Border Patrol - Blog Posts
Prevention through Deterrence.
What is Prevention through Deterrence? It is a strategy that the U.S Border Patrol implemented to make border crossing as difficult, dangerous, and expensive as possible, ultimately aiming to redirect migrants routes into the most inhospitable sections of the border, basically making the hot desert a weapon to discourage migrants from attempting the crossing at all.
The U.S has made it abundantly clear that migration through crossing the border is illegal, making policies after policy to dismay the crossing, including Operation Streamline, a joint initiative of the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice in the U.S started in 2005 that adopts a ‘zero-tolerance’ approach to unauthorized border-crossing by criminally prosecuting them; up to 70 people, locked together in handcuffs through hands and feet are shown before a judge before being prosecuted and sent to the state jail, which affects the economy since all of the space being taken up is being paid at taxpayer’s expense, and destroys the judicial system because justice is not being served, and instead becomes corrupt.
But then how did this all start? Why are migrants crossing the border in the first place? Because of colonialism and domestic violence, that’s why. Back in 1944, the allies like the U.S, the U.K, and France, etc. would connect their banks to the dollar, or regular paper money, making it the BrettonWood Agreement. The colonies under such big world powers, around the ’50s wanted independence, which caused immense turmoil for the world powers. The colonies wanted to rise independently, and could only do that economically. A man by the name of Jacobo Arbenz was elected president of Guatemala; he was a great military officer and politician. At this time he had drawn a land reform, where he wanted the U.S who owned land in Guatemala that they weren’t using to pay taxes and give that fallow land back to the Guatemalan government for land distribution. The U.S felt like they were being bossed around, and didn’t like that this small country was forcing them to give up their land’, so they, under the company United Fruit decided they couldn’t control this man, so they killed him and set a man who became a dictator by the name of Carlos Castillos Armas in his place. A series of coups and new presidents/dictators after Armas’s four years. It was only in the ’80s of Guatemala do things go from bad to worse, with the presidency of Rios Montt, who believes he was appointed by God.
The guerillas, a small attack force that was taking part in action against a large force, in this case, Montt, were being hunted down, killed, and tortured. In Guatemala, there are white Spaniards, brown Spanish people, and then the indigenous tribes called the Maya; some of the Maya, who lived in small towns away from the city, wanted to join and stop Montt, who became a dictator at this point. He believed that since the Mayan people had joined against them, then all of the Mayan people were guerillas. He, with the help of the U.S government, started the Scorched Earth Campaign, which was the legal use of killing and destroying every Maya and anyone else who was associated with the Maya, or the ‘guerillas’. 626 villages were burned down, and over 1.5 million were displaced, with many of them being children (kill the seed, a strategy of destroying the Mayan tribe.) People would hide in the mountains or they would migrate to Mexico or other countries, some able to migrate to the U.S.
I mention Guatemala because in the ‘Imaginarium of migration’, what we in the U.S think about these people who are crossing the border believe they do not just come from Mexico here to ‘steal our jobs’. They come from Guatemala, Chile, Brazil, Venezuela, etc. all over, so they could have a shot at supporting their families, and learn and be somewhat educated, then hope to go back home. So no, not all migrants are from Mexico, and not all of them are criminals. Many people are traveling through the desert knowing the risks and the dangers and doing so on the basis of hope that they could get through, hoping to find border patrol. Yes, they want to find border patrol, because border patrol offers them food, water, and shelter from the heat of the sun and the dryness of the desert. But sometimes many people do not even get that far, and their deaths become ambiguous because again, they have no rights; hundreds, if not thousands are dying in the desert.
Colonialism and nationalism also play a big part in how the U.S writes immigration policy. ‘’Give me your needy, your tired and your poor’’ is a regular statement and not to be taken literally. The colonialist/capitalist mindset is that people can come to the U.S, they just have to be white and rich. State/space of exception is the concept where human rights are negated. There is a space where people are reduced to distribution, where they don’t matter enough for anything a person in the U.S might take for granted because they are ‘alien/illegal’. Since there are no laws to protect them, they have no rights to be protected. And the rise of nationalism is what we've been seeing a lot since the presidential campaigns of 2016 when Trump was stated into office. Nationalism is the ideology and movement that promotes the interests of a particular nation, especially the aim of gaining and maintaining the nation’s sovereignty over its homeland, in this case the U.S. Nationalism holds that each nation should govern itself, free from outside interference, that a nation is a natural and ideal basis for a polity, and that the nation is the only rightful source for political power. This is why racism, fascism, and classism always follow closely after.
Information from Jason De Leon’s book, ‘‘The Land of Open Graves.’’
