Bring the Drones In: Reyes and Homeland Security

U.S. Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas) is not your prototypical border security hawk. Representing the El Paso area, Reyes doesn’t tap fears of “spillover violence” and illegal immigrants to promote his own agenda for increased border funding.

This stands in welcome contrast to the border security rhetoric of fellow Texas congressman and leading border security hawk Michael McCaul, a Republican who represents the state’s 10^th congressional district – the nonborder area between Austin and Houston.

Still, the former Border Patrol chief has been a constant cheerleader for increased border security funding – especially high-tech instruments of border management including remote land and air-based surveillance. Like other border security hawks, notably McCaul (see his opening statement this week at the House’s Homeland Security Oversight Subcommittee), Reyes closely associates border security and the drug war in Mexico.

In an interview published by an El Paso magazine this week, Reyes indicated that he supports the U.S. deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to hunt down cartel leaders in Mexico.

“We have to do what we’ve done essentially in Pakistan, and that is start taking out the heads of the cartels,” said Reyes, whose four-year tenure as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee ended in December. Reyes is also a leading member of the House Armed Services Committee and its Air and Land Forces Subcommittee.

According to the congressman’s website:

“As a member of the Air and Land Forces Subcommittee which has jurisdiction over the modernization of equipment used by our military's ground and aviation troops.  With a focus on the Army and Air Force programs, Congressman Reyes' service as a senior member of the Subcommittee allows him be involved in the decisions which affect the future of our national defense.  Specifically, the Subcommittee is responsible for funding key programs of importance to Fort Bliss, White Sands Missile Range, and Holloman Air Force Base include the Future Combat Systems (FCS), F-22 fighter aircraft, the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), and all Army aviation programs.”

Reyes has long boasted of his support for the military-industrial complex’s presence in the El Paso area. In 2009, for example, Reyes stated: “As I serve on the House Armed Services Committee and the Intelligence Committee, I have been involved with the development of UAVs and know the importance of the intelligence they provide.” (See Tom Barry, “Reyes the Rainmaker.”)

Like Reyes, McCaul is also in favor of escalating U.S. military involvement in Mexico. At the March 31 hearing on “The U.S. Homeland Security Role in the Mexican War Against Drug Cartels,” subcommittee chair McCaul said that the Zetas’ Feb. 15 attack in Mexico on two Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents that killed one and severely wounded the other was “a game changer which alters the landscape if the United States’ involvement in Mexico’s war against the drug cartels.”

 “We should explore a joint military and intelligence operation with Mexico, similar to the 1999 Plan Colombia which has succeeded in undermining that country’s cocaine trade, disrupting its cartels and restoring its economic and national security,” asserted McCaul.

“In addition, I have introduced legislation requiring the State Department to classify drug cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations as a means to limit the groups’ financial, property and financial interests,” stated McCaul.

Reyes also supports such a change, which would open the way for increased U.S. intervention in Mexico by the U.S. military and DHS.

Reyes’ spokesman Vincent Perez said the congressman had proposed designating Mexico’s drug cartels as terrorist organizations to the administration while he headed the House Intelligence Committee.

“They frequently engage in brutal acts of narcoterrorism to undermine democratic institutions and the rule of law, and to incite fear among the people and law enforcement,” Perez told El Paso Inc. “Such a designation would provide additional tools to help combat drug cartels and the threat they pose to the security of the United States, Mexico, and Central and South America.”

In the El Paso Inc interview, Reyes expressed his admiration for President Felipe Calderón at a time of widespread public protests in Mexico against the president’s drug war.

“[Calderón is] probably the most courageous man I have ever met. He and (Colombian President Alvaro) Uribe,” said Reyes.

(Also see: Tom Barry, Fallacies of High-Tech Fixes for Border Security, CIP International Policy Report, April 2010.)

Sharing Responsibility for Bloody Drug War

Boxed marijuana in West Texas' Hudspeth County
Sheriff's Office/Photo by Tom Barry

Critics of the Mérida Initiative will surely find Shared Responsibility: U.S. Mexico Policy Options for Confronting Organized Crime an infuriating assessment of the drug war.

Published by the Mexico Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center in DC and the TransBorder Institute in San Diego, the editors of this volume of essays accept the legitimacy and worth of the “four-pillar strategy” of the Mérida Initiative.  

