{"id":24579,"date":"2021-02-03T12:00:08","date_gmt":"2021-02-03T12:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/?p=343464"},"modified":"2021-02-03T12:00:08","modified_gmt":"2021-02-03T12:00:08","slug":"the-border-patrol-calls-itself-a-humanitarian-organization-a-new-report-says-thats-a-lie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/02\/03\/the-border-patrol-calls-itself-a-humanitarian-organization-a-new-report-says-thats-a-lie\/","title":{"rendered":"The Border Patrol Calls Itself a Humanitarian Organization. A New Report Says That\u2019s a Lie."},"content":{"rendered":"

For more than<\/u> two decades, the U.S. Border Patrol has told a story about the role it plays in the Southwest. Confronted with the fact that thousands of migrants have died crossing the border during those years, the agency has produced dramatic videos of agents conducting rescues, invited reporters to demonstrations showcasing its lifesaving skills, and pointed to the existence of its specialized search and rescue unit. The efforts are used to drive home a talking point common among Border Patrol officials, one in which the most militarized component of the nation\u2019s largest police agency is also the border\u2019s \u201clargest humanitarian organization<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

A new report from two of the border\u2019s leading nongovernmental humanitarian organizations calls this narrative into question, arguing that a close examination of Border Patrol responses to migrants in distress proves that militarized law enforcement and the provision of humanitarian aid do not mix.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

\u201cLeft to Die: Border Patrol, Search and Rescue, and the Crisis of Disappearance<\/a>,\u201d published Wednesday by No More Deaths, a faith-based organization based in Tucson, Arizona, and the Coalici\u00f3n de Derechos Humanos, an organization that has provided humanitarian aid on the border since the 1990s, analyzed hundreds of emergency cases recorded by a nongovernmental crisis line and more than 2,100 calls routed by Pima County Sheriff\u2019s Department 911 dispatchers to the Border Patrol over a two-year period. Buttressed by further analysis of Border Patrol press releases and interviews, the 122-page report documented evidence of inaction, indifference, and obstruction to reports of missing migrants. The Border Patrol \u201chas monopolized emergency services for undocumented people in the borderlands,\u201d the report said, crowding out other sources of humanitarian aid while failing to provide those services on its own. In the face of a humanitarian catastrophe that\u2019s taken a minimum of nearly 10,000 lives, the report concluded that the Border Patrol\u2019s \u201csystematic negligence toward emergency reports of undocumented people in distress constitutes a state crime of historic proportions.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe conflict of interest between Border Patrol\u2019s enforcement mission and its directive to search for and rescue those in distress on U.S. soil is precisely why international governing bodies mandate the strict separation of humanitarian and military activities during human rights emergencies,\u201d the report said. \u201cBorder Patrol as an agency, and Border Patrol agents in the field, cannot reasonably advance both humanitarian and political\/military objectives simultaneously.\u201d<\/p>\n

Josiah Heyman, director of the Center for Inter-American and Border Studies at the University of Texas at El Paso, has spent years studying the culture of the Border Patrol and the consequences of its operations. He agreed that the Border Patrol\u2019s core identity and mission made it impossible for the agency to ever be considered a properly functioning humanitarian organization. Ever since the post-9\/11 creation of Customs and Border Protection, the agency that oversees the Border Patrol, a debate has raged in policy circles about how the federal government\u2019s immigration agencies should balance enforcement versus the provision of services, Heyman noted. Among those agencies, he said, \u201cBorder Patrol is the most purely enforcement minded.\u201d<\/p>\n

The report found that the Border Patrol took no confirmed action in 60 percent of the cases where a search was requested.<\/blockquote>\n

From 2015 through 2016, Derechos Humanos received thousands of calls on a hotline established for migrants in distress; 456 of those calls were deemed emergencies, and 89 involved a call to the Border Patrol requesting that the agency conduct a search. The report found that the Border Patrol took no confirmed action in 60 percent of the cases where a search was requested. In 40 percent of those cases, the \u201cBorder Patrol directly stated to families and\/or humanitarian responders that the agency would not conduct any search or rescue response for a known distressed person,\u201d the report said. \u201cIn 16 of these instances, Border Patrol\u2019s direct refusal to respond to a reported emergency resulted in the distressed person\u2019s death or disappearance.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Agu\u00edlas\n

