Arresting Babies on the Border

by Scott Nicol

“They’re arresting babies.”

The thought struck hard, and it kept echoing.  I had come to the border wall with a correspondent from National Public Radio to see its impact on the environment.  We had also seen evidence of the apprehensions that occur there daily.  Piles of shoelaces and belts that immigrants were forced to abandon before being taken into custody, and even a pair of plastic toy helicopters, littered the ground.

The Border Patrol agent said that they had captured eighteen people.  Most sat in a line in the dirt beside the rusting wall as agents took their names and bagged their possessions.  Only three or four were adults.

Inside a Border Patrol van, escaping the heat, were two mothers, each with an infant in her arms.  On the seats beside them were a pair of toddlers.

The Border Patrol would probably prefer not to use the term “arrest,” but the children were taken into custody along with the rest of their family.  All eighteen will be included in the sector’s apprehension statistics.

In 2013 the Border Patrol apprehended 26,027 juveniles in its Rio Grande Valley sector, 21,553 of whom were unaccompanied.  Border-wide 38,833 out of the 47,238 minors who were captured were traveling without an adult.  At least these children were not on their own.

Call it an apprehension, call it an arrest, for a child too young to walk or talk the terminology does not matter.

The United States of America, through elected Representatives who are meant to express the will of its citizens, spent $18 billion last year to keep these families out.  A few years back taxpayers spent $12 million per mile to build the border wall that stood nearby, and more than $3 billion was spent to wall off 652 miles of the southern border.  From 1995 to 2003 we doubled the size of the Border Patrol, then over the last decade we doubled their ranks again.  They carry out the mission that we have given them.

We are arresting babies.

And toddlers.  And teenagers.  And adolescents.  And their parents.

We have decided that the people I saw lined up beside the wall, parents who traveled hundreds of miles from Guatemala looking for work with children in tow, threaten us.

Like most who walk or swim across the border they are not terrorists, they are not smugglers, they simply want a better life.  They are parents struggling to feed their families.  They are children hoping to escape violence, go to school, live the American Dream.  So long as that desperation and desire remains people will keep coming. 

This is not a challenge to our nation’s defenses, it is a test of our conscience.

When the Senate took up immigration reform they failed to grasp this.  They made a “border surge,” with hundreds of miles of new border wall, a further ballooning of the Border Patrol, and tens of billions of dollars of new military hardware, a “trigger” that must be completed before anyone currently in the country could start on a thirteen-year-long pathway to citizenship.  The irrational fears of middle American voters who only see the border when they watch FOX News or Border Wars on TV had to be appeased.

Even with the “surge” Republicans in the U.S. House refuse to even debate immigration reform.  They are far less concerned with the children sitting in a line on the dirt beside the wall than they are about a Tea Party challenge in the next primary election.

The Border Patrol agents called headquarters to have child car seats sent out.  Older kids shuffled back into the green and white van, now lacking belts and laces for their sneakers.

After they drove off we began to walk back along the top of the levee.  Through the border wall’s rusting bollards we could see another mother being marched out of the brush, clutching an infant to her chest.

As the sun settled into the treetops the wind carried the baby’s cries.

Border Skirmish: Republicans Are Using Immigrants to Bash Our Wilderness

by Char Miller

It would be nice if Congress held executive-branch agencies accountable for their actions. Or insisted that they follow federal law. Or fulfill their fiduciary responsibilities to one another.

But the Republican-controlled House of Representatives is making a mockery of these basic rules of order and good government.

You won't be surprised that the latest bit of GOP chicanery involves its twin obsessions: the U.S-Mexico Border and national environmental regulations. Their hyperventilating defense of the former, as I've noted before, comes with blustery assaults on the latter.

Since November, Utah representative Rob Bishop, chair of the House subcommittee on public lands, along with his gal pal, Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), and a host of fellow travelers, have mounted an incessant campaign to allow the U. S. Border Patrol to ignore key provisions of the Wilderness Act, the Endangered Species Act, and other vital environmental laws.

Arguing that such legislation impedes the Border Patrol's capacity to defend the nation against undocumented migrants, they have filed amendments and riders to pending legislation, called public hearings to lambaste officials of the Department of Interior, and penned fulminating op-eds to rouse the party's extremist base.

Their most recent gambit came late last week in the form of an amendment to the Department of Homeland Security's appropriation. Rep. Lummis proposed, and a lock-step Republican vote secured, a rule prohibiting DHS from transferring funds to the Department of the Interior.

These moneys would have been used to mitigate the oft-intense environmental damage resulting from the construction of the infamous border wall across federal wildlife refuges, wildlands, and preserves, in such places as the Rio Grande Valley; Arizona's Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument; and the Otay Wilderness near San Diego. And from the spinning wheels of its high-speed patrols that can tear up wildlife habitat or damage sensitive ecosystems.

Such mitigation, required by law, is also sanctioned through longstanding practice among localities, states, and the federal government. It is also a matter of committed environmental stewardship.

Neither the precedent nor the principle matters to contemporary Republicans. In a "Dear Colleague" letter that Bishop, Rep. Doc Hastings (R-WA), chair of the Natural Resources Committee, and Rep. Peter King (R-NY), chair of the Committee on Homeland Security sent out in support of Lummis' amendment, they thrilled at its anti-environmentalism: "the amendment would strike language in the bill that allows these funds to be used by the Interior Department to purchase even more land. Additional federal land acquisition only exacerbates the problem by limiting access to even more land and further bloating the federal estate--at a time when the government cannot even afford to provide the basic care and maintenance needed for existing national parks and other lands."

(Query: why can't the government afford to take care of its treasured public lands? Answer: drastic Republican budget cuts!)

Lummis heaps just as much scorn on the legal obligations and moral responsibilities the government has for protecting our public lands: "Every day our nation's border patrol fights to protect our country against increasingly sophisticated criminal networks that produce and smuggle illegal drugs, and people, into America," she fumed. "Unfortunately, DOI policies have tied the hands of Border Patrol agents, who need access to federal lands to carry out their constitutional responsibility to secure the border."

Her allegation is bogus. The very same Government Accountability Office report that Lummis and Bishop routinely cite as evidence that environmental regulations have handcuffed the Border Patrol, in fact reached the opposite conclusion. In mid-April, for instance, the GAO found that "22 of the 26 patrol agents-in-charge reported that the overall security status of their jurisdiction had not been affected by land management laws. Instead, factors such as the remoteness and ruggedness of the terrain have had the greatest effect on their ability to achieve operational control in these areas."

The report also revealed that the four patrol agents-in-charge who had "reported that delays and restrictions had affected their ability to achieve or maintain operational control," admitted they "either had not requested resources for increased or timelier access or their requests had been denied by senior Border Patrol officials because of higher priority needs of the agency."

