by Geo Maher
And all of the world, in fact.
7
Abolish ICE, Abolish the Border
Rigoberto Ortiz’s bones were found on the Barry Goldwater bombing range, alongside those of his cousin, Carmelo. They weren’t the first to lose their lives faltering deliriously across this barren stretch of desert, their skin cold and clammy under a raging sun, and they would be far from the last. A massive swath stretching seventy miles eastward from Yuma, the Goldwater range spans nearly a third of the state of Arizona. It’s a poetic injustice, to say the least, that Rigoberto and Carmelo would take their last, hurried breaths on O’odham Indigenous land, later Mexico, now named for an arch-nativist and father of the “law and order” politics that came to criminalize this border and its inhabitants. If the desert is a trap, the Goldwater range is even more treacherous. It’s nearly impossible to travel north without crossing it, and many only reach it after they have been on their feet for a week. They are invariably running low on water—it’s physically impossible to carry enough to make the trip safely—but the federal government bars access to the aid workers who would provide it or, failing that, search for remains. Many a disoriented migrant has likely stumbled upon a more surreal scene still: one of several mockups of Iraqi villages designed like movie sets to be strafed by military aircraft from the air.
Rigoberto’s brother, Ely Ortiz, lost cell phone contact with the pair as they crossed the border. “Their guide [coyote] abandoned them,” he recounted. “I asked immigration for help and they refused. I asked the consulate for help and they refused. I asked the police for help and they refused too.” Days later, Ortiz got an unexpected call from his own home state of Oaxaca. The voice on the other end of the line was a migrant from the larger group that had left the two behind. After being detained by Border Patrol, the caller said, he alerted agents to Rigoberto and Carmelo’s location. Border Patrol helicopters scanned the area a couple of times before deporting the man back to Mexico. “I think my brother was still alive,” Ortiz said. “They could have sent people to look on foot. I think if they would have looked, they would have found him alive.”1 With no other option, he got some friends together and went to search himself.
It would be nearly five months before they found Rigoberto and Carmelo, or what was left of them.
When I walked to where the bodies were, one of the young men went ahead and said, “Don’t look at them.” I said, “I’m psychologically prepared for how I’ll find them.” But I never imagined in that moment seeing them that way. It was really traumatic for me to see the condition my brother was in, to see the condition my cousin was in, and to smell the smell in that moment, in the middle of nowhere. A million things came to my head. I started to think about his last moments, the desperation he was experiencing, that he needed water, that he shouted for water. How his body was fading, how the animals had eaten him, seeing where my brother had died.2
It was there and at that moment that the Águilas del Desierto—the Desert Eagles—were born of Ely Ortiz’s grief. The Águilas answer calls from families of migrants, sometimes even those crossing themselves, using Google Earth to narrow down a search area before trekking out into the unforgiving heat to do the impossible. Before every search, Ortiz pauses briefly, praying to a picture of his brother Rigoberto.
Ricardo Esquivias, a volunteer with the Águilas, penned a corrido dedicated to the organization’s founders and the loved ones they have lost:
Today I say goodbye to family and to friends
I’m going to the other side to change my destiny
I go disillusioned, my money isn’t enough
I feel marginalized, I’m going there with La Raza.
Today I will try at Altar, since there’s no surveillance there
and I already feel my longing to arrive in Arizona.
Five days have already passed, with their moons and suns,
my body is already very tired, I feel only pain.
Under this merciless sun my dream has come to an end,
forgotten here by the American people.
In Esquivias’s ballad, however, it’s a happy ending—the Águilas swoop in to save the day. But to call what they do a rescue operation is naive, even Pollyannaish. The reality is that the Sonoran Desert—Mexico’s hottest—is far too large, its identifiable landmarks too few and far between. While the Águilas have located and rescued migrants, more often they provide families the same kind of agonizing closure that Ely himself experienced a decade ago. Once, they recovered the remains of eleven migrants in a single day.
