THE MILITARIZED BORDER

More surveillance, less regard for due process marks collaboration among
cops, feds, and military.

FROM THE dark wastelands overlooking Tijuana's eastern slums, U.S.
Border Patrol agent Albert Barrajas watches ghostly figures on the
small black-and-white screen of his army-surplus infrared scope.
"Aliens on the fence line," he informs me quietly.

Three pale figures hoist themselves over the fence. Radios crackle,
and Barrajas directs his team of Bronco-driving agents down toward
"echo four section." The would-be migrants scatter; two dash into a
drainpipe leading back to Mexico, while the third runs panicked along
the cold metal fence.

"Bronco on the E two, there's a single moving east," Barrajas mumbles
into his radio. On the scope we see "the single," frantic for an
opening or low point in the recently installed fence. The barrier is
made of surplus metal landing mats, courtesy of the National Guard;
it's so sharp in spots it can sever fingers. Even on the strange
little infrared screen the immigrant's terror is palpable.

Welcome to the vanguard terrain of America's emerging police state,
where law enforcement sees through military eyes. Since the early
1980s there has been a massive paramilitary buildup on the U.S.-Mexico
border, involving new equipment, expanded police powers, and
unprecedented interagency cooperation. Now these changes are spreading
to the U.S. interior, where they have major implications for law
enforcement -- and create a new layer of terror and tension throughout
Latino communities.

Urban sectors of the border now seethe with guard towers, motion
sensors, night scopes, impassable 18-foot-high concrete "bollard
fencing," and swarms of border patrol agents -- 8,000 of them, to be
exact, 110 percent more than in 1994, according to the 1997
Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) fact book. The INS budget
was $3 billion in 1997; Attorney General Janet Reno requested $3.6
billion for fiscal year 1998.

According to a September 1997 report in Helicopter News, last year the
border patrol, the uniformed law enforcement branch of the INS,
received 45 state-of-the-art Blackhawk helicopters to augment its
fleet of more than 50 Vietnam-era Hueys. Meanwhile, on the ground,
agents got yet more night-vision goggles and infrared TV cameras, a
slew of hypersensitive microphones, thousands of high-tech motion
sensors, and scores of new mobile "stadium-style" klieg lights.

Despite the August 1997 shooting of 18-year-old shepherd Esequiel
Hernandez by a secret reconnaissance squad of U.S. marines in Redford,
Texas, thousands of U.S. soldiers are still heavily involved in border
policing. The army is building roads and providing aerial
reconnaissance; the National Guard searches vehicles and staffs border
checkpoints. In 1995 the Department of Defense valued the military
hardware on the border at $260 million.

The buildup doesn't stop where First and Third Worlds collide. In the
name of fighting both drugs and illegal immigration, an alliance
between law enforcement, INS, and the military that was first
consummated on the border is taking root "throughout the entire
country," said chipper military spokesperson Maureen Bosch in an
interview with the Bay Guardian.

Facilitating this trend is the military's Joint Task Force-Six (JTF-6)
and Operation Alliance, a consortium of federal, state, and local law
enforcement agencies. Set up in 1989 to help fight drug trafficking
across the U.S.-Mexican border, JTF-6 was at first restricted to
aiding the DEA; later, with the government's rhetorical conflation of
immigration and drugs, the INS and its border patrol were brought in.

Law enforcement officials and the military argue that none of these
programs violate the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which makes it
illegal for soldiers to be deputized or to arrest U.S. citizens. The
logic behind this argument is that JTF-6 only provides training to
law-enforcement agencies. But the line between "training" and "doing"
can be blurry. For example, the military can't analyze phone records
for local law-enforcement agencies, but it can translate
foreign-language surveillance calls.

Critics, however, say that any relations between law enforcement and
the military violates Posse Comitatus, and sets a dangerous precedent.
"Once the military starts helping with one sort of task, it becomes
very easy for them to help with, or do, all sorts of others," says
Timothy Dunn, author of The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border.
"You have to keep in mind the military is trained to wipe out a
clearly defined enemy. That's not what law enforcement is about."

Nonetheless, just 10 years after border cooperation between law
enforcement and the military began, JTF-6 is training local police
across the country in data analysis, aerial surveillance, "mission
planning," firearms, canine teams, and interrogation techniques.

"You'd be surprised how little some heartland police know about
interviewing and interrogation," JTF-6 Lt. Colonel Bill Riechert told
us in an interview. Critics say military interrogations usually
involve sophisticated psychological -- sometimes even physical -- torture.

