

For those of you who follow border security issues closely, this may seem like old news.  But there is some fascinating and disturbing new information about the border security report produced for the Texas Department of Agriculture by two retired military generals -- Robert Scales and Barry M. McCaffrey and their respective security consulting agencies.

The report, as you may remember, was alarmingly titled Border Security: Strategic Military Assessment, and praised Texas for mounting a “comprehensive military-like operational campaign against narco-terrorists” and encouraged the federal government to follow example of the border security campaign launched in Texas under Gov. Rick Perry’s leadership. The retired generals called the Texas border a “war zone.”

You might ask what all this has to with the price of beans? Why the agriculture department?

Explaining why his department has taken on the border security issue, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples asserts “violent Mexican drug cartels are invading Texas farms and ranches, threatening the lives of our fellow citizens and jeopardizing our nation’s food supply.” The slogan of the department’s new border security website is: “Defend Our Borders, Protect Our Citizens, Secure Our Food.”

Staples may have commissioned report by the so-called “independent consultants” to raise his own political profile.

Border security hawkishness is a path to political power.  

A political fact that is especially relevant is that Staples is campaigning to become the state’s next lieutenant government, following the political path of Rick Perry, who served as agricultural commissioner before becoming lieutenant governor under George W. Bush.

Texans are constantly reminded not to forget the Alamo. Fighting against Mexico and Mexicans runs deep in the heart of the history of the Lone Star State.

Rick Perry, who made Texas border security a central theme of his 2006 and 2010 reelection campaigns, is fond of saying that “there can be no homeland security without border security.” Commissioner Staples builds on this argument by asserting that without border security there can be no food security.

In addition to hiring the two generals, both of whom operate their own security consulting firms, to assess the security threat along the Texas border, Staples has launched Protect Your Texas Border.com, a Texas Department of Agriculture-sponsored website that solicits comments from Texas ranchers and farmers.

But all the above may be old news to border watchers.

However, that’s not all.  We are trying to track down the public records used by the retired generals to make their alarmist assessment. And we started looking into the background of the consultants – finding what we regard as truly alarming facts about the Ret. Gen. Barry M. McCaffrey.

(Read an earlier post, Hired Gun Comes to Texas for the disturbing facts about consultant McCaffrey’s war record and his post-military record as a paid Pentagon warmonger.)

Pubic Records Denied, Public Records Disclosed

In our probe of the “border security is food security” clamor in Texas, we have been asking to see the public records cited in the Strategic Military Assessment to support the reports recommendations that a military response is necessary.

The Office of the Governor, which launched the Texas Border Star campaign that is so lavishly praised in the report, responded to our public records request stating that it didn’t have any of the requested documents that were cited in the military assessment report, including the Border Security Strategy and Operations Plan, the first Border Security Plan, and the Concept Plan for Border Star.

But Perry’s office suggested we pursue our inquiry with the Agriculture Department, which commissioned and produced the report. That made sense, but we already had and were told that the department didn’t have any “responsive documents” – even though they were cited in its highly publicized report.

We also tried to get the records cited by the Strategic Military Assessment report from the Department of Public Safety. While originating in the governor’s office, the direction of Border Star and other components of the state’s much-touted border security operations moved over to DPS in 2009. That’s when Steve McCraw, Governor Perry’s appointed chief of the state’s Homeland Security Office, was appointed DPS chief – while maintaining his homeland security directorship.

Finally, the requested records were located at DPS.

In addition to those cited above, we requested other records also cited in the generals’ military assessment of the border. These included records from two Border Star surge operations called Operation Comanche Moon and Operation Blue Heron that the generals referenced in support of their recommendations for a more expansive military response to purported border insecurity.

We also requested records cited by the report from the Border Security Operations Center, the command center for Border Star that has been operated under contract by another security consultancy agency called Abrams Learning and Information Systems.

But there is a catch. These documents are, according to DPS, not available for “public disclosure” – even though they were apparently disclosed to the two independent consultants for the purpose of producing an alarmist report about the military threats and needed military responses needed on the Texas border.

There’s hope, though. In denying our request for public records, DPS referred our request and its denial to the Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott.

