In the first few years of Operation Gatekeeper, and the similar Operation Hold the Line at El Paso, the number of Mexicans who died en route north increased markedly. The University of Houston Center for Immigration Research, citing what it called conservative estimates, reported that well over a thousand undocumented immigrants died trying to cross the border from 1993 to 1996. “For every body found there is certainly one that isn’t,” said the center’s codirector, Nestor Rodriguez.3
“It’s a shocking number of deaths,” was the response from the late Roberto Martínez, then the director of the U.S.-Mexico Border Program for the American Friends Service Committee. “It sets us back on the human rights issue. It can’t be ignored by the governments on both sides of the border.”4 Yet in the years since, the border remained heavily fortified at San Diego and other urban centers and the death toll in the deserts keeps climbing. By 2020, the official body count was closing in on ten thousand, with the wilds of the desert undoubtedly providing the final resting place for scores more unclaimed and uncounted.
A report in 2001 by the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) had already condemned the Southwest Border Strategy, the name used by the Border Patrol for its scheme to dissuade illegal crossings by hardening urban ports of entry. By that time the Border Patrol had doubled its agent roster over a period of some seven years and had seen its annual budget multiply four times to well over $6 billion dollars. The result? “The primary discernable effect,” stated the GAO, was simply a “shifting of the illegal alien traffic.”5 And the deaths of over two thousand migrants.
The Southwest Border Strategy was the brainchild of former El Paso Representative Silvestre Reyes. Reyes held unique credentials for his job. He was the first member of Congress with working experience as a Border Patrolman. He retired after 26 years with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 13 of them as Border Patrol chief in Texas. “The chaos of illegal immigration, uncontrolled and unaddressed, as it existed before I implemented Hold the Line in El Paso, was unacceptable,” Reyes testified. “It was unacceptable to the officers and it was unacceptable to the community.” Even as the deaths mounted in the deserts far from El Paso, Reyes expressed pride and confidence in the strategy.
I have first-hand knowledge of not only the difficulties and struggles we face on the border, but also of the success we have had with initiatives such as Operation Hold the Line and Operation Gatekeeper. While our Border Patrol has made progress, we all agree that we have a long way to go before we establish control of our 2,000-mile border with Mexico.6
The Border Patrol requires its agents speak enough Spanish to pass the agency’s language tests. That prerequisite is at least partially responsible for the fact that many of the agents are Latino. Some were born in Mexico and became U.S. citizens; some were born in the United States and have lived in Mexico. Others have parents or grandparents who came across the border without proper documents. Veteran agent Marco Ramirez was raised in Mexico, but says he does not let his heritage interfere with his work. “The way I see it,” he explains, “you carry the badge in one hand, and in the other hand, you carry your heart.”7
Immigration invaded presidential politics during the 1996 campaign, with both political parties inciting fear. First Bob Dole blanketed television with ads accusing Bill Clinton of being soft on undocumented immigrants. The pictures accompanying the aggressive narration were of migrants clandestinely crossing into California. Clinton was on the air in retaliation with pictures of a brown-skinned man handcuffed by the Border Patrol, inflammatory images that were punctuated by text claiming a 40 percent increase to the Border Patrol ranks during Clinton’s first term, along with record numbers of deportees.8
Shot Dead
More Border Patrolmen on the frontier, of course, resulted in increased encounters between them and Mexicans trying to cross into the United States. Over a weekend in late September 1998, Border Patrol agents twice reacted with guns to what they said were threats from Mexicans who were armed with rocks and refused orders to stop. Agents shot both migrants dead. The official Border Patrol explanation was terse, impersonal and clinical: “Fearing for his life, [the agent] brings out the weapon and shoots this person, striking the person in the torso area,” said Border Patrol spokeswoman Gloria Chavez about one of the shootings. Her colleague, Border Patrol spokesman Mario Villarreal said about the other, “The agent ordered him to drop the rock and stop. [The man] went on in an aggressive manner. The agent discharged his service firearm in self-defense, striking the individual in the torso.”9
“Something is going wrong,” was the response of the Mexican consul general in San Diego, Luis Herrera-Lasso, who explained that rock throwing is commonplace along the border and that the Border Patrol need not use deadly force to combat it.10
In 1989, the U.S. government sent regular army troops back to the Mexican border, this time with the rationale of fighting drug traffickers. On July 30, 1997, it suspended those border operations, two months after a Marine corporal shot and killed 18-year-old Esequiel Hernandez Jr. as the high school student was herding goats near his hometown of Redford, Texas.
Redford, understandably, was shocked.
“The only thing we know is that a good kid is dead who shouldn’t be,” said Hernandez’s English teacher Kevin Stahnke immediately after the killing.11
The teacher and the rest of Redford—the population in 1997 was 107—soon learned that Esequiel was herding his family’s goats down near the Rio Grande, as usual, the afternoon of the day he was killed. He was carrying his grandfather’s 1910 rifle, as usual, to protect the goats from a pack of wild dogs.12 He apparently shot a few rounds in the direction of brown shapes moving near his goats.
Those shapes were four Marines, covered in brush for camouflage, their faces blackened. They were deployed on the border for surveillance duty, assigned to track suspected drug smugglers and report on the traffickers’ whereabouts to the Border Patrol. These Marines were a unit of something called Joint Task Force Six, a Federal agency set-up to coordinate operations between the military and the Border Patrol. The U.S. military is proscribed by law from performing domestic police work. That prohibition was established in 1878 with the passage of the Posse Comitatus Act. But in 1981, federal law was changed to allow for cooperation between the military and civilian police, specifically for the purpose of stopping illegal drugs at the border.
Joint Task Force Six, known as JTF-6, was the work of then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, who—along with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell—chose to militarize the border, an escalation of the so-called War on Drugs. Part of their strategy was to deploy the Marines without telling local townspeople. Since Esequiel and the rest of Redford were not informed of the patrol, they also could not know the orders for the Marines’ tour in their neighborhood. Unlike domestic police, the Marines were not to identify themselves. They were not to fire warning shots. And if they felt threatened, they were expected to shoot to kill.13 These were their “rules of engagement.” As the months passed following young Esequiel’s death, that term, “rules of engagement,” infuriated the citizens of Redford.
“What are these ‘rules of engagement?’”