Agu\u00edlas del Desierto search and rescue crew recover the body and clothing of a migrant who attempted to make the crossing in the Cabeza Prieta wilderness near Ajo, Ariz., on May 27, 2017.<\/p>\n

\nPhoto: Caitlin O'Hara\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

In a quarter of the emergency cases fielded by Derechos Humanos, the report found that the Border Patrol \u201cobstructed\u201d the process through a variety of means. Examples included agents directing families and humanitarian groups to nonworking phone numbers or providing them with false information, such as telling family members that their loved ones had been found alive when that was not true. In one case, aid volunteers sought assistance from the Border Patrol\u2019s \u201celite\u201d search and rescue team. According to the report, an agent told the volunteers it was \u201ctoo hot\u201d for the government team to operate. In another case, a volunteer called to report a missing teenager last seen in a dangerous area roughly 15 miles north of the border. According to the \u201cLeft to Die\u201d report, \u201cBorder Patrol told the responding Crisis Line volunteer that the agency would not activate a search for the unaccompanied minor because they \u2018didn\u2019t work that far south.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\"One\n

Aid volunteer Gilberto Mateos shows his shoes as the glue melted and came apart in the heat during a mission with Agu\u00edlas del Desierto search and rescue crew on May 27, 2017, in the Cabeza Prieta wilderness near Ajo, Ariz.<\/p>\n

\nPhoto: Caitlin O'Hara\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>The report found that when the Border Patrol did activate searches, the operations tended to last \u201cless than a day, and in some cases, less than an hour.\u201d The report classified nearly a third of those cases as a \u201cdisappearance\u201d: \u201cmeaning that the missing person was never rescued, nor were their remains located, recovered, or identified.\u201d This stands in stark contrast to government-led search and rescue efforts in the borderlands involving U.S. citizens, the organizations noted. \u201cThe Pima County Sheriff\u2019s Department has a near 100% success rate for lost citizens,\u201d the report said, adding that \u201cgovernment agencies searching for distressed US citizens very rarely call off their efforts without locating the subject.\u201d The authors argued that the Border Patrol\u2019s failure rate was \u201ca clear indication of systemic and deadly discrimination.\u201d<\/p>\n

Customs and Border Protection,\u00a0the nation\u2019s largest police agency, did not respond to a list of questions nor make available an official to discuss the No More Deaths\/Derechos Humanos report.<\/p>\n

In the days leading up to Wednesday\u2019s report, CBP did, however, publish a\u00a0feature-length article<\/a> in Frontline, the agency\u2019s in-house magazine, touting the Border Patrol\u2019s humanitarian efforts. The article noted how extraordinarily deadly the summer of 2020 was for migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border; as The Intercept reported in January<\/a>, Arizona closed out 2020 having nearly broken its 10-year record for most migrant remains recovered in a single year. The article noted that CBP personnel \u201csaved more than 5,000 people and conducted 1,400 search and rescue operations in fiscal year 2020.\u201d The figures were accompanied by a 2,400-word profile of the agency\u2019s Border Patrol Search, Trauma, and Rescue team \u2014 \u201cbetter known as BORSTAR\u201d \u2014 while casting all blame for deaths on the border on smugglers and showing how the federal government is responding.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we found in the report is that Border Patrol as an agency is twice as likely to cause a person to become lost and in distress in the desert than they are to rescue anyone.\u201d<\/blockquote>\n

