| law enforcers. |
[Sep. 25th, 2006|08:17 pm] |
law enforcers.
One day Carrillo, a U.S. Navy veteran, stood in his welding yard, amid machinery and tankers under repair and barking dogs. He pulled out his cell phone and called the Spanish language TV station in El Paso as neighbors and his workmen were being picked off at the roadblocks. It was a cry for help, or at least for some attention from the wider world. "I've lived here 24 years, and there's been nothing like this before," says Carrillo, a 36-year-old father of two.
"That's the Torres house, that's Martinez, that's Garcia-he's in the service-and that's Telles, the one they named the street over there for," says Carrillo on a ride through town. He waves at the driver of a passing truck. "And there goes my brother." This part of San Elizario began as a rough colonia, unimproved lots where families have seen water come to houses only in the last few years, although many, like Carrillo's mother, don't have gas yet, and sewage systems are still a dream. That means part of Camaron's business is modifying the trucks that go around cleaning septic tanks. He sweeps an arm to take in concrete brick houses rising among the nopales and pink tunas, and a developer's sign that announces: Coming Soon - Mission Style, 31 Lots. Progress in making colonias a decent place to live has come hard, but now people are scared. Households have always been a mix of citizens, legal residents, and undocumented relatives, but the war on terror is changing lives. Take a ride around other colonias east of El Paso -- Agua Dulce, Sparks, around Horizon and Montana Vista -- and you hear more. For weeks during the Linebacker stops, neighbors brought food and diapers to houses where fathers had been taken by authorities and mothers didn't dare go into the streets. Priests reported churches vacant. A clinic usually bursting with the uninsured stood empty of families, the sick unattended. Today those who are undocumented, and relatives, remain uneasy. Around San Elizario the occasional Lazy Boy or old sofa in a yard sits empty. "People used to walk around more, used to walk down along the edge of the cotton field over there along the river for exercise, late in the day," says mechanic Jessie Rubio, 46, a friend of Camaron's. Skybox rises above backyards in San Elizario, photo by Jana Birchum
On a July morning, as Rubio spoke under a shade tree outside the family's trailer home, his 11-year-old son, Jose Luis, tinkered with a car engine, and a lone, white egret was the only other creature visible in the expanse between Rubio's yard and the line that marks the border. "What if a Minuteman mistakes me and shoots me?" he asks. Then there's the Guard. "They can make a mistake with somebody taking a stroll, because now there's too many guns and too many people. Somebody will say, 'I'm an American, you can't tell me what to do,' and there'll be trouble. Sometimes you get mad when you get asked so much for papers. You feel racism starting to climb. You can feel the tension." Being asked for papers to go to the store "felt like those countries you hear about where soldiers and police are taking over and can search you," says Rubio, whose parents immigrated from Chihuahua when he was six. He votes, and like other residents, is pleased when he reads the Border Patrol has busted drug runners. "They could hurt my son," he says. But Rubio feels less ownership of his neighborhood now, questions why it's feeling like a front line, and senses danger. "In a war situation you're looking at people and asking, 'Friend or foe?' Well, now you're getting people coming in from different parts, the Guard and Minutemen, and here we all look the same. In a war zone they don't know who is who."
Guard spokesmen reiterate that soldiers have authority only to call in the Border Patrol, not to arrest suspicious persons. Yet on the ground, fear of running into a soldier and being challenged is far greater than running into a Border Patrol agent. Partly this is because agents are familiar, but the soldiers are not. Partly it's because residents see soldiers at war on TV every day, pictured amid explosions and in combat, then, disconcertingly, see them behind their back yards. And partly fear rises because residents know soldiers who are trained for war, or recently returned from war, may have a mind-set that doesn't belong in the neighborhood. It's not an outlandish concern: Veterans Affairs Secretary R. James Nicholson told The Washington Post in October 2005 that 12 percent of returning troops from Iraq and Afghanistan seen at Veterans Administration facilities suffered from some degree of post-traumatic stress disorder. But Suzanne Dennis, an Air Force veteran of Desert Storm who returned six months ago from Baghdad deployment as a public affairs specialist with the Texas National Guard, dismissed anxiety about stressed-out soldiers on the line. "They just switch gears," Dennis says, from the battlefield to assisting the Border Patrol. "If you can't switch, you don't belong there."
Nevertheless, for those in houses near the line, living in the zone now brings a sensation of the ground shifting under their feet. For Ray Carrillo, it also comes with a hunch his role in life is changing, because what is experienced as repression demands a response. "It just clicked," says Carrillo about the moment when the Linebacker roadblocks were in full swing and the Guard was beginning to arrive. "It's illegal to ask somebody for papers without suspicion of a crime. It's not right for people to be afraid to come out of their houses." His wife wants to move a few miles east to Fabens, but now Carrillo is deciding to stick around, staying in touch with rights groups, monitoring, listening, "protecting my rights, my kids, my neighbors."
"I didn't just throw a rock and run," says Camaron about the roadblocks. "I stood my ground, in the light." Texas National Guard and Border Patrol agents checking documents of those heading north, photo by Jana Birchum
President Bush, the Border Patrol and the military declare the border is not militarized, but it is. Experts say it began years ago. In 1986, President Reagan issued a directive designating illegal drug traffic as a threat to U.S. "national security," which permitted the Department of Defense to enter a range of "anti-drug" activity, including on the border. Even before that, in 1981 Congress passed amendments that diluted the strength of the 100-year-old Posse Comitatus Act, which had strictly prohibited deputizing military to carry out domestic law enforcement. The Pentagon's Center for the Study of Low Intensity Conflict helped design the Border Patrol's "Strategic Plan: 1994 and Beyond," devoted almost entirely to immigration control.
The rhetoric of violence has taken over in a new way since September 11, 2001, replacing the language of immigration enforcement, border policy, or even drug interdiction with the language of fighting terrorism. When Gov. Perry's Border Security Plan announced support for Operation Linebacker, its overview began with these words: "Al-Qaeda leadership plans to use criminal alien smuggling organizations to bring terrorist operatives across the border into the U.S." Douglas T. Mosier, Border Patrol spokesman in El Paso, says, "Our primary objective now is preventing terrorists and instruments of terrorism from entering." Rick Glancey, spokesman for the El Paso County Sheriff's Department, says its job is the "same as the Border Patrol, preventing terrorism."
"Every day you have drugs coming in duffel bags," says Glancey, who is also interim executive director of the Texas Border Sheriff's Coalition and helped develop Linebacker. "Today narcotics, tomorrow weapons of mass destruction. Since September 11 we've seen the border is perfect for someone to take advantage of the United States. We will not let this happen on our watch, Mr. and Mrs. America, you can be sure of that." Soldiers bring experience manning Iraq entry points to the U.S. border, photo by Jana Birchum
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