Sadly, Democrats Are Vowing to Be as Tough as Republicans and Support Draconian Surveillance Apparatus
During the GOP convention in Milwaukee in July, speaker after speaker made it seem like the U.S.-Mexico border was as porous as a leaking sieve and that the Biden administration had allowed the U.S. to be overrun by illegal immigrants.
In 2024, however, the Biden administration signed off on a record $30 billion spending on border patrol. Four million people have been kicked out of the U.S. since Biden took office—compared with 1.5 million during Donald Trump’s presidency.
In February, Biden and Kamala Harris supported a border bill that, had it passed, would have given an additional $15 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), on top of the record $30 billion spending.
The extra money was to be used for expanding Trump’s border wall, providing more surveillance technologies, furthering DNA extraction of border crossers, and utilizing maritime drone systems to go along with aerial drones that fly en masse around the U.S.-Mexico border.
Huge Gap Between Rhetoric and Reality
On August 15, Todd Miller, an Arizona-based journalist who specializes in border security issues, spoke at a webinar hosted by the War Industry Resisters Network and Massachusetts Peace Action, about the dichotomy between political rhetoric during this election cycle and reality.
Miller discussed how the U.S.-Mexico border is a heavily militarized zone where the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) deploys a host of Orwellian surveillance technologies, including sophisticated biometric database and DNA extraction systems, sensors and drones.
In 2011, Boeing was given a major contract to construct surveillance towers and a virtual wall, which was followed by the construction of Trump’s border wall that now runs some 455 miles.
Perhaps the most futuristic weapons that ICE deploys are two robotic dogs, produced by Ghost Robotics of Philadelphia, which possess high-tech cameras and are weaponized.
According to Miller, the budget for border patrol and surveillance has increased exponentially since the 1990s, escalating from $1.5 billion in 1994 to $4.5 billion in 2000 to $20 billion in 2017, to the $30 billion today.
The events of 9/11 were a major game changer. DHS was created subsequently and escalation of border surveillance and militarization was justified under the guise of “counter-terrorism.”
The War on Drugs has been another important pretext going back to the Nixon era, when electronic sensors were first adopted on the U.S.-Mexico border from Robert S. McNamara’s “electronic battlefield” in Vietnam.[1]
The Clinton administration employed robotic drones for the first time along the border with radar-blimps and military aircraft equipped with high-speed thermal imagers, night vision and infrared detection devices, and Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers and radio links to law enforcement agencies off the Florida coast and a drug-intelligence center in El Paso, Texas.[2]
It was the Clinton administration, ironically, which passed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that devastated Mexico’s agricultural industry by removing tariffs on U.S. agribusiness, contributing to a spike in migration to the U.S. along with drug trafficking.
The impact of NAFTA and other U.S. foreign policies in fueling immigration from Mexico and South America are rarely discussed by political candidates who vie with one another to prove how “tough” they are in policing the border and controlling illegal immigration.
Adjunct of the Military-Industrial Complex Supported by Two-Party Duopoly
The border-industrial complex continues to grow today as an adjunct to the military-industrial complex. Most of the same companies that have profited massively off wars like Afghanistan, Ukraine, Libya and Israel-Gaza receive major government contracts for border patrol.
Mainstays of the border-industrial complex include:
- Lockheed Martin, a top border contractor, which built a border survillance center as part of the mid-2000s Secure Border Initiative.
- Elbit Systems, an Israeli company, which produces surveillance technologies also used for social control purposes in the West Bank and Gaza.
- General Dynamics, one of Obama’s top all-time campaign donors, which has developed a remote video surveillance system used to police the border.
- Northrop Grumman, which created an advanced biometric and facial recognition system used by Border Patrol agents.
Miller found it somewhat surprising that, during the 2020 election, border industry companies gave three times more money to Joe Biden than they did to Donald Trump.
In the 2020 election campaign, Biden and the Democrats advocated for relatively liberal positions, vowing to halt building Trump’s border wall, to not put any kids in ICE detention centers, and to establish a moratorium on deportations.
Those promises went largely unfulfilled, with Biden deporting more than three times as many immigrants as Trump.
In the current campaign, Harris, amazingly, is running to Trump’s right in the sense that she is trying to show that she is tougher than he is.
In her first campaign ad, Harris criticized Trump for blocking a bill to increase the number of border patrol agents and promised to hire more border agents, bolster law enforcement technologies deployed at the border, and ramp up prosecutions of illegal border crossers.
In a follow-up ad, Harris emphasized her background as a border state prosecutor who prosecuted border gangs and bragged about backing “the toughest border control bill in decades” as vice president, vowing to sign the bill as president.
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See Jeremy Kuzmarov, The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009), 117, 118. The electronic battlefield was a high-tech system in which ground sensors were strategically placed along the Ho Chi Minh Trail and connected to Air Force headquarters in Thailand. When the sensors were triggered, the Air Force would order bombing on the exact spot. ↑
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See Ted Galen Carpenter, Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington’s Futile War on Drugs in Latin America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 4; Timothy J. Dunn, The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1978-1992: Low-Intensity Conflict Doctrine Comes Home (Austin, TX: University of Texas at Austin Center for Mexican American Studies, 1996), 132. On May 20, 1997, Esequiel Hernandez, Jr., was killed by a U.S. Marine Corps unit engaged in anti-drug surveillance along the U.S.-Mexico border. The gentle 18-year-old high school student was herding goats near his home town when he was stalked and shot and allowed to bleed to death. Lt. General Carlton W. Fulford, Commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force at Camp Pendleton, admitted, as reported in The Washington Post, that “the killing might not have happened had civilian law enforcement agencies patrolled the border.” ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Left on Left.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
