The Lucrative Business of “Border Chaos”
How Trump, right-wing media, and MAGA authoritarians will use the border to win in 2024.
On the dusty border wall road, not far from the port of entry in Lukeville, Arizona, a burly cameraman from Fox News filmed the distant line of asylum seekers walking toward us. The port, a vital lifeline for border communities and the shared binational economy, had made national news after Customs and Border Protection closed it December 4. And once again, the sight of people from all over the world presenting themselves for asylum was front and center.
I stood next to the cameraman, listening to the steady patter of outrage coming from the Fox News anchors, through a live feed on his cell phone mounted on his camera. “Bodies,” “raise the fear … the credible fear threshold,” and “Haitians of concern.” The words, disembodied and freighted with fear, were being beamed throughout America, and they echoed in the chilly morning air as the group of women, men, and children walked toward us. You could see the weariness in their faces. Most had traveled through several countries and survived the dangerous jungle trek through the Darién Gap.
I asked the groups in Spanish where they were from. One family told me Ecuador. The country was once one of the safest in South America, but in recent years it has been engulfed by narcopolitics, corruption, and violence, with a murder rate that has outstripped Mexico’s. A thoughtful 15-year-old boy from Honduras, who was traveling alone, said he was escaping the gangs back home and wanted to find work to support his five siblings. If all went well, he said, he would join his relatives in New Jersey, learn English, and send money home. There were also several men from African countries, including Senegal, and Mali. Most of them spoke only French, and so I said “bonne chance” (good luck), which is one of the only French phrases I know. The men smiled and said, “merci, merci,” nodding their heads. One flashed a peace sign.
A man from Central America told me they’d arrived at the border wall in the middle of the night, spent the night in the cold, then began walking along the dirt trail searching for U.S. border agents, so that they could turn themselves in and request asylum. He estimated they’d walked as far as 10 miles.
None of them knew what to do, only that they should keep walking until they found someone who looked like a U.S. border official. They looked to me and the Fox cameraman for answers. I pointed east to where a group of Border Patrol agents, in olive green uniforms, stood next to their white vans and green-and-white SUVs. The handful of agents had parked next to white tents, which had been erected by the nonprofit Humane Borders. Under the tents were barrels of water and portable bathrooms nearby. “Good luck,” the Fox cameraman told them, and the men’s faces lit up with smiles.
On the Mexican side of the wall, a family sold coffee and sandwiches, and a skinny puppy darted back and forth between the gaps in the bollards of the border wall, from Mexico to the U.S. and back again, looking for food scraps. The trail was lined with torn travel documents, discarded medications, and at least one empty roller bag. A log still smoldered from a campfire lit the night before by asylum seekers. I was struck by the solidarity among the people from the many countries arriving, united by their hopes and dreams for the future. United by their idea of America as a place of refuge.
They carried an idea of America, the myth of America, a land of immigrants and opportunity, which many Americans are now at odds with. Listen to Fox News, Newsmax, OAN, or any other right-wing outlet, and the people arriving are “invaders,” “bodies,” “military-age men,” or “gotaways” and “giveups.” Their humanity has been erased. I had no idea whether the Fox cameraman believed in what the Fox News anchors were saying: that the weary group of people before us were invaders who had come to do us harm.
Whether he believed it or not, these people lining up and removing their shoelaces and handing over their meager possessions were being used with organized precision to paint a fearful narrative for America, one that stokes a billion-dollar border security industry, organized crime, and a MAGA authoritarian movement that would like to snuff out our democracy in the next election.
The Drill, the Wall, and the Saw
A week before my visit to Lukeville, Donald Trump appeared in a Fox News town hall meeting and declared, once again, that he wants to be a dictator if reelected. The audience cheered. “I said I wanted to be a dictator for one day. You know why I wanted to be a dictator? Because I want a wall, and I want to drill, drill, drill.”
When it comes to business and politics, wrote historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert in authoritarianism, Trump is a practiced liar, but when he says, if reelected, he’ll become a dictator, we need to take him at his word. By mentioning the wall and oil drilling, Trump is reassuring the moneyed interests that he’ll make them richer if they support him. “Xenophobia allies with misogyny and racism to create justifications for authoritarians to fulfill their desires for control and possession,” Ben-Ghiat noted. “They seek to control minds and bodies, they seek to legislate what can be seen and said and done, and they even seek to police the past, through control of historical narratives, and convince people that they and they alone can guide the nation to a glorious future.”
