Smuggler Nation (54 page)

For political reasons, customs officials continued to proclaim that efforts to keep drugs out would not be sacrificed in order to keep legitimate trade moving, but commercial realities dictated that the border remain highly porous. The more intensive and intrusive the inspection process, the longer the wait at the border. As one customs official
warned, “If we examined every truck for narcotics arriving into the United States along the Southwest border … Customs would back up the truck traffic bumper-to-bumper into Mexico City in just two weeks—15.8 days. In 15.8 days, there would be 95,608 trucks backed up into Mexico. That’s 1,177 miles of trucks, end to end.”
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By the end of the decade, ninety million cars and four million trucks and railcars were entering the United States from Mexico every year.

But even as increased cross-border traffic placed practical limitations on border controls, domestic political imperatives meant devoting ever more resources to enhancing such controls. In February 1995 Customs announced Operation Hard Line, an intensified effort to target drug smuggling in commercial cargo. Customs received more than six hundred new positions through Hard Line in fiscal year 1997, roughly a 25 percent increase in personnel on the border. A year after the initiation of Hard Line, Customs issued a press release praising the program’s “record-breaking success”: 24 percent more seizures of cocaine, heroin, and marijuana than in the previous year. Another press release a few days later boasted that the number of drug seizures along the California-Mexico border had increased by 79 percent over the same period the year before. The fine print, though, revealed that although the overall number of drug seizures was up, the actual amount of drugs seized had fallen, indicating that smugglers had adapted to increased enforcement by breaking their loads into smaller packages to reduce their risks.
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The trend, in fact, was toward more-but-smaller drug shipments—creating more and harder work for drug enforcement. Border inspectors and their drug-sniffing dogs were mostly kept busy making busts of relatively small marijuana shipments.

To keep generating drug seizures without stopping the rising flow of commercial traffic, U.S. border-control strategists increasingly turned to state-of-the-art technologies. Giant Backscatter x-ray machines, large enough to drive a truck through, were installed at more and more ports of entry along the border. In 1995 a Border Research Technology Center was opened in San Diego, with the purpose of adapting various gadgets and gizmos previously restricted to military use to border-control tasks. As Clinton’s drug policy director, Barry McCaffrey, put it, “Technology can help us stop drugs while facilitating legal commerce.”
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And this military-aided search for a high-tech fix for the border was just getting
started. Indeed, it turned out that the sharp escalation of border enforcement in the 1990s was just a warm-up.

The Border Aftershocks of September 11

Even though the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, took place thousands of miles away, the shock waves were intensely felt along the U.S.-Mexico borderline. Ports of entry were virtually shut down, squeezing the arteries that provided the lifeblood to the border economies and the larger U.S.-Mexico economic integration process. In Laredo, Texas, for example, during peak crossing times before the attacks it took about five minutes for a pedestrian to cross a bridge checkpoint and a half-hour for a motorist. Immediately after the attacks, the wait increased up to five hours. Retail sales in U.S. border cities immediately plummeted as Mexican shoppers stayed south of the border. Mexican border towns were similarly shaken by the sharp decline in U.S. visitors. Although the crisis mode of border enforcement eased within a few weeks, the shocks of September 11 left a permanent mark on the border.

In the aftermath of the attacks, politicians from across the political spectrum rushed to pledge allegiance to “securing the border”—and attacked their opponents for not doing enough. In this heated political climate, U.S. border strategists scrambled to take the old drug and immigration enforcement infrastructure and adapt it to the suddenly prioritized counterterrorism mission. It was an awkward fit and a cumbersome retooling job. The INS enforcement apparatus was designed to handle millions of migrant workers entering the country in search of employment, not to detect and deter those few determined individuals arriving to commit terrorist acts. Similarly, Customs agents along the border had until September 2001 been mostly preoccupied with drugs and other contraband.

These already overstretched agencies were now ordered to suddenly reinvent themselves and play a frontline role against terrorism. The new security fear was that the same groups, methods, and routes long used to smuggle migrants and drugs into the country could be used to smuggle in terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. Also worrisome to U.S. authorities was that the same fraudulent document industry
that had long provided identification cards for unauthorized migrants could also potentially provide these services to terrorists.

The bureaucratic reinvention process led to a flood of new funding for border enforcement and the consolidation of twenty-two agencies, including Customs and INS, under a new cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—the largest reorganization of the federal government in more than half a century. It would become the third largest cabinet agency (after the Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs), with some 230,000 employees by the end of the decade. A once-obscure term, “homeland security,” suddenly became part of everyday security lingo. Similarly, “border security” replaced “border control” as the favored policy term, though it remained vague exactly what this actually meant or entailed. Traditional concerns about drugs and unauthorized migrants were now lumped together with counterterrorism as “transnational security threats.” One sign of this change was that the roving border inspectors screening vehicles for smuggled goods and people were renamed “Anti-Terrorism Contraband Enforcement Team.” Terrorism was now put at the top of the list of border priorities in official mission statements, even though the day-to-day work of patrolling the border remained overwhelmingly focused on smuggled drugs and migrants.

