As Congress has tried and failed to pass immigration reform, both Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Bush Administration plan to continue their strong-arm tactics against undocumented immigrants. Soon after the Senate’s failed second attempt to pass Bush’s immigration bill, ICE agents have carried out well-organized publicized raids in factories, meatpacking plants, janitorial services companies, and other workplaces around the country employing immigrants. Recently, the Bush administration announced plans to step up immigration enforcement by raising fines on businesses who hire undocumented workers, overhauling temporary worker programs and speeding up deployment of border agents, according to a summary of the plans. Earlier this year, Bush claimed that his administration had stepped up efforts to improve border security by authorizing DynCorp to hire as many as 120 “current and former U.S. Border Patrol agents.” This was done because the Bush administration is already scaling back the number of National Guard troops along the Mexico border.

Increasingly, the globalization of markets and profit seeking has pressed US prisons to become profit-generating enterprises - hence, the prison-industrial complex. Nevertheless, prisons also continue to serve their main purpose: to warehouse and “disappear” the “unacceptable.” It was bad enough that as part of ICE’s Operation “Return to Sender,” local law enforcement officials are in effect being deputized as immigration agents - putting into effect a practice that has been debated since the 1990s. However, private contractors are now wanting to get into the immigration game. DynCorp International, a Virginia-based private defense contractor, is lobbying Homeland Security in hopes of supplying mercenaries to supplement the US Border Patrol. Homeland Security wants to increase the presence of the US Border Patrol dramatically along the southern border by adding hundreds of private contractors to its ranks. DynCorp is offering ‘to train and deploy 1,000 private agents to the US-Mexican border within 13 months, offering a quick surge of law enforcement officers to a region struggling to clamp down on illegal immigration.

Increasingly, the private police are considered the first line of defense in the post-September 11th world. This expansion of what security is to include effectively resulted in a convergence between the meaning of international and internal security. This convergence is particularly important in relation to the issue of migration, and specifically in relation to questions about who gets to be defined as an immigrant. One of the dangers of placing the fate of potential immigrants in the hands of private mercenaries and military contractors, they are unburdened by the law of constitutional criminal procedure or by state regulation.

DynCorp, the largest private military contractor in Iraq, has Department of Defense contracts worth more than $2 billion to provide “post-conflict police training” around the world. This not the first time DynCorp is used in the US, during the post-Katrina clean-up and reconstruction effort, private security companies saw the Gulf Coast as a land of opportunity. DynCorp was hired shortly after the storm to protect several New Orleans hospitals from the Tenet Health Organization Group, which earned them about $14 million for their work in the Gulf Coast. According to Peter W. Singer, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of “Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry,” DynCorp had set precedence because this was “first time you had the deployment of armed private security contractors in the US.”

According to Robert B. Rosenkranz, President of DynCorp’s Government Services Division, before the Subcommittee on Management, Investigation, and Oversight Committee on Homeland Security House of Representatives Hearing [pdf file] did provide services for St. Bernard Parish Sheriff’s Department performing “security work.” DynCorp employees were deputized by the Sheriff’s Department, which allowed making arrests and carrying weapons.

DynCorp represents nothing less than the future of national security. Over the last decade, it has dispatched trainers to Haiti, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Liberia, East Timor, Afghanistan and now Iraq. In 2002, the company took in $2.3 billions doing Pentagon work. The company has also handled aviation services for drug-eradication programs in Latin America as part of Plan Colombia. Armed DynCorp employees constitute the core of the police force in Bosnia; however, they were recently found to be running a sex-slavery ring. DynCorp troops protect Afghan president Hamid Karzai. They also updated information systems for the State and Justice departments, Department of Defense, FBI, Internal Revenue Service, Security and Exchange Commission and Drug Enforcement Agency; and maintained or managed U.S. border posts, weapons-testing ranges, Air Force bases and the president’s fleet of planes and helicopters.

So why should we worry about DynCorp? The company has a history of human rights abuses in their ranks. Dyncorp claims that their trafficking in women and children into white slavery were the actions of a few employees, but that is hard to believe when you consider the number of slaves, they abducted. Kathryn Bolkovac, an American policewoman and former DynCorp employee, was demoted and then dismissed after revealing DynCorp was involved in a human trafficking and sex slavery in Bosnia. According to Bolkovac:

“The women who refused were locked in rooms and withheld food and outside contact for days or weeks. After this time they are told to dance naked on table tops and sit with clients.

“If the women still refuse to perform sex acts with the customers they are beaten and raped in the rooms by the bar owners and their associates. They are told if they go to the police they will be arrested for prostitution and being an illegal immigrant.”

