In late February, I drove to the Trump Wall in Sasabe, Arizona. As soon as I was parked, a green-striped Border Patrol vehicle, stationed a quarter of a mile away, crawled up the dirt road towards us. Shortly in front of us, a dystopian sign saying “No Trespassing” fluttered in the wind. It was cold when I got out of the car with my 5 year old son, William. The wall in front of us, 30 feet high with steel bollards, was imposing indeed as it trembled slightly in the wind. Through its beams we could see Mexico, a broken panorama of mesquite hills surrounded by a blue sky.
The Homeland Security vehicle soon stopped next to us. An agent rolled down his window and asked me, “What are you doing? Joyriding? ”
After I laughed at a word I hadn’t heard in years, the agent informed us that we were in a dangerous construction zone, even though this part of the wall had been built four months earlier. I looked around. There were no bulldozers, excavators or construction machinery. I wondered if the lack of machines reflected recently inaugurated Joe Biden’s campaign promise that “no further foot “Trump’s wall was going to be built.
In fact, that’s why I was here – to see what the border looked like at the beginning of the post-Trump era. President Biden had begun his tenure with strong promises to reverse his predecessor’s border policy: families who had broken up would be reunited, and asylum seekers previously forced to stay in Mexico were allowed to enter the United States. Given the Trump years, the new administration’s proposals sounded almost revolutionary.
And yet something else bothered me when we drove away: everything looked the same as it had for years. I have been coming to this section of the border since 2001. I have seen its gradual distortion during the most dramatic period of border fortification in the history of this country. There was an influx of border guards in the early 2000s, followed by the construction of a 15-foot wall (Senator Joe Biden) in 2007 elected for), followed by multi-billion dollar high-tech surveillance towers courtesy of contract with the Boeing Corporation.
Believe me, the forces that have shaped our southern border over the decades have been far more powerful than Donald Trump or any single politician. It was widely claimed during the 2020 election that by abolishing Trump, the United States would create a more humane border and immigration system. And that was a certain truth, but a clearly limited one. Beneath the theater of partisan politics remains a troubled border industrial complex, a combination of ingrained interests and relationships between the US government – particularly the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – and private corporations that have received very little attention.
The small border town of Sasabe and its surroundings are a microcosm of it.
The cumulative power of this complex will now continue in Trump’s wake. In fact, the frontier industry, created by decades of bipartisan fortification, donated more money to the Biden campaign and the Democrats than to Trump and the Republicans during the 2020 election.
The complex In the 12 years from 2008 to 2020, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Control (ICE) signed 105,000 contracts, which is a staggering average of 24 contracts per day $ 55 billion to private contractors. That sum exceeded hers $ 52 billion collective budgets for border and immigration enforcement for the 28 years 1975-2003 Fishing sand and gravel Many of them – including the most expensive ones – went to companies that made high-tech border fortifications, from sophisticated camera systems to advanced biometric and computing technologies.
This could explain the frontier industry’s interest in candidate Biden, who promised : “I’ll make sure we have border protection, but it will be based on us using high-tech capabilities to deal with it.”
Behind that bold, powerful phrase was an all-too-familiar version of technological border protection, sold as something so much more innocuous, harmless, and human than what Trump was offering. Despite our former president’s urge to create a literal wall spanning hundreds of kilometers of border areas, high technology has long been a large part of the cross-border industrial complex.
A pivotal moment for this complex was in 2005 when the Department of Homeland Security’s Assistant Secretary Michael Jackson (previously Chief Operating Officer of Lockheed Martin) spoke about the creation outside a conference room of frontier industry representatives a virtual or technological wall . “This is an unusual invitation,” he said then. “I want to make sure you have it clear that we are asking you to come back and tell us how to do our business. We ask you. We invite you to let us know how we should run our organization. ”
Of course, the border and immigration control system was already growing at this point. For example, during President Bill Clinton’s tenure (1993–2001), annual budgets were close to tripled from $ 1.5 billion to $ 4.3 billion. In fact, Clinton initiated the immigrant deterrent system that still exists today, in which Washington used armed agents, barriers and walls, and high-tech systems to block the traditional urban locations where immigrants once crossed. They were instead smuggled into dangerous and dangerous places deadly Places like the remote and brutal Arizona desert around Sasabe. As Clinton Put it in his 1995 State of the Union Address:
[O]Our government has worked aggressively to secure our borders by hiring a record number of new border guards, deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever, fighting illegal recruitment and excluding illegal aliens from benefits.
