JE #3B

From The New York Times:

 OPINION: War on the Border

The Border Patrol, the largest federal law enforcement agency, has become an expensive military apparatus deployed to police and capture immigrants.

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“War on the Border”, the first four words of this article made me question how this journalists and his employer The New York Times could possibly find parallels between the U.S.-Mexico border and what we have come to define war in America, post 9-11. The same first two-words have been so deeply ingrained in our foreign policies and make citizens bend over backwards at the site of  “War on Terrorism”. A terror that from pure fear of the “unknown”, the “others” and misinformation has continued to perpetrate an undeniable fear of foreign brown bodies. This fear has existed since pre-colonial times at the U.S.-Mexico border and in the U.S. regions of the Southwest. A suppressed post-racial society myth that reenergized as quickly as the fall of the twin towers on September 11th.

This article highlights the continuous downward crash of absolute disregard for government officials waging wars overseas and the uncountable profits contract corporations make overseas in the Middle East and along the U.S.-Mexico border. And yet, there is no mention to the additional millions of profits and policies made by U.S. corporations crossing the border south and its disruption on the societies and environments in Mexico.

Mr. Loews inconvenient non-violent exchange of a few words with a national security agent demonstrates the United States government’s agenda. Under this “War on Terror”, this man was vouched by another agent to be clear. He was not seen as a viable threat to homeland or national security. A temporary discomfort, but a permanent privilege deemed by his color of skin. A social border policy that extends across the U.S. for people of brown skin, or as documented by border patrol agents as “medium” in their tally reports of the profiles of those who they detain. An experience lived by U.S. citizen Silvio Torres-Saillant, when asked to provide additional documentation because his university identification where he is an English professor was not enough proof. 

In Vermont, a little over a one hundred miles from the U.S.-Mexico Border a similar situation occurred to Senator Patrick Leahy. A Democrat that I suspect would never in the thousands of votes casted toward his election would imagine that his citizenship would ever be questioned.  And much less when exercising his rights as a U.S. citizen, being replied with a gesture to a gun and told by a Border Patrol agent, “That’s all the authority I need.”

This shows that the “War on the Border” is actually a War on the Brown. The U.S.-Mexico border is a geographic locating from which anti-immigrant policies and many Americans base their unfounded arguments to build a wider and higher wall that prevents them from looking over the border fence and seeing the U.S. corporations making millions every month, the deaths of migrants in the desert and the shadow of Uncle Sam luring behind every brown skinned person within its borders. In this downward crash, to wage another deadly war militarizing the U.S.-Mexico border, there fear has swayed them to have absolute disregard for government officials waging war and corporate monopolies both inside and outside their country.

An additional part, the article also goes on to note that the Border Patrol is a branch of the Customs and Border Protection, one of the federal government’s largest law-enforcement agencies. This agency that disrupts the lives of Mr. Loew’s, and also his neighbors and many border cities like San Diego, El Paso, Brownsville who “have sizable Latino populations”. This “sizable population” not only has to live in a police state because of the color of their skin and the “r” that may or may not roll off their tongues. This police state does not look for proper identification, but instead fuel the overarching powers of associating “war”, “border” and “brown” as threats to the nation.     

In many cases U.S. citizens of Latina/o background are treated as second-class citizens in their birth nation. And fail to mention, the thousands killed along the U.S.-Mexico border due to the militarization of selective regions along the border. This selectivity has forced many to treacherous regions that have extreme weather conditions that leave many dead.

These high vigilante areas are deemed critical to this “war” by the U.S. government standards and border patrol. This leaves an unsettling mix of missions all at the cost of immigrant lives, U.S. funds and poor journalism that does nothing but patch up small holes of borders debate and larger scale issues at hand. In attempting to humanly address latina/o immigrants coming to America, they are labeled as job-seekers, “maids, janitors or day laborers”, this highlights a narrative that has been told by the media time and time again, dehumanizing immigrants and while further marketing them as cheap labor.

The U.S.-Mexico Border is a revolving door of green rhetoric, made to be feared by self-proclaimed patriots. A border that revolves around brown bodies wherever they go.