The U.S-Mexico Border: A Strategy of Low-Intensity Conflict

Maria Jimenez, interviewed by Rebecca Phares Could you give our readers a brief introduction to what your job is? The American Friends Service Committee established this particular project in 1987, so it's been around 13 years. The work we do in the areas of the U.S.-Mexico border is with community-based organizations to document human and civil rights violations in the enforcement of immigration laws. For about the first decade, we concentrated on Southern California, southern Arizona, El Paso, and the Rio Grande Valley. Recently, we have been restructuring, and so we are probably going to try to work primarily in the New Mexico and Texas areas of the border because, the way the enforcement strategy has been developed by the INS, most of the flow of undocumented immigrants is going through the State of New Mexico and the State of Texas, as opposed to California and southern Arizona. What are some of the changes that have been made in the last few years with respect to law enforcement at the border? The largest federal law enforcement agency in the country right now is the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), with its uniformed branch, the U.S. Border Patrol. It has a budget of four billion dollars and it does joint operations with local [law enforcement] groups, as well as the military. According to studies by the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., although statistically only four out of 10 undocumented people in the United States cross the southern border (the others come in legally through airports or seaports or at the Canadian border), 85% of the INS/Border Patrol resources aimed at stopping undocumented migration are placed at the U.S.-Mexico border.... Basically, we work in a militarized zone. The strategy carried out in this area by the U.S. Department of Defense and the Border Patrol is really a low-intensity conflict strategy.... When [in May 1997] a young man by the name of Ezequiel Hernandez was shot in Redford, Texas, by U.S. Marines carrying out a covert operation -- we had monitored those types of operations for the last 10 years -- we took a delegation from Redford, Texas, to Washington, and we didn't know who to talk to at the Pentagon. So we asked the Pentagon to tell us whom we should talk to. The delegation wound up actually talking to the Assistant Secretary of Defense in charge of Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict. So they verified that this is the strategy. One of the changes that we've seen in [recent] years has been increased militarization, which is conceptualized under the low-intensity conflict strategy. The second thing we've seen is the reaction against covert government operations on U.S. soil directed against U.S. communities. We've at least had a change in that the Joint Task Force Six (JTF6, the military unit responsible for Hernandez's death), or the military unit that made these decisions on its own, can no longer do so for covert operations; they have to be approved by the Secretary of Defense. However, this does not eliminate the 14 other types of military operations that still are in the hands of the JTF6 and the Border Patrol. Third, we've seen an enforcement strategy of implementation designed by the Sandia Laboratories in New Mexico for the national drug office, which was enacted by the Border Patrol against immigrants. Their strategy is to make the populated areas of the border like San Diego, El Paso, and Brownsville inaccessible and to oblige the immigrants to attempt to go through the riskier areas of the border, such as the mountains, deserts, or the isolated areas of Texas. That's been a dramatic change. Also, the growth in the use of military equipment -- from infrared vision to all-terrain vehicles -- that has been incorporated into Border Patrol activities. Have these changes caused the number of people who come across the border to decrease? No, it has had no impact on the number of people that are crossing the border. …

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