It is important to note that the violence that participants in the No Borders Camp faced was only a small sliver of what migrants face on a daily basis from the border patrol. Due to this highly militarized border, many people attempting to cross die of dehydration and exposure as they cross the desert. Others are held for indefinite amounts of time in detention facilities with no way to contact loves ones, or are physically assaulted and killed by the same people who assaulted and arrested the three activists on Sunday, November 11. The number of migrants that have died crossing the border since the inception of Operation Gatekeeper in 1994 has exceeded 4,000 and that "official" estimate doesn't even including the many people who simply disappear, dying alone in the desert, their bodies never discovered. The Border Patrol are violent thugs who enact their violence on innocent civilians simply trying to make a better life for themselves and their families.

For more see
Border Patrol Brutalize Non-violent No Borders Camp Participants

Excerpts

"I think that people should really understand that the border is a totally militarized zone and that this isn't your normal police repression at a demonstration. This is an occupation force protecting its institutional apparatus of occupation. And that is the real context of what happened today, rather than simple policing tactics."

It is critically important to situate this recent violence within the larger context of border enforcement, for which the violence perpetrated to enforce the border is not exceptional but daily. For the over four hundred migrants buried in Holtville cemetery (since 1994) who died trying evade the very forces we confronted today, this violence is not exceptional but a fact of life and a fact of death. The brutal, uncoordinated, random violence you can watch on the event footage is both symptomatic and systematic. The Border Patrol is not law enforcement, and can only be understood as an occupation force whose mission is to control a contested space. Like all occupation forces, they end up trying to control the conflict they create, and displace the consequences of that control onto the population. The result is a sustained level of violence which tears apart communities, families, neighborhoods, and peoples lives. The occupation of the borderlands is a projection of state values in which peoples lives are acceptable casualties of economic objectives. The cheap exploited labor of the Mexican workers in the Maquiladoras we visited on wednesday were behind the wall we protested all week. Operation Gatekeeper began the same year NAFTA was signed. As the militarization of the border increases in man power and sophistication, so does the extent to which this racist system can jeopardize peoples lives. Our action today both confronts and exposes the violence of the border system, but so long as the holes we put in the fence today are repaired this occupation will continue to enforce a border state in which some lives are worth more than others, in which some people are given choices that others are denied, and in which justice is relativized and racialized.