Moreover, the GAO investigation demonstrated that relevant agencies out in the field and inside the Beltway have developed close working relations. To argue otherwise, as Lummis and Bishop reflexively do, is to perpetuate a fraud.

Ah, but why let the facts get in your way when you can wrap yourself in the flag as protective cover? Trumpets Lummis: "our nation's security should be our top priority." Wilderness be damned.

Such a blinkered public policy, in point of fact, will lead us into damnation. That's the potent message embedded in Aldo Leopold's private correspondence and his brilliant conservation classic, Sand County Almanac (1948).

Arguing that wilderness is an irreplaceable part of our "cultural inheritance," and that even then was in precious, dwindling supply--it is a "resource that can shrink but cannot grow"--Leopold urged his fellow citizens to defend these beleaguered lands against those with a narrowly conceived notion of homeland securityhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif. "If we lose our wilderness, we have nothing left...worth fighting for."

Note, please, that Leopold was a Republican.

Char Miller is the Director and W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis at Pomona College, and editor of the just-published "Cities and Nature in the American West."

Reprinted with the author's permission, this essay was originally posted at KCET:

http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_focus/commentary/border-skirmish-republicans-are-using-immigrants-to-bash-our-wilderness-34146.html

Be Careful What You Wish For

by Char Miller

Jan Brewer, the Governor of Arizona, says the funniest things. Especially about immigrants. Ok, I’ll admit that SB 1070, the state’s vicious anti-immigrant legislation, is nothing to laugh about. But when Brewer went on local television in early July she cracked me up.

Why? Because she told astonished viewers that Arizona police have begun to stumble on bodies buried in the desert that have been beheaded. Beheaded by those nasty immigrants she has been warning us about. Really, she said that.

Of course there is no truth to this preposterous allegation. Nor is there any basis for her claims that the “terrible border security crisis…has gotten worse.” Quite the reverse: the U. S. Borderlands are among the safest places in the United States, and getting more so. Then there is Brewer’s remarkable assertion that the majority of immigrants crossing into Arizona are drug dealers, mules or addicts. Investigations by journalists, Border Patrol officials, and county medical examiners have produced not a shred of evidence to support this and other of her bizarre rants.

Just as baseless is Senator John McCain’s frenzied claims that the state he represents is the “No. 2 kidnapping capital in the world.” Arizona has experienced nothing like the wave of kidnappings that mar social life in Africa, Asia and Central America; indeed, its figures are dropping, which suggests that the once-principled presidential candidate has gone off the deep end.

In this he has good company in the wacky State Senator Sylvia Allen. She has been blustering of late that "in the last few years 80 percent of our law enforcement that have been killed or wounded have been by an illegal." Arizona police departments have been quick to denounce her false charges.

All these lies have a purpose: the GOP in Arizona and across the nation has been flogging anti-immigrant horror stories to terrorize voters. The party wants to whip up its political base and drive independent voters into its ranks. Its fearmongering tactics and eagerness to incite racial prejudice, aided and abetted by right-wing talk radio and television, are also designed to cut into President Obama’s popular support and the Democratic Party’s congressional majority. This summer’s GOP craziness is all about the November 2010 elections.

Yet in so operating Republicans are proving to be certifiably crazy. They swear they want to include Latinos in their “Big Tent” coalition; they recognize--or at least the savviest of them do--that being inclusive is the only way that the GOP can remain a national party; it cannot otherwise survive in our twenty-first nation of immigrants. Perhaps it does not wish to: how else explain its sanctioning of repeated and vicious assaults on Hispanics, the very voters with whom they claim such great affinity?

The political impact of GOP anger and hostility is captured in the latest LatinoMetrics poll. It shows that the economy is no longer Latinos key worry--immigration is. And this change in focus came about in just six months, the exact period of time when Arizona politicians and others began to lambast immigrants. Latinos have taken notice. As one commentator told the Los Angeles Times: “Latinos are feeling less optimistic and more under siege.” Embattled, they are ready to fight back. They “have taken offense to the way immigrants have been demonized by politicians and political interest groups,” said Brent Wilkes, LULAC Executive Director, “and are prepared to vote accordingly.”

Come November, a crazed Jan Brewer may be just what the Democrats needed to maintain power. How funny is that?


Char Miller is W. M. Keck Professor and Director of the Environmental Analysis Program at Pomona College, Claremont CA. He is author of Deep in the Heart of San Antonio: Land and Life in South Texas and a columnist for the Rio Grande Guardian, where this essay originally appeared.

Building More Border Walls is Not Effective Immigration Reform

By Scott Nicol

In 2006, both the House and Senate passed Comprehensive Immigration Reform bills. Each contained hundreds of miles of border wall, inserted as a bone to lure conservative support. The bills differed on a number of points, including the number of miles of wall to be built. When a conference committee convened to craft a final bill they were unable to work out their differences, and immigration reform died in committee. From its ashes Congress pulled the one thing that they could agree on: 700 miles of border wall.

The stated goal of the Secure Fence Act was to “achieve and maintain operational control over the entire international land and maritime borders of the United States.” Nearly 3 years later, most of the border walls that it mandated are complete. Time to dust off the “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” banner and hang it on the border?


Apparently not. This month Senator Jim DeMint, whose home state of South Carolina is closer to Canada than Mexico, inserted an amendment into the Senate’s bill funding the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). It changes the Secure Fence Act to say that, “Fencing that does not effectively restrain pedestrian traffic (such as vehicle barriers and virtual fencing) may not be used to meet the 700-mile fence requirement.”

As of July 17, DHS claims to have completed 331 miles of “pedestrian fencing” and 302 miles of vehicle barriers. If DeMint’s amendment makes it through the House/Senate Conference Committee and is signed into law, the border wall will suddenly be 369 miles short of its new mandate. DHS will probably replace many of the 302 miles of vehicle barriers with “pedestrian fence,” inflicting tremendous environmental damage in the process. That leaves at least 67 miles of brand new border wall to be built in places that are currently unwalled. With California, Arizona, and New Mexico largely walled off, those new border walls will most likely be built in Texas.

So far, Congress has given the Department of Homeland Security $3.1 billion for border wall construction. The Army Corps of Engineers reported that between February and October of 2008 the cost of building walls increased by 88%, from an average of $3.5 million per mile to $7.5 million per mile. Some sections of border wall are particularly expensive: the levee-border wall combination in South Texas averaged $12 million per mile; in California, a 3.5 mile section that involved filling in canyons cost taxpayers $57 million.


If the Secure Fence Act succeeded in achieving “operational control” of the border, why should we spend no less than (and quite possibly a lot more than) $2,767,500,000.00 to build 369 miles of new border wall?