Bolkovac was also concerned that Dyncorp continued to receive substantial contracts from the US Government when there appeared to have been no real scrutiny of the reservations that she and another former employee, Ben Johnston, also made.

Ben Johnston, a DynCorp aircraft mechanic for Apache and Blackhawk helicopters in Kosovo, filed a lawsuit against his employer. The suit alleged that in the latter part of 1999 Johnston “learned that employees and supervisors from DynCorp were engaging in perverse, illegal and inhumane behavior [and] were purchasing illegal weapons, women, forged passports and [participating in] other immoral acts.” Before the Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights of the Committee on International Relations, Johnston stated:

I know of a 50-something-year-old man to this day that is a lead man for DynCorp in Bosnia that has a—she was a teenager just a year or so ago when I was there. He still owns her. He still owns her to this day. And the reason I know that, he lives right across the street from my wife, which my wife is a Bosnian. He lives right across the street from my wife. I have heard people say that they are getting married or he is engaged, and then when my lawyer asked about it, it was what is her father’s name? I do not know. How do you spell her last name? I do not know. What date did you set? You know, he does not know. And he told me and others that he paid 10,000 marks for this girl because he bought her while I was in Bosnia, and he still owns her today.

There is my supervisor, the biggest guy there with DynCorp, videotaping having sex with these girls, girls saying no, but that guy now, to my knowledge, he is in America doing fine. There was no repercussion for raping the girl. I do not know if because he is in Bosnia Americans do not hold him accountable, we say, oh, that is okay … And my wife tells me that when we first got to Bosnia that the joy was overwhelming, and then after DynCorp infestated it, all the people—because DynCorp lived off post, so they lived in the civilian houses whereas the soldiers did not. So DynCorp employees are living off post and owning these children and these women and girls as slaves. Well, that makes all Americans look bad. I believe DynCorp is the worst diplomats our country could ever want overseas.

After Bolkovac was vindicated, she still remains skeptical DynCorp even after Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) bought out DynCorp. She stated:

CSC/Dyncorp has the same managers and employees in high level and consulting positions who were involved in my demotion and my dismissal. I am pleased that my position is vindicated by Dyncorp’s eventual acceptance of the tribunal decision. However, I remain concerned that any changes will only be cosmetic and vulnerable people will continue to be at risk. I hope that now that my claim has proved successful, any other people who uncover wrong doing will not be afraid of speaking out.

Given all this, why would Washington consider DynCorp? The answer is easy; it is all about whom you know in DC and DynCorp is no exception. Just recently, DynCorp International hired Gen. Anthony C. Zinni to the position of executive vice president. General Zinni General Zinni is a retired general in the United States Marine Corps and a former Commander in Chief of U.S. Central Command. In 2002, he was the special envoy for the United States to Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Zinni has been floated as a possible Vice Presidential nominee for Barack Obama, should he win the Democratic nomination.

The billions of dollars spent on homeland security since 911 have not made us safer but have dramatically amplified technologies of social control. Like an addiction, the scope of the corporate greed continues while government continues to enable them through its incompetence and complicity. However, the border is perhaps the key locus of militarization of law enforcement in the US, for it is also the site of the longest-running manifestation of such efforts and the home of the deepest institutional ties between the military and police bodies. Constant restructuring through structural adjustment programs, aimed to protect or generate profits, requires retaining the public’s consent; otherwise, coercion and force would need to be applied more frequently and explicitly. This is based on the ideology of individualism, competitiveness, entrepreneurship, and marketization combined with structural inequities that perpetuate exploitation, poverty, and desperation.

The Southwest border divides two contiguous countries, covering over 2,000 miles from Texas to California. It encompasses six states in Mexico and four in the United States, including forty-eight counties in which more than a third of US border families live at or below the poverty line. The borderland has become “the land of the third culture” as noted by the Pan American Health Organization in El Paso, Texas. This third culture has a wide mixture of Anglo, Mexican, and indigenous cultures that can be seen by the blending of English, Spanish, and Indian words, creating a new language innately understood by most who live there, but seldom by outsiders. The mix of Spanish and English may be referred to as “Spanglish,” and it can also be mixed with border slang and “gringoismos.”

Millions of immigrants are driven to the US from their home countries to be horribly exploited in restaurants, sweatshops, landscaping, and construction. One of the important things to understand about border crossers is that the impact of globalization and militarization doesn’t happen just to immigrants. It really happens to the border community, particularly with the growth of the presence of the Border Patrol and other policing agencies. It is the only area of the country where someone born in the country has to answer to officials about their citizenship to do normal things. It doesn’t matter how many generations you have been an US citizen; you are stopped and questioned at any moment.

With mercenaries guarding the border, there will be hell to pay for this.

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