Pubdate: Wed, 11 Mar 1998 Source: San Francisco Bay Guardian Author: Christian Parenti Contact: http://www.sfbg.com THE MILITARIZED BORDER More surveillance, less regard for due process marks collaboration among cops, feds, and military. FROM THE dark wastelands overlooking Tijuana's eastern slums, U.S. Border Patrol agent Albert Barrajas watches ghostly figures on the small black-and-white screen of his army-surplus infrared scope. "Aliens on the fence line," he informs me quietly. Three pale figures hoist themselves over the fence. Radios crackle, and Barrajas directs his team of Bronco-driving agents down toward "echo four section." The would-be migrants scatter; two dash into a drainpipe leading back to Mexico, while the third runs panicked along the cold metal fence. "Bronco on the E two, there's a single moving east," Barrajas mumbles into his radio. On the scope we see "the single," frantic for an opening or low point in the recently installed fence. The barrier is made of surplus metal landing mats, courtesy of the National Guard; it's so sharp in spots it can sever fingers. Even on the strange little infrared screen the immigrant's terror is palpable. Welcome to the vanguard terrain of America's emerging police state, where law enforcement sees through military eyes. Since the early 1980s there has been a massive paramilitary buildup on the U.S.-Mexico border, involving new equipment, expanded police powers, and unprecedented interagency cooperation. Now these changes are spreading to the U.S. interior, where they have major implications for law enforcement -- and create a new layer of terror and tension throughout Latino communities. Urban sectors of the border now seethe with guard towers, motion sensors, night scopes, impassable 18-foot-high concrete "bollard fencing," and swarms of border patrol agents -- 8,000 of them, to be exact, 110 percent more than in 1994, according to the 1997 Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) fact book. The INS budget was $3 billion in 1997; Attorney General Janet Reno requested $3.6 billion for fiscal year 1998. According to a September 1997 report in Helicopter News, last year the border patrol, the uniformed law enforcement branch of the INS, received 45 state-of-the-art Blackhawk helicopters to augment its fleet of more than 50 Vietnam-era Hueys. Meanwhile, on the ground, agents got yet more night-vision goggles and infrared TV cameras, a slew of hypersensitive microphones, thousands of high-tech motion sensors, and scores of new mobile "stadium-style" klieg lights. Despite the August 1997 shooting of 18-year-old shepherd Esequiel Hernandez by a secret reconnaissance squad of U.S. marines in Redford, Texas, thousands of U.S. soldiers are still heavily involved in border policing. The army is building roads and providing aerial reconnaissance; the National Guard searches vehicles and staffs border checkpoints. In 1995 the Department of Defense valued the military hardware on the border at $260 million. The buildup doesn't stop where First and Third Worlds collide. In the name of fighting both drugs and illegal immigration, an alliance between law enforcement, INS, and the military that was first consummated on the border is taking root "throughout the entire country," said chipper military spokesperson Maureen Bosch in an interview with the Bay Guardian. Facilitating this trend is the military's Joint Task Force-Six (JTF-6) and Operation Alliance, a consortium of federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. Set up in 1989 to help fight drug trafficking across the U.S.-Mexican border, JTF-6 was at first restricted to aiding the DEA; later, with the government's rhetorical conflation of immigration and drugs, the INS and its border patrol were brought in. Law enforcement officials and the military argue that none of these programs violate the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which makes it illegal for soldiers to be deputized or to arrest U.S. citizens. The logic behind this argument is that JTF-6 only provides training to law-enforcement agencies. But the line between "training" and "doing" can be blurry. For example, the military can't analyze phone records for local law-enforcement agencies, but it can translate foreign-language surveillance calls. Critics, however, say that any relations between law enforcement and the military violates Posse Comitatus, and sets a dangerous precedent. "Once the military starts helping with one sort of task, it becomes very easy for them to help with, or do, all sorts of others," says Timothy Dunn, author of The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border. "You have to keep in mind the military is trained to wipe out a clearly defined enemy. That's not what law enforcement is about." Nonetheless, just 10 years after border cooperation between law enforcement and the military began, JTF-6 is training local police across the country in data analysis, aerial surveillance, "mission planning," firearms, canine teams, and interrogation techniques. "You'd be surprised how little some heartland police know about interviewing and interrogation," JTF-6 Lt. Colonel Bill Riechert told us in an interview. Critics say military interrogations usually involve sophisticated psychological -- sometimes even physical -- torture. "We also teach 'survival Spanish,' " Riechert said. "Like, 'Law enforcement -- get down!' " More ominous are the little known trainings in "Close Quarter