This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
Yes, Donald Trump is distinctly focused on the border and immigration but, of course, he's anything but focused on the issue that, more than any other in the years to come, will actually drive immigration. I'm thinking, of course, about climate change. Today, TomDispatch regular and border expert Todd Miller, author of Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders, considers a world in which our changing climate -- the growing heat -- is indeed driving people in Mexico toward the U.S. border. Of course, if they make it, in a world where Donald Trump has already sent 1,500 more U.S. troops to the Mexican border to join the 2,200 already there -- yes, Joe Biden sent troops to the border, too! -- and is threatening to dispatch many thousands more, they may be in for a surprise.
After all, thanks to the phenomenon that Donald Trump wants to encourage in a significant fashion through his "drill, baby, drill" policies when it comes to oil and natural gas (not to speak of coal), Phoenix, Arizona, a desert city which is only getting drier and hotter by the year, has already experienced 154 rainless days as it heads for a new record, while this planet comes off yet another record-breaking year of global heat.
With that in mind, let border expert Miller remind you of how this country already put staggering amounts of money into border "security" during the "liberal" presidency of Joe Biden and so many presidents before him while building up a stunning -- to use Miller's term -- "border-industrial complex." Tom
The Mass Deportation Handoff, Biden to Trump
And the Booming Border-Industrial Complex
By Todd Miller
It didn't take long for the border and immigration enforcement industry to react to Donald Trump's reelection. On November 6th, as Bloomberg News reported, stock prices shot up for two private prison companies, GEO Group and CoreCivic. "We expect the incoming Trump administration to take a much more aggressive approach regarding border security as well as interior enforcement," explained the GEO Group's executive chair, George Zoley, "and to request additional funding from Congress to achieve these goals." In other words, the "largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history" was going to be a moneymaker.
As it happens, that Bloomberg piece was a rarity, offering a glimpse of immigration enforcement that doesn't normally get the attention it deserves by focusing on the border-industrial complex. The article's tone, however, suggested that there will be a sharp break between the border policies of Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Its essential assumption: that Biden adored open borders, while Trump, the demagogue, is on his way to executing a profitable clampdown on them.
In a recent article, "The Progressive Case against Immigration," journalist Lee Fang caricatured just such a spectrum, ranging from people with "Refugees Welcome" yard signs to staunch supporters of mass deportation. He argued that Democrats should embrace border enforcement and "make a case for border security and less tolerance for migrant rule-breaking." This, he suggested, would allow the party to "reconnect with its blue-collar roots." Fang's was one of many post-election articles making similar points -- namely, that the Democrats' stance on free movement across the border cost them the election.
But what if the Biden administration, instead of opposing mass deportation, had proactively helped construct its very infrastructure? What if, in reality, there weren't two distinctly opposed and bickering visions of border security, but two allied versions of it? What if we started paying attention to the budgets where the money is spent on the border-industrial complex, which tell quite a different story than the one we've come to expect?
In fact, during President Biden's four years in office, he gave 40 contracts worth more than $2 billion to the same GEO Group (and its associated companies) whose stocks spiked with Trump's election. Under those contracts, the company was to maintain and expand the U.S. immigrant detention system, while providing ankle bracelets for monitoring people on house arrest.
And that, in fact, offers but a glimpse of Biden's tenure as -- yes! -- the biggest contractor (so far) for border and immigration enforcement in U.S. history. During his four years in office, Biden's administration issued and administered 21,713 border enforcement contracts, worth $32.3 billion, far more than any previous president, including his predecessor Donald Trump, who had spent a mere -- and that, of course, is a joke -- $20.9 billion from 2017 to 2020 on the same issue.
In other words, Biden left office as the king of border contracts, which shouldn't have been a surprise, since he received three times more campaign contributions than Trump from top border-industry companies during the 2020 election campaign. And in addition to such contributions, the companies of that complex wield power by lobbying for ever bigger border budgets, while maintaining perennial public/private revolving doors.
In other words, Joe Biden helped build up Trump's border-and-deportation arsenal. His administration's top contract, worth $1.2 billion, went to Deployed Resources, a company based in Rome, New York. It's constructing processing and detention centers in the borderlands from California to Texas. Those included "soft-sided facilities," or tent detention camps, where unauthorized foreigners might be incarcerated when Trump conducts his promised roundups.
The second company on the list, with a more than $800 million contract (issued under Trump in 2018, but maintained in the Biden years), was Classic Air Charter, an outfit that facilitates deportation flights for the human-rights-violating ICE Air. Now that Trump has declared a national emergency on the border and has called for military deployment to establish, as he puts it, "operational control of the border," his people will discover that there are already many tools in his proverbial enforcement box. Far from a stark cutoff and change, the present power transition will undoubtedly prove to be more of a handoff -- and to put that in context, just note that such a bipartisan relay race at the border has been going on for decades.
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