Practice 1AC

Contention 1 is Pandemics

The Next Pandemic Likely to Originate from Mexico

Horrox 20 writes

[James Horrox, Ph.D. in political science and policy analyst at Frontier Group, "Factory farms: A pandemic in the
making", Frontier Group, 4-23-2020,
https://frontiergroup.org/blogs/blog/fg/factory-farms-pandemic-making // DOA 1-17-2022]

In March 20 09, the first case of a novel H1N1 influenza virus infection was reported
in the small community of La Gloria in the Mexico state of Veracruz. The virus
quickly spread through Mexico and the United St the WorldHealthOrganization ates, and in June 2009

officiallydeclared it a pandemic. Within a year , it had [and] the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates,

killed up to 575,400 people worldwide. the source of the outbreak Early reports suggested that

lay in the factory-style pig farms in the area around its epicenter in
Veracruz. Subsequent tests, however, traced the genetic lineage of the virus to astrain that had emerged in an industrial hog farm in Newton Grove, North Carolina, in the late 1990s, where it had circulated

Mostrecent pandemics, including the one we’re currently

and evolved among pigs before crossing to humans.

experiencing, have been the result of zoonotic viruses “spilling over” to humans
from animals. In many cases, this spillover hasn’t occurred via so-called “exotic”
animals in faraway markets, as is believed to have been the case with the new
coronavirus, but through domestic livestock. Most livestock today are raised in
“concentrated animal feeding operations” (CAFOs) – more commonly known as
factory farms. In these industrial-scale facilities,the proximity of thousands of
genetically similar animals, packed together in unsanitary,
overcrowded spaces and vulnerable to disease due to the stress placed on
their immune systems by these living conditions, provides the ideal
environment for viruses and other pathogens to circulate,
mutate, and evolve the ability to cross over to human populations.
workers at these
Research shows that these farms can act as “amplifiers” for the spilloverand spread of viruses. One recent model based on datafrom hog farms shows that

facilities, being in close proximity to animals and thus at increased risk of contracting a virus, can be a “bridging
population” for transmission of diseases from pigs to humans . The study found that a higher percentage of factory
farm workers in a given community leads to a higher rate of human influenza cases in that community, concluding that a human influenzaepidemic due to a new virus could beamplified in alocal community and beyond by the

Most of the major pandemics of recent decades can ultimately be

presence of afactory farm nearby.

traced back to birds, bats or other wildlife, but because these creatures are so
genetically different from us it’s difficult for viruses to jump directly to humans
without some other species acting as an intermediary . Historically this intermediary
has often been pigs. Being genetically quite similar to us, and with similar immune systems, pigs are ideal “mixing vessels” in which
viruses picked up from other animals are “genetically rearranged” to be able to cross over to human populations. In particular, it’s believed that pigs
are the primary source of influenza pandemics, because they can pick up the virus from both birds and humans and act as incubators for new strains
that combine genetic traits from both, and thus make the relatively easy jump to humans. Industrial pig farms have been the source of a range of
disease outbreaks over recent years, the 2009 H1N1 outbreak being a case in point. In this instance, the new virus is thought to have arisen from a
“reassortment” of bird, swine and human influenza viruses combined with a Eurasian pig flu virus. Similarly, in the 1990s, factory farms were at the
epicenter of a deadly Nipah virus outbreak, believed to have been the result of pigs in CAFO operations in Malaysia contracting the virus from bats
and passing it on to farm workers, causing an outbreak of fatal encephalitis among pig farmers. But it’s not just pigs. Studies have indicated that
industrial poultry farms can be similarly lethal amplifiers of disease, as was the case with the 2006 HPAI (highly pathogenic avian influenza) outbreak
and the H5N1 avian flu in the late 1990s, both of which originated in Chinese poultry farms. Avian flu spreads quickly in chickens and is thought to
have been picked up and carried further afield by migratory birds in the vicinity of these farms. The virus is still mutating to this day, and continued
outbreaks in industrial poultry farms worldwide – including in Thailand, Nigeria, France, and in just the last couple of months, India and China – are
Factory
providing new opportunities for the virus to mutate into a form capable of moving even more easily among both animals and humans.

