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With the agility of a seasoned Border Patrol veteran, the woman rushed after the students. She caught up with them just before they entered the exhibition hall of the eighth annual Border Security Expo, reaching out and grabbing the nearest of them by the shoulder. Slightly out of breath, she said, “You can’t go in there, give me back your badges.”

The astonished students had barely caught a glimpse of the dazzling pavilion of science-fiction-style products in that exhibition hall at the Phoenix Convention Center. There, just beyond their view, more than 100 companies, including Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Verizon, were trying to sell the latest in futuristic border policing technology to anyone with the money to buy it.

Read the rest here on TomDispatch: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175834/tomgram%3A_todd_miller%2C_the_creation_of_a_border_security_state

And please check out Tom Engelhardt’s introduction (which will appear when you click the above link) to see how you by purchasing the book you can support the great journalism produced by TomDispatch.

Texas Observer: You cover a lot of territory in this book. It’s a very thorough examination of how the notion of border security and the U.S. Border Patrol has changed since 9/11.

Todd Miller: Yes, I wanted to really focus on the expansion of the agency and what that means in one sense and also look at some of the not so obvious, yet powerful manifestations of the expansion.

See the entire interview done with Melissa del Bosque here:

http://www.texasobserver.org/qa-todd-miller-author-border-patrol-nation/

“We talked with Author Todd Miller on his recently published book, Border Patrol Nation. The book gives first-hand encounters with people who are most involved with and impacted by the Border Patrol and the change into high-end technology, weapons, surveillance and prisons.”

http://marfapublicradio.org/blog/talk-at-ten/author-todd-miller-on-his-new-book-border-patrol-nation/

In desert camouflage and combat helmets, the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents kneel behind a white truck. One agent has his pistol aimed at an unseen enemy. Another has a semi-automatic assault rifle. In the distance stretches the brown desert landscape, the mountains, the expansive sky.

At first glance, the agents are alert and ready as if in combat theater in the Middle-East. At the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, and in the context of the persistent 30-year push of Mexico-U.S. border militarization, maybe this isn’t so far off. This CBP special response team—that in its trainingunleashes “torrents of fire”—is part of the United States’ largest federal law enforcement agency. With more than 60,000 agents, the Department of Homeland Security’s CBP has become a daunting domestic army.

The U.S. government often portrays CBP agents—especially the “men in green” of the Border Patrol—as professional warriors who “protect,” as former CBP chief David Aguilar puts it, “our way of life.” These agents are on the front lines fending off enemies of many shades, faces, and ideologies who are supposedly eager to penetrate the U.S. international boundary with malicious intentions. However, a Los Angeles Times article, which discusses an independent review by law enforcement experts on the U.S. Border Patrol’s use of deadly force, shows an entirely different reality.

Read the rest here at NACLA.

It is 6:00 a.m., and there is a loud pounding on the door. Gerardo looks to Luz, who is also suddenly jarred awake, and both get up quickly. He is in shorts and an undershirt. It is a cold March morning in Tucson, Arizona. Across the bedroom is a bunk bed. Somehow Adrián and Sammy are sleeping through the loud pounding. Adrián is twelve and Sammy is ten, and both, it seems, can sleep through a war. Gerardo looks out the window. There are armed men out there.

“Okay,” he tells Luz, “they are coming for me.”

Read the rest here in the Tucson Weekly.

My guest appearance, and an interesting discussion, on one of my favorite podcasts.

http://www.breakthruradio.com/#/post/?dj=johnandmolly&post=4545&blog=92&autoplay=1

A Salvadoran man looked at us and asked if we could make ends meet earning five dollars a day. I was with a group of students and we were in Arriaga, Chiapas, Mexico in a migrant shelter called “Hogar de la Misericordia” in January. The man, like most of the 15 other men talking to us in a semi-circle, had walked a grueling 150 miles from the Mexico-Guatemala boundary. They had done so to circumvent the numerous immigration, military, and police checkpoints on the road leading north from Tapachula, a Mexican border city.

Read the rest here: http://nacla.org/blog/2014/1/31/us-central-american-border

It isn’t exactly the towering 20-foot wall that runs like a scar through significant parts of the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. Imagine instead the sort of metal police barricades you see at protests. These are unevenly lined up like so many crooked teeth on the Dominican Republic’s side of the river that acts as its border with Haiti. Like dazed versions of U.S. Border Patrol agents, the armed Dominican border guards sit at their assigned posts, staring at the opposite shore.  There, on Haitian territory, children splash in the water and women wash clothes on rocks.

One of those CESFRONT (Specialized Border Security Corps) guards, carrying an assault rifle, is walking six young Haitian men back to the main base in Dajabon, which is painted desert camouflage as if it were in a Middle Eastern war zone.

If the scene looks like a five-and-dime version of what happens on the U.S. southern border, that’s because it is. The enforcement model the Dominican Republic uses to police its boundary with Haiti is an import from the United States.

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/it-was-bad-enough-we-militarized-our-own-borders-now-us-doing-it-rest-world

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.

An excerpt of Border Patrol Nation as it appears in Guernica.

The police always put the checkpoint at the entrance to the mobile home park where María and Manuel live. A road barely two lanes wide leads through the park with its approximately sixty gray, white, and beige mobile homes tightly concentrated in a two-block area. Just in case, María and Manuel check to make sure the shiny black police cars and orange cones aren’t there. They decide to risk it and go to church.

Q: When people think about border or immigration enforcement they usually think about Arizona or Texas. Are you saying border enforcement is happening in the state of New York?

Yes, I’ve had this conversation with a lot of other people. You’re right that the discussion is about people crossing in Arizona or Texas. But they don’t talk about the fact that once migrants cross the border, that’s just really the beginning of their struggle. If they survive crossing the border, then they have to survive getting to their destination. And for a lot of folks their destination is this part of the country—Sodus, New York, near Rochester.

They get here and the whole thing starts over again. They’re getting targeted here just like they are on the Mexican border. So there’s this constant siege mentality that leads to the same sort of survival mentality as crossing the border. People are hiding, not being seen in public on purpose.

Border Patrol has told me publicly that its agents are sitting in their cars looking out into Lake Ontario, waiting apparently for Mexicans to swim across Lake Ontario from Canada. But these people are not coming from the north, they are coming from the south. So I picture the commander of the Border Patrol sitting in his car, I don’t know, drinking a beer—I don’t know what they’re doing sitting there, you know? And all the action is happening right behind him. The Border Patrol agents behind him are picking up all the farmworkers.

Border Wars’ Todd Miller talks with John “Lory” Ghertner, a doctor who is a member of the Greater Rochester Coalition for Immigration Justice. For more background information on Border Patrol operations in Sodus and Rochester, see this article written here for Border Wars in July, 2012.

Read the rest here: http://nacla.org/blog/2013/11/27/qa%E2%80%94siege-mentality-border-patrol%E2%80%99s-northern-advance