If you hadn’t heard, Staples is running for Lieutenant Governor in 2014. For the past year, the Ag Commissioner has been beating the war drums and burnishing his border security credentials. Last March, he unveiled a fancy, new taxpayer-funded Web site called “Protect Your Texas Border” which offers such highlights as night-vision surveillance chases of drug traffickers along the Rio Grande and a video interview with a Texas Ranger who proclaims: “We are in a war and I am not going to sugarcoat it by any means. We are in a war, and it is what it is.”

The Web site also hosts a forum where visitors are encouraged to share their views on securing the border. The forum was dinged by the press, however, after a number of posts advocated for vigilante justice offering such gems of advice as “Killem all!!!! They are destroying or great country.”

Now, we have Staples’ “military assessment” advocating for greater militarization of the border, which sets a dangerous precedent and adds to the growing campaign by the GOP to turn Mexico into Afghanistan. In the report written by retired Generals Barry McCaffery and Robert Scales drug cartel operatives are referred to as “narco-terrorists” and U.S. border counties are referred to as the “sanitary tactical zone” where military operations can push back the “narco-terrorists.” The generals applaud the Texas Department of Public Safety’s “comprehensive military-like operational campaign against narco-terrorists” and suggest that Texas serve as the national model for the nation-wide militarization of the border.

“Five years of state operations have yielded valuable lessons and insights that can improve the border security operations of states and U.S. federal agencies. Below are insights shared by senior leaders within the Texas DPS who consider their operations in the war against narco-terrorism to be a model for how war might be prosecuted in a wider, multi-state and national campaign. They accede to the face that much of their effort was derived from experience in recent campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan…”

The only problem is this isn’t a war and U.S. border counties — last I checked — are still considered part of the United States and civilian territory. They also boast crime and murder rates far lower than cities such as Washington, D.C., according to FBI crime statistics.

Despite this fact, GOP leaders are pushing ahead at both the federal and state level to turn the border region into a theater of war. After 9/11, Congress gave the Department of Homeland Security the right to set up internal checkpoints within 100 miles of the international borders where they have the ability to stop people, question them and ask them to prove their citizenship. Now, Staples and other politicians are calling for more militarization which will inevitably deteriorate further U.S. citizens constitutional rights.

I don’t want to understate the growing security crisis in Mexico. It does have an impact on the United States. But a military-only solution doesn’t address the underlying factors that are fueling organized crime’s takeover of Mexico – namely poverty, impunity, government corruption and the U.S’. multi-billion dollar drug market.

It’s a purely cynical and political move to only push for militarization and not address the myriad social, economic and political issues fueling the crisis in Mexico. For Republican candidates such as Staples issues such as combating poverty, immigration reform or revising our outmoded drug laws are not politically expedient. They just don’t draw GOP Primary voters to the election booths like armored cars or boots on the ground, which is a shame for both the United States and Mexico.

Published on: Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Melissa del Bosque has a Masters in Journalism from U.T. Austin and a M.P.H. from the Texas A&M School of Rural Public Health.  She spent five years in the Texas Senate as a communications director. Her work has been published in Time magazine and the NACLA Report on the Americas.

Follow @MelissaLaLinea on Twitter.

The National Security and Federal Lands Protection Act, authored by Utah Republican Rep. Rob Bishop, would prevent the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Secretary of the Interior from enacting environmental regulations that hinder the operations of the CBP on public lands within 100 miles of the U.S. border. It was voted out of the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources last month — with “yes” votes from Republican Texas Reps. Louie Gohmert and Bill Flores.

The bill, Bishop said, “is a common sense solution that addresses one of the prevailing issues preventing us from gaining full operational control of the border — the U.S. Border Patrol’s lack of sufficient access to millions of acres of federally owned land.”

Environmental groups, however, call the proposal a land grab that would allow the federal government to circumvent environmental regulations whenever it chooses, placing water, fresh air and other natural resources in peril.

“There are literally no checks on the agency. They would have unfettered access and control to do whatever they choose; there would be no oversight in Congress,” said Paul Spitler, senior regional conservation representative for the Wilderness Society. “This bill is a wrong-headed approach to a serious problem. … Overturning the laws that protect Americans, that’s not going to make our border more secure.”

