Bloodied Waters

Earlier this year on July 19, rising flood waters dislodged dozens of bright orange buoys from their anchoring in the Rio Grande River near Eagle Pass, Texas. Outfitted with razor wire and sawblades, the buoys were sent careening downriver until they marooned on the U.S. and Mexico shores, their blades clattering against the concrete pillars that support the bridges spanning the river. One of those bridges—the World Trade Bridge between Laredo and Nuevo Laredo—is often the busiest commercial port of entry in North America. The unexpected appearance of the buoys temporarily forced its closure, bringing billions of dollars of trade to a halt.

Occasioned by anthropogenic climate change, this event marked the unexpected intersection of two infrastructures of circulation that cut across the Mexico-U.S. borderlands. On the bridge, owner-operator freight truckers progress through check points, surveillance gates, and custom booths carrying consumer commodities to and from intermodal distribution warehouses. Below, migrants attempt to avoid razor wire, surveillance towers, and—as of 2023—buoys covered in serrated metal plates. Usually separated in the topography of inland ports like Laredo-Nuevo Lardo and Eagle Pass-Piedras Negras, these two sides of the contemporary border met that day in the currents of the Rio Grande as a torrent of water, mud, and the state’s instruments of violence briefly interrupted the circulation of capital.

In what follows, I take this event—something of a return of the repressed of capitalist crisis, wherein state capacity intended to stabilize accumulation instead disrupts it—as an opportunity to survey recent developments at the Mexico-U.S. border. In the context of maximalist enforcement rhetoric, spectacles of border wall construction, wanton ICE killings, and the expansion of migrant detention centers, what can these buoys tell us about the infrastructures and strategies of border policing in the present? In one sense, they mark a further development of the strategy of Prevention Through Deterrence, expanding a mesh of impersonal coercion that brutalizes migrants by confining crossing routes to the most remote corridors of the Sonoran Desert and Rio Grande River. However, manufactured by an apartheid-era South African firm, placed alongside surveillance towers designed by Israeli defense contractors with offices at university business parks in Tucson and Mexico City, and administered by increasingly activist personnel of the State of Texas and Department of Homeland Security, they also point to how border security strategy forms a space of cohesion between different fractions of capital, cross-cut by national and sectoral interests, and activist personnel of the global far right. In their multi-scalar spatiality, the buoys demonstrate how contemporary capitalism’s lineaments of global apartheid are realized in the fleshy, quotidian brutality of the borderlands.

Violent Landscapes

In the early 1990s, the paradigm of policing and enforcement in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands shifted from an uneven method of detaining migrants once they were in U.S. territory towards a more displaced, impersonal form of violence. Forged in partnership with agribusiness in the early 20th century, Border Patrol spent much of its early history carrying out mass deportations when planters faced a bad crop or financial downturn. As agricultural employment fell precipitously from the 1970s on, and borderlands cities like San Diego-Tijuana, El Paso-Juarez and Laredo-Nuevo Laredo grew, seasonal mass deportations were replaced by a regime premised on racial profiling and the pursuit of undocumented persons in neighborhoods and city centers within the territorial U.S. While this enforcement apparatus continues into the present—rechristened as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2003—it now operates in conjunction with the strategy of Prevention Through Deterrence (PTD). Announced in a 1994 document titled Border Patrol Strategic Plan 1994 and Beyond, this strategy accepted that the direct apprehension of all persons attempting to cross the border was a functional impossibility and instead sought to produce a condition wherein migrants “will consider it futile to continue to attempt illegal entry.” In the passive language characteristic of PTD, the report noted that “illegal entrants crossing through remote, uninhabited expanses of land and sea along the border can find themselves in mortal danger.” In the ensuing years, the strategic placement of agents was supplanted by a massive buildout of surveillance, military, and interdiction infrastructure intended to push migrant crossings into inhospitable terrain. By the end of 1994, the strategy was extended to San Diego (Operation Gatekeeper) and Arizona (Operation Safeguard), and in 1997 it arrived in South Texas (Operation Rio Grande). These initiatives amounted to an instrumentalization of the harsh landscapes of the borderlands and a designed indifference to the fate border crossers would likely meet. Violence and mortality, in short, became a measure of immigration enforcement’s success.