Sound familiar?
The Clinton years, however, seemed old when Jackson made this plea for 2005. He was speaking in the middle of a burgeoning Homeland Security era. After all, DHS was just created in 2002 after the 9/11 attacks. During George W. Bush’s tenure, budgets for border and immigration enforcement increased from $ 4.2 billion in 2000 to $ 15.2 billion in 2000 2008 – more than any other presidency, including Donald Trump. Under Bush, this border became yet another front in the war on terror (even if terrorists did not cross it) and opened the money taps. And that was what Jackson underlined – the emergence of a new reality that would spawn tens of thousands of private company contracts.
As the US war effort subsided in Afghanistan and Iraq, many security and defense companies turned to the new frontier market. As a provider pointed out For me at a Border Security Expo in Phoenix in 2012: “We’re bringing the battlefield to the border.” This salesman, who had been a soldier in Afghanistan a few years earlier, smiled confidently and banners from large arms manufacturers like Raytheon hung over him. At that time (as now) was an “unprecedented boom period” forecast for the frontier market. As the company VisionGain explained at the time, a “virtuous cycle … would drive spending in the long term, based on three interrelated developments:” illegal immigration and terrorist infiltration, “more money for border police in” developing countries “and” maturation “of new technologies . ‘
Since September 11th, corporate giants in the border security arena have become major campaign contributions not only for presidential candidates but also for keys Members the budget committees and homeland security committees (both House and Senate) – all crucial when it comes to border policy, treaties and budgets. Between 2006 and 2018, top cross-border entrepreneurs like General dynamics , Lockheed Martin , Northrop Grumman , and Raytheon contributed A total of $ 27.6 million for House Appropriations Committee members and $ 6.5 million for House Homeland Security Committee members. Nearly 20,000 were reported from 2002 to 2019 Lobbying “visits” to convention bureaus in connection with homeland security. The 2,841 visits reported for 2018 alone included visits from leading CBP and ICE contractors Accenture , CoreCivic , GeoGroup , L3Harris , and Leidos .
When Donald Trump entered the White House in 2017, the cross-border industrial complex was really buzzing. That year he would oversee a $ 20 billion Border and Immigration budget and has nearly 20,000 border guards (up from 4,000 in 1994), 650 miles of already erected walls and barriers, billions of dollars in border technology, and more than 200 immigration detention centers in the United States.
He claimed he would build his own “big, fat, beautiful wall , “As it turned out, most of them already existed . He claimed he was stuck on a boundary that was already remarkably stuck. And in his own way, he took it to a new level.
We saw this in Sasabe, where a 15-foot wall was recently replaced with a 30-foot wall. How it happened has much of the 450 miles At the end of the wall, the Trump administration really built replacing pre-existing smaller barriers with monstrous barriers that left notable environmental and cultural barriers behind destruction in their wake.
Trump administration policies forced asylum seekers to wait in Mexico, toddlers to wait appear before the immigration court and separated family members into a sprawling detention machine whose companies had reconciled $ 126 per person and day for years. He could have done little of it without the ever-growing frontier industrial complex that preceded it and brought it to it in important ways.
However, in the 2020 election campaign, the frontier industry turned to Biden and the Democrats. This pivotal point ensured one thing: His influence on such questions would be strong, if not outstanding, when he took over the new administration.
The Biden years begin at the limit At the beginning of January 2021, Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s candidate to head the DHS, was appointed disclosed that he had made $ 3.3 million from corporate clients at the WilmerHale law firm over the past three years. Two of those clients were Northrop Grumman and Leidos, companies where Nick Buxton and I were identified as top frontier entrepreneurs Biden’s Limit: Industry, Democrats, and the 2020 elections , a report We co-authored for the Transnational Institute.
When we looked at the campaign submissions from 13 top cross-border companies for CBP and ICE for 2020, we had no idea what to expect. After all, it was a group of companies that included manufacturers of surveillance infrastructures for the “virtual high-tech wall” along the border, such as L3Harris, General Dynamics and the Israeli company Elbit Systems ;; like others Palantir and IBM produced boundary data processing software; and there were also detention centers like CoreCivic and GeoGroup.
To our surprise, these companies had given the Biden campaign ($ 5,364,994) significantly more than Trump ($ 1,730,435). In general, they had switched to the Democrats, who had raised 55 percent of their $ 40 million in campaign contributions, including donations to keys Members the Committees on Home Funds and Senate Funds and Homeland Security.