The acceptance of the four-pillar paradigm of binational collaboration contrasts with the wholesale rejection of what the initiative’s left-of-center critics pointedly label Plan Mexico (tacitly referencing the Clinton-supported counternarcotics/counterinsurgency Plan Colombia).

The essays address various aspects of the initiative’s “four pillars of cooperation”, namely: disrupting criminal organizations, strengthening law enforcement institutions, building a “21^st century border, and building strong and resilient communities.

The 2007 initiative, while based on a binational framework of cooperation, is based on the U.S. commitment of foreign aid to Mexico – and to a much lesser degree Central America and Caribbean nations – to underwrite collaborative efforts to fight the threat of drug trafficking organizations (DTOs).

After three years of funding and enhanced binational cooperation, the U.S. and Mexican governments are hard put to demonstrate progress on any of these four fronts.

Only on the first front – disrupting the DTOs – can the cooperating governments point to concrete achievements, such as captured drug lords and the increased inter-DTO competition for formerly secure plazas. Yet, even here, the progress is superficial as other DTOs emerge and the capos are replaced by other ambitious narcotraficantes, violence spreads, and drug corridors shift.

The volume’s editors, the Wilson Institute’s Eric Olson and Andrew Selee and the TransBorder Institute’s David Shirk, call warn that “there is no magic bullet that will solve Mexico’s security crisis in the near term.” But, as the volume’s title indicates, the editors and the authors insist that any solution must be a shared one. They conclude that among the priority areas for enhanced collaboration are efforts to disrupt the flow of firearms and to improve binational law enforcement and intelligence sharing.

In their introduction to the collected essays, Olson and Shirk assert that “an intelligence-based law enforcement strategy, which allows the two countries to develop the capacity to identify key leaders and disrupt the flow of narcotics moving north and weapons and money moving south, is urgently needed.”

Olson and Shirk write that such a strategy is “fortunately…already underway.” Unfortunately, though, “significant limitations in capacity and willpower in both countries” limit the progress of the four-pillar strategy, noting that success in implementing the strategy “will take time.”

Consistent with the even-handed, politically measured tone of Shared Responsibility, Olson point to two major deficiencies in the implementation of the four-pillar strategy. On the Mexican side, the “presence and patrol” strategy of the military and police “continues to dominate,” despite their stated intention to move toward a more intelligence-based strategy. On the U.S. side, the initiative suffers from the lack of the “underfunding judicial reform while prioritizing the ‘presence and patrol’ strategy.”

Shared Responsibility is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the security and social implications of narcotrafficking in the region. It underscores the fundamental importance of bringing informed scholars and policy analysts into a public and policy debate dominated by news reporting and political grandstanding.

But the apparent objective of fostering binational cooperation has the effect of preempting more penetrating analysis of fatal flaws of the Mérida Initiative (including its drug prohibition foundation and its role in bolstering the military-led character of President Calderón’s drug war) and of Mexico’s capacity to address corruption and structural failings of its criminal justice system. The volume’s commitment to shared responsibility is also undermined by the feeble concluding essay by Sigrid Arzt.

The scholarly tone (and quality) of Shared Responsibility contributes to a dispassionate analysis of the threat of the DTOs. But this tone contrasts with the scale of the violence and the growing popular rejection of the prevailing policy frameworks (witness, for example, recent protests in Mexico of drug war) that makes Shared Responsibility seem oddly disconnected  not only with the reality of the drug war but also with any strong advocacy for new policy frameworks. 

At the same time, though, the enormity of the governance challenges in Mexico and in Central America (Guatemala and Honduras principally) and the political strength of the drug prohibition obstruct necessary shared solutions.

Mexican Military’s Drug War Not New

In their essay on DTOs and shared counterdrug strategies, Luis Astorga and David Shirk remind us that the Calderón-initiated drug war in 2006 is not the first instance of Mexican military involvement in drug enforcement. Rather the militarization of counternarcotics operations has been a near constant since the 1930s. They write:

“[T]he militarization of Mexico’s anti-drug initiatives is a decades-long phenomenon, a ‘permanent campaign’ that stretches back to the deployment of troops in counter-drug initiatives as early as the 1930s. The militarization of Mexican domestic security has included not only the deployment of military troops in troubled states, but also the appointment of military personnel to head civilian law enforcement agencies and the wholesale recruitment of soldiers to the ranks of law enforcement agencies. By the mid-1990s, more than half of Mexico’s 32 states had military officers assigned to police command positions….”