But shortly before Attorney General Abbott was asked to consider our request and support the DPS denial, he took a high-profile stance himself as a border security hawk. In a November 2 letter to President Obama, Abbott warned that, “if your Administration continues to fail to secure the border against this threat, it is only a matter of time before American lives are lost.”

In his letter to Obama, Abbott echoed the assertions of Perry, McCraw, Ag. Commissioner Staples, and the two hired generals that federal government should join in the border security campaign initiated and directed by Texas.  

Texas officials close to Perry boast that Border Star is “model” that DHS should emulate.  Abbot wrote:

I implore you to aggressively confront this escalating threat. To protect American lives, your administration must immediately dedicate more manpower to border security—especially along the 1,254 mile Texas border, which remains unacceptably porous. Texas and its law enforcement personnel at the state, county and local levels remain committed to working with your Administration to maintain the highest level of public safety. We ask that you collaborate with us to accomplish that goal before more American blood is lost. 


DPS insists that the records cited and apparently reviewed by the ex-military consultants are exempt from public disclosure under provisions of state law that specify that certain law enforcement records if publicly disclosed would “unduly interfere with law enforcement.”

All this raises several issues and concerns:

1.    Why doesn’t Rick Perry’s governor’s office, which launched Operation Border Star the Border Security Operations Center – tapping criminal justice assistance funds from the U.S. Department of Justice – have records of the founding documents in its files?

2.    Why doesn’t the Texas Department of Justice, which commissioned and promoted the Texas border security report, have the documents cited in the report it published in its own files? (Shouldn’t the commissioner have vetted the authors and their conclusions before it released the report in a major press release and in congressional testimony in Washington?)

3.    On what grounds did the government of Texas – whether the governor’s office or DPS – disclose these and other records about the state’s border security campaign and operations to the private for-profit consultants who were not current (or past) law enforcement officials? (And on what grounds did it deny the release of even redacted documents?)

4.    The governor’s office, DPS, the Texas Rangers, the Public Safety Commission (which oversees DPS), and most recently the Agriculture Department all hail the accomplishments of Border Start and other components of the “Texas model of border security,” yet there is no publicly available information that would allow the public to: 1) determine what exactly are Operation Border Star and related entities like the Border Security Operations Center, 2) assess the validity of the claims of success (arrests, drug seizures, shutting down transnational criminal organizations, increasing public safety in border areas) made by Governor Perry, DPS Chief McCraw, and consultants McCaffrey and Staples, 3) allow the public (Texas and U.S.) and legislators (Texas and U.S.) to evaluate if the millions of dollars in U.S. criminal justice funds and state appropriated revenues are being well spent, 4) assess the practice of DPS and the governor’s office of outsourcing border security strategy and operations to private security firms, and, finally, 5) make a determination whether Border Star and its affiliates are products of law enforcement or rather of crass political motives.

Related articles:

At War in Texas (Boston Review)

Private Contractors Build Texas Model (Alternet)

Consulting Firm Epicenter of Border Security

Outsourcing Texas Border Security

Join Border Wars Policy Group to follow/discuss border security, immigrant imprisonment, and drug policy issues at: 

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Hired Gun Comes to Texas

Marina Mendez Ransanz

In September the government of Texas released a border security report titled Texas Border Security: A Strategic Military Assessment. The report, authored by General Barry R. McCaffrey and General Robert Scales, depicts a rather bleak situation in the south border, one comparable to a “war zone.” The report, commissioned by the Texas Agriculture Commissioner, states:

Living and conducting business in a Texas border county is tantamount to living in a war zone in which civil authorities, law enforcement agencies, as well as citizens, are under attack around the clock.

Texas Ag Commissioner Staples and Barry R. McCaffrey in center at
congressional hearing/ Texas Ag Dept.

Such statements, as well as the general content of the report, provoked strong reactions as in the case of U.S. Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-El Paso. Reyes called into question the accuracy of the report, arguing that the report is a political product aimed at bolstering Gov. Rick Perry’s border security operations. The report, which cost the Texas government $80,000, also praises the success of border operations by Texas Rangers.

General Barry R. McCaffrey is not new to the world of military and security consultancies or, for the matter, to raising questions regarding his integrity and potential conflict of interests.

