The Fence: National Security, Public Safety, and Illegal Immigration along the U.S.–Mexico Border

By Robert Lee Maril

To the American public it’s a 2,000-mile-long project to keep illegal immigrants, narcotics, and terrorists on the other side of the U.S.–Mexico border. In the deserts of Arizona, it’s a “virtual fence” of high-tech electronic sensors, cameras, and radar. In some border stretches it’s a huge concrete-and-steel wall; in others it’s a series of solitary posts designed to stop drug runners; in still others it’s rusted barbed-wire cattle fences. For two-thirds of the international boundary it’s nonexistent.
Just what is this entity known as “the fence”? And more important, is it working? Through first-person interviews with defense contractors, border residents, American military, Minutemen, county officials, Customs and Border Protection agents, environmental activists, and others whose voices have never been heard, Robert Lee Maril examines the project’s human and financial costs. Along with Maril’s site visits, his rigorous analysis of government documents from 1999 to the present uncovers fiscal mismanagement by Congress, wasteful defense contracts, and unkept political promises.
As drug violence mounts in border cities and increasing numbers of illegal migrants die from heat exhaustion in the Arizona desert, Maril argues how the fence may even be making an incendiary situation worse. Avoiding preconceived conclusions, he proposes new public policies that take into consideration human issues, political negotiation, and the need for compromise. Maril’s lucid study shows the fence to be a symbol in concrete, steel, microchips, and fiber optics for the crucible of contemporary immigration policy, national security, and public safety.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
• Release date: Apr 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9780896727489

Robert Lee Maril

Robert Lee Maril is professor of sociology and the founding director of the Center for Diversity and Inequality Research at East Carolina University.

Book preview

ROBERT LEE MARIL

THE FENCE

National Security, Public Safety,

and Illegal Immigration along

the U.S.-Mexico Border

Texas Tech University Press

Copyright 2011 by Robert Lee Maril

Unless otherwise stated, photographs copyright ©2011 by Robert Lee Maril

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including electronic storage and retrieval systems, except by explicit prior written permission of the publisher. Brief passages excerpted for review and critical purposes are excepted.

This book is typeset in Melior. The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997).

Designed by Kasey McBeath

Composition by NK Graphics, Brattleboro, Vermont

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

This book is catalogued with the Library of Congress.

Printed in the United States of America

978-0-89672-748-9

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 / 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Texas Tech University Press

Box 41037 | Lubbock, Texas 79409-1037 USA

800.832.4042 | [e-mail] | www.ttupress.org

For Dindy Reich

There is always an easy solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.

H. L. Mencken

Beware the aged critic with his hair of winebar sawdust. Beware the nun and the witchy buckles of her shoes. Beware the man at the callbox with the suitcase: this man is you. The planesaw whines, whining for its planesaw mummy. And then there is the information, which is nothing, and comes at night.

Martin Amis

I could give all to Time except - except What I myself have held. But why declare The things forbidden that while the Customs slept I have crossed to Safety with? For I am There And what I would not part with I have kept.

Robert Frost

Contents

Copyright

Illustrations

Part One: A Virtual American Dream

1: A Simple Solution

2: Manny’s Disguise Isn’t One

3: Anzalduas

4: Olga Rivera Garcia’s Fence and Omar Sanchez’s Fence

5: ISIS

6: Dubuque

Part Two: Crossing to Safety

7: More Virtual Fences

8: CBP Agent Nora Muñoz

9: Juliet Garcia’s Fence and Michael Chertoff’s Wall

10: Three Different Walls

11: It’s Getting Crowded along the Border

12: Crossing to Safety

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

About the Author

Illustrations

1.1. Cameron County levee with Border Patrol road, 2009.

3.1. Border wall at Tijuana, Mexico, 2009.

9.1. University of Texas at Brownsville–Texas Southmost College border fence, 2009.

9.2. Workers pouring concrete for Hidalgo County hydraulic wall, 2008.

9.3. Construction of hydraulic wall at Anzalduas County Park, 2009.

10.1. Workers constructing hydraulic wall near McAllen, Texas, 2008.

10.2. Workers on concrete forms fronting old levee near Weslaco, Texas, 2008.

10.3. View from north side of Hidalgo County hydraulic wall, 2009.

10.4. Border wall separating Nogales, Arizona, from Nogales, Mexico, 2009.

11.1. Project 28 towers outside of Sasabe, Arizona, 2009.

Maps

1. The U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

2. Terrain near Brownsville, Texas, and Matamoros, Tamaulipas

3. Terrain near Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora

Part One

A Virtual American Dream

Map 1. The U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. (Map by Margret Mulcahy, East Carolina University Center for Geographic Information Science)

Chapter 1

A Simple Solution

Perhaps the core implications of Time do not occur until, straining to hear the unintelligible ramblings of the youthful radiation oncologist, we are forced to face down the possibility of our own death. Or perhaps Time’s reminder is the inevitable passing of a parent or beloved friend, or even the family pet, one second romping with the kids, another inexplicably expiring on the freshly cut front lawn, legs jerking among the roots of the bermuda as unspoken words collect on the tongues of the gathering children. The vapid democracy of illness and death produces in the living an understanding of Time as the distillate of life.