President Calderón has insisted that the military involvement is temporary – until the federal, state, and local police forces are overhauled and until what is currently regarded as a national security threat diminishes to a level of a public security threat. But, as Astorga and Shirk rightly observe: “Considering how long the military has been involved in the drug war, it is unclear when the military’s mandate for participation in domestic affairs will finally end.”

In the typically understated style of editors and the main contributors, Astorga and Shirk observe: “Generally speaking, efforts to combat transnational crime – particularly with regard to drug trafficking – through tougher security measures have borne less than satisfactory results.”

Astorga and Shirk note that the militarization of domestic public security has brought “mixed results, at best.” The problem, though, in demilitarizing the campaign against the DTOs is that “Mexican officials appear at a loss for any effective alternative strategy.”

The authors advocate moving toward a policy regime that treats drug use as a public health problem,” which, they contend, could “yield significant results.” Only a couple of years ago, it was rare to have a national policy institute lend credence to initiatives to decriminalize illegal drugs.

Partly the result of changing public opinion and partly seeing the scourge of a drug war just across the border, more policy analysts and politicians are lending varying levels of support to calls to end drug prohibition. Astorga and Shirk note that a possible scenario for reducing DTO-related violence is “to move away from the absolute prohibition of drug production, distribution, and consumption toward a policy regime in which the state regulates these activities in some significant way.”

Not Just Mexico

The chapter on the role of DTOs in Central America by Steven Dudley, codirector of the Bogota- and DC-based InSight, is a must-read overview of the reach of organized crime in the region. For anyone tracking the extent and impact of drug trafficking organizations in the reach, InSight is an excellent resource – and a testament to the foresight of the George Soros’ Open Society Institute.

The chapter offers a concise overview of DTOs in Mexico and Colombia before charting the role of the Central American transportistas and the direct involvement of the Mexican DTOs.

Dudley reminds us that: “DTOs are businesses. Their objective is to limit costs and maximize profits. They do this by trying to minimize the number of participants, borders crossed, and authorities they have to bribe.”

According to Dudley, “large swaths” of Guatemala and Honduras have already been lost to the government.  “The region,” he writes,” seems ill prepared to face what is arguably a bigger threat to regional security than the civil wars of the 1990s.” And “much of the industry [in Guatemala] is run by ex-army intelligence and high-ranking officers, including many with longtime ties to organized crime.”

Limitations of Drug Treatment

Peter Reuter, founder of the RAND Corporation’s Drug Policy Research Center and currently University of Maryland professor, offers a fact-filled, provocation chapter titled: How Can Domestic U.S. Drug Policy Help Mexico?”

Reuter, who doesn’t address the rapidly expanding scourge of drug consumption in Mexico, states that the violence and corruption associated with trafficking in Mexico is largely a consequence of the large U.S. drug market. “If the U.S. market disappeared, Mexico’s problems would diminish dramatically, even with its own domestic consumption remaining.”

But he isn’t optimistic, even in the event of a major U.S. commitment to prevention and treatment. “Few of even the most innovative programs have shown substantial and lasting effect, while almost none of the popular programs have any positive evaluations.”

Typical of the intellectual rigor of chapter, Reuter notes that U.S. demand for drugs from Mexico is likely to decline given that drug use, apart from marijuana, is largely an epidemic phenomenon, explaining that the U.S. has entered a “post-epidemic” phase for most Mexico-sourced drugs. But that may not have an ameliorative impact in Mexico, writes Reuter, observing. “It may be that the current violence itself is in part engendered by the gradual decline in the U.S. market [except for marijuana] and that further declines will, for a while at least, increase the inter-gang disputes over falling revenues.”

Repeating what all but the most benighted of anti-drug advocates readily acknowledge, Reuter writes that the “purely didactic prevention programs and some of the most widely used ones, such as the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE), have no evidence of effectiveness…”  

Although not an advocate of incarceration for drug use, Reuter states that “cutting demand through incarceration has been an unintended though predictable consequence of the massive increase in imprisonment.” Observing that it is highly unlikely that incarceration will increase greatly over the next five years – in part because of budget cuts – Reuter concludes that it is “highly unlikely that more drug users will be imprisoned.”