Barry McCaffrey was the most highly decorated serving general at his retirement, having been awarded three Purple Heart medals, two Distinguished Service Crosses, and two Silver Stars. He also performed as the nation’s drug czar as the chief of the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy for five years during President Clinton’s administration.

McCaffrey has continued adding roles to his impressive résumé as NBC and MSNBC military analyst as well as president of his own consulting firm, BR McCaffrey Associates. However, this highly notable career has been tainted with serious accusations that do not appear to have been investigated thoroughly.

The first blow to the General’s reputation came from an article written by Seymour Hersh published in The New Yorker in May 2000. The article, titled “Overwhelming Force,” recounts the events occurred at the end of the first Gulf War on the morning of March 2,1991, two days after the ceasefire had been declared. During the war, Barry McCaffrey was in charge of the 24^th Infantry Division and that day he ordered an assault, considered by some witnesses as totally unjustified and atrocious.

The attack, carried out by Apache attack helicopters, Bradley fighting vehicles, and artillery units, killed apparently unarmed Iraqi soldiers and civilians, and destroyed some seven hundred enemy tanks, armored cars, and trucks. The massacre at Rumaila, as some have called it, has been described by some of the soldiers who witnessed it as an unprovoked attack ordered by McCaffrey against Iraqis who were fulfilling the requirements of the retreat.

Hersh reported that many of the generals he interviewed believed that McCaffrey’s attack had gone too far and that it had violated the “response in proportion to the threat” military doctrine.

One of the officers on the ground, Edward Walker, stated being ordered to head count of the Iraqi soldiers who had surrendered that day in Rumaila. 382 prisoners is the number he recalled. All of them had been immediately striped of their weapons. Next to the site there was a hospital bus, clearly marked with the Red Crescent symbol. In a very upsetting statement, Walker recounted: “They knew there were prisoners there. They knew they were unarmed. They knew the hospital bus was there…” Nonetheless, the attack proceeded.

The Pentagon started an official investigation of the events when an anonymous letter accusing McCaffrey of war crimes was received a few months after the division had returned home. The investigation was unable to produce substantial evidence against the official version, and McCaffrey has, ever since, defended his actions alleging that the attack was motivated by the need to protect American soldiers.

After Hersh’s article was published, ABC News followed with its own investigation. ABC interviewed six soldiers from the platoon of scouts that witnessed the attack, the same platoon Walker belonged to. All six interviewees confirmed the story reported by Hersh. The network also reviewed the internal investigation conducted by the army and found it “flawed and incomplete.”

New York Times graphic

The second blow to Barry McCaffrey’s credibility came from an article published in The New York Times in November 2008 by David Barstow. In the piece titled “One Man’s Military-Industrial-Media Complex”, Barstow exposed the conflict of interests resulting from McCaffrey’s several roles.

On one hand, the four-star Army general had been hired in 2007 as a consultant by the military contractor Defense Solutions. On the other hand, he was strongly recommending to the commanding General in Iraq David H. Petraeus the purchase of 5,000 armored vehicles produced by Defense Solutions.

The catch is that McCaffrey did not reveal to General Petraeus his personal involvement with Defense Solutions. He also omitted to disclose this information when he, as a military analyst, appeared on CNBC praising the company or when he told Congress, shortly afterwards, that it should immediately supply Iraq with large numbers of armored vehicles and other equipment.

Barstow described this opaque world, where mostly retired generals “had a foot in both camps as influential networks military analysts and defense industry rainmakers.”

McCaffreys’ triple role as media analyst, government adviser and businessman offered the perfect platforms to advance both policy goals and business objectives. Besides running his personal consulting company, BR McCaffrey Associates, McCaffrey also sat on the board of Mitretek, Veritas Capital, two other Veritas companies, Raytheon Aerospace and Integrated Defense Technologies, and performed as chairman of HNTB Federal Services.

All these companies directly competed for national security contracts or promoted linkages between government officials and contractors. The Nation, a few years earlier, had also pointed out that many former military generals held paid advisory board and executive positions at defense companies, while serving at the same time as advisers for groups that promoted an invasion of Iraq after 9/11. McCaffrey was mentioned as the ultimate example of this practice.

McCaffrey’s status as a four-star general gives credibility to the “strategic military assessment” of Texas border security. But the alarmist language of the report and its reliance on cherry-picked anecdotes to make the case that the border is a war zone raises questions about its integrity.

