the contemporary militarized border as we know it stems from 2006, "when President George W. Bush signed the Secure Fence Act and gave a green light to over seven hundred miles of new border construction and surveillance technology, a high-security cocktail of imposing steel walls, checkpoint stations, radar towers, ground sensorts, thermal imaging, and beefed-up Border Patrol ranks"
over $23 billion in private contracts to Boeing, Raytheon, IBM, and Lockheed Martin
plus "private architectural design firms to make the secure border 'aesthetically pleasing' (as the federal mandate put it)"