So what are possible paths toward reducing U.S. drug demand?

He briefly describes Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (HOPE) project – a coerced abstinence project -- as one of the only methods of treatment that may merit widespread adoption. This involves random drug testing for all those on parole or probation. Rather than a treatment program, it involves adverse consequences for those testing positive, and has resulted in dramatically lower positive urine tests, arrest rates, and revocation rates for probationers.

It is also worth underscoring Reuter’s assessment of state-level legalization of marijuana. Referring to the proposed California legalization, he writes:

“It could substantially reduce the U.S. demand for Mexican produced marijuana, simply be eliminating California’s demand for imports. It may turn out to be difficult to prevent smuggling from California, so that Mexico could lose a substantial share of the total U.S. market.”

Military at the Center But in Shadows

The contribution of Roderic Ai Camp, veteran analyst of the Mexico’s military, serves as a helpful primer on the Mexican armed forces. For example, he explains:

“The Mexican officer corps has never collaborated with American leadership to the extent found elsewhere in the region, even when they have shared similar security interests. The reasons for this pattern can be attributed to the historic relationship between the two countries, and to the officer corps success in maintaining its own internal autonomy from Mexican civil and political intervention. It has sustained a closed, secretive posture even to the present day.”

And even though Mexican officers have for decades received military training in the United States for decades, “such career experiences never enhanced institutional cooperation between the two armed forces at the highest levels,” he notes.

Addressing the dramatically changed Mexican views of U.S. involvement and intervention, Ai Camp writes:  “While one would expect them [Mexican public] to direct a large portion of the blame on the United States drug consumption habits…ordinary citizens are far more critical of their own institutional culture, notably corruption.”

According to Ai Camp, the Mérida Initiative has not been solely responsible for increased relations between the U.S. and Mexican militaries. He notes that the initiative, launched by President Bush, has resulted in much closer Mexican relations with Homeland Security and Justice, while military-military relations – and resulting closer personal contacts, especially with the Mexican Navy – preceded the counternarcotics initiative.

“Since 2006,” recounts Ai Camp, “the numbers of Mexican officers in U.S. schools has grown markedly. Mexicans have the most officers in the Department of Defense IMET-funded [– U.S. based training --] program of any Latin American country.”

The Mexican Navy, he says, has “been the leader in cross-national collaboration” – which has precipitated much closer relations with the U.S. military than experienced by the Mexican army and which has contributed to intensifying Navy-Army tensions.

Other Contributions

The contribution by Sigrid Arzta, former national security adviser to President Calderón, on U.S.-Mexico security collaboration is particularly weak.  Descriptive rather than analytical, the chapter contains a series of bland statements that contribute nothing to a sharper understanding of the processes and problems of U.S.-Mexico collaboration, offering not a hint of the intra-governmental tensions in Mexico highlighted in the Wikileaks cables. 

Arzt, a frequent speaker at forums on the drug war and the U.S.-Mexico relations, closes the empty chapter stating:

[I]t is clear that the Mérida Initiative has become an umbrella for increased information sharing, data inter-operability, and the use of common systems, such as fusion centers, that create platforms for information sharing, whether through SIUs [Sensitive Intelligence Units) or BEST [Border Enforcement Security Task Force] teams. The reality is that both governments need to continue strengthening these structures.”

Such uncritical analysis and baseless assertions only serve to cloak the reality of failure of the Mérida Initiative, Calderón’s drug war, and structures as the BEST teams.

Shared Responsibility also includes helpful essays by José Díaz-Briseño (heroin trafficking), Douglas Farah (money laundering), Colbey Goodman and Michel Marizco (firearms trafficking), Shirk (judicial reform), Daniel Sabet (police reform), Dolia Estévez (press freedom), and John Bailey (intelligence and law enforcement collaboration).

Immigration Enforcement, Border Security, and Reform

Parking lot at Reeves County Detention Center
in Pecos, Texas operated by GEO/Tom Barry

1. (One of the recommendations from a draft CIP policy report on border security.)

President Obama and congressional leaders should set forth a new vision of immigration reform.

 

As an administrative reform, the Obama administration could – and should -- end enforcement that targets immigrants who have integrated into U.S. society and workforce. The administration should make a commitment to regularize their immigration status and work with Congress to ensure immigration reform.

