This is what happens when you militarize the border as part of a phony "war on drugs."
Cross-posted at So What?
In 1997, no one in the small town (pop. 100) of Redford, Texas knew that U.S. Marine teams, fully camouflaged and armed with M16 rifles, had been secretly deployed to their section of the border. No one knew that their town had been designated a major drug corridor and that a team of four Marines had taken up a position near the local river crossing to watch for smugglers. Farmers like the Hernández family, who lived by the river, went on working their fields and tending to their livestock. On the evening of May 20, 18-year-old Esequiel Hernández Jr. left the house to tend to his family's goats, taking with him, as usual, a .22 rifle to keep away wild dogs. It was the last evening of his life.
As eloquently demonstrated in the new documentary The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández, the southern border is not simply a line in the sand, nor is it a war zone. Communities such as those near the Rio Grande in Texas are home to hard-working American families and many grow up with ties to both Mexico and the United States. As Judge Jake Brisbin of Presidio County says, "On a map it's an international border, but in reality it's something you walk across in everyday life."
Watch a clip
The wall that is presently being built is likewise phony. In the first place, it will not stretch across the entirety of our 2000-mile border with Mexico. It generally cuts across the property of ordinary people and skips over the property of resorts, the rich and the well-connected. Furthermore, it turns out that most immigrants enter the country—whether legally or illegally—at ports of entry not across shallow portions of the Rio Grande. The wall frankly doesn’t keep many immigrants out. So, what is it for? One purpose of the wall is to create the impression that the U.S. government is doing something about unauthorized immigration. I believe, however, that there is a deeper purpose. That purpose is to divide "us" from "them."
In the absence of an effective federal policy toward immigration, cities and towns Across the U.S. have been taking matters into their own hands by passing English-only laws, restrictions against renting to undocumented residents and tasking their police officers with customs enforcement. These local measures, however, seem to be directed not just at immigrants but as Hispanics in general. The legislation and its enforcement tends to be racist in origin and implementation. Texas, in particular, has a history of using English-only instruction as a legal basis for racial segregation in schools. In other words, local immigration law is the new Jim Crow.
This can be seen partly as a nativist backlash against demographic changes taking place in our land. Hispanics represent the most rapidly growing ethnic group in our midst, and this growth is reflected in a growing political, economic and cultural presence. Some Americans feel that they need to reassert a national identity they believe is under attack. They assume this national identity to be Anglo-Saxon and will protect that fiction with a fierceness reminiscent of those who believed African American voting rights would lead inevitably to blood in the streets. The wall is, among other things, a national symbol meant to reassure the native-born and non-hispanic that their vision of Anglo-Saxon moral supremacy remains intact. But as the story of Esequiel Hernandez illustrates, phony wars can have real casualties.