Time can be particularly cruel to those residing in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Those living along the northern banks of the Rio Grande, the Big River, as well as those on the Mexican side of the Río Bravo, the Fierce River, may experience Time in very different and more direct ways than those in the interior of border states and those in nonborder states. The countenance of Time may be far different in the South Texas border towns of La Paloma, Relampago, Blue Town, Mercedes, San Benito, Brownsville, Harlingen, Santa Rosa, McAllen, Donna, Pharr, Rio Grande City, Santa Maria, Progresso, Zapata, Granjeno, Sullivan City, and San Juan than in Dallas, Dubuque, and Washington, D.C.¹

For undocumented workers along the border, Time may be counted in units of mesmerizing panic while crossing the Río Bravo on inflated inner tubes linked by lines of thin, wet twine, one eye fixed on a six-year-old child, the other on the coyote, the human smuggler.² Traversing a dangerous river is followed by a crazed dash toward a new life, beginning with a wild ride in a fifteen-year-old Ford van, motor revving, the coyote sweating in the vehicle’s air-conditioned interior as his passengers pray out loud to their patron saint. Illegal entry also may be an attempt to rejoin an abandoned life in the United States after the abuela, the grandmother, has died and the sons have rushed back home to the funeral in San Luís Potosí. How then will these same sons get back safely to their families and jobs in Des Moines, Iowa?

If there is not a dangerous river to cross along some parts of the border, there may be an even more hostile desert in locales such as Nogales, where thousands have already died illegally crossing the borderline.

For a Latino Border Patrol agent sworn to apprehend these workers and their families, Time’s foreshortened memory may end in uncounted bravery or a coward’s desperation when shadowy figures suddenly emerge from the banks of the Rio Grande or the deep canyons south of San Diego. Anonymous to the public in his or her green nylon uniform, often despised by local residents for a history of other agents’ transgressions, this federal law enforcer must immediately decide what action to take.³ Are these human outlines heavily armed cocaine smugglers, or are they nameless men, women, and children looking for work in a new land? Alone in the desert under a dark moon, the agent knows that, whatever decision he or she makes, backup cannot arrive in less than forty-five minutes.

For those on both sides of this international boundary—whether community residents, undocumented workers, law enforcement officers, or tourists— personal safety cannot be assumed or taken for granted. The borderlands have always been a very dangerous place in which to live.⁴

In the border villages, towns, and cities from Brownsville to San Diego, from Matamoros to Tijuana, Time is also sensed as centuries of family, community, and regional history unique to the American experience. Those who live in Nogales, Arizona, may have as much or more in common with those residing in Nogales, Sonora, than with those of nearby Tucson.

Although Time reigns supreme in the borderlands, geography and topography cannot be ignored. Isolated from mainstream Mexican and American culture and politics, these borderlands form nothing less than a slim wedge between two very different nations, one first-world, one in the third-.⁵ The rural landscape ranges from rich delta farmland with two growing seasons to high Sonoran desert. Neither entirely Mexican nor entirely American, the people of the border, sui generis, and the landscape in which they are embedded are perpetually misunderstood, underestimated, and even distrusted by federal officials in the distant capitals of México, D.F., and Washington, D.C.

Arbitrary but binding decisions made in the two national capitals have the ability to directly form, shape, and change the lives of residents on both sides of the border—and, more tellingly but in ways less understood, the lives of those far from these borderlands. The prevalent supposition that residents on both sides of this international boundary are passive recipients of their respective nation’s laws and policies arrogantly disregards history. Repeatedly these people of the borderlands have negotiated, mitigated, ignored, stalled, passively tolerated, blunted, changed, or fought to the bitter end laws, regulations, and policies they deemed unacceptable. They also repelled invading armies, armed bands of outlaws, and bureaucrats with MBAs and law degrees. The complexities of life in the borderlands are frequently far too intricate to be understood or appreciated in federal offices in Washington and Mexico City.⁶

Olga Rivera graduated from Brownsville’s Porter High School in the spring of 1978. Her life across Time plays out in edited closeups and broad pans of the camera’s eye, first as a novice eighteen-year-old field researcher, then a part-time assistant and secretary, then later a full-time college employee at the University of Texas, Brownsville–Texas Southmost College (UTB-TSC), less than a city block from the bridge to Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico.⁷ Just over five feet tall, with long, black hair framing her dark eyes, Olga dressed in crisp blue jeans and a white blouse little different from those of the other Latinas roaming the academic halls of UTB-TSC.