If passed, the resolution would allow the U.S. Border Patrol access to territories like Texas’ Big Bend National Park to build patrol roads and fences and set up surveillance equipment. The proposal also authorizes the use of Border Patrol vehicles and aircraft and the deployment of “tactical infrastructure, including forward operating bases,” according to statement from Bishop’s office. National wildlife refuges, forests and lands overseen by the Bureau of Land Management would also be open to the U.S. Border Patrol.

Representatives with the Department of the Interior declined to speak about the proposal, saying the agency does not comment on pending legislation. The USDA did not respond to a request for comment.

But opponents of the measure say it simply isn’t necessary.

“The Border Patrol has been working closely with the land management agencies to ensure that they have the access they need to make the borders more secure, and they’ve testified to this fact,” Spitler said. He cited a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office published last year that showed a majority of Border Patrol supervisors said environmental regulations did not impede their abilities to patrol the border.

“Most patrol agents-in-charge whom we interviewed said that the border security status of their jurisdictions has been unaffected by land management laws,” the report stated. “Instead, factors … such as the remoteness and ruggedness of the terrain or dense vegetation have had the greatest effect on their abilities to achieve or maintain operational control.”

But more than two dozen groups, including the National Border Patrol Council and theNational Association of Police Organizations, support the measure.

“For years, the federal government has used environmental regulations to block access for our Border Patrol agents to the over 20 million acres of federal land along the U.S.-Mexican Border,” the NBPC said in a statement. “This lack of access has resulted in an increase in criminal activities such as drug smuggling and human trafficking.”

Added the police association, “Currently, Border Patrol agents are unable to access portions of the 20.7 million acres along our southern borders and 1,000 miles of our northern borders.”

These arguments haven’t swayed environmentalists with the Rio Grande International Study Center, a Laredo-based conservation group dedicated to preserving the Rio Grande-Rio Bravo watershed. They question the motives behind the proposal.

“This is a bill that would impact such a huge part of the country and so many people in an area that falls outside of [Bishop's] own district,” said Tricia Cortez, the group’s executive director. Cortez adds that, at least in Laredo, federal law enforcement officials work closely with landowners and public officials. “As far as I know there hasn’t been an issue where there are all these kinds of impediments that prevent them from doing their job.”

Spitler said all sides favor a secure border. He said this proposal is really an effort by conservatives to dilute environmental protections.

“It’s part of a pattern of scapegoating environmental laws for any problem by extreme members of Congress,” he said. “Their solutions always seem to be to overturn the environmental laws. Well, the environmental laws aren’t the problem here.”

Officials at Big Bend National Park in West Texas said the current system works quite well.

Chief Ranger Allen Etheridge, who oversees law enforcement operations there, declined to comment on the proposal, but said his agency has an “excellent” relationship with U.S. Border Patrol. Park officials provide the agency access to communications equipment and even to the park’s aircraft for surveillance support. Etheridge says there has never been a situation where park staff has impeded agents from performing their duties, and agents in turn alert Big Bend employees to situations they feel need to be addressed. Agents actually live on park land, he added.

“We help them if our agents encounter [a situation] with immigration concerns … and when Border Patrol encounters resource damage or wildlife crimes, they call us,” he said.

Bill Brooks, the public information officer for Border Patrol’s Beg Bend Sector, declined to comment on the proposal. But he concurred with Etheridge’s assessment of the relationship.

Crystal Feldman, the press secretary for the Committee on Natural Resources, told the Tribune the bill is still pending, and could not comment on when the measure would go before the full House of Representatives for a vote

The first notable thing about the border wall between the United States and Mexico is that the damned thing exists. Unless you live in the most southwestern reaches of America, you may have assumed, as I did, that the whole thing was merely a proposal, one of those preposterous ideas that are floated in Washington by politicians hotdogging for their constituents, only to be shot down by saner minds. But no, there is a wall, or rather, there are several walls, intermittently covering more than 600 miles of the 1,954-mile-long boundary between the U.S. and Mexico, including most of California’s and Arizona’s borders and much of New Mexico’s. (South Texas residents, a formidably independent bunch, have slowed its progress across our state, though some cities, like Brownsville, have been unable to stop the wall from slicing through their community.)

