Land of Open Graves, anthropologist Jason De León wrote that with the “Prevention Through Deterrence” strategy, border zones became “spaces of exception—physical and political locations where an individual’s rights and protections can be stripped away upon entrance.”
“Having your body consumed by wild animals,” he wrote of conditions on the U.S.-Mexico border, “is but one of the many ‘exceptional’ things that can happen in the Sonoran desert as a result of federal immigration policies.”21
De León further explained that the U.S. borderlands have become “a remote deathscape where American necropolitics are pecked onto the bones of those we deem excludable.”22
Indeed, the remains of more than 6,000 people have been recovered in the U.S. borderlands since the federal government implemented these policies in the mid-1990s. Scholar Mary Pat Brady described this as “a kind of passive capital punishment,” in which “immigrants have been effectively blamed for their own deaths.”23 According to the report “Fatal Journeys,”24 40,000 people have perished crossing borders worldwide between the years 2000 and 2014. The International Organization on Migration, which issued the report, says there are probably many more uncounted.
Given the predicted increases of people displaced by environmental destabilization, we can only predict in turn that increasing numbers will brave hot deserts and hostile seas, circumventing the places where surveillance is constant. The changing climate, subsequent upheavals, and fortified borders are on course to geopolitically remake the globe in profound ways. “While there are examples of militarized borders in past eras—for example, the Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War—most political borders have never been militarized,” geographer Reece Jones wrote in the book Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India, and Israel. “Even the simple idea of using mutually agreed-upon borders to divide separate states is a relatively recent development.”25
Now the militarized fringes of countries—with the injected xenophobia exemplified by the Donald Trump rise to power, or the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union known as Brexit, will result in the the 21st century being defined by the refugee meeting the razor-wire wall guarded by the guy with the big gun.
While the Obama administration is given much credit for the institutionalization of global warming with the U.S. government and national security apparatus, it was the George W. Bush administration, after nearly eight years of climate change denial, that in its waning days laid the foundation for today’s climate security doctrine, as crudely outlined by Kaplan. Right when money was flooding into the newly formed Department of Homeland Security and its border apparatus, in the exact period between 2006 and 2008 when the U.S. Border Patrol was in the largest hiring surge in its history—adding 6,000 new agents to its ranks—and just when bulldozers were cutting through pristine landscape to erect 650 miles of walls and barriers along the U.S. international boundary with Mexico under the Secure Fence Act of 2006, six new major unclassified documents came out of the military and intelligence communities. Their warning was that climate shifts would threaten U.S. national security and this time the reports had the backing of generals such as Stephen Cheney. There was the CNA Military Advisory Board report titled “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change,”26 the United States Joint Forces Command report “The Joint Operating Environment, Trends and Challenges for the Future Joint Force Through 2030,” the National Intelligence Council’s “National Intelligence Assessment (NIA) on the National Security of Climate Change to 2030,” and the Department of Defense’s “National Defense Strategy” to name some of them.27 Following the lead of The Coming Anarchy and the Bill Clinton administration, Bush was setting the stage for Obama.
When Obama told Coast Guard cadets about the rising possibility of climate refugees, he did not say what he meant by “they will have to respond.” One might think that he meant rescue operations. However, every other year the Coast Guard, other Homeland Security agencies such as Customs and Border Protection, and the U.S. military participate in a mass-migration simulation in the Caribbean, similar to the one done in Nogales in 1995, known as “Integrated Advance.” This is part of Operation Vigilant Sentry, a mass-migration contingency plan that involves the “interdiction, screening, processing, detention, and repatriation” of people. In other words, mass detention and deportation are now rehearsed like war games on the high, rising seas south of Florida. As the 2014 addendum to the DHS Climate Adaptation Plan states: “A mass migration plan has been developed, and a plan for increased operations planning of mass migration is under development.”28 It was as if the border fortress described by Schwartz and Randall in the 2003 Pentagon assessment An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications For U.S. National Security was coming into being, the unthinkable already here. This was where the doctrines of Obama and Trump meet in the climate destablilization era: a machine of arrests, expulsions, and banishment from the United States.
DONALD TRUMP
The immediate U.S. response to one of the most devastating natural disasters to hit the Western Hemisphere in the 21st century would have been befitting of U.S. President Donald Trump. Much like the scenarios fully practiced during Integrated Advance trainings, not only did 16 U.S. Coast Guard cutters prowl Haitian waters waiting to interdict anyone leaving the country, but the private prison company Geo Group set up a temporary detention center in Guantánamo Bay while Haitians were still digging themselves out of the rubble. The earthquake killed about 230,000 people and displaced more than a million. The message from U.S. Homeland Security was clear, and even broadcast over the country in the Kreyol language by a U.S. Air Force bomber: If you leave, you will be arrested and returned. “Please: If any Haitians are watching, there may be an impulse to leave the island and to come here,” Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano pleaded, “Please do not have us divert our necessary rescue and relief efforts that are going into Haiti by trying to leave at this point.”
When President Donald Trump took office, at his disposal was the most massive border enforcement apparatus in United States history, built on turbocharge for more than 20 years, even able to act with startling efficiency to faraway disasters such as in Haiti. At his disposal were more U.S. Border Patrol agents than ever before in U.S. history, approximately 21,000, a five-fold increase from 1994 numbers. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), at more than 60,000 agents had become the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country. Including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the 2017 border and immigration enforcement budget was $20 billion, a significant jump from early 1990s annual budgets (from the Immigration and Naturalization Service), which hovered around $1.5 billion. Such was the enforcement arsenal before Trump ever set foot in the White House. And at Trump’s disposal were the relationships with untold thousands of local and state police through many collaboration programs with ICE and CBP, such as Operation Stonegarden and 287(g) agreements—accords between DHS and local police jurisdiction that deputized police officers as immigration agents—to name just two.
At his disposal was the capacity to extend the U.S. border to the shores of Haiti, to the Mexican divide with Guatemala, and to the Iraq border with Iran. On top of this, Trump promises to build a more chilling and ramped-up border and immigration control apparatus, capturing, whether he admits it or not, people coming from environmental catastrophes.
Indeed, Trump’s climate change skepticism is well known. On November 6, 2012, he sent out a tweet that read “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”29 On January 25, 2014, the president tweeted “NBC News just called it the great freeze—coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX?”30 On January 29 of that same day he tweeted “Give me clean, beautiful and healthy air—not the same old climate change (global warming) bullshit! I am tired of hearing this nonsense.”31 On January 6, 2014, Trump called climate change a “hoax” on Fox & Friends, and on September 24, 2015, he said,