The new framework for immigration must also include a transparent process for issuing visas for new immigrants -- based primarily on the verified demand for their skilled and unskilled labor. This review process should be safeguarded from the lobbying pressure of business interests and should ensure that new immigration will result in job losses for current residents. ICE should focus its attention on enforcing visa expiration dates and on apprehending human smugglers and traffickers.

Also essential is the enforcement of workplace safety and wage regulations, thereby precluding the now-routine exploitation of an immigrant workforce and thereby mitigating the downward pressure on national working conditions and wages.

To boost their credibility and effectiveness, liberal immigration reformers must come to the bargaining table – once the crackdown has been halted – ready to accept widespread employment verification (to dissuade new illegal immigrant flows), stricter limits on family reunification (especially for illegal immigrants who are granted a change of immigration status), and the feasibility of temporary worker programs. 

Political refugees facing grave human rights abuses should be granted priority status in any assessment of the number of immigrants the nation can successfully absorb into society and economy. 

Inside the Drug War (Sort of)

To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War

John Gibler

City Lights Books, 2011

U.S. progressive analysts come to the Mexican drug wars with an instinctive skepticism and deep distrust of the military, drug policy, and U.S. foreign operations. Early progressive criticism of Felipe Calderon’s drug war and of American aid for the military-led campaign proved prescient.

Human rights abuses by the military have surged, the illegal drugs continue flowing to markets, and organized crime organizations evolve and expand their reach.

But it is time – after more than four years of deepening violence in Mexico -- for the left to offer more than its standard repertoire of criticism.

John Gibler’s To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War is the latest of a series of recent books on the drug war in Mexico. 

These dispatches from Mexico are welcome given the difficulties and dangers – especially for Mexican journalists -- of providing first-hand coverage of the forces and figures driving the drug war. But this short book compares unfavorably with other English-language book-length accounts, including Howard Campbell’s Drug War Zone, Charles Bowden’s Murder City, Ed Vulliamy’s Amexica, and George Grayson’s Mexico: Narco-Violence and a Failed State?

It benefits neither from Campbell’s penetrating analysis of drug trafficking, Bowden’s excellent impressionistic writing and years of experience on the border, the engaging journalistic inquiry and synthesis offered by Vulliamy, or the political history and wealth of data provided by Grayson.

None of the above books is the single-best source on the drug war. But each offers valuable insights and information. Given how murkiness of the picture of what’s happening in Mexico, this new contribution is welcome, especially for its reporting from Sinaloa and elsewhere in Mexico.

But there are no revelations here. The interviews, while fascinating, don’t provide a foundation for Gibler’s blunt and all-too-predictable analysis (given his politics – on full display in his previous book Mexico Unconquered.

If you can endure his simplistic left-bound analysis of current events in Mexico, his interviews with grassroots activists, drug -treatment workers, editors, and reporters (including the always interesting Julian Cardona) are well worth the read.

To Die in Mexico will surely be received favorably by U.S. readers who tend to conspiracy theories, materialist structural analysis, and to blame America for most of Mexico’s problems:

Explaining what he describes as the “theatrics” the drug war, Gibler writes:

“High level federal officials in the United States government know all of this and go along with the theatrics because, among other reasons, the U.S. economy is also buoyed by the influx of drug money, the defense industries profit handsomely from arms sales to armies, police, and drug gangs themselves, the police are addicted to asset forfeiture laws, prison guard unions are addicted to budget increases, and the criminalization of drugs has proven a durable excuse to lock people of color in prison in a country still shackled by racism.”

Gibler dismissively labels the RAND Drug Policy Research Center as “rightwing” without offering any evidence or definition of what is rightwing. But nuance is not a strong suit of this book.

Exaggeration, rooted in his own politics, undermines Gibler’s commitment to delve deeper than headline reporting of the drug war. He writes: “But banks also need drug lords. In 2008, drug money saved the major global banks from collapse and thus,, stretching just a bit, saved capitalism from a devastating internal crisis when the speculative capital markets imploded.” Stretching, indeed.

For Gibler, the drug war and drug prohibition are not utter failures of conservative social politics in the United States. The international campaign against drugs the U.S. has criminalized is an instrument of other U.S. processes and objectives. In the book’s concluding paragraph, Gibler writes: “The drug war is a proxy war for racism, militarization, social control, and access to the truckloads of cash that illegality makes possible.”