Almost all of it has been built by the Department of Homeland Security in the past four years, under the aegis of the Real ID Act, which granted the Secretary of the DHS an absolute, monarchical freedom to barricade our borders in whatever manner he chose, unhampered by the established laws of the land, including those covering environmental protection, clean air and water, and historical preservation. Starting at the Pacific Ocean, then—or, more accurately, about 450 yards into the ocean, presumably to deter swimmers, but not really strong swimmers—the wall runs over hill and dale, gouging a path through wildlife preservations, Indian reservations, and many poor neighborhoods (though at least one golf club managed to secure a waiver). In some places it’s little more than reinforced hurricane fencing with barbed wire on top, but in most others it’s an imposing structure built of slabs of concrete or steel that extend as high as 25 feet. It has cost over $2 billion to build thus far, and it’s expected to top out at more than $6 billion, not counting future costs for upkeep. An expensive project, and what’s more, ugly, unnecessary, and ineffective. And so we have The American Wall(MS Zephyr Publishing, distributed by the University of Texas Press), a forthright attack on the entire project, composed of two volumes, the first presenting nearly one hundred photographs by the French photographer Maurice Sherif, the second containing seven essays about the wall. The whole thing comes in a slipcase and retails for $150.

If you’re like me, you’ll read the essays first, and while you probably won’t find yourself any more cheerful when you’re done, you’ll almost certainly be better informed. They’re prefaced by a monody from the essayist Charles Bowden, a longtime observer of life and death along the border, and a brief statement from Sherif. Then comes a series of dismaying facts, presented without embellishment.

Anthropologists Miguel Díaz-Barriga and Margaret E. Dorsey focus on South Texas, where the wall is seen as an eyesore, an encroachment, and a crude obstacle to communities that have traditionally enjoyed fluid relations with their Mexican neighbors. What’s more, they point out, most of it has been built in urban areas and small towns, forcing illegal immigrants to cross the border in harsh and isolated regions, thereby increasing the number who die along the way. University of Texas law professor Denise Gilman neatly sums up the many ways in which the wall violates American legal precedents and international human rights law. Scott Nicol, an activist with No Border Wall and the Sierra Club, details how it threatens animal species whose existence depends on their ability to roam the lands around the Rio Grande. The last essay is an unfortunately homiletic performance by a doctor named James Tryon, but it’s followed by an exceptionally useful timeline, put together by the researcher Martha Davidson. There you will learn, for example, that barricading the border is utterly irrelevant to about half of all illegal immigrants, who come to the U.S. on legitimate visas and simply stay when they run out, and it’s little more than a speed bump for many of the rest (in four years, the wall has been breached well over three thousand times).

Volume one, which is the impetus for the entire publication, is more of a mixed bag. To be sure, Sherif’s photographs are beautiful, and they’ve been printed in quadratone black and white, an elaborate process that produces an unusually rich tonal range. Together with the translucent negative borders that frame them, this gives the pictures a plush, dreamy quality. Taken as a whole, it’s obviously a deluxe production. And just as obviously, it’s all wrong.

Almost everything about the pictures suggests a will to elegance that’s inappropriate to the matter at hand. Back in the day, black and white film was the standard for both newspapers and art photography. But that changed in the seventies and eighties, and now it looks deliberately archaic and somewhat effete—the photographic equivalent of wearing spats, or using the word “shall.” By the same token, the distorted strips at the edges of Sherif’s photographs indicate that he shot on large-format film, using a discontinued stock called Polaroid Type 55—an expensive and unwieldy process, useful mainly for large reproductions but somewhat pretentious otherwise. Moreover, by printing beyond the boundary of the negative, Sherif proves that he didn’t crop the photos, in accordance with an outmoded notion of authenticity that insists that “real” photographers frame their pictures through the camera rather than in the darkroom. It’s all very precious, “artistic” in the worst way.

As a result, Sherif’s pictures make the wall seem quite lovely as it wends abstractly across the landscape. In his opening statement he asks how “the United States became such an egregious violator of basic human rights.” Yet not one of his images shows a human being; the lives that the wall has degraded have been shut out of the pictures as well. What’s left looks like an art project—something by Christo, say, or a Richard Serra sculpture blown up to enormous scale. But the wall is not a work of art. It’s a crude and wasteful boondoggle. It should have been shot to reflect as much.

To be fair, Sherif has merely fallen victim to one of the commoner paradoxes of the medium: It’s very difficult to take a good picture of an ugly thing—to preserve its ugliness in a photograph that is estimable and compelling. The camera tends to glamorize whatever it sees, making the silkiest images out of those things we should find most revolting. Many photographers have exploited this phenomenon—Sebastião Salgado comes to mind, with his epic and hyper-refined treatment of miserable conditions around the world—and many have been admired for it. But I find it meretricious at best and vile at worst, and in this case it yields an especially cruel irony. As a photo book, The American Wall is very much like the American wall: too big, too expensive, and oblivious to the needs of the people it’s meant to serve.

