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Contention 1: Harms
Border surveillance produces a site of perpetual warfare
Miller 13 (Todd, has researched and written about US-Mexican border
issues for more than 10 years. He has worked on both sides of the border for
BorderLinks in Tucson, Arizona, and Witness for Peace in Oaxaca, Mexico. He
now writes on border and immigration issues for NACLA Report on the
Americas and its blog Border Wars, among other places, Surveillance Surge
on the Border: How to Turn the US-Mexican Border into a War Zone, Truth
Out, 7-11-13, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/17513-surveillance-surgeon-the-border-how-to-turn-the-us-mexican-border-into-a-war-zone)//MJ
The first thing I did at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix this March was climb the brown explosionresistant tower, 30 feet high and 10 feet wide, directly in the center of the spacious room that holds this
to future border-security budgets thanks to Congresss sequester, the vast Phoenix Convention Center
hall -- where the defense and security industries strut their stuff for law enforcement and the Department
of Homeland Security (DHS) -- told quite a different story. Clearly, the expanding global industry of border
security wasnt about to go anywhere. It was as if the milling crowds of business people, government
officials, and Border Patrol agents sensed that they were about to be truly in the money thanks to
immigration reform, no matter what version of it did or didnt pass Congress. And it looks like they were
absolutely right. All around me in that tower were poster-sized fiery photos demonstrating ways it could
eye could see surrounded by Disneyesque fake desert shrubbery, barbed wire, sand bags, and desert
camouflage. Throw in the products on display and you could almost believe that you were wandering
through a militarized border zone with a Hollywood flair. To an awed potential customer, a salesman in a
suit and tie demonstrated a mini-drone that fits in your hand like a Frisbee. It seemed to catch the
technological fetishism that makes Expo the extravaganza it is. Later I asked him what such a drone would
be used for. To see whats over the next hill, he replied. Until you visit the yearly Expo, its easy enough
the U.S. borderlands are today ground zero for the rise, growth, and
spread of a domestic surveillance state. On June 27th, the Senate passed the Border
Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act . Along
to forget that
with the claim that it offers a path to citizenship to millions of the undocumented living in the United States
state whose mission is already moving well beond those borderlands. Calling
this immigration reform is like calling the National Security Agencys
expanding global surveillance system a domestic telecommunications
upgrade. Its really all about the country that the United States is becoming
-- one of the police and the policed. But whatever happens, its time to stop
thinking of all this as immigration reform. It represents what may be the
most intense concentration of the surveillance state in a single location ever
witnessed -- a place where the Constitution has an asterisk, which means that
anything goes and dystopian worlds of all sorts can be invented. The Los Angeles
Times has written that, if passed, the bill would also be a boost to defense contractors and an economic
stimulus for border communities, creating thousands of jobs that could raise home prices and spur
consumer spending around border security stations. It sounds like Keynesian economics, but of a whole
different sort. In a world where basic services are being cut, an emerging policing apparatus in the
borderlands is flourishing. As Mattea Kramer and Chris Hellman reported at TomDispatch in February, since
September 11, 2001, the United States has spent $791 billion on homeland security alone, an inflation-
Numerous other operations have been put into place in the U.S.-Mexico
border region. All have had similar deadly impacts. Despite the death toll, the U.S.
government continues to pursue enforcement operations with great vigor. Indeed, Congress
consistently enacts proposals designed to bolster border enforcement, with
such proposals often representing the only items of political consensus when
it comes to immigration reform. Operation Gatekeeper demonstrates the U.S.
governments callous indifference to the human suffering caused by its
aggressive border enforcement policy. In the words of one informed
commentator, [t]he real tragedy of [Operation] Gatekeeper . . . is
the direct link . . . to the staggering rise in the number of deaths
among border crossers. [The U.S. government] has forced these crossers
to attempt entry in areas plagued by extreme weather conditions and rugged
terrain that [the U.S. government] knows to present mortal danger .98 In
planning Operation Gatekeeper, the U.S. government knew that its strategy
would risk many lives but proceeded nonetheless . As another observer concludes,
Operation Gatekeeper, as an enforcement immigration policy
financed and politically supported by the U.S. government, flagrantly
violates international human rights because this policy was
deliberately formulated to maximize the physical risks of Mexican
migrant workers, thereby ensuring that hundreds of them would
die.99 Apparently, the government rationalized the deaths of migrants as collateral damage in the
war on illegal immigration. Even before the 1990s, the Border Patrol had a
reputation for committing human rights abuses against immigrants and U.S.
citizens of Mexican ancestry.100 Created to police the U.S.-Mexican border,
the Border Patrol has historically been plagued by reports of brutality,
shootings, beatings, and killings.101 Amnesty International, American Friends Service
Committee, and Human Rights Watch have all issued reports documenting recent human rights abuses by
the Border Patrol.102 Migrants face other perils on their journey through the U.S.-Mexico border region.
