07/16/14 – Todd Miller – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And like I said, we've got a show full of interviews today, five of them, starting now with Todd Miller.
He's a regular at tomdispatch.com.
And his first book is Border Patrol Nation, Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security.
And he's got a new one, relatively new, ran, I guess, yesterday at Tom Dispatch, Bill of Rights Rollback in the U.S. borderlands.
And it's running today at antiwar.com under Tom Englehart's name.
Of course, you guys know how they do with Tom's intro.
This intro's by Peter Van Buren, but same difference.
So it's under Tom's name today at antiwar.com.
Welcome to the show, Todd.
How are you doing?
Very good.
Thanks for having me on.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
A very important story.
Doesn't get much coverage here.
The expanding definition of that previously mentioned borderland.
Can you please explain?
Yeah, sure.
Well, I mean, we could start with the notion that when, probably when most people think of the border, they probably think of a line, a line of division, a thin line that separates two countries.
What I depict in this article is that the actual, well, there is a difference.
There's an international boundary line, which is that exact line.
But the actual border or the border zone and the border zone, meaning the place where the border can be enforced, is actually a jurisdiction that goes from the international boundary line, a hundred miles inland into the country.
And that's along the 2000 mile US Mexico border.
It's along the 4,000 mile US Canada border, and it's also along the coast.
So that covers approximately 200 million people living within the jurisdiction.
And that's two thirds of the US population.
Now see, here's what's funny about that, is I live dead center in the middle of Texas, where I'm from.
And so a hundred miles is nothing.
A hundred miles is just starting to get somewhere from here.
But you're reminding me, I guess, and I was reminded in this article that, hey, if you're really starting at the oceans or at Canada and Mexico, and you're going a hundred miles in, why, that really is, like you just said, two thirds of the American people, 200 million people live within that now vastly expanded definition of the border region.
But then, so what?
Yeah.
So, I mean, you can look at that and say, well, you know, if you look at the green uniform US Border Patrol agents, they're not, you know, you don't, you go to New York City and, and well, you're not, you don't see them there.
I mean, you'll see Customs and Border Protection agents in airports, but you won't see, you know, but, but one of the, one of the points is there are many places, when you look at, for example, US Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection, and you see the expansion of the, of US Border Patrol agents, say from, you know, the mid 1990s or in the post 9-11 era until now, and they're expanding at a rate, an unprecedented rate in a way that we've never seen them grow before.
So in the, if in the early 1990s, they were around 4,000 agents and, and, and to go back, the Border Patrol was formed in 1924.
So it went from about 500 agents in 1924 to about 4,000 in, in, in the early 1990s, which was, you know, it's an agency that was almost, you know, not really a priority for the federal government.
They were there, but, you know, not much attention was given to them.
And then to compare that with the post 9-11 era, you see that the agency has grown five times, like the US Border Patrol is now approaching 22,000 agents.
So it's five times the number of agents that was in the early 1990s, and there's calls for more and more and more.
And so you add this expansion, and this is expansion of agents, but also of resources.
I mean, the different technologies, the surveillance towers, the high power cameras, even the, the drones, the Predator B unmanned aerial vehicles that are patrolling our borders.
And you, you add, you put that into the mix.
You are now looking at, you are seeing this expansion into this jurisdiction in ways that we haven't seen before in unprecedented ways.
So in the US Southwest, you're seeing more and more agents buzzing around certain areas.
In the, in the North, you're seeing Border Patrol agents and patrolling, getting onto Greyhound buses, getting onto Amtrak trains, doing checkpoints in places where they have never, ever been before.
Like Erie, Pennsylvania, like Rochester, New York, you know, along the lakefronts in the Great Lakes, for example.
Yeah, but they're catching a lot of Al Qaeda guys coming through from Canada, right?
Oh, yeah.
Thousands of them.
No.
Actually, no.
Not, not.
Can they even claim any successes on the Canadian border?
I mean, what do they even pretend they're protecting from there?
So US officials, according to the official line, is that there is a more, there's a larger chance that a terrorist will come across the Canadian border than the US southern border.
They say that the 4,000 mile long border is more porous.
They say that it'd be easier, you know, it'd just be easier for that, for a person affiliated with some sort of US recognized terrorist organization to come across that border.
But the fact is, they haven't caught anyone.
The only, the one example that they bring up is the, what is he called, the Millennium Bomber?
Yeah, I was going to say, at least there's one example in the case of Canada when all of the hype is about, you know, Arabs dressed up like Mexican laborers or whatever.
Yeah, right, right.
Which just isn't happening.
