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Title: Designed to Kill
Author: CrimethInc.
Date: May 22, 2011
Language: en
Topics: borders
Source: Retrieved on 9th November 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2011/05/22/designed-to-kill-border-policy-and-how-to-change-it

CrimethInc.

Designed to Kill

Designed to Kill analyzes US border control policy, exploring how its

actual effects and objectives differ from its ostensible purpose. The

conclusions are based on several years of firsthand observation of both

sides of the border by a participant in No More Deaths. For additional

context, Four Stories from the Border offers glimpses into the lives of

those who risk death to cross the border. These texts have since been

expanded into a book, No Wall They Can Build, which you can download for

free or order online.

for everyone who didn’t make it, and for everyone who did

For a number of years now I’ve worked in the desert on the

Mexican-American border with a group that provides humanitarian aid to

migrants who are attempting to enter the United States—a journey that

claims hundreds of lives every year. We’ve spent years mapping the

trails that cross this desert. We walk the trails, find places to leave

food and water along them, look for people in distress, and provide

medical care when we run into someone who needs it. If the situation is

bad enough, we can get an ambulance or helicopter to bring people to the

hospital. We strive to act in accordance with the migrants’ wishes at

all times, and we never call the Border Patrol on people who don’t want

to turn themselves in.

During this time I’ve been a part of many extraordinary situations and

I’ve heard about many more. Some of the things I’ve seen have been truly

heartwarming, and some of them have been deeply sad and wrong. I’ve seen

people who were too weak to stand, too sick to hold down water, hurt too

badly to continue, too scared to sleep, too sad for words, hopelessly

lost, desperately hungry, literally dying of thirst, never going to be

able to see their children again, vomiting blood, penniless in torn

shoes two thousand miles from home, suffering from heat stroke, kidney

damage, terrible blisters, wounds, hypothermia, post-traumatic stress,

and just about every other tribulation you could possibly think of. I’ve

been to places where people were robbed and raped and murdered; my

friends have found bodies. In addition to bearing witness to others’

suffering, I myself have fallen off of cliffs, torn my face open on

barbed wire, run out of water, had guns pointed at me, been charged by

bulls and circled by vultures, jumped over rattlesnakes, pulled pieces

of cactus out of many different parts of my body with pliers, had to

tear off my pants because they were full of fire ants, gotten gray

hairs, and in general poured no small amount of my own sweat, blood, and

tears into the thirsty desert.

There is nowhere on earth like the place where we work. It is beautiful

beyond telling: harsh, vast, mountainous, remote, rugged, unforgiving,

every cliché you can think of and more. I have been humbled countless

times by the incredible selflessness and courage of the people that I

have met there, and I have been driven nearly out of my head with rage

at the utterly heartless economic and political system that drives

people to such lengths in order to provide for their families. Doing

this work has given me a great deal of opportunity to observe how the

border is managed on a day-to-day basis, and hopefully some insight into

the functions that it performs within global capitalism—the real

objectives that it serves. I offer this essay as ammunition to anyone

who still cares enough about anything to intervene when people around

them are being treated like pieces of meat.

“Answer the question of who benefits or profits most directly from an

action, event, or outcome and you always have the starting point for

your analysis or investigation, and sometimes it will also give you the

end point.”

— Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The first thing that I want to make clear is that the atrocious

suffering that happens on the border every day is not an accident. It is

not a mistake and it is not the result of a misunderstanding. It is the

predictable and intentional result of policies implemented at every

level of government on both sides of the border. These policies have

rational objectives and directly benefit identifiable sectors of the

population of both countries. It may be evil, but it’s not stupid. If

this sounds a little shrill, let me tell you how I’ve seen this play out

on the ground.

When I started working in the desert I began to notice some very

peculiar things about the Border Patrol’s operations there. They would

do a lot of enforcement in some areas and very little in others, and

this would not necessarily correspond to which areas were busy and which

areas were slow. In fact, very often the enforcement would clearly be

done in such a way that it would push traffic into rather than out of

the busiest areas, where Border Patrol would keep a low profile until

the very northern end of the route. At that point there would be a

moderate amount of enforcement again, but not really what you would

expect given the numbers of people that were moving through.

Then they started building lots of surveillance towers. But once again,

the towers were not really built in the places where the traffic was

heaviest—they were built on the edges of them. If anything, they seemed

to be intent on forcing traffic into the busiest routes rather than out

of them. What was happening?

Meanwhile, I was constantly meeting migrants whose groups had been split

up by helicopters. The Border Patrol would fly over them a few feet off

the ground, everybody would run in different directions, and soon there

would be thirty people wandering lost across the desert in groups of two

or three. What seemed particularly odd was that the Border Patrol often

made no effort to actually apprehend these groups after breaking them

up—they just flew away. Why?

