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“Prevention Through Deterrence,” a strategy that largely relies on rugged and desolate terrain to impede the flow of people from the south.
Prevention through deterrence
Documenting these largely undocumented stories and giving the reader an up-close look at faces and bodies can perhaps help us remember tomorrow that people lived and died in this desert today.
“Prevention Through Deterrence” (PTD) was first deployed in El Paso, Texas.
This NAFTA-induced human flood now meant there were hordes of fence hoppers in San Ysidro, California, and McAllen, Texas.
The basic premise was, and continues to be, that if they can’t stop the huddled masses, at least they can funnel them into remote areas where the punishment handed out by difficult terrain will save money (or so some foolishly thought) and get this unsightly mess out of public view, which it did.
Still, everyone knows that if you survive this death race, the backdoors of US stockyards, carpet factories, meat rendering plants, and sushi restaurants are wide open.
What’s agonizing for the O’odham is that the American federal government has turned their sacred landscape into a killing field, a massive open grave.
The line in the sand that currently exists between Arizona and Mexico was first drawn after the Gadsden Purchase of 1854.
no matter what you do, you can never get full comprehension of what is actually happening on our southern frontier.
Don’t forget the off- the-record dinner conversations when politicians and their federal contractor friends eat Delmonico steaks and drink single malt while laughing about how they are going to fill newly constructed private detention facilities and charge the government a pretty penny.
In the end, the anthropologist was let go with a warning, while his nameless companions were processed and deported.39
The primary theme of this book is violence: how it is constructed in the desert, its productive nature from the perspective of those benefiting from it, and how its victims come to know its destructiveness.
structural violence.53 It is violence that is indirect (i.e., the result of federal policy). No one individual is responsible for it. Moreover, it often occurs out of site, many portray it as “natural,” and it can easily be denied by state actors and erased by the desert environment.54
One researcher estimates that as many as 90 percent of women who attempt to cross undocumented into the United States through northern Mexico suffer sexual assault,57
Perhaps by humanizing that nebulous mass of humanity that we call the undocumented, we can begin to have a serious conversation about how to fix America’s broken immigration system.
every time I try to quench my thirst, it’s like drinking soup.
Just a few weeks earlier Bob had encountered the fragmented and skeletonized remains of a border crosser in this area. It was the second person he had found in under a month.
searching for the bones of dead “illegals” has never been a top priority for any law enforcement agency out here.
a moment when you despise the capacity of the human imagination.
that it’s the not knowing what happened to them coupled with the flashes of grotesque possibility that drive you insane.
For many Americans, this person—whose remains are so ravaged that his or her sex is unknown—is (was) an “illegal,” a noncitizen who broke US law and faced the consequences. Many of these same people tell themselves that if they can keep calling them “illegals,” they can avoid speaking their names or imagining their faces.
many Americans today have no problem putting nationality before humanity.
but this disregard for the lives of undocumented people and the idea that dead bodies should act as a form of deterrence to future migrants are fundamental components of the US federal government’s current border security strategy.
Border zones become spaces of exception —physical and political locations where an individual’s rights and protections under law can be stripped away upon entrance.
Contributing to this dehumanization is the fact that the Sonoran Desert is remote, sparsely populated, and largely out of the American public’s view.
Just imagine how people would react if the corpses of undocumented Latinos were left to rot on the ninth hole of the local golf course or if their sun-bleached skulls were piled up in the parking lot of the neighborhood McDonald’s.
The isolation of the desert combined with the public perception of the border as a zone ruled by chaos allows the state to justify using extraordinary measures to control and exclude “uncivilized” noncitizens.
nature has been conscripted by the Border Patrol to act as an enforcer while simultaneously providing this federal agency with plausible deniability regarding blame for any victims the desert may claim.
Placing heightened security in and around the downtown urban port of entry in El Paso would force undocumented migrants to attempt crossings in more rural areas that were easier for law enforcement to monitor.
It states that ‘The overarching goal of the strategy is to make it so difficult and so costly to enter this country illegally that fewer individuals even try.’”39
This comment that the increasing number of migrant fatalities is an “unintended consequence” of PTD is misleading and ignores previous evidence suggesting that policy makers were well aware of the role that death would play in this enforcement strategy.
clearly and publicly states that one way for the government to measure the efficacy of PTD is via a migrant body count.
Prevention Through Deterrence set the stage for the desert to become the new “victimizer” of border transgressors.
These grim figures represent only known migrant fatalities. Many people may die in remote areas and their bodies are never recovered. The actual number of people who lose their lives while migrating will forever remain unknown (see chapter 3).
Twenty years later, the common Border Patrol discourse focuses on blaming the smugglers who “endanger migrants in the desert.” This shift in federal tone that now deflects culpability away from policy and toward the environment and coyotes