It is too early to judge what will happen to this country’s vast border and immigration apparatus under the Biden administration, which has promised to reverse Trumpian border policy. Yet it will be no less trapped in the network of the border industrial complex than the previous administration.
Perhaps a glimpse of the future border under Biden was offered when Homeland Security candidate Mayorkas appeared at his Senate confirmation hearings on January 19 and was asked about the 8,000 people from Honduras who were in a “caravan.” were traveling to the USA moment. The day before, US-trained troops and police officers in Guatemala had foiled large numbers of them and then deported them when they tried to enter that country. Many in the trailer reported that they headed north thanks to the successive catastrophic Category 4 hurricanes that devastated the coasts of Honduras and Nicaragua in November 2020.
Mayorkas answered In general, if it is determined that individuals are “qualified under the law to stay in the US, we will apply the law accordingly. If they are not qualified to stay in the US, they will not.” Given that climate refugee status is not available to anyone who crosses the border, most of those who eventually made it (if they ever did) would not qualify to stay.
It is possible that some people from this caravan, when I visited this wall with my son at the end of February, had already made it to the border despite endless obstacles on their way. As we drove down Highway 286, also known as Sasabe Road, there were reports of undocumented people from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Mexico, all traveling through the rugged Baboquivari Mountains to the west of us and the gloomy gorges to the east of us in attempts to avoid the border police and their surveillance equipment.
When President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned Americans in 1961 about what he called the “military-industrial complex”, he spoke of his “total influence – economically, politically, even spiritually … in every city, every state house, every federal office Government.” Sixty years later, something similar could be said about the ever-growing border industrial complex. It takes exactly such climate disasters and such caravans (or, as we are just seeing, only such “crises “From unaccompanied minors) to continue its never-ending growth, whether the president announces a big, thick, beautiful wall or opts for high-tech frontier technology.
My son and I first noticed the enforcement apparatus at a checkpoint 25 miles north of the international border. Not only did green-uniformed agents interrogate passengers in a vehicle heading north, but also a multitude of cameras focused on the passing vehicles.
I didn’t know whether it was license plate readers or facial recognition cameras. What I knew was that Northrop Grumman (who donated $ 649,748 to Joe Biden and $ 323,014 to Donald Trump in the 2020 campaign) had received a valuable assignment to ensure that CBP’s biometric system contained:Modalities “All kinds – facial and voice data, iris recognition, scars and tattoos, possibly even DNA sample collection and information about” relationship patterns “and” encounters “with the public. And who could tell if that Predator B drones General Atomics’ production – by the way, the company gave Biden $ 82,974 and Trump $ 51,665 in 2020 – was above us with Northrup Grummans (as is regularly the case in the border regions) VADER “Manhunt” radar system that was first used in Afghanistan?
As we passed through that glove, there were Border Patrol vehicles everywhere, adding to the expanded surveillance apparatus 100 miles into the US interior. We soon passed a roadside surveillance tower, first built by Boeing Corporation and renovated by Elbit Systems ($ 5,553 for Biden, $ 5,649 for Trump), one of dozen in the area. On the other side of this highway was a gravel clearing where a G4S ($ 49,233 for Biden, $ 33,019 for Trump) Van is usually idle. It is a mobile prison used by the border police to transport their prisoners to temporary detention centers in Tucson. And remember, there was so much we couldn’t see, like the thousands of implanted motion sensors made by a host of other companies.
As you travel through this frontier area, it’s hard not to feel like you’re in a profitable version of a classic panopticon, a prison system where you are watched wherever you are. Even 5 year old William was surprised by such a world and asked me really confused: “Why do the green men”, as he calls the border police, “want to stop the workers?”
When we got to that shard of Trump’s “big, fat, beautiful” wall, it seemed like only a humble part of a much larger system that left partisan politics in the dust. The focus was never on The Donald, but rather on a powerful group of companies that had an active interest in working on that frontier until the end of time.
Shortly after the agent told us we were in a construction zone and had to leave, I noticed a pile of bollards near the dirt road that ran parallel to the wall. They were from the previous wall that Biden voted for in 2006. As William and I drove back to Tucson through this inspection glove, I wondered what the border industrial world would be like if he were my age and what could be living in an even more extreme world with more and more people fleeing disaster.
And I kept thinking of that discarded pile of bollards, a reminder of how easy it would be to tear down that wall and the world that goes with it.