Robberies,
murders, and rapes of immigrants are commonplace. Lawlessness
reigns along the U.S.-Mexican border. Absent serious reform efforts,
nothing seems likely to change.
Criminals frequently prey upon unlawful entrants seeking to evade border inspection.
networks that emerged in response to the federal governments efforts during Prohibitions ban on the
commerce in alcohol. Criminal elements grew and asserted control over a new lucrative industry. But it
conditions of deprivation and despair. Their captors may threaten their families. Perpetrators exert near
total control over victims, creating a situation of dependency. Victims come to believe they cannot
They are terrified of their captors but also fear law enforcement, a
fear often based on bad experiences with police and other government
officials in their countries of origin.105 Today, in no small part because of the
operation of the immigration laws, cases of involuntary servitude regularly
make the news.106
leave. . . .
across the entire spectrum of migration and travel. In the growing number of contexts in which
immigration control activities now take place, enforcement actors engage in extensive
collection, storage, analysis, and dissemination of personal information, in
order to identify individuals, screen them and authorize their activities,
enable monitoring and control over their travel, and share information with
other actors who bear immigration control responsibilities. Initially deployed for
traditional immigration enforcement purposes, and expanded largely in the name of security, these
surveillance technologies and processes are qualitatively remaking the nature
of immigration governance, as a number of examples illustrate.
Structural violence is the largest proximate cause of warcreates priming that psychologically structures escalation
Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 4
(Prof of Anthropology @ Cal-Berkely; Prof of Anthropology @ UPenn)
(Nancy and Philippe, Introduction: Making Sense of Violence, in Violence in War and
Peace, pg. 19-22)
This large and at first sight messy Part VII is central to this anthologys thesis. It encompasses everything from the routinized,
bureaucratized, and utterly banal violence of children dying of hunger and maternal despair in Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes,
Chapter 33) to elderly African Americans dying of heat stroke in Mayor Dalys version of US apartheid in Chicagos South Side
(Klinenberg, Chapter 38) to the racialized class hatred expressed by British Victorians in their olfactory disgust of the smelly
working classes (Orwell, Chapter 36). In these readings violence is located in the symbolic and social structures that
overdetermine and allow the criminalized drug addictions, interpersonal bloodshed, and racially patterned incarcerations that
characterize the US inner city to be normalized (Bourgois, Chapter 37 and Wacquant, Chapter 39). Violence also takes the form
of class, racial, political self-hatred and adolescent self-destruction (Quesada, Chapter 35), as well as of useless (i.e. preventable),
important, it interrupts the voyeuristic tendencies of violence studies that risk publicly humiliating the powerless who are often
forced into complicity with social and individual pathologies of power because suffering is often a solvent of human integrity and
dignity. Thus, in this anthology we are positing a violence continuum comprised of a multitude of small wars and invisible
genocides (see also Scheper- Hughes 1996; 1997; 2000b) conducted in the normative social spaces of public schools, clinics,
emergency rooms, hospital wards, nursing homes, courtrooms, public registry offices, prisons, detention centers, and public
morgues. The
violence continuum also refers to the ease with which humans are capable of
reducing the socially vulnerable into expendable nonpersons and assuming the license - even
the duty - to kill, maim, or soul-murder. We realize that in referring to a violence and a genocide continuum we are
flying in the face of a tradition of genocide studies that argues for the absolute uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust and for
vigilance with respect to restricted purist use of the term genocide itself (see Kuper 1985; Chaulk 1999; Fein 1990; Chorbajian
1999). But we hold an opposing and alternative view that, to the contrary, it
possibility that war crimes are merely ordinary, everyday crimes of public consent applied
systematically and dramatically in the extreme context of war. Consider the parallel uses of rape during
peacetime and wartime, or the family resemblances between the legalized violence of US immigration and naturalization border
raids on illegal aliens versus the US government- engineered genocide in 1938, known as the Cherokee Trail of Tears.
