Blockading the Border and Human Rights: The El Paso Operation That Remade Immigration Enforcement

CHAPTER 2

The federal lawsuit brought by students and staff at El Paso’s Bowie High School against the El Paso Border Patrol in 1992 was a historic event, for it is the most successful, formal, and large-scale challenge to Border Patrol enforcement excesses and rights abuses in local history, and arguably along the entire border. It is a vivid instance of a “subject population” standing up to a bureaucratic power structure and its negative impact on their community, thereby putting some limits on the previously almost untouchable power and discretionary authority of the El Paso Border Patrol. It marked the establishment of a dynamic, though still unequal, two-way relationship between the unit and its “subject population,” drastically changing the one-sided previous relationship in which the Border Patrol acted with impunity. Community activists successfully challenged the enforcement excesses of the Border Patrol by making an appeal to another institution, the federal courts, thereby making change in one organization by playing it off against the contrasting norms and practices of another (Freidland and Alford 1991)—in this case, one with formal authority as well. This was done within the citizenship-nationalistic framework as a long-subordinated ethnic group made a victorious claim for their civil rights in U.S. federal court, appealing as legitimate members of the nation with legal standing. This lawsuit and the surrounding complex social environment clearly shaped the Border Patrol’s actions thereafter, especially in Operation Blockade, initiated less than one year after the lawsuit was filed—which in turn became the model for subsequent Border Patrol operations elsewhere along the border, and a whole new approach to border enforcement . Accordingly, the landmark lawsuit and its origins merit considerable attention, something they have not received much of from scholars CHAPTER 2 TheBowieLawsuitChallenge totheElPasoBorderPatrol The Bowie Lawsuit Challenge 21 (two of the only exceptions being Ortíz-González 2004, 66–68; BixlerM árquez 2005). I will not be delving in great detail here into the various rights abuses (that will come later in Chapter 5), but rather will focus on this unique organized challenge to the Border Patrol, and how it arose. Earlier Challenges to Border Patrol Abuses: An Organized Opposition Emerges In some regards the Bowie lawsuit was the culmination of a grassroots challenge, begun in the mid-1980s, to human rights abuses committed by area border enforcement authorities. It is important to note that the context for this was the Border Patrol’s great discretion in exercising its broad formal authority—particularly far greater latitude to stop and search people in an area within twenty-five miles of the border and its functional equivalents (e.g., highway checkpoints and airports) (see clinic 2001; Compton and Newland 1992).1 In practice, agents used this authority against people of Hispanic appearance, especially those appearing to be from lower-income backgrounds (as most undocumented border crossers in the area were from Mexico and poor), and they pushed this authority even further, asking to see suspects’ “papers” (immigration documents, even birth certificates), obliging them to comply or explain why they could not (e.g., see Plaza 1993). This meant that out on the streets of El Paso, Hispanic residents had to be prepared to prove their right to be in the country at all times or face the prospect of arrest, detention, and possibly even deportation by Border Patrol agents—a form of ethnic policing, in essence, at odds with American culture and more reminiscent of authoritarian regimes, leading some rights advocates to term the border a “deconstitutionalized zone” (Jimenez 1992; clinic 2001).2 For many years the unit’s main enforcement tactic in the area was roving patrols in ubiquitous green-and-white sport utility vehicles (suvs) throughout the city and especially neighborhoods near the river boundary that were transit points for undocumented border crossers (e.g., the “south side” of the city between the Rio Grande and Interstate 10, including downtown), as well as close monitoring of transportation centers (airports, bus depots, etc.).3 One of the oldest of these neighborhoods is the densely populated, poor segundo barrio, or second ward, in the south-central area of the city, immediately adjacent to the river boundary running from downtown roughly two miles east to the Bridge of the 22 Chapter 2 Americas, and including Bowie High School. Roving Border Patrol vehicles were a common, near constant sight in these areas. As one veteran agent said...