#theborder

A Fire Alarm at the Border.

While I was in Bisbee, Arizona, I went looking for the emergency at the border. I could not find it - but Trump sure wants to create one. The piece of land where I am standing in these photos will be militarised and off-limits very soon.

Some background.

The first 60 feet of America - the strip where I am parked - from San Diego to El Paso was commandeered by President Teddy Roosevelt in 1907 - called the Roosevelt Reservation - as a way to create a patrol able space to fight smuggling. Spoiler alert: it didn’t work. It’s a 2,000 mile long border and smugglers are resourceful

At that time the border fence was occasional barbed wire to keep animals apart with the border being marked by small obelisks put there by a joint Mexican-US team of surveyors in the mid-1800s.

The kind of fence now along this border was built starting with George W Bush around 2005 when the Real ID Act and the Secure Fence Act were stuffed into must-pass funding bills for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Trump 1.0 made a lot of noise and added to the wall and made sections taller like you see here. These fences were meant to prevent illegal pedestrian movement northwards. Spoiler alert: it didn’t work. A 30 foot fence is powerless against a 32 foot ladder and there are also thousands of holes that have been cut and disguised.

The whole border here, anyway, is surveilled every few hundred yards by towers with infra-red, video, and motion sensors and the Border Patrol presence is constant and intense - nobody can walk through here without being spotted and tracked immediately + Most of the contraband arrives in the US by truck and all of the refugees arrive at legal border crossings.

Fast Forward to Now

This week Trump 2.0 announced that the Roosevelt Reservation will now be transferred to the US military as a “National Defence Area” and be patrolled by active duty military and not Customs and Border Protection. Up to now, this strip has been accessible and used by locals and farmers and, of course, adventure motor bike riders to get around. No more.

The only section that has been designated - so far - is east of Fort Huachuca through Bisbee to Douglas and up to the New Mexico line - exactly where I am standing in this photo. Anyone entering would be trespassing. Driving back to Tucson from Bisbee I saw a lot of Army Stryker vehicles arriving as this swung into action.

So Here We Go

They say that the patrols are meant to assist CBP officers, but active-duty military members are prohibited from direct law enforcement activities under the Posse Comitatus Act. Given the general blatant disregard for the law and the Constitution the current regime, this is just another fire alarm going off in the desert. Getting ready to point guns at US civilians.

Even without the threat of the army taking over the country, ProPublica also drew attention this week to opinions locally that Trump spending billions on border nonsense does not sit well with neglected communities on the border. Here in Cochise County that went 60-40 for Trump, hundreds of thousands of people here are hours from the nearest hospital and more than half the people in the county are on Medicaid. I bet their priority would not be to flood the fence line with the Border-Industrial Complex.