Elements of truth, of course, can be found in such analytical summations. But such analysis does little to help readers understand the existential threat that Mexico faces from organized crime.

Yes, drug prohibition must end as should militarized campaigns against the drug trade. But that doesn’t mean, as Gibler implies, that grassroots-led social movement or revolution against the ills of capitalism, is the war we should be joining. Gibler attempts to rally us to the cause: “And this is what should be fought: a future of hunger, forced migration, and thinly disguised slave labor.”

Gibler concludes his dispatches from the drug war with these final lines: “The drug war itself is a rehearsal of our future. To stand by and watch it rage is to step inside the silence that hangs over every anonymous death, blow our heads, and wait our turn.”

Such Bowdenesque prose frustrates and confuses. Unlike the evocative portrayals of border life by Bowden, little is communicated – except a vaguely leftist call to action and solidarity.

But read To Die in Mexico, not for Gibler’s own interpretation but for the views of the Mexicans that shared their own valuable observations. 

Border Patrol Strategy Origins and Lack of Strategic Focus

Sierra Blanca Checkpoint/Tom Barry

The Border Patrol’s 1994 "Prevention Through Deterrence" strategy -- the agency's first strategy statement in its 70-year history -- was not wholly an agency formulation. 

In January 1989 the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an immigration restrictionist policy institute, published a white paper titled “Ten Steps to Securing America’s Borders.” The FAIR paper advocated vastly increased border control infrastructure, including barriers and fences, enhanced electronic surveillance and highway checkpoints, as well as an expanded Border Patrol presence directly on the line.

Most influential, though, in influencing Border Patrol strategy was the January 1993 release of a Sandia Laboratories report that the White House’s Office on National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) had commissioned in 1991.

The ONDCP report, titled “Systematic Analysis of the Southwest Border,” recommended the urgent adoption of a “prevention strategy” for border control and called for major increases in funding for multiple-layered fences, highway checkpoints and intense border surveillance. (1)

While the FAIR’s recommendations for a fortified border was the product of its concerns about rising illegal immigration flows, the Sandia/ONDCP report was the product of ONDCP’s deepening concern about the cocaine smuggling corridor through Mexico, which had opened up as a result of increasingly effective interdiction efforts in the Caribbean Basin region, including in Florida.

Also noteworthy was the undifferentiated character of the prevention strategies outlined in the early 1990s in both the Border Patrol strategy statement and the two outside reports. Little distinction is made, or prioritization given, between the two illegal border flows, immigrants and drugs. The strategies to stop immigrants and drugs were the same.

Today’s border security strategy is similarly undifferentiated with respect to terrorists, criminal aliens, drug smugglers, or immigrants crossing to seek work and reunite with their families – even though the policies that respond to these different pressures on the border must be different. In the name of securing the homeland and deterring immigrants, the federal government has merged the criminal justice and immigration regulation systems with tragic results, as illegal immigrants are routinely shackled and imprisoned before being deported. (2)

DHS conveniently – but hardly strategically – lumps together illegal immigrants, violent immigrant criminals, and drug lords into its category of “dangerous people.”  Less convenient but more constructive would be homeland security programs that focus on real security threats, drug programs that aim to disassociate criminality and drug use, criminal policies that target those who endanger public safety, and immigration policies that just, pragmatic and enforceable.

In retrospect, it also worth noting that in those less politically charged times the Border Patrol referred to immigration flows less as threat and more as a product of social and economic forces. As its 1994 strategy statement observed:

“The forces that cause legal and migration are powerful. Without positive, long-term changes in the root causes that prompt illegal migration such as improvements in the Mexican economy, NAFTA, effective employer sanctions restrictions, or closing the loopholes that allow illegal aliens to gain equities in the United States, the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors will remain strong.”

Whether framed as “border control” or as “border security,” U.S. border policy cannot stand alone.

If other U.S. policies are creating the constant pressure on the integrity of our borders, then those policies should be reconsidered.

Border policy would, for example, would likely be effective and more highly regarded if U.S. policymakers were more mindful of the adverse consequences of other nonborder policies. U.S. trade, drug, and foreign policies contribute to crossborder smuggling and to emigration pressures in the major sending countries of Central America and Mexico.

(Third of a three-part series on strategic formation of the Border Patrol.)