Trump didn’t create the border wall, but he’d like Americans to think he did. For nearly 20 years, the border wall economy has metastasized into a multibillion-dollar industry supported by both political parties, an industry that enriches private contractors, military vendors, tech billionaires, and politicians. But it’s Trump who has wielded the wall like an authoritarian cudgel and made it his MAGA political brand. On Fox News, the wall is presented as a panacea for “#Biden’s Border Crisis”—a campaign narrative created by Fox News and former Trump cabinet members, including Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, and repeated ad infinitum online to great effect by an army of right-wing content creators.
But the issues at the border started long before Joe Biden ever inhabited the White House. And large global movements of people, fleeing pandemic-wrecked economies, climate change, and corrupt political regimes, are a phenomenon in many parts of the world, not just the United States. Similar authoritarian campaigns scapegoating immigrants LGBTQ communities, and threatening women’s reproductive rights, are eclipsing democracies from Hungary to Argentina at an alarming rate.
Inaction and polarization in the U.S. Congress are only compounding the border’s problems. Congress hasn’t updated the immigration system since the last century, and increasingly an underfunded and overstretched asylum system has become the only way for many to enter the United States. Thousands of people have died just to reach the United States for an opportunity to work and improve their lives. Meanwhile, according to a recent report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, nearly 3 million jobs remain open with no one to fill them.
Increasingly, “border chaos” has become a lucrative business. As I write this, MAGA extremists in Congress are holding funding to Ukraine hostage in exchange for fast-track deportations from the interior of the country and making a Title 42 deportation policy permanent, while expanding immigrant detention. Even though Title 42 only resulted in people crossing multiple times, increasing the number of Border Patrol apprehensions. These deterrence measures won’t solve problems at the border, but they will terrorize immigrant neighborhoods, enrich private detention facilities, and increase the paramilitary powers of Border Patrol and ICE, which acted as enforcers for Trump, kidnapping protesters in Portland, Oregon, and surveilling journalists in California.
Under the border chaos scheme, even the human smugglers get rich. As I walked along the border wall, some of the concrete-filled bollards in Trump’s “big, beautiful wall” had been sliced through with a saw. As the deterrence goes up, so does the price for crossing. People with more resources can pass through one of the manmade gaps, while those who have less must climb over the wall and be hoisted down on a rope. Along the way, I met two young Guatemalan men who were limping, and over their jeans had wrapped white T-shirts around their legs, like tourniquets, where they had injured themselves after having fallen from the wall. Meanwhile, a welder in a bright yellow safety vest, working for the private contractor Spencer, which had secured a $600 million contract, followed behind the smugglers, closing the gaps shut. And so it went.
As I was leaving, I overhead the Fox cameraman asking one of the Border Patrol agents whether he’d like a Pedialyte or a Monster Energy drink. They were chatting it up like old friends. The cameraman would be back tomorrow, no doubt. And there would be another fear-filled missive about invaders at the border for Fox viewers, which would filter through the rest of the right-wing media ecosystem. If Democrats and non-MAGA Republicans, if they still exist, don’t confront this false narrative and break from the border chaos industry, Trump and the MAGA movement are going to use the border to dismantle our democracy.
How to help: Humanitarian groups including Green Valley-Sahuarita Samaritans Humane Borders and No More Deaths are seeking volunteers and donations for emergency aid to asylum seekers at the Arizona-Mexico border.
Sadly, the Democrats may buckle under the budget pressure to fund Ukraine and Israel. We've already seen Biden's plans to build more miles in Starr County. Faux border crises ginned up by fascists may well end any semblance of democracy is we know it. Most of it is largely mass ignorance propagated by right wing agitators and their "news" outlets on the public. And, there is an incredible amount of intellectual laziness caused, in part, by collaborative social media that make it too easy to actually "not" know what is transpiring at the Mexico-U.S. border due to misinformation overload - as well as other borders globally.
The Republicans won't even consider in their proposal a path for DACA citizenship, which shows how unserious they are.