Beneath my office window amid a verdant patio formed by what was once the juncture of the morgue at Fort Brown and the officers’ infirmary, I saw Olga return from lunch with her boyfriend Carlos, kiss him quickly, then skip up the stairs to greet me with a smile. Looking down through the royal palms, bougainvillea, and acacia, I saw Carlos, his steps falling silently on the terra cotta tile, walk briskly in the direction of Olin Library.

From the very beginning Olga was the star of a summer research program funded by Washington dollars siphoned through Brownsville City Hall. Antonio Tony Zavaleta, one of my colleagues at UTB-TSC, had recruited a group of ten high school graduates who badly needed summer jobs in a region in which systemic poverty is pervasive. Tony and I sent Olga and our other high school interviewers to selected households in Brownsville neighborhoods, where they introduced themselves, as they had been trained to do, then conducted a twenty-minute interview before exiting gracefully. This survey questionnaire was no easy matter, a tough sell to barrio residents with many other things to do than answer questions from an unknown teenager who had appeared uninvited on their doorstep. A tireless but cheerful motivator, Olga was both the best interviewer and the best leader among the recruits.⁸

I regularly dropped off Olga and the other teens in neighborhoods they had never before seen, then picked them up at a certain street corner at an arranged time. As I drove up, Olga always stood patiently under the slim shade of a tall palm, her stack of completed interviews clutched to her chest. The others students huddled in the shade to avoid the stifling heat, heads down, often worn out and dispirited. For every one interview her fellow high school graduates completed, Olga completed three.

In later years, Olga married her high school boyfriend Carlos Garcia, raised two daughters, worked full time, and took college classes. Graduating in 1981, she was immediately hired by her alma mater as a data entry operator in the new Department of Information Technology. Thriving on staff training and professional development workshops, Olga also tried her hand at teaching in the classroom and, over the years, moved in and out of various positions and titles. Again and again Olga demonstrated a steadfast competency along with a disdain for academic laziness in all its forms and shapes.

Stumbling into law enforcement, Carlos worked first for the Brownsville Police Department, then with the Cameron County sheriff’s office before finally landing a coveted job with the Immigration and Naturalization Service as a customs officer at Brownsville’s bridges to Matamoros. Such employment was coveted because job security and a federal pension speak loudly when the most common local work is picking grapefruit, oranges, cabbages, and onions at a piece rate in Rio Grande Valley orchards and fields. Carlos’s job was to scrutinize all those leaving and entering the territorial boundaries of the United States, allowing only those with the proper legal documents and goods to pass. His brothers and brothers-in-law soon followed him into federal law enforcement.

Born and raised in Brownsville, Carlos is a second-generation citizen of the United States. Olga, Carlos, and their two daughters reside in a two-bedroom wood-framed house on a quiet street in a Brownsville barrio. Carlos’s parents live barely two miles distant from them in another Brownsville neighborhood. Covered in dust and poinsettias, Olga and Carlos’s house is a stone’s throw from the banks of the Rio Grande.

Unlike Carlos, Olga was born in Matamoros, en el otro lado, on the other side, of the Rio Grande. After Olga married Carlos, she became an American citizen. But she was not one before. For more than ten years Olga and certain members of her family lived illegally in Brownsville. When first brought to this country by her parents, Olga did not speak a word of English and was thrown into public school in Brownsville with no formal preparation. She recalls, They put me on the back row of all my classes. I had no idea what was going on. I got no help in English. By high school graduation, Olga spoke fluent English.

Border Time is transnational, unhindered in South Texas by a political line of demarcation assigned to the Rio Grande/Río Bravo. Olga and Carlos’s story is only one among many; on the border, each individual and place can be very distinct from another. Twenty miles upriver from Olga and Carlos’s neighborhood, at Anzalduas County Park, coyotes smuggle in thousands of workers each year while narcotrafficantes, drug smugglers, find this particular bend in the river an excellent site at which to cross tons of marijuana and cocaine. Part of a Spanish land grant awarded to the original colonists in 1767, a centuries-old Oblate chapel next to the park has morphed into a staging area for illegal aliens and drugs.⁹

Olga Rivera Garcia’s singular transnational story is also typical: lives of new immigrants to the United States often reveal a complexity not easily circumscribed within the popular Horatio Alger myth of success guaranteed by hard work. One, two, or more generations removed from their families’ immigration experiences, Americans may forget or selectively disremember the joys and tragedies of their immigrant status—or whether they entered legally or sin papeles, without documents.

