Campaign Action
There’s no crisis at the U.S./Mexico border—according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), unauthorized crossings are at the lowest levels since 1971—but Donald Trump invented one anyway, deploying the National Guard to the border even though they’re prohibited from doing any actual immigration enforcement. But who cares about the basic facts when your one goal—to rile up your racist base—went off without a hitch. Border residents who have and continue to live in militarized communities, however, see right through the political stunt:
“El Paso is safer than Washington D.C., than Chicago, than most of the country’s major cities. But they still insist that we need walls, that we need to militarize the border,” Fernando Garcia lamented on Thursday afternoon.
Garcia, who serves as executive director for the Border Network for Human Rights, told ThinkProgress that the Trump administration has a “distorted reality” of what the border is, pushing a narrative of the region as dangerous and uncontrolled. But a scan of general data immediately calls that depiction into question — the southern border is, arguably, one of the safest parts of the United States.
What is dangerous, though, is what acts unleashed Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents are committing against families and with our tax dollars. Since Trump’s inauguration, Border Patrol agents have stalked sick kids as they were being transferred to medical facilities, detained Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients, raided life-saving medical camps along the border and even killed. Now with added deployment of the National Guard—“to the glee of the anti-immigrant movement,” including neo-Nazi groups—border communities are speaking out.
“Our community is already heavily militarized,” said Bekah Hinojosa, a conservation organizer from Brownsville, Texas. “Cameras line the international bridges, we are surrounded by border checkpoints, border patrol helicopters can be seen in the sky, and agents patrol every highway. [W]e reject this latest move by Trump and Abbott to deploy National Guard personnel and further militarize our home.”
According to reporter E.A. Crunden, “militarization of the border was a concern voiced by virtually every resident ThinkProgress spoke with this week.” Parents with sick children shouldn’t have to worry about a trip to the hospital possibly ending in deportation, but it’s a possibility for Silvia Macuixele, who this week “was detained after traveling through a Border Patrol checkpoint while accompanying her 4-year-old son to the hospital for his emergency surgery,” according to immigrant rights group America’s Voice:
“People that live here will tell you that having dozens and dozens of border agents in addition to ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents only furthers the fear they feel,” Efrén C. Olivares, the racial and economic justice director for the Texas Civil Rights Project, told ThinkProgress.
Olivares said that efforts like the petition are a crucial measure of how residents actually feel about the White House call and the compliance of the Texas government.
“This was a top-bottom directive,” he said. “The Abbott administration was happy to jump on that train without consulting anyone in the Valley. No officials were even contacted that I know of.”
“[Gov. Greg] Abbott didn’t bother to listen to … border residents, even after people protested to remind him this is not a war zone and that more troops are not welcome,” said Dani Marrero Hi of Neta, a bilingual multimedia platform amplifying Rio Grande Valley voices. The site just launched a petition calling on Abbott, always eager to fall in Trumpian line, to halt the National Guard deployment, which is available to sign here. Similarly, two Texas legislators say that Texas landowners are promising a legal fight if Trump continues with his effort to build the stupid wall that Mexico will never pay for:
GOP Rep. John Carter, chairman of the House Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee, and Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar, whose district sits on the border with Mexico, laid out a host of reasons why landowners on the border could stifle — temporarily, at least — DHS efforts to make Trump’s hallmark campaign promise a reality.
“I’ve been warning people since day one,” Carter said at a subcommittee hearing on Trump’s fiscal 2019 budget request for Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “You’re gonna need a lot of lawyers.”
“Statewide, 61 percent of Texans oppose building a wall,” according to recent polling. What border communities want is to live their daily lives without fear. “We’re tired of being used as part of the political gamesmanship,” said Texas Civil Rights Project’s Efrén C. Olivares. “People who are not from the border, who have never been to the border, use these imagined ideas of violence. And that is not really compatible with what’s really happening there. We, the ones who live on the border, have to live with the consequences.”