Storming the Wall. Todd Miller
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and the Bill Clinton administration, Bush was setting the stage for Obama.
When Obama told Coast Guard cadets about the rising possibility of climate refugees, he did not say what he meant by “they will have to respond.” One might think that he meant rescue operations. However, every other year the Coast Guard, other Homeland Security agencies such as Customs and Border Protection, and the U.S. military participate in a mass-migration simulation in the Caribbean, similar to the one done in Nogales in 1995, known as “Integrated Advance.” This is part of Operation Vigilant Sentry, a mass-migration contingency plan that involves the “interdiction, screening, processing, detention, and repatriation” of people. In other words, mass detention and deportation are now rehearsed like war games on the high, rising seas south of Florida. As the 2014 addendum to the DHS Climate Adaptation Plan states: “A mass migration plan has been developed, and a plan for increased operations planning of mass migration is under development.”28 It was as if the border fortress described by Schwartz and Randall in the 2003 Pentagon assessment An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications For U.S. National Security was coming into being, the unthinkable already here. This was where the doctrines of Obama and Trump meet in the climate destablilization era: a machine of arrests, expulsions, and banishment from the United States.
DONALD TRUMP
The immediate U.S. response to one of the most devastating natural disasters to hit the Western Hemisphere in the 21st century would have been befitting of U.S. President Donald Trump. Much like the scenarios fully practiced during Integrated Advance trainings, not only did 16 U.S. Coast Guard cutters prowl Haitian waters waiting to interdict anyone leaving the country, but the private prison company Geo Group set up a temporary detention center in Guantánamo Bay while Haitians were still digging themselves out of the rubble. The earthquake killed about 230,000 people and displaced more than a million. The message from U.S. Homeland Security was clear, and even broadcast over the country in the Kreyol language by a U.S. Air Force bomber: If you leave, you will be arrested and returned. “Please: If any Haitians are watching, there may be an impulse to leave the island and to come here,” Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano pleaded, “Please do not have us divert our necessary rescue and relief efforts that are going into Haiti by trying to leave at this point.”
When President Donald Trump took office, at his disposal was the most massive border enforcement apparatus in United States history, built on turbocharge for more than 20 years, even able to act with startling efficiency to faraway disasters such as in Haiti. At his disposal were more U.S. Border Patrol agents than ever before in U.S. history, approximately 21,000, a five-fold increase from 1994 numbers. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), at more than 60,000 agents had become the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country. Including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the 2017 border and immigration enforcement budget was $20 billion, a significant jump from early 1990s annual budgets (from the Immigration and Naturalization Service), which hovered around $1.5 billion. Such was the enforcement arsenal before Trump ever set foot in the White House. And at Trump’s disposal were the relationships with untold thousands of local and state police through many collaboration programs with ICE and CBP, such as Operation Stonegarden and 287(g) agreements—accords between DHS and local police jurisdiction that deputized police officers as immigration agents—to name just two.
At his disposal was the capacity to extend the U.S. border to the shores of Haiti, to the Mexican divide with Guatemala, and to the Iraq border with Iran. On top of this, Trump promises to build a more chilling and ramped-up border and immigration control apparatus, capturing, whether he admits it or not, people coming from environmental catastrophes.
Indeed, Trump’s climate change skepticism is well known. On November 6, 2012, he sent out a tweet that read “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”29 On January 25, 2014, the president tweeted “NBC News just called it the great freeze—coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX?”30 On January 29 of that same day he tweeted “Give me clean, beautiful and healthy air—not the same old climate change (global warming) bullshit! I am tired of hearing this nonsense.”31 On January 6, 2014, Trump called climate change a “hoax” on Fox & Friends, and on September 24, 2015, he said, “I don’t believe in climate change”32 on CNN’s New Day.
Finally, as part of his presidential campaign he said that he would “cancel the Paris Climate Agreement and stop all payments of U.S. tax dollars to U.N. global warming programs.”33 And in June 2017, he did exactly that, removing the United States from what some consider the most important international agreement ever signed, to the complete dismay of many people not only in the United States, but across the globe.
In mid-November 2016, a week after the election, the Climate and Security Advisory Group delivered to the president-elect a book of recommendations. This group was composed of 43 U.S.-based military, national security, homeland security, and intelligence experts, which included former commanders of the U.S. Pacific and Central Command and the former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan for national security—the same sorts of people who were at the “National Security, Defense, and Climate Change” conference discussed earlier in this chapter. The document stressed that the new administration needed to build off the “progress already made”34 by both the Barack Obama and George W. Bush administrations around climate change and national security.
When I contacted the American Security Project’s Andrew Holland, the senior fellow on Energy and Climate, to get his take on Trump’s intentions with climate, especially regarding the extensively reported “hoax” comment, Holland responded (cautiously): “There’s a lot of different moving pieces in a government: the President isn’t everything! What the SecDef has to say is important—as apparently is what the President’s daughter has to say!” Indeed, former Exxon Mobile CEO Rex Tillerson stated in January after taking charge of the U.S. Department of State: “I think it’s important that the United States maintain its seat at the table on the conversations around how to address threats of climate change, which do require a global response.”35 Even Trump himself has said and done wildly contradictory things, such as asking officials in County Clare, Ireland, to approve construction of a sea wall to protect his golf resort from global warming, and meeting with climate advocate Al Gore. Also at this meeting was Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, who said that she wanted to “make climate change . . . one of her signature issues.”36
In March 2017, Trump signed an executive order that sought to eliminate a number of Obama-era policy iniatives—such as the Clean Power Plan and the September 2016 presidential memorandum on climate change and national security. Little more than a month later, the U.S. intelligence community issued a “Worldwide Threat Assessment”37 in which climate change is identified as a prominent national security threat. The Assessment, as presented by the Director of National Intelligence Daniel R. Coats to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, repeats the climate security doctrine almost verbatim: global warming is “raising the likelihood of instability and conflict around the world.”38 The report stated that “this warming is projected to fuel more intense and frequent extreme weather events ” and that countries with large coastal populations would be the most vulnerable, especially those in “Asia and Africa.”
When I asked Stephen Cheney at the 2015 conference about how climate change would directly affect the U.S. southern border he told me that in fact the night before, in Las Vegas, he had had dinner with the commander of Southern Command, General John Kelly. Of course, he had no idea at the time of Kelly’s future as Homeland Security secretary. What Cheney said was “We did talk border security and what’s driving immigration and there is no doubt that climate change is having an impact there as well. As it gets hotter, as the catastrophic events become more frequent, it’s having an impact on how they grow their agriculture in the Latin American countries, and employment is becoming a problem, and it’s driving people up north. So he’s seeing that problem.”
Indeed, Cheney said in a November 2016 interview not only that Secretary of Defense Mattis “get[s] climate change”39 but that John Kelly