First and foremost, the border wall has failed to stop either immigrants or smugglers from entering the United States. The majority enter through ports of entry, rather than crossing the desert on foot or the Rio Grande on an inner tube, so walls erected between the ports have no effect on them. And according to the Border Patrol, even those who find the wall directly in their path are only slowed down by around 5 minutes. As Border Patrol spokesperson Mike Scioli said, “The border fence is a speed bump in the desert.”


Professor Wayne Cornelius, with the University of California at San Diego, has spent more than a decade interviewing immigrants before and after they cross the border. His research has revealed that, even with border walls,

“fewer than half of migrants who come to the border are apprehended, even once, by the Border Patrol. … [T]he apprehension rate found in these studies varied from 24% to 47%. And of those who are caught, all but a tiny minority eventually get through – between 92 and 98 percent, depending on the community of origin. If migrants do not succeed on the first try, they almost certainly will succeed on the second or third try.”

Professor Cornelius goes on to conclude,

“the eventual success rate is virtually the same for migrants whose most recent crossing occurred before 1995, when the border was largely unfortified, and those crossing in the most recent period. In other words, the border enforcement build-up seems to have made no appreciable difference in terms of migrants’ ability to enter the United States clandestinely.”


So why would Senators, ranging from alleged fiscal conservatives such as Texas Republican John Cornyn to New York Democrat Charles Schumer, vote to spend nearly $3 billion on more border walls when those already erected do not work?

Simply put, for those politicians who do not live beside the border, and do not count on the votes of those who do, the border wall is an abstraction. The reality that the border wall has little or no impact on border crossers is irrelevant. The reality that more than 300 property owners have had their property condemned is irrelevant. The reality that federally designated wilderness areas and wildlife refuges have been severely impacted is irrelevant. The Senators who voted for more border walls were voting for a symbol, nothing more.

Even the Department of Homeland Security recognizes this fact. After DeMint’s amendment was adopted, DHS spokesman Matt Chandler told the Wall Street Journal that it is, “designed to prevent real progress on immigration enforcement and [is] a reflection of the old administration's strategy: all show, no substance."

Senator Schumer, who will be introducing a Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill around Labor Day, wrote in an op-ed, “I voted to require the Department of Homeland Security to construct significant fortifications to the border fence” as proof that he is, “serious about securing the border.” He did not bother to defend the effectiveness of the border wall, because that was not the point. The wall that he voted for is simply a symbol, meant to show that immigration reform and border enforcement can go arm in arm.

Senator Schumer seems to think that by voting for more walls, and more than likely including border walls in his Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill, he can appease conservatives like Cornyn and gain their votes. If so, he is deluded. No matter how much of the borderlands the bill sacrifices for the sake of empty gestures, immigration reform will not woo conservatives. It is far more likely that Schumer will instead see a repeat of 2006, in which the only part of Comprehensive Immigration Reform that makes it to the President’s desk is hundreds of miles of border wall.

Our nation desperately needs immigration reform. But as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said this past February, “you cannot build a fence from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas, and call that an immigration policy.”

It is a message that Congress sorely needs to hear.

No More Deaths Volunteer Convicted of Littering for Leaving Water in the Desert

The group No More Deaths has been working to save immigrants who are funneled into the Arizona desert by the border wall. In 2006, even before the Secure Fence Act led to the construction of hundreds of miles of Arizona border wall, the Government Accountability Office found that immigrant deaths had doubled as a result of the first walls built in California. A number of No More Deaths volunteers have been charged with littering for leaving water for border crossers. In the Arizona desert, where summer temperatures regularly top 110 degrees, it is virtually impossible to carry sufficient water. No More Deaths issued the following press release regarding the conviction of one of their members for leaving water in the desert for migrants:

Humanitarian Who Left "Life-Sustaining Water" for Migrants Convicted of “Littering”

Walt Staton, a volunteer with the Tucson-based humanitarian aid group No More Deaths, was convicted today of "knowingly littering garbage or other debris" after he left clean drinking water for undocumented migrants crossing the desert on the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge.

In response to this verdict, No More Deaths released the following statement:

“This is a sad day for human rights and for all of us in southern Arizona. By penalizing life-saving work, the United States is showing callous disregard for the lives of our neighbors to the south, whose only crime is to seek a better life. No More Deaths will continue to provide life-saving aid to those in need, and to do our part to clean up the desert. The era of border enforcement that uses death and human rights abuses as a deterrent must come to an end.”

After more than four hours of deliberation on Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning, the 12-member jury first stated to the court that they were not able to agree upon a verdict. Magistrate judge Jennifer Guerin then ordered the jury to go back and attempt again to reach a unanimous verdict. Staton's attorney, William Walker, objected to the order, stating that it was coercive to the jury. The jury reconvened and met for less than an hour before returning a guilty verdict.

On December 4, 2008, U.S. Fish and Wildlife officer James Casey cited Staton and three other humanitarians for littering after being contacted by Border Patrol agents who were following the volunteers. The US Attorney’s office later dropped the charges against the other three. Staton refused to accept guilt and pay the original $175 fine. He now faces the punishment of this criminal misdemeanor that could include up to one year of prison time and a large fine. Sentencing is set for August 11.

In Staton's court testimony, he said that he was compelled by his personal experiences of encountering severely dehydrated migrants in distress. He also explained how the organization uses a strategic system of maps and GPS equipment to place the water in strategic locations. "We try to be conscious as an organization to be the most effective in order to save lives," stated Staton during examination.

During closing arguments, defense lawyer Bill Walker held a full gallon jug of water in the air and declared: "When the government tells you this case isn't about water or this isn't about saving lives, they're wrong! This is valuable, life-sustaining water."

During jury selection nearly one third of the original 31 potential jurors were dismissed after stating they had strong emotions about providing humanitarian aid to migrants and would be unwilling to convict someone who was engaged in humanitarian aid. Public support was also evident during the two full days of the trial as the courtroom remained full with 40-50 humanitarian supporters from local groups such as The Samaritans, Humane Borders, American Friends Service Committee and the Unitarian Universalist Church of Tucson, among others.

Dan Millis, a fellow No More Deaths volunteer, received a similar ticket in February, 2008, for leaving water jugs on the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge. Millis was found guilty last September after a bench trial before magistrate judge Bernie Velasco in Tucson. Dan appealed the case to the US District Court, where the original ruling was upheld. It is currently under appeal at the 9th Circuit Court. Staton also plans to appeal his case to the 9th Circuit.

“The Buenos Aires leadership needs to realize that we’re on the same team here,” Millis said. Millis works full-time for the Sierra Club’s Borderlands Protection Campaign. “They need to issue more permits allowing humanitarian groups to provide water and pick up trash on the refuge,” he said.