What is more, McCaffrey’s war record and his history as a hired gun for the Pentagon and the media should also cast doubt on the report’s analysis – and raise new questions about the use of Texas tax revenues during the Perry administration to underwrite fear-mongering reports and border security programs.

(Marina Mendez Ransanz is a Latin American Rights & Security intern at the Center for International Policy, working with the TransBorder Project.)

Rick Perry's Border Populism Betrays His Love of "Big Government"

Tom Barry/Alternet

For Perry, like most right-wing populists, big government is bad government when it regulates and redistributes. Yet when government enforces, when it secures, the more government the better.
When our tax revenues support the new security trinity -- border security, homeland security, and national security – Perry is a professed and proven advocate of big government.

Nor will you find Rick Perry criticizing big government when it involves funding cracking down on crime and drugs. In Texas, state government has expanded into new dimensions and grown new tentacles. In the name of border security, Perry has overseen the creation of an array of new fusion centers, intelligence centers, drug task forces, and criminal data exchanges in Texas.

In Washington, there isn’t a more pertinent example of big government expansion than the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, with its annual budget of $55 billion. During Perry’s tenure as governor, the DHS budgets for border control and immigration enforcement have more than doubled. There is no other Washington bureaucracy that has a greater presence in Texas.

In his campaign book, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington, Perry does take aim at DHS, writing that “we are fed up with the Department of Homeland Security.” But not because of undue government meddling, waste of tax dollars, or infringement of states’ rights.

Instead, Perry is fed up with DHS because this huge government bureaucracy is not doing more and doesn’t have a greater presence in Texas.  Despite the more than doubling of DHS border security operations in Texas since 2005, Perry complains that Washington’s financial commitment to border security in Texas is “puny.” He demands that President Obama commit “greater resources” to border security – without offering any advice about how to raise those additional resources.

When President Obama authorized federal payment for the deployment of 286 National Guard troops on the Texas border, Perry demanded a thousand troops. When President Obama announced last year that DHS would hire 1,000 more Border Patrol officers, Perry immediately countered, demanding at least 3,000 new patrol agents.

Border security – both Perry’s charges that the Obama administration is failing in its responsibility to secure the border and his claims that the governor’s office is taking the lead in protecting Texas – has had a central (and very successful) place in Perry’s two reelection campaigns since 2005. Whether in primary challenges or in the general election, with border sheriffs and Texas Rangers at his side, Perry has gained critical electoral support by convincing voters he is tougher on border security and illegal border crossings than his opponents. Perry also claims that Texas is tougher on border security than Washington, having mounted its own border security campaign – Operation Border Star – whose motto is: “Leave no exploitable seam.”

During Perry’s first several years as governor (after, as lieutenant governor, succeeding George W. Bush in 2001), border security was barely mentioned. However, as the anti-immigrant backlash mounted and as the calls for enforcement-first and border security-first intensified as part of the immigration reform debate, Governor Perry also jumped on the border security bandwagon.

Indicative of the emergence of border security as core theme of the Perry administration after 2005 was the changing focus of the state’s Homeland Security Office and its strategy statements. The attention of the governor’s homeland security office – which is funded entirely by Washington – was initially on foreign terrorism and the capacity of first responders. But as the national prominence of immigration and border issues increased, references to border security began to dominate the pronouncements of Perry’s homeland security office, whose mantra became: “There can be no homeland security without border security.”

Appearing with the most hawkish Texas border sheriffs in a 2010 television campaign aid, titled “Securing Our Future, Perry vowed, “Until Washington gets serious, Texas will fight to make our border safe.”

Lately, the governor has also brought national security into the equation. In an August 10, 2010 letter to President Obama, Governor Perry warned that U.S. national security is at risk. He warned: “An unsecured border is a threat to our national security and to the safety and security of all our citizens.” In press releases and media interviews, Perry regularly calls for the deployment of Predator drones to combat drug trafficking organizations and transnational gangs in the Texas-Mexico borderlands, claiming that U.S. national security is threatened by the crossborder flow of drugs and criminal aliens.