"We also teach 'survival Spanish,' " Riechert said. "Like, 'Law
enforcement -- get down!' "

More ominous are the little known trainings in "Close Quarter Battle"
(CQB) and "Advanced Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain" (AMOUT).
The curriculum includes storming apartments, kicking in doors,
rappelling down walls, and simulating shoot-outs.

The first to receive such training were the elite air-mobile Border
Patrol Tactical Teams (BORTACs), which were later deployed in Los
Angeles during the 1992 riots. Among the more unlikely agencies to
request such training in 1995 and 1996 were law enforcement
departments from Burlington, Vt.; Niagara Falls, N.Y.; Columbus, Ohio;
Atlantic City, N.J.; and Rochester, N.Y.; along with those from cities
like Philadelphia and Seattle. JTF-6 has also built training complexes
for elite cops in San Diego and Hillsborough, Fla., near Tampa.

Drug enforcement has served as a Trojan horse for this creeping
militarization of the border. At first JTF-6 and Operation Alliance
were limited to a region called the High Intensity Drug Trafficking
Area (HIDTA) that encompassed all counties within 150 miles of the
U.S.-Mexico frontier. But as critics predicted, soon more HIDTAs were
defined around the country, and with them grew the military's
involvement with law enforcement.

The nation is now graced with 17 of these federal hot spots. They
encompass most major metropolitan areas -- including the San Francisco
Bay Area, New York-New Jersey, greater Chicago, L.A., and San Diego --
as well as the marijuana-growing regions of the rural Northwest and
Appalachia.

Big Brother on the border While military training in "Close Quarter
Battle" sounds sinister, the most frightening aspect of border
militarization may be the small expansions of law enforcement's powers
and the increased cooperation between local police and federal agents.
These developments are spreading from border regions into the interior.

The invisible underpinnings of this tightening of control are the
rapidly growing network of interlocking data banks that help track
both citizens and noncitizens alike. Fingerprints and photos collected
at the border are now used for policing Latinos in the fields of
California's Central Valley and in the barrios of Los Angeles.

Also, the INS is empowered under Titles 19 and 21 of the U.S. Code to
enforce both contraband and drug laws -- that is, to act as DEA or
Customs Agents. As one senior customs official testified at a 1990
Senate hearing, this "enables those agencies to conduct warrantless
border searches which are valuable in the border communities and
inland areas vulnerable to air smuggling."

The border patrol is also teaming up with local police for day-to-day
operations. "On the border it's very common to see border patrol and
the local P.D. or sheriff riding together," says Mike Connell, El
Paso's chief border patrol agent. This routine cooperation circumvents
the limitations on each agency's powers. In downtown El Paso and in
Tucson, border patrol agents regularly participate in bike patrols
with local police. In the towns of California's Imperial Valley,
duel-agency teams travel in cars.

When the agents make contact with a "subject" they can simply pass the
person back and forth. If a suspected undocumented immigrant has
papers, the local police can search for drugs or run a warrants check;
border patrol agents can check Latinos who run stop signs for
immigration papers.

In San Diego, joint bike patrols are less common, but the INS does
have substations throughout the county, including one in the downtown
police headquarters. With 2,500 border patrol agents stationed in the
San Diego area and more arriving all the time, the INS has taken to
setting up checkpoints all over California's most southern counties.
And between checkpoints the border patrol cars cruise through Latino
communities, some as much as an hour and a half from the border.

The most disturbing thing about the spread of the INS's net and its
cooperation with local police is that the border patrol's standards
for stops and searches are much lower -- and more overtly racist --
than those used by police.

"Border patrol agents have the right to ask anyone, anywhere, for
proof of citizenship," Jesus Rodriguez, public affairs officer for the
El Paso INS, told the Bay Guardian. That's not actually the case --
"they're supposed to have a 'reasonable suspicion,' such as a heavily
laden car traveling near the border with a Latino driver who wouldn't
make eye contact," San Diego federal public defender Jeremy Warren
says.

That an INS spokesperson thinks agents can stop "anyone, anywhere"
says quite a bit. In reality that's what they do all the time. Skin
color and accent are inevitably among the INS's criteria for making
stops. This standard is problematic enough at the border, but it
becomes a racist nightmare when applied within the United States.

Town under siege At 2 p.m., July 27, 1997, life in Chandler, Ariz.,
pop. 130,000, is turned upside down. Thirty police and six border
patrol agents, in mixed teams, sweep down on the barrios of this
desert city some 120 miles from the border. For the next five days the
combined force combs the streets, stops cars at random, and conducts
warrantless house-to-house searches, harassing and, in a few cases,
beating Latino residents. By the end, 432 undocumented migrants and
two U.S. citizens are deported. Following the raid, a $35 million
class-action lawsuit is filed and Arizona attorney general Grant
Woods's office releases a detailed and chilling report.

