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

CHAPTER 3

The implementation of Operation Blockade on September 19, 1993, with four hundred agents posted round-the-clock in high-visibility fashion directly along the Rio Grande international boundary between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez for miles, was a historic turn in Border Patrol enforcement efforts. It sparked a series of new Southwest border region operations to discourage undocumented border crossers in the main long-standing, unauthorized border-crossing areas (in and around several border urban centers) and to divert or displace them to more remote and hostile terrain. It also was the foundation for a rewriting of the Border Patrol’s national strategy based on this approach (see U.S. Border Patrol 1994 and U.S. General Accounting Office 1997, 64–67), which remains a cornerstone (see Office of the Border Patrol 2004).1 It was a drastic departure from previous practices that had for decades been focused on apprehension of undocumented crossers after entry, which led to impressive totals for the El Paso sector of over 200,000 per year (as will be seen later on), which traditionally ranked second, behind the San Diego sector, in annual total apprehensions. Thus, Operation Blockade was a true strategic paradigm shift—and though it was officially later renamed Operation Hold-the-Line, in my view the original name is the more fitting and will be used henceforth.2 The origins of Operation Blockade, despite its key regional and national role, are decidedly local and merit careful attention. In the aftermath of the Bowie lawsuit, the El Paso Border Patrol was clearly on the political defensive, and it was clear that the old enforcement approach was not viable. The federal court injunction prohibiting ethnic profiling greatly limited the unit’s discretionary authority and made its previous core enforcement practices—roving patrols of predominantly lowerCHAPTER 3 OperationBlockade/Hold-the-Line: TheBorderPatrolReassertsControl 52 Chapter 3 income, Mexican American neighborhoods near the border—difficult if not impossible to sustain. The local political climate had turned decisively against the unit, with a wide array of social actors jumping on the bandwagon to take up the issues raised in the Bowie lawsuit and poised to challenge the unit. Thus, the previously intractable bureaucratic power structure of the Border Patrol was forced to respond and modify its practices by the surrounding social environment, especially by the challenge launched by its “subject population.” And internally, the unit was in flux, awaiting a new chief in light of the retirement of Sector Chief Musegades in the spring of 1993, and with significant discipline and morale problems. The time was indeed ripe for change; it would come from the top with the arrival in July 1993 of a new, politically savvy Mexican American sector chief, Silvestre Reyes, who brought a completely different way of relating to the public and responding to the challenging social environment . Within three short months after his arrival he accomplished what had previously seemed nearly impossible, restoring the unit’s credibility and earning it widespread public support across ethnic lines. Key in this was the new chief’s strategic use of popular myths and symbols (Meyer and Rowan 1991) to construct support for the new operation, particularly local myths about crime. Strongly reinforcing the border, as this operation did, certainly fit the citizenship-nationalistic framework, and it gave Mexican Americans in El Paso a new sense of security and belonging , as they were no longer prime “suspects” as objects of enforcement , which in turn enhanced their civil rights. While the operation illustrates a bureaucracy responding to the surrounding social environment , it also demonstrates the emphatic reassertion of bureaucratic power and authority to create a new dominant status and marginalize the opposition. Consequently, the operation merits a detailed examination , especially given its subsequent key role in U.S. border enforcement policy. In this chapter, then, I examine the buildup to the operation, the implementation of it, and the response of various social actors, before then scrutinizing its purported successes. The New El Paso Border Patrol Chief The ins brought in Silvestre Reyes, an El Paso native, to replace the retired Dale Musegades to fill the chief Border Patrol agent post of the contentious, crisis-ridden El Paso Border Patrol sector. Reyes came Operation Blockade/Hold-the-Line 53 from the McAllen, Texas, sector at the far eastern end of the border, which he had led since 1984, becoming the first Hispanic Border Patrol sector chief in...