30 Years of Operation Gatekeeper: A Q&A with Joseph Nevins

Today's border has "surveillance towers littering the landscape, militarized personnel [everywhere], miles of formidable walls. Gatekeeper played a huge role in bringing about this dystopian reality."

Border Patrol watches over a newly built wall during Operation Gatekeeper in February of 1999 near San Diego. (Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

Thirty years ago there were drastic changes underway at the U.S.-Mexico border, epitomized by the U.S. Border Patrol’s Operation Gatekeeper. Never would the since disfigured borderlands look the same again.

Luckily, the author of Operation Gatekeeper and Beyond: The War On “Illegals” and the Remaking of the U.S.–Mexico Boundary, geographer Joseph Nevins, is with us today to explain the significance of this operation and how it served as a blueprint for the current border-enforcement regime. Nevins, a professor at Vassar College, also authored the book Dying to Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration in the Age of Global Apartheid.

As Nevins says in the following interview, “Gatekeeper laid the foundation for the huge immigration and boundary policing apparatus that is now housed within the Department of Homeland Security. It was a key chapter in what has now become a seemingly endless war against ‘illegal’ immigrants and a permanent crisis along the U.S.-Mexico boundary.”

What is Operation Gatekeeper, and why is it important for people to know its history? In your book Operation Gatekeeper and Beyond, what was the most crucial point you were trying to make?

Operation Gatekeeper was an enhanced boundary-policing strategy of the U.S. Border Patrol that began on October 1, 1994. The goal was to reduce unauthorized crossings from Mexico into Southern California through the forward deployment of Border Patrol agents, and increased use of surveillance technologies and support infrastructure. The Border Patrol described it as a “territorial denial” or “prevention through deterrence” strategy (as opposed to the old strategy of apprehending people after they crossed). At the time, Southern California, particularly in and around San Diego, was the principal gateway into the United States for people crossing the border extralegally.

To understand Gatekeeper, one must appreciate the short-term political context out of which it emerged. During the U.S. presidential campaigns in 1992, border policing and unauthorized immigration were not important topics of debate. [Republican candidate] Pat Buchanan tried to push the Republicans to adopt a strongly restrictionist stance on immigration and the border, but his efforts ultimately failed. As for the Democrats, their national platform maintained its historical silence by not even mentioning undocumented immigration and boundary policing.

Soon after Bill Clinton entered the White House in January 1993, it became clear that boundary enforcement was a low priority for his administration. Clinton’s first budget proposal actually called for a reduction in the size of the Border Patrol—by 93 agents (at a time when the agency had about 4,200 agents). Also in 1993, the Office of Management and Budget told the Border Patrol that the agency would have to “do more with less” in terms of resources. But quickly the administration’s position changed radically. The question is, why?

A big part of the answer lies in the state of California in the form of Proposition 187. Championed by Republican governor Pete Wilson, the ballot measure sought to deny public services (including education and health care) to undocumented immigrants in the vote-rich state. Prop 187 passed overwhelmingly in November 1994, and Wilson won reelection. For a Clinton White House already thinking about reelection, these were worrisome signs.

Another big part relates to what was happening on the national level, where, in 1993–94, various events created headaches for the administration. They included the first bombing of the World Trade Center, the killing of two CIA employees outside the agency’s headquarters by a Pakistani national, the running aground off the coast of Queens of a ship with hundreds of unauthorized immigrants from China on board, and the influx of refugees from Haiti. These events had nothing to do with the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, but political actors in Washington framed them in such a way that they translated into a focus on the southern border.

Operation Gatekeeper was the administration’s response. It was an effort to undercut the political hay the Republican Party was making by blaming the Democrats for what they framed as a country under siege from without, with the U.S. southern border allegedly being at the center of the problem.

In my book, I seek to show how Gatekeeper emerged out of a confluence of long- and medium-term processes, as well as short-term developments, that produced the “illegal” as a threat to the national social fabric and a heavily policed U.S.-Mexico border as the supposed remedy.

A view of what the California-Mexico border near SanYsidro looked like at night after Operation Gatekeeper in 2001. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)

In what ways does Gatekeeper serve as a blueprint for the modern border-enforcement regime?

Today’s border-policing apparatus is characterized by surveillance towers littering the landscape, large amounts of militarized personnel and their motor vehicles, scores of miles of formidable walls, etc. Gatekeeper played a huge role in bringing about this dystopian reality. Gatekeeper was the opening blow of the Clinton administration’s national border strategy, one that sought to greatly boost the policing apparatus by swelling the resources of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (the once-parent agency of the Border Patrol).

To give you a sense of how dramatic the growth was, between fiscal year 1994 and FY 2000, the number of Border Patrol agents more than doubled, increasing from 4,200 to 9,212. Meanwhile, the budget for immigration-related enforcement efforts along the southwest boundary grew from $400 million in FY 1993 to $800 million in FY 1997.

In this way, Gatekeeper laid the foundation for the huge immigration and boundary-policing apparatus that is now housed within the Department of Homeland Security. It was a key chapter in what has now become a seemingly endless war against “illegal” immigrants and a permanent crisis along the U.S.-Mexico boundary. It helped to birth the huge border and immigration industrial complex, the annual budget for which is more than $30 billion in 2024, that plagues us today, producing great hardships, and often death, for poor people trying to immigrate to the United States.

Do you think it’s important for people to know the bipartisan nature of border building?

There are some important differences between the Democratic Party and Republican Party in relation to border building—not least in terms of rhetoric. But more important than the differences are the similarities, and the shared assumptions and practices. One only has to look at Operation Gatekeeper. Remember: it emerged under Bill Clinton, a Democrat.

Today, we see Kamala Harris, the Democrat’s candidate for the White House, fully embracing the political black hole called “border security.” She has promised, if elected, to resurrect bipartisan legislation that she calls the “toughest border control bill in decades.”

While you won’t see the Democrats mouthing the racist garbage about Haitian immigrants in Ohio that we hear from Donald Trump and J. D. Vance, what the party of the Clintons and Obamas offers in relation to the U.S.-Mexico border is strikingly similar to what the Republican Party calls for.

And finally, how can we use this historical knowledge and analysis going forward? For example, the border is very much on the table now for this year’s election. How do you think we should be talking about it in the national discourse?

Challenging what has become the common sense around the U.S.-Mexico border is a really hard nut to crack. It’s part and parcel of an intensifying warlike endeavor of the rich and privileged parts of the world against the global poor.

This makes it all the more important—indeed, imperative—that immigrant, border justice, and human rights advocates challenge the assumptions that underlie “border security.” This means rejecting the characterization of the border as a problem and instead seeing it as place where the United States and Mexico (and, increasingly, other countries, particularly those of Central America) come together, albeit on very unequal terms. It is this profound inequality—and myriad forms of violence that have helped to bring it about—that we need to confront and transform.

This also involves seeing and talking about those who seek to enter, or have already entered the United States from beyond, first and foremost as human beings, not as foreigners or “illegals,” as people fully deserving of human rights and a just share of the earth’s bounty.