October 6, 2019
Over the course of a few days
in early 2019, Selene Saavedra-Roman went from starting her dream job as a
flight attendant to scrubbing toilets in a dreary Texas detention center.
“I knew not to argue or talk
back — refusing to obey the guards’ commands would end up hurting us greatly,”
she recalled
in her testimony last week at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on
immigrant detention. Saavedra-Roman, who was born in Peru and came to the U.S.
24 years ago at the age of 4, was in the process of applying for legal
residency. But she was detained at the airport in Houston, Texas, after flying
in from Mexico. Recalling the trauma of being locked up with other migrant
women in desolate squalor, she testified, “If you volunteered for the work
program [in the migrant jail], you would be compensated $1 an hour,” though it
was understood that refusing to “volunteer” could jeopardize their immigration
cases.
While Saavedra-Roman’s
harrowing experience in the migrant jail came as a shock to her, the system she
was trapped in had been building up from the time she first crossed the border
as a child. Her unjust detention was the product of the Trump administration’s
hardline deportation agenda. But the militarized border that had ensnared her
was the product of a massive security infrastructure that has been building up
for decades. Although Trump’s unabashedly anti-immigrant agenda has amplified
the brutality of the border regime, he is merely capitalizing on a massive,
entrenched network of corporate power and political influence.
Bottom of Form
The Border-Industrial Complex
An analysis of the “border-industrial
complex” by the Transnational Institute shows that the budgets of
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection
(CBP) have exploded in recent years. The combined budgets of the agencies have
more than doubled since the mid-2000s — and are now 60 times higher than the
immigration enforcement system received in 1980. By one estimate, the border
security industry will more than double in value from approximately $305
billion in 2011 to some $740 billion in 2023.
Much of the funding is plowed
into public-private contract deals with large firms that furnish immigration
agencies with everything from tear gas canisters to detainee health care.
Altogether, the Transnational Institute found that three border-related
agencies under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), “ICE, CBP and Coast
Guard, together issued more than 344,000 contracts for border and immigration
control services worth $80.5 billion between 2006 and 2018” — about six
times the entire 2018 foreign aid budget. By contrast, the
Office for Refugee Resettlement, an agency under the Department of Health
and Human Services that handles the care of unaccompanied migrant children, has
suffered massive budget shortfalls in recent months.
Todd Miller, author of the
Transnational Institute report, told Truthout that Trump’s
anti-immigrant policies and his signature vow to “build the wall,” echo a long
history of border crackdowns. In the mid-1990s, just as the Mexican economy was
getting ravaged by the trade disruption caused by the North American Free Trade
Agreement, the Clinton administration rolled
out Operation Gatekeeper, an expansion of border enforcement that choked
off major crossing points, drove migrants toward more dangerous routes through
the desert and contributed to a subsequent influx of deaths of border crossers.
Another turning point came
after 9/11, Miller added, when a surge in counterterrorism efforts led to “both
a centralized border enforcement build-up, and a massive upsurge in corporate
participation, [with] more contracts, more campaign contributions, more
lobbying, more pressure to grow.”
The Business of Borders
The major border security contractors include
military equipment firms such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman,
and tech
firms such as IBM, Amazon and Palantir, which help provide the digital
backbone for ICE and CBP’s surveillance activities. The scope of corporate
border militarization reaches far beyond the border itself, since enforcement
activity can extend up to 100 miles inland. That leaves about 200 million
people nationwide within striking distance of border authorities.
Meanwhile, migrant jails,
euphemistically described as “detention centers,” have mushroomed across the
country. The leading vendors for immigrant detention, CoreCivic and GEO Group, which run
private prisons and ICE facilities, are guaranteed business under a federally
designated “bed quota” for immigration detention. Many of these contractors
have been exposed for their egregious human
rights abuses and mismanagement scandals. Not only do they help train
and equip Border Patrol officers, they are also associated with the
dysfunctional management of prison-like detention facilities. Over the years,
scandals have surfaced about abuses by ICE’s contracted health care programs (notorious
for dysfunctional management, medical
neglect and lately, disease
outbreaks). Part of the “maintenance” of these facilities is subcontracted
to detainees themselves, through institutionalized
“voluntary” work programs like the one Saavedra-Roman experienced,
which have routinely paid detainees as little as $1 per day for doing chores
for the facility.
Despite their abysmal human
rights records, security contractors invest heavily in burnishing their
reputations on Capitol Hill to keep the spigot of federal dollars flowing.
After Trump took office, industries tied to border enforcement significantly
upped their spending on lobbying in Washington compared to the end of the Obama
administration: For-profit prison companies and defense-electronics
firms spent roughly $3.8 million and $24.4 million respectively on
lobbying in fiscal year 2018 alone. The private prison industry also contributed a
record amount to candidates in the 2016 and 2018 election cycles.
In early 2018, The Wall
Street Journal quoted CoreCivic
CEO Damon Hininger boasting that his company was experiencing “probably the
most robust kind of sales environment we’ve seen in probably 10 years.” DHS did
not respond to Truthout’s request for comment.