Peacetime crimes suggests that everyday forms of state violence make a certain kind of domestic peace possible. Internal
stability is purchased with the currency of peacetime crimes, many of which take the form of professionally applied strangleholds. Everyday forms of state violence during peacetime make a certain kind of domestic peace possible. It is an easy-toidentify peacetime crime that is usually maintained as a public secret by the government and by a scared or apathetic populace.
Most subtly, but no less politically or structurally, the phenomenal growth in the United States of a new military, postindustrial
prison industrial complex has taken place in the absence of broad-based opposition, let alone collective acts of civil disobedience.
The public consensus is based primarily on a new mobilization of an old fear of the mob, the
mugger, the rapist, the Black man, the undeserving poor. How many public executions of
mentally deficient prisoners in the United States are needed to make life feel more secure for
the affluent? What can it possibly mean when incarceration becomes the normative socializing experience for ethnic
minority youth in a society, i.e., over 33 percent of young African American men (Prison Watch 2002). In the end it is
essential that we recognize the existence of a genocidal capacity among otherwise goodenough humans and that we need to exercise a defensive hypervigilance to the less dramatic,
permitted, and even rewarded everyday acts of violence that render participation in genocidal
acts and policies possible (under adverse political or economic conditions), perhaps more easily than we would like to
recognize. Under the violence continuum we include, therefore, all expressions of radical social
exclusion, dehumanization, depersonal- ization, pseudospeciation, and reification which
normalize atrocious behavior and violence toward others. A constant self-mobilization for
alarm, a state of constant hyperarousal is, perhaps, a reasonable response to Benjamins view
of late modern history as a chronic state of emergency (Taussig, Chapter 31). We are trying to recover here
the classic anagogic thinking that enabled Erving Goffman, Jules Henry, C. Wright Mills, and Franco Basaglia among other midtwentieth-century radically critical thinkers, to perceive the symbolic and structural relations, i.e., between inmates and patients,
between concentration camps, prisons, mental hospitals, nursing homes, and other total institutions. Making
that
decisive move to recognize the continuum of violence allows us to see the capacity and the
willingness - if not enthusiasm - of ordinary people, the practical technicians of the social
consensus, to enforce genocidal-like crimes against categories of rubbish people. There is no
primary impulse out of which mass violence and genocide are born, it is ingrained in the
common sense of everyday social life. The mad, the differently abled, the mentally vulnerable
have often fallen into this category of the unworthy living, as have the very old and infirm, the
sick-poor, and, of course, the despised racial, religious, sexual, and ethnic groups of the
moment. Erik Erikson referred to pseudo- speciation as the human tendency to classify some individuals or social groups as
less than fully human - a prerequisite to genocide and one that is carefully honed during the unremark- able peacetimes that
precede the sudden, seemingly unintelligible outbreaks of mass violence .
(1977, 1996) means by symbolic violence, the violence that is often nus-recognized for something else, usually something
good. Everyday violence is similar to what Taussig (1989) calls terror as usual. All these terms are meant to reveal a public
secret - the hidden links between violence in war and violence in peace, and between war crimes and peace-time crimes.
Bourdieu (1977) finds domination and violence in the least likely places - in courtship and marriage, in the exchange of gifts, in
systems of classification, in style, art, and culinary taste- the various uses of culture. Violence, Bourdieu insists, is everywhere in
social practice. It is misrecognized because its very everydayness and its familiarity render it invisible. Lacan identifies
rneconnaissance as the prerequisite of the social. The exploitation of bachelor sons, robbing them of autonomy, independence,
and progeny, within the structures of family farming in the European countryside that Bourdieu escaped is a case in point
(Bourdieu, Chapter 42; see also Scheper-Hughes, 2000b; Favret-Saada, 1989). Following Gramsci, Foucault, Sartre, Arendt, and
other modern theorists of power-vio- lence, Bourdieu treats direct aggression and physical violence as a crude, uneconomical
mode of domination; it is less efficient and, according to Arendt (1969), it is certainly less legitimate. While power and symbolic
domination are not to be equated with violence - and Arendt argues persuasively that violence is to be understood as a failure of
power - violence, as we are presenting it here, is more than simply the expression of illegitimate physical force against a person or
group of persons. Rather, we need to understand violence as encompassing all forms of controlling processes (Nader 1997b)
that assault basic human freedoms and individual or collective survival. Our task is to recognize these gray zones of violence
which are, by definition, not obvious. Once again, the point of bringing into the discourses on genocide everyday, normative
experiences of reification, depersonalization, institutional confinement, and acceptable death is to help answer the question: What
makes mass violence and genocide possible? In this volume we are suggesting that
to rethink-politically,
violence." By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs
gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an
attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is customarily conceived as an event
or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility.