farms are a relatively recent development in agriculture . Until the late twentieth century, most of the
world’s food animals were dispersed across numerous diversified small to mid-sized farms growing a mixture of different crops and raising different
kinds of livestock. In the space of just a few decades, a combination of unrestrained corporate power, wrongheaded agricultural policy and
inadequate environmental and public health regulations – all of which can be remedied if we so choose – has led to a system of intensive,
industrialized food production that poses serious risks to both animal and human health. COVID-19 is the latest in a growing catalogue of public
health disasters stemming directly from humans meddling with wildlife, and it’s right that we should be exploring every avenue to figure out exactly
how it emerged and to ensure that nothing like it ever happens again. But while the spotlight is currently trained on animal husbandry practices on

agricultural systems are creating

the other side of the world, we also need to recognize that our own

hotbeds for disease outbreaks, potentially no less devastating

than this one, right here on our own doorstep.

Affirming increases surveillance

Graham 24
[Pellerin, Cheryl. "AI Can Enhance Border Security, But Won’t Close Workforce Gap, Lawmakers Say." Nextgov,
July 24, 2024.https://www.nextgov.com/artificial-intelligence/2024/07/ai-can-enhance-border-security-wont-
close-workforce-gap-lawmakers-say/397943/]

The use of artificial intelligence along the U.S.-Mexico border will

help agents better secure the crossing and combat the flow of illicit drugs into the country but
will not make up for a continuing manpower shortage, according to lawmakers. During a joint hearing between the
House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border Security and Enforcement and Subcommittee on Oversight,
Investigations and Accountability on Tuesday, both Democrats and Republicans said t he
use of more
advanced scanning and detection tools along the southern border was a
force multiplier for agents but warned that better technology alone was not a viable security solution.
Rep. Lou Correa, D-Calif. — ranking member of the Subcommittee on Border Security and Enforcement — noted
“advanced technologies will help [Customs and Border Protection] officers and agents work more efficiently and
effectively to keep the American people safe,” but warned that “technology isn't enough.”

Border Surveillance Key for Early Warning

Sridhar ‘23
[Sridhar, Siddharth. “Preparation for the next pandemic: challenges in strengthening surveillance.” National Library
of Medicine, August 31, 2023. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10478602/}

