Photo by author. “Border wall” on the Arizona-Mexico border.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott says he is building a “border wall” and he’s soliciting donations to do so. He is also marshaling more police power to "fortify the border, although what they will do is quite unclear. One of those actions is the March 4 “Operation Lone Star” to “combat the smuggling of people and drugs into Texas.”
Texas sheriffs are helping to lead the charge. The Texas Sheriffs’ Regional Alliance, a new nonprofit of conservative sheriffs, advocates specifically (and only) for 2nd Amendment rights and “maintain[ing] a strong, secure border to safeguard our great nation.” Jackson County Sheriff A.J. Louderback is a member and a frequent Fox News personality opposing Biden’s policies (whatever he thinks they are).
Now, Abbott is asking Texas sheriffs to make bedspace in their jails to hold detained migrants. The wording of the press releases suggests that law enforcement will charge people with “trespassing,” a state crime, to make these arrests stick. (State police, sheriffs, and city police cannot arrest or charge people for violating immigration law.)
And the mania is reaching states far from the border. States like Nebraska and Florida have volunteered to send sheriff deputies to Texas to “help.” Maverick County Sheriff Tom Schmerber (Maverick is on the border of Texas and Mexico to the southwest of San Antonio) has concerns that these deputies may be, well, racist:
I’m a little worried because they don’t know the area, and they don’t know the people. Here in Maverick County, we have a lot of Hispanics, so I’m just afraid that they might confuse just a regular citizen of being an immigrant. I expect a lot of complaints.
His solution? Position the deputies on the river like a human shield against…what? (Sounds like a recipe for boredom.)
Put them on the river where they could be seen, and maybe they would prevent the immigrants from crossing.
Sheriffs across the country have been using their power to collaborate with ICE to argue in favor of increased border policing. Generally, sheriffs collaborate with ICE by vetting people inside their jails for potential immigration violations. This is either done by sheriff deputies or ICE agents themselves. Then, ICE can request that sheriffs hold certain people for potential deportation proceedings, eventually transferring them to a detention facility (which might be another jail or a private prison with a contract to hold people for ICE).
But the current leadership of ICE has been trying to detain fewer people, so sheriffs have changed their tactics to focus on border security and patrol, which usually means that sheriffs and their deputies use their extremely discretionary policing power to patrol border regions for people who may be crossing on foot, by car, or by boat.
There’s a lot of mythos around these images. News agencies from Fox News to Newsmax to the New York Times to the Washington Post have been awash with pictures of immigrants crossing on foot across harsh desert scrub. Many headlines have claimed that border crossings and “border apprehensions” (e.g. people who are arrested at the border for trying to cross without proper documentation) have increased significantly. And a 2018 paper found that media images similarly focus on threat construction of immigrants, portraying migrants as disproportionately dangerous and engaged in low-wage employment.
This popular media image presents a warped picture of immigration. First of all, most (around half) of all undocumented immigrants in the U.S. overstayed their visas. That’s not really as exciting for television news. And, while border apprehensions have increased thus far this year, these numbers may have been artificially depressed by Trump’s immigration policies, like “remain in Mexico,” and the coronavirus.
Sheriffs have seized on the confluence of a few different problems. First is the perceived lack of concern they argue the Biden administration has presented on immigration. For example, sheriffs critiqued Kamala Harris’s visit to El Paso as “not being the real border” and have opposed the new head of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas for being ineffective. (Or, as some say, “Your policies suck!” it )This is often presented in opposition to Donald Trump’s “immigration policy,” by which I can only think they mean his xenophobic and racist rhetoric.
Second, sheriffs have seized on the increase of fentanyl and related overdose deaths in communities across the country to blame immigrants for transporting drugs. They have similarly seized on the language of human trafficking to argue that children migrating with adults (whether parents, siblings, etc) are being “trafficked” and need to be saved.
And finally, I think sheriffs are seizing on what they can easily present as a sense of disorder and chaos, like things are happening too much, too fast. The images of migrants making border crossing, whether on foot or by raft, look disorderly as the media shows it. There is debris, like shoes and clothing. There are people, many people, crowding people. There’s luggage and children. It’s a distorted image to which fearful people can easily pin their anxieties. As one sheriff said, “They [the Biden administration] want this chaos that is coming into this country.” Another: “[they are] creating havoc in our communities.” It’s an old framing, used to argue against civil rights and equality and part of the fear-mongering tactics designed to make law enforcement look important and necessary.
I was at the Arizona-Mexico border this past weekend. It felt like the end of the world. There are vast rocky canyons, yawning prickly fields, tons of dust, and mountain peaks. At the Texas-Mexico border in Falfurrias, the brush cuts through your clothing like needles and you cannot see more than a yard in front of you during the day.
During my drive, I ran into these two young men sitting outside a few yards from part of the constructed border wall in the 105-degree heat. What are you doing? I asked. We are just showing how much we love America, they said. I asked if I could take their picture and they said yes.