Olga, Carlos, and their kids live geographically less than five miles from Olga’s place of birth. Yet the distance economically from Olga’s Mexican family in the poorest sections of Matamoros is much greater. In this border city, third-world poverty prevails behind the broad avenues, a tourist curtain of prosperity masking the economic status of the majority of Mexican citizens who, if fortunate enough to be employed, work hard for several dollars a day. Those who are the most fortunate work in the twin plants, the Mexican- and American-owned maquiladoras, where they earn the exceptional wage of several dollars an hour.¹⁰

This pervasive poverty often goes unseen by the average American tourist to Matamoros or other cities of the Mexican border, such as Juárez or Tijuana, or the Mexican communities more modest in size. It is partially invisible; you have to know where to look. For example, throwaway cardboard salvaged from the back alleys of my former Brownsville neighborhood on a Monday can, by Tuesday, become exterior building material for one-room shacks in Matamoros. Cinder blocks purchased at Walmart, Lowe’s, or Home Depot are the preferred building material but far too expensive when the average Matamoros job pays so little. Those who can afford cinder-block houses on both sides of the river often build them one wall at a time. In the poorest neighborhoods of Matamoros extension cords from one structure to the next serve as the only source of electricity, and clean water is scarce for drinking, cooking, or bathing. When it rains, the narrow pathways flood, the dirt floors turn to mud, and the cardboard, tin, and cinder-block constructions that are the homes of many residents frequently collapse.¹¹

Oklahomans I grew up with in the 1960s would call Olga and Carlos Garcia wetbacks. For me, born and raised in Oklahoma City suburbs, where wetbacks were uncommon but not unheard of on the nearby farms and ranches, this derogatory term held no real substance or meaning. In a state founded as recently as 1907, my own family ignored its immigrant roots. Only much later in my adult life did I learn one side of my family were fourth-generation Americans, land-poor Okie Boomers from England by way of Arkansas, and the other side were only second-generation Americans descended from Lithuanian peasants. In Oklahoma, which recently celebrated its centennial, country of origin and date of citizenship can frequently be trumped by land, oil, cattle, and other sources of wealth. Intentionally ignorant of the specifics of their own state history, including the exodus of many impoverished Okies to California during the Great Depression, my fellow Oklahomans have long held personal wealth and its accoutrements to be the ticket to social acceptance and prominence.¹²

Labeling based on perceived notions of race, class, nativity, or other markers can be tricky within certain regions and histories. Definitions of race and ethnicity, whether in Oklahoma or on the Mexican border, are far more elusive than many Americans would like, or want, to believe. In the Lower Rio Grande Valley, often called simply the Valley, Olga Rivera Garcia, not unjustifiably, considers herself no more or less a Mexican national than she did before she married Carlos. During this same time Carlos, in contrast, identified himself as Mexican American or, less frequently, Hispanic, even though those in other parts of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California may have selected other labels. At one time the term Chicano was used in the Valley to refer to college-educated young adults who were also politically active or Hispanics living in far-away Austin, 350 miles to the north, or in San Antonio, Dallas, Houston, or Los Angeles. Most recently, while I was living in the Valley border city of McAllen, it became clear that the label Mexican American had been replaced by the more common Hispanic or Latino.¹³

In the 1970s and 1980s in Brownsville, Texas, Olga and Carlos, like the three Valley teenagers my wife and I welcomed into our home, or our neighbors, campus colleagues, and friends throughout Brownsville, were individuals about whom I cared rather than labels, people first rather than Mexican American, Mexican national, Chicano, or Anglo. Certainly I never thought of Olga’s citizenship status, or that of any of those with whom I was acquainted, as crucial or necessary. For their part, my college students at UTB-TSC referred to me as Anglo, a label I hated but one with which I was forced to live while in the Valley. The validity of these racial and ethnic labels went largely unquestioned in the Valley at that time, as in the suburbs of Oklahoma and many other places throughout the United States.

Like all the other instructors at the college in Brownsville, Tony Zavaleta and I taught a busy schedule of five courses a semester, plus one to three course overloads. Finding time to exercise between the demands of work and family life was always challenging. During lunchtime we sometimes jogged together around the city golf course, which lay squeezed between a resaca, a small lake, bordering the campus and the banks of the Rio Grande. The golf course on our left, the Rio Grande on our right, we ran down a narrow, sandy road talking at first about nothing in particular, then fell silent as the demands of running under a tropical sun commanded our attention. Our view of the waters of the Rio Grande was limited by the thick vegetation and earthen levees designed to prevent Brownsville from flooding.

One lunch period in October 1978, two young men came slowly out of the weeds and brush lining the sandy road, saw us, then continued in our direction. Perhaps realizing that we were crazy Americans with nothing better to do than jog during the heat of the day (the temperature was close to one hundred degrees), they did not panic at the sight of us. Their only other choice, once we had seen them, was to retrace their steps back to the banks of the river. Never missing a stride, Tony waved to them. The two waved back. As we rounded another curve in the road bordering the river, I looked back to see them trudging across the fairway, both dressed in tan pants, cuffs still rolled up above their knees, cheap sneakers, T-shirts, and baseball caps. Soaked to their chests, their shirts were marked by a thick line of river water and mud. A few minutes earlier they had waded across the river under the international bridge linking Matamoros to Brownsville.¹⁴ Once they had crossed the golf course, the two men were less than a block from the safety of downtown streets.

