Bordertown 
Near/Far
Brutal shoot-outs, grisly murders, random kidnappings: Drug cartels in Mexico are in a savage fight to the death that has claimed more than 23,000 lives since 2006. Yet despite fears to the contrary, the violence has not spilled over into Texas—which doesn’t mean it isn’t transforming life all along the border.
chuck says: This story provided a great deal of insightful detail into the differences between El Paso, McAllen and Del Rio. The distinctions between the these three communities is a nuance that I have not seen anywhere else. I appreciated the video -- the contrast between the tranquility of El Paso and the violence in Juarez. Beautiful music, too. In a case of "whatever you give them they will want more," I found myself wishing that you could have provided time for McAllen and Del Rio in the video, too. I’m sure it’s a matter of time and money -- so please don’t let this one small thought detract from my overall compliments on your story and video. Both were great. (July 22nd, 2010 at 4:09pm)
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Like McAllen, Del Rio has weathered the recession better than most towns its size, but the savior here has not been Mexico—it has been Washington, D.C. The annual payroll for Del Rio sector agents is roughly $100 million, and that does not include support personnel or the hundreds of officers employed by other immigration agencies under the aegis of the Department of Homeland Security, such as Customs and Border Protection, which checks vehicles and people crossing at the ports of entry, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which conducts investigations farther from the border. “Homeland Security is the only thing keeping us afloat,” said Blanca Larson, the president of the chamber of commerce and the manager of Del Rio’s Plaza del Sol mall. Trouble across the river in Ciudad Acuña, while not nearly as bad as in Juárez or even in Reynosa, has hurt the tourist industry on both sides of the river, which in turn has put a dent in the number of Mexicans coming across to spend money at the mall. Layoffs in the maquila industry have added to the downturn.
Border security, however, has proved to be a recession-proof industry, as has an ancillary industry that has sprung up in Del Rio: the for-profit detention of illegal immigrants caught at the border. Under a program called Operation Streamline, pioneered here five years ago, illegal immigrants are no longer immediately deported. Instead they are held in the Val Verde Correctional Facility, a 1,344-bed jail owned and operated by a publicly traded company called the Geo Group, and charged with a misdemeanor in federal court, punishable by up to 180 days in prison. Only after serving their sentences are they deported; if they are caught crossing again, they can be charged with a felony. The expense to the federal government is considerable, but the violence in Mexico has renewed calls for expanding the program to the entire border.
One morning I sat on a bench behind the witness stand in U.S. Magistrate Collis White’s courtroom, the only seat I could find in a room packed with undocumented immigrants captured crossing the river in the previous week. They sat hip to hip, with handcuffs on their wrists attached by a chain to shackles around their ankles and earphone cords dangling under their chins so that they could hear the translator standing next to the judge’s dais. They wore the same jeans and T-shirts and cheap tennis shoes they had been wearing when they were caught, in most cases after lengthy walks through the desert, and the courtroom had the salty smell of sweat. Fifty men, along with a handful of women, were being tried at the same time, all represented by the same court-appointed attorney. Each person stood in turn when his name was called and glumly listened to the charge against him and then to the brief defense offered by his attorney, a hefty man with a voice like a children’s librarian, who read from notes without looking up from his binder. “Your honor, the defendant is from Chiapas, Mexico. He is a bricklayer by trade. He went to school to the third grade. He is married, with four children, and he came to the U.S. for economic reasons.” Everyone pleaded guilty, and then Judge White pronounced sentence, in most cases ten days in jail, unless the defendant had previously been caught and convicted.
As the hours went by, the proceedings took on the feel of factory work. Two federal marshals circled the room, making sure nobody fell asleep or removed his earpiece. Only the defense attorney’s lines changed, and even then the story was always a variation on the same theme: “elderly mother,” “two sets of twins,” “daughter’s eye operation,” “no work.” One grim-faced twenty-year-old from El Salvador had been deported the previous winter and had made the long, expensive, and dangerous trek back across the entire length of Mexico. Now he would be sent all the way to Central America again, after he served the ninety days Judge White gave him.