In marked contrast to other Republican critics of big government, notably U.S. Congressman Ron Paul and former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, Perry doesn’t have a problem with big government intervention outside the United States. He laments that a U.S. economy weakened by big government intervention and regulation saps the capacity of America to project its military power around the globe. In the tradition of both conservative and liberal internationalists, Governor Perry hails America’s “exceptionalism.”

"Without that strong economy, America can't be strong militarily. We can't have, frankly, a presence in the world that we need to have," Perry told Time magazine as he was about to launch his presidential campaign.

So grave is the drug and criminal alien threat from Mexico, says Perry, that Washington should consider military intervention. In a Nov. 18, 2010 interview with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, Perry said: "I think we have to use every aspect of law enforcement that we have including the military. I think we have the same situation as we had in Colombia. Obviously Mexico has to approve any type of assistance that we can give them."

Referring to the drug trafficking organizations, Perry said, “I want to see them defeated. And any means we can run these people off our border and to save Americans’  lives have to be engaged in.”

On the national campaign trail, Perry routinely touts his own national security experience –  in contrast to Obama’s lack of military service. Although his campaign book Fed Up!: Our Fight to Save America from Washington focuses almost exclusively on expounding his social anti-big government populism along with his conservative and fiscal conservative convictions, he dedicates the book to “all the warriors…who have run to the sound of gunfire.”

Guns aren’t the problem, government is. Consistent with that anti-big government populism, Perry opposes most gun-control regulations. Even while raising fears about the spillover across the border of drug-related killings in Mexico, Perry objects to the federal government’s attempts to clamp down on the flow of Texas-sold guns to Mexico. In response to a new Justice Department policy requiring increased reporting of multiple sales of automatic weapons in U.S.-Mexico border states, Perry in July demanded that the government desist from “implementing this misguided and constitutionally questionable policy.”

Some observers may regard Perry’s support for expanded government involvement in security, crime, and drug war operations as running counter to his anti-Washington, anti-big government political philosophy. Perry skirts this apparent contradiction with messaging that blames and scapegoats Washington for the purported lack of border security.

Bad big government is the problem is the message that he effectively communicates to his prospective constituencies. By asserting the right and need of Texans to take border security into their own hands, Perry has also astutely converted border security into a populist principle that also meshes well with the “states’ rights” convictions of many right-wing populists.

Steve McCraw and Rick Perry

Texas Border Hawks Lead the Way


Rick Perry has earned the reputation as a shrewd, highly effective political operator, and his ownership of the border security issue in Texas amply demonstrates his political smarts.  Perry has made himself the top border hawk in Texas and arguably in the nation.

Arizona Republican sheriffs and legislators, with Governor Brewer following their lead, have lately gained more national attention for their hawkish border and immigration policies. But if any credit is due for making border security a wedge political issue to challenge the Democrats and President Obama, it must go to the rural border sheriffs in Texas, along with the governor and his homeland security chief, Steven McCraw.

From the beginning, Perry’s own border security initiatives – collectively called Operation Border Star – piggybacked on the operations and politics of the Texas Border Sheriffs Coalition (TBSC). In the spring of 2005, several Republican border sheriffs formed the coalition as a way to take border security into their own hands. Associating its own initiative with the state’s love of football, the newly formed coalition launched Operation Linebacker. As former TBSC president Sheriff Arvin West of Hudspeth County told me, by “forming our own line of defense the sheriffs along the border are only doing what we know is necessary to protect our communities and America from the invasion of criminals.”

Although a local initiative, the sheriffs coalition and its Operation Linebacker are also products of big government. No local or state resources were used to launch these border security efforts. From the start, annual earmarks by the Texas congressional delegation, mostly by Senator John Cornyn, provided the core financing for the sheriffs coalition and Operation Linebacker. Without the $4-5 million in annual earmark funding and other criminal justice assistance grants from the Justice Department, there likely would be no Texas border sheriffs coalition.

Another TBSC initiative that has received federal support is the coalition’s Border Watch program, which the coalition describes as “an innovative real-time surveillance program designed to empower the public to proactively participate in fighting border crime, which through is “a network of cameras and sensors along the Texas-Mexico” allow so-called “virtual deputies” to “directly monitor suspicious criminal activity along the border via this virtual fence^.”