According to the report, no warrants had been issued for any of the
body, vehicle, or house searches made during the Chandler raid. But
thanks to the presence of the INS, it's not clear that any were needed.

Transcripts of police and border patrol radio transmissions during the
sweep included in the report also reveal that the fig leaf of
"probable cause" was dropped altogether. Any and all working-class
Latinos were fair game. In a typical call to a backup car, a bike
officer is quoted saying: "to any [police] motor, there's a red
Intrepid leaving from the property, no probable cause."

Police and INS arrest reports indicated an equally cavalier disregard
of due process. One border patrol agent justified a bust by noting
that he had "immediately noticed the lack of personal hygiene
displayed by the subject, and a strong body odor common to illegal
aliens."

"They really went too far, entering homes, detaining all the
Mexican-looking kids," says Alberto Esparza, vice president of the
newly formed Chandler Coalition for Civil and Human Rights. "They even
beat a few people up. This one 17-year-old kid ran, and when they
caught him they beat him real bad." The youth was a U.S. citizen,
Esparza said.

And so it went for five days: early-morning SWAT-style raids in which
whole families were rousted by screaming officers, blinding
flashlights, and guns in the face; people deported in their underwear;
Latinos humiliated on public highways; schoolchildren accosted by
uniformed thugs.

Latino citizens and "resident aliens" told investigators from the
Attorney General's Office that their children are scared to go
outside, that they had been "made to feel like cockroaches," and that
relations between Latinos and Anglos may have been irrevocably
strained by the raid. Among those stopped and harassed were Arizona's
top-ranked amateur golfer (who happened to have been casually
dressed), and people who can document that their families have been in
California and Arizona for the last 150 to 200 years. One woman, who
was pregnant, was so traumatized she didn't leave her house for weeks.
"The roundup, as they call it, was a tremendous violation of an entire
community," Esparza says.

The border patrol, in crisp military fashion, investigated itself and
found no evidence of any wrongdoing; the Chandler P.D. has demanded an
apology from the Attorney General. Chandler P.D. officials would not
comment on the case because litigation is still in progress.

As the raid in Chandler makes clear, collaboration between cops and
the INS facilitates the criminalization and political marginalization
of Latinos. And undocumented Latina women are particularly vulnerable.

It's not that the INS deliberately targets women, but rather that
women cross back and forth over the border most often, due to family
obligations, and so have more chances to be caught. Women are more
likely than men to have immigrated with family or children, and, like
women in all communities, tend to be more politically and socially
active, whether as community organizers or engaged church members. A
young mother's deportation can have reverberations far beyond her
immediate fate. Thus the new border regime helps break family ties and
demoralize Latino communities within the United States.

"People aren't just scared of going north -- thanks to these
roadblocks boxing in San Diego County, they're scared to go anywhere,
especially back south," says Roberto Martinez, director of the
American Friends Service Committee's U.S.-Mexico Border Program. "We
get calls all the time from the barrios that women are too scared to
leave their homes. This is a real crisis."

Martinez points out that it has always been difficult to organize
undocumented migrants. "That's why the UFW usually doesn't try," he
says. But he says that in the last four years, the fear among
immigrants -- and even Chicanos -- has grown tremendously.

Due to the huge law-enforcement staff increases, Martinez says,
political organizing among Latinos is more difficult than ever. "The
checkpoints just keep people immobilized in every sense," he says.
"They also have Operation Clean Sheets, where they've been raiding
about a hundred large hotels. We go in on behalf of the [hotel
workers'] unions to tell people their rights, and hardly anyone shows
up. At one meeting we had zero -- literally no one showed up. People
are very frightened right now."

We may be seeing the beginnings of de facto apartheid in the
southwest. Working-class Latinos live under a different set of laws
than Anglos. The new regime is even insinuating itself into the lives
of those who support "la Migra." San Diego's Interstate 5 now offers a
"Pre-enrolled Access Lane" (PAL) where those with proper clearance --
registered fingerprints and photos, a bar code on their car -- can
speed through customs on their way back from Mexico. "Be a PAL," urge
bumper stickers.

The entire social landscape of the border region is being remolded by
the politics of the militarized frontier. The anxious right-wing
voters and homeowners of southwest suburbia -- the ones who in the
early 1990s organized vigilante border actions, such as shining their
headlights at the ranks of would-be migrants in Mexico -- get
federally subsidized political theater. Employers get frightened and
obedient workers. And the national security state gets a bulwark
against the slow-motion social and economic implosion of Latin
America. But as for new immigration flows -- those who must cross,
will. Only now the price is higher, in both human and financial terms.