President Trump never talks softly, but he has a new big stick to carry in his fight for more restrictive immigration policies: closing the southern border.
"Congress must get together and immediately eliminate the loopholes at the Border!" Trump tweeted Wednesday. "If no action, Border, or large sections of Border, will close. This is a National Emergency!" The next day, switching focus from Congress to his dissatisfaction with Mexico's drug enforcement efforts, he suggested the closure would not happen until next year.
If Trump ever makes good on his threat, he'll exact enormous costs on the American and Mexican economies — the avocado shortages are just the beginning — while, realistically, accomplishing far less than he has promised in stemming the tide of human migration and drug trafficking from the south. He'll also follow a path few presidents have trod.
There are four times in recent history a president has ordered the southern border completely or significantly closed. Only one of those four cases is comparable to Trump's proposal here, and it was not a model to be imitated. On the contrary, a review of this brief history of border closures offers only fresh reason for skepticism of Trump's plan.
Two of the four past border closures were dramatically different from what Trump has in mind. In 1963, on order of the newly minted President Lyndon B. Johnson, the border was sealed to aid the capture of the late President John F. Kennedy's assassin. Kennedy was killed in Dallas, and the proximity to Mexico raised worries the killer might try to flee the country. Mexico closed the border from its side as well. This dual closure did not last long, as suspect Lee Harvey Oswald was captured and then murdered within two days of JFK's death.
In 1985, then-President Ronald Reagan closed the southern border, again to deal with a specific crime, the abduction and murder of a Drug Enforcement Administration agent named Enrique Camarena. This was not a complete closure; crossing the border was not impossible, merely very difficult because of the hours-long delays caused by U.S. border agents' manual searches of every vehicle coming through. It lasted about a week, beginning midway through the month-long gap between Camarena's disappearance and the discovery of his body.
The third closure is a little more like what Trump wants, but not much. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in 2001, then-President George W. Bush ordered searches of every car and pedestrian, much as Reagan had 16 years earlier. "Usually you cross pretty promptly — after 9/11 they went to this Level One Alert, and within about a day you had lineups of 12 to 18 hours at the borders," Edward Alden, a Council on Foreign Relations expert on migration, told CBS News. This delay "had an immediate effect in places like the auto industry. In a couple of days, GM and Ford were running out of parts they needed for production." Some of the new border security measures put in place as part of this closure were never relaxed.
Fourth is our sole close comparison. In 1969, then-President Richard Nixon launched "Operation Intercept," part of the nascent war on drugs. The aim was to stop marijuana imports from Mexico, and the method was a dramatic escalation of scrutiny applied at border checkpoints. As with the 1985 and 2001 closures, every vehicle was thoroughly searched, and some drivers were reportedly strip-searched. The operation began without prior announcement, leaving would-be border crossers stranded in line for hours in dangerously hot weather without air conditioning or adequate water.
After two weeks, amid widespread protest, the closure ended. Drug traffickers, predictably, figured out alternative routes, so Operation Intercept proved spectacularly ineffective in its stated purpose.
For the Nixon administration, however, the border closure was successful — not in the ostensible aim of finding weed but as a means of coercion against the Mexican government. Mexico was previously an unwilling partner in the drug war, having responded to a Nixonian proposal of destroying marijuana fields by saying, albeit in "diplomatic language," that Washington should "go piss up a rope." The pain of border closure made Mexico more willing to give Nixon the cooperation he sought.
Half a century later, with 50 years of often morally monstrous failure of the drug war behind us — and marijuana on its way to national legalization — Nixon's strategy hasn't aged well. But even setting aside the drug policy specifics, border closure as an underhanded tool of presidential coercion should raise alarm.
Whether the target is a foreign country or opposition in Congress, the president should not be able to bring a major portion of the American and Mexican economies to a punishing halt just to get his way. It is entirely unacceptable to willfully cause large-scale economic turmoil and suffering for what amounts to a deceptive tantrum, especially when this coercion is implemented by an office constitutionally tasked with enforcing policy more than making it.
Trump's threat here has much in common with his emergency declaration to obtain funding for further border wall construction: Is it legal? Arguably yes, and it may well survive court challenge. But it is nonetheless ripe for abuse and grounded in a troubling disregard for constitutional separation of powers and diplomacy.
Border trade and transit are not a plaything to be tossed aside in a fit of pique or pursuit of demonstrably vain goals like ending drug traffic. Repetition of Nixon's coercive closure should be prohibited, not repeated.