Since Prevention Through Deterrence was implemented, the Mexico-U.S. Border has become the most dangerous land crossing in the world. Through a ‘corral apparatus’ made up of walls, checkpoints and surveillance towers, Customs and Border Protection (now an agency of the Department of Homeland Security) funnels migrants into remote territory where they face an inordinate risk of death and disappearance. Designed to displace violence away from urban space (and thus the public eye), PTD has emboldened immigration officials to dramatically increase the brutality of border enforcement. Between 2014 and 2024, at least 5,405 persons are confirmed to have died or went missing while crossing the border. Many thousands more have disappeared while attempting to cross. The extent of death and suffering is vastly underestimated in official statistics. As detailed in a report by the groups No More Deaths and La Coalición de Derechos Humanos, “extreme heat and bitter cold, scarce and polluted water sources, treacherous topography, and near-total isolation from possible rescue [have become] weapons of border enforcement.”

Parallel to this engineered mortality is the territorial enclosure of ports of entry like Laredo-Nuevo Laredo and Eagle Pass-Piedras Negras as heavily trafficked corridors for both intra-firm supply chains and long-distance trade. While the political economy of Mexico’s border states have been defined by the maquila export model since the 1960s, the post-NAFTA era has seen a dramatic rise in both the volume and dollar value of trade that moves across the border daily. NAFTA famously avoided the question of labor, encouraging enforcement of labor law and freedom of association within its constituent states’ domestic legal systems but excluding that enforcement from its bylaws and institutional mechanisms. Prevention Through Deterrence has, in lieu of a continental labor agreement, functioned as an informal mode of labor regulation, channeling migrants away from commercial corridors while NAFTA’s lowering of tariff and customs barriers conveys transnational supply chains through the borderlands.

PTD’s infrastructure of violence was extended into the waters of the Rio Grande in July 2023 when agents of the State of Texas anchored four-foot-wide buoys covered in razor wire and assembled around spinning circular saw blades in the center of the river near Eagle Pass. The bright orange buoys are linked to each other with metal cables, anchored in place with concrete blocks and set on the bottom of the riverbed. The floating barrier is designed to spin so that persons attempting to cross the barrier are maimed (or worse) upon contact. The razor buoys adjoin barbed wire placed on the banks of the Rio Grande and a longstanding practice of Border Patrol agents pushing migrants back into the river upon apprehension. Since their placement, they have directly caused two deaths, injured 130 persons (including 10 children), and caused a pregnant woman to endure a miscarriage while caught in razor wire. This violence is directly attributable to the buoys, but they have surely caused further suffering by compelling migrants into areas characterized by rougher currents, higher cliffs and rugged terrain.

The buoys were introduced into the river as part of Operation Lone Star, a State of Texas initiative begun in 2021 that has enlisted the Texas National Guard and Texas Department of Public Safety to “work around-the-clock with federal partners to deter and repel illegal crossings.” By 2024, Texas had spent $11 billion on Operation Lone Star which has led to over 13,000 arrests in non-border counties, many outside of the 100-mile zone that CBP can legally operate within. Since Trump entered office for a second term, Operation Lone Star has been expanded throughout the borderlands. Once hampered in the courts by a Biden Administration dead set on dictating immigration enforcement from the federal level, Operation Lone Star is now interlocked with $170 billion of federal funding for border security, including $46.5 billion for an integrated border barrier system, passed in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. In March 2026, DHS announced that the waterborne barrier system will be extended across 536 miles of riverine borderlands. Tracked by The Border Chronicle’s vital Wall Watch mapping project, the buoy wall is already being assembled near Brownsville, Laredo, and McAllen.

