Operation Hold The Line, 18 Years Later

About 18 years ago then-El Paso Border Patrol Sector Chief Silvestre Reyes (the El Paso Congressman since 1996), started an operation to deter immigration that came to be called Operation Hold The Line. He was the first ever Latino sector chief, and a native of the area.

The gist of the operation it was to push Border Patrol agents closer to the actual border so as to deter crossings. According to the DOJ:

Agents assumed positions along the border, visible to both would-be crossers and to each other. This deployment effectively stopped numerous day-crossers, resulting in a 70 percent drop in El Paso Sector apprehensions. Although smugglers and illegal immigrants heading for cities beyond the border circumvented this deployment by shifting to areas where more traditional apprehension tactics were in use, they no longer came through central El Paso. Crime rates dropped along with apprehension numbers.

Operation Hold The Line took place right around the time things were getting hot and heavy with anti-immigrant (read: Latino) sentiment in California with Proposition 187. The San Diego version of “containment” known as Operation Gatekeeper, which resulted partly in the construction of the first part of the U.S. border wall on the western part of the border. (It’s also good to remember that a lot of the anti-immigrant, anti-Latino rhetoric and tactics we’re seeing nowadays were born during this time period.) Much like its El Paso counterpart, the San Diego operation was largely billed as a success because of how it stemmed immigration in that sector.

Of course one way to view this tactic is as a “success,” but if you read between the lines all you’re really doing is diverting traffic from one place to another. You don’t actually “stop” immigration, just move it away from where people can see it. So here we are, almost two decades later, without comprehensive immigration reform and contending with an even larger industrial border complex that involves billions in government contracts, sometimes as in SBI Net, not to actually do anything but just to change our perception of things.

The very idea that any of these operations “work” is really a matter of perspective. The fact is, you can’t stop people from moving — the Great Wall of China, Berlin Wall and West Bank Barrier are good examples — if people are going to move, they’re going to find a way. One way to combat this inconvenient fact is by deporting the heck out of people here in the U.S. without papers — President Barack Obama seems to favor this tactic, on track to deport more people in two and a half years than President George W. Bush did in two terms.

Whatever your perspective, there were pros and cons of Operation Hold The Line — crime did go down in El Paso, for example — even though the challenges we face with immigration reform today are, in some ways, more complex than they were 18 years ago.