And then there’s this. Over the last few years, the organization I work

for has developed a pretty comprehensive understanding of the area we

cover, which at times has been one of the most heavily traveled sections

of the entire border. We’ve formed a fairly clear picture of where

traffic starts, where it goes, how it gets there, where it’s busy and

where it’s slow at any given time, where the pinch points are, and so

on. I honestly believe that if I worked for the Border Patrol I could

basically point at a map and tell them how to shut down the whole

sector. It’s really not rocket science. Keep in mind that all of our

work has been done by untrained civilian volunteers, armed with low-end

GPS units, a few old trucks, run-of-the-mill mapping software, cheap

cell phones with spotty service, and a very limited budget. Does it seem

logical that we could figure this stuff out while the government of the

United States of America cannot, despite access to helicopters, unmanned

drones, electronic sensors, fleets of well-maintained trucks, night

vision systems, state-of-the-art communications and surveillance and

mapping technology, tens of thousands of paid employees, and a limitless

supply of money to shovel down the hole at every possible opportunity? I

don’t think it does. So what’s going on?

If you accept the stated objectives of the border at face value, then

none of this makes any sense at all. If you accept that the actual

objectives may not be the stated ones, things start to come together

fast. The task of the Border Patrol—and the actual objective of the

policies it is there to enforce—is not in any sense to STOP ILLEGAL

IMMIGRATION. It is to manage and control that migration. Trust me on

this.

But to what end? To whose benefit? Settle in, because it’s complicated.

First of all, it’s as plain as day that the economy of the United States

of America is dependent in no small part on the hyper-exploitation of

undocumented labor. You know it’s true, I know it’s true, the

Guatemalans that shovel the shit out of Lou Dobbs’ horses’ barn know

it’s true, but it is considered extremely taboo to mention this fact in

public. Excuse me, but anyone with a modicum of common sense should be

able to see that if the government were to actually build a

two-thousand-mile-long Berlin Wall tonight and then somehow round up and

deport every undocumented person in the country tomorrow, there would be

massive and immediate disruption in the agriculture and animal

exploitation industries, not to mention in everything related to

construction—quite possibly leading to a serious breakdown in the

national food distribution network and conceivably even famine. I’m not

exaggerating. The people that write border policies are not fools. They

understand this perfectly, even if your racist co-workers evidently do

not. Regardless of what any politician or pundit says, I don’t believe

anyone is going to put a stop to illegal immigration as long as

undocumented labor is needed to maintain the stability of the economic

system. But this isn’t good news to those of you who dislike seeing

people treated like shit and then discarded like diapers, because what’s

more important is that this migration will continue to be managed and

controlled.

The border is a sick farce with a deadly conclusion. The goal is to make

entering the country without papers extremely dangerous, traumatizing,

and expensive, but possible. The point isn’t to deter people from

coming—far from it. It is to ensure that when they do come, the threat

of deportation will mean something very serious. It means spending a ton

of money. It means risking your life to return. It means that you may

never see your family again. This is supposed to provide American

employers with a vast and disposable pool of labor that is kept

vulnerable and therefore easy to exploit—and this in turn drives down

wages for workers with American citizenship, which is why the old saw

about the “illegals coming to our country and taking our jobs” is so

convincing. Like many good lies, it’s powerful because it omits the most

important part of the truth.

Those who believe that immigration and border enforcement protect the

jobs or wages of American workers are seriously misinterpreting the

situation. Even if you limit the scope of your analysis to market-based

behavior, it seems clear that if undocumented workers were not subjected

to such extraordinary risks and pressures they would act like anybody

else and obtain the highest price for their labor that the market would

bear. In fact, these same workers have proven themselves able time and

again to struggle successfully for higher wages, despite having to

overcome obstacles other workers do not face. But border and immigration

enforcement drives down wages across the board—that’s the point of it.

Here’s another lead that is easy to follow: the recent wave of

anti-immigrant hysteria sounded very similar to the anti-Muslim

fear-mongering of five to ten years ago. It’s easy to trace this to the

mid-term elections. With the war in Iraq winding down, and in lieu of

any recent successful domestic Al Qaeda attacks, the so-called

immigration debate became the de facto national security issue for

politicians to talk about.

The Republican strategy was pretty straightforward. They hoped to regain

power by appealing to white fear, anxiety, guilt, and racism. The

Democratic strategy was more nuanced. First, they blamed Republicans for

lack of progress on immigration issues. They hoped that this would

maintain the support of voters from immigrant communities. Second, they

did not actually try to push any pro-immigrant measures. They hoped that

this would avoid alienating anti-immigrant voters. Third, they ramped up

deportations. The Obama administration deported almost 400,000 people in

2010, the most in a single year ever. Now they can use those numbers to

emphasize their toughness on immigration. With these law and order

credentials, the Democrats hoped to woo conservative voters before the

last elections and in the next ones. Expect to see some version of this

charade play out again in 2012, unless it’s trumped by another war or

major terrorist attack.

Here’s one last clue: much of the legislation that becomes government

policy is written by the corporations that stand to profit from it.

Arizona’s State Bill 1070, which among other things would require police

to lock up anyone they stop who cannot show proof of having entered the

country legally, was drafted in December 2009 at the Grand Hyatt hotel

in Washington D.C. by officials of the billion-dollar Corrections

Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison company in the

country. This took place at a meeting of the American Legislative

Exchange Council (ALEC), a membership organization of state legislators

and powerful corporations. The law, which was partially overturned but

may still go into effect, could send hundreds of thousands of immigrants

to prison, which would mean hundreds of millions of dollars in profits

for the companies such as CCA that would be responsible for housing

them. It almost goes without saying that it is not in this industry’s

interest to completely stop illegal immigration from happening; it is in

their interest to let in enough people to fill their jails.

