It becomes clearer that barriers are not the issue but an entire ensemble of policies at the southern border, primarily driven by inequality and poverty but combated by an administrative state given a repressive mandate.
It’s about smuggling and the flows of labor that come from corruption, neither of which is addressed by “barriers”.
Four women have been convicted of misdemeanors for leaving food and water for migrants crossing through a protected wildlife refuge on the U.S.-Mexico border in 2017.
According to the Washington Post, the volunteers—who were with the group No More Deaths—were charged with violating federal law by entering the 860,000-acre Cabeza Prieta on Arizona’s southwest border. U.S. Magistrate Judge Bernardo Velasco convicted the women following a three-day bench trial, saying that they violated “the national decision to maintain the Refuge in its pristine nature.” They could face up to six months in federal prison.
Prosecuting trespassers who are highlighting the problem about managing environmental conservation is really a secondary rationalization for a failed policy of attacking the real systemic problems of human trafficking.
The obvious contradiction is that the penalties for human trafficking lag in proportionality to those of drug smuggling. Not to endorse the death penalty as some countries have enforced drug smuggling punishment to a full extent, but it is clear that there’s fewer deterrents by comparison.
...newly released materials illustrate how generations of hard-line border enforcement measures collide with government wilderness preservation priorities, creating a situation in which thousands of people have died and the actions of those working to prevent further loss of life have been criminalized in the name of environmental conservation.
The No More Deaths trial unfolding in Tucson right now has as much to do with land management as with immigration. Two and a half decades of U.S. border enforcement policy has intentionally funneled generations of migrants into the sprawling landscape of the Sonoran Desert. Much of the area on the U.S. side is administered by the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the U.S. military. But these Interior Department agencies, as well the Department of Defense, have largely escaped the scrutiny their Department of Homeland Security counterparts receive on matters of immigration — despite the fact that thousands of migrants have lost their lives on the lands these agencies administer.
theintercept.com/...
The author, Scott Warren, is facing 20 years in prison for his activities.
Many metaphors are used to understand the border, with perhaps the border-as-war-zone being the most common. But the best metaphor to use in understanding the transformation of the Ajo corridor at the turn of the twenty first century is that of the border as the setting for a coupled smuggling interdiction industry. The expansion of this industry is reflected in the physical infrastructure of roads, walls, forward operating bases, surveillance towers, and checkpoints, as well as an equal magnitude of expansion in the tools, techniques, and resources used by smuggling organizations to evade this detection infrastructure. Both sides of the industry have become interdependent,and as the size and scope of interdiction efforts has increased, so too has the size and scope of human- and drug-smuggling efforts. And while locales on both sides of the border may have experienced an economic boom as a result of this expanding economy, these same locales bear the overwhelming burden of militarization, violence, fear, and environmental damage. The smuggling-interdiction industry has further proven to be extractive in nature, as the profits of smuggling and the federal expenditures for interdiction are now enjoyed by people and corporations largely outside of the border region.
sites.fhi.duke.edu/...