William “Drew” Dodds, the salesperson for StrongWatch, a
Tucson-based company, is at the top of his game when he describes
developments on the southern border of the United States in football
terms. In his telling, that boundary is the line of scrimmage, and the
technology his company is trying to sell -- a mobile surveillance system
named Freedom-On-The-Move, a camera set atop a retractable mast
outfitted in the bed of a truck and maneuvered with an Xbox controller
-- acts like a “roving linebacker.”
As Dodds describes it, unauthorized migrants and drug traffickers
often cross the line of scrimmage undetected. At best, they are seldom
caught until the “last mile,” far from the boundary line. His
surveillance system, he claims, will cover a lot more of that ground in
very little time and from multiple angles. It will become the
border-enforcement equivalent of New York Giants’ linebacking great,
Lawrence Taylor.
To listen to Dodds, an ex-Marine -- Afghanistan and Iraq, 2001-2004
-- with the hulking physique of a linebacker himself, is to experience a
new worldview being constructed on the run. Even a decade or so ago,
it might have seemed like a mad dream from the American fringe. These
days, his all-the-world’s-a-football-field vision seemed perfectly
mainstream inside the brightly-lit convention hall in Phoenix, Arizona,
where the seventh annual Border Security Expo
took place this March. Dodds was just one of hundreds of salespeople
peddling their border-enforcement products and national security wares,
and StrongWatch but one of more than 100 companies scrambling for a
profitable edge in an exploding market.
Vivid as he is, Dodds is speaking a new corporate language embedded
in an ever-more powerful universe in which the need to build up
“boundary enforcement” is accepted, even celebrated, rather than
debated. It’s a world where billions of dollars are potentially at
stake, and one in which nothing is more important than creating,
testing, and even flaunting increasingly sophisticated and expensive
technologies meant for border patrol and social control, without serious
thought as to what they might really portend.
The War on Terror on the Border
Phoenix was an especially appropriate place for Border Security Expo.
After all, the Arizona-Mexico border region is Ground Zero for the development of an immigration enforcement apparatus which soon enough may travel from the southern border to a neighborhood near you.
The sold-out convention hall was abuzz with energy befitting an
industry whose time has come. Wandering its aisles, you could sense the
excitement, the sound of money being spent, the cacophony of hundreds
of voices boosting product, the synergy of a burgeoning marketplace of
ideas and dreams. General Dynamics, FLIR thermal imaging, and Raytheon
banners hung from the vast ceiling, competing for eyeballs with the
latest in mini-surveillance blimps. NEANY Inc.’s unmanned aerial drones
and their water-borne equivalents sat on a thick red carpet next to
desert-camouflaged trailer headquarters.
At various exhibits, mannequins dressed in camo and sporting guns
with surveillance gizmos hanging off their helmets seemed as if they
might walk right out of the exhibition hall and take over the sprawling
city of Phoenix with brute force. Little imaginable for your futuristic
fortressed border was missing from the hall. There were even
ready-to-eat pocket sandwiches (with a three-year shelf life), and Brief
Relief plastic urine bags. A stream of uniformed Border Patrol,
military, and police officials moved from booth to booth alongside men
in suits in what the sole protester outside the convention center called
a “mall of death.”
If there was anything that caught the control mania at the heart of
this expo, it was a sign behind the DRS Technologies booth, which
offered this promise: “You Draw the Line and We’ll Help You Secure It.”
And what better place to express such a sentiment than Phoenix, the seat
of Maricopa County, where “America’s toughest sheriff,” Joe Arpaio (now
being sued by the Justice Department), regularly swept through
neighborhoods on a search for poor people of color who looked like they
might have just slipped across the line dividing the United States from
Mexico.
Dodds and I stood a little more than 100 miles from that border,
which has seen a staggering enforcement build-up over the last 20 years.
It’s distinctly a seller's market. StrongWatch is typical. The
company, Dodds told me, was hoping for a fat contract for its border
technology. After all, everyone knew that the Department of Homeland
Security (DHS) was about to issue
a new request for proposals to build its latest version of a “virtual
wall” along that border -- not actual fencing, but a barrier made up of
the latest in surveillance technology, including towers, cameras,
sensors, and radar.
In January 2011, DHS had cancelled
its previous attempt, known as SBInet, and the multi-billion dollar
contract to the Boeing Company that went with it. Complaints were that
the costly and often-delayed technological barrier was not properly
tailored to the rugged terrain of the borderlands, and that it had
trouble distinguishing animals from humans.
But the continued fortification of the border (and the profits that
accompany it) caught only one aspect of the convention’s reality. After
all, the Arizona portion of the U.S.-Mexican border has not only become
Ground Zero for every experiment in immigration enforcement and drug
interdiction, but also the incubator, testing site, showcase, and
staging ground for ever newer versions of border-enforcement technology
that, sooner or later, are sure to be applied globally.
