The Other October 1st Birthday
Operation Gatekeeper turns 30. But who's celebrating?
I’ve been traversing the US since June, talking about Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands in hopes of touching hearts and changing minds on the issue of immigration before the November election. It’s been intense and amazing, exhausting yet enriching, with learnings and observations that I’d intended to share in real time, though my time has not been my own! Thrillingly, my book is resonating with communities of readers, resulting in new speaking engagements being scheduled nearly every day—every writer’s dream come true. So, more to come. I promise. For now, I hope you’ll like my latest tour installment about the 30th birthday that few acknowledge and no one’s celebrating…
On October 1, 2024, I had the honor and privilege of speaking to a room full of high school juniors and seniors at my alma mater: the University School of Nashville (USN). I have never been more proud to call USN home. The young people I met there—bright-Blue flames in a Red-hot state—gave me hope for the future, though the focus of our time together was how history is being made around us, even by us, every day.
We began by wishing a Happy 100th Birthday to the man who was president when I was a student at USN: Jimmy Carter. Then setting our discussion in historical context, I recalled that in my last year in high school, President Carter signed into law the 1980 Refugee Act—Congress’s response to Carter granting protection to 300,000 Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees in the aftermath of the US war in Vietnam.
Carter was forced to offer safety to these war refugees by Presidential action because official refugee caps were then so low. This sparked Carter’s Congress to create a permanent and systematic procedure for admitting into the US folks considered to be of “special humanitarian concern.” The bill brought the tenets of the 1951 Refugee Convention into US law, defining the term “refugee” as a person with a “well-founded fear of persecution.” It outlined the rights of people fleeing horror and harm, upholding the international standards governing their protection. And it funded two new governmental offices, Refugee Affairs and Refugee Resettlement, establishing comprehensive and uniform provisions for providing welcome.
The 1951 Refugee Convention evolved from the shame of nations, including the USA, turning Jewish refugees back to their deaths in WWII Nazi death camps. Fingered for what would then also be defined as “genocide” and “crimes against humanity,” the Western powers rose up in one collective voice to state “Never again” and “We’re not going back.”
The US Refugee Act passed unanimously in late 1979. Carter signed it into law in early 1980. But before the ink dried on this signature legislation, the Reagan-Bush administration led the charge in flouting it.
First, they refused to offer safety to the Central American refugees their regional Dirty Wars created. Characterizing Salvadorans and Guatemalans fleeing war and genocide as “economic migrants,” coming to the US to “steal” jobs and “drive down the wages” of US citizens, they refused to acknowledge the human rights atrocities committed by governments against their own people because these governments were US allies. Asylum approval rates for Salvadorans, for example, remained a steady 2 percent throughout the 1980s despite the US funneling $1 million a day to fund the brutalities that caused forced human displacement.
It was an end-run around both the International Refugee Convention and the US Refugee Act. And it wasn’t the only illegal end-run the Reagan-Bush administration would commit.
In the aftermath of the 1980 Mariel Boatlift, when approximately 125,000 Haitians and Afro-Cubans alighted in Florida in search of safety from repression, the Reagan administration failed to uphold US law again, this time kick-starting the for-profit US immigrant prison industrial complex.
The first government contract—$17.5 million to build a lock-up for mostly Haitian refugees—went to Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America, known today as CoreCivic. And because some within the administration feared that it would “create an appearance of ‘concentration camps’ filled largely by [B]lacks,” Reagan declared that henceforth all new arrivals, including asylum seekers, would be jailed, instituting mandatory imprisonment as a staple of today’s US asylum system.
Following in Reagan’s footsteps, US presidents and their Western allies have been making deliberate end-runs around both international and US asylum laws ever since. Fourteen years later, for example, after opening US borders to the free and unfettered flow of products and profits under the still-celebrated North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Clinton administration closed the same borders to the people the new economic experiment would inevitably displace under the little-talked-about Operation Gatekeeper.
Launched on October 1, 1994, Operation Gatekeeper kicked off the militarization of the US southern border. It put “boots on the ground” and surged to the line the most up-to-date surveillance technology. It erected walls and fences; added interior checkpoints as far as one hundred miles north of Mexico; and built more prison facilities for those immigrants who cleared the gauntlet. It delivered sophisticated weapons to Border Patrol agents whose policing practices shifted from hunting, apprehending, incarcerating, and expelling undocumented individuals already in the US to keeping folks out of the US altogether—another end-run around both US and international law.
Gatekeeper pinched off the easiest routes across the line, forcing folks already in El Norte to stay—undocumented—and pushing those wishing to get into the US to try their luck in geographically harsher, more isolated, more dangerous terrain—through deserts, over mountains, across rivers. This was not done blindly. Both Gatekeeper and the indefinite incarceration of all safety seekers crossing the US-Mexico line were built upon the same dehumanizing theory: “prevention through deterrence.”
Now 30 years old, unknown and uncelebrated by most of us, “prevention through deterrence” posits that if we make northward migration as dangerous and difficult, and as painful and perilous as possible, those who survive it—and many don’t—will send word back home: Do Not Come. Do Not Come.
More aptly named “deterrence through cruelty” and responsible for the tragic deaths of untold thousands, prevention through deterrence has never worked. Why?
Because for as long as there have been people on this planet, we have moved.
Migration is part of our human story. We move away from harm, horror, and hunger and toward better. We move toward opportunity. We move toward safety, per our fundamental human rights.
As of October 1, 2024, thirty years after the launch of Operation Gatekeeper and on the 100th birthday of the US president most dedicated to human rights, CoreCivic and its chief rival, GEO Group, run more than 200 facilities for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, whose routine human rights abuses are legion and well-documented. CoreCivic and GEO Group each bring in annual revenues of over $2 billion and are the “no-brainer investment opportunity” of retirement portfolio managers seemingly unbothered by making bank off denying their fellow human beings their rights to freedom, safety, and dignity.
Which is all to say that the system politicians and pundits like to refer to as “broken” is working just fine for the demagogues and profiteers who benefit from modern enslavement. And it all started in Nashville in 1980, when I was in high school.
Texas Family!
I’m coming to a venue near you this month, starting in Dallas/Fort Worth and continuing to El Paso. Check out my events schedule below (or at my website here) and if you’re able to make an engagement, please be sure to introduce yourself!