We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor
instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a
range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational , narrative, and
strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence. Climate change, the thawing
cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying
oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable
representational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively. The long
dyings-the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological that result from war's toxic aftermaths
or climate change-are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory. Had
imaginatively, and theoretically-what I call "slow
Summers advocated invading Africa with weapons of mass destruction, his proposal would have fallen under conventional
definitions of violence and been perceived as a military or even an imperial invasion. Advocating
invading countries
with mass forms of slow-motion toxicity, however, requires rethinking our accepted assumptions
of violence to include slow violence. Such a rethinking requires that we complicate
conventional assumptions about violence as a highly visible act that is newsworthy because it is event
focused, time bound, and body bound. We need to account for how the temporal dispersion of slow
violence affects the way we perceive and respond to a variety of social afflictions-from domestic abuse to
posttraumatic stress and, in particular, environmental calamities. A major challenge is representational: how to devise arresting
stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects. Crucially, slow
The Control
The biopolitics of borders justifies the management of life
and death, pushing immigrants to extreme situations and
insurmountable danger
Ajana 05 (Btihaj, Lecturer in Culture, Digital Humanities & Creative
Industries Education Lead (Digital Humanities, Surveillance, and Biopolitics),
http://www.sociology.org/content/2005/tier1/ajana_biopolitics.pdf) Franzy
The biopolitics of borders is precisely the management of that
waiting-to-live, the management of that non-life (the waiting-to-live and the
non-life of those who are forcibly placed in detention centres), and at times, it is the management of
forgrantedness of institutional racism, and the inscription of modes of exclusionary differentiations in many
occluded but inevitable and thus constitutive violence (Zylinska, 2004: 530); a symbolic violence
(manifested, for instance, in the act of naming as Butler (in Zylinska, 2004) and Derrida argue asylum
seekers, detainees, deportees, illegal immigrants, etc) as well as a material one (for example, placing
asylum seekers and illegal immigrants in detention centres), attesting to that epistemic impulse to
resuscitate the leftover of late modernity and the residual of disciplinary powers that seek to eliminate and
ostracise the unwanted-other through the insidious refashioning of the final solution for the asylum and
immigration question. Such an image has been captured by Braidotti (1994: 20): Once, landing at Paris
International Airport, I saw all of these in between areas occupied by immigrants from various parts of the
former French empire; they had arrived, but were not allowed entry, so they camped in these luxurious
transit zones, waiting. The dead, panoptical heart of the new European Community will scrutinize them and
The
biopolitics of borders stands as the quintessential domain for this
kind of sorting, this kind of racism pervading Western socio-political
imaginary and permeating the rhetoric of national and territorial
sovereignty despite its monolithic use of euphemism. It is precisely this task
not allow them in easily: it is crowded at the margins and non-belonging can be hell.