So who benefits from the death in the desert? In a broad sense, the

entire ruling class does. That’s pretty ugly. But that’s not the whole

story, not by any means. To tell that story we’re going to need to back

up a bit.

To start with, permit me to subject you to an extremely abbreviated

history lesson, beginning with some very inconvenient truths. Like the

rest of the Western Hemisphere, the land that is currently called the

United States of America was stolen from its rightful inhabitants by

European colonists through a well-documented orgy of bloodshed,

massacre, treachery, and genocide of proportions so epic that they are

arguably unprecedented in the thousands of often gruesome years of human

history preceding them and unsurpassed in the hardly tranquil ones that

followed. This monstrous crime has been in progress for over five

hundred years, has never been atoned for in any meaningful way, and

continues to be perpetrated to this day.

Everybody knows this, but nobody really likes to think too much about

what it means. What it means is this: unless you’re honest enough to

admit that you think that might makes right as long as you’re on the

winning side, you have to acknowledge that the federal, local, and state

governments of the United States of America, along with all of the

agencies such as the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs

Enforcement contained therein, are illegitimate institutions with no

claim to legitimate authority whatsoever over the territory they

currently govern. If anyone can show me an ethically, logically, or even

legally sound way to disprove this statement, they’re welcome to let me

know, but I’m not going to lose any sleep waiting for this to happen.

It’s important to start by framing the matter this way. Who are these

people that claim to have jurisdiction over native land? What right do

they have to be telling anybody where to go and when? If anyone has a

right to decide who can and cannot pass through the territory that

currently constitutes the Mexican-American border, it’s the people whose

ancestors have inhabited that land since time immemorial, not the

descendants or institutions of the ones who colonized it. Most so-called

illegal immigrants are closer to having a defensible claim to the

continent they’re traversing than most of the hypocrites who condemn and

pursue them.

Now fast forward, for the sake of brevity, to January 1, 1994, the day

that the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, and

thousands of indigenous people in southeastern Mexico famously rose up

in arms in response. Calling themselves Zapatistas after the Mexican

revolutionary, these people predicted that this agreement would mark a

final deathblow to their way of life if they failed to resist. Their

analysis of the situation quickly proved exceedingly cogent, their

ensuing project of indigenous autonomy has yet to be defeated, and their

actions sparked an entire generation of resistance to global capitalism:

a whole different story that is thankfully not over yet.

In addition to its ruinous effects on American industrial communities,

NAFTA’s aftermath in Mexican agricultural communities was truly

catastrophic. As part of its preparation for the agreement, the Mexican

government amended Article 27 of its own constitution to allow for the

privatization of communally-held campesino and indigenous land. NAFTA

then permitted heavily-subsidized American agribusiness giants like

Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland to flood the Mexican market with

cheap imports of corn and other agricultural products, undercutting

nearly all small-scale Mexican farmers. Exactly as the Zapatistas

predicted, this drove millions of rural Mexicans, many of whom were

already living in desperate poverty, off the land and straight into the

abyss. This in turn set off a massive wave of migration as millions and

millions of people left their homes to find work in Mexican cities, in

sweatshops primarily owned by American corporations in northern Mexico,

and in the United States.

Within the year, the Clinton administration launched Operation

Gatekeeper, a program that massively increased funding for Border Patrol

operations in the San Diego sector of the border in California. The

federal government greatly stepped up enforcement in this sector and

built a fourteen-mile wall between San Diego and Tijuana. Operation

Gatekeeper roughly marks the beginning of a two-decade-running process

of ever-increasing border militarization that has continued steadily

throughout the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. This has meant

that every year there are more Border Patrol agents, National Guardsmen,

helicopters, fences, towers, checkpoints, sensors, guns, and dogs along

the border. Understanding the nature of this militarization will go a

long way towards clarifying what’s actually happening and why.

By all accounts I’ve ever heard, it used to be much easier to cross the

border than it is now. Most people crossed into relatively safer

urbanized areas such as San Diego, El Paso, or the Lower Rio Grande

Valley in Texas. Starting with Operation Gatekeeper, the Border Patrol

made it much more difficult to enter the country in these places; over

the years, it has methodically pushed the traffic into the increasingly

remote mountains and deserts beyond. Many thousands of people have died

from heat, cold, sickness, injuries, hunger, and thirst as a direct

result. At this point, I think, the game is reaching a bit of an

endpoint. The government has pushed the traffic into the very deepest

and deadliest pockets of the entire border, which is where they want it.

This does not mean that the situation is completely static—the Border

Patrol will clamp down on some of these pockets sometimes and ease up on

others—but on the large scale, I think that it is more or less stable.

There have been several interesting byproducts of these changes. Many

people used to come to work for a season, go back home, and return the

next year. That’s much less common now that getting into the country is

such an ordeal. People come and generally stay as long as they can.

