By Robert Rhodes
Mennonite Weekly Review

TUCSON, Ariz. — With increased security and a greater Border Patrol presence along the frontier between Arizona and Mexico’s Sonora state, a war zone has slowly emerged in the past decade, according to a group that monitors border issues.

Dan Kraybill, a Mennonite who works with the Tucson-based Border Action Network, said that since 1993 U.S. enforcement efforts along the border have become increasingly militaristic.

“Military techniques are being brought into the domestic sphere,” Kraybill told a Mennonite Central Committe learning tour Jan. 27.

With the installation at ports of entry of high-tech sensors, walls, surveillance cameras and X-ray devices, and a growing arsenal of weaponry and equipment, including Black Hawk helicopters, Kraybill said the U.S. Border Patrol has become the overseer of a low-intensity war zone.

Ever since the North American Free Trade Agreement eased trade with Mexico in January 1994, migration from the south has increased, leading to stronger interdiction and deportation measures by U.S. authorities.

These efforts have created a bottleneck, forcing most migrants today to enter primarily along the Arizona border. There, they have to cross the Sonoran Desert — an often fatal gambit that has claimed more than 2,500 lives in recent years.

Stories of harrowing desert passages are common in the region.

Recently, a migrant woman reportedly died because she gave the last of her water to a child. Other migrant families have been split apart and subjected to extortion by corrupt smugglers who promised to ferry them across.

In other incidents, innocent bystanders mistaken for illegal immigrants have been killed or fallen prey to enforcement measures.

In 1997, Kraybill said, eight teenagers were killed near Douglas when a steep border ditch, designed to act as a trap for illegal border crossers, became flooded.

In another case, a girl who lived near Douglas was shot by a Border Patrol agent who fired into the tent where she was camping near her home. The girl, now 21, survived but is disabled.

Cases like these, Kraybill said, illustrate the Border Patrol’s growing reliance on brute force techniques typically used by the military in combat zones.

Kraybill said many more incidents are included in Border Action Network’s recent report, “Justice on the Line: The Unequal Impacts of Border Patrol Activities in Arizona Border Communities.”

The report also alleges widespread racial profiling on the border, abuses of power by federal border agents, invasions of private property, harassment of migrants and border residents and other Border Patrol corruption.

Though conditions along the frontier were tough before, Kraybill said border militarization has become even more intense since 9/11 and the formation of the Department of Homeland Security.

This escalation, in turn, has led to the emergence of several anti-Latino hate groups in the region.

Kraybill said in Arizona’s Cochise County, which borders Sonora state, five significant hate groups have emerged in recent years.

These range from factions advocating even greater border militarization, to others predicting ethnic wars between whites and Latinos, to armed militias that hunt migrants like human game.

These groups, Kraybill said, often have working relationships with the Border Patrol, allowing them considerable leeway when it comes to pursuing migrants who cross the border.