---

1 U.S. General Accounting Office, “Border Control: Revised Strategy is Showing Some Positive Results,” December 12, 1994.

2 Tom Barry, Immigrant Crackdown Joins Failed Wars on Drug and Crime, International Policy Report, Center for International Policy, April 2009, at:http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/americas/mexico/immigrantcrackdowntombarry.pdf

Border Patrol History: Origins of "Prevention Through Deterrence" Strategy

(Second of three-part series on Border Patrol history before onset of border security framework of border control.)


In the political context of the early 1990s, the Border Patrol felt compelled -- for the first time in its 70 years -- to formulate a strategy of border control. As the outcry about illegal immigration intensified, Border Patrol sector chiefs, particularly those in large urban areas like El Paso and San Diego, began to overhaul traditional enforcement practices – ones that were widely acknowledged as being half-hearted, ineffective, and nonstrategic.

Despite Border Patrol sloganeering, “Hold the Line” has never been agency practice. Instead, the common practice was to attempt to apprehend illegal border crossers once inside the country, usually near roads that immigrants would cross or travel on their way north, or within neighborhoods adjacent to the border. This type of border patrolling didn’t catch all the illegal traffic between the ports-of-entry. 

But the Border Patrol’s presence – while not resulting in border control or border security – did nonetheless serve various objectives, including:

-      * Forestalling a massive influx of illegal immigrants,

-      *  Keeping illegal immigrant workers vulnerable to apprehension by the government and immigrant exploitation by business of wage/working conditions, and

-      * Providing a useful display of government authority and a commitment to national sovereignty.

As immigration flows increased, particularly through well-traveled “corridors,” such as those that passed through El Paso and the San Diego area, the Border Patrol in the early 1990s faced intensifying pressure to alter its traditional border-management practices.

Border Patrol at Eagle Pass on Rio Grande/Tom Barry

In 1994 the Border Patrol issued a national strategy to control illegal border crossing.  That strategy, called “Prevention through Deterrence,” drew on the direct experiences in 1993-94 of Operation Hold the Line (initially called Operation Blockade) in El Paso and of Operation Gatekeeper in the San Diego sector. 

This deterrence strategy -- which aimed to achieve greatly stepped-up patrol deployment and barrier construction on the most frequently crossed stretches of the border line -- remains core to Border Patrol strategy today, although now set in a national security context.

Any evaluation of current border security policy must consider the lasting consequences of The Border Patrol Strategic Plan: 1994 and Beyond (August 1994) and its “Prevention through Deterrence” strategy. 

As it explained in the strategy statement, the Border Patrol stated that it intended to “increase the number of agents on the line and make effective use of technology, raising the risk of apprehension high enough to be an effective deterrent.” According to the new strategy, the Border Patrol aimed to hold the border line by deploying many more agents at the border, installing electronic surveillance at the border, and erecting border infrastructure, such as fences and stadium lighting, to deter illegal entry.

The strategy set forth four phases of prevention through deterrence starting with the El Paso and San Diego sectors, followed by increased concentration on the South Texas and Tucson sectors, and succeeded by a third phase by which time the entire southwestern border would be effectively controlled.  The planned fourth phased included all areas outside the Southwest border.

The authors of the strategy statement envisioned a time when U.S. borders would be so tightly controlled by new prevention strategy practices that “special interests” and other pull factors would create irresistible pressure to “revert back to traditional ways of operating, which may result in loosening control.”

The Border Patrol strategy statement also acknowledged the possibility that “changed conditions such as reduction in the cheap labor force may create unrest and resistance.” At a time when controlling the border has been reframed as border security, such critical thinking is nowhere to be found in agency assessments of the immigration policy challenge.

According to the statement: “The prediction is that with traditional entry and smuggling routes disrupted, illegal traffic will be deterred, or forced over more hostile terrain, less suited for crossing and more suited for enforcement.”

That prediction proved all too true.

The underlying Border Patrol’s assumption that immigrant flows would be mostly deterred or stopped by hostile terrain was badly mistaken, as the later surge of immigrants through the deserts and mountains of Arizona revealed. Tragically, neither the hostile terrain nor the escalating deaths of illegal border crossers from the harsh conditions deterred immigrants and marijuana smugglers from charting dangerous new corridors into the United States.