It is just a matter of time before another pandemic emerges because collective alertness about pandemics declines
disease epidemics emerge from
as memories of the last pandemic fade. Novel infectious
the interplay of human, environmental, and pathogen factors. Increasing
interaction between wild animals, livestock and humans , together with large-
scale international movements of humans and animals can rapidly
spread infectious diseases to other parts of the world [18]. Travellers from epidemic
centres have been a major cause of epidemics and pandemics
. The first case of
SARS-CoV-1 in 2003 in Hong Kong was a medical doctor who travelled from Guangzhou to Hong Kong and had
preceding contact with patients suffering from severe acute respiratory syndrome. The first case of pandemic H1N1
in Hong Kong in 2009 was a Mexican national travelling to Hong Kong via Shanghai. The first identified family
cluster of COVID-19 in 2019 was a Shenzhen family with members returning from a visit to Wuhan [19].
Overcrowding especially in cities promotes the rapid transmission of respiratory virus infections through viral
shedding by airborne (inhalation), droplet (spray), and/or direct and indirect contact routes [20,21].The increase in
human and animal interactions as a result of the rising global population, the destruction of natural habitats, factory
farming, and trafficking of exotic animals enhances the probability of zoonotic transmission, a necessary precursor
to epidemics or pandemics. Outbreaks of poultry deaths in farms and markets were reported before or during
outbreaks in humans for the 1997 avian influenza A H5N1.For both SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-
2, human cases were traced to have a linkage with wild animals or wet
markets [22–25]. Interestingly, the first case of H5N1 in Hong Kong in 1997 was a child with possible contact
with sick chickens at a preschool [26]. In developing countries, overpopulation, encroachment into forest areas, and
interactions with animals through animal contact or consumption have led to outbreaks of agents of viral
haemorrhagic fever, including the Ebola virus and Lassa virus [27–29].Besides the above measures,
more
effort on microbial and disease surveillance using both indicator- and
event-based approaches should be put into patients with symptomatic
disease and sick animals, especially those with severe disease and unexplained death. Massive reduction of
population in wild birds or other animals has been followed by zoonotic outbreaks in humans due to
Orthomyxoviridae [60], Filoviridae [61], Flaviviridae [62], and Paramyxoviridae such as the Nipah virus. Therefore,
a surveillance approach would be more cost-effective in
such
picking up candidates with pandemic potential before their
further spread to humans. Specimens collected from symptomatic patients, and sick or dead
animals should be first screened by multiplex nucleic acid amplification tests for known pathogens or RNA viruses
[63,64], and specimens with a negative screen or from clinically suspicious or inconsistent cases should be further
tested by unbiased next-generation sequencing to detect novel zoonotic viruses [65,66]. Although the amount of
nucleic acid of unknown viruses is usually low in surveillance specimens, the yield can be increased by the use of
Sequence-Independent, Single-Primer-Amplification (SISPA) [67,68]. The combination of a comprehensive database
and multiple innovative bioinformatics pipelines can overcome the problems of frequent mutations in RNA viruses
and the lack of reference genomes. Another area for surveillance is to focus on the human–animal interface,
especially in high-risk locations (such as abattoirs, markets, farms, and clinical or high-containment laboratories).
Workers and especially animals with unusual tolerance to viral infections such as bats, pangolins, civets, camelids,
and birds [69,70], should be the prime targets for surveillance. Clinical specimens from sick workers and faeces or
corpses of the above animals are excellent specimens for microbial surveillance. Dead bird surveillance in Hong
Kong has led to the discovery of the fourth coronavirus genus, including sparrow coronavirus HKU17, which is
closely related to porcine coronavirus HKU15 and porcine deltacoroanvirus jumping into Haitian children [54]. Wet
market surveillance should be performed in a sustained manner instead of performing only in response to
outbreaks. Viruses with epidemic and pandemic potential, including avian influenza H5N1 [71], H7N9 [72], SARS-
CoV-1 [73], and SARS-CoV-2 [19], have been linked to the markets. A similar surveillance approach should be
considered for international travellers with fever or relevant clinical symptoms especially when alerted by an
early warning system or soft intelligence of suspected outbreaks in their country of origin due to uncertain agents.
The advantages of AI early warning systems
in are multi-fold. It is rapid and real-time because
the system generates epidemic alerts through the processing of open-source data online all over the world. It
requires minimal human intervention and therefore can address the issue of lack of expertise in the field
theoretically. It is also applicable in developing countries as it does not require additional manpower, and has been
demonstrated to be able to detect the Ebola epidemic earlier even in areas with relatively low smartphone
penetration [78]. It has the capability to combine with other software tools for risk analysis and simulation, in order
to forecast the severity of upcoming epidemics so as to prioritize resources. Most of the AI systems are available on
the Web free-of-charge so that different sectors can access these tools for early warning and pandemic preparation.
Although most of the AI early warning systems, such as Metabiota and Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources
(EIOS),only perform analysis for specific pathogens, other systems, such as HealthMap and EPIWATCH, can perform
therefore allowing early detection of
analysis through a syndrome-based approach,
epidemics even for unknown pathogens

Early Detection is Key

Haigh 23
[Montagni, Ilaria et al. “Digital Health Tools for the Surveillance and Prevention of Infectious Diseases: Public Health
Monitoring Approach.” National Library of Medicine, April 20, 2023.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10148710/]