While much scholarly and journalistic work emphasizes the articulation between Silicon Valley and border policing, the state’s means of controlling and measuring circuits of migration is often facilitated by machinery more fit for a Tower of London torture chamber than glossy tech pamphlets. In conjunction with the “natural” landscape, the razor buoys accentuate the non-synchronicity of border enforcement, matching archaic modes of violence with drones, sensors and algorithms. What Iván Chaar López calls the cybernetic border, an assemblage of unmanned drones, surveillance towers, and underground sensor networks, forms an integrated whole with the fast tracked construction of rudimentary fencing (including segments on protected Tohono O'odham territory and the remote Big Bend region), a Texas State trooper policy of pushing migrants back into the Rio Grande upon apprehension, the frenzied assault on U.S. cities by CBP and ICE agents haphazardly recruited in huge numbers since January 2026, and a dramatic expansion of migrant detention capacity that has seen surplus warehouse space repurposed as a carceral archipelago. Whereas the ‘smart’ border was once justified as a more humane alternative to paramilitary mobilization, whether of ICE or renegade sheriffs like Maricopa County’s Joe Arpaio, the explicit cruelty of the latter now relies on the instruments of surveillance and sorting provided by the former. The escalation of both direct and impersonal violence, detention and deportation, maiming and family separation, demonstrates how the displaced violence characteristic of PTD has been inverted into a conspicuous and racialist policy of expulsion, one that, as we track the provenance of the razor buoys, extends beyond U.S. territory and into a longer global history of segregation and bordering.

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Lineaments of Global Apartheid

The simultaneous implementation of water-born buoys with deportation offensives in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis indicates how disfiguring violence and nativist spectacle subtends technocratic border enforcement policy. They also point to how the boundary between Global South and Global North has become a laboratory for revanchist ideology and experimentation. After the buoys’ initial placement in 2023, it was revealed that they were manufactured by Cochrane Global, an apartheid-era South African security barrier firm based in Johannesburg, and that Texas had awarded the firm an $850,000 purchase order for its marine floating barrier. Founded as Cochrane Steel in 1973, the firm typifies a distinct process of racialized globalization that has proliferated apartheid’s technologies of separation and securitization into borderlands throughout the world. Fencing produced by Cochrane Global can be found at the Gaza-Rafah crossing, the Port of Dover, and from Dubai to the California coast. Photos on the firm’s website further depict its products at mines, power stations, oil refineries, ports, and military bases. Cochrane Global has provided fencing for CBP since 2017 and trailers for the Federal Bureau of Prisons since 2012. Loren Flossman, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Infrastructure Portfolio Director from 2007 to 2022, has since slid through the revolving door between public and private sector to take over buoy implementation as Director of International Border Projects at Cochrane USA. 

It is well established that, during the era of formal apartheid, the interchange of personnel, technique, and equipment was common between the state security agencies and military industrial firms of South Africa, the U.S., and Israel. Today, many of these same agencies and firms are tasked with policing the movement of migrants displaced by war, environmental destruction, and economic crisis into an ever-expanding global surplus population. As the latter grows, a de facto global apartheid comes to look much more like its formal predecessor. While the logic of violence in South Texas derives from a political struggle over whether border policy should entail personalistic and explicitly racialist ethnic cleansing or technocratic pacification—the two now having merged in the second Trump Administration—its genealogy must be mapped at the scale of the world system. Razor buoys produced by Cochrane Global form a mesh of deterrence with Hermes drones and Integrated Surveillance Towers (IST) designed by Elbit Systems, the largest Israeli military contractor. Meanwhile, ICE maintains an office in Tel Aviv (as well as Bangkok, Abu Dhabi and Berlin) and the Mexican state purchases Israeli-made small arms and missiles for use by state security forces in the so-called drug war. Like Palestine, the Mexico-U.S. borderlands were long ago rendered a frontier for novel technologies of killing, dispossession, and population transfer. Today, capital, personnel, and technology circulate between these sacrificial grounds, linking them to other zones in an emergent system of global apartheid. 

If PTD was devised by long-serving agents in the El Paso Border Sector, border strategy today radiates from Tech Parks Arizona, a ‘business incubator’ and public-private venture of the University of Arizona in Tucson. Through a program called Global Advantage, Tech Parks Arizona facilitates intelligence transfers, joint training operations and investment opportunities between DHS, private firms, and Israeli military contractors. Home to Tetakawi (formerly the Offshore Group, a Mexican consultancy that offers “nearshore solutions for manufacturers of any size”) Tech Parks Arizona provides clients with a range of services including lawyers, accountants, researchers, development resources and facilities. In partnership with Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and Ben-Gurion University, it has sought out business from Israeli firms through its Israel Business Initiative. This resulted in a meeting to discuss autonomous vehicles at a We Work in Tel Aviv in 2017, the opening of an Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd. office in Mexico City that same year, and U.S. defense contractor Raytheon establishing its own facility at Tech Parks Arizona. By providing institutional and investment infrastructure under the umbrella of a public university, Global Advantage undergirds the circulation of genocidal strategies tested in Gaza into the Sonoran Desert and corral tactics forged in the Southern Arizona mountains to the West Bank. Further, it realizes the dream of what former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs dubbed “armoring NAFTA,” suturing together governance of political borders with that of monetary, commodity, and intellectual property circuits. Global Advantage brings the blunt edge of state violence into practical concert with the market and its mediation of everyday life. It allows transnational firms to move fluidly across conflict zones and borderlands and to disseminate the ‘experience’ gained in these laboratories to local police departments, federal border enforcement agencies, and paramilitary groups staffed at commercial ports, civilian border crossings, and sensitive infrastructure the world over.