I was shocked by the sight of two men so openly crossing the international border at high noon on a Tuesday, but, exhausted from the run in the heat, I never asked Tony, not until many years later, about this brief encounter. By his utter lack of alarm or concern—the mere wave of his hand—it was clear to me that the two young men were an unremarkable sight. Born and raised in Brownsville, he never gave a second thought to the illegal crossers because it was an insignificant event, one he had witnessed many times.

Those two young undocumented workers are joined inextricably by shared history, family, culture, and blood with hundreds of thousands of other residents on both sides of the border from Brownsville to San Diego, over centuries a commingling of millions of lives never completely separated by the nations in which they reside. This sediment of Time, embodied in families like that of Olga Rivera Garcia and her husband Carlos, or that of Antonio Zavaleta, or those of eighth-generation Valley Mexican Americans, reduced my sighting of one illegal crossing to a mere blip on a far grander parade of life.¹⁵

The vast, unique history of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands clearly demonstrates that the international boundary between Mexico and the United States is frequently a figment of the political imaginations of decision makers in Mexico City and in Washington. In reality and practice it is a boundary regularly crossed and recrossed each day of the year by border residents pursuing their routine lives. It is no surprise that deterrence theory, the major theoretical underpinning upon which the U.S. Border Patrol struggles to maintain order and law, has been largely ineffective in the borderlands. That is, it is ineffective except in the minds of political leaders and institutions invested in certain imprecise theories of law enforcement, border labels, stereotypes, and myths with little basis in reality.¹⁶

In South Texas, Rio Grande City was colonized by Spanish soldiers and settlers in 1757. Not until 164 years after its founding were two border agents assigned there, along with two agents to nearby Brownsville and four to Hidalgo. A year later, in 1922, a handful of other agents were sent to Harlingen, Mission, Kingsville, and Alice. In 1924 Congress formally created the Border Patrol, and by 1975 the department had 1,746 agents. Since the events of 9/11 the number of agents has increased to approximately 20,000.

But the influx of undocumented workers and vast amounts of illegal drugs has not been deterred regardless of the number of agents patrolling the line. Of the approximately 29 million foreign-born who entered the United States in the last twenty-five years, about 12 million migrated illegally. Half of them, roughly 6 million in number, are from Mexico; another 12 percent are from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and the Philippines. The vast majority of the undocumented aliens from Mexico and Latin America crossed into the United States by way of our southern border with Mexico. Drugs annually crossing from Mexico into the hands of the American consumer are valued in the billions of dollars. The amount and value of drugs also have not been reduced since the War on Drugs was initiated several decades in the past.¹⁷

Now, highlighted by the horrific events of September 11, 2001, the overriding concern is with international terrorists who might enter this country by way of the Mexican border to cause irreparable harm to our homeland. They are a major threat to our national security. We must deter them.

Time structures and frames border and nonborder communities alike, populating both with those who share similar histories, cultures, languages, wisdoms, and perceptions. Those Americans who live in nonborder cultures, particularly those who have lost or conveniently forgotten their own family narratives—as has been the case with my own family in suburban Oklahoma—are in a difficult position. Since they are forced to rely on experiences other than their own, they can fall victim to social information and expertise supplied to them by trusted social institutions and/or rely on social myths, labels, and common sense. Border stereotypes abound and thrive not only in nonborder communities, but also within border communities.

In remarkable contrast to the simplistic labels that may fuel these misreadings of the borderlands, border factory workers, ranch laborers, migrant farmworkers, service workers, single working mothers, municipal and county employees, public school teachers, construction workers, street vendors, the elderly, the young—all those who make up the populations of border Latinos and Anglos—are as American in their own special ways as any of the tens of thousands of Americans claiming ancestral passage on the tiny Mayflower. Regardless of place, Time is always translucent.¹⁸

In early January of 2006 I received an unsolicited email from a vice president at Honeywell, Inc., a global conglomerate with annual revenues of 30 billion dollars that manufactures products ranging from household thermostats to engines for NASA spacecraft.¹⁹ This corporation’s original 1885 contribution to the marketplace was, in fact, a kind of coal furnace thermostat called the damper flapper. The email read in part: I am leading some initiatives at Honeywell on border protection. … Tools such as ground sensors, radar and video for example…. Would you be willing to talk to me or maybe even my team sometime?