Also, most people who crossed used to be men with families south of the

border. There are many more women and children crossing now that it’s no

longer possible for many men in this position to work in the north

without leaving their families behind for good. Finally, with the

increase in internal deportations, there are many more people crossing

now who have lived here for long periods of time and are returning to

their homes in the United States. This latter group faces a particularly

fiendish dilemma if they run into trouble on the way. I have often heard

people whose children live south of the border say things like “I

thought I was going to die and all I could think about was my babies.

It’s better for me to go back home than to risk dying again.” I have

often heard people whose children live north of the border say things

like “If I have to risk dying to get home to my babies, then I will.”

As I hope I have made clear, a policy of pushing migrant traffic into

extremely dangerous areas does not at all imply an actual intention to

stop or even deter people from entering the country illegally. This

complex and slightly perverse strategy has numerous compelling

advantages. It allows politicians to look tough for the cameras while

still providing the American economy with the farmworkers and

meatpackers it depends on. It provides ample opportunities to swing huge

government contracts to giant corporations: for example, to Wackenhut to

transport migrants, to Corrections Corporation of America to detain

them, to Boeing to build surveillance infrastructure. It justifies the

hefty salaries of the 20,000 people who work for the Border Patrol. And

it has other beneficiaries, who I will get to momentarily. On the whole,

border militarization is best seen as a massive government pork and

corporate welfare project that is possibly only surpassed in the last

twenty years by the war in Iraq.

The outcome of this policy of has been most educational. Just as it used

to be easier to cross the border, it also used to be a lot cheaper. This

won’t be surprising to anyone familiar with the laws of supply and

demand. Any service will become more expensive if it becomes more

difficult to provide, and the service of being smuggled across the

border has certainly been a case study in this law. Prices rose and rose

as the Border Patrol pushed people further and further from the cities

and established more and more checkpoints that made the journey longer

and longer, until at a certain point there was as much money to be made

in moving people as there was in moving drugs. At that point, the

cartels that already controlled the drug trade recognized an excellent

business opportunity, muscled out the competition, and took over the

game entirely. This dramatically transformed what had been a relatively

low-key affair into a lucrative, highly centralized, and increasingly

brutal industry with tens of billions of dollars at stake. There is no

doubt that these cartels are among the primary beneficiaries of American

and Mexican drug, trade, and immigration policies since the end of the

Cold War.

The rise of the cartels to a position of absolute dominance within a

booming industry led, unsurprisingly, to a mass-based approach and an

extraordinarily inhumane methodology. I have commonly heard them

referred to as pollero networks, which means something like “meat

herders” since pollo is the word for a dead chicken rather than a live

one. This should offer some indication of the degree of care that these

organizations tend to invest in each individual human life throughout

the process of bringing people into the United States. I have seen

groups of as many as fifty people—and heard about groups as large as a

hundred—being driven quite literally like cattle across the desert, with

the sick and wounded straggling behind and trying desperately to keep

up. I have met people who were told that what is always at best an

extremely demanding four to five day journey would take as little as

twelve hours on foot, and countless more who were left behind to die by

their guides without hesitation when they were for any reason no longer

able to keep up.

As a result of border militarization, prices have risen now to the point

that it costs around five thousand dollars for a Guatemalan to be

brought into the United States through the networks, and about six

thousand for Salvadorans. Fees for Mexicans vary widely, but they are

far from cheap. You won’t be surprised to hear that many people who wish

to migrate do not actually have six thousand dollars lying around. The

cartels have developed a variety of inventive solutions to this problem,

often involving kidnapping and indentured servitude. I’ve met people who

spent years working in the United States simply to pay off their initial

fee, some while held in conditions of outright bonded labor. I’ve met

others who made it through the desert and were immediately held for

ransom by the same groups that brought them in. The ones who were able

to raise a few thousand dollars more were allowed to go. The ones who

weren’t able to were beaten for days and then driven back out to be left

in the desert, where within minutes they were picked up for deportation

by Border Patrol agents who clearly had some sort of working arrangement

with the kidnappers. I’m not kidding. It’s scandalous.

As bad as all this is, it still doesn’t fully convey the depth of the

cruelty that has characterized this era of government-sponsored cartel

control. Rape and sexual assault of female migrants is absolutely

endemic at every step of the process of migration. This has been greatly

exacerbated by the actions of the government: by pushing the traffic out

into the middle of nowhere, they have basically guaranteed that in order

to enter the country women have to place themselves in situations where

rape and sexual assault are extremely likely. In addition, the trails

are frequented by groups of armed bandits who make their living

targeting migrants. I believe that some of the bandits are employed by

the cartels themselves, who are simply robbing their own clients, while

others are freelancers taking advantage of an easy opportunity to prey

on defenseless people who are often carrying their life savings in their

pockets. Again, it is primarily because the government has pushed the

traffic into the ends of the earth that these fuckers have been blessed

with such favorable circumstances in which to ply their trade.

