The Everywhere Border: Trying to Understand the 9/11 Legacy
The Everywhere Border: Trying to Understand the 9/11 Legacy
September 11 brought heavy-handed border enforcement into a new, ever more dystopian era. It is not only a legacy, but has also become a 21st-century recipe for security.
So, we are almost at 1,000 paid subscribers here at The Border Chronicle. You know what that means, dear readers. First, a deep thanks to all those who have subscribed. We can’t express how much that means to us and how it goes a long way to making this work sustainable. And second, we need just 10 more people (that’s all!) and we will hit this huge milestone. Thanks so much for making this happen.
Oh, and don’t forget to fill out the survey. Let us know how we are doing!
The Everywhere Border: Trying to Understand the 9/11 Legacy
September 11 brought heavy-handed border enforcement into a new, ever more dystopian era. It is not only a legacy, but has also become a 21st-century recipe for security.
The Border Patrol is hiring, a commercial tells me. Not only is the agency protecting the international border, but it’s protecting all Americans, everywhere. Border Patrol agents are in our cities, our communities, the ad goes on. They are protecting the American way of life. Somehow this ad algorhithmed its way into a podcast (that had nothing to do with the border) I was listening to as I rode my bike in Tucson.
When later I tried to search for the commercial somewhere on the internet, I couldn’t find it. But it was essentially reporting the signature accomplishment of the Border Patrol after 9/11: the border is everywhere. And on this 23rd anniversary of the attack that killed nearly 3,000 people, this enforcement and surveillance panopticon—which has spread throughout the U.S. borderlands, interior, and increasingly the world—has become one of 9/11’s paramount legacies.
Right before the attacks in September 2001, I had just started working for a binational NGO called BorderLinks in Tucson and Nogales. We worked with university and church delegations who would come to the borderlands—sometimes for a week or more—to learn about and engage with border issues. At the time, U.S. border and immigration enforcement budgets were already rising at unprecedented rates. President Bill Clinton explained it well in his 1995 State of the Union: “Our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens.”
Clinton wasn’t lying. In Nogales, by the time I got there, a rust-colored 15-foot wall of landing mats snaked up and down the hills on the international boundary. It was built as part of Operation Safeguard, a deterrence initiative started in 1994. Right up against that wall, Border Patrol agents (who had gone from 4,000 to 10,000 from 1994 to 2000) “sat on their Xs” every quarter mile; that is, to say they made sure nobody crossed. And in the surrounding deserts, where many did cross, people began to die.
At the pre-9/11 border, there was already a sort of Border Patrol omnipresence, and a burgeoning humanitarian crisis. Yet what was to come after 9/11 was barely fathomed, perhaps only on the pages of a dystopian sci fi novel. The border and immigration enforcement apparatus was about to be turbocharged.
Contrary to claims endlessly made by Donald Trump about enforcement during his term, including during the presidential debate on Tuesday, 9/11 was palpably the most critical moment in the history of U.S. border fortification. First, it resulted in what journalist and writer Roberto Lovato called the “the largest, most important restructuring of the federal government since the end of World War II,” meaning, of course, the formation and implementation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003. The department included new agencies that now seem like they’ve been around a million years: Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement—both of which have barely stopped being teenagers.
And while the term “homeland” now does roll off people’s tongues, former Republican Party speechwriter and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan reminded us in 2002 that the term was “creepy” in a “Nazi-resonating way.” Maybe, she suggested, another term could be chosen. “Homeland isn’t really an American word,” she wrote. “It’s not something we used to say or say now.” But, alas, as with any other word endlessly repeated, inevitably comes the numbing of the mind.
Safe to say, our minds have been adequately numbed. How else do you explain the budgets?
For nothing else would come close to what 9/11 meant in sheer budget power. The budget increased from $4.9 billion in 2001 (Immigration and Naturalization Service) to $14.4 billion (CBP and ICE) in 2008, the final year for President George W. Bush. Meaning that it nearly tripled, a feat that was not accomplished before and hasn’t been done since. With the newly minted priority mission of stopping terrorists and weapons of mass destruction, money poured in. During that time I was crossing the border three times a week, watching it all change before my eyes.