Years later, when the Águilas were granted permission to search a small corner of the Goldwater range, they found twelve bodies, leading researchers from the Marshall Project to speculate that the base likely holds hundreds more. The federal government has blocked any further access.3
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Donald Trump wasn’t responsible for the deaths of Rigoberto and Carmelo Ortiz. They died in 2010, as Trump was charting a dizzying path from Obama supporter to conspiratorial “birther.” But for that matter, Obama wasn’t really directly to blame, either. Their blood wasn’t on the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—which leaves border issues largely to Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—or those of George W. Bush, who oversaw ICE’s creation. The problem is far bigger than ICE, and its origins more distant. According to Ely Ortiz, the blame instead falls squarely at the feet of Bill Clinton: “It was the policy of closing off the border and forcing them to cross in the most dangerous areas” that killed his brother and cousin.4
Ortiz is referring to Clinton’s 1994 Operation Gatekeeper, the real predecessor to Trump’s vaunted border wall. By building a wall eastward from the Pacific and upping enforcement, Gatekeeper sought to eliminate unauthorized entries in and around San Diego. The predictable consequence has been to drive migrant routes east toward Arizona and the sweltering “funnel” of the Sonoran Desert, “one of the most inhospitable and arid areas of the world.”5 Fewer people crossed—that much is true. But far more died in the attempt. Even according to official sources, annual deaths on the border increased tenfold to more than 800 by 2007, and this was only the bodies that were found and counted.6 Conservative estimates place the number of border deaths since Gatekeeper at 10,000—others, like the humanitarian organization No More Deaths, put that number in the tens of thousands.7
The border wall was born in an era marked by lofty rhetoric about global integration and free trade—a fact that was less ironic than it was cynically sadistic. In January 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement came into effect, freeing capital to hop effortlessly over the border and glide through bank accounts, but unlimited mobility for the poor was never part of the deal. Clinton knew perfectly well what devastation NAFTA would wreak on the Mexican economy, and how it would dislocate the poorest of the poor.8 Subsidized corn from the United States flooded the Mexican market, decimating small producers and forcing millions off the land, in a historic exodus from the countryside. As the Zapatistas revolted against NAFTA in the south, millions rebelled northward with their feet. Clinton had driven hundreds of thousands of Mexicans to the gates of hell and then turned up the heat.
When it came to Clinton’s strategy for stopping these displaced workers from entering the country, dubbed “prevention by deterrence,” death was all part of the plan—a message to others who might try to cross. However, Operation Gatekeeper also responded to NAFTA in a different way. As author and activist Joseph Nevins has shown, Gatekeeper was a “trade-off,” a bribe to buy off the increasingly vocal anti-migrant backlash that NAFTA itself fueled. “Neoliberalism and globalization,” Nevins concludes, “go hand in hand with the buildup of national boundaries,” leveraging borders for profit rather than seeing them vanish.9 The “nativist revolt” would not go quietly, however, and instead Operation Gatekeeper opened the floodgates to a process of criminalizing migrants that has played into the hands of the nativist far right ever since.10
Operation G
atekeeper was soon followed by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA), an overlooked piece of legislation that essentially gave us the immigration system—and the deportation apparatus—that we have today. Those convicted of nonviolent crimes, even long ago, were now “criminal aliens,” an intentionally misleading category that sought to permanently fuse “criminal” to “alien.” Clinton himself pressed this conflation even further, describing migrants as an inherently criminal class, “people whose first act is to break the law as they enter our country.” Those with minor convictions, as well as any picked up within one hundred miles of the border, were now fast-tracked for expedited removal, making immigration agents judge, jury, and executioner. On top of all this, IIRIRA made the already-difficult task of gaining legal status downright impossible for many. In the words of one legal scholar, “IIRIRA’s unprecedented crackdown on non-citizens who commit crimes, then, did not arise from an identified harm … it was merely craven politics.”11
The impact has been devastating. Immigration enforcement was no longer an administrative affair, but a squarely criminal one, and Clinton’s criminalization of migrants was part and parcel of a larger strategy. After all, 1994 was not only the year of NAFTA and Operation Gatekeeper, but also his draconian crime bill—which, lest we forget, also plowed billions into border policing and detention. Clinton had been steering the Democratic Party to the right and appeasing white supremacy for years. In 1992, he compared Black nationalist rapper Sister Souljah to KKK grand wizard David Duke, just months after hosting a press conference at Stone Mountain (the birthplace of the Klan), against a backdrop of Black prisoners. For Clinton, the criminalization of Black Americans and predominantly Latinx migrants went hand in hand, and in both cases, criminality became a convenient pretext to mobilize racism.