of sorting and this act of fragmenting that contemporary modes of border security and surveillance are
designed making the management of misery and misfortune a potentially profitable activity (Rose,
1999: 260) and evaporating the political into a perpetual state of technicism (Coward, 1999: 18) where
control and security are resting upon vast investments in new information and communications
technologies in order to filter access and minimise, if not eradicate, the infiltration and riskiness of the
unwanted. For instance, in chapter six of the White Paper, Secure Borders, Safe Haven (2002), the UK
government outlines a host of techniques and strategies aimed at controlling borders and tightening
security including the use of Gamma X-ray scanners, heartbeat sensors, and millimetric wave imaging to
where physical attributes such as fingerprints, DNA patterns, retina, iris, face, voice, etc are used to
collect, process, and store biometric samples onto a database for subsequent usage during the
recognition phase in which these data are matched against the real-time data input in order to verify
identity. Authorities have been keen on integrating biometric identifiers into ID cards and passports as a
means of strengthening security, enhancing modes of identification and facilitating the exchange of data
between different countries. Further application of biometrics in information sharing can be seen in the EUwide database EURODAC (Koslowski, 2003: 11), used to store the fingerprints of asylum applicants in order
to prevent multiple applications in several member states or what is referred to as the so-called asylum
shopping. Added to that, the employment of a broad array of private actors (employers, banks, hospitals,
educational institutions, marriage register offices, etc) to perform the role of gatekeepers (Lahav, in
Koslowski, 2003: 5) (or more accurately, borderkeepers) and reinforce immigration controls from within
the internal and ubiquitous borders, constituting a multiplicity of points for the collection, inscription,
accumulation and distribution of information relevant to the management of risk (Rose, 1999: 260), and
the administration of life and death.
This surveillance causes two forms of biopolitical control in the form of extreme order
and extreme exclusion.
that may emerge out of the mixing of bodies, be these living or dead. The second organisational form is
that of the treatment of the leper which, unlike the plague and its segmentations, functions by means of
separation and exclusion of the leper from the healthy community through
an observing supervisor
placed in a central tower and who can see without being seen, serves as a compelling
paradigm for the kind of surveillance that is intrinsic to the compound
power of exclusion and individualization . As Elden (2002: 244) explains, the model
of the Panopticon is where the space of exclusion (of the figurative leper) is rigidly
regimented and controlled (as is the case with the figurative plague victim). The idea that
visibility is a trap (Foucault, 1975: 200) (i.e. the presence of the tall tower at the centre does not
(1975: 200). Benthams utilitarian plan for a prison which is based on
necessarily mean the supervisor is watching), that collective individualities are overridden by separated
individualities (the treatment of lepers as a plague victims the trinity of segmentation, individualisation
devoid of other disciplinary modes of power but it is also a machine that could be used to carry out
experiments, to alter behaviour, to train or correct individuals (Foucault, 1975: 203) within a variety of
institutional spaces, ranging from prisons to schools, hospitals, factories, etc. It is, hence, the way in which
both conservative and liberal critics. I suggest that these were never self-evident attributes that people
replacing the discriminatory national origins quota system with preferences that were based mainly on
family ties. lawmakers expected that "the great bulk of immigrants henceforth will not merely hail from the
same parent countries as our present citizens' but will be their closer reletives.w In other words,
although openly racist provisions were removed, the law was nonetheless
intended to uphold the virtual exclusion of immigrants of color . Reimer's argument
echoes the decades of research on equal access to education and employment, which shows that
critically evaluate how the written materials on which we draw are part of, and therefore help to reproduce,
the disciplinary apparatus that subjectifies immigrants. Equally, methods for reading official documents
against the grain, utilized by scholars such as those engaged in subaltern studies, may prove to have great
relevance for immigration scholarship too.
The
use of these non-specific yet all-inclusive tags also serves to dehumanise and
depersonalise a highly abstracted Other . In turn, depersonalisation allows social
Good/Bad and Self/Other binaries is the notion that opposing identities are relatively homogenous.
stereotyping, group cohesiveness and collective action to occur. The construction of absolutist discourses
of this kind are an important vehicle for understanding conflict: [a]lthough generally described as
been quoted as saying we're on the hunt...got the evildoers on the run...we're bringing them to justice
and they kill without mercy because they hate our freedoms... (Sample, 2006, The White House, 2001).
The emotive language used in speech acts of this kind are designed to elicit
in-group distinctiveness and cohesion through the negation and
disparagement of the out-group (terrorist organisations). The use of terms evil doers,
them, and they are interesting however in the sense that they refer to an enemy that extends beyond
the confines of terrorist organisations like Al Qaeda. 7. A clear and simplified depiction of good (us) and
By
framing their conflict within a discourse which accentuates a struggle
between good and evil, both religious terrorist groups and their Western-led protagonists,
view non-members of either camp to be infidels or apostates (Cronin, 2003) and
immoral or fanatical respectively. The maintenance of such a discourse can be
seen as serving a dual purpose; namely, to dehumanise the respective victi ms on both
sides of the conflict, and sustain in-group and out-group identities .
evil (them) that serves many functions (Brown and Gaertner, 2001; Coleman, 2004, p.18). 5.17
The plan
The United States federal government should
substantially curtail its surveillance of the United States
Mexico border.
