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The U.S.-Mexico border spans nearly 2,000 miles, from Brownsville, Texas / Matamoros, Tamaulipas in the east, to San Diego, California / Tijuana, Baja California in the west. The border line passes through mountains, deserts, marshes and other incredibly diverse ecological regions. The border wall is not always built on the international boundary line - at times it is built up to a mile away, cutting people off from their private property, restricting access to parks and protected refuge areas.
Over the last three decades, the border has become home to one of the most militarized regions in the world. The deadly border wall has divided vibrant communities, put people’s lives at risk, harmed wildlife, and destroyed sacred indigenous sites.
As of January 21, 2021, 776 miles of wall exist dividing the U.S. and Mexico -- covering about 40% of the total length of the border. A total of 654 miles of border wall were built before Trump took office by the Bush and Obama administrations. The state of Arizona had the most miles of pre-Trump border wall construction at a total of 307 miles (including both pedestrian walls and vehicle barriers). California, Texas and New Mexico each had 116 miles before Trump rapidly and forcefully continued construction.
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Irregular crossings between ports of entry at the southern border peaked around the year 2000, and sharply decreased since then. There were about 852,000 apprehensions in fiscal 2019, according to the latest government data.
Increased border enforcement in the early 2000s pushed a large portion of Mexican immigrants to cross in remote areas of the Sonoran Desert along Arizona’s border. Then beginning in 2014, more individuals started fleeing unstable conditions and violence in Central America. Many Central Americans took the quickest route through Mexico to the border with south Texas, which explains why today a majority of apprehensions take place in Texas. In 2019, there were some 339,000 apprehensions in the Rio Grande Valley sector, accounting for about 40% of the total. The second largest number of apprehensions occurred in the El Paso Sector.
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Few people are familiar with the racist origins of the improper entry (8 U.S.C. § 1325) and re-entry after deportation (8 U.S.C. § 1326) charges made against people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border between ports of entry. In the early 1900s, nativists wanted to restrict Mexican immigration, but the agricultural industry relied heavily on Mexican labor. In 1929, Coleman Livingston Blease, an unrepentant white supremacist Democrat who was “notorious for playing on the prejudices of poor whites to gain their votes,” proposed a law that would criminalize those who did not cross the border through an official port of entry, where Mexicans would have to pay a high fee and sometimes be subjected to kerosene baths and humiliating delousing procedures. Because of these fees and procedures, many Mexicans avoided ports of entry and informally crossed the border, as both U.S. and Mexican citizens had done for decades. Blease’s law passed and thus improper entry became a federal misdemeanor, punishable up to 6 months in prison, and a felony, punishable up to 20 years when combined with another felony.
In the first 10 years of the law being in effect, about 44,000 immigrants were prosecuted, but during World War II, the prosecutions decreased because the U.S. needed more people to fill a labor shortage while many men and women were fighting overseas (this was the start of the Bracero Program). Prosecutions of immigrants under 8 U.S.C. § 1325 and § 1326 did not again become a priority until after 9/11 under the presidency of George W. Bush. Now, illegal entry and re-entry cases are the majority of cases prosecuted in federal courts, further clogging up the system and wasting federal resources.
In fiscal year 2007, nearly 30,000 people were charged with illegal entry and re-entry. This number more than doubled in 2008 with the expansion of Operation Streamline. Prosecutions for entry-related offenses reached an all-time high of 106,312 in FY 2019. Prosecutions of immigration charges sharply declined in April 2020, after the administration temporarily halted Operation Streamline and other programs for prosecution across the border due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Recent data from TRAC shows that prosecution rates remain at historically low levels.Along the Southwest border, the Trump administration spent vast resources by referring thousands of people for criminal prosecutions under 8 U.S.C. § 1325 or § 1326. This included prosecutions of asylum seekers, in violation of Article 31 of the 1951 Refugee Convention and Refugee Act of 1980. The DHS Inspector General found in 2015 that the joint DOJ/DHS border prosecution program (i.e., Operation Streamline) was used regularly against those who express fear of persecution or return to their home countries, and found that en masse prosecutions may violate U.S. treaty obligations. Despite these findings, DHS had not made any notable changes in its monitoring or operation of the program, and in fact has expanded the use of prosecutions and continued to use Streamline for individuals who express a fear of return to their home country until the COVID-19 pandemic.
It’s also worth noting that 8 U.S.C. § 1325 prosecutions were the driving force behind the Trump Administration’s family separation policy, when the 2018 “zero-tolerance” directive required each U.S. Attorney’s Office to prosecute all DHS referrals of unauthorized entry violations.
It is interesting to note that prosecutions of improper entry (8 U.S.C. § 1325) have ceased completely. This can be attributed to the continued use of Title 42 by Border Patrol, who immediately expel people encountered between ports of entry.
Also problematic is that DHS has not adequately evaluated the full costs for criminal prosecutions under 8 U.S.C. § 1325 or § 1326. A 2015 DHS Inspector General report found that CBP did not have a system in place to differentiate the costs of Streamline from other CBP enforcement activities. In 2017, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a report that found that the Border Patrol did not effectively account for all the costs of these prosecutions, focusing only on CBP’s own costs. In December 2019, GAO published another report finding that agencies had to divert resources to support the prosecution priorities outlined by the Trump Administration in 2017 and 2018, including personnel and physical space. CBP has failed to account for the full monetary and human costs of implementing its deterrence policies, and has not provided sufficient justification for the use of taxpayer dollars.
These prosecutions have also shown to be ineffective in deterring improper crossings. Instead, it makes it harder for immigrants to regularize their status due to having a criminal record, and it may disqualify legitimate claims of asylum from courts.
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For decades, thousands of people have died attempting to cross the southwestern border in remote regions. The causes of death vary. Many have died due to drowning, exposure to harsh temperatures and terrain, dehydration, heat exhaustion, and dangers related to smuggling, among others. U.S. policies have directly contributed to these deaths by forcibly pushing migrants into the desert and other dangerous terrains and away from urban centers. The lynchpin policy of ‘prevention through deterrence’ was designed to raise the cost of crossing by funneling people into the dangerous Sonoran desert and beyond.
Since then, a large body of research has shown that hardened border enforcement raised the number of deaths, and overall failed to decrease the number of undocumented entries. Moreover, the continued militarization of the border region has exacerbated the devastating loss of life in the southwest border.
In addition, many lives could have been saved by more concerted search and rescue efforts. Border Patrol focuses on enforcement, neglecting its responsibility as the primary responder for migrants in desperate need of rescue. Counties forward all the 911 calls from undocumented migrants crossing the border to Border Patrol agents who are often unresponsive.
According to a report analyzing calls received by the 24-hour Missing Migrant Crisis Line, Border Patrol only conducted a confirmed search for a distressed person in 37% of emergency cases. These searches often last less than a day and in some cases less than an hour. In 40% of distress cases that families and advocates referred to Border Patrol, the agency replied that they would not conduct a search for the distressed person. In an additional 23% of emergency cases, Border Patrol refused to provide family members or humanitarian groups confirmation that a rescue mobilization was taking place for a known person in distress.
