LOCAL LAW ENFORCERS TURNING BORDER INTO 'POLICE STATE'

One of the reasons I wanted to move to Bisbee is because it is so close to
the border. Growing up, I spent a lot of time along the Texas-Mexico border.
Countries at their edges begin to fade out a little, to relax their grip. I
liked the border's loose, end-of- the-line character. At least that's the
way it used to be.

But it is not like this anymore. It is a cordoned divide, like the Berlin
Wall, something to keep people out, a partition that symbolizes the deep
divide in our nation over immigration policy.

Of all the fates that lie in store for Bisbee, the one that worries me the
most is that of the border as cordoned wall. A walled border lined with
security police turns into a prison for people on both sides.

People make borders, but borders also make people and communities. Defending
the cordoned wall is becoming a way of life, turning the border region and
small communities into a faceless "sector" or "zone."

Border zones become the de facto administrative appendages of a federal
policy, with all who enter the zone held suspect by a complex of public and
private enterprises devoted to sealing the nation off from danger.

For the most part, the people coming north across the border are refugees
from Mexico's grim inequalities and pose no threat. They just want work.

Yet as the border zone gets harder and harder to enter and cross, the nature
of the enterprise of crossing changes and intensifies. People come with more
organization, more information and more determination to get beyond the
heavily-policed border corridor.

As the national government increasingly strengthens the border with more
agents, money to house prisoners, helicopters and blimps, the border itself
becomes a police economy. This changes everything for everyone.

Racial profiling, now legitimate, makes all Mexican nationals and U.S.
citizens of Mexican descent subject to special surveillance. Public
prosecutors, public defenders and the courts spend more and more of their
time handing undocumented alien-related crimes or drug-trafficking matters.

The border captivity has already changed the Bisbee police department.
Reports can be found weekly in the Bisbee newspapers that read like this:
"This week, Bisbee police discovered 256 undocumented immigrants and turned
them over to the Border Patrol, impounding 36 of the vehicles used to
transport them."

To an outsider, this might seem like another story of the border badlands.
But the real story is, our local police department hires out its badges to
the Border Patrol, helping the U.S. "federales" track down undocumented aliens.

As payment, the Bisbee police get to keep aliens' vehicles and use the
proceeds from their sale to fatten the department's budget.

A Bisbee policeman can stop any vehicle driven by a person they reasonably
suspect is in violation of a law. Still, it is very bad idea for the local
police to help with the Border Patrol's job.

Undocumented aliens do not have the same rights the rest of us do. The
police practices used to detect and detain them are unusually intrusive and
arbitrary. No local police force should get into the habit of treating any
person, citizen or not, the same way the Border Patrol and the Immigration
and Naturalization Service are empowered to do.

The Bisbee police deny they are working for the Border Patrol and say they
stop the seized vehicles only after they violate a traffic law. But if you
believe that, you believe in the tooth fairy.

The Bisbee police stop far more cars than they seize. Each week, they stop
and inspect 100 cars driven by people under the suspicion of being Mexican.
This means Mexican nationals and Mexican-American citizens alike are forced
to bear the burden of extra police scrutiny, or profiling, by a local police
agency.

Is it possible to slow or stop this trend toward the border captivity?

A first step is for the town or the state to rein in the Bisbee police
department, stopping it from making our town a local precinct of federal
vehicle seizure policies. Our City Council is headed by a mayor who is a
former police officer, so this is not likely to occur.

The attorney general of Arizona promised to investigate the Bisbee police,
but to date no report has been forth coming.

The state needs to act to rein in the local police force. It can't solve the
drift toward border captivity on its own. But it can prevent a struggling
town from acting stupid when a federal policy dangles money under its nose.

Dan Beauchamp lives in Bisbee and writes the "Going Local" column for The
Bisbee Observer.