The prevention-through-deterrence strategy succeeded in obstructing easy passage along the usual corridors. Yet alternate corridors for immigrants and drugs, such as Arizona’s Cochise County, began opening.

In parts of the U.S. borderland, where earlier trickles of immigrants and drugs turned into steady streams, border residents grew resentful not only of the illegal border crossers but also of the federal government for unwittingly turning their communities, ranches, and backyards into border-crossing corridors. 

"Border Control" Before "Border Security"

(First in three-part series on Border Patrol  prior to adopting the "border security" framework.)

Following the September 11 terrorist attacks, the Border Patrol adapted their rhetoric to reflect its newly acquired homeland security mission. 

In the past, the Border Patrol only occasionally referred to its mission as “securing the border.” But the use of the term “border security” has gained prevalence over the past decade and now commonly substitutes for “border control.” References to border security – and border insecurity -- shape current discourse not only about the border but also about immigration, drug policy, U.S.-Mexico relations, and homeland security.

Border Patrol at Douglas/Agua Prieta/ Tom Barry

Border control operations and Border Patrol strategy prior to 9/11 facilitated the transition to the new border security framework, while also presaging the failures of this new paradigm of border management.

The Border Patrol has long been a backwater agency -- one with little prestige or influence and populated by ex-military with little professional or academic training. It is an agency drawn to a plethora of multitude of military-like “operations” and less inclined to embrace intelligence operations, strategic thinking, and inter-agency collaboration.

With its military-style management, the Border Patrol comes to the border security challenge with brawn and bluster but with little strategic focus. The Border Patrol carries a chip on its shoulder with respect to other more prestigious DHS and DOJ agencies, particularly with ICE.

Tension between the Greens and the Blues (referring to the green-uniformed Border Patrol and the blue-outfitted ICE agents) is palpable along the border. Evaluation and self-criticism are rare, while tradition and routine are favored over strategy, intelligence and policy analysis.

Origin as Labor Patrol

The Border Patrol, formed as a Labor Department agency in 1924, was preceded by irregular squads based in El Paso and by Texas Rangers who were routinely contracted by the National Immigration Service. The apprehension of Chinese laborers who were in violation of the Chinese Exclusion Act occupied these patrols.(1)

Since its official founding at the start of the Prohibition Era (1919-1933), the Border Patrol has been tasked to prevent the entry of illegal alcohol and drugs across the southwest border.

Yet, given the immensity of the border, the federal government never expected that the Border Patrol would seal the border against the routine flow of unauthorized immigrant workers and prohibited substances. In tacit agreements with ranchers, farmers, and agribusiness, the Border Patrol did not enforce immigration laws against their immigrant workforces.

For most of the last century the Border Patrol often fumbled along without a clear mandate or strategy. In 1940 the Border Patrol, following the agency’s transfer to the Justice Department (along with the entire immigration and customs service), became more clearly defined as a federal law-enforcement agency. The U.S. wartime government was concerned less about unauthorized immigration from Mexico than about the possible penetration of the border by enemy agents.

The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 created a path to legalization and citizenship for 2.6 unauthorized immigrants then living in the country, while also authorizing major increases in the Border Patrol staffing and the enforcement of sanctions against employers who hired immigrants without proper papers.

Yet this immigration reform legislation -- despite the authorization for an additional 2,000 Border Patrol officers -- failed to stem the flow of illegal immigrants, while the stipulated employer sanctions were not enforced.

Liberal immigration reformers had lent their support for employer sanctions as part of the amnesty deal. But once amnesty became law they didn’t support the enforcement of these sanctions – thereby further angering immigration restrictionists and hardening their resolve to oppose any future immigration-reform compromise.

What is more, the amnesty precipitated new illegal and legal immigration flows, as millions of relatives and neighbors in the past couple decades sought to join the newly legalized residents. An exodus from Central America – roiled by escalating repression, counterinsurgency wars, and U.S. intervention – created a new northbound stream of immigrants.

By the late 1980s, the local and national backlash forces against immigration began to gather new strength and national resonance.

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(1) Sources for Border Patrol history include: Kelly Lytle Hernández, Migra!: A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010); Peter Andreas, Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide (Cornell University Press, 2010); Timothy J. Dunn, The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border 1978-1992 (CMAS Books, University of Texas, 1996); Dunn, Blockading the Border and Human Rights (University of Texas Press, 2009).