After the events of 9/11, the George W. Bush administration formed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) by enveloping twenty-two separate federal law enforcement agencies and programs, along with their more than two hundred thousand employees, into one unwieldy bureaucracy. After a series of miserable failures, DHS eventually birthed the Secure Border Initiative (SBI), designed as a comprehensive multi-year plan to secure America’s borders and to reduce illegal immigration. DHS decided that it would secure the U.S.-Mexico borderlands by constructing a concrete and steel fence along with a virtual fence to be called SBInet. This combination of low tech and sophisticated high tech would aid Border Patrol agents in controlling the flow of illegal immigrants and drugs and inhibit international terrorists from illegally crossing into the homeland.²⁰

Honeywell, Inc., now stood in line with other major defense contractors for a $250 million federal contract to construct a virtual fence that, it was vehemently hoped by politicians of both major parties in Washington, would finally resolve the myriad problems and issues at our southern border. Major contractors, including Honeywell, believed that this initial $250 million contract, modest by standards of the defense industry, would soon lead to multibillion-dollar contracts to construct a virtual wall stretching from Brownsville to San Diego.

SBInet, illegal immigration, and the fence are exactly why I sat fiddling with my PowerPoint presentation in Clearwater, Florida, one sunny Thursday morning in March 2007, a small crowd of Honeywell employees cautiously eyeing me from around a conference table. Although dressed like professional golfers, most of these engineers were executives who led their divisions. There was Randy from the Honeywell Smart Lab in Albuquerque; Chris from Government Relations in Washington, D.C.; Jason from Marketing; Len and Joe from the Space and Defense Division; Kevin in Security Software; Todd and Scott from Sales; Ray in Military Tech Services; Danny from Business Development; and Bob, the local connection, the manager of Honeywell’s Clearwater plant. George, the team leader who originally invited me to give the presentation, sat at the opposite end of the table, patiently waiting for me to begin.

Unfortunately I couldn’t fire up Honeywell’s state-of-the-art computer, because my own university-issue PowerPoint software was an older version and hopelessly incompatible. I looked around at the fifteen white male executives immersed in their BlackBerries and laptops and asked, Could someone please get your IT person?

I had jumped on the flight to Florida because I believed I had something vital to convey to Honeywell’s executives about the proposed fence between two countries. After riding shotgun with Border Patrol agents for two years and witnessing firsthand the problems they confronted daily, I had published my findings in the first comprehensive study of this federal law enforcement agency. During my stint with the agents I eyeballed the coyotes, those apprehended sin papeles, the drug smugglers tied to the narcotrafficantes, and all the rest of the criminal element populating the borderline.²¹

Given unprecedented access to the Border Patrol for two years, I’d documented the data, then analyzed it along with additional data underlying the foundation of specific immigration and Border Patrol policies and regulations, many of which were based upon deterrence theory. I described in detail how Border Patrol agents daily placed themselves in high-risk situations while patrolling the line. At the same time I documented the many ways in which undocumented workers also were placed in constant danger as they sought to enter the United States.²² As the talk in Washington of an international fence morphed into political reality, I believed my research might contribute to the planning and development of a virtual border fence designed to be secure and as reasonably safe as possible for all concerned.

I remained optimistic that a detailed description of my recent findings, presented within the context of my thirty-five years of borderland studies, might provide Honeywell engineers insights otherwise unavailable. My goal at Honeywell was to establish the requirements for a virtual fence that, on the one hand, would be a strong barrier to narcotrafficantes, drug smugglers, the coyotes, and international terrorists. That same research told me it was possible to develop that secure barrier and virtual fence in ways that would, on the other hand, maintain the safety and dignity of those seeking honest employment in this country without putting Border Patrol agents at risk.²³

It was first necessary to appreciate and consider the bravery and heroism of agents, something that frequently went unacknowledged. From my two years with agents patrolling the line I also was familiar with why it was so difficult, even when agents put their own lives at risk, to apprehend even a small percentage of those trying illegally to cross the border. Observing and interviewing undocumented workers, I was also informed by their fear, their physical exhaustion, and their human suffering: I had heard the cries of infants and children and seen the faces of women who believed that upon their arrest they would be sexually assaulted and/or killed.²⁴

Having witnessed successes and failures of the system and policies in place along the border, I was concerned that Honeywell would seek out high-tech engineering solutions that could be bolstered by misleading Border Patrol measurements of success, such as apprehension rates.²⁵ I was equally concerned that these engineering solutions would take a toll in human suffering for which, for whatever reasons, the engineers would not be concerned. In short, Honeywell’s solution to SBInet might be a glorious engineering feat for the ages, but one treating both agents of the U.S. Border Patrol and undocumented workers as expendable blips on a computer screen.

George had shaken my hand firmly when he met me at the Tampa airport the night before. A tall, handsome man in his late thirties, George sported short, blond hair in a faux military cut, expensive slacks and shirt, and a Bluetooth glued to his right ear. We were delayed in rush-hour traffic but were soon ensconced in George’s favorite restaurant overlooking the ocean. Over little parasol drinks after dinner we exchanged pleasantries as Larry, another Honeywell employee just in from Turkey, scanned me from head to toe. Larry was less than forthcoming about his own personal job history, leaving me to take at face value that he was in international security. I was left to assume Larry was one of those former CIA or military intelligence types who since 9/11 have become ubiquitous, popping up in the private sector and on university campuses where they teach courses in security studies.²⁶ Larry soon excused himself, and I never saw him again. Apparently he had assessed that I was no risk.