The need for effective early detection and timely surveillance for a robust
pandemic and epidemic early warning and preparedness has been widely
discussed amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, which suddenly erupted
worldwide. This need is further established by various other hazards
reported in many countries amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition,
the failure of early detection of pathogens and their source of origin has
been largely connected with global transmission and severe outbreaks in
many contexts. Therefore, effective early detection , timely
surveillance and early warning are key aspects of a successful
response to an epidemic or pandemic. . Hence, this paper aims to identify key elements
and stages of an effective epidemic and pandemic early warning (EW) and response system. Further, the paper
analyses inter-connections of the elements of the early warning system, focusing on the COVID-19 and multi-hazard
context. The systematic literature review method was used to collect data from electronic databases. Results
suggest that epidemiological surveillance & detection, primary screening of raw data & information, risk and
alerts & early warnings are critical
vulnerability assessments, prediction and decision-making,
components of epidemic and pandemic EW. In addition, response-control &
mitigation, preparedness-preventive strategies, and reducing
transmission , elimination and eradication of the disease are integrated
components of the early warning and response ecosystem that largely
depend on effective early warnings. The significance of integrating
epidemic and pandemic EW with other EWs to operate as multi-hazard
early warning systems is also analysed.

Pandemics cause extinction

Pamlin and Armstrong 15

[Dennis Pamlin: Executive Project Manager Global Risks, Global Challenges Foundation. Stuart Armstrong: James
Martin Research Fellow, Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford. February 15, “12
Risks that threaten human civilisation: The case for a new risk category”, Global Challenges Foundation,
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291086909_12_Risks_that_threaten_human_civilisation_The_case_for_a_n
ew_risk_category]

Infectious diseases have been one of the greatest causes of mortality in

history. Unlike many other global challenges pandemics have happened recently, as we can see where
reasonably good data exist. Plotting historic epidemic fatalities on a log scale reveals that these tend to follow a
power law with a small exponent: many plagues have been found to follow a power law with exponent 0.26.261
These kinds of power laws are heavy-tailed262 to a significant degree.263 In consequence most of the fatalities are
accounted for by the top few events.264If this law holds for future pandemics as well,265
then the majority of people who will die from epidemics will likely die from
the single largest pandemic. Most epidemic fatalities follow a power law,
with some extreme events – such as the Black Death and Spanish Flu – being even more deadly.267 There are
other grounds for suspecting that such a high- impact epidemic will have a
greater probability than usually assumed. All the features of an extremely
devastating disease already exist in nature: essentially incurable (Ebola268), nearly
always fatal (rabies269), extremely infectious (common cold270), and long incubation
periods (HIV271). If a pathogen were to emerge that somehow combined
these features (and influenza has demonstrated antigenic shift, the ability to combine features from
different viruses272), its death toll would be extreme. Many relevant features of the
world have changed considerably, making past comparisons problematic. The modern
world has better sanitation and medical research, as well as national and supra-national institutions dedicated to
combating diseases. Private insurers are also interested in modelling pandemic risks.273 Set against this is the fact

that modern transport and dense human population allow

infections to spread much more rapidly274, and there is the
potential for urban slums to serve as breeding grounds for disease .275 Unlike
events such as nuclear wars, pandemics would not damage the world’s infrastructure, and initial survivors would

likely be resistant to the infection. And there would probably be survivors, if only in isolated locations. Hence
the risk of a civilisation collapse would come from the ripple effect of the fatalities and the policy
political and agricultural disruption as well as
responses. These would include
economic dislocation and damage to the world’s trade network (including the
food trade). Extinction risk is only possible if the aftermath of the epidemic fragments and
diminishes human society to the extent that recovery becomes impossible277 before humanity succumbs to other
risks (such as climate change or further pandemics).

Causes Extinction

Diamondis 22
[Rosalind Franklin: Author. Richard J. Roberts: Author. April 27, “The Role of Mitochondrial DNA in Human Health and
Disease,” National Center for Biotechnology Information, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8802343/]