Letters of support for Walt Staton, Dan Millis and No More Deaths can be sent to media@nomoredeaths. org; they will be posted on our web site.

* Background on No More Deaths:

According to Pima County medical examiner's data, approximately 20 bodies of deceased migrants have been recovered from Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge since 2002. Dehydration is a factor that leads to many of these deaths. More than 5,000 bodies have been recovered from the US/Mexico border as a result of the U.S. Border Patrol’s strategy of deterrence, beginning in 1994 with Operation Gatekeeper.

Since 2004 No More Deaths has provided life-saving aid to migrants in distress along the Arizona/Mexico border. Thousands of volunteers have participated in these efforts, which include providing water, food and medical assistance. No More Deaths is a ministry of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Tucson and seeks to work with other religious groups, government, community partners, and individuals willing to work toward an end to the humanitarian crisis occurring in the Arizona desert.

No More Deaths is currently gearing up for its sixth summer of humanitarian action during the hottest, deadliest months of the year. We are accepting volunteer applications for the summer, and welcome any and all donations to support our work!

For an updated list of migrant deaths in Arizona, visit DerechosHumanosAZ. net.

Please take a moment to sign the following e-letter to participate in an international campaign declaring that "Humanitarian Aid Is Never A Crime!” This letter speaks to a case in which the Italian government is prosecuting two Germans for "smuggling" after they rescued a sinking raft in the Mediterranean Sea with 37 African refugees on board. Such prosecutions resonate with the efforts by the United States government, described above, to criminalize life-saving humanitarian work.

Friendship Park: A Place of Communion or a Zone of Enforcement?

By John Fanestil

We arrived Sunday as planned at 2:30 pm at the entrance to Border Field State Park . We hiked out the horse trail as we did last week and headed south on the beach. It was a stunningly beautiful day – the hike is about a mile and a half.

No two days are alike at Friendship Park , and two things stood out. First, there were a lot of people at the park – far more than usual for a winter weekend. Clearly, the word was out about this past Tuesday’s meeting – the one at which Customs and Border Patrol announced that the designs for Friendship Park had been finalized and that these designs would allow no public access of any kind to either Monument Mesa or to the border wall on the beach.

Second, the tide was extraordinarily low, and from a distance we could see that hundreds of people had gathered on the beach at Playas de Tijuana. Of these at least a hundred were standing down by the water’s edge, beyond the reach of the border wall (see photo).

As we approached, a Border Patrol officer checked in with us. It was clear that he had been briefed about our presence and was courteous and professional. He asked that we gather at the fence on the beach, but not congregate with the crowds down at the water’s edge as that would make it difficult for them to monitor border crossings. We sent some of our group ahead to talk with the folks on the beach, not wanting our celebration of communion to be confused for an event that invited crossings.

We also told the agent that we intended to serve communion on Monument Mesa, and this clearly surprised him. The mesa was closed, he told us, because it was a construction zone and was unsafe. We told him we were aware of this and that we intended to go to the top of the mesa anyway, as our people had been gathering there for years, in fact for generations. He told us that he would have to check in with his supervisor about this and we agreed that this would be good for him to do. We kept walking.

After waiting a while for the supervisor to weigh in, we decided to begin our celebrations on the beach. Many hundreds of people gathered on the Tijuana side of the fence. I shared with the crowd my belief that what is happening at Friendship Park is of historic proportions. Just as in 1849 the members of the first US-Mexico boundary commission gathered at this site to create the border out of nothing, we are once again at this location trying to decide exactly what the border will be.

At present the US Government is trying to impose a vision of the border that is characterized by fear and hostility and mistrust. They envision a “zone of enforcement” that will run the entire length of the border, and to which no one will be allowed access, from either the south or the north. This is why they have chosen to declare that all public access at Friendship Park will soon be eliminated – because they are trying to set a precedent that they hope someday to enforce along the entire length of the border.

We, by contrast, had gathered to celebrate a different vision of the future. We had gathered to celebrate the border we have come to know and love – a place of profound human encounter, a place of friendship, a place of communion.

After consecrating the elements and serving the crowd on both sides of the wall, a small number of us prepared to climb the slope of Monument Mesa. We had been warned that we would be cited for trespassing by officers from CA Fish & Wildlife, but we had prepared for there to be some consequence and we were committed to make it to the monument. We climbed up on to the mesa, stepped over the plastic meshing that now surrounds the plaza, and began to prepare to share communion. Another Border Patrol agent approached us, told us the Mesa was closed, again citing reasons of safety in a construction zone as the reason for its closure. We told him we understood that, but that we were going to stay and serve communion. He returned to his vehicle, and we shared communion with a small group of people who greeted us on the Mexican side of the monument.

When we returned to the beach below, one of our friends told us he heard a Border Patrol agent call in on his radio, “There are about eight of them (who went up on to Monument Mesa) and I’m not going to detain anybody with all these cameras around.”

We look forward to celebrating communion at Friendship Park next Sunday, January 18. We will meet at the entrance to the park at 2:30 p.m.

Adelante.

John Fanestil is the Executive Director of the Foundation for Change.

http://www.foundation4change.org/

Communion through the border wall at Friendship Park

By Jason Evans

Every Sunday afternoon, I head down I-5 towards the San Ysidro border crossing. I get off the freeway and head towards Border Field State Park. Within the park, at the most southwest point of San Diego county is Friendship Park, a monument to the friendly relationship between the U.S. and Mexico. When I come up to the monument I am met by familiar faces on both sides of the fence. Mexican men, deported from the U.S., women selling their handmade goods, and families separated from each other by the border, using this unique space as a place to meet, squeezing their fingers through the fence to touch each other; wipe away tears from each others faces. And there are clergy and activists too. We are gathered to celebrate communion. We are gathered to celebrate our unity through the work of Jesus Christ that surpasses fences and walls built by the State.


The Department of Homeland Security has elected to build a new border fence that will run through this special place. 35 laws and regulations have been waived in order to do this. Millions of dollars will go into this project. Several months ago, I went to the meeting with the Army Corps. of Engineers to see how San Diego contractors could get a piece of this work. I may disagree with most of the contractors present on this fence, but they aren’t dumb. Everyone quickly realized that the meeting was a simply a “dog and pony show.” There wasn’t any real work for San Diego contractors. No significant amount of that large amount of money was going back into our economy.

So, as I walk towards that fence every week, looking to the east and seeing the new fence encroaching on this peacable place, I am aware of the undemocratic manner in which it has been erected. I am aware of how unhelpful this is to our local economy. I am aware of the irreprable ecological damage it reeks on God’s creation in this place. I am aware that it will give coyote’s reason to raise prices for human smuggling, making a violent, inhumane industry even more so. I am aware that this means even more people will die in the eastern rural segment of our county, trying to cross in areas manned by fewer Border Patrol agents. I am saddened by this but I feel that our symbolic work every Sunday helps us imagine another world, a world that we continue to work towards establishing even in the face of this large challenge.

