Border Patrol History: Origins of “Prevention Through Deterrence” Strategy
Tom Barry
TransBorder Project, Center for International Policy
Friday, March 25, 2011
https://borderlinesblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/border-patrol-history-origins-of.html
In 1994 the Border Patrol issued a national strategy to control illegal border crossing. That strategy, called “Prevention through Deterrence,” drew on the direct experiences in 1993-94 of Operation Hold the Line (initially called Operation Blockade) in El Paso and of Operation Gatekeeper in the San Diego sector.
This deterrence strategy -- which aimed to achieve greatly stepped-up patrol deployment and barrier construction on the most frequently crossed stretches of the border line -- remains core to Border Patrol strategy today, although now set in a national security context.
Death as ‘Deterrence’: the Desert as a Weapon
By Gabe Shivone
Alliance for Global Justice
https://afgj.org/death-as-deterrence-the-desert-as-a-weapon
The perception of the border environment is explicitly used to demonstrate that migrants “crossing through remote, uninhabited expanses of land and sea along the border can find themselves in mortal danger.” The document bases the strategy on the “prediction” that migrant “traffic will be deterred, or forced over more hostile terrain, less suited for crossing and more suited for enforcement.”
Forgoing any subtly, “enforcement,” in this instance, is a euphemism for “mortal danger” as a premeditated method of death by example to deter human beings from crossing unauthorized into the US.
A Case for Dismantling the U.S. Border Patrol
The U.S. Border Patrol’s violent, racist, and ineffectual policies have come to a head under Trump. What can be done?
Geoffrey Alan Boyce
Border Wars
2/22/2018
https://nacla.org/blog/2018/02/23/case-dismantling-us-border-patrol
The logic governing this border strategy was simple and straightforward: by ratcheting up the hardship that unauthorized migrants endure along the journey north, they might be successfully “deterred” from crossing the border altogether. This outcome was to be accomplished by weaponizing the geography and terrain of the borderlands, and concentrating agents in urban areas to push migration routes into increasingly remote and treacherous areas. At the time, then-Immigration and Naturalization Services Director Doris Meissner said, “We did believe that geography would be an ally for us. It was our sense that the number of people crossing through the Arizona desert would go down to a trickle once people realized what it’s like.”
Since 1994 at least 7,000 human beings have lost their lives attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, and thousands more have disappeared along the journey north. For example, the Pima County, Arizona Medical Examiner’s office counts 939 unidentified remains of border-crossers found between 2001 and 2016, while the Coalición de Derechos Humanos identifies more than 1,200 unresolved missing persons cases reported to the organization during 2015 alone. The harm inflicted by the death and disappearance of migrants extends to communities across the United States, Mexico, and Central America.