Todd Miller<\/b><\/p>\n
With the agility of a seasoned Border Patrol veteran, the woman rushed after the students. She caught up with them just before they entered the exhibition hall of the eighth annual\u00a0Border Security Expo<\/a>, reaching out and grabbing the nearest of them by the shoulder. Slightly out of breath, she said, \u201cYou can\u2019t go in there, give me back your badges.\u201d<\/p>\n The astonished students had barely caught a glimpse of the dazzling pavilion of science-fiction-style products in that exhibition hall at the Phoenix Convention Center. There, just beyond their view, more than 100 companies, including Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Verizon, were trying to sell the latest in futuristic border policing technology to anyone with the money to buy it.<\/p>\n The students from Northeastern Illinois University didn\u2019t happen to fall into that category. An earnest manager at a nearby registration table insisted that, as they were not studying \u201cborder security,\u201d they weren\u2019t to be admitted. I asked him how he knew just what they were studying. His only answer was to assure me that next year no students would be allowed in at all.<\/p>\n Among the wonders those students would miss was a fake barrel cactus with a hollow interior (for the southern border) and similarly hollow tree stumps (for the northern border), all capable of being outfitted with surveillance cameras. \u201cAnything that grows or exists in nature,\u201d Kurt Lugwisen of TimberSpy\u00a0told<\/a>\u00a0a local Phoenix television station, \u201cwe build it.\u201d<\/p>\n Nor would those students get to see the miniature drone\u2013\u201ceyes in the sky<\/a>\u201d for Border Patrol agents\u2013that fits conveniently into a backpack and can be deployed at will; nor would they be able to check out the \u201ctechnology that might,\u201d as one local Phoenix reporter\u00a0warned<\/a>, \u201cfreak you out.\u201d She was talking about facial recognition systems, which in a border scenario would work this way: a person enters a border-crossing gate, where an image of his or her face is instantly checked against a massive facial image database (or the biometric data contained on a passport).\u201cIf we need to target on any specific gender or race because we\u2019re trying to find a subject, we can set the parameters and the threshold to find that person,\u201d Kevin Haskins of\u00a0Cognitec<\/a>\u00a0(\u201cthe face recognition company\u201d) proudly claimed.<\/p>\n Nor would they be able to observe the strange, two day-long convention hall dance between homeland security, its pockets bursting with their parents\u2019 tax dollars, and private industry intent on creating the most massive apparatus of exclusion and surveillance that has ever existed along U.S. borders.<\/p>\n Border Security Expo 2014 catches in one confined space the expansiveness of a \u201cbooming\u201d border market. If you\u00a0include<\/a>\u00a0\u201ccross-border terrorism, cyber crime, piracy, [the] drug trade, human trafficking, internal dissent, and separatist movements,\u201d all \u201cdriving factor[s] for the homeland security market,\u201d by 2018 it could reach $544 billion globally. It is here that U.S. Homeland Security officials, local law enforcement, and border forces from all over the world talk contracts with private industry representatives, exhibit their techno-optimism, and begin to hammer out a future of ever more hardened, up-armored national and international boundaries.<\/p>\n The global video surveillance market alone is expected to be a $40 billion industry by 2020, almost three times its $13.5 billion value in 2013. According to\u00a0projections<\/a>, 2020 border surveillance cameras will be capturing 3.4 trillion video hours globally. In case you were wondering, that\u2019s more than 340 million years of video footage if you were watching 24 hours a day.<\/p>\n But those students, like most of the rest of us, haven\u2019t been invited to this high energy, dystopian conversation about our future.<\/p>\n And the rebuff is far from a surprise. It has, after all, been less than a year since Edward Snowden emerged on the scene with a portfolio of NSA documents revealing just how vast our national security state has become and how deeply it has reached into our private lives. It has by now created what the\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>\u2019s Dana Priest and William Arkin have\u00a0termed<\/a>\u00a0\u201can alternative geography.\u201d And nowhere is this truer than on our borders.<\/p>\n It is in the U.S. borderlands that, as anthropologist Josiah Heyman once\u00a0wrote<\/a>, the U.S. government\u2019s modern expertise in creating and tracking \u201ca marked population\u201d was first developed and practiced. It involved, he wrote prophetically, \u201cthe birth and development of a\u2026 means of domination, born of the mating between moral panics about foreigners and drugs, and a well-funded and expert bureaucracy.\u201d<\/p>\n You may not be able to watch them at the Border Security Expo, but in those borderlands\u2013make no bones about it\u2013the Department of Homeland Security, with its tripartite missions of drug interdiction, immigration enforcement, and the war on terror, is watching you, whoever you are. And make no bones about this either: our borders are widening and the zones in which the watchers are increasingly free to do whatever they want are growing.<\/p>\n Tracking a Marked Population<\/strong><\/p>\n It was mid-day in the Arizona heat during the summer of 2012 and Border Patrol agent Benny Longoria (a pseudonym) and his partner are patrolling the reservation of the Tohono O\u2019odham Nation. It\u2019s the second largest Native American reservation in the country and, uniquely, shares 76 miles of border with Mexico. The boundary, in fact, slices right through O\u2019odham aboriginal lands. For the approximately 28,000 members of the Nation, several thousand of whom live in Mexico, this international boundary has been a point of contention since 1853, when U.S. surveyors first drew the line. None of the region\u2019s original inhabitants were, of course, consulted.