Pedro Rios, director of the
U.S.-Mexico Border Program of the social justice group American Friends Service
Committee, said pro-migrant advocacy groups were tremendously outgunned by the
security industry lobby. “We go to D.C., and we make our case for increasing
humanitarian efforts along the border and holding border agencies accountable,
… yet, some of these corporations have lobbyists every single day of the year
in D.C. And so how we can compete with that is just absolutely nonexistent,” he
told Truthout.
An even more direct interface
between officialdom and the border security industry is the massive “revolving
door” between Washington and its contractors and consultancies. The circular
flow of personnel leads many former officials to secure positions as lobbyists
or “strategists” for companies that do business with federal agencies. From
2006 to 2019, the Transnational Institute report documents 177 individuals
who have crossed between the Department of Homeland Security and related
corporations. Former head of Homeland Security under George W. Bush, Michael Chertoff,
went on to found a high-profile security consultancy, and in 2009, was
entangled in a controversy
over a brand of body scanners that he promoted publicly without
disclosing his firm’s financial ties to the manufacturer.
DHS has in recent years also
embedded itself with the higher education system. Homeland Security has seeded
research facilities known as “Science & Technology Centers of
Excellence” on several university campuses, outsourcing its research and
development on drones, data analytics and other security technologies to
prestigious academic institutes. The
University of Houston’s Borders, Trade and Immigration Institute, for
example, coordinates a research consortium with various partner institutions to
work on projects such as developing biometric and facial recognition systems
and tracking human smuggling patterns. The industry has simultaneously boosted
its commercial profile at the annual Border
Security Expo, where industry representatives network with government
officials while hawking innovations in border guard gear, biometrics and
surveillance technology.
Miller’s report highlights the
global aspect to the border-industrial complex. The same types of technology
deployed by U.S. immigration authorities are helping other governments
incarcerate, segregate or oppress their own migrant populations. The
Israel-based contractor Elbit Systems, for example, has obtained
government contracts to provide surveillance
towers at the border in Texas and Arizona. But the company’s specialty
is building out Israel’s border and military infrastructures, including
patrolling the border wall between Israel and Palestine and developing
munitions and drones for the Israeli military.
The security firm G4S provides
ICE with detainee
transportation services, and also serves
the Israeli government with police trainings and surveillance of local
Palestinian populations. G4S immigrant detention centers in the United Kingdom,
moreover, have been embroiled
in several abuse scandals, including the death of a detainee as he was
being deported by G4S guards, and physical and emotional abuse of teens at a
youth detention facility.
Raytheon says that it has
established its border security products in more than 24 countries across
Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and the Americas, and has trained 9,000
security personnel. The ties between border security and military contracting
underscores how the state violence of warfare parallels the state violence of
immigration restriction, as the refugees displaced by conflict end up getting
thwarted and detained at foreign borders.
Exposing the Wall
In recent years, some rights
groups have sought to directly target the border security contractors through
divestment campaigns, which pressure higher education institutions, municipal
governments and unions to cut ties with corporations linked to immigration
enforcement. The American Friends Service Committee has shed light on the issue
with an extensive database listing
contractors and financial institutions involved with immigration enforcement,
prisons and military ventures, along with recommendations on which companies to
divest from. Rios said that seeking accountability from the deportation
industry requires “moving away from just calling out one single elected
official — in this case, Trump — and pointing out how these corporations have
been profiting from this type of relationship for a long time.”
Increasingly, activists are
bringing their grievances not to the White House but to the corporations that
execute Washington’s directives. Earlier this year, the reports of abuse of
children held in detention camps led employees of the online retailer Wayfair
to walk out
to protest their company selling $200,000 worth of furniture to a
large nonprofit organization that was contracted to house children and adults.
The New York-based community group Freedom to Thrive has managed to persuade
several cities, universities and union pension funds to withdraw their funding from
the financial
institutions that support detention and deportation, including Bank of
America, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase.
Daniel Carillo, executive
director of Freedom to Thrive, described the divestment campaigns as a way to
actively hold representatives accountable to the needs of communities, not
corporations that are profiting from detention and deportation on a local and
global scale. “The Trump administration plays a huge role in anti-immigrant
policies alongside corporations,” Carillo told Truthout. “To address
the problem, we must target both entities, a united front that addresses
anti-Blackness, transphobia, xenophobia. We are working for the freedom of all
migrants seeking safety.”
But to fully dismantle the
corporate interests behind the border, Miller said, “DHS would have to be
reformed to the degree that it no longer is what it is, or simply abolished and
replaced with another sort of border department whose mission would be much
more helpful to people in dire circumstances crossing borders.”
For now, whether or not Trump
gets his wall, divestment will not fundamentally change the economic incentives
driving border enforcement. The business of Homeland Security is as profitable
for its contractors as it is painful for those ensnared in its grip.
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