During winter months, the park is closed to vehicles. The roads often flood. Instead, my colleagues and I park outside the park gate and hike through the sticky mud, down to the beach and then south towards the monument. Altogether about a mile and a half walk in sand and mud. Not a big ordeal when considering the celebratory moment we are about to participate in. The Friendship Park monument segment in Mexico is part of urban Tijuana. People easily walk up to the Mexican side to meet us, eating cob corn on a stick as they meet with their loved one’s that have not been deported.

A plastic mesh fence was put around the monument the week before Christmas this year. The park was still open to pedestrians and no one has prohibited us from serving communion. So, this week we continued with our usual plan. We turned off the muddy horse path and on to the beach beginning our southward walk. About halfway from the horse path to the monument we were met by two Border Patrol jeeps. We were told that we would be given a citation by State Parks if we went any further. We asked why this wasn’t on their website. The agent did not have a helpful response. This was also curious as the Department of Homeland Security has declared this federal property. Why would the Parks give us a citation and not Border Patrol? We told the young agent that we had people waiting for us at the fence. We needed to get there. He told us he would have to “intervene” if we did that. He would not clarify what this meant. We asked to speak to a supervisor.

About this time, a Border Patrol helicopter flew over us a couple times. A curious show of force. A photo journalist from the LA Times was with us this Sunday. He decided to risk driving up to the monument and was stopped by the State Parks and cited. About the time that it was realized that he was a photo journalist, we were told we could approach the fence near the ocean to do communion, and the “man from the LA Times” would be driven out to meet us if we agreed to stay away from the monument. It seemed clear that they were willing to compromise with us as long as it didn’t mean a scene would be made for the photo journalist to report.

Communion was beautiful this week. It was cold enough to keep the orders of rotting fish, trash and kelp at our feet at bay. At the water, the fence has wider openings. The chalice was able to fit through the fence so that people did not have to squeeze their small bit of tortilla through the opening. I was able to fully grasp my friend Martin’s hand as we prayed. An honor to do with a man who–along with his family–has been through so much. The initial behavior of the Border Patrol ignited a fervor in my fellow clergy, Rev. John Fanestil who brought tears to eyes during his introduction to communion, smoothly moving between Spanish and English.


After saying goodbye to our friends, cleaning up and getting ready to start our walk back, we noticed a couple that had met us at the fence from the San Diego side walking back north. Around 10 people had started the walk back before them, several yards north of them. Two Border Patrol jeeps stormed down the beach cutting off these 2 specific pedestrians. The couple and their young son were brown-skinned Hispanic Americans. No one else had been stopped who had begun walking home. None of the rest of us were brown-skinned as they were… But the Border Patrol will say they do not conduct racial profiling.

It has become even more important for the tight-lipped posture of the agencies in charge of this project and area to be more transparent. At a minimum, it seems realistic to ask for plans for the park to be made public. To date, their has been nearly zero consistency between information released by State Parks and Border Patrol. It’s disconcerting and unlike the democratic society this country claims to be to not involve the public and it’s elected officials in the process of something that so drastically impacts part of the place we call home. We are a long way from Washington D.C. We should be allowed to have a voice in this project.

Even more deeply important to me, is that as a follower of the Great Liberator, Jesus Christ, I do not feel I can stand idly by while powers do not listen to their people, act inhumanely to people based on the color of their skin or place of origin, recklessly destroy God’s creation and line the pockets of corporations who have no intent on benefiting the people who live in the region effected by their work–further gouging the divide between the have’s and have-not’s in a variety of ways. Last night, I asked my faith community to pray for discernment, courage and wisdom as I work with my colleagues in determining how we will continue to respond to this situation. I ask those of you that pray to do the same. I also invite those physically able to join me next Sunday for communion at the border. It is uncertain how much longer we will be able to do this. You may even want to spend the day in Tijuana and meet us on Mexican side. We meet at the fence on Sundays at 3:00 p.m. It would be really great to see a large turn out. It would make a great statement to the people and powers of Tijuana and San Diego. Feel free to contact us for information.

Jason Evans is a co-founder of the Ecclesia Collective and a member of the Hawthorn House.

His essay was originally posted at the Ecclesia Collective's website: http://ecclesiacollective.org/borderland/continued-border-activity

To see the results from the LA Times photojournalist who accompanied him, go to:
http://www.latimes.com/news/columnists/la-me-tobar6-2009jan06,0,2887120.column

Chertoff’s Billion Dollar Speedbump Should Be Obama’s First Budget Cut

By Scott Nicol

On the day that Barak Obama takes the oath of office workers will be pouring concrete and welding steel to extend the border wall. Today, walls slice through 378 miles of our borderlands. The Secure Fence Act calls for roughly double that amount. As president, it will be up to Obama to decide whether the costs, in terms of billions of dollars spent and homes, farms, communities, and wildlife refuges torn apart, is justified. He recently said that with two foreign wars, hundreds of billions of dollars pledged to the financial bailout, and trillions of dollars in national debt, projects that “bleed billions of dollars” without benefiting the nation will have to be cut. The border wall should top that list.

All of the imagined benefits of the border wall flow from the assumption that if walls are built they will stop illegal traffic from entering the U.S. Some politicians claim that building 700 miles of wall along our 1,933 mile long southern border, while ignoring the 3,987 mile long northern border and 12,479 miles of coastline, will somehow allow the Department of Homeland Security to realize the Secure Fence Act’s goal, to “achieve and maintain operational control over the entire international land and maritime borders of the United States.”



In fact, the Border Patrol’s own statistics show that border walls have not brought about a decrease in illegal entries. The border patrol uses the number of border crossers apprehended in a given sector to gauge the overall number of attempted crossings. Apprehensions dropped dramatically between 2005, the year before the Secure Fence Act was passed, and 2007, the year after. But the decrease did not occur in areas where border walls had been built. On the contrary, the greatest reductions in apprehensions, which according to the Border Patrol would indicate a successful strategy for stopping undocumented immigration, were seen in sectors that did not have walls. Texas’ Rio Grande Valley sector saw a 45.3% decrease in apprehensions, bringing them to a 15 year low. The Del Rio sector saw a 66.5% decrease. Neither sector had an inch of border wall before 2008. In sectors such as Tucson, which saw walls built shortly after the passage of the Secure Fence Act, the reduction in apprehensions began before any cement was poured. The areas that saw an increase in crossings were California’s San Diego and El Centro sectors, both of which have had border walls for over a decade. At the same time that the unwalled border witnessed dramatic decreases in crossings, heavily fortified San Diego saw a 20.1% increase.