Solvency
Easier immigration solves a myriad of problems deaths,
racism, technological competitiveness, and national
security
Johnson 07 (Kevin R., Kevin R. Johnson is Mabie-Apallas Professor of
Public Interest Law and Chicano/a Studies at the University of California Davis
, Opening the Floodgates: Why America Needs to Rethink its Immigration
Policies, http://nyupress.org/books/9780814743096/) Franzy
The presence of undocumented immigrants in the United States is a
plain reality that needs to be addressed. Open borders would provide
a pragmatic, long-term solution to this nations undocumentedimmigrant and related immigration problems . Freeing up migration
through a liberal admissions policy would recognize that the enforcement of
closed borders cannot stifle the strong, perhaps irresistible, economic, social,
and political pressures that fuel todays international migration . Border
controls, as currently configured in the United States, simply waste
billions of dollars and result in thousands of deaths. They have not
ended, and cannot end, unlawful immigration . Like the United Statess
failed prohibition of the alcohol trade in the early twentieth century, effective
enforcement of the immigration laws to halt undocumented immigration has
proven virtually impossible. To make matters worse, border enforcement
shares many of Prohibitions negative side effects: increased criminal activity,
abusive law enforcement practices, and a caseload crisis in the courts. An
inability to enforce the laws, whether they prohibit alcohol or dramatically
restrict immigration, undermines and damages the legitimacy and moral
force of the law. Elimination of border controls would help eliminate these
costs by making the laws more realistic. As summarized in Chapter 2, history shows that
the cyclical fear of a flood of immigrants of different races destroying U.S. society often reaches fever
pitch. These nativist outbursts have never been justified .
Samuel Huntington, have complained that current levels of immigration have made the assimilation of
immigrants difficult.9 However, the United States has a long history of successfully integrating immigrants
into U.S. society. The waves of immigration in the early twentieth century were, as a percentage of the U.S.
population, larger than the current levels of immigration.10 Over the course of the twentieth century, the
nation slowly but surely adjusted. Unassimilable
borders would be the norm. Easy, not difficult, entry would be the result. A less dramatic change in the law
would be to allow labor migration within the nations that are a party to the North American Free Trade
Agreement. Over the past thirty years, a regional common market, which includes labor migration between
and among the member states, has evolved in the European Union. A similar labor migration agreement
among the NAFTA nations would recognize that migration from Mexico, perhaps Latin America generally, is
Globalization,
technological advances, and changing conceptions of the nation-state require
serious study of new approaches to immigration and border controls.17
Besides limiting the abuses and injuries that enforcement of the current
immigration laws cause immigrants and U.S. citizens, a system of easy entry
promises many benefitseconomic and otherwiseto the United States.
Importantly, allowing free labor migration would permit the U.S. government
to effectively and efficiently focus enforcement efforts on protecting national
security and public safety, a high priority after the terrorist acts of September
11, 2001.
inevitable,16 and must be managed responsibly, efficiently, and safely.
A possible false alarm from a ground sensor, and faulty radio communications, may have
contributed to the death of Border Patrol Agen t Nicholas Ivie in a friendly-fire
incident Oct. 2. As is often the case with sensor alarms, agents didnt detect
anyone but each other when they arrived . Ivie, responding separately, apparently
mistook the other agents for smugglers and opened fire . One of the agents
shot and killed him.
But false alarms are nothing new.
They were supposed to be replaced as part of the $1.1 billion Secure Border Initiative, a massive 2006
effort to boost security at the border. But most of the money was spent on a problematic network of hightech towers, known as SBInet.
The towers, to be equipped with video and infrared cameras and radar, were to cover the whole border. By
the time Homeland Security pulled the plug in 2010, after a host of problems, the contractor, Boeing, had
completed only 15 towers covering a 72-mile stretch of Arizonas border. Most of the old ground sensors
with their false-alarm problems remained.
In January 2011, Homeland Security launched another initiative, the Arizona Border Surveillance
Technology Plan.
