Local governments and organizations are dealing with the chaos left by immigration policy

Blanca Navarrete García and Dylan Corbett
| Guest columnists

Our organizations have been working together for almost a decade on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, in our partner cities of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez.

Much of our work in providing humanitarian assistance to those seeking refuge at the border has been assembling the pieces of an immigration system focused on deterrence.

Evidence from the past several decades shows that tough enforcement measures have little long-term impact on arrivals and increase the dangers and hardships migrants face. For this reason, it is clear that President Joe Biden’s latest executive action to stem the flow of people at the border – the reuse policy once pursued by Donald Trump – is largely a political maneuver.

Relying on deterrence may be a winning short-term political strategy, but it ultimately does little to help manage regional migration in a safe, sustainable and humane way. Worse still, the lack of action to address real challenges at the border opens the door to dangerous rhetoric and actions from reactionary politicians and extremist groups, deepening the challenges facing not only those who migrate, but also border communities and our two countries.

In El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, the local costs of failing to implement effective migration management mechanisms are mounting.

Washington’s lack of reform has enabled Texas Governor Greg Abbott to implement an extremely parallel immigration regime at the border. As part of Operation Lone Star, Abbott sent an army of state troopers and Texas National Guard personnel to El Paso.

While El Paso’s local government has largely implemented immigrant-friendly policies, the community is being drawn inexorably into Abbot’s project of deterrence and incarceration, at a cost measured in both lives and dollars.

State police engage in mass arrests of migrants at the border and shift the financial burden of incarcerating them to the local government of El Paso, which is currently considering acquiring additional jail space. Reckless high-speed chases by state troopers on El Paso highways are resulting in a horrific death toll. Last year alone, nearly forty people were killed or seriously injured, and the local district hospital covers most of the costs of these unnecessary mass casualty incidents.

More: Court documents reveal details of migrants’ confrontation with Texas National Guard at the border

The presence of the National Guard in El Paso also undermines decades of work by the local community and the U.S. Border Patrol to ensure that the rights of asylum seekers and vulnerable migrants are respected and to develop transparent and accountable policies regarding the use of force. Physicians working in our medical programs treated wounds from pepper and rubber bullets fired by the National Guard at border camps, including camps with families and children. Brazen and brutal enforcement actions that would be prohibited for Border Patrol agents are a daily occurrence for the National Guard here.

In El Paso, Operation Lone Star is taking place on federal land, in clear violation of the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, but surprisingly without protest from the Biden administration. The National Guard’s successful capture of the El Paso border brought deaths on the El Paso border to an all-time high.

Abbott envisions applying his strategy to statewide borders by empowering local police to enforce immigration laws throughout Texas. Here’s what will happen if federal courts allow Texas’ recently passed SB4 law to go into effect. If re-elected, Donald Trump has signaled that he plans to use the Texas model – deploying the National Guard on the border and local law enforcement in the interior – as a mass deportation strategy.

Another pillar of the Biden administration’s deterrence approach is its reliance on Mexico for law enforcement. Despite President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s harsh rhetoric, Mexico’s government has largely capitulated, deploying its own National Guard and INM, Mexico’s federal immigration agency, to harass and detain migrants. Lopez Obrador’s administration also turns a blind eye to criminal groups that rob, exploit and kill migrants in staggering numbers.

Local deterrence strategies are also increasingly coordinated across the border.

Abbott and his Chihuahua counterpart, Gov. María Campos Galván, reached a legally questionable cross-border agreement aimed at curbing migration. Campos Galván recently announced that migrants are no longer welcome in the state. One can distinguish her words from a serious new increase in collusion by INM agents, local police and mafia groups in Chihuahua and Ciudad Juárez that aim to attack, exploit and divert migrants back into Mexico’s interior or divert them for smuggling.

We recently met with DHS transnational crime officials who confirmed our observations and were equally concerned about the unprecedented number of people being smuggled, kidnapped and trafficked in Ciudad Juárez, which represents the cost of excessive securitization.

More: Pastor Juárez, who ran the Aposento Alto refugee shelter, is imprisoned on forced labor charges

Texas is no longer simply going after people who migrate, but amid Attorney General Ken Paxton’s continued attempts to shut down the Annunciation House, a faith-based migrant hospitality facility in El Paso, the state is also targeting people who help migrants.

Attacks on aid workers and human rights defenders in Latin America have been common for decades, and the number of priests, activists and journalists killed in Mexico has increased sharply in recent years. But the Guatemalan government’s April raid on the offices of Save the Children, an NGO that works with migrants, after being contacted by Paxton’s office, may represent a troubling new frontier in cross-border intimidation.

Unfortunately, tough border deterrence is now the default policy of all major political parties in the United States and Mexico. However, given the reality of war, inequality and violence around the world, migration is not going away any time soon, and that includes migration on our shared border.

Biden’s recent executive actions to restrict migration at the border will leave more people stuck in Ciudad Juárez and targeted for exploitation. This will be a further boon to smugglers, kidnappers and human traffickers. And this will not calm down restrictionists like Abbott, who, after announcing Biden’s new policy, quickly announced that he would bring even more police and soldiers to the border.

Both the United States and Mexico will have new administrations next year. If Biden is re-elected, he and future Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum will have the opportunity to move away from a law enforcement paradigm that has caused pain, death and crime in our border communities, towards a smarter and more humane governance model that ensures robust systems of humanitarian protection in borders and legal migration routes, which removes incentives for criminal groups that prey on migrants.

But if Trump is re-elected, Biden’s legacy will be to enact a plan to close borders to asylum seekers and leave a draconian model of state immigration enforcement largely unchecked.

Dealing with the chaos and human harm caused by deterrence policies will continue to fall to local governments and organizations like ours.

Blanca Navarrete García is the executive director of Derechos Humanos Integrales en Acción in Ciudad Juárez, and Dylan Corbett is the executive director of the Hope Border Institute in El Paso, Texas.