The recent SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, which is causing COVID-19 disease, has

taught us unexpected lessons about the dangers of human suffering
through highly contagious and lethal diseases. As the COVID-19 pandemic is now being
partially controlled by various isolation measures, therapeutics, and vaccines , it became clear that our
current lifestyle and societal functions may not be sustainable in the long
term. We now have to start thinking and planning on how to face the
next dangerous pandemic, not just overcoming the one that is upon us
now. Is there any evidence that even worse pandemics could strike us in the near
future and threaten the existence of the human race? The answer is
unequivocally yes. It is not necessary to get infected by viruses found in bats, pangolins, and other exotic
animals that live in remote forests to be in danger. Creditable scientific evidence indicates
that the human gut microbiota harbor billions of viruses that are capable
of affecting the function of vital human organs such as the immune
system, lung, brain, liver, kidney, or heart. It is remotely possible that the
development of pathogenic variants in the gut can lead to contagious
viruses, which can cause pandemics, leading to the destruction of vital
organs, causing death or various debilitating diseases such as blindness,
respiratory, liver, heart, and kidney failures. These diseases could result
in the complete shutdown of our civilization and probably the gradual
extinction of the human race. This essay will comment on a few independent pieces of
scientific facts, and then combine this information to come up with some (but certainly not all) hypothetical
scenarios that could cause human race misery, even extinction, in the hope that these hypothetical scenarios will
trigger preventative measures that could reverse or delay the projected adverse outcomes.
Contention 2 is Federalism

Red states are out to erode governance and set bad

precedent absent a federal push on border policy

Brownstein 23

[Ronald Brownstein 23, senior editor at The Atlantic and a senior political analyst for CNN., Texas’s
Immigration Policy Is Getting More Aggressive, The Atlantic, 7-21-2023, accessed, 7-16-2024,
https://archive.ph/MRzR9#selection-1153.0-1155.1, og link:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/texass-immigration-policy-biden/674784/ ]

Republican states are maneuvering to seize control from President Joe

Biden’s administration over immigration. A pregnant teenager writhing in pain as she suffered
a miscarriage while trapped in the barbed wire that Texas has strung along miles of the state’s southern border. A 4-year-old girl
collapsing from heat exhaustion after Texas National Guard members pushed her away from the wire as she tried to cross it with her
family. Texas state troopers receiving orders from their superiors to deny water to migrants in triple-digit heat. Officers on another
occasion ordering troopers to drive back into the Rio Grande a group of migrants, including children and babies, that they found
huddling alongside a fence by the river. These are all incidents that a medic in the Texas Department of Public Safety says he
witnessed during recent patrols, according to an explosive email published this week by the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio
Express-News. “I believe we have stepped over a line into the in humane [sic],” the medic, Nicholas Wingate, wrote in the email.
These revelations capture not only the extreme tactics that Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, and state law-enforcement
officials are employing against undocumented migrants seeking to cross the U.S. border with Mexico. They also show how
aggressively Texas and other Republican-controlled states are maneuvering to seize
control from President Joe Biden’s administration over immigration policy. To many
immigration experts, these moves by Texas, like the harsh measures against

undocumented migrants signed into law this spring by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, push
to the edge the legal limits on states’ ability to infringe on
federal authority over immigration. “U.S. immigration law governs the border; Texas
law doesn’t govern the border,” David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers
Association, told me. Federal law, he noted, establishes a process for handling undocumented migrants seeking asylum in the
United States. “It may not be a process that I like, or you like, or people in Texas like, but it’s a process,” Leopold added. “And that
process does not include taking a 4-year-old child and throwing that child into the water … or depriving them of water when the
temperatures are above 100 degrees. Those are not our values. Those are not our laws.” Jerusalem