The coalition’s colorful, outspoken leaders, including Sheriff West and coalition founder Sheriff Siggy Gonzalez of Zapata County, soon began making national news and earning spots in congressional hearings with their alarming assessments of border security and their contention that U.S. security depended primarily on their underfunded, poorly armed deputies. “We’re the nation’s first line of defense,” Sheriff Gonzalez told me.

The Texas border sheriffs pointed the way for Arizona to make border security a winning political issue. The Texas sheriffs did this – with Perry at their side in his televised campaign ads and public appearances – by painting a scenario of poorly armed, besieged deputies protecting America’s frontline while big government in Washington dithered.

In the classical pattern of right wing populism, the sheriffs coalition leaders together with Governor Perry and Homeland Security/DPS chief McCraw attracted national attention and strong state support with their fearmongering and scapegoating.

What proved so politically astute about the Texas model was its deliberate avoidance (for the most part) of blatant anti-immigrant and anti-immigration rhetoric. What was to fear were not illegal immigrants – a term rarely used in the Texas model – but “criminal aliens,” “transnational gangs,” and the intrusions of Mexican drug cartels on Texas soil.

The tales of Muslim “sleeper cells,” penetration of Los Zetas operatives, alarming outbreaks of crime and violence in the Texas borderlands, and the refusal of the Border Patrol to engage armed intruders were credible by virtue of the shiny badges of the sheriffs and their grassroots, tell-it-like-it is manner. Fox News loved it, and so did the legions of Perry supporters eager to bash Washington for being soft on border security.

By late 2005 Governor Perry increasingly began associating himself with TBSC, while at the same time marking border security his signature issue with his own Operation Border Star. In his 2010 campaign aid, Perry said he “confronted Barack Obama with detailed steps to reduce drug cartel violence along our border.”  Earlier in 2010 Perry wrote to Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), inviting her to visit Texas “to observe Operation Border Star so that you might consider this approach as a national model to increase border security.”

Border Star became the umbrella border security project not only for Operation Linebacker but also for a dizzying array of other initiatives, including a series of individually named “high-intensity border surges”, including Operation Rio Grande and Operation Wrangler, which brought together the border sheriffs with the Department of Public Safety’s (DPS) state police and its Texas Rangers. Perry also established a Border Security Operations Center in Austin to coordinate a half-dozen Joint Operation Intelligence Centers along the Texas border.

The Border Star model of border security is a shape-shifting creation, as the governor and McCraw keep adding new components without bother to report the performance of previously announced dimensions of the model. Other parts of the loosely constructed Border Star model are the state’s Border Intelligence Information Network, a border Unified Command, TX Crime Mapping project, and, most recently, the Ranger ReCon missions.

In the last couple of years, Arizona has created its own lesser version of the Texas model. Like in Texas, right-wing rural sheriffs – Sheriff Larry Dever of Cochise County and Sheriff Paul Babeu of Pinal County – formed the vanguard of the state’s border hawk forces, forming their own organization called BorderSheriffs.com to raise funds to defend their border and immigration enforcement operations from possible legal challenges by the ACLU and the Justice Department.

Like in Texas, the Arizona model border includes border control operations mounted by border sheriffs and supported by the governor’s office. But the Arizona model deviates in its more assertively anti-immigrant strategy – notably the SB 1070 immigration enforcement law – and its support for the border wall (which is less well regarded in Texas, even among border hawks).

The Texas model has a political sophistication lacking in Arizona’s “Secure the Border”  campaign and which makes it more readily adaptable to the national political campaigning by Perry.

The “Secure the Border”  campaign mantra of John McCain and the anti-immigrant antics of the Arizona border sheriffs, Republican legislators, and governor have marked Arizona in the national consciousness as standing in the forefront of the border security and immigration backlash.  But the more measured and strategic border security politics of Texas have since 2005 served as the true vanguard of America’s border hawk forces.

What proved so politically astute about the Texas model – at least in Texas -- has been its deliberate avoidance (for the most part) of blatant anti-immigrant and anti-immigration rhetoric. What is to fear are not illegal immigrants – a term rarely used in the Texas model – but “criminal aliens,” “transnational gangs,” and the intrusions of Mexican drug cartels on Texas soil. The “Don’t Mess with Texas” spirit of the Texas border security model was something all Texans, including Latinos and immigrants, could share.