Long before the Secure Fence Act was written it was clear that border walls did not reduce the number of people entering the United States. In looking at the number of crossers apprehended by the Border Patrol between 1992 and 2004, when walls were being erected in the San Diego sector, the Congressional Research Service found that there was no change. They concluded that, “While the increased enforcement in the San Diego sector has resulted in a shift in migration patterns for unauthorized aliens, it does not appear to have decreased the overall number of apprehensions made each year by USBP agents.” Would-be immigrants were not stopped by the border wall; they simply went around it.


Two months before the passage of the Secure Fence Act, Wayne Cornelius, Director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California-San Diego told the House Judiciary Committee that,

“tightened border enforcement since 1993 has not stopped nor even discouraged unauthorized migrants from entering the United States. Even if apprehended, the vast majority (92-97%) keep trying until they succeed. Neither the higher probability of being apprehended by the Border Patrol, nor the sharply increased danger of clandestine entry through deserts and mountainous terrain, has discouraged potential migrants from leaving home.”

The assertion that more walls will allow the U.S. to “secure” its southern border is therefore false. Spokespersons for the Border Patrol tend to describe them much more modestly. Del Rio, Texas, Border Patrol Chief Randy Hill said, “We're going to see steel barriers erected on the borders where U.S. and Mexican cities adjoin. These will slow down illegal crossers by minutes.” He says nothing about stopping crossers, or allowing the Border Patrol to “achieve and maintain operational control” of the border, but only slowing crossers down by “minutes.” As Border Patrol spokesperson Mike Scioli said, “The border fence is a speed bump in the desert.”


The false sense of security that the border wall brings comes with a real price tag. In 2007 the Congressional Research Service estimated that the border wall could cost as much as $49 billion to build and maintain. Since then the costs of construction have risen dramatically. Between February and October of 2008, the Army Corps of Engineers reported that the cost of building border walls had increased by 88%, from an average of $3.5 million per mile to $7.5 million per mile. The cost of building vehicle barriers on the border increased by 48%, to $2.8 million per mile. Some sections of border wall are particularly expensive: the walls that are being inserted into the levees in South Texas are averaging $12 million per mile; in California, a 3.5 mile section that involves filling a canyon with 2.5 million yards of earth torn from adjacent mountains so that the wall will not have to dip down into it will cost taxpayers $57 million. In 2008, the Department of Homeland Security asked Congress to allocate an additional $400 million for border wall construction, because the $2.7 billion already spent was not enough to finish out the year.

Arizona governor Janet Napolitano has been named as President-elect Obama’s choice for Secretary of Homeland Security. From her first day on the job she must embody the “change” that Barak Obama campaigned on. Napolitano must have the courage to speak truthfully to the American people, to admit that we are not safer for having built hundreds of miles of border wall, and our national security will not be enhanced by building another mile or one hundred miles or even one thousand miles. She should restore the rule of law on the border by rescinding the waivers of 36 federal laws that Michael Chertoff issued in order to build border walls. Thanks to last year’s Omnibus spending bill, she will have the authority to either double the current length of the border wall or immediately halt construction. Chertoff has used these powers to condemn private property, decimate wildlife corridors, and build mile upon mile of useless border wall. Napolitano should shift the Department of Homeland Security’s funds and priorities away from empty gestures and political grandstanding, and bring an end to the border wall.

Walkers Remember Migrants on Tohono O'odham Land

By Brenda Norrell

SAN XAVIER DISTRICT, TOHONO O'ODHAM NATION -- Walkers arrived at San Xavier District on the Tohono O'odham Nation on Saturday to remember the 183 migrants who died this past year in the Sonoran desert. Of those migrants, 108 were not identified. Nineteen could not be identified as male or female because so little of their remains were found. A large portion of those deaths were on Tohono O'odham land.

Walkers called out "Presente!" during the reading of the names at San Xavier, remembering those who died walking to a better life. The walk, organized by Derechos Humanos, was an 8-mile walk from Tucson, during temperatures that reached the mid 90s.

Although the elected leaders on the main section of the Tohono O'odham Nation, located to the west of here, have not welcomed humanitarian aid for migrants, the San Xavier District cohosted the Indigenous Peoples Border Summit of the Americas in 2006 and 2007. The border summits were cohosted by the International Indian Treaty Council and organized by Tohono O'odham Mike Flores.

Photos: Walkers arrive at San Xavier. Crosses carry the names of the migrants who died this past year. Photos Brenda Norrell. Please e-mail for reprint permission: brendanorrell@gmail.com

This originally appeared in Censored News: http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2008/11/walkers-remember-migrants-on-tohono.html

The Border Wall Violates Human Rights

On October 22, the two-year anniversary of President Bush's signing ceremony for the Secure Fence Act, the Organization for American States convened a hearing into allegations that the border wall currently under construction violates human rights. A multi-disciplinary working group of faculty and students affiliated with the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice at The University of Texas at Austin submitted a series of briefing papers to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an inter-governmental body of the Organization of American States which provide evidence of human rights violations. Their report is available here:
http://www.utexas.edu/law/academics/centers/humanrights/publications/




The situation on the U.S. – Mexico border is one in which fundamental human rights, environmental concerns, and the rule of law have been set aside to facilitate the construction of border walls which have, at most, symbolic value. The border wall's construction coincides with a rise in misinformation regarding the situation at the border, as well as the impacts and effectiveness of the border wall. We hope that the hearings that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights holds will help to bring clarity to the situation, and will spur the United States to adopt rational border policies that promote human rights and reverse policies which currently violate human rights.


Border Wall construction in south Texas


The No Border Wall Coalition is deeply troubled by the headlong rush to build walls along the United States’ southern border without meaningful consideration of the walls’ negative impacts on border communities and the environment, and without evidence that such walls will enhance national security or curtail illegal immigration and smuggling. The border wall is a monumental project that will severely impact the entire 1,969-mile southern border and the 11 million US citizens who live along it, as well as those who live in Mexican cities and communities along the border.

Building the border wall in urban areas is a priority for the Department of Homeland Security because they say that in such places it is “easier for an alien…to conceal themselves in a home or business.” In Texas border communities, the edge of the Rio Grande is already crowded with many homes and businesses that will have to be destroyed for a border wall to be erected. Like countless other human societies throughout history, these communities were founded on the banks of a river. In places like Laredo, Roma, and Brownsville, the river is still the heart of the community, its status as an international border notwithstanding. You cannot cut through the heart of a community without causing grave harm.