Abbott has defended the state’s

Demsas: Why deterrence policies create border chaos

enforcement effort by arguing that Biden’s immigration

policies have exposed his state’s residents to dangerous migrants and
drug smuggling, and has endangered migrants themselves by encouraging them to
make the arduous trek to the southern border. Responding to Wingate’s email, Abbott’s top law-
enforcement officials issued a joint statement in which they maintained that “these tools and strategies—including concertina wire
that snags clothing” were necessary to discourage migrants from making “potentially life-threatening and illegal crossings.” The
red-state offensive against undocumented immigration sits at the crossroads of two powerful trends in the Donald Trump–era
Republican Party. One is the growing movement in the red states to roll back a wide range of civil rights and liberties, including
voting rights, access to abortion, and LGBTQ protections. The other is an arms race among Republican leaders to adopt ever more
militant policies against undocumented immigrants. That dynamic is carrying the party beyond even the hard-line approaches that
Trump employed in the White House. Both DeSantis and Trump, for instance, have promised that if elected, they will move to end
birthright citizenship, the guarantee under the Fourteenth Amendment that anyone born in the United States is automatically an
American citizen. In his town-hall appearance on CNN, Trump suggested that he would reinstate his widely condemned policy of
separating the children of migrants from their parents at the border to discourage illegal crossings. And he’s promised to “use all
necessary state, local, federal, and military resources to carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”
That’s an idea Trump often discussed but never risked trying to implement as president. DeSantis, meanwhile, has indicated that he
would authorize federal border-enforcement personnel to use force against suspected drug smugglers. He’s also talked about
deploying the Navy and the Coast Guard if Mexico does not act more aggressively to interdict the arrival of chemicals used to
manufacture drugs. Simultaneously, DeSantis and Abbott have been at the forefront of the red-state efforts to seize more control
The legislation DeSantis signed contains sweeping measures to
over immigration policy.
crack down on undocumented migrants, including criminal penalties for anyone
providing transportation for such a migrant in Florida. Abbott, for his part, is
building an enforcement apparatus outside the control of the
federal agencies legally responsible for managing the border. His efforts
represent one of the most tangible—and consequential—manifestations of what I’ve called the