The changed political climate after September 11 also hardened the U.S. immigration policy debate as the entry of foreigners inescapably came to be viewed through the prism of national security. In the months prior to the terrorist attacks, Mexican President Vicente Fox had high hopes of reaching a migration deal with the United States and creating a more open border, but such hopes were quickly dashed on September 11 as Washington’s mood and attention suddenly shifted.
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Immigration policy reform stalled and was placed on the back burner, and the prior escalation of U.S. immigration enforcement along the border escalated even further. This included a continuation of the Border Patrol hiring boom that started in the 1990s. By the end of the decade, the size of the Border Patrol exceeded twenty thousand agents—more than doubling since 2000 and a fivefold increase since the early 1990s, turning it into the nation’s largest police force. And this did not count the deployment of National Guard troops to the border, including six thousand sent in as a stopgap measure by President George W. Bush in 2006.

The rush to hire and deploy more agents to the border, however, also brought with it greater risks of corruption. Corruption cases proliferated along the border, involving both federal and local law enforcement and extending to military and National Guard troops. Between 2003 and 2010, 129 customs officials and border agents were arrested on corruption-related charges.
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In one 2005 case, a San Ysidro port inspector was caught waving carloads of illegal immigrants through his lane. Between the ports of entry, several Border Patrol agents in California were caught shuttling illegal migrants across the line and showing smugglers how to evade Border Patrol sensors and cameras. At one point they even removed a group of migrants from custody and, instead of sending them back across the line, dropped them off at a local Walmart parking lot for their smugglers to pick them up. Other Border Patrol agents were caught using interior road checkpoints as de facto tollbooths to collect payoffs from drug traffickers. In one particularly troubling case in 2005, the corruption investigation implicated the assistant area port director, whose job included overseeing anti-smuggling and anticorruption efforts at San Ysidro. Equally troubling was the discovery that the top FBI official in El Paso, who oversaw 220 special agents and employees, was closely associated with a Juarez businessman allegedly tied to drug traffickers.
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Paralleling Washington’s deployment of thousands of additional border-enforcement personnel, a militia-style border-monitoring campaign called the “Minuteman Project” was launched in early 2005, involving armed civilians in fatigues taking up patrol positions along the Arizona-Mexico border. The initiative—essentially a border publicity stunt designed to draw public attention to the porosity of the border and embarrass the federal government to do more about it—generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations and drew recruits from across the country, aided by the use of the Internet and national media coverage.

Continuing the fence fetish that began in the 1990s, in 2006 the U.S. Congress passed the Secure Fence Act, which included approval to build some seven hundred miles of new border fencing, at a cost between $1 million and $3 million for every mile.
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As governor of Arizona, Janet Napolitano had expressed skepticism about the expansive fencing plan when it was first proposed in 2005, saying “You show me a fifty-foot
wall and I’ll show you a fifty-one-foot ladder at the border.” She also could have mentioned the dozens of tunnels that had been discovered under the border. But once Napolitano was appointed as head of the Department of Homeland Security in the Obama administration, she was noticeably less dismissive about the utility of border fences. Meanwhile, some Arizona officials, frustrated by the slow pace of fence construction, began to seek private donations to build their own border wall.
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Figure 15.2 U.S. border fence along the Arizona-Mexico border, 2011 (U.S. Customs and Border Patrol).

The post–September 11 security environment also created an opportunity to further militarize immigration control via the broader mandate of “homeland security.” In the past, military units operating on the border were formally limited to assisting counterdrug work: “It had to have a counterdrug nexus,” noted a spokesperson for Joint Task Force North (which replaced Joint Task Force Six in September 2004). “Now our mission is a major supporter of homeland security.” The new expanded mission was to support federal law enforcement agencies in the “interdiction of suspected transnational threats within and along the approaches to the United States,” which could include targeting unauthorized immigration.
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Although further militarization of border
control was partly inhibited by the deployment of military forces to Iraq and Afghanistan, some aspects of border policing provided training in desert warfare. For example, an Alaska-based Stryker unit (designed to roll out quickly on eight-wheeled armored vehicles using surveillance and reconnaissance to generate information) on its way to Iraq spent sixty days in the New Mexico desert working alongside the Border Patrol, and it was reportedly responsible for the Border Patrol’s apprehension of twenty-five hundred illegal immigrants.
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Figure 15.3 Drug tunnel discovered under the California-Mexico border, 2011 (U.S. Customs and Border Patrol).

Major military contractors, such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman, were also recruited to play a larger role in border control—as one press report put it, “Using some of the same high-priced, high-tech tools these companies have already put to work in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
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Reflecting the growing faith in high-tech solutions, in 2004 the Border Patrol began to use unmanned aerial vehicles, the first civilian law enforcement agency in the world to
do so.
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In September 2005 border officials in Arizona unveiled a new unmanned aerial surveillance system based on the satellite-controlled Predator-B drone used for military operations in the Middle East and elsewhere. By the end of the decade the Department of Homeland Security, which already operated hundreds of manned aircraft—the largest nonmilitary air force in the world—also had a small fleet of Predator drones along the border.
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