The Department of Homeland Security received guidance in 2017 allowing it to prioritize the deportation of unauthorized immigrants who have a record of criminal convictions, no matter how minor, or are suspected of a crime.36 At the same time, some six hundred thousand people in 2017 were awaiting their immigration hearings, with the legal system struggling with the case backlog.37 Then, in September 2017, the Trump administration announced that DACA would be stopped, though renewals were permitted to continue while legal and legislative issues were resolved, leaving around eight hundred thousand young people—the majority of whom were from Mexico but who also included people from other parts of Latin America—facing a very uncertain future. In addition, some 2,500 Nicaraguans and 200,000 Salvadorans with Temporary Protected Status (TPS) were informed that they would have to leave the United States by 2019. TPS was created in 1990 to help foreigners fleeing from war or natural disasters, providing legal status to affected people even if they had made an unlawful entry. In late 2017 Trump announced that TPS for these two groups would no longer be renewed. The Salvadorans who qualified for TPS arrived in 2001, after two earthquakes devastated their country, and were the largest group in the program. After living in the United States for nearly two decades, many of the people with TPS have a cause for great concern about what lies ahead.
By the spring of 2018, the Trump administration had put into effect a “zero-tolerance” policy to deter migrants or refugees entering at the border, which meant adults would face criminal charges and any children traveling with them would be placed in a separate holding facility, leading to an estimated 2,300 children being separated from their parent or guardian. This drew heavy criticism from across the political spectrum, and by June the president signed an executive order declaring that families must be kept together while awaiting trial. The following month, a federal court ordered that any separated children must be reunited by the end of July, though it was clear that this deadline would not be met, in part because of the numbers involved and problems the different agencies were having in matching information in order to reunite families. This particular moment came at a time of heated debate about immigration, and the question of how to reform the system—especially given that opinions remain deeply divided—will continue to challenge policy-makers on all sides.38
Mexicans remain the largest group of Hispanic people in the United States, making up some 64 percent of the Hispanic population, and correspondingly making up a large segment of unauthorized immigrants.39 Overall, according to the Pew Research Center, the number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States in 2015 was 11 million, which is about 3.5 percent of the nation’s total population. This number has remained steady since 2009 and represents a decline from a peak of 12.2 million in 2007.40 Underneath these figures, some significant changes are occurring. The number of people arriving from China and India is beginning to overtake the number from Mexico, especially in states farther away from the border, such as Ohio and New York. According to a 2016 Wall Street Journal analysis, around 136,000 people immigrated from India and 128,000 from China in 2014, while only 123,000 came from Mexico; a further 82,000 arrived from other Central American countries.41 In the same year, thirty-one states saw the arrival of more Chinese than Mexican people in 2014, and twenty-five states had more Indian immigrants than Mexican. Although many of these newer migrants are highly skilled and brought in on work visas, not all are, and not everyone is legal. Asians have become the second-largest group of undocumented immigrants, but at around 13 percent of all undocumented people in the United States, they are still quite a way behind people from Mexico and Central America, who between them make up about 71 percent.42 Mexicans have actually seen an overall net fall in migration. Net migration from Mexico has actually fallen below zero, according to a 2015 Pew study, with a net loss of some 140,000 between 2009 and 2014. In those years, around 1 million Mexicans left the United States to return to Mexico, while another 870,000 Mexicans came to the United States.43
In 2015, the overall Hispanic population—including recent immigrants and U.S. citizens—reached a new high, at fifty-seven million people, and accounted for 54 percent of total U.S. population growth from 2000 to 2014.44 Hispanic people are also living in more diverse regions, with 2014 data pointing out that half of the counties in the United States had at least one thousand Hispanics: the place with the fastest-growing Hispanic population growth from 2007 to 2014 was Williams County, North Dakota, with an increase of 367 percent.45
MEXICO’S HISTORY WITH illegal substances goes back many decades, but the rise in the twenty-first century of narco crime has been without precedent. No part of Mexico remains untouched, and the associated violence—wars between cartels, or shoot-outs between narcos and the police and military—has cost, according to some estimates, at least eighty thousand lives, with tens of thousands more people disappearing as well. Journalists have paid a high price, as those trying to report on the cartels or corruption in their own towns end up silenced by a gun.46
One indirect solution to part of the problem may lie in the growing number of U.S. states willing to legalize marijuana. The Border Patrol’s seizure of that drug in FY 2016 was the lowest it has been in a decade, at just under 1.3 million pounds.47 Legal growers in states like Colorado are forcing the price down while keeping the quality high. In fact, in 2015 the Drug Enforcement Agency reported some evidence that marijuana from the United States was being smuggled into Mexico.48 Now the more lucrative substances for the cartels are methamphetamine and heroin. Demand for the latter is fueled by prescription opioid abuse; no longer able to obtain legal opioids, many users have turned to heroin, and in parts of the United States the number of overdoses has skyrocketed.
