On September 29, Elon Musk, an immigrant from Apartheid-era South Africa, donned a backward Stetson hat and toured the U.S.-Mexico border at the Texas town of Eagle Pass. The world’s richest man had not arrived to aid the desperate migrants who had presented themselves to U.S. border officials for processing. Instead, he made a four minute live video in which he called the town “a Breaking Bad situation” while spitballing boilerplate immigration approaches for a country that has been unable to design and pass comprehensive immigration reform since 1986.
Musk’s visit followed the September 6 ruling by a district judge in favor of the U.S. Department of Justice over a line of marine buoys placed in the Rio Grande by the State of Texas in June. The judge declared that the buoys would have to be removed by September 15. But the victory for common sense was short-lived, as Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s appeal to the U.S. 5th Circuit Court has indefinitely delayed the removal.
The buoys, while sounding innocuous, are actually a 1,000-foot line of interconnected, wrecking ball-sized floats that spin when grasped. They are tethered to the river floor with sheets of stainless-steel mesh and concrete blocks. They can trap people underwater, force asylum seekers and migrants into deeper channels, and impair river rescues. Four people have already died as a result of the buoys. The removal of the marine barrier, fatal by design, must be immediate, and such practices should never be allowed again.
Images of the buoys circulated in local, national and international media. Many of them featured migrants, strapped with heavy backpacks, walking in a waist-high riverbed in wet clothes; another is of a mother holding the hand of her child; one showed families trudging together in groups with toddlers on their shoulders, their children’s thin arms wrapped around their necks.
The migrants who have traversed the Rio Bravo to the Rio Grande walk the dangerous gap between the orange buoys and concertina wire. These images are meant to be seen—to demonstrate the cruelty of a weaponized border. The United States has a long tradition of spectacular violence—burning crosses, lynchings, of marking boundaries with bodies. The buoys have now joined this tradition.
Abbott and other border alarmists argued that these kinds of barriers to crossing are necessary. But it is clear that these have never succeeded at deterrence. In fact, according to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, there was “a significant and continuing decline” in the number of unauthorized crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border—a drop of 42 percent from May to June of this year. This decrease preceded the buoy installation. Those focused on “unlawful” entry, should note that the buoys represented an illegal crossing.
Abbott recently gathered supporters near the buoys in Eagle Pass to cheer the success of the cruelty that has killed at least four and wounded countless others. Minimizing the lethal design of the concertina wire and four-foot-wide rotating buoys, Nebraska's Republican Governor Jim Pillen—standing at the location where dozens of children have been injured, and where a young mother miscarried while ensnared in the concertina wire—declared, “They [Abbott’s policies] don’t cause a Band-Aid, and if they do, I say, ‘What the heck? Stay on your side of the river.’”
It is clear that Abbott continues to proudly demonstrate an ineffective and violent policy. The governor is undeterred, but we shouldn’t be. We must remove these technologies of terror, designed to cause suffering and death, immediately and permanently. After the buoys, the concertina wire must also come down.
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.