The Tower and the Tarantula: Searching for a New Way Forward 24 Years after 9/11
A reflection on the development of a border war machine, its imposition, its fragility, and the necessity of finding another way.
Today marks the four-year anniversary of The Border Chronicle. We started on September 11, 2021, 20 years after the 9/11 attacks, because of the significance that day has had for the U.S. borderlands and our reporting. It’s incredible how quickly these four years have passed and that we, The Border Chronicle, are still here. In 2021, we didn’t know that would be the case. In a way, these four years have been like building a house—brick by brick, two pieces each week, for more than 200 weeks. That’s a lot of weeks.
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The Tower and the Tarantula: Searching for a New Way Forward 24 Years after 9/11
A reflection on the development of a border war machine, its imposition, its fragility, and the necessity of finding another way.
A tarantula crawls on a rocky path just up the hill from where a surveillance tower stares toward the U.S.-Mexico border, 10 miles to the south. I am there with a student group from the School of International Training in late August to discuss the tower, its camera and radar systems, and how it all fits into the broader Customs and Border Protection surveillance and enforcement apparatus. From our location, there is a sweeping view of the hills and valleys rolling south in the Coronado National Forest toward Nogales, Arizona. The late-August sun hovers over us—with pure heat—as it does this time of year.
I lie flat on my stomach to snap a photo of the tarantula with the tower in the background. The contrast seems important, even insightful. The tarantula has been around since at least the Cretaceous period, 120 million years ago, while the tower has stood since 2015. This day presents a paradox: what seems strong is, in the grander scheme, fragile.
This incident with the tarantula occurs just days before a series of hostile actions by the Trump administration: returning the Department of Defense to its original name, the Department of War; firing a missile into a Venezuelan boat in the southern Caribbean Sea, killing 11 people; and posting a meme about the president’s admiration for the “smell of deportations in the morning” (in the meme, Trump resembles former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio) while threatening to invade Chicago and emphasizing that “there is a reason now it’s called the Department of War.” This week puts to rest any doubt about what border and immigration enforcement really is: an act of war against a clear enemy.
Trump’s bellicose overtures against alleged “narcoterrorists” have pushed border patrolling to new extremes. It’s the first time the United States has carried out a violent military operation on its own accord in Latin America since the Panamanian invasion in 1989, according to journalist Michael Fox. (And the threat of U.S. drone strikes in Mexico continues to loom). Trump, however, is simply following the prescription offered by the 9/11 Commission report: “9/11 has taught us that terrorism against American interests ‘over there’ should be regarded just as we regard terrorism against America ‘over here.’” It concludes that “the American homeland is the planet.”
Indeed, while the September 11, 2001 attacks occurred more than 2,000 miles from the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, no place in the domestic United States has been more affected, with some areas so deformed by border militarization that they are unrecognizable from what they were before. This significance is one reason The Border Chronicle’s inaugural post was on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 in 2021, four years ago.
As I snap the photo of the tarantula, I think about how this integrated fixed tower—in the CBP’s parlance—was first deployed in the occupied West Bank of Palestine. The company Elbit Systems sold the product to the United States in 2014, stating it had “10+ years securing the world’s most challenging borders.” The tower was “combat proven.” Elbit took over the virtual wall project from Boeing, which received a nearly $2 billion contract from DHS in 2006 via the SBInet program. This is the 9/11 link: the Secure Border Initiative, a technology program that stemmed from a historic blast of funding after the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, which also included the Secure Fence Act of 2006. The newly formed ICE and CBP agencies became key components of the counterterror machine, the top priority of the new department, even though no terrorists have ever been arrested crossing the border—nor have officials ever busted anyone carting weapons of mass destruction through the bumpy, oven-hot desert. Nevertheless, the border became a front line in the global war on terror. More than $400 billion has been poured into CBP and ICE since 2003.
DHS is not the Department of War, but it has become what constitutional attorney Daniel Whitehead called “a standing army on American soil.” In a 2014 article, Whitehead wrote about DHS militarizing police, spying on dissidents and activists, stockpiling ammunition, contracting to build detention camps, tracking cell phones, conducting military drills in U.S. cities, enforcing border control searches that violate the Constitution, and using drones, among other activities. DHS also has a navy and an air force; CBP’s Air and Marine division has a fleet of 200 aircraft and 300 marine vessels to, as they put it, “safeguard our nation by anticipating and confronting security threats.”