Border communities will be severely impacted by the border wall. In South Texas, the river that defines the border is also the reason that settlers originally came to the area. Land grants that were parceled out by the King of Spain in the 1760’s are in many cases still held by their original owners’ descendants. These grants included access to the Rio Grande, recognizing that without its water the area would be uninhabitable, and the river remains the source of water for irrigation and municipal use. If farmers along the Rio Grande can not access the river or the intake pumps that bring its water to their fields they will lose their farms.


Border Wall construction in Granjeno, Texas
Approximately one-quarter of the population in the counties along the border live at or below the poverty line. This is more than double the national poverty rate. In addition, most of the counties in the border region have majority-minority populations. Executive order 12898 (Federal Action to Address Environmental Justice [EJ] in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations), provides that “each Federal agency must identify and address, as appropriate, disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects of its programs, policies, and activities on minority populations and low-income populations in the U.S.” The Department of Homeland Security has ignored its responsibility to address the Environmental Justice issues raised by the border wall.

The Lower Rio Grande Valley has double the poverty rate of rest of the state of Texas (In 2000, 35.7% vs. 15.4%). In many cases landowners facing condemnation proceedings cannot afford legal representation, so they decide to cut their losses rather than fight for their legal rights. Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid has stepped in to represent many low income property owners, but their resources are limited. The Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law is representing other residents in suits against DHS challenging eminent domain proceedings.

Despite the mandate of the Omnibus Spending Bill of 2007, which requires meaningful consultation with local stakeholders before walls are built, the Department of Homeland Security has ignored the comments and concerns of those of us who will be directly impacted by the border wall. Meetings have been held in secret and are closed to the general public. All maps that have been released are claimed to be preliminary, despite the fact that DHS has been contacting landowners to gain access to private property and construction has already begun. DHS has gone so far as to tell members of the public and press that releasing information would endanger national security, because then smugglers and terrorists would know their plans. This is ludicrous, as once an 18 foot wall is built its location will hardly be a secret.

The most glaring abuse of human rights that is directly connected to the border wall is the fact that the wall has caused thousands of deaths. In 2006 the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) looked at the border wall’s human toll since the erection of the first California sections in the mid 1990s. They found that, though the number of border-crossing deaths had been declining in the 1980s and early 1990s,

“Since 1995, the number of border-crossing deaths increased and by 2005 had more than doubled. […] This increase in deaths occurred despite the fact that, according to published estimates, there was not a corresponding increase in the number of illegal entries. Further, GAO’s analysis also shows that more than three-fourths of the doubling in deaths along the southwest border since 1995 can be attributed to increases in deaths occurring in the Arizona desert.”



Migrant trail through the Arizona desert


This increase in deaths occurred because the border walls did not stop people from entering the United States, they only rerouted them. Confronted with an 18 foot high wall near San Diego, desperate immigrants did not turn around and go home. They went around it. Rather than crossing in safer urban areas, thousands instead came in through the desert. As a result, more than 5,000 have died from dehydration and exposure, and it is estimated that thousands of bodies lie undiscovered.

The No Border Wall Coalition would like to thank the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights for holding hearings on the abuses of human rights that are associated with the construction of the border wall. The fact that the United States has avoided a similar examination is shameful. We look forward to reading your conclusions regarding the situation on the border, and hope that they will be read by U.S. decision makers as well. So long as the discussion regarding the border and the wall that is being erected along it is dominated by demagogues, rather than a careful examination of the facts, there is little hope of improvement.

Art Against the Wall

By Scott Nicol

International borders are abstract concepts, little more than lines on maps that we imagine upon the earth. Existing outside of the real world of rivers, mountains, or deserts, political boundaries have no bearing on ecosystems. Ephemeral, the lines shift from decade to decade, century to century, making old maps obsolete. Still, the map and the concept that it represents are privileged over the actual landscape. The wall under construction along the U.S.-Mexico border is an attempt to impose a political fantasy upon living ecosystems, to transform a line on a map into a permanent line of concrete and steel on the land.

The border wall is meant to enforce division, to block the migration of humans based on the national boundary that encircled them at birth. Near San Diego it consists of parallel 18 foot tall steel walls with stadium lights, cameras, and a road in between. In Arizona rusted steel landing mats left over from the Vietnam War have been welded together and driven into the earth. Three hundred and thirteen miles of pedestrian walls and vehicle barriers had been built by March 31, 2008; another six hundred and seventy miles are to be built by January. Walls will slice through parks and National Wildlife Refuges, communities and businesses, farms and homes. They will stop the movement of endangered species such as the Sonoran pronghorn and ocelot, but according to the Border Patrol human migrants will only be slowed by a few minutes.

In the face of something so destructive and absurd, what role can art play?

Migrating from the campuses of South Texas College and the University of Texas at Brownsville to the McA2 Creative Incubator in McAllen, and scheduled to travel on to Monterrey, Mexico, the Art Against the Wall exhibition allows artists living along the border to address this question. Much of the work is didactic, like Monica Ramirez’ painting “International Friendship”, depicting a golden Statue of Liberty obscured by a crude stone wall with the words, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” written on its impasto surface. Oscar Martinez flirts with abstraction, using bands of paint and scraps of plywood to overwhelm a photograph of a concertina wire-topped prison fence in “Crossing the Dividing Line”. In “Anatomy of a Border Wall” Victor Alvarez and Rachael Brown digitally impose fencing onto landscapes that will soon be scarred by actual walls. These and other works in the show express a mix of fear and outrage at what the artists see as a tremendous injustice, an assault on border communities and American ideals. Political in its inception, this show and these artists want to stop the border wall.

The border wall is actually a series of walls with wide gaps in between, the first of which were built near San Diego, California in 1995. As more walls have been constructed near cities, immigrants have traveled deeper into the desert to get around them. This has lead to hundreds of deaths due to dehydration and exposure, a tragic situation that artists in Tijuana, Mexico wanted to bring to light. In 2003 they bolted coffins to the Mexican side of the border wall. Each was decorated and inscribed with a year and the number of crossers who had died that year. For 1995 the number of confirmed dead was 61; in 2000 there were 499. The artists sought to transform the border wall into a graveyard, a memorial to the dead that its construction had caused.

Like the graffiti that covered the West German face of the Berlin wall, the placement of the coffins both undermines the border wall’s authority and protests the authoritarianism that brought it into being. Removed from the art world of galleries and museums, they occupy the real world where people risk their lives to enter the United States, and where military means are marshaled to stop them. They are both a warning to crossers and a reproach to the United States. Affixed to the border wall the coffins become part of the reality of the wall, mediating the perception of the wall of those who encounter it. But they have not stopped further construction. Three years after their installation, and two weeks before the U.S. midterm elections, Congress passed the Secure Fence Act of 2006, calling for more than 700 miles of border wall modeled on the barrier from which the coffins hang.

The transformation of the map’s depiction to the reality of miles of walls is currently underway. Can more art reverse this conjuring trick? During the Spanish Civil War, with Franciso Franco attempting to overthrow Spain’s Republic and install himself as dictator, artists were commissioned to make work that would rally world opinion behind the Republican government to stop Franco’s advance. Pablo Picasso’s epic “Guernica”, with its chaotic disfigurement of humans and animals, was a reaction to the bombing of the Basque village of the same name in which 1,600 civilians died. The chaos of Picasso’s composition was meant to capture the raw terror felt by Franco’s victims as they desperately sought shelter. It has shaped our perception of the event and of Franco’s brutality, but it did not prevent him from taking Spain from democracy to fascist dictatorship.

A reproduction of “Guernica” hangs in the United Nations beside the door to the Security Council chamber. In 2003, when Colin Powell made his now infamous presentation to the UN Security Council laying out evidence for the invasion of Iraq, “Guernica” was covered with a blue banner. The United States did not want the backdrop for the call to war to be a depiction of the horrors of aerial bombardment. Picasso’s painting was viewed as a threat to the control of the message. In the intervening years support for the invasion of Iraq has plummeted, from 90% of Americans in favor of the war to 70% opposed. This dramatic shift was not the result of a single news report, act of protest, or work of art. It is the accumulation of all of these that has inexorably pushed the national debate.

The artists of the borderlands who seek to stop the walls hope for a similar result. Whether images on gallery walls or coffins on the border wall itself, the goal is to shape the conversation, moving it from the xenophobia and “broken borders” rhetoric of CNN’s Lou Dobbs to the lives and landscape that the border walls destroy. It is the art of engagement, addressing the world and addressed to the communities that these artists live in. Their hope is that the rest of the nation will engage in this dialogue and perceive the border walls as they do before more is lost.

This article originally appeared in Voices of Art magazine.

Chertoff Pays the Price of the Border Wall in Human Lives

By Scott Nicol

In 2007 a U.S. district court ordered a halt to construction of the border wall through the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff responded to the ruling, “I have to say to myself, ‘Yes, I don’t want to disturb the habitat of a lizard, but am I prepared to pay human lives to do that?’” He then waived 19 federal laws, using the unprecedented power granted him by the Real ID Act to override the judge’s order, and immediately resumed construction of the border wall through the last free-flowing river in southern Arizona. This past April he issued another Real Id Act waiver, which swept aside 36 federal laws to enable the construction of walls called for by the Secure Fence Act along the southern border.


Secretary Chertoff’s statement was intended to mislead the American people into believing that the environmental damage caused by border walls is the necessary cost of protecting U.S. citizens. When confronted with a “lizards vs. humans” choice, anyone with warm blood will defend the latter. Establishing this false dichotomy is therefore a great way to marshal support for the border wall by demonizing border wall opponents as wanting to sacrifice human safety and national security to protect animals. But it is a lie, and Chertoff knows it.

While the walls built along the U.S./Mexico border since the 1990s have done tremendous environmental damage, they have not saved any human lives. Chertoff cannot point to a single terrorist who has attempted to cross the U.S./Mexico border, much less one turned back by a section of border wall. It has not even reduced the number of undocumented immigrants who enter the country each year seeking work. Four months before Chertoff claimed that if we do not build walls we must be “prepared to pay human lives,” the Congressional Research Service issued a report which found that the border wall “did not have a discernible impact on the influx of unauthorized aliens coming across the border.”

The border wall has instead caused thousands of deaths. In 2006 the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) looked at the border wall’s human toll since the erection of the first California sections in the mid 1990s. They found that, though the number of border-crossing deaths had been declining in the 1980s and early 1990s,

“Since 1995, the number of border-crossing deaths increased and by 2005 had more than doubled. […] This increase in deaths occurred despite the fact that, according to published estimates, there was not a corresponding increase in the number of illegal entries. Further, GAO’s analysis also shows that more than three-fourths of the doubling in deaths along the southwest border since 1995 can be attributed to increases in deaths occurring in the Arizona desert.”


This increase in deaths occurred because the border walls did not stop people from entering the United States, they only rerouted them. Confronted with an 18 foot high wall near San Diego, desperate immigrants did not turn around and go home. They went around it. Rather than crossing in safer urban areas, thousands instead came in through the desert. As a result, more than 5,000 have died from dehydration and exposure, and it is estimated that thousands of bodies lie undiscovered.

The GAO report revealed that funneling immigrants into the desert was not accidental, but intentional. “The strategy assumed that as the urban areas were controlled, the migrant traffic would shift to more remote areas where the Border Patrol would be able to more easily detect and apprehend migrants entering illegally. The strategy also assumed that natural barriers including rivers, such as the Rio Grande in Texas, the mountains east of San Diego, and the desert in Arizona would act as deterrents to illegal entry.”

The GAO concluded, “The increase in deaths due to heat exposure over the last 15 years is consistent with our previous report that found evidence that migrant traffic shifted from urban areas like San Diego and El Paso into the desert following the implementation of the Southwest Border Strategy in 1994.”


These findings were presented to Secretary Chertoff long before he lied to the American people to justify his Real ID Act waiver. Fully aware that existing border walls have caused thousands of deaths, he has decided to erect more walls.

And the decision is entirely his to make. Last year’s supplemental appropriations bill contained a provision which gives Secretary Chertoff absolute discretion as to whether or not to build walls along the border. It changes the Secure Fence Act’s text to read, “nothing in this paragraph shall require the Secretary of Homeland Security to install fencing, physical barriers, roads, lighting, cameras, and sensors in a particular location along an international border of the United States, if the Secretary determines that the use or placement of such resources is not the most appropriate means to achieve and maintain operational control over the international border at such location.'' With ample evidence that the border wall is causing thousands of deaths without slowing the influx of undocumented immigrants or enhancing national security, it should be easy to make that determination.

The border wall does not present the United States with a choice of either saving the environment or saving human lives. The wall takes a terrible toll on both. The real choice is whether or not to build more walls, knowing that if more walls are constructed they will do irreparable environmental damage and cause thousands more to die.

Until Congress acts to amend or repeal the Secure Fence Act and the Real ID Act, only Secretary Chertoff has the power to make this decision. The language in the Omnibus bill gives Secretary Chertoff the power to decide whether or not more border walls are built. The Real ID Act gives him the power to suspend our nation’s laws to build walls that would otherwise be illegal. Numerous reports have spelled out how many people have died, and how many more are likely to die, as a direct result of the border wall. In the face of all of this, Secretary Chertoff continues to build walls. In legal terms, this is a premeditated act, because he knows what the result will be. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has decided that to build the border wall he is in fact “prepared to pay human lives.”