“In the era of colorblindness,” Michelle Alexander reminds us, “it is no longer permissible to hate blacks, but we can hate criminals” and are even “encouraged to do so.”12 Long before Trump was demonizing migrants as “rapists” and the Mara Salvatrucha gang (MS-13) as “animals,” the Clintons—Bill and Hillary—were busy pioneering the same dehumanizing rhetoric under the guise of “criminal aliens.” This is not hyperbole but a matter of historical fact: among the first “criminal aliens” that Clinton deported en masse were those inmates in California prisons who, upon arriving in El Salvador, would cement MS-13 as a hemispheric force. For Black and Brown “superpredators” in American cities and south of the border, Clinton’s answer was one and the same: the police.
For Stephanie Ortiz, Ely’s daughter and Rigoberto’s niece as well as an organizer with the Águilas, Operation Gatekeeper and the flood of anti-migrant legislation it unleashed since have “normalize[d] the psychological and physical violence” meted out on those who dare to cross: “We have an obligation to ask, and the U.S. government to respond and be accountable for, the humanitarian crisis taking place along the border by rejecting policies that violate human lives. We deserve to live in a dignified way and not be asked to walk along countless graveyards along the U.S.-Mexico border to find our relatives.”13
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While the scale of Bill Clinton’s expansion of the US immigration enforcement apparatus was unprecedented, the criminalization of migrants didn’t begin, and wouldn’t end, with him. As historian Kelly Lytle Hernández has shown in Migra!, when the Border Patrol was first established a century ago, it policed people more than the border, introducing in the process a new “axis of racial division” grounded in illegality. “Border Patrol officers linked being Mexican in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands with being illegal in the United States,” setting into motion the long chain of events that would lead to 1996 and beyond.14
ICE was established in 2003 under the aegis of the newly established Department of Homeland Security (DHS), weaponizing the fear of the post-9/11 context and painting the border as an inherent threat. The 2005 Real ID Act helped speed the construction of the border wall at the same time that ICE upped the ante with Operation Streamline, requiring that migrants who crossed the border, even for the first time, be subjected to federal criminal prosecution—a step previously reserved for more serious immigration “crimes.” Like Clinton, Obama sought to placate the right by continuing—indeed, radically expanding—these policies, prosecuting record numbers and deporting millions, while leaning on Mexico to harden its southern border against Central American migrants displaced by US-backed coups and gang violence. In 2003, 4,000 migrants were prosecuted for crossing the border; a decade later, that number had reached 97,000 through mass hearings and blatant violations of due process.15 “By the end of Obama’s first term,” journalist Daniel Denvir writes, “immigration enforcement and criminal justice institutions would be almost seamlessly linked.”16
From Clinton to Bush and from Obama to Trump and Biden, Natascha Elena Uhlmann argues, “the cruelty of US immigration policy is a bipartisan affair,” and Trump “inherited a well-oiled machinery of death.”17 Trump made the most of this machinery, of course: in his first eight months, ICE arrests shot up 42 percent, with intimidation tactics like courthouse arrests jumping 1,700 percent.18 Deportations from the interior—ICE territory—immediately increased 34 percent.19 Trump sought to intentionally criminalize migration, linking it to fears of religious terrorism with the shortlived 2017 Muslim Ban and to violence along the southern border by exaggerating the threat of MS-13. History shows that it takes a lot to shock the American conscience, but shocked many were when, in May 2018, the Trump administration announced a “zero tolerance” policy that entailed prosecuting all unauthorized migrants and—most shocking of all—the mass separation of children from their families. In reality, CBP had already been separating families for months, and prosecutions had been increasing exponentially for years, but the sadistic glee with which the Trump administration did so sparked widespread outcry and calls to abolish ICE entirely.