red-state drive to build “a nation within a nation” that operates

by its own rules and values. Abbott has not gone as far as conservative activists who claim that the
Constitution gives states the right to set their own immigration policies, on the grounds that they are facing an “invasion” of
undocumented migrants. During a campaign stop in Texas, DeSantis embraced that fringe legal theory and argued that it provides
states, not just the federal government, deportation authority. Most immigration-law experts are dubious that even the current
conservative Supreme Court majority would agree, and Abbott has not claimed this power. Operation Lone Star, the expansive
enforcement effort he launched in 2021, is not attempting to deport undocumented migrants it apprehends in the state.
Instead, Texas has returned them to the border, arrested them, or bused
them to Democratic-controlled jurisdictions. Abbott’s choice not to claim deportation authority
under the invasion theory has generated a steady stream of criticism from some immigration hard-liners. Yet the revelations in the
emails from Wingate, the Texas state trooper, show how far the state has already moved toward usurping federal authority. It has
lined its southern border with miles of concertina wire and sunk barrels wrapped in that wire into the river. Recently, the state
placed floating buoys in the river to block areas that might be easier and safer to cross. State troopers and National Guard members
are also using force to push migrants away from the barbed-wire barricades. Republican governors from nearly a dozen other states
have sent law-enforcement personnel, equipment, or both to Texas to support Abbott’s efforts. “In the federal government’s
absence, we, as Governors, must band together to combat President Biden’s ongoing border crisis and ensure the safety and
security that all Americans deserve,” Abbott wrote in a letter asking other states to send resources. Wingate, in his email, noted one
consequence of these efforts: “With the [razor] wire running for several miles along the river in areas where it is easier for people to
cross. It forces people to cross in other areas that are deeper and not as safe for people carrying kids and bags.” He recounted the
story of a woman who was rescued in the river with one of her children, while another one of them drowned. Wingate also reported
that a man suffered “a significant laceration” on his leg while extricating his child from one of the wire-wrapped barrels sunken in
the river. “We have a governor who is literally using the full force of his government to inflict physical harm and even death on
people,” Democratic Representative Veronica Escobar of Texas told me. “The fact that he is using the government doesn’t make it
any less horrific and it certainly doesn’t make it lawful.” Beyond the human costs, the red-state border-enforcement effort raises
pointed questions about legal authority. Escobar and six other Democratic U.S. representatives from Texas last week wrote to
Attorney General Merrick Garland and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, asking them to investigate whether Abbott’s buoys violate
U.S. and international law, including the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War. Escobar told
me she believes that not only should the Justice Department take legal steps to stop Abbott’s enforcement program; the Biden
administration should be “sending in federal personnel to remove all of” the physical barriers Texas has constructed. Adam Serwer:
A crime by any name The White House this week condemned the actions disclosed in the email; The Texas Tribune and ProPublica
have reported that the Justice Department is already investigating whether Operation Lone Star is violating federal civil-rights laws.
A spokesperson said Wednesday. that the department is assessing Wingate’s allegations, and it seems likely that the administration
may soon announce further actions. White House spokesperson Abdullah Hassan told me via email late yesterday that while the
White House "won't be getting ahead" of the Justice Department assessment, it condemns "Governor Abbott’s actions in the
strongest terms.” Abbott's actions, Hassan charged, "are putting the lives of migrants and Border Patrol agents in danger, and are
creating chaos at a time when our border enforcement plan has brought unlawful border crossings down to the lowest levels in
years.” But many immigration advocates have joined Escobar in arguing that Biden should be challenging the red-state
encroachments on federal immigration authority more forcefully. “There needs to be federal investigations of this,” David Leopold
“The Biden administration should be out front in demanding that the
told me.
creation of chaos at the southern border by these southern governors
stops now.” Angela Kelley, a former senior adviser to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, told me that the
Biden administration generally sought to minimize conflict with Abbott early on, while it was struggling to redirect many of Trump’s
federal immigration policies. But Texas, she said, is now pursuing “actions [that] actually exceed the atrocities of Trump’s child
separation policy.” If Biden feels pressure from congressional Democrats and advocacy groups, “I think that they will act, because it
will be an embarrassment that this administration sat back and let” Texas pursue such policies “in an arena that is really the federal
government’s responsibility,” said Kelley, now the chief policy adviser to the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Ironically,
Texas is pursuing these severe approaches just as the administration’s own program finally appears to be reducing the pressure of
undocumented migration. Despite predictions of chaos when Biden ended Trump’s pandemic-era Title 42 policy this spring,
conditions appear to be stabilizing somewhat at the border: On Tuesday, the administration reported that encounters with
undocumented migrants at the southwestern border had fallen by more than 40 percent from May to June, to the lowest monthly
level recorded since early 2021. But with polls consistently showing that most Americans disapprove of Biden’s handling of
immigration and trust Republicans more on the issue, Abbott and his fellow Republican governors clearly have felt comfortable
embracing ever more extreme tactics. In response to the Wingate revelations, Texas Department of Public Safety officials launched
an internal investigation and denied that they had implemented a policy of refusing water to apprehended migrants or pushing
them into the river. But in his statement after the disclosures, Abbott made clear that he has no intention of retreating from
Operation Lone Star. Conservative Texas state legislators are already calling on Abbott to maintain the effort, and local political
observers told me they are dubious that he will back down in any way. As long as the Texas program continues in its current form,
more abuses may be inevitable. Doris Meissner, the director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service under President Bill
Clinton, points out that even if the state has not instituted a blanket policy ordering such belligerent actions as denying water to
migrants, “it is highly predictable that this kind of overreach will happen” in individual units because the state is trying to enforce
immigration law with people who are “not trained to do this.” Several other Texas public-safety officers told The New York Times on
they had received orders to deny water to migrants and to tell them to
Thursday that

return to Mexico. Abbott’s willingness to pursue such a militant enforcement

campaign, and the decision by so many Republican governors to
assist him, provides another measure of the same impulse evident in the
proliferating red-state laws restricting or banning abortion, rolling back voting
rights, and prohibiting gender-affirming care for transgender minors. All capture
a determination to slip the bonds of national authority and impose a set
of rules and policies that reflect the priorities and grievances of the primarily older, white, nonurban and Christian coalition that has
a dangerous
placed these states’ leaders in power. That impulse, as Leopold says, is producing

“balkanization” of the country reminiscent of the years before the Civil

War. It has also motivated the leadership of the nation’s second-largest state to
conclude that the threat of undocumented immigration is sufficient to justify, both
legally and morally, entangling children and pregnant women in coils of razor-sharp
wire.

That erodes federal supremacy.

