Preface and Acknowledgments

My aim in this book is to provide an in-depth study of the groundbreaking Operation Blockade/Hold-the-Line that was initiated by the El Paso Border Patrol in September 1993, and related human-rights issues. This operation was a radical departure from previous Border Patrol enforcement—a shift in focus from apprehending unauthorized border crossers to deterring such border crossing in key urban areas and diverting potential crossers elsewhere. When Silvestre Reyes, a new, enterprising El Paso Border Patrol sector chief, aptly sized up and seized upon local confl icts over rights issues and other conditions, he fundamentally changed the unit’s immigration enforcement efforts in ways that would resonate far beyond his sector. The operation, as implemented by Reyes, was extremely successful politically and changed the paradigm of border-immigration enforcement, becoming the model for a remaking of the Border Patrol’s strategy and efforts border-wide. However, many purported positive effects of the operation were less impressive upon closer study and over time. Most notably, its impact on rights abuses was somewhat ambiguous in the El Paso sector, but became decidedly negative once the strategy was applied to other key border locations, resulting in the death of over 4,600 unauthorized border crossers by the end of 2007. Despite its crucial importance to U.S. immigration-enforcement strategy for the entire U.S.-Mexico border since 1993, the operation, as well as its origins, context, and aftermath, has never received in-depth study in a full-length book. By contrast, key operations subsequently modeled on it have been studied, e.g., Operation Gatekeeper in San Diego, begun in 1994 (see Nevins 2002), and Operation Rio Grande in