The cartels’ access to arms—often smuggled from the United States—allows them to win the battle against police and the Mexican military. Corruption infiltrates the system at the highest levels. The United States has poured more than $2.5 billion into the Merida Initiative since its inception in 2008, aiming to target organized crime, establish anticorruption programs, build up the police, and reform the judiciary.49 The violence has infiltrated the lives of millions of people along the border and well beyond, as a network of distributors moves Mexican drugs throughout the United States, from Alaska to Atlanta. Even the music of the frontera has been infused by the cartels, as narcocorridos—a variation of the corrido ballad—provide a sound track for the stories of communities struggling with violence and loss.
There is also another sort of drug trafficking taking place along the border. The expense of pharmaceuticals in the United States draws people across, where they can buy the same drugs in cheaper forms produced in Mexico at what seem like endless blocks of pharmacies in most border towns. These pharmacies are a crucial part of local economies. At the entrance to the pedestrian crossing at the Progreso–Nuevo Progreso International Bridge, a sign in English reads: “Thank God for America & for Our Winter Texans. Welcome Home.”
Well before Donald Trump’s insistence on building a wall at the Mexican border, many efforts had been made to tighten control along the frontier. The number of agents was increased along sections of the border near El Paso under Operation Hold the Line in 1993, and in Operation Gatekeeper the following year in San Diego, both heavily trafficked sectors. Some fencing was put up in this period, but the push for an even more fortified border came after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks. The U.S. government began to spend billions shoring up the border region, fearing that its porousness could lead potential terrorists to come in from the south. The Department of Homeland Security was created and the Immigration and Naturalization Service was put under its command and reorganized into new departments, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), under which the Border Patrol operates.
The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 provided ten thousand more agents for the Border Patrol, pushing the total number employed to s
ome twenty thousand in 2016. In addition, unofficial border agents arrived around 2004, in the form of a vigilante group known as the Minutemen Project, which would patrol parts of the border looking for the Mexican it calls “José Sanchez”—a catchall applied to people who made the illegal crossing.50 At first the group of mostly white, working-class, ex-military men attracted visits from the American Civil Liberties Union to make sure no Mexicans were being harmed, and the Minutemen remained controversial, with some people praising them as patriots and others condemning them as racists.51 One member explained that he joined because, “What’s happening is nothing less than an invasion. We have already lost California.”52 In the end, the group splintered and membership declined, particularly after one prominent member, Shawna Forde, was sentenced for murder, while the group’s cofounder, Chris Simcox, was imprisoned for child sex abuse.
In 2005, the Secure Border Initiative was introduced; its aim was to create a “wall” of surveillance between the United States and Mexico with high-tech monitoring equipment. The aircraft manufacturer Boeing won a bid to work on the project and was given a $1 billion contract.53 Technology such as radar, drones, infrared detectors, and sophisticated cameras does not come cheap, and the program’s costs rose so much that it had to be suspended.54 The changes in this period also attracted criticism for the “militarization” of the border. This was further extended by the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which funded additional fencing. By 2011, about 650 miles had been completed, at a cost of around $3.4 billion.55 A bipartisan bill in the Senate in 2013—the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Bill—sought to further increase spending on the border, as well as provide pathways to citizenship for undocumented people. It passed the Senate but died in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. The next phase of border security may be Trump’s promised wall, though its political support, design, construction, and funding remain, for the moment, under heated discussion.
ON A COOL evening in Tucson in 2014, visions of the dead paraded through the city’s downtown streets during the annual All Souls Procession, held around the time of the Mexican Day of the Dead (día de los muertos). Faces glowed with white paint, disguised as elaborate Mexican death masks; some paraders donned full costumes, looking like smartly dressed Victorian skeletons though the genesis of this skeletal imagery goes back much earlier, to the pre-Columbian commemorations of the dead.
Others in the procession took a simpler approach, wearing everyday clothes, with no makeup, each holding a stick to which an empty plastic water jug was tied with a string. Each jug had a small light inside, giving off a dim glow. The jugs swung in the desert night air, an eerie and powerful symbol of the thousands of people who have died near Tucson trying to cross the border through the Sonoran Desert. Water could have saved their lives. These gallon jugs are among the common artifacts found throughout southern Arizona, left behind by people trying to enter the United States, along with knapsacks, clothing, and children’s toys.
This gathering has become a city tradition, falling on the first Sunday after the Day of the Dead, on November 2. The whole evening is somber—there is no alcohol sold, and the mood is quiet and respectful. People walk the parade route carrying pictures of loved ones, often mounted on placards and decorated with flowers and tinsel. Participants and observers can also write down names of people who have died, which are put into a giant urn at the end of the night. This is hoisted onto a platform by a crane and set ablaze.
The procession was the idea of two local artists who were inspired by the Mexican tradition, and they began it in the 1990s as a way of coming to terms with their own losses. Today it is an event that involves an estimated one hundred thousand people.56 Mexican-Americans did not take part at first, but more have started to join in, bringing the communities together in a town that has long been segregated, and which continues to face many problems because it is on the front line of the immigration debate. As a handwritten sign two young men carried in the procession said: “If you use/steal our culture and would still deport us, you’re honoring no one.”