The next morning in the conference room, after Honeywell’s IT guy jump-started my antiquated software, I was finally able to ask a rudimentary question to those seated around me: How many of you have ever traveled to the Mexican border? No one spoke up, no hands were raised around the conference table. These decision makers, while champing at the bit to construct an airtight security system spanning more than two thousand miles, had never personally seen the low banks and steep gorges of the Rio Grande, or its islands and sandbars, or the formidable Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts, or the rugged mountain ranges. Nor had they ever walked through any of the border cities, towns, and villages.

Neither were any of them acquainted with the diverse populations on both sides of the border, nor did any of them have a fundamental understanding of the political and economic conditions in Central and Latin America that motivated illegal immigrants to travel thousands of miles just to reach the American border—a journey along which they are harassed, extorted, robbed, kidnapped, beaten, sexually assaulted, and killed, often by Mexican law enforcement officers.²⁷

No border fence was going to keep out all undocumented workers. No stationary structure would prove a match for human ingenuity and motivation. Illegal workers are, in fact, crucial to the welfare of many Mexican communities long since grown dependent upon remittances.²⁸ In addition, countless subsidiary jobs, such as that of tube wrangler, rely upon illegal crossers. Tube wranglers make their daily living selling inner tubes at a premium to illegal border crossers on the south side of the Río Bravo. After the tubes are left on the north side, following their one-way trip, the wranglers cautiously swim from one country to the other to retrieve them, reinflating the used tubes by means of unwieldy air tanks hidden in the riverbank cane.

Fig. 1.1 Cameron County levee with Border Patrol road before fence construction. Near the Rio Grande, Brownsville, Texas, 2009.

They then tie their tubes into long rafts and tug them back across to the Mexican shore to resell to the next customers to come along.²⁹

Stories among Border Patrol agents are already circulating about an enterprising group of Mexicans drug smugglers who build a steel ramp for a van or truck to span border barriers already in place. Then, before the authorities can get to the scene, they dismantle the ramp and move it to another site. For decades smuggling and employment related to it have been big business in Mexico.

I show photographs of U.S. Border Patrol agents in body armor posed with M-16s in front of an Econoline van filled with over a ton of marijuana, and I explain why these same agents are very worried they are about to take incoming fire from the south banks of the Rio Grande. I tell the Honeywell engineers, who have never spent five minutes in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, about the first dead worker I saw lying in the Valley weeds along State Highway 281 after a high-speed chase. Eight men had been stuffed into a 1991 Toyota Corolla by their coyote; three more were packed into the trunk. When the coyote at the wheel bailed out, a common practice, the car rolled into the highway median, and one of the undocumented workers in the front seat, an old man, panicked, jumped out of the car, and ran into oncoming traffic. When the first car hit the old man at full speed, the impact was so severe it flung his body fifty feet into the weeds at the side of the highway. The exact point where he was struck on State Highway 281 was marked by his left tennis shoe, out of which he literally had been slammed. Next to his tennis shoe was his upper dental plate.³⁰

And I tell them about the floater, a human corpse found in the Rio Grande, vividly discussed at the Border Patrol muster along with detailed photos of the bloated body. Identified as an amateur drug runner (amateur because he carried less than twenty pounds of marijuana in his knapsack), the body was eventually turned over to the Mexican authorities at the border for identification and burial by his family. Many bodies and body parts discovered are never identified.

I tell them also about the ropa usada, giant bales of used clothes smuggled into Mexico by the rental truckload, the tons of frozen chicken bound for turista restaurants in Mexican border cities, the avocados headed north, guns smuggled south, the Mexican prostitutes at the highway bars, all part of the endless goods and services smuggled back and forth across the Rio Grande year after year, decade after decade.³¹

And, last but not least, I tell them about the Mexican military and other armed groups that regularly cross with impunity into the United States.³²

I want these engineers, obviously impatient and itching to get out of here by early afternoon, to know about the forests of border cacti that can rip apart your arm, the boulders and the ravines that cause falls that can result in disability or surgery, the soaring temperatures that bring dehydration within forty-eight hours, the poisonous snakes, and the crying infants in the arms of trembling women—always the first apprehended when a group of undocumented workers runs for its freedom. I cannot forget the toddler tossed out by border carjackers and not discovered by Border Patrol agents for several hot summer days; the two agents who finally came upon his corpse first thought they were looking at an old doll strapped in a child’s car seat.³³

Since 1996, the first year that statistics of dead workers were collected, an average of more than four hundred illegal crossers have died each year attempting to cross the Mexican border into the United States.³⁴ I knew in fact these figures to be undercounts, because law enforcers never find all the bodies in this vast, unforgiving frontier. The ways, furthermore, in which the bodies of undocumented workers are counted or not counted in the collection of these statistics leaves much to the imagination: the old man struck by a passing motorist after the coyote bailed out on the Valley’s Highway 281 was never included among those who died. His death was not defined by the number crunchers as directly attributable to his illegal entry because the accident was fifteen miles from the border.³⁵

