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Over the past few decades, the U.S.-Mexican border has undergone extensive militarization. There’s now a seething mass of different federal and state security agencies policing it, and support for adding more has been fairly bipartisan. Many people - including me - objected when Donald Trump sent hundreds of U.S. soldiers to the border just before the midterm elections of 2018. Even though it looked like Trump was engaging in security theater designed to bolster his party’s chances in the upcoming election, the deployment seems to have become permanent. The Biden administration has played around with the exact numbers, but it still sees a role for both federal troops and National Guard personnel at the border and has deployed them there at various times, including today.
Although the federal military deployment caught the most attention because it seemed like such a cynical piece of electioneering by Trump when it was first launched in 2018, the troops that form part of it rarely if ever come into contact with migrants. Under the Posse Comitatus Act federal troops cannot engage in domestic law enforcement, which means they have mostly been lugging stuff around in warehouses and doing paperwork. (The act was recently extended to cover the Space Force, so have no fear you’ll be beamed up and probed). Much more problematic has been Operation Lone Star, which Texas Governor Greg Abbott launched in March 2021, bringing thousands of Texan police and security forces onto the border. Poorly-trained, poorly-paid, and often serving involuntarily, the personnel of Operation Lone Star have suffered from low morale, including a string of suicides.
They’ve also recently done something else: shot over the border into Mexico.
Such shootings are not new, but since a string of them occurred in 2010 - 2012, they have been very rare. Each of these earlier cases was egregious, but two have always always stuck with me. One is the case of Guillermo Arévalo Pedroza, who was shot while picnicking with his family on the banks of the Rio Grande and died in his young daughter’s arms. The Border Patrol agents who shot him were on a boat on the river and later claimed that Mexicans on the banks were throwing rocks at them, although a video of the incident shows no rocks being thrown.
The second case that has always stuck with me went down like this:
Sergio Adrian Hernandez Guereca was playing chicken.
At just fifteen years of age, in a dried-out desert basin separating the United States and Mexico, he and his friends on the Mexican side of the border dared each other to run towards the border fence and touch it before running back to the other side.
From the American side, US Border Patrol (USBP) agent Jesus Mesa Jr put a bullet through the teenager’s head.
And, in a cruel affront to his memory, the agency quickly accused Sergio of endangering the agents on duty. Mesa “feared for his life,” he claimed, as Sergio was throwing rocks in their direction. Video footage soon emerged that contradicts this account: Sergio’s back was turned to the agents. He was trying to flee.
The case of Sergio Hernandez became the basis of a drawn-out diplomatic and legal battle. When U.S. authorities declined to bring charges against the agent who shot Hernandez or to extradite him to Mexico to face charges, Hernandez’s parents sued the U.S. government in the American court system. The case went to the Supreme Court, which essentially ruled that “the constitution does not follow the bullet”. Because he died on foreign soil, Hernandez had no rights that U.S. officials were bound to respect, and shooting him violated no U.S. law. The result was the creation of a situation of almost total impunity for U.S. security forces at the southern border.
The Supreme Court decided the Hernandez case in 2020, but after six such shootings in the period 2010 - 2012, Border Patrol has not since been involved in any known incident. This week, however, a Texas National Guard member shot over the border into Mexico and wounded a man in the leg. The exact details of what happened are unclear - U.S. officials are saying off the record that the man had a knife and was threatening other migrants, but the man himself says he was playing sport near the river. Because of a long history of U.S. security agencies lying about this sort of incident, it’s hard to know what is true.
No-one was killed this time, but the incident is a reminder of the massive legal authority that U.S. officials on the border have. With judicial impunity for any harm they do to Mexicans on the other side of the border, it’s only a matter of time until agents kill again. The existence of this authority is particularly concerning when you hear the sharply escalating rhetoric of Republican presidential candidates, who are starting to talk about using much more force at the border and even invading Mexico. When he was in office, Donald Trump suggested that border security officials shoot migrants in the legs to stop them crossing the border. That’s a horrendous idea - but thanks to the Supreme Court, it’s unfortunately not entirely clear that it’s actually illegal.
Americans also tend to severely underrate the problems that these shootings create with Mexico. Not many Americans know who Sergio Adrian Hernandez Guereca was, but cases like his are big news in Mexico. Further hardening and militarization of the border might seem like it brings more security. But it also increases the potential for deadly incidents to happen, and in the long run undermines the trust and cooperation which is necessary to deal with issues like migration and drug trafficking in the long run.
(Image credit on post: Andreas F. Borchert, under Creative Commons).