In Arizona alone, the border fencing stretched 180 miles by 2010, impelling people to find another way across, one that has caused a lot of problems for the state.57 The routes through the Sonoran Desert into Arizona are fraught with dangers, not least the extreme temperatures and the ease with which a person can become disoriented and lost amid the sagebrush. According to data collected by the local charity Humane Borders, there were 3,002 deaths from October 1, 1999, through July 31, 2016, in southern Arizona, with dehydration being a main cause. The charity’s maps plot the deaths in the area, and the dots around Tucson look like red blood cells clustered under a microscope.58
Everyone in Tucson seems to have a story—from a friend of a friend, or from someone who owns land to the south—of helping people across, or finding old clothes and shoes, dropped knapsacks, toothbrushes. The artist Valarie James, who lives in the Tucson area, began to collect such objects, using them in her work, including a collaborative creation of three life-size sculptures—Las Madres, or The Mothers—to honor those who had died in the desert. She told the Wall Street Journal, “For those of us who live close to the border, the humanitarian crisis is not an abstraction.”59 Some landowners and residents in Arizona now want the wall Trump promised so that it will put an end to the grisly encounters in their fields.
The Tucson area is one of the busiest corridors of undocumented immigration traffic, though it has begun to slow. Customs and Border Protection apprehended 70,074 people in Arizona in FY 2015, a significant decline from the 613,346 in 2000.60 Likewise, there has been a more than 50 percent reduction in the number of undocumented people living in the state between 2007 and 2014, from 500,000 to around 244,000, in an overall population of nearly 7 million.61
In 2010, Arizona’s legislative efforts to curb undocumented migrants came to national attention, owing to state senate bill SB 1070.62 This bill in the state legislature proposed allowing police to check a person’s immigration status if there was “reasonable suspicion” that he or she might be illegal, and this could be done during routine policing, such as a simple traffic stop for a minor violation. Before it could go into effect, President Obama’s Department of Justice filed an injunction against Arizona on the grounds that the legislation was unconstitutional, and a nationwide controversy followed. The bill also required immigrants to carry their documents or face a misdemeanor charge; and it gave law enforcement the ability to make arrests without a warrant if there was “probable cause” that the person could be removed from the United States.
To opponents, the legislation looked like a bill to sanction racial profiling. SB 1070 inspired a group of rappers to produce “Back to Arizona,” an updated version of Public Enemy’s “By the Time I Get to Arizona,” which was itself written in response to Arizona’s 1990 opposition to a state holiday to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. After the 1993 Super Bowl was pulled from Tempe, a vote was taken again, and the holiday was reinstated. Similar economic boycotts took place over SB 1070, with conference bookings dropping by 30 percent.63
The state launched an appeal, but the injunction was upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in April 2011. It reached the Supreme Court the following year. In its June 2012 decision, the Court upheld section 2B, which required “law enforcement officers to determine immigration status during a lawful stop.” The three other contested sections—making it a crime not to carry alien registration papers; forbidding an unauthorized immigrant to solicit or undertake work; and allowing an arrest without a warrant for anyone suspected of being undocumented—were struck down. Still, other states followed suit, with attempts at or passage of similar legislation in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, and Utah.
Arizona is also home to Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Maricopa County, who came to national prominence for his own controversial methods in dealing with detainees and prisoners. Although voters in the 2016 election
decided to end his twenty-four-year reign, denying him a seventh term, he was back in the public spotlight in August 2017 after receiving a presidential pardon. Arpaio and the Maricopa Country Sheriff’s Office had been charged with routinely violating the rights of Hispanic people by detaining them on the basis of racial profiling. In 2011 he was ordered to stop such behavior, and in July 2017, after much legal wrangling, he was found guilty of criminal contempt of court for defying that order. The pardon was a controversial move for Trump and immediately met with criticism from Hispanic and immigration rights groups.64
A 2009 New Yorker profile of Arpaio highlighted many of the reasons he has been embraced by opponents of immigration.65 In response to prison overcrowding, he set up army surplus tents and surrounded them with barbed wire until his tent city held twenty-five hundred inmates. He banned cigarettes, coffee, hot food, even salt and pepper, spending 30 cents per meal on the inmates. Most television was banned, and he put the prisoners to work in chain gangs. He also tried to humiliate them by making them wear pink garments, including underclothes.
Many of those in his custody had not been charged with a crime; indeed, most were undocumented people rounded up by the police. Arpaio charged illegal immigrants as “coconspirators” in their own human trafficking, making their transgression a class 4 felony—and rendering them ineligible to post bond.66 Yet what Arpaio saved in salt and pepper was far outstripped by the cost of lawsuits. Inmates, and families of inmates who died in custody, have gone to court in droves, and by the time of his run for reelection in 2016, the county had paid out nearly $80 million in legal costs.67
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