WE'RE STILL LIVING WITHOUT RIGHTS IN SOUTH TEXAS

By Juan Montoya
In 1998, then Texas Gov. George W. Bush hosted the governors of the Mexican states bordering Texas for a confab in Brownsville and held a press conference before his run for the White House.
That same year, top INS officials met in Brownsville on the anniversary of Operation Rio Grande, a program begun with the aim of controlling the movement of migrants and narcotics across the Texas and New Mexico border with Mexico. A significant part of the operation was a dramatic increase in the number of Border Patrol agents stationed in the area, doubling in the first two years.
Among those in attendance at the press conference was then-INS Commissioner Doris Meissner. In a speech she stated "by nearly every measure, Operation Rio Grande has produced impressive results."
Among the signs of the programs success cited was a 32 percent decline in apprehensions in the area since 1997 and a 19 percent drop in crime.
It wasn't until later that research showed that as apprehensions dropped in the populated areas, the number of undocumented immigrants dying in remote and attendant criminal activity in desert areas was increasing commensurately.
But what I asked Bush (who was being chaperoned by Karen Hughes) at the Brownsville airport was what effect the onslaught of law enforcement and border security personnel was having on the civil rights of legal citizens living here.
If you lived along the border at the time, it was not unusual to go into downtown Brownsville and be subjected to ID searches as you ate in a restaurant, were walking down the sidewalk, or merely window-shopping.
The discretion of stopping anyone was left to the individual agents on the ground. If you were pulled out of a grocery store line, a gas station, a movie house, or a school campus, there was nothing you could do but prove your citizenship. There were even Border Patrol cops going into 14th Street bars and bathrooms and along barrio alleys asking people for ID.
Today we have drones flying over us, plans for the federal government to spend an additional billions for yet more border security, and of course, the multimillion dollar border wall.
Local congressmen have voiced their approval of the White House and congressional requests and are even asking for more.
Only Sheriff Omar Lucio has expressed some skepticism of the buildup along the river.
"You can put additional personnel along the border, you can build fences, but not everything is caught there," he said. "Things are still happening on this side of the fence."
Currently, if you go to Boca Chica Beach, you will be asked for identification on the BP checkpoint on the way back. The same applies if you're downtown are on the city's streets. Unlike other parts of the country, people in Brownsville must answer to local, county, state, federal, ICE, BP, FBI, DEA, any number of metro squads, special teams, and even the military when asked for identification in the course of living here.
It is virtually impossible to reach the river on this side of the border now. The days of going to the main port in Brownsville to fish is a thing of the past. You have to deal with the formidable force under Chief Carlos Garcia.
Getting back to W, he looked lost when I asked the question, glanced at Hughes for support, and then pulled his stock answer: "I support Operation Rio Grande."
"That wasn't my question, governor," I persisted. "What about the rights of Americans living here who have to prove their citizenship to all these agencies?"
"I'll get back to you," he said.
Not surprisingly, he never did.
(The drawing above appeared with an accompanying article by John S. Robey, a professor at UTB-TSC that appeared in the Crossroads Weekly newspaper. The artist was the inimitable Joaquin Ribera.)