<\/p>\n Now Tohono O\u2019odham lands on the U.S. side of the border are one place among many in Arizona where the star performer at Border Security Expo, Elbit Systems of America\u2013whose banner at the entrance welcomed all attendees\u2013will\u00a0build<\/a>\u00a0surveillance towers equipped with radar and high-powered day\/night cameras able to spot a human being up to seven miles away. These towers\u2013along with motion sensors spread over the surrounding landscape and drones overhead\u2013will feed information into snazzy operational control rooms in Border Patrol posts throughout the Arizona borderlands.<\/p>\n In March, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) awarded a $145 million contract to that Israeli company through its U.S. division. Elbit Systems prides itself on\u00a0having spent<\/a>\u201c10+ years securing the world\u2019s most challenging borders,\u201d above all\u00a0deploying<\/a>\u00a0similar \u201cborder protection systems\u201d to the separation wall between Israel and Palestine. It is now poised to enter U.S. indigenous lands.<\/p>\n At the moment, however, the two forest-green-uniformed Border Patrol agents search for tracks the old-fashioned way. They are five miles west of the O\u2019odham\u2019s sacred Baboquivari mountain range and three miles north of the U.S.-Mexican border. It\u2019s July and 100-plus-degrees hot. \u00a0They scour the ground for tracks and finally pick up a trail of fresh ones.<\/p>\n The agents get out of their vehicle and begin to follow them. Every day, many hours are spent just this way. They figure that people who have just walked across the border without papers are hot, uncomfortable, and probably moving slowly. In this heat in this desert, it\u2019s as if you were negotiating the glass inside a light bulb. About an hour on, Longoria spots the woman.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a giant mesquite tree, and she\u2019s beneath it, her back to the agents, her arm shading her head. They creep up on her. As they get closer, they can see that she\u2019s wearing blue jeans and a striped navy shirt.<\/p>\n When they\u2019re 10 feet away and she still hasn\u2019t moved, Longoria whispers, \u201cOh, shit, why isn\u2019t she reacting?\u201d In Arizona in July, you can almost hear the sizzle of the heat.<\/p>\n In human terms, this is where the long-term strategy behind the Border Patrol\u2019s \u201cprevention through deterrence\u201d\u00a0regime<\/a>\u00a0leads. After all, in recent years, it has militarized vast swaths of the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexican border. Along it, there are now 12,000 implanted motion sensors and 651 miles of walls or other barriers. Far more than $100 billion has been\u00a0spent<\/a>\u00a0on this project since 9\/11. The majority of these resources are focused on urban areas where people without papers traditionally crossed.<\/p>\n Now, border crossers tend to avoid such high concentrations of surveillance and the patrolling agents that go with it. They skirt those areas on foot, ending up in desolate, dangerous, mountainous places like this one on the sparsely populated Tohono O\u2019odham reservation, an area the size of Connecticut. The Border Patrol\u2019s intense armed surveillance regime is meant to push people into places so remote and potentially deadly that they will decide not to cross the border at all.<\/p>\n That, at least, was the plan. This is the reality.<\/p>\n \u201cHey,\u201d Longoria says to the woman as he steps up behind her. \u201cHello.\u201d Nothing.<\/p>\n \u201cHello,\u201d he says again, as he finally stands over her. And it\u2019s then that he sees her face, blistered from the sun, white pus oozing out of her nose. Her belly has started to puff up. She is already a corpse.<\/p>\n The moment is surreal and, for Longoria, depressing. In the 1990s, almost no undocumented people bothered to cross this reservation. By 2008, in the midst of an exodus from Mexico in the devastating era of NAFTA, more than\u00a015,000 people<\/a>\u00a0were doing so monthly. Although the numbers have dropped since, people avoiding the border surveillance regime still come, and sometimes like this woman, they still die.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Occupation\u201d Before 9\/11, there was little federal presence on the Tohono O\u2019odham reservation. Since then, the expansion of the Border Patrol into Native American territory has been\u00a0relentless<\/a>. Now, Homeland Security stations, filled with hundreds of agents (many hired in a 2007-2009 hiring binge), circle the reservation. But unlike bouncers at a club, they check people going out, not heading in. \u00a0On every paved road leaving the reservation, their checkpoints form a second border. There, armed agents\u2013ever more of whom are\u00a0veterans<\/a>\u00a0of America\u2019s distant wars\u2013interrogate anyone who leaves. In addition, there are two \u201cforward operating bases<\/a>\u201d on the reservation, which are meant to play the role\u2013facilitating tactical operations in remote regions\u2013that similar camps did in Afghanistan and Iraq.<\/p>\n Now, thanks to the Elbit Systems contract, a new kind of border will continue to be added to this layering. Imagine part of the futuristic Phoenix exhibition hall leaving Border Expo with the goal of incorporating itself into the lands of a people who were living here before there was a \u201cNew World,\u201d no less a United States or a Border Patrol. Though this is increasingly the reality from Brownsville, Texas, to San Diego, California, on Tohono O\u2019odham land a post-9\/11 war posture shades uncomfortably into the leftovers from a nineteenth century Indian war. Think of it as the place where the homeland security state meets its older compatriot, Manifest Destiny.<\/p>\n
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