A domestic military, but with a new twist. When I interviewed the director of the Criminal Defense Immigration Project, Joanne Macri, in 2012 for my book Border Patrol Nation, she said that since 9/11, “Border Patrol has become the national security police.” Now, as Border Patrol has roamed the streets of Portland and Washington, DC, and sent drones over Minneapolis, and 14 other cities, Macri’s words seem prophetic.
It wasn’t long after my interview with Macri—only a couple of years later—that I witnessed national security police in action from the hill with the tarantula overlooking the tower. In 2015, I joined a group from the Arizona Palestine Solidarity Alliance protesting the integrated fixed tower, then still under construction. Border Patrol was none too pleased with protesters’ objections to the U.S. using Israeli occupation technology for border enforcement, so it dispatched a roaming ATV unit up the hill with a roar. From the top, I saw four quads approaching and kicking up dust. When they finally reached the top, they skidded to a dramatic stop, sending gravel flying toward the small but vociferous protest. The Border Patrol agents had the look of men hungry for action, only to confront activists they didn’t know how to handle. Once things calmed down, I spoke with one agent who had a teddy bear wedged into the front grille of his vehicle. He said he found it in the desert, probably left by a child.
As I looked at the tarantula juxtaposed against the tower, I recalled being with another student group from Prescott College a few years earlier. I had just explained the towers and how they formed a technological barrier. I even repeated what the agent with the teddy bear had told us: that the towers were placed on the hills to force migrants into “choke points” where Border Patrol can intercept them.
Then historian Mary Poole, a professor with the Prescott College group, said, “The tower, to me, looks so fragile.”
I was struck by her comment, since I had thought of the tower only as powerful and invasive, part of an imposing surveillance state. It seemed strange to think of it as fragile. It appeared anything but. Then I remembered the twin towers on 9/11 that seemed so permanent but then so suddenly buckled under themselves. And I recalled a chunk of the border wall—also seemingly permanent--that I witnessed being consumed by the earth. A piece of the Normandy barrier had been dragged a quarter mile into Mexico by the rushing arroyos from the Arizona summer rains. I was on a ranch in Mexico to learn about a binational water harvesting project, a prime example of alternatives to border fortification, but they wanted to show me this barrier first. This border barrier, now well into the Mexican interior, was partially covered with soil, purple flowers, and webs spun by arachnids. It would soon be gone.
This is the paradox of the tower: despite its show of power, it is ultimately a fragile, unsustainable structure. Perhaps this is what Poole meant; left alone without maintenance, the tower will eventually crumble, be consumed by the hill, and maybe even be inhabited by burrowing tarantulas, composted into something else entirely.
Staring at the tarantula, I wonder who will be around in 100, 1,000, or 1 million years—the tarantula or the tower? If we could see this fragility and promise, would it be possible to recognize there are indeed other ways forward in the borderlands?
This seemed like a powerful reflection point to consider the 24 years since 9/11.
After the tower, the next stop with the student group was La Linea Art Studio in downtown Nogales on Morley Avenue, half a block from the border wall, which featured intense coiling razor wire. There were six rows of wire covering the 20-foot bollard wall completely, leading up a hill behind which were the colorful houses of Nogales, Sonora’s Embarcadero neighborhood. This was the very concertina wire that prompted La Linea to open its doors in 2019. Its director, Aissa Huerta, said in a video interview that the arrival of the wire “was like waking up one day and being in a war zone. It was like a punishment. It made downtown look like a prison. It made Nogales look like a police state.”
La Linea board president Evan Kory told me people have been passing through what is now the Morley Avenue crossing for hundreds, “if not thousands of years.” For the last hundred years, it has been a shopping area for people on both sides of the border. But, Kory said, “since 9/11 the border has become increasingly less fluid, which has led to businesses closing and buildings becoming vacant.” After the concertina wire spurred them into action, artists cleaned up one of these vacant buildings to “form a gallery and community art space.”
“There are so many talented and passionate artists in our region,” Kory said, “and the art they create reflects the rich binational lifestyle we live and cherish,” a vision that actively challenges the post-9/11 world of walls and towers. As the people and creatures of the borderlands constantly show us, sometimes a way forward, something new, even beautiful can come from the wreckage. For Huerta, La Linea was not just about art, it also represented a fundamental psychological shift from a mentality of “things happening to us” to a firmer position of “what we can create.”
Great reflection, also important to remember that all 19 hijackers entered the US legally on tourist and student visas, not across US-MX border. 24 years of misplaced resources, targeting our residents and ecosystems.
Amazing piece. I've been thinking about perpetual war and the militarization of the relationship between the state and its population a lot these days. It seems this is the definitive arc of the twenty-first century so far, a trend wherein the maintenance of borders and control of undesirable populations play a key role.