Cooperation between borderlands institutions and Israel has only gathered pace in recent years, accelerating after October 7. In September 2022, head of the Israeli Border Police Amir Cohen was hosted by Raul Ortiz, then Chief of U.S. Border Patrol. Cohen demonstrated how Israeli drone technology could be used to drop tear gas on protestors. 2024 saw $4 billion in trade move between Texas and Israel and the U.S. headquarters of Elbit Systems is now located in Fort Worth. In June of this year, Israel's Foreign Trade Administration and the Israel Export Institute hosted a pavilion at Expo Seguridad México 2026 at Centro Banamex. Israeli firms Magos Systems, LiveU, Corsight AI, Matrix 2Bsecure and CROW all had a presence at the pavilion and Mexico’s ambassador to Israel, H.E. Mauricio Escanero, hosted meetings with 50 Israeli firms to entice their entry into Mexico. Obverse to its status as a pariah state, Israel's defense industry is increasingly entangled in the tech and security sectors of states deputized by the U.S. for the externalization of its territorial borders. Whether brazen as in the meeting between Cohen and Ortiz or shrouded in a haze of public-private partnerships and university research centers, the export of violence from Palestine and South Texas to borderlands and ports across the globe indicates a reconfiguration of state capacity towards the elastic deployment of force. If Prevention Through Deterrence armored NAFTA, pushing spaces of migration as far away from cross-border value chains as possible, then Global Advantage is its complementary mirror, clustering security and military firms, but perhaps more importantly providing the infrastructure for them to rub shoulders with CitiBank and IBM, construction and renewable energy firms. It has been the state’s role to mediate between the conflicting interests of these firms for the purpose of stabilizing accumulation through force and territorial exclusion. Reconciling the contradictions of the accumulation process is still the state's remit but as capital’s self-expansion chafes against its own limits, the legal and fiscal exterior of its institutions falls away to reveal a morbid interior of class domination.

Reddened Waters

Prevention Through Deterrence presupposes the migrant as a rational agent who will decide to cross or not cross the border based on the risks they might face on the way. Yet, those persons who end up embarking on the often-deadly journey have no such choice. More people live outside of their country of birth than at any other point in history, compelled to move by war, famine, economic precarity, and state violence. The people who attempt to cross the Mexico-U.S. divide now come from a huge swath of origin countries and travel considerably longer, more dangerous routes than migrants of previous generations. By the time they reach the Rio Grande, they will likely have crossed multiple national and extraterritorial borders, each policed by overlapping national security agencies armed with weapons and fencing infrastructures designed for, and often historically rooted in, formal legal and spatial segregation. While the U.S. spearheads this regime of global apartheid, its means of gating and corralling migrant mobility is determined less by the interests of a single polity than by spaces of collaboration between transnational capital and national security agencies.

There is a perverse irony to a flood dislodging the razor buoys. For years, the nativist right has used the language of Biblical disaster to describe the movement of migrants northwards. Buttressed by this racialist hysteria, DHS has more tools to police the citizen/non-citizen distinction than ever before. Nonetheless, its violent onslaught, actualized in its preferred migrant-exclusion technology bringing billions of dollars of trade to a standstill, suggest the limits of its capacity to reckon with the multiplication of ecological and economic crises flung from the belly of capital. No matter how many ICE agents are hired or wall segments built, the forces pushing people to cross land, sea and border will only escalate in the coming years. While the state may fail to completely securitize the boundaries of the national economy, its mandate to reconcile the contradictions of capitalism by whatever means necessary will continue. As crises once localized to the borderlands flood into the center of everyday life, it is the communist opposition’s task to commit to the abolition of borders as foundational to the determinate negation of the present state of things.