8 June 26th - July 2nd, 2025 phoenixnewtimes.com PHOENIX NEW TIMES | NEWS | FEATURE | FOOD & DRINK | ARTS & CULTURE | MUSIC | CONCERTS | CANNABIS | acts as the proverbial canary in the coal mine when it comes to civil liberties. As Jefferson once wrote, “the friendless alien has indeed been selected as the safest subject of a first experiment, but the citizen will soon follow.” Trump is leveraging that same immigra- tion system for largely the same purpose. If anything, he’s just more honest about what he’s doing with it. A Constitution-free zone In 1946, Congress amended the Immigration and Nationality Act to allow U.S. Border Patrol to operate within a “reasonable distance” from the country’s borders — later pegged at 100 miles. Wrapping ribbon-like around the U.S., that outline of the country contained more than 200 million Americans as of the 2010 Census. That strip covers every major city on the east and west coasts, as well as Chicago, Houston, New Orleans, El Paso and Tucson, among many more. If Border Patrol stops you in any of those locales, say goodbye to your rights. You’re in what many call a “Constitution- free zone.” (The ACLU would surely argue otherwise, but such arguments become rather academic when you’re being detained by federal gendarmes.) Within that 100-mile strip, Border Patrol operates checkpoints, conducts warrantless searches and seizes the electronic devices of those crossing the border and at interna- tional airports. Communities at the U.S.- Mexico border are awash in surveillance towers, fencing, walls, drones, license plate readers and facial recognition technology — all policed by a bellicose national force of more than 20,000 Border Patrol agents. On the Tohono Oʼodham Nation, which traverses the Arizona-Mexico border, the Border Patrol acts as an occupying army. South of the Gila River, agents are at constant war with activists seeking to render aid to migrants, going so far as to ille- gally invade their encampments and sabo- tage jugs of water left out by volunteers for border crossers. The U.S. Attorney’s Office also periodically prosecutes modern-day Samaritans who take to heart the Biblical command to “show love to the alien.” The Border Patrol’s viciousness knows no bounds. Case in point: In the waning days of the Biden administration, Border Patrol agents stationed near the California- Mexico border staged a three-day opera- tion more than 300 miles north in Bakersfield, targeting farmhands, arresting 78 people and terrorizing the entire community. According to the Santa Barbara Independent, Border Patrol agents pulled over a U.S. citizen hauling a trailer full of gardening equipment and slashed his tires when he declined to surrender his truck keys. A Border Patrol spokesperson told a San Diego news outlet the operation made Bakersfield “a safer place.” Such an episode is a direct product of what some have called the “Border Security Industrial Complex,” which a succession of presidents have had a hand in creating. A 2021 analysis from the nonprofit Migration Policy Institute revealed that in Fiscal Year 2000, prior to the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service had a budget of $4.3 billion, with just a portion of it dedicated to immigra- tion enforcement. After 9/11, Congress created the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Customs and Border Protection (of which the Border Patrol is a part) and ICE. By Fiscal Year 2020, according to MPI, the budget for immigration enforcement, now housed within Homeland Security, was $25.1 billion — “28 percent more than the $19.5 billion directed to the principal federal criminal law enforcement agen- cies.” According to a report from the nonpartisan National Immigration Forum, the GOP’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” would increase CBP funding by $60 billion over the next four years, while ICE would receive $75 billion. Regardless of party, the funding for immigration interdiction only goes in one direction: up. The question is merely by how much. The imperial presidency Given that illegal immigration is neither an economic nor a security threat to the nation, the insanity of U.S. border and immigration policies in the modern era should be self-evident. So is their cruelty, which was obvious long before Trump started ranting about emptied insane asylums and Mexican criminals. During the Clinton administration, the Border Patrol adopted a policy of sealing the border at El Paso and San Diego, funneling migration through the brutal Sonoran Desert, with deadly conse- quences. Instead, Clinton INS commis- sioner Doris Meissner admitted in 2000 that Clinton’s deterrence policy didn’t work. “We did believe that geography would be an ally to us,” she said. “It was our sense that the number of people crossing the border through Arizona would go down to a trickle once people realized what it’s like.” Estimates of those who perished in the Arizona desert since 1998 number close to 10,000. No one knows for certain how many have died. Clinton compounded the problem by backing