Beginning in Portland, Oregon, anti-ICE protests morphed into encampments, which in turn inspired blockades nationwide, combining the ethos of Occupy Wall Street with the ethical vision of Black Lives Matter, all within a transnational framework that sought to break the prevailing mold of US movement politics. The encampments, which oscillated between the monikers #OccupyICE and #AbolishICE, embraced direct action, surrounding ICE offices and blocking vehicles in a direct attempt to make immigration enforcement impossible. The Portland ICE headquarters was completely shut down during the occupation, and two years later, amid months of uninterrupted protests following the murder of George Floyd, protesters would attack the building once again, smashing windows and confronting federal agents. In Philadelphia, movements successfully leveraged protests to force the city to cancel its agreement with ICE for shared access to what is known as the Preliminary Arraignment Reporting System, or PARS, in August 2018.
Nationwide, calls to abolish ICE quickly went mainstream, with all of the opportunities and pitfalls this entailed. Polls showed nearly half of Americans, and nearly three-quarters of Democrats, favored dismantling the agency. At the height of the protests, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won an uphill New York congressional primary on a radical platform that included eliminating the agency, and within weeks, House Democrats introduced a bill to that effect. A full half of the candidates in the Democratic presidential primary would ultimately embrace the call. There were plenty of good reasons that ICE became a target of widespread indignation: mass workplace raids to intimidate workers, accusations of widespread physical and sexual assault, the apparent impunity of ICE’s operations, and its management of massive detention centers, which have often been compared with concentration camps. At the same time, it was also a strange choice on some level.
In the first place, with some exceptions, it wasn’t ICE that was separating families—it was Border Patrol. While both operate under the umbrella of Homeland Security, and CBP detainees are often transferred to ICE custody, lost amid calls to abolish ICE was CBP’s long-standing role
. This was no accident of course, especially for congressional Democrats to whom abolition meant breaking up ICE but keeping most of the pieces. The problem, as they saw it, was ICE’s lack of transparency and Trump’s abuse of the agency’s functions. The draft legislation therefore proposed a committee empowered to determine which of ICE’s functions were “essential” and didn’t violate due process and human rights, placing these under new authority. This is a far cry from abolition or even significant reform, and has more in common with those city administrations like New York or Philadelphia that “defunded” the police by shuffling budget lines around.
When it comes to ICE, this has looked like attempting to distinguish enforcement and removal (ERO) from the agency’s investigatory (HSI) and legal (OPLA) wings. Controversy over enforcement is nothing new within ICE; indeed, HSI had previously changed its name to remove affiliations with ICE, and more recently a group of investigators pressed for it to leave ICE entirely. This was not due to moral outrage at ICE’s enforcement activities, of course, but a practical consideration—no one wants to collaborate with investigators tied to ICE. For Representative Mark Pocan, a self-styled “progressive” and co-sponsor of the Democratic bill to dismantle ICE, this comes down to a question of branding: “A part of your policy is the brand. If you can’t get information by working with certain communities because they think you may be deporting them, you’re not getting information that could help you go after someone who really is a threat to this country.”20
HSI’s stated goal of investigating weapons proliferation and drug and human trafficking, for example, furnishes an easy alibi for centrist Democrats who have no intention of actually abolishing ICE, while also revealing just how naturalized ICE’s functions have become. Take for example the 2018 outrage over 1,475 children allegedly “lost” by the federal government. In reality, this meant that the Office of Refugee Resettlement was unable to locate the children. In their anti-Trump zeal, few well-meaning liberals bothered to ask why we would want those children under the watch of ORR, working hand in hand with ICE; most weren’t lost at all, but were simply free of government oversight. Such exaggerated fears about child trafficking have been explicitly weaponized to justify and naturalize ICE’s functions. Similarly, it’s absurd to draw a line between OPLA and ERO, between the more than 1,100 lawyers overseeing mass deportation proceedings and the jackbooted thugs who carry out the orders.