As that buzzing convention floor made clear, the anything-goes
approach to immigration enforcement found in Arizona -- home to SB1070,
the infamous anti-immigrant law now before the Supreme Court
-- has generated interest from boundary-militarizers elsewhere in the
country and the world. An urge for zero-tolerance-style Arizona borders
is spreading fast, as evidenced by the convention’s clientele. In
addition to U.S. Border Patrol types, attendees came from law
enforcement outfits and agencies nationwide, and from 18 countries
around the world, including Israel and Russia.
In theory, the Expo had nothing to do with SB1070, but the
organizers' choice of controversial Arizona governor Jan Brewer as
keynote speaker could be seen as an endorsement of the laissez-faire
climate in the state. It is, in other words, the perfect place to
develop and even test future technology on real people.
Brewer first assured convention-goers
that the “immigration issue isn’t about hate or skin color… it’s about
securing the border and keeping Americans safe.” That out of the way,
she promptly launched into one of her usual tirades, blasting the
federal government for not securing the border. "America's failure to
understand this problem at a national level and to deal with it,” she
insisted, “has haunted borders like mine for decades."
In fact, as Brewer well knows, the very opposite is the case.
Arizona’s rise to immigration importance has gone hand in hand with the
creation of a border version of the very homeland security state she
criticizes. In reality, federal resources and Department of Homeland
Security dollars have been pouring into Arizona as part of a tripartite
war on “illegals,” drugs, and terrorism. Her continual complaints about
a “porous border,” enhanced by exaggerated tales
of “decapitated bodies,” only ups the pressure for ever more building
blocks to Fortress USA. Brewer’s are sweet words to the companies who
hope to profit, including DRS Technologies, StrongWatch, and Boeing.
The governor is hardly alone. Politicians from both parties are
loath to acknowledge (as is the much of the mainstream media) how
drastically the enforcement landscape along the U.S.-Mexican borderlands
has been altered in recent years. As geographer and border scholar
Joseph Nevins sums the matter up: “The very existence of lines of control over the movement of people is a very recent development in human history.”
Al-Qaedizing Immigrants
Anybody revisiting Nogales, El Paso, San Ysidro, or Brownsville today
would quickly realize that they look nothing like they did two decades
ago. In 1993, there were only 4,000 Border Patrol agents covering 6,000
miles of Canadian and Mexican boundarylands, and only flimsy chain-link
fences along the most urbanized stretches of the southern border
separated communities on either side.
Now, 16-foot walls cut through these towns. An array of cameras peer
over them into Mexico sending a constant flow of images to dark
monitoring rooms in Border Patrol stations along the 2,000 mile southern
border, where bored agents watch mostly pedestrian traffic.
Stadium-style lighting rises over the walls and shines into Mexico,
turning night into day as if we were indeed in salesman Dodds’s football
game. For residents whose homes abut the border sleep is a challenge.
Border Patrol forces, still growing, have more than doubled
in the years since 9/11. As the new uniformed soldiers of the
Department of Homeland Security, close to 20,000 Border Patrol agents
now occupy the U.S. Southwest. Predator drones and mini-surveillance
blimps regularly patrol the skies. Nevins says that it is a “highly
significant development” that we have come to accept this version of
“boundaries” and the institutions that enforce them without question.
The Border Patrol became part of the Department of Homeland Security
in 2003 and was placed under the wing of Customs and Border Protection,
now the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country with
60,000 employees. In the process, its “priority mission” became “keeping terrorists and their weapons out of the U.S.” Since then the Border Patrol has not netted a single person affiliated with a terrorist organization nor a single weapon of mass destruction.
It has, however, apprehended millions of Latin American migrants
coming north, including a historic number of Mexicans who were
essentially victims of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
No terrorists, they were often small farmers who could no longer
compete with subsidized U.S. grain giants like Cargill and Archer
Daniels Midland for whom NAFTA proved a free pass into Mexico. U.S.
officials were well aware
that the trade agreement would lead to an increase in migration, and
called for the enforcement build-up. In the post-9/11 world, under the
rubric of “protecting” the country from terrorism, the DHS, with the
help of state governments and local police, has enforced what is really a
line of exclusion, guaranteeing eternal inequality between those who
have and those who do not.
These lines of division have not only undergone a rapid build-up, but have fast become the accepted norm. According to
anthropologist Josiah Heyman, the muscling up of an ever more massive
border enforcement, interdiction, and surveillance apparatus “has
militarized border society, where more and more people either work for
the watchers, or are watched by the state.” Heyman’s words may prove
prophetic, and not just along our borders either.
As any migrant, protester, or activist in the United States knows,
the “watchers” and the “watched” are proliferating nationwide.
Geographer Matthew Coleman says
that the “most significant yet largely ignored fallout of the so-called
war on terrorism... [is] the extension of interior immigration policing
practices away from the southwest border.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is another 20,000-strong
agency sheltered under the expansive roof of the Department of Homeland
Security. It draws from a pool of 650,000 law enforcement officers
across the country through deputization programs with innocuous names
like 287(g) and Secure Communities. ICE effectively serves as a conduit
bringing the borderlands and all they now imply into communities as
distant as Utah, North Carolina, New Jersey, and Rhode Island.