In recent years, I tell the executives around the conference table, there have been significant positive changes in the Border Patrol. Budget increases have been translated into newer, higher-quality equipment, including communications systems, boats, planes, drones, and agency computers. Yet American technology in place along the border is, I know from firsthand experience, still a dismal failure despite Border Patrol claims to the contrary.³⁶ Ground sensors, the foundation of the Border Patrol’s system of border security, are Vietnam-era trash. They simply do not work. Most determined undocumented workers still find ways to cross the border, their total numbers lessening only from a combination of economic recession and more agents. Not even the recession, however, stanched the mind-boggling flow of illegal immigrants and illegal drugs.³⁷ Honeywell faces formidable challenges in building what I suggest should be not only an effective border fence, but also a safe one.

We break for lunch. Several of the engineers are curious about my presentation; most are not. One of the curious sums it up in an aside: I didn’t know the Mexican border and the Border Patrol were so screwed up. While the group around the table is certainly competent and qualified as engineers with many years of corporate experience, they are not necessarily sensitive to the human implications or consequences of their products. Another Honeywell engineer provides a broader context in which to judge the group at the table: These guys here haven’t the slightest idea of what it’s like out there. They think they do, but they don’t.

After a quick, tasty lunch in the company cafeteria, I walk along the long corridors of the Honeywell plant to get a feel for the place. Passing by hundreds of workers behind glass walls, most dressed in sanitary white from head to toe, more than a few with white masks covering their faces, I have more questions than answers. The Honeywell men and women stand hunched over space-age optical devices or sit at tables next to small piles of chip boards on which they perform intricate tasks and operations. A few wave as I walk by, and I wave back.

George, the team leader, a take-charge kind of guy, after summing up my morning presentation demands that his team develop a formal business plan. He writes on the left side of the white board the sources of the information necessary to bring a superior security system, the virtual border fence, to market. Various team members talk about value, then much more about marketing the security product.

Jason, from Marketing, waxes eloquently in business-school speak on off-the-shelf Honeywell products and how to integrate them with existing technologies. Honeywell, according to Jason, should be able in a very short time to get it up and running in the field. All that then remains is to tweak it and work out the bugs.

As specific tactics and solutions unfold around the table, I have no intention of remaining silent. I am not a member of this team, only a short-term outside consultant. As such, Honeywell hired me to provide my expertise and honest opinions about the border fence. I do not give one hoot about corporate protocol, deference to higher-ups, and all the other restraints by which the full-time employees, regardless of their stature within Honeywell, might feel constrained. So I remind the team that the real experts are not the engineers sitting around the table in Clearwater, Florida, but the federal agents who spend their careers patrolling the line, along with the millions of undocumented workers who successfully cross the Mexican border time after time.

Okay, says one of the engineers from Government Relations who listens carefully to what I have to say. No problem. We’ll buy us a Border Patrol agent. (Honeywell could always hire an agent or former agent as a consultant. But all Border Patrol agents are not carbon copies of each other, nor are they trained to question those who pay their salaries.)

A robust discussion of other marketing and pricing concerns immediately follows. Honeywell must, in order to pay its one hundred thousand employees, develop and manufacture products that sell for no less than $20 million a pop. Otherwise, they lose money on the deal. (Later that night, one of the engineers tells me, Simple economies of scale. We’re too big in some ways, too small in others. Our start-up costs are high. We’re slower and more expensive than some of our small competitors. So we have to be very careful about whether this border fence project is going to be big enough for us to make a profit.)

Suddenly the Clearwater plant manager, so far silent as a clam, says in a jolly voice, Anybody want to see our new secret weapon? It’s right outside the door and across the parking lot. I certainly would like to see Honeywell’s new secret weapon. But first it is time for the team to watch, according to George, some simulations the guys at the Virtual Lab in Albuquerque have been working on for the last six months. The large screen at the end of the narrow room comes to life as a childlike outline of a missile silo somewhere in the Midwest comes into focus. The silo, housing one of hundreds of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) left over from the Cold War, is nuked to the nines and ready to blow. Honeywell’s task is to develop security software to crush any threat to these dinosaur missiles, thereby avoiding a radioactive nightmare in our own backyard.

Played out in images resembling the first generation of video Pong (but without the annoying sound effects that drove a generation of parents crazy), a pickup truck filled with local yokels stumbles by accident onto an ICBM silo site. Honeywell’s innovative technology quickly determines that the intruders are beer-guzzling nimrods from Nebraska. However, when a vehicle carrying Taliban terrorists crosses Honeywell’s invisible security screen, heavily armed rent-a-cops quickly save the day.

One of the engineers sitting next to me leans over to fill in the missing details.