Read an Excerpt: The American Wall: From the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico Copyright (c) 2011. Courtesy of the University of Texas Press. Buy it from University of Texas Press.

If HB 428, authored by state Rep. Allen Fletcher, is passed into law, Mexican Consulate staff would not be allowed to go onto to a school or college campus to help students with their matricula consular applications.

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Fletcher, who served in the Houston Police Department for 21 years, explained the rationale behind his bill.

“The bottom line is we’re trying to keep foreign consuls from being on our campuses,” said Fletcher, R-Houston. “I don’t like them using our public facilities and our schools to basically access the foreign nationals that are in our country and give them an opportunity to take advantage of our benefits when they’re here illegally.”

The Matrícula Consular de Alta Seguridad (MCAS) (Consular Identification Card) is an identification card issued by the Government of Mexico through its consulate offices to Mexican nationals residing outside of Mexico regardless of their immigration status. -

It’s ridiculous but not terribly surprising in the current political environment. There are 40+ similar legislative proposals currently proposed in the Texas legislature according to Denise Gilman of Clinical Professor of Law – Immigration Clinic – University of Texas School of Law

© Copyright of the Rio Grande Guardian, www.riograndeguardian.com. Publisher: Steve Taylor. All rights reserved. – By Jesse Bertron

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of San Diego and Imperial Counties is calling on U.S., Mexican and international officials to recognize the alarming number of migrant deaths at the U.S. – Mexico border as an international humanitarian crisis; address the ongoing violations of the right to life and identify protective measures going forward.

The ACLU joined together with Mexico’s National Commission on Human Rights (Comision Nacional de Derechos Humanos – CNDH) and sent a letter to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) – a commission of the Organization of American States (OAS). In the letter, they requested that the IACHR get permission from the U.S. and Mexican governments to make an onsite visit to the region. They further requested that once there, the IACHR conduct an investigation on the crisis, issue a report for the General Assembly of the OAS, and identify measures that both countries should adopt to bring them in compliance with their international human rights obligations.

For emphasis, the ACLU and CNDH also provided the commission with the 76 page white paper they drafted documenting the situation: Humanitarian Crisis: Migrant Deaths at the U.S.-Mexico Border. The release of this report marked the 15th anniversary of the border enforcement policy, Operation Gatekeeper. This policy not only provided a higher concentration of border agents, but added walls and fencing along populated areas, forcing migrants into hostile environments and creating natural barriers that increased the incidence of injury and death. Since the program’s inception, an average of one migrant per day has died.

“More than 5,000 people have died crossing our border, and an estimated seven to eleven percent of them are children,” said Kevin Keenan, Executive Director of the ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties. “Equally alarming are the hundreds of family members who are left in inconsolable limbo, never knowing the fate of their loved one.”

According to their report, family members have no alternative recourse, and are often faced with complex or contradictory methods and red-tape when merely trying to locate a loved one who may be missing or even dead. State obligations to these families with regards to migrant deaths at the border has never been addressed. There is no uniform standard or centralized data base for locating the migrants or identifying their remains. One-quarter of those who perish in transit are never identified, leaving their families behind in a permanent state of anguish.

Ten years ago, the San Diego ACLU submitted a petition to the IACHR alleging that U.S. border enforcement-deterrence strategies under Operation Gatekeeper violated the right to life under Article 1 of the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man. The Commission initially expressed concern over the findings, even agreeing to monitor the situation, but eventually dismissed the petition and things have only gotten worse.

“Since the Commission consented to monitor the border situation, we respectfully ask that they now act on their concerns,” said Jose Luis Soberanes, president of CNDH. “When they initially expressed unease, only 300 migrants had died. Today, nearly twenty times that number have died—many of their deaths directly attributable to U.S. border enforcement policies.”

The local ACLU hopes that since the United States and Mexico are bound by the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, they will soon begin to adopt policies or negotiate bilateral agreements to deal with the crisis. Their recent white paper on the situation only highlights the fact that to date, the two countries have seemingly abandoned their obligations under international law to respect and ensure the rights of migrant populations.

Been travelling and photographing the Wall since 2006 and there is no reason to believe that additional investments in the Wall project – both physical Wall and the new “virtual Wall” – will create an effective deterrent.

How much will it cost to tear down the Wall?