It was precisely the kind of public framing targeted in the No More Deaths\/Derechos Humanos report. \u201cWhat those measures are ultimately aimed at is legitimizing the agency that\u2019s actually causing the crisis and sort of positioning them as somehow the saviors,\u201d Max Granger, a longtime humanitarian aid volunteer and co-author of the report, told The Intercept. The evidence shows that the Border Patrol\u2019s sought-after legitimacy is wholly unwarranted, he argued: \u201cWhat we found in the report is that Border Patrol as an agency is twice as likely to cause a person to become lost and in distress in the desert than they are to rescue anyone.\u201d<\/p>\n

A lack of<\/u> transparency as to how the Border Patrol defines and tracks its \u201crescues\u201d makes a serious problem much worse, the No More Deaths\/Derechos Humanos report argued. Examining a sample of\u00a0about 160 press releases describing Border Patrol \u201crescues\u201d from 2015 to 2016, the organizations concluded that more than half \u201cactually describe a routine arrest,\u201d including a 2018 \u201crescue\u201d in which Border Patrol agents in Arizona chased an 18-year-old through the wilderness with a helicopter, causing him to nearly drown in a cattle pond. \u201cAt least 91 of the 456\u201d emergency cases logged by the Derechos Humanos crisis line involved a so-called Border Patrol chase and scatter incident, when agents descend on groups of migrants, often with helicopters, to break them up so they are easier to catch. The report said: \u201cIn other words, approximately one in five emergencies involved distressed individuals having been chased but not arrested by Border Patrol agents in remote areas.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Across the border, the report pointed to an absence of consistently applied Border Patrol protocols in cases involving migrants in distress: \u201cInstead, the agency\u2019s behavior seems to depend largely on the personal approach of the responding agent.\u201d In one case, \u201ca Crisis Line volunteer called Border Patrol repeatedly to try to activate a search for a missing individual. Later, the volunteer received a mysterious call from an unknown personal cell phone \u2014 the caller simply said that the lost person was safe, and then hung up,\u201d the report said. \u201cThe volunteer later learned that the call had come from a sympathetic Border Patrol agent who had called in secret because she was afraid of breaking protocol by calling the volunteer back with information. Such exceptional cases speak to how Border Patrol\u2019s standard culture is one of noncommunication, dismissiveness, and hostility \u2014 a standard that agents subvert by being responsive and timely when communicating about emergencies with family, advocates, and the public.\u201d<\/p>\n

The discretion afforded to individual Border Patrol agents is key to understanding how the agency functions, Heyman, the\u00a0UTEP professor, said. The Border Patrol is a \u201cfield organization,\u201d he explained, which means that life-or-death decisions typically boil down to a lone agent or pair of agents in a remote part of the country, often in the middle of the night, with little expectation of close oversight of their actions. \u201cIt comes down to the discretion of individual officers and especially supervisors who are out there assigning people in the field,\u201d Heyman said. If an agent or supervisor has developed an attitude that a report of a migrant in distress represents something less than a human being in need of care, that could impact how they respond in the moment.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo More Deaths, I think, has done an important piece of work here,\u201d Heyman said. He pointed to a passage in the report detailing the extensive efforts that government offices made to locate a pair of German hikers who died of heat exhaustion in the mountains outside of Tucson in 2016, and how those efforts compared to the Border Patrol\u2019s responses to cases of migrants in distress. \u201cWhy is a German tourist different from a Guatemalan migrant?\u201d Heyman asked. By raising those kinds of questions, he said, the report opened the door to a deeper conversation about \u201cthe way people are taken care of or not\u201d on the border and the inherent problems in ceding the humanitarian response to migrant deaths to the Border Patrol.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you give them this humanitarian task, they devalue it and they don\u2019t have a service mentality,\u201d he said. \u201cDefaulting this stuff to an enforcement agency is just a predictable failure.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Canine\n

Border Patrol Agent Jose Solis tracks remote terrain with his dog in Marfa, Texas, on Jan. 29, 2020.<\/p>\n

\nPhoto: Paul Ratje\/AFP via Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