To be fair, I’ve also heard stories of low-level cartel members acting

decently, compassionately, and even occasionally heroically. It’s worth

pointing out that the guias—the people who actually walk the groups

through the desert to the other side of the checkpoints—are at the very

bottom of the pecking order within the networks. Their lives are

considered nearly as expendable as those of the migrants. Working in the

desert has given me some appreciation for the fact that being a guia

would be very stressful. They’re supposed to bring large groups of

people through harsh terrain where there is no potable water, usually

either in the dark or in brutal heat, while being hunted by military

types with guns and helicopters. Their bosses are probably not the kind

of people you want to piss off. It’s hardly surprising that guias are

often unwilling to risk losing their whole group because one or two

people can’t keep up. The whole situation is just guaranteed to bring

out the worst in someone. This is not to make excuses for them, or to

absolve relatively powerless people of their personal responsibility for

doing indefensible things. It is simply to say that most of the guilt

has to be assigned to the powerful people whose actions have created

this nightmare and who profit most directly from it.

Toward that end, it’s important to understand the relationship between

the governments and the cartels. Basically it is this: they need each

other. They share similar interests. Perhaps it is most precise to say

that in the United States the cartels need the government, while the

government makes great use of the cartels. The cartels rely on the US

government to keep the prices of their goods and services artificially

high. The government uses the cartels to justify funneling billions of

dollars to the corporations whose interests they represent. On the

Mexican side, meanwhile, it isn’t realistic to talk about the government

and the cartels as if they are separate entities. There, the government

and the various cartels are fighting for control of the multi-billion

dollar American drug and migration market. This ten-sided bloodbath has

gotten progressively uglier since the Mexican federal government got

involved in December of 2006, ending what had been a longstanding policy

of non-engagement in intra-cartel violence and leading to tens of

thousands of deaths.

Analysts sometime use term “Colombianization” to point out that the

state of affairs in Mexico is starting to look a lot like that in

Colombia. Perhaps the most striking similarity is in the increasingly

sophisticated collusion between elements of the government and the

cartels with which they are nominally at war. These connections run

deep, and the influence runs in both directions. Los Zetas, arguably the

most violent cartel in the country, was founded by members of the

Airmobile Special Forces Group (GAFE), an elite division of the Mexican

military established in 1994 to combat Zapatista rebels in Chiapas.

Around that time, about 500 GAFE personnel received training by the

United States Army’s 7^(th) Special Forces Group in Fort Bragg, NC for

this purpose. Somewhere between 30 and 200 of these operatives then

defected from the Mexican military to become hired guns, went on to

provide security for the Gulf cartel—a well-established trafficking

organization—and eventually split to form a cartel in their own right.

On a local and state level, bribery of police, mayors, judges, and other

government officials by the cartels is extremely widespread. On the

national level, there is strong evidence to suggest that the Mexican

Army and federal government are favoring the Sinaloa cartel—the largest

and richest in the nation—in hopes that they will eventually defeat

their rivals and enter into a stable agreement with the government such

as the ones enjoyed by their counterparts in Colombia.

So there is indeed a great deal of cartel infiltration of the Mexican

security forces. This is common, although less widespread, on the

American side as well. For instance, a large percentage of the drugs

that are brought into the United States are driven into the ports of

entry where they are waved through by corrupt Customs and Border

Protection agents who know what vehicles to look for. In general,

however, the arrangement on both sides of the border is not so crude

that there always or even usually has to be direct personnel overlap

between, say, the Corrections Corporation of America, the Border Patrol,

the Gulf Cartel, and the Mexican Army. What’s most important is that all

of these organizations have interlocking interests, benefit from each

other’s activities, and generally act in a way that keeps the others in

business. This unholy trinity of government, corporations, and organized

crime—three ways of saying the same thing—is a formidable opponent to

anyone who hopes to see the death in the desert end any time soon.

“Vivir para ser libres o morir para dejar de ser esclaves”: Living to be

free or dying to stop being slaves

“You haven’t heard our thunder yet!”

— slogan at a protest against SB1070

The corporate, governmental, and criminal elites that benefit from the

suffering on the border are ruthless and powerful, but they are not

gods. They aren’t the only actors in this drama, and they don’t have the

situation completely under control. People make it through the desert

because they are brave and resourceful, not just because the Border

Patrol lets them. The trails themselves are extraordinary testaments to

human ingenuity, weaving gracefully through canyons and over mountains

with an unerring eye for direction and cover.

There are somewhere around twelve million undocumented people in this

country. One thing that working in the desert has shown me is that they

are not all the same. The migrants are not all angels, or devils, or

victims. They are not passive objects that are acted upon by the world

without acting in return. They are complex individuals who have chosen

to take their lives into their own hands, and I have chosen to take

their side as best I can. Sometimes it works out and sometimes it

doesn’t. Sometimes you beat the man and sometimes the man beats you.

The border doesn’t end at the border, and the hardships that

undocumented people face don’t stop there either. The border cuts

through every city and state; it cuts through many of own our bodies.

The line in the sand is neither the first twist nor the last of the meat

grinder that global capitalism has prepared for people without papers.

After making it across the border undocumented people enter a world in

which they cannot legally earn money; they have compelling reasons not

to call the ambulance, go to the hospital, get health or auto insurance,

drive a vehicle, open a bank account, use a credit card, apply for a

mortgage, sign a lease, or rely on any number of other options that

people with citizenship can fall back on. If for any reason you have

made it a practice to live a portion of your life off the books, you

might be able to appreciate how hard it is to do this full-time in this

society.