Battle" (CQB) and "Advanced Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain" (AMOUT). The curriculum includes storming apartments, kicking in doors, rappelling down walls, and simulating shoot-outs. The first to receive such training were the elite air-mobile Border Patrol Tactical Teams (BORTACs), which were later deployed in Los Angeles during the 1992 riots. Among the more unlikely agencies to request such training in 1995 and 1996 were law enforcement departments from Burlington, Vt.; Niagara Falls, N.Y.; Columbus, Ohio; Atlantic City, N.J.; and Rochester, N.Y.; along with those from cities like Philadelphia and Seattle. JTF-6 has also built training complexes for elite cops in San Diego and Hillsborough, Fla., near Tampa. Drug enforcement has served as a Trojan horse for this creeping militarization of the border. At first JTF-6 and Operation Alliance were limited to a region called the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) that encompassed all counties within 150 miles of the U.S.-Mexico frontier. But as critics predicted, soon more HIDTAs were defined around the country, and with them grew the military's involvement with law enforcement. The nation is now graced with 17 of these federal hot spots. They encompass most major metropolitan areas -- including the San Francisco Bay Area, New York-New Jersey, greater Chicago, L.A., and San Diego -- as well as the marijuana-growing regions of the rural Northwest and Appalachia. Big Brother on the border While military training in "Close Quarter Battle" sounds sinister, the most frightening aspect of border militarization may be the small expansions of law enforcement's powers and the increased cooperation between local police and federal agents. These developments are spreading from border regions into the interior. The invisible underpinnings of this tightening of control are the rapidly growing network of interlocking data banks that help track both citizens and noncitizens alike. Fingerprints and photos collected at the border are now used for policing Latinos in the fields of California's Central Valley and in the barrios of Los Angeles. Also, the INS is empowered under Titles 19 and 21 of the U.S. Code to enforce both contraband and drug laws -- that is, to act as DEA or Customs Agents. As one senior customs official testified at a 1990 Senate hearing, this "enables those agencies to conduct warrantless border searches which are valuable in the border communities and inland areas vulnerable to air smuggling." The border patrol is also teaming up with local police for day-to-day operations. "On the border it's very common to see border patrol and the local P.D. or sheriff riding together," says Mike Connell, El Paso's chief border patrol agent. This routine cooperation circumvents the limitations on each agency's powers. In downtown El Paso and in Tucson, border patrol agents regularly participate in bike patrols with local police. In the towns of California's Imperial Valley, duel-agency teams travel in cars. When the agents make contact with a "subject" they can simply pass the person back and forth. If a suspected undocumented immigrant has papers, the local police can search for drugs or run a warrants check; border patrol agents can check Latinos who run stop signs for immigration papers. In San Diego, joint bike patrols are less common, but the INS does have substations throughout the county, including one in the downtown police headquarters. With 2,500 border patrol agents stationed in the San Diego area and more arriving all the time, the INS has taken to setting up checkpoints all over California's most southern counties. And between checkpoints the border patrol cars cruise through Latino communities, some as much as an hour and a half from the border. The most disturbing thing about the spread of the INS's net and its cooperation with local police is that the border patrol's standards for stops and searches are much lower -- and more overtly racist -- than those used by police. "Border patrol agents have the right to ask anyone, anywhere, for proof of citizenship," Jesus Rodriguez, public affairs officer for the El Paso INS, told the Bay Guardian. That's not actually the case -- "they're supposed to have a 'reasonable suspicion,' such as a heavily laden car traveling near the border with a Latino driver who wouldn't make eye contact," San Diego federal public defender Jeremy Warren says. That an INS spokesperson thinks agents can stop "anyone, anywhere" says quite a bit. In reality that's what they do all the time. Skin color and accent are inevitably among the INS's criteria for making stops. This standard is problematic enough at the border, but it becomes a racist nightmare when applied within the United States. Town under siege At 2 p.m., July 27, 1997, life in Chandler, Ariz., pop. 130,000, is turned upside down. Thirty police and six border patrol agents, in mixed teams, sweep down on the barrios of this desert city some 120 miles from the border. For the next five days the combined force combs the streets, stops cars at random, and conducts warrantless house-to-house searches, harassing and, in a few cases, beating Latino residents. By the end, 432 undocumented migrants and two U.S. citizens are deported. Following the raid, a $35 million class-action lawsuit is filed and Arizona attorney general Grant Woods's office releases a detailed and chilling report. According to the report, no warrants had been issued for any