When President Joe Biden<\/u> took office last month, he inherited a bundle of crises. Some, like the coronavirus, were more recent and present in the American psyche. Others have festered for generations, largely removed from a wider public debate but deadly all the same. The humanitarian crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border falls into the latter category, and as No More Deaths\/Derechos Humanos\u2019 report makes clear, its origins are rooted in U.S. border enforcement strategies going back decades.<\/p>\n

In 1994, the Clinton administration implemented a new strategy for securing the U.S.-Mexico border. Accepting that the \u201cabsolute sealing of the border is unrealistic,\u201d planners from the Border Patrol, the Pentagon, and the now-defunct Immigration Nationalization Service nonetheless believed the divide could be \u201cbrought under control.\u201d Dubbed \u201cPrevention Through Deterrence,\u201d the borderwide strategy they developed relied on a buildup of interdiction infrastructure around key border cities, thus funneling migration flows into \u201chostile terrain, less suited for crossing and more suited for enforcement.\u201d The plan accepted that migrants would encounter \u201cmortal danger.\u201d An assessment published by the Government Accountability Office three years after it went into effect listed \u201cdeaths of aliens attempting entry<\/a>\u201d among indicators of the strategy\u2019s effectiveness. That assessment was delivered to the Senate Judiciary Committee in December 1997, where Biden was serving as the ranking minority member.<\/p>\n

The strategy\u2019s impact was immediately felt in southern Arizona, where the Office of the Medical Examiner in Pima County went from seeing an average of roughly 12 migrant deaths a year in the early 1990s to more than 150 a year in recent decades. Facing blowback over the explosion in deaths, the Border Patrol created BORSTAR in 1998 and began rebranding itself as both a law enforcement and humanitarian organization. The effort was met with skepticism from nongovernmental humanitarian aid providers, who detected a public relations ploy that ignored the core problem: a law enforcement strategy that weaponized a deadly ecosystem to accomplish its mission. As the Rev. John Fife, a co-founder of the 1980s Sanctuary Movement<\/a> and of No More Deaths, said in a 2001 interview<\/a>: \u201cBORSTAR is like a lifeguard who tries to herd everyone into the deep end, and then takes credit for the occasional rescue.\u201d Five days after Fife\u2019s words were published, terrorists attacked New York City and Washington, D.C. The Border Patrol and the migrant death toll in the American Southwest have been growing ever since.<\/p>\n

\"ALTAR\n

Crosses left by activists mark the locations where the remains of migrants \u2014who died trying to cross into the United States through the harsh conditions of the Sonoran Desert \u2014 were discovered in Altar Valley, Ariz., on Jan. 28, 2021.<\/p>\n

\nPhoto: Andrew Lichtenstein\/Corbis via Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

Since 9\/11, CBP has routinely absorbed more federal funding than the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; and the FBI combined. Growing from 4,100 agents in 1992 to nearly 20,000 today, the modern Border Patrol is a sprawling paramilitary organization with a lengthy record of corruption<\/a>, abuse<\/a>, and politicization<\/a>. According to the agency\u2019s data,\u00a0nearly\u00a08,000 sets of human remains were recovered on the southern border from 1998 to 2019. Multiple<\/a> journalistic investigations<\/a> in recent years have shown that the patrol\u2019s records are a poorly kept undercount. Experts agree that the true death toll is undoubtably higher. No More Deaths and Derechos Humanos estimated the number of lives lost since the advent of Prevention Through Deterrence could be three to 10 times larger than the Border Patrol\u2019s total \u2014 meaning upward of 80,000 deaths in the past quarter century.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t call Border Patrol a valid government search and rescue agency. That\u2019s not what they do.\u201d<\/blockquote>\n

