ABSTRACT
In June 2003, I visited Douglas, Arizona, a small city of about 20,000 residents. I was there to see the dramatic boundary-enforcement-related transformations
that had taken place in the area since the mid-to late 1990s. As a result of Operation Gatekeeper, migrant traffic had moved eastward. Whereas the San Diego Sector had been responsible for almost half of the apprehensions of unauthorized migrants in the United States in FY 1994, the sector’s apprehensions were only 16 percent of the national total in FY 1998. The Tucson Sector, responsible for the vast majority of the Arizona borderlands, by contrast, had 26 percent of the apprehensions by that time, making it the busiest sector in the country (U.S. GAO 1999). For the INS, the apparent shift in migrant traffic was proof of Gatekeeper’s success in thwarting would-be unauthorized crossers in the San Diego area, and justification for launching Operation Safeguard in Nogales, Arizona in 1995 (A.- M. O’Connor 1997; U.S. INS 1997), which it expanded eastward in 1999 to areas in and around Naco and Douglas, all of which abut the international divide.