Operation Streamline, which has also been implemented to varying degrees in Laredo and in parts of the Valley, has turned illegal immigrants into a kind of commodity for the border communities in which they are caught. Fees for the court-appointed attorneys who work at the mass trials in Del Rio, held five days a week at the federal courthouse, are calculated using wholesale discounts: $100 a head for 1 to 14 clients, $75 a head for 15 to 49, and $50 a head for dockets over 50. The federal government pays Val Verde County about $50 per day to house each immigrant awaiting trial, and the county contracts with Geo to do the actual work. With the jail averaging 90 percent capacity, the county is earning at least $60,000 per day, less what it pays Geo. Known for its low wages, the company, which employs three hundred people at the detention center, occupies the bottom rung of the security economy in Del Rio, where it has become a sort of employer of last resort for locals who cannot make the grade as federal agents. If the immigrants ever stopped coming, the dent in the economy in this town would be considerable.
Expanding Streamline would require the federal government to double down on the enormous investment it has already made in border security. It would also accelerate the already unprecedented transfer of wealth from U.S. taxpayers to one of the poorest parts of the country; in that respect it may be the only stimulus program amid the current call for fiscal austerity that conservatives in Congress can get behind. But would it work? Apprehensions of illegal immigrants in Del Rio, considered a generally reliable indicator of the volume of people trying to cross, have decreased dramatically, which is why border security hawks often point to the sector as an example of what can be done with the proper will and resources. But how much of the decline in crossings here is due to Streamline is unclear, since apprehensions along the entire border have plummeted in recent years, from 1.2 million in 2005 to 556,000 in 2009. Most analysts believe the decline has been caused by the recession more than any other factor—fewer jobs mean fewer people coming north.
And then there is the more fundamental question about Streamline, the same one raised by SB 1070 in Arizona: Does cracking down on illegal immigration make us safe from the violence in Mexico? When I asked Blanca Larson, the mall manager and chamber of commerce president, for her opinion on Streamline, she gave me a blank look. I reminded her what it was and that it was said to have drastically lowered illegal immigration here. She shook her head. “I don’t think we really noticed the difference,” she said. “People are coming across to look for jobs. They’re not criminals.”
At the border patrol sector headquarters, Deputy Chief Patrol Agent Dean Sinclair told me that he didn’t really need any more Border Patrol agents, though he knew that Obama’s emergency appropriation meant another round of hiring was coming soon. What Del Rio really needed were more inspectors at the port of entry, where a new emphasis on searching Mexico-bound vehicles for drug cash and guns bought in the U.S. on behalf of the cartels was causing long delays up and down the border. The ports of entry are where the action is for northbound contraband too, since cars and trucks have always been the preferred method for moving drugs into the U.S. But border security advocates want to see more agents in the field, in the desert scrub in places like Val Verde County and southern Arizona, where the border seems most porous and the threat of gun-toting traffickers most real.
After an hour touring the bustling headquarters, it was hard not to conclude that the army of agents here is ready for anything. Near the end of my tour, Agent David Toothman took me into a locked closet filled with automatic weapons and high-capacity shotguns with short, menacing barrels. “They know they can’t win if they start a war with us,” he said of the traffickers. But he didn’t expect to see one. The guns that narcos sometimes brought across the river in the backcountry were to protect drug loads from bandits and rival cartel men, he said. “They’re not for us.”
Still, with so many guns on both sides of the border, trouble is never far away. On June 7, a Border Patrol agent in El Paso shot and killed a fifteen-year-old Mexican boy after the agent reportedly came under attack from rock throwers on the Mexican side. Three weeks later, at least seven stray bullets from a shoot-out in Juárez hit the city council building in downtown El Paso. This last incident prompted Texas attorney general Greg Abbott to send a heated letter to President Obama warning that Texas “is under constant assault from illegal activity threatening a porous border.”
You don’t have to be a cynic to infer that inaction by the federal government on border security has clearly become a Republican talking point in advance of the midterm elections and the coming debate over immigration reform. It is hard to imagine what Obama or anyone else can do about stray bullets in the air over El Paso or how more boots on the ground will help someone, such as David Arnold Jr., with family members on the other side of the river, where the violence is all too real. After Mexican federal police and army units began extending their patrols into the tiny towns southeast of Juárez, Arnold’s cousin took his family back to their home in Bosque Bonito. The patrols didn’t last, however, and the family was forced to flee again, this time to a secluded village near the river, far enough away from the road to avoid detection. I asked Arnold what his cousin’s plan was, but there was no plan, he said. “They’re just going to wait and see what happens.”
Read a Q&A with Nate Blakeslee.
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