Illegal immigration is a legitimate form of resistance to the iniquities

of global capitalism for millions of people worldwide. It may be

indirect resistance, but it gets the goods. This functions in two

principal ways. First, remittances from immigrant workers in the United

States—many of them undocumented—to their families in Mexico totaled

more than 21 billion dollars in 2010 alone. If you add up all the

remittances from immigrant workers in the entire global north to all of

their families in the entire global south, the total starts to look

pretty significant. Even though it’s filtered through a fine screen of

work and exploitation, this money probably represents one of the largest

redistributions of wealth from the rich to the poor in the entire course

of human history. Second, south-to-north immigration, much of it

illegal, is bringing about real demographic shifts in parts of the

global north and particularly in the United States. This shift may

eventually lead to meaningful social changes within this country, which

could contribute to a somewhat more equitable restructuring of the

global economic system, which would mitigate the tremendous disparity in

wealth between the global north and south, which is what drives the

migration in the first place.

It’s certainly not a given that this latter hope will pan out.

Generations of immigrants have moved from the margins into the

mainstream of American society without radically changing its course. In

fact this is exactly how settlers took control of the land to begin

with. Nonetheless, a distinctive feature of American history is that

this pathway has generally been reserved for immigrants of European

ancestry. It has not yet been proven that this country can assimilate or

segregate the current influx of non-European immigrants without

eventually undermining the foundation of white supremacy upon which it

has been built.

This impending demographic change is a cause of real anxiety for some

powerful Americans, as well as many less powerful ones who have not

managed to think all the way through its ramifications. My opinion is

the sooner the better—because I believe that even a partial erosion of

white supremacy in the United States is actually in the long-term

self-interest of most “white” Americans such as myself. You can build a

throne out of bayonets, but you can’t sit on it long. Aside from the

fact that subjugating other people is a rotten thing to do, it’s not a

very safe way to live. It’s extraordinarily impressive that black people

in the United States managed to break free from both slavery and Jim

Crow without resorting to indiscriminate slaughter of white people on a

grand scale. It certainly would have been understandable to do so, and

it arguably would have been justified. I suspect that things would have

been much uglier if there had not been at least a few white people who

were willing to do the right thing. I don’t know if I want to bet that

the billions of people that are being pushed around the world today will

be so restrained when it comes time to pay the piper on a global level.

It seems better to get on the winning side while there still may be

time.

In any case, the wheels are coming off the bus. We live on the same

small planet as everybody else. The way of life we inherited has proven

disastrous for the biosphere and for the long-term prospects of human

survival within it. As others have pointed out before me, my generation

is perhaps the first group of white Americans that not only have an

ethical mandate to turn away from this path but also an urgent

self-interest in doing so. Left unchecked the current arrangement is

guaranteed to cannibalize what is left of our land base within our

lifetimes and leave our children with nothing but the bones.

Admittedly, this is complicated. Groups of humans have subjugated other

groups of humans and destroyed their own land bases since long before

the social construct of whiteness ever existed, and it is clearly not

only people of European ancestry who are capable of doing either of

these things. White supremacy is not the only lynchpin holding this all

together, but it is a significant one. At this point in time, I don’t

think we can hope to stop the devastation of our planet without

contesting the structures of white supremacy—or vice versa.

So the answer is not for white Americans to continue to defend the

indefensible at the price of our souls, or to crawl into a hole and die.

It is for those of us who fit that description to think carefully about

where our allegiance really lies, and to find ways to act on it in

materially meaningful ways. Believe it or not, there are examples

throughout history of people who did just this—members of oppressor and

colonizer groups who decided to throw in their lot with the colonized

and oppressed. You can point to white people involved in the Underground

Railroad during slavery, gentiles who sheltered Jews during the

Holocaust, white Americans who took part in the civil rights movement,

white South Africans who resisted Apartheid, Americans involved in the

Sanctuary movement during the wars in Central America in the 1980s, and

Israelis resisting the occupation of Palestine today, among others. It’s

a good story to be part of. Those of us who are positioned to do so

should embrace it and be proud of it.

Our opponents will call us traitors, as if we support another

government. In fact we have pledged our allegiance to something older

and wiser than anything that any nation-state has to offer, and it is

the apologists for the current order who have turned their backs and

lost their way.

Working on the border has shown me time and again that you can’t really

extricate one part of the equation from all the other parts. Once you

start untangling one thread you start to see how it’s tied into the rest

of the noose. The killings in Juarez will not end without structural

change throughout Mexico, which will not happen without structural

change in Colombia and the other cocaine-producing countries, which will

not happen without structural change in the United States, and so on.

You can reverse the order of these statements or add others and they

will still be true. Fighting internal deportations and fighting border

militarization are not two different things. This ultimately has global

implications, but it is especially true in the case of Mexico, the

United States, and their devil-child The Border. Nothing will get better

on the border without things changing in both countries, and the

problems in one country will not be solved without addressing the

problems in the other.

Once, I asked this Oaxacan guy what he thought it would take to end the

death in the desert. “Una revolucion binacional,” he answered without

hesitating. We laughed and laughed, because of course that is

impossible. It was probably impossible for the Egyptians and Tunisians,

also.