It is a model that invokes more patriotism and nationalism than the racism inherent in the Arizona model. As McCraw told me, the Texas paradigm is not about catching illegal immigrants but simply about “Texans protecting Texas.”

Border Security First


Faith, freedom, and free enterprise are the first principles that unite conservatives in the Republican Party. But coursing through the right-wing base are less noble sentiments like nativism and nationalism – commonly taking the form of immigrant scapegoating -- that the party has struggled to contain and manage.

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and rise of the homeland security complex, the country’s  nativists, nationalists, and immigration restrictionists have risen to the forefront of the populist backlash movement.

No doubt that shrill anti-immigrant positions ring true among the tea party base. But to win the general election, Republicans can’t afford to completely write off the votes of Latinos and others who may be offended by such borderline racist rhetoric.

The staunch immigration restrictionists, as represented by the Beltway restrictionist institutes – Center for Immigration Studies, Numbers USA, and Federation for American Immigration Reform – fret that anti-immigration, anti-immigrant stance of the right wing populists may be sidelined by a candidate like Rick Perry who has less restrictive position on immigration.

The central challenge for the Republican Party is to field a slate that can count on the support of the base while at the same time win over the independents and disenchanted in enough blue and contested states to defeat Obama. Try as he may, Mitch Romney will never be regarded as the standard bearer of the right wing resurgence, although he may better positioned to reach beyond the ideological confines of the party.

Rick Perry came to politics not as an ideological conservative or right-wing populist but as conservative Democrat and social conservative. Over the years he has moved steadily to the right, and in recent years embraced the economic libertarianism and states’ rights positions that resonate within the right wing resurgence. While his social conservativsm and libertarianism have certainly factored in his electoral victories, it has been his ownership of the border security issue that ensured his 2010 primary victory over Kay Bailey Hutchinson.

Whenever the topic of immigration reform is raised, Perry will insist that border security must first be addressed. As he told President Obama, we “can’t have a rational discussion about immigration reform without real, effective border security.”

In the election campaign, President Obama will surely also tout his commitment to border security. But in a face-off with the Texas governor, the president would be hard put to convince voters that he is as tough on border security as Perry.

What is more, Obama will, unlike Perry, be burdened by his administration’s immigration enforcement and border security accomplishments – three years of record-breaking deportations and immigrant imprisonment. While not beloved by Texas Latinos, Perry did capture 39 percent of the Latino vote in 2010 gubernatorial contest. The governor’s past statements in favor of a guestworker program and in-state tuition rates for immigrant students as well his opposition to an Arizona-style immigration enforcement law would, in an Obama-Perry election, also contribute to an erosion of Latino support for Obama.

Rather than scagegoating immigrants, as has been the usual practice of border hawks and immigration restrictionists, Texas border security populism cast the blame on Washington, on big government, and, more vehemently over the past three years, on the Obama administration.

Rick Perry and Texas Border Sheriffs Coalition leaders

The Populist Model of Border Security


As a national candidate, Perry’s border hawk identity gives him the security credentials that the other Republican candidates lack. But more than other border hawks like John McCain, Rick Perry has infused border security with a populist rage. Rather than simply demanding that the government “meet its responsibility to secure the border,” Perry has mobilized Texan law-enforcement agencies and citizens to “protect the people of Texas.”

Perry can boast that he is not the type of American that turns first to big government. Instead he has empowered sheriffs’ posses through Operation Linebacker, tapped the expertise of the private sector with homeland security consultants, sent Texas Rangers on the border in Ranger Recon mission, and mobilized thousands of citizen activists through the Border Watch surveillance program.

Washington certainly deserves much blame for the border control crisis. But the Texas scapegoating of the Obama administration aims to stir popular resentments and heighten feelings of vulnerability, not to address the real problems of the border. The Obama administration has committed unprecedented resources to border and immigration enforcement. What it is not doing taking the necessary measures to decrease the pressure on the border by overhauling drug prohibition policies and immigration law.

I encourage you to join the Border Wars Google Group to follow/discuss border security, immigrant imprisonment, and drug policy issues at:

http://groups.google.com/group/border-wars