More than one million migrants have been deported from
the country over the last 3½ years under the Obama administration,
numbers that surpass those of the Bush years. This should be a reminder
that a significant, if overlooked, part of this country’s post 9/11
security iron fist has been aimed not at al-Qaeda but at the
undocumented migrant. Indeed, as writer Roberto Lovato points out,
there has been an “al-Qaedization of immigrants and immigration
policy.” And as in the Global War on Terror, military-industrial
companies like Boeing and Halliburton are cashing in on this version of
for-profit war.
Bringing Arizona to You
Surprisingly enough, in that vast, brightly-lit cathedral of science
fiction in Phoenix it wasn’t the guns, drones, and robots, or the fixed
surveillance towers and militarized mannequins that startled me most. It
was the staggering energy and enthusiasm, so thick in the convention’s
air that it enveloped you.
That day, I had no doubt, I was in the presence of a burgeoning new
industry which has every intention of making not just the border, but
this world of ours its own. I could feel that sense of excitement and
possibility from the moment Drew Dodds began explaining to me just how
his company’s Freedom-On-The-Move system actually works. He grabbed two
water bottles close at hand and began painting a vivid picture of one
as a “hill” obstructing “the line of sight to the target,” and the other
as that “target” -- in fact, an exhausted migrant walking “the last
mile” after three days in the desert, who might give anything for just
such a bottle.
I have met many migrants in Dodd’s “last mile” -- hurt, dehydrated,
exhausted. One man’s feet had swelled up so much, thanks to the
unrelenting heat and the cactus spines he had stepped on, that he could
no longer jam them in his shoes. He had, he told me, continued on anyway
in excruciating pain, mile after mile, barefoot on the oven-hot desert
floor. Considering the thousands of dead bodies recovered from
the borderlands since the massive build-up of Border Patrol forces and
technology, he was lucky to have made it through alive. And this was the
man Dodds was so pumped about Freedom-On-The-Move’s “spot and stalk”
technology nabbing; this was his football game. In the end, though, he
abandoned football for reality, summing up his experience this way: “We
are bringing the battlefield to the border.”
That caught it all, offering a vision of what the military-industrial
complex looks like once it’s transported, jobs and all, to the
U.S.-Mexican border and turned into a consumer’s mall for the post-9/11
American era. You could sense it in the young woman from RoboteX, who
looked like she had walked directly out of her college graduation and
onto the floor of Border Security Expo 2012. She loaned me her remote
control for a few minutes and let me play with the micro-robot she was
hawking. It looked like a tiny tank and was already being used by the
Oakland police and its SWAT team.
It was the breathless excitement of the University of Arizona
graduate student describing to me the “deception detection” technology
the university was developing, along with a “communication web” that
would allow drones to communicate with each other without human
intervention. Perhaps training students for this rising industry was
part of the University of Arizona’s thought process in accepting
a multi-million-dollar grant from DHS to create a Center of Excellence
on Border Security which will work in tandem with its Tech Park on
Science and Technology. That center, in turn, was to develop the newest
border enforcement technologies, as part of a consortium of several
other universities.
In the next three years, the homeland security market in the United States is expected to reach $113 billion,
according to a report by Homeland Security Market Research, and a
significant chunk of that money will be dedicated to boundary building.
Pretty soon the idea of border security as part of a Fortress USA will
be so entrenched in the system that no one will be able to shake it
loose -- and then, of course, like all such systems, it will
proliferate.
It has been fashionable to treat the state of Arizona as an American
fringe phenomenon, simply a bunch of lunatics hell-bent on passing
bluntly racist anti-immigration laws. However, as Border Security Expo
indicates, something far more sinister is at work. There’s nothing
fringe about the companies in the convention hall eager to build up the
homeland security state, and funded by the federal government.
In Arizona, industry leaders are calling for the formation of the
first “global cluster” of private companies on border security in the
United States. Already 50 businesses, large and small, have been identified
as possible participants. Bruce Wright, vice president of the
University of Arizona Tech Park on Science and Technology, says that
many of them have set up shop in the park, and that the university has
the facilities to incubate both start-up companies and subsidiaries for
more established military or aerospace corporations as they enter what
he calls “the border tech realm.”
“Here we are living on the border -- turning lemons into lemonade. If
we are to deal with the problem -- what is the economic benefit from
dealing with it?” Wright asks, referring to immigration enforcement,
trade, drug interdiction, and the war on terror. “Well, we can build an
industry around this problem that creates employment, wages, and wealth
for this region… And this technology can be sold all over the world. So
it becomes an industry cluster that is very beneficial to us in Southern
Arizona.”
Wright’s vision is likely to prove far more powerful than SB1070 will
ever be. As Arizona defines the line of scrimmage for U.S. border
security strategy, it is also preparing the way to export its products
of social control not only abroad, but also to your hometown, or to
wherever a boundary needs to be built between the rich and poor.
© 2012 Todd Miller
Todd Miller has researched and written about U.S.-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. He is at work on his first book, Border Patrol Nation, for the Open Media Series of City Lights Books.
President
Obama and CIA Director David Petraeus: the agency appears engaged in a
carefully planned campaign of leaks about its targeted killing drone
campaign. (Photograph: Charles Dharapak/AP)