New volunteers sometimes ask me what I think a just border policy would

look like. I tell them that there is no such thing; it is a

contradiction in terms. I am not interested in helping the authorities

figure out how to fix the mess they’ve created. Ultimately the only hope

for a solution to the border crisis lies in bringing about worldwide

systemic change that ensures freedom of movement for all people, rejects

the practice of state control over territory, honors indigenous autonomy

and sovereignty, addresses the legacies of slavery and colonization,

equalizes access to resources between the global north and the global

south, and fundamentally changes human beings’ relationship to the

planet and all of the other forms of life that inhabit it. That’s a tall

order! Where to start?

The desert is not the only place, but it is one. The strength of our

work is that there is no doubt we are having a tangible effect on the

lives of individual people who find our water, our food, or us. I know a

number of people I am certain would have died were it not for the

resources that we had to offer, and a number more who made it back to

their families that never would have been able to do so without meeting

us. I don’t say this to pat myself on the back, but to say that it is

possible to start somewhere.

People sometimes lament the fact that it can feel like we are just

serving as a band-aid. This word always aggravates me, because the

stakes are too high and the metaphor is not strong enough. One life

means a lot to the person that lives it. “Tourniquet,” I tell them, “you

mean you don’t want us to just serve as a tourniquet.” Nevertheless, the

weakness of our work is that we are always dealing with the symptoms and

never the cause. I’m not certain that anything we’re doing is having

much of an effect on the larger factors that cause so many people to end

up in the desert in the first place. It can feel like we’re always

cleaning up a mess we didn’t create, like we’re always mending the

damage the abusive drunken stepfather has done to the rest of the

family. It’s better than nothing, but what really needs to happen is for

the abuse to be stopped.

Many of the most effective types of direct action can end up looking

like some version of damage control. The problem is that it’s easier to

make attainable goals and quantify success when dealing with individuals

than when dealing with a system. I can visualize the steps from A to Z

of how to drop twenty-five gallons of water on a trail. When I wake up

in the morning there is something that I can do that will move me

towards that goal. I have a much harder time visualizing how to get

Border Patrol out of the desert, and a harder time still imagining how

to effectuate structural economic change on a global scale. It can be

tempting to say that it’s better to succeed at what we can do than fail

at what we can’t, but that’s just defeatism. I really don’t want to be

doing these same water drops twenty-five years from now. So what should

we do?

Thankfully, none of us have to do everything. It’s not my job to act

like Moses and set the people free. That’s not how meaningful social

change happens. I can do my best to help, but if the people are going to

get free they are going to do it themselves. I not only don’t have to—I

simply can’t call the shots in other people’s struggles for liberation.

I trust that the millions of people who are most directly affected by

immigration and border enforcement will keep finding ways to combat it.

There will almost certainly be things that white American citizens can

do if we keep our ears to the ground. If my efforts in the desert are in

any way contributing to 21 billion dollars moving from the rich to the

poor, I’m happy.

With that caveat, dear reader, please allow me to address you directly.

The death in the desert is not the only messed up thing in the world.

But it is pretty bad, and it is very close to my heart. I would really

like to see it end. I encourage you to find a way to get involved. I

can’t tell you exactly how to do this. Coming to work in the desert is

one way. There are many others. There are communities of undocumented

people in nearly every part of the country. What is the situation in

your area, and what might you have to offer? There are corporations that

benefit from this whole catastrophe in nearly every part of the country,

as well. What might you be able to do?

It has been suggested that in order to link systemic change with

tangible goals we must find points of intervention in the system where

we can apply power to leverage transformation. These points of

intervention have been described as the point of production, the point

of destruction, the point of consumption, the point of decision, and the

point of assumption. It’s not perfect, but it’s as good a framework as

any to use when thinking about how to intervene in this particular

situation.

What might direct action at the point of production look like? Stalling

the construction of new CCA facilities? What about at the point of

destruction? Finding ways to interfere with BP/ICE operations or

intervene in deportations? What about the point of consumption?

Pressuring businesses to commit to non-compliance with anti-immigrant

laws and organizing boycotts of ones that refuse? The point of decision?

Interrupting meetings or legislative processes? What might direct action

at the point of assumption look like? What lies and assumptions are used

to justify dehumanizing immigrants? How might you be able to counter

them? Do you have other ideas?

Direct action in the context of humanitarian aid in the desert is a

relatively new field, all things considered. There are many tactics yet

to be developed, and many others that have yet to exhaust their

effectiveness. There is still much to learn and much that new people can

offer. Most promisingly, the bi-national, cross-cultural, and

inter-generational alliances that have been forged in the crucible of

the border have yet to approach their full potential. Our ability to

realize this potential will determine the extent of the success of our

campaign to end migrant deaths in the desert, as well as whether that

campaign ever develops into a deeper resistance to the systems at the

root of the problem. They haven’t heard our thunder yet.

