"My Home is Treated Like a Warzone. That Militarization has Expanded to Minnesota."

[Nevilledog]

https://www.texasobserver.org/texas-border-militarization-minnesota-alex-pretti/

The two shooters during the killing of Alex Pretti in Minnesota on January 24 were Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents from South Texas. The same place I’m from.

For years, local activists and community leaders here have demanded the demilitarization of the border. For decades, natural landscapes, rivers, and deserts have been used as a means, along with the border wall, to violently deter and kill migrants. For generations, Border Patrol has maintained a high presence in South Texas and has operated with minimal oversight and accountability, shaping a culture in which terrorizing immigrants and their families has become part of our daily life.

That this culture traveled with these agents far from the border underscores how practices developed in the name of immigration enforcement are no longer confined to border communities. They are exported.

I grew up in Laredo in a working-class family less than a mile from the Rio Grande. For so long, we have normalized CBP agents keeping a watchful eye on us and our neighborhoods. I now live in Brownsville, about four hours downriver. South Texas has not only been my home for most of my life, but it has also been the breeding grounds for evolving tactics of policing, racial profiling, and surveillance.

Many of us here live with the mechanization of militarization and surveillance embedded into our psyches. We know where the checkpoints are. We warn one another when the Border Patrol is nearby. In public space, we adjust our bodies and behavior, attempting to go unnoticed, offering smiles of compliance as a way to disarm.

*snip*