West 22

[senior fellow in the Center for Technology Innovation within the Governance Studies program and a co-editor-in-
chief of TechTank (Darrell, “Why federalism has become risky for American democracy,”]

State and local governments long have been considered “laboratories of democracy” that
spawn valuable innovation. But recently states have taken this a step farther entering a
risky new phase that pits blue states against red ones and blue cities against red states, and threatens democracy as a
whole. As opposed to tolerating policy experimentation by different jurisdictions, some leaders are seeking to impose their own

policy views on other places. Taken to an extreme, this behavior likely would intensify conflict
and escalate policy nullification on a broad scale. Take, for instance, the recent
intensification of arguments over immigration. Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas have
bussed unwanted arrivals from the southern border to New York City, Washington, DC, and Martha’s Vineyard as a way to
express their discontent with national policy. These leaders are upset over so-called “sanctuary cities” that are pro-immigrant
and seeking to attract media attention to their cause. While successful at generating press coverage, this confrontational stance
puts innocent people in the middle of policy disputes and disrupts social service delivery in the targeted states. Another area is

abortion policy where the Supreme Court reversal of Roe v. Wade turned that issue back to the states and transformed the
politics of that subject. A number of states used that decision not only to outlaw abortion but to criminalize actions that provided
help for those wanting abortions. The stark differences in how state legislatures have responded to the Roe aftermath suggests
federalism is moving in a destructive direction and putting states on a collision path with one another. Similar issues have popped

in regard to marijuana legalization. For a number of years, that area has pitted states wanting to relax prohibitions
and spawn new businesses against existing laws preventing interstate commerce involving illegal drugs or using the national
banking system to transfer money. The resulting jurisdictional conflicts have strained federalism and made it difficult for
businesses to know whose laws they should obey. And in the gun area, California recently enacted a law allowing people to sue

those who make or distribute assault weapons. Modeled after Texas legislation that enabled lawsuits against
those who aid women seeking abortions, the legislation demonstrates how states are turning on one another and restricting
personal activity on a much broader scale than before. It no longer is enough for states and localities to take decisive policy
stances, but rather they are aiming their enforcement against people living elsewhere who have different points of view. Even
within individual states, there are risks for governance and democracy. Increasingly, there is preemption between red states and
blue cities whereby Republican-controlled legislatures are putting major restrictions on the ability of Democratically-controlled
cities to spend money, set policy, and address social issues. These within-state conflicts are eroding the capacity of cities to
innovate and undertake useful policy experiments. By restricting local prerogatives, state legislatures are upsetting the balance

of power within their boundaries and relegating cities to purely administrative functions. From these and other
actions, it appears federalism is entering an intolerant terrain that
threatens democracy itself. There is a power reshuffling that
likely will have profound ramifications for questions of who decides and
what they decide on many topics. Large-scale political and institutional shifts on
abortion policy, immigration enforcement, gun safety, and marijuana legalization are rippling through many

jurisdictions and eroding the traditional prerogatives of state and local

government.

thin democracy, falling from liberal democracy status to be reclassified as an electoral democracy. The full list of such cases is
polarization have been an important
shown in table 4. This list illustrates clearly that extraordinary levels of
feature of the ongoing wave of democratic decline . Indeed, fourteen of the twenty-six countries in
table 4 saw their democracies downgraded since 2005, the year widely observed to have been the beginning of a new global
wave of autocratization.10 Some of the world’s most prominent backsliders, including Hungary, India, Poland, and Turkey,
register on the list. This wide assortment of countries illustrates how polarization can contribute to democratic downgrading in
In some cases, as in Bangladesh in 2002 or Thailand in 2006,
multiple ways.
polarization—and government dysfunction—became so intense that security
forces stepped in and attempted to realign the country’s politics. In other cases, like Turkey
and Poland, leaders relied on explicitly polarizing populist strategies to gain and retain power, sowing division to energize their
supporters while claiming that it is necessary to curtail democracy in order to overcome opponents’ resistance and enact their
the United States is quite alone among the ranks of
agenda.Another troubling realization stands out:
perniciously polarized democracies in terms of its wealth and democratic
experience. Of the episodes since 1950 where democracies polarized, all of those aside