The desert is full of places that are sacred to me. There is the last

place I saw Esteban, the place I found Alberto, the places where Claudia

and Jose and Susana and Roberto died, Jamie’s rock, Yolanda’s hill and

Alfredo’s tree. It is overwhelming for me to think that as many of the

stories as I know—as many as anyone will ever know—it is just a drop in

the bucket of all that has happened there. The objects that people leave

behind are a constant reminder of this to me, a physical manifestation

of all of the best and worst that human beings have to offer. I am not a

particularly spiritual person, but the weight of these remnants is

immense and often oppressive. I love the desert. It breaks my heart that

it has played host to such terrible suffering. It gives me some solace

to know that someday—even if it is only because there are no more human

beings left on the planet—there will be no more United States, no more

Mexico, no more helicopters, no more walls, no Border Patrol and no

border. The plastic will break down, the memory of these things will

fade, and the land will finally have a chance to heal under the blue sky

and the merciless sun.

“Las paredas vueltas de lado son puentes.” Walls turned sideways are

bridges.

— graffiti on the south side of the Border Wall, Nogales, Sonora

Appendix: The Border Patrol

Allow me to add a couple of words about the Border Patrol. There is no

government job that can be attained without a high school diploma that

pays more than that of a Border Patrol agent. They are generally paid

about $45,000 a year their first year, $55,000 their next two, and

$70,000 and up after that. They are not going around hungry.

I don’t know how to convey the extent of the abuse that I have heard

migrants report at the hands of these jokers. I have heard of agents

beating, sexually abusing, and shooting people as well as throwing them

into cactus, stealing their money, denying detainees food and water,

deporting unaccompanied minors, driving around wildly with migrants

chained in the back of trucks that look unmistakably like dogcatchers,

and on and on. I’ve also heard numerous reports of Border Patrol seizing

fifty pound bales of marijuana from drug smugglers and then either

letting them go or processing them as regular migrants without drugs.

What happened to the weed? Who knows!

Border Patrol is a lucrative business in and of itself, and part of that

business entails exaggerating the danger of the job in order to milk

taxpayers for more money. In my experience law enforcement personnel

generally think that their work is really perilous, and that the world

owes them a sincere debt of gratitude and a fat paycheck. It’s

interesting to note that since the organization’s inception in 1904

there have been 111 Border Patrol agents who died in action, of which 40

were due to homicides. In 2010, out of 20,000 agents, two were killed

and one died in a car accident. It is impossible to know how many

migrants die crossing the border every year, but somewhere from the mid

hundreds to the low thousands is probably a good bet. If you actually

crunch the numbers you will find that Border Patrol agents are also much

safer than roofers, sanitation workers, truck drivers, sex workers, and

any number of other people whose jobs are actually dangerous.

The other thing that any self-respecting Border Patrol agent will tell

you is that they are protecting us from terrorists. This begs the

question of who “us” is. More human beings have lost their lives in the

desert as a direct result of Border Patrol activity than in every

Al-Qaeda attack on American soil combined—quite possibly more than would

have died if every attack that the Border Patrol has had a hand in

thwarting had been successful. The more important point is that as long

as there is such outrageous global inequality Americans are never really

going to be safe.

Many Border Patrol agents come from working class backgrounds and many

are Hispanic. To be fair I will say that I have met some who treated

migrants with respect. I will also say that in fact they do find people

sometimes, that some of those people would surely have died otherwise,

and that some agents can be nice enough people. The fact of the matter,

though, is that it is rank-and-file Border Patrol agents that enforce

the policies that cause all of the problems that I have wasted so many

words trying to diagnose. No matter what they do individually, they will

never be a part of the solution as long as they wear a uniform and carry

a gun. They could put the cartels out of business and end the death in

the desert tomorrow by simply going home.

I’ve heard too many apologies for the Border Patrol—that they are not

the enemy and that they are subject to the same economic forces as the

migrants and so on. I don’t buy it. History is replete with examples of

people who were willing to sell out their own people to save themselves.

There were black slave drivers on the plantations, Jewish police in the

ghetto, native scouts leading the Army after Crazy Horse, and now there

are Hispanic Border Patrol agents in the desert. I’m sorry but I’m not

impressed. I think that when people become willing accomplices in

atrocities, they just don’t deserve much sympathy.

Recently a friend of mine found the body of a woman who died of some

combination of dehydration, sickness, exposure, and exhaustion within a

quarter of a mile of reaching one of our largest supply drops—a place

that I have personally serviced several hundred times in my life. She

had passed through an area where for months a few particularly hostile

Border Patrol agents have consistently slashed our water bottles, popped

the tops off our cans of beans so that they go rancid, and removed the

blankets that we leave on the trails. As a result of these activities,

we have had to move these drops around constantly, and stop dropping at

what would otherwise be excellent locations because the supplies will

almost surely be vandalized. I believe that more likely than not, before

this woman died she either passed a drop that had been vandalized or a

place where there would have been a drop if it were not for the actions

of these agents. I believe that it is very likely that had she found our

supplies she would have survived long enough for us to find her. As far

as I am concerned, the pieces of shit who are doing this are murderers

and her blood is on their hands.

Border Patrol agents really are scared, even if right now they don’t

actually have much to worry about. You can see it in them. I guess

fucking over other people every day of your life must do that to you.

Personally it gives me great pleasure to be able to go unarmed daily to

places that people with automatic weapons and body armor are terrified

to set foot in. I have not made myself an enemy of the people—and in the

long run that is going to keep me safer than them.