For Robin Reineke, the question of the true toll is an emotionally frustrating one. An assistant research social scientist at the University of Arizona\u2019s Southwest Center, Reineke is one of the world\u2019s leading experts on migrant deaths in the Sonoran Desert. In 2006, she co-founded the Colibr\u00ed Center for Human Rights, a Tucson-based nonprofit that works closely with the families of individuals who have disappeared or died crossing the border. \u201cWe\u2019re never going to know how many people have died and disappeared in this landscape,\u201d Reineke told The Intercept. The forensic anthropologist attributed the border\u2019s transformation into a zone of human disappearance and death to two key factors: Prevention Through Deterrence and the absence of federal response to its consequences. \u201cThat\u2019s basically what this report is saying \u2014 is we don’t have a federal search and rescue operation in the desert borderlands,\u201d Reineke said. \u201cThat doesn\u2019t exist. You can\u2019t call Border Patrol a valid government search and rescue agency. That\u2019s not what they do.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the weeks since he took office, Biden has signed executive<\/a> orders revoking several of the Trump administration\u2019s most infamous immigration policies and proposed legislation providing a pathway to citizenship for the nation\u2019s 11 million undocumented immigrants.<\/p>\n

While many of Biden\u2019s efforts mark clear breaks from the Trump era, critical legacies of the president\u2019s predecessor remain. Among them is a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rule commonly referred to as Title 42, which allows for the rapid<\/a>, due-process-free expulsion of migrants at the border. The rule was aggressively pushed by Trump\u2019s ultranationalist immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, in response to the pandemic and over the objections of public health experts<\/a>. Since the rule\u2019s implementation last March, U.S. border authorities have summarily removed more than 400,000 migrants, including\u00a0unaccompanied children. At least for the near-term, Biden is expected to continue enforcing the rule. With the border effectively closed, law enforcement officials in Arizona have described a return to the state\u2019s \u201cdark days<\/a>,\u201d with migrants seeking riskier means to make it into the U.S. and in some cases dying in the process.<\/p>\n

\"AJO,\n

Jugs of water for migrants sit along trails after being dropped off by volunteers for the humanitarian aid group No More Deaths on May 10, 2019, near Ajo, Ariz.<\/p>\n

\nPhoto: John Moore\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>No More Deaths and the\u00a0Coalici\u00f3n de Derechos Humanos listed several demands in their joint report Wednesday, including the legalization of all border crossings, the dismantlement of the Border Patrol and the border security infrastructure that comes with it, and a process of recognition and reparations for the harms caused by U.S. policies<\/a> that prompt people to migrate. The organizations also listed several interim recommendations the U.S. government could take in the meantime, including an \u201cimmediate end to Border Patrol\u2019s role as sole or primary responder to reported emergencies\u201d on the border and the creation of \u201cborderlands emergency response systems that are fully separate from immigration enforcement.\u201d<\/p>\n

Heyman, the UTEP professor, argued that decriminalization of migration flows is critical to saving lives. \u201cAll of these things are symptoms of a disease and the disease is this illegalization of migration flows,\u201d he said. \u201cThe size of the problem would be vastly smaller if we did that.\u201d Reineke, the Arizona researcher, linked the report to a broader pattern in the U.S., wherein state investment in care of marginalized populations is routinely diminished while investment in law enforcement is prioritized. \u201cWhat you see on the border is an extreme version of that,\u201d she said. Reineke added that the implications of Wednesday\u2019s report should be cause for collective introspection.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the big things to ask is not just how big is this problem, but why has it been allowed to go on for so long?\u201d she said. For many families of the disappeared and dead, she noted, the problems described in the report are\u00a0just\u00a0the entry point into a new system of trauma \u2014 one that, in some cases, never ends. \u201cThe disappearance issue within the physical borderlands is the tip of the iceberg in terms of what the families experience when they try to find information about a missing loved one in this country,\u201d Reineke said. \u201cIt\u2019s shameful.\u201d<\/p>\n

The post The Border Patrol Calls Itself a Humanitarian Organization. A New Report Says That\u2019s a Lie.<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on The Intercept<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Arizona aid groups reviewed thousands of 911 calls routed to the Border Patrol. They uncovered inaction, indifference, and obstruction.<\/p>\n

The post The Border Patrol Calls Itself a Humanitarian Organization. A New Report Says That\u2019s a Lie.<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":665,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[118],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24579"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/665"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24579"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25506,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24579\/revisions\/25506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}