the North American Free Trade Agreement, forcing small Mexican farmers to compete with subsidized agribusiness in the U.S. As Arizona State University’s Cronkite Borderlands Project wrote, “Rural farmers left Southern Mexico in droves and migrated north, spurring increasing numbers of undocumented immigrants to the U.S. from Southern Mexico states.” Effectively, Arizona became a death trap for Mexican migrants. Clinton’s immigration legacy also includes the 287(g) program, created by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. The program, which cross-deputizes local law enforcement to act as federal immigration agents, was viewed by both Democrats and Republicans as a “force multiplier.” Democratic Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano lobbied for the addition to the program of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, led by Joe Arpaio, with a disastrous outcome. Arpaio once had the largest 287(g) force in the nation, and his agency’s abuses of the 287(g) authority led to a civil rights lawsuit and a judge finding the sheriff’s office guilty of widespread racial profiling. The Obama administration eventually canceled Arpaio’s 287(g) street authority, but ICE agents still screen arrestees at the Maricopa County jail to this day. Republican President George W. Bush was perceived by some as an immigration moderate who pushed for a legislative compromise on immigration reform. But his foreign policy and immigration enforcement sins far outweighed any unre- alized policy goals. Bush lied to the American public about invading Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. His prevarica- tions countenanced torture at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib and at black sites across the world, with the CIA using “extraordinary renditions” to transfer suspected terrorists to countries eager to allow waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Bush’s illegal actions in the Iraq War paved the way for the forced removal of undocumented aliens to hellholes such as El Salvador’s infamous CECOT prison. Though forgotten now, Dubya had his own mass deportation plan, “Operation Endgame,” tasking ICE’s Office of Detention and Removal with “the removal of all removable aliens” by 2012. If that sounds ridiculously ambitious, well, it was. Predictably, it didn’t happen. The Bush administration did vastly expand the 287(g) program, which signed its first local law enforcement agreement after Clinton left office. By 2011, there were 72 agree- ments in place, including Arpaio’s. Under Bush, ICE conducted large-scale raids on worksites around the country, arresting and deporting thousands of undocumented workers, often decimating the small towns where they lived and labored. In 2008, ICE rolled out its “Secure Communities Program,” creating a vast database against which an arrestee’s fingerprints could be checked for deport- able offenses, no matter how minor. According to a 2021 Migration Policy Institute report, by January 2013, Secure Communities “was in effect in all 3,181 law enforcement jurisdictions in the country.” Like his predecessor, Obama embraced the imperial presidency, using military drones to execute supposed enemies of the state. Obama’s moral compass was simi- larly shaky when it came to addressing the 11 million people in the U.S. who lacked legal status. When he came to power in 2009, echoing the popular Latino catch- phrase “Si, se puede” and with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, his administration declined to take up the cause of immigration reform. He spent his political capital to pass Obamacare, and then used his presidential authority to deport more than 3 million people during his time in office, earning him the moniker “Deporter in Chief.” As he was running for re-election in 2012, Obama threw some of his Latino supporters a life raft, initiating the policy of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which protects undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children from deportation. But it was an administrative action and not a legislative one, meaning another president can reverse it, as Trump has already once attempted. It’s as if Democrats lacked the imagination to envi- sion a world wherein the enemies of freedom would use their best efforts against them. Testing the boundaries That’s not to say Trump’s immigration policies and rhetoric aren’t different. They are. He’s turned American immigration enforcement up to DEFCON 1. As Cochise Regional News and Phoenix New Times reported last month, internal Project 2025 documents lay out a plan to use a phony immigration crisis to create a Commander of Homeland Security Operations, appointed by the president, with direct control over the A Long Time Coming from p6 >> p 10 Past presidents — including, left to right, Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton — are as responsible as anyone for building the deportation machine that Donald Trump is now weaponizing. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
