Halting pointless wall construction in inaccessible areas is one thing, but an unregulated “virtual border” may go beyond its “intended” purpose

 

Business Insider posted a photographic essay last week, in which it commissioned photographer John Darwin Kurc to investigate Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful wall” on the southern border. Kurc’s photos revealed that outside of easily accessible areas where the vast majority of the “new” construction was simply replacing old barriers, the extended sections were mainly isolated constructions like this…

…or both environmentally destructive and useless:

Many of the “extensions” were being built (or being attempted) in mountainous terrain that was already difficult and dangerous for both migrants and border patrol agents to even access (let alone traverse), with contractors apparently spending a great deal of their funding not on the walls themselves (as demonstrated in the first photo), but on paving dirt access trails just to get their equipment into position to do the actual “work.”

While doubtless there are those anti-immigrant fanatics like Laura Ingraham who will decry Joe Biden’s “proclamation” halting new construction until after the results of an overview of the goings-on, it is clear that there was a reason why almost none of Trump’s “wall” was actually “new,” and that Trump and Stephen Miller wasted billions of dollars in taxpayer money and military funding for essentially nothing. It also proved that Steve Bannon swindled people out of their wall donation money in more ways than to just line his own pockets.

BI also points out the construction of these “roads” in previously inaccessible areas of the border only served to make them more accessible to foot traffic by migrants, which is indicative of the poor planning, failure of logic, and the fanatical desire to build something somewhere/anywhere just to convince the “base” that something was actually being done to satiate their hate-filled desires. Environmental activist Laiken Jordahl called much of the construction “surreal,” destroying national park and forest land just to build tiny sections of wall in places where “no human being could ever cross.”

Kurc noted that while taking photographs with a drone in one of the smaller (and now abandoned) staging areas for construction, four migrants could be observed climbing over the wall, which if nothing else proves that some of these walls act as little more than “speed bumps.” That doesn’t mean that walls don’t “work,” but it does mean that they are more an eyesore and a physical representation of this country’s often conflicting notions of what it “stands” for.

Biden is now proposing an “alternative” plan to control not just the border, but what The Nation is warning may be vastly expanded “smart technology” that won’t be used just against migrants if not sufficiently regulated, with advanced technology making it even easier for DHS, CBP and ICE agents to ignore everyone’s Fourth Amendment rights if given any “rationalization” to do so. Biden’s “fact sheet” proposes legislation that skirts the issue, focusing on the usual “hot button” issues:

…builds on record budget allocations for immigration enforcement by authorizing additional funding for the Secretary of DHS to develop and implement a plan to deploy technology to expedite screening and enhance the ability to identify narcotics and other contraband at every land, air, and sea port of entry. This includes high-throughput scanning technologies to ensure that all commercial and passenger vehicles and freight rail traffic entering the United States at land ports of entry and rail-border crossings along the border undergo pre-primary scanning. It also authorizes and provides funding for plans to improve infrastructure at ports of entry to enhance the ability to process asylum seekers and detect, interdict, disrupt and prevent narcotics from entering the United States.

The Nation points out that it is easy for Democrats to support smart technology like “aerial drones, infrared cameras, motion sensors, radar, facial recognition, and artificial intelligence as more humane ways to reach the shared, if somewhat amorphous, goal of border security,” particularly if they don’t like the “optics” of walls and children in wire cages, and it has the “veneer of scientific impartiality.” In two words, it has the potential to be “insidiously dangerous.” 

The Nation also observed that this “virtual border” expands 100 miles inland from all borders, including seacoasts in what is being called a “Constitution-free zone,” where, as Bloomberg reports, nearly two-thirds of the country’s population lives, and

While the weight of border patrol’s operations is felt heaviest along the southwest border of the U.S., the “no man’s land”…actually extends much further into the country. In the “border zone,” different legal standards apply. Agents can enter private property, set up highway checkpoints, have wide discretion to stop, question, and detain individuals they suspect to have committed immigration violations—and can even use race and ethnicity as factors to do so.

Bloomberg noted that only a tiny percentage of immigration arrests are made at arbitrary checkpoints far from the border, and most detentions are made of legal immigrants and international students who have not committed a deportable offense, but do not have their “papers” to immediately prove their status. CBP agents have also detained U.S. citizens because of their “ethnicity”—particularly those who out of indignation refuse to play by the border agent “rules”:

“[U.S. citizens) don't understand why their rights as Americans don't encompass going from point A to point B in the U.S.—far from the border,” said Chris Rickerd, a policy counsel at the ACLU. “The checkpoints are very controversial, and not only from a civil liberties perspective.”

White Americans, of course, are not particularly concerned about such things unless, of course, their civil rights are being violated; most simply see the civil rights of those they consider not to be “real Americans” to be of a lesser quality and can be violated for the sake of “safety”—mainly their own as they see it.

The Nation quoted one CBP officer who was concerned about the expansion of technology that would expand the CBP “capabilities” and responsibilities, transforming it into a kind Gestapo-like federal police force. This was demonstrated during BLM protests last year, when “unidentified” federal agents that included CBP personnel, testing ground and aerial surveillance equipment, and making arbitrary arrests without identifying themselves. “This sort of mission creep illustrates the folly in complacency over the use of advanced surveillance tech on the grounds that it is for ‘border enforcement.’”

The Nation also noted that politicians are often reluctant to regulate the behavior of law enforcement, for fear of looking “weak” or somehow “culpable” for some crime: “It is always easier to add to the list of acceptable data uses than it is to limit them, largely owing to our security paranoia where any risk is unacceptable. It’s the same mechanism that stops politicians from reducing bloated police budgets: Do so, and you run the risk of having one grisly crime be your political undoing. ‘The oversight committees are not providing oversight,’ the CBP officer said, referring to the congressional committees that have purview over homeland security and technology.”

There is currently almost no limitations on immigration agents accessing and using federal databases, The Nation notes. The restrictions that are in place are easily moved around by using commercial software, such as phone geolocation data; you might not be aware of this, but the GPS tracking that tells you where you are on your smart phone can be used to find you for no reason at all, and can be used by anyone to “surveil” you without a warrant—including DHS. And being a U.S. citizen doesn’t matter.

The point of all of this is that the expansion of “Big Brother” technology is the “natural” outgrowth of “virtual border” tools that were already employed during BLM protests last year. Worse, the lack of legal limitations to their use by immigration agents (which of course included ICE) also means privacy and civil rights abuses that “inadvertently” expand beyond the mere legal status of an individual.

The halting of the more egregious and unnecessary wall construction is one thing; but is Biden intending to “supplement” what is already there with something that can potentially be used for purposes far beyond the “intended” use, unless there are regulations put in place to curb abuses by DHS and its agents? After all, Biden has brought many of the “old hands” who contributed to Barack Obama being labeled the “Deporter-in-Chief.”