of the body, vehicle, or house searches made during the Chandler raid. But thanks to the presence of the INS, it's not clear that any were needed. Transcripts of police and border patrol radio transmissions during the sweep included in the report also reveal that the fig leaf of "probable cause" was dropped altogether. Any and all working-class Latinos were fair game. In a typical call to a backup car, a bike officer is quoted saying: "to any [police] motor, there's a red Intrepid leaving from the property, no probable cause." Police and INS arrest reports indicated an equally cavalier disregard of due process. One border patrol agent justified a bust by noting that he had "immediately noticed the lack of personal hygiene displayed by the subject, and a strong body odor common to illegal aliens." "They really went too far, entering homes, detaining all the Mexican-looking kids," says Alberto Esparza, vice president of the newly formed Chandler Coalition for Civil and Human Rights. "They even beat a few people up. This one 17-year-old kid ran, and when they caught him they beat him real bad." The youth was a U.S. citizen, Esparza said. And so it went for five days: early-morning SWAT-style raids in which whole families were rousted by screaming officers, blinding flashlights, and guns in the face; people deported in their underwear; Latinos humiliated on public highways; schoolchildren accosted by uniformed thugs. Latino citizens and "resident aliens" told investigators from the Attorney General's Office that their children are scared to go outside, that they had been "made to feel like cockroaches," and that relations between Latinos and Anglos may have been irrevocably strained by the raid. Among those stopped and harassed were Arizona's top-ranked amateur golfer (who happened to have been casually dressed), and people who can document that their families have been in California and Arizona for the last 150 to 200 years. One woman, who was pregnant, was so traumatized she didn't leave her house for weeks. "The roundup, as they call it, was a tremendous violation of an entire community," Esparza says. The border patrol, in crisp military fashion, investigated itself and found no evidence of any wrongdoing; the Chandler P.D. has demanded an apology from the Attorney General. Chandler P.D. officials would not comment on the case because litigation is still in progress. As the raid in Chandler makes clear, collaboration between cops and the INS facilitates the criminalization and political marginalization of Latinos. And undocumented Latina women are particularly vulnerable. It's not that the INS deliberately targets women, but rather that women cross back and forth over the border most often, due to family obligations, and so have more chances to be caught. Women are more likely than men to have immigrated with family or children, and, like women in all communities, tend to be more politically and socially active, whether as community organizers or engaged church members. A young mother's deportation can have reverberations far beyond her immediate fate. Thus the new border regime helps break family ties and demoralize Latino communities within the United States. "People aren't just scared of going north -- thanks to these roadblocks boxing in San Diego County, they're scared to go anywhere, especially back south," says Roberto Martinez, director of the American Friends Service Committee's U.S.-Mexico Border Program. "We get calls all the time from the barrios that women are too scared to leave their homes. This is a real crisis." Martinez points out that it has always been difficult to organize undocumented migrants. "That's why the UFW usually doesn't try," he says. But he says that in the last four years, the fear among immigrants -- and even Chicanos -- has grown tremendously. Due to the huge law-enforcement staff increases, Martinez says, political organizing among Latinos is more difficult than ever. "The checkpoints just keep people immobilized in every sense," he says. "They also have Operation Clean Sheets, where they've been raiding about a hundred large hotels. We go in on behalf of the [hotel workers'] unions to tell people their rights, and hardly anyone shows up. At one meeting we had zero -- literally no one showed up. People are very frightened right now." We may be seeing the beginnings of de facto apartheid in the southwest. Working-class Latinos live under a different set of laws than Anglos. The new regime is even insinuating itself into the lives of those who support "la Migra." San Diego's Interstate 5 now offers a "Pre-enrolled Access Lane" (PAL) where those with proper clearance -- registered fingerprints and photos, a bar code on their car -- can speed through customs on their way back from Mexico. "Be a PAL," urge bumper stickers. The entire social landscape of the border region is being remolded by the politics of the militarized frontier. The anxious right-wing voters and homeowners of southwest suburbia -- the ones who in the early 1990s organized vigilante border actions, such as shining their headlights at the ranks of would-be migrants in Mexico -- get federally subsidized political theater. Employers get frightened and obedient workers. And the national security state gets a bulwark against the slow-motion social and economic implosion of Latin America. But as for new immigration flows -- those who must cross, will. Only now the price is higher, in both human and financial terms.