A former Border Patrol chief turned congressman is the architect of today’s failed immigration policies. Silvestre Reyes’s Operation Hold the Line operation led to today’s official immigration strategy of “prevention through deterrence”. It is a strategy that failed then and continues to fail to address the problem of irregular migration. Not only did it fail to deter undocumented migration from entering the United States, but Reyes’ operation was “successful” in one thing only – keeping El Paso’s gardeners, maids and nannies from going to work while doing nothing for keeping undocumented migrants from crossing the border.
In 2001 “water planners widely assumed that El Paso ‐ ‘that parched desert city’ ‐ would run out of water by 2030…Juárez, they said, might deplete its water in a matter of several years…into this ‘crisis’ scenario stepped would‐be water marketers like El Paso businessman and University of Texas regent Woody Hunt and Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz.” Reports described “the two men gallivanting around West Texas in search of underwater sources and concocting high‐flying plans to sell water to El Paso.”
As El Pasoans recover from the most recent flooding, the obvious question has been why? Why hasn’t the local government fixed the flooding problems? Although an important question to have because of the recent flooding, there is an even more important question the community needs to ask ‐ who controls the water policies for El Paso?
The Luis Posada Carriles arraignment scheduled for June 13, 2005 in El Paso brings international intrigue and public policy issues to the city. What it also brings is the need to look inward towards the idea that the rule of law is paramount to America’s identity. Although the political intrigues lie outside of the purview of local government, El Paso’s judicial actors may set precedent the political agendas override the need to hold terrorists accountable.