That plan called for spending $1.5 billion over 10 years to integrate the SBInet towers, build new camera
towers, buy trucks loaded with surveillance gear and replace 525 ground sensors in Arizona with more
sophisticated military models. The military sensors use a combination of technologies that can distinguish
more accurately between, say, a four-legged coyote and the two-legged kind, and can even detect the
direction of travel.
However, under the new technology plan, Arizona agents have received:
Twenty-three hand-held thermal-imaging devices (like night-vision binoculars).
Two scope trucks modified Ford 150 4x4 trucks with day and night cameras mounted on retractable
poles.
Twelve agent portable surveillance systems, which include radar, video and infrared video sensors and
can be carried in a box and set up on tripods.
Drone problems
Drones, too, have proven problematic. So far, CBP has acquired 10 drones, all versions of the
Predator B made by General Atomics, for about $18 million apiece. CBPs unarmed drones carry radar,
video and infrared sensors.
Theoretically, the drones can fly for up to 20 hours at a time. But last year, according to CBP, the drones
Theyre on the ground most of the time for lack of funding, said Adam Isacson, a regional security-policy
analyst for the Washington Office on Latin America, a human-rights organization that studies the effects of
U.S. policies on Latin America. They cost $3,234 an hour to operate. They havent had the budget for
maintenance or crews.
CBP also didnt have enough operational support equipment at the airfields
where the drones are based, and didnt prioritize missions effectively, the inspector general
found all findings with which CBP concurred. Flight hours last year rose 30 percent from the year before,
to 5,700, but were still well below half the target hours. Budget cuts this year because of the congressional
sequester are likely to further limit flight hours, Isacson said.
The drones are sensitive to high winds and thunderstorms . They face Federal Aviation
Administration flight restrictions because they are less able than manned aircraft to detect other aircraft
and avoid collisions.
At a Senate hearing in March, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., cited reports that DHS
has customized
its drone fleet to carry out domestic surveillance missions such as identifying civilians
carrying guns ... that fly in the face of civil liberties. We must ask whether the trade-off in
terms of border security is worth the privacy sacrifice.
But CBP officials have said they believe FAA concerns and other issues can be addressed, and that drones
can help increase surveillance wherever its most needed.
More coordination
In practice,
Eight aerostats, or tethered radar blimps, that CBP is taking over from the military, cant be
flown in high winds, and the line-of-sight radar makes them less effective in
rugged, mountainous areas, which is much of the Tucson Sector. In May 2011, an aerostat
crashed in a Sierra Vista neighborhood after coming loose in 50-mile-an-hour wind gusts.
CBP limits the use of its 16
Blackhawk helicopters because the high rate at which they guzzle fuel makes
them very expensive to operate, according to pilots; and CBP budget documents confirm plans to
temporarily ground nine of the 16 Blackhawks next year pending enough money for renovations.
The 16 workhorse P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft are, on average, 42 years old. Refurbishing costs $28
million apiece.
But the bigger issue is a lack of coordination in fitting all of the pieces together and making effective use of
the data they provide, said Rick Van Schoik, director of the North American Center for Transborder Studies
at Arizona State University in Phoenix. Its still hard for CBP to figure out what we get out of all these
billions that have been spent, he said, which hampers planning for the future.
the border security regime, and in the case of the US-VISIT, to the entire mobile
population of border-crossers.
In addition to an extended examination at the border, the US-VISIT special registration program continues
the work of domestic monitoring of high-risk visitors. Aliens are initially fingerprinted and photographed at
the border. They must report any change in their employment, schooling, or residence details to the
government within ten days, and must also report in person to an BCIS official after one month and one
year, where they are interviewed and are compared to the records of their fingerprints and photograph,
after which their are also recorded. The function of the program is to define, regulate, and identify foreign
visitors in the country. While
Do your own
screening and profiling. You want to look into their eyes. You can tell a lot
about people by looking in their eyes. Are they shifty? Are they nervous?
terrorist attacks suggested: You want to take a good look at who's getting on board.
(Sloan, 2002). This is epitomized in the campaign slogan: Don't be afraid, be ready.9 We would argue
that the campaign in fact urges citizens to be afraid in an economy of danger .
Simply put, buying duct tape and extra water does not attack the roots of global terrorismrather it places
American citizens in the position of continuous threat against which they can only be ready to victims. The
primary functions of this public campaign are to distract the populace from the external war on terror
(which seems unable to reach its goalswitness the absence of Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden) and