RE-LEGALIZE IT:

We can't understand U.S. border enforcement without understanding the history of the border. For more than 10,000 years, Indigenous communities lived in what are now called the borderlands. Stone tools found in Arizona date back 12,000 years. O'odham traditional territory spanned an area that includes parts of modern-day Arizona and Sonora, Mexico.

When the Mexican-American War ended in 1848, the U.S. acquired most of the land that is now the southern U.S. The 1854 Gadsden Purchase marked the current U.S.-Mexico border, slicing through the middle of traditional O'odham territories. The border was drawn at a time when the U.S. was expanding west, forcibly removing Indigenous people from their land. O'odham people were not consulted and did not consent to the establishment of the border, according to former Tohono O'odham tribal leader David Garcia.

O'odham members could cross the border freely until the 1990s, when Clinton's militarization policies began. Following a 1993 study by the Office of National Drug Control Policy that found the southwest border was "being overrun" and the new Nafta trade deal that encouraged Mexican agricultural workers to head north, the Clinton administration approved the Border Patrol plan of prevention through deterrence--enforcing the border with personnel, infrastructure, and tech to make it more like a fortress to drive migration routes into less hospitable areas. Doris Meissner, commissioner of the agency that oversaw Border Patrol at the time, said of the policy in 2000: "We did believe that geography would be an ally to us.... It was our sense that the number of people crossing the border through Arizona would go down to a trickle, once people realized what it's like."

At 34, Amber Lee Ortega, a Tohono O'odham tribal member and Hia C-ed O'odham descendent, is part of the last generation that can remember a demilitarized border. She recalls moving freely across the border during tribal pilgrimages. "Now I can't go 100 feet without a helicopter or Border Patrol arriving," she said over the phone.

Today the Tohono O'odham reservation shares 62 miles of border with Mexico. It is also one of the most deadly places for migration across the border, with 1,400 deaths recorded since 2000.

As a child, Ortega's parents taught her migration was natural. When people traveled through the reservation, her family helped them by offering water and food. "It wasn't even a hesitation, it was part of our himadag," or way of life, she said.

That changed as she grew up. Historically, migrants crossed the border at major cities like San Diego and El Paso, but prevention through deterrence beefed up patrol in cities, so people turned toward open land, including the Tohono O'odham reservation. Ortega remembers Border Patrol harassing her dad on his way to work; signs he posted on their property didn't deter Border Patrol from crossing onto their land. In the 1990s, Mexican cartels began using the reservation as a smuggling corridor. Her family only received one TV channel, and it broadcast news stories about violence and drug-running on a loop. From the news and Border Patrol, Ortega said her family got the message: "If you offer water or food, you are considered a terrorist." They stopped offering assistance, she said, "due to the harassment of Border Patrol." When she was nine, someone broke into her family's home and stole blankets and bikes. "We went from feeling cheerful and helpful to fearing anyone knocking on the door." Ortega has had to unlearn this fear.

What Ortega experienced in her backyard was being designed thousands of miles away. From 2000 to 2010, primarily under George W. Bush, Border Patrol's budget more than tripled. After the 9/11 terror attacks, Border Patrol turned its focus toward terrorism and smuggling, doubling down on deterrence and surveilling the border. From 1997 to 2009, the mortality rate per 10,000 apprehensions shot up from 1.6 deaths to 7.6 deaths, showing how even as unauthorized migration decreased during this time, crossing the border became more dangerous. In 2003, Border Patrol launched a search and rescue team and placed 20 rescue beacons in the desert, but these measures proved ineffective. Border control continued under Obama; in 2010 he signed a $600 million border security bill and increased deportations. The primary reason, according to ProPublica, was to gain credibility with Republicans in order to pass comprehensive immigration reform. The secret sauce for such a bill was tightened border security plus legalizing undocumented people. The bill ultimately failed.

Although apprehensions of unauthorized migrants at the southern border were down from a peak in 2000, Trump followed through on his campaign promise to crack down on "illegal" immigration. Deterrence took on a new meaning; Trump took headline-grabbing action to show migrants that they should not come to the U.S. through, among other measures, continuing mass deportations, funding border wall construction, implementing the Migrant Protection Protocols that forced tens of thousands of asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico, separating families at the border as part of his "zero tolerance" policy, and moving the border further south by pressuring Mexico and other Central American nations to halt migration north.

Migrants aren't the only casualties of border militarization; the construction of new border wall under the Trump administration has limited O'odham people's ability to practice ceremonies and pilgrimages, destroyed archaeological sites and ancient graves, and ruined the sacred sites of Quitobaquito Springs and Monument Hill. Ortega, who was arrested in September for temporarily halting its construction, said: "The border wall has not just limited our way of being, our culture, our spiritual practices--it has felt like an intentional severing of who we are."

Today, when crossing the border, Garcia said O'odham people must identify themselves with a tribal ID card. Border agents have the power to deny entry and can confiscate these cards, he said. The militarized border has made it harder for tribal members on the southern side of the border to travel to the tribal hospital in the U.S. without an appointment. "They're all being scrutinized," he said. "There's been several of our tribal members, including relatives of mine, who have been deported." He said his southern relatives "are now categorized as migrants."

All of this is Biden's inheritance.

When migrating people become lost, there is no U.S. agency with the primary mandate to save them. Border Patrol resources are first directed toward deterring and detaining migrants; the 911 system is not designed to respond to these emergencies, either. If a lost migrant or their family calls 911 in Texas, police cannot obtain a warrant quickly enough to search private ranches, according to Sanchez-Cristobal.

According to a new report by the Arizona-based humanitarian group No More Deaths, if a person is lost in the borderlands and calls 911, the emergency response is segregated based on perceived citizenship; 911 calls are automatically diverted to Border Patrol if the missing person is perceived to be a migrant. The group analyzed thousands of calls to a crisis line for missing migrants and found that in 63 percent of emergency requests to Border Patrol, the agency did not conduct a confirmed search; if a migrant becomes lost in the borderlands, there is a one in three chance the agency will search for them.

No More Deaths also found that Border Patrol caused people to go missing by chasing and scattering groups of migrants, and documented cases of the agency interfering with family efforts to search for loved ones. "Far from constituting an accidental tragedy, we find that Border Patrol's practice of abandoning people to die in U.S. territory lies at the heart of contemporary border enforcement strategy," the report concludes. The organization calls people missing in the borderlands "disappeared"--a term that denotes the state's role in their deaths.

Whereas previous administrations have inflamed these patterns, No More Deaths can imagine a border policy that, if Democrats and the Biden administration embraced it, breaks the pattern of balancing border security with amnesty.

Tweet   @brothersjudd