In 2006, thousands of miles from where the attacks first took place and where no crossings of so-called terrorists had been detected, the federal government began a massive wall construction project called the Secure Fence Act, which produced 650 miles of walls and barriers, a surveillance project that awarded the Boeing Corporation $2 billion to build a “virtual wall” called SBInet, and the largest Border Patrol hiring surge in its history, that brought in 8,000 new agents in three years, from 2006 to2009. For this—besides recruiting in the Indiana Black Expo and Job Fair, and in areas hard-hit by the great recession—the Border Patrol had a car on the NASCAR circuit, driven by legend Kenny Wallace, who never won a race for the Border Patrol but had green-uniformed agents as part of his pit crew. The border became so all over the place that even Vermont’s senior senator Patrick Leahy was forced out of his car in New York state in 2008, as one of many examples of what was becoming, as Melissa del Bosque put it, a checkpoint nation.
With all the money, other hungry companies, like Boeing, swooped in. On industry day in 2005, Lockheed Martin’s former chief operating officer turned DHS Deputy Director Michael Jackson told prospective companies, “This is an unusual invitation. I want to make sure you have it clearly, that we’re asking you to come back and tell us how to do our business. We’re asking you. We’re inviting you to tell us how to run our organization.” One hundred and seventeen thousand contracts later, one can safely say that corporate power has become very much a part of the organization.
Take the beginning of the NFL season last week. The first game of the year—between the Kansas City Chiefs and Baltimore Ravens broadcast on Peacock—was sponsored by the company Accenture. I had to look twice to make sure I was seeing things correctly. That was a company I was familiar with, because it was a top border contractor. Accenture was the company that in 2018 got a contract from CBP to hire new agents. Part of the contract was that it would be paid $40,000 per hire. The contract was canceled in 2019 after these egregious details came to light. Ni modo, the company received another contract in 2023 to modernize CBP IT operations. And now it had a cute commercial for millions of viewers on national TV. The Border Patrol is everywhere, even when hidden in plain sight.
CBP has 65,000 employees that include a number of agencies such as Field Operations in the ports of entry, an Air and Marine division, as well as the Border Patrol. ICE, which has plans for further expansion, employs about 20,000 people with more than 7,000 dedicated to enforcement and removal within the United States. And they are working with local police forces. There has been more than $400 billion put into these agencies since 2003—in what constitutional attorney John Whitehead calls “a standing army on U.S. soil”—a force that relies on racial profiling and the subversion of basic rights to do its job.
But not only U.S. soil. Remember the 9/11 commission report, which explicitly stated that the “American homeland is the planet”? That statement, buried in that 1,000-page document, presages the expansion of U.S. homeland security worldwide. CBP has more than 24 attachés in countries such as Honduras, Kenya, and Turkey. They have run border enforcement programs in more than 100 countries. This extension of “the zone of security” abroad, to prevent “strategic surprise,” as the CBP Vision and Strategy 2020 puts it, has also become part of the post 9/11 border footprint.
Meanwhile, my podcast tells me that the Border Patrol is hiring. The border is everywhere, and after watching the September 10 presidential debate, that doesn’t seem like it will change anytime soon. Donald Trump was true to form with racist, xenophobic language and hyperbole, while reinforcing that there will be a mass deportation of potentially 20 million people under his watch. For her part, Kamala Harris promised that she would sign an enforcement-heavy border bill when she becomes president, which includes more hiring of Border Patrol, expansion of ICE detention centers, more deportations, and more technology and wall construction. 9/11 is not just a legacy, it is a recipe, and it continues on.
Thanks for these comments. Our government has become part of the corporate business model instead of ensuring the basic needs of affordable housing, healthcare, food security, etc. that our "democracy" should be providing. Our public tax funds are subsidizing business to violate everybody's human rights. We will not go back and we will resist the Project 2025 fascist ideas!!
Without a foreign WAR to fight defense contractors have expanded to the Border-Industrial complex for easy money. It provides jobs and a voter base as it pays politicians to do its bidding.