There hasn't been, you know, every study shows, and you know, maybe, you know, I've had pushback on this before where people have said, well, how are we supposed to know?
Maybe they wouldn't make it public.
And maybe that's the case.
But I know, like, for example, you know, in the global war on terror abroad, if we capture a terrorist in another country, that's like front page news.
So why wouldn't it be the same?
Yeah, we don't give the government credit for secret successes that we don't know about based on unknown unknowns and what's probably the justification for all of this crap.
Not around here anyway.
Right.
But yeah, I mean, that's what regular people are left to do, though, as George Carlin might say, that in the situation, what do you do?
You rationalize.
Well, they must have, they must have protected me somehow or else what the hell is all this, you know?
And that's exactly the rationalization, the idea that that there is the front lines, you know, that the actual rhetoric of the of the Customs and Border Protection and Border Patrol is that they're on the front lines, they're defending the country.
You know, it's this posturing, militaristic posturing as if we were at war.
And in reality, are we at war with Canada?
No.
Are we at war with Mexico?
No.
We're not.
We're not at war.
In fact, we're, you know, economic, more economically integrated with both of those countries than we've ever been before in our history, which is another topic altogether.
But they claim that immigrants coming is an invasion.
But of course, that's just, you know, again, for to to reach for my George Carlin, that's like calling an effect an impact or where it's just jargon.
An invasion would mean the government of Mexico is coming and trying to establish territorial jurisdiction on our soil, which, of course, is exactly what's not happening.
Exactly.
It's not an invasion.
That's incorrect.
Incorrect way to put it.
But it creates but but the word is used over and over and over and over and over again so much that it seems like there is almost a military incursion coming from the south.
And what what's striking right now, you have the fifty two thousand or almost sixty thousand now children.
So now now this invasion has this the space of a child, you know, this which which really is one of the biggest contradictions you can possibly, you know, come across.
All right.
And now.
So I'm sorry.
I must have missed the part.
Did you say exactly they went from 4000 in the early 90s to how many now?
There are about twenty three thousand twenty three hundred.
OK.
I'm sorry.
We got to go out and take this break.
But we'll be right back.
Everybody with Todd Miller is writing over at Tom Dispatch dot com.
And this article is Bill of Rights rollback in the U.S. borderlands.
The book is Border Patrol Nation.
And we'll be back in just a minute.
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We're taking a break from Iraq today to do all domestic police state stuff, except Ramsey Baroon's going to be here to talk about Palestine.
But otherwise, it's all DHS and NSA and drug wars today on the show.
Right now we're talking with Todd Miller about his great article, Bill of Rights Rollback in the U.S. Borderlands.
It's under Tom Englehardt's name.
It's a Tom Dispatch article you can find at Tom Dispatch dot com.
And today it's at Antiwar dot com.
You'll see it there by Todd Miller and Peter Van Buren, it says.
But it's running under Englehardt's column and you know how it works.
Anyway, so the article is great.
And that's what we're talking about.
And when we left off, we were saying there are twenty three thousand Border Patrol agents now.
That's not enough for some people.
They want to put the army on the border.
Then we can all get shot to death like Ezequiel Hernandez.
But meanwhile, the Border Patrol is bad enough and they've been kind of in real trouble even with their own I.G. and even with, I don't know, local prosecutors or somebody over some of these killings getting out of control now.
And by out of control, I mean what?
That must be hundreds and hundreds before anybody cares at all.
Right.
What are we talking about with that?
Yeah, we're looking at the since 2005, and this actually goes right along with the with the with the expansion of of the Border Patrol when it was doubling its ranks and in the and also when the mission of the Border Patrol is changing.
So it's important to note that in in 2003, when they became a part of the Department of Homeland Security, their primary mission became counterterrorism, became counterterrorism with stopping terrorists and weapons of mass destruction from crossing the border on top of their normal missions of of immigration enforcement and drug interdiction.
So you have this kind of almost this blurriness in missions.
You have this rapid expansion, a huge, you know, I think there was almost 10,000 agents hired between 2006 and 2009.
And during that same time, you see this upsurge of Border Patrol agents shooting and killing people, sometimes even U.S. citizens, sometimes on U.S. soil, and sometimes shooting across into Mexico and killing people on the Mexican side of the border.
And so there's been a lot of talk about their use of deadly force policies.
There's been a lot of talk about accountability.
There's been a lot of talk about who's being who's going to get charged for these for these killings.
All of this is actually an active conversation right now.
Do you have any kind of numbers for us?
Can you estimate on a year basis or a decade basis how many people we're talking about?
As far as, and this is off the top of my head, I don't have the numbers right in front of me, but I think since 2005, there has been over like 45 or so known killings where Border Patrol has shot and killed somebody.
And that's because these Mexican day labor types are coming with their rifles in their invasion force, right?
Oh, yeah, absolutely right.
You know, people, that's the thing, you know, when people cross, I live in Tucson, Arizona.
There's a lot of people that cross through the desert lands here.
And what happens is that Border Patrol is forced, or I should say concentrated in some enforcement zones, particularly in the urban areas.
So they're in the Nogales, they're in Douglas, they're around Yuma.
And this has created what they call the funnel effect.
So the people that cross by the hundreds of times, mainly laborers, as you say, are coming, are actually crossing the border in places where the Border Patrol isn't.
It's part of their prevention by deterrence strategy.
So the idea is that some areas would be so dangerous to cross, so deadly that people wouldn't dare cross through there.
And so people are actually crossing through some of the most hostile deserts in Arizona.
And what they do is they walk 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, sometimes 10.
I've heard a story of one woman that was in the desert for 26 days.
And it's impossible to carry enough water.
People run out of food.
By the time Border Patrol catches up with the people, usually they've been walking three or four days.
A lot of times they're in distress.
If anything, they're anything but people, you know, with rifles or an army invading.
They're people in their weakest state.
Oftentimes they, you know, I just interviewed a woman who turned herself into the Border Patrol after walking five days with a group.
And they had, it had gotten so bad, she described the scenario.
She was walking and she said she heard, started hearing the mountains start to speak to her.
And she had run out of water.
And then she said they arrived to this, to the road.
And she looked around her and four or five people, their noses had spontaneously burst with blood because it was, I guess, of dehydration.
And then she passed out.
When she woke up, she was in a hospital bed.
She actually thought she had died.
She had been brought back to life because she had those like electronic, one of those shock machines.
So these are the, you know, this is what we see in Arizona as far as, you know, the people coming across.
I think you just described the first government light rail project that I would ever support.
Get these people a train and get them where they're going in safety.
Yeah, right.
And that would be, that would solve a lot of problems, I tell you.
Yeah.
I mean, that's absolutely horrible.
No matter how anti-immigration you are, funnel them through, you know, Death Valley, basically, you know, deliberately cannot be the solution, man.
Not for human beings, unless we're monsters or animals.
So well, talk to me a bit about the resistance to this, because that gets some play in your article here.
And I think it's important that there's some pushback against the vast overreach by the Border Patrol.
Sure.
Yeah.
So in the article, I focus on how it impacts people that live in the 100 mile zone as much as it impacts, you know, the people crossing the border, undocumented border crossers.
So for example, again, there I can give the example of Arizona.
I live in the 100 mile zone.
I live in Tucson, which is 60 miles south of the border.
If I go anywhere south of here, and I'm traveling around, I will have to go through probably one, or two, or possibly three Border Patrol checkpoints.
So my movement, I have to stop.
They will ask me a question about my citizenship.
They will give a quick visual search of my vehicle.
And if anything strikes their fancy, if anything, they find anything suspicious, and this could be along an immigration mandate, it could be along, they could think I'm a drug smuggler.
They have dogs at the checkpoints as well that could sniff out drugs, that can sniff out explosives, or if they think I'm a national security risk, they can pull me over in a secondary and do a more thorough search.
They can remove me from my car.
They can ask me questions, and this is happening all the time.
This is actually, so you have a couple different, you can break it down into three components really of what you're seeing in the 100 mile zone.
One is the ports of entry, and in the article I wrote for Time Dispatch, I do highlight one of the stories is from the actual port of entry.
Port of entry is where you come into the country, and it deals with a woman that was wearing a shirt that said stop border patrol brutality, and she seems to think that she was pulled into secondary inspection, and then what she considers to be verbally abused, and then even physically abused within the secondary inspection, that's one part of, that's one component of what you would see in the, where your, the idea is that your fourth amendment, the fourth amendment is your right not to be searched, to search or seizure, and this, your fourth amendment right is altered within the borderlands, so the idea that you can be searched, the idea that you can be interrogated, et cetera, et cetera, is put on hold in a lot of ways in the borderlands, so one of the areas is the port of entry.
Another area is the checkpoints, which I just described, and another area is just simply roving patrols.
Oh man, I'm sorry we're out of time.
That's all right.
I really appreciate your time on the show, it's been a good interview, Todd.
Yeah, thanks for having me, I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Take care.
All right everybody, that's Todd Miller, he's writing at timedispatch.com, his article's running today at antiwar.com, Bill of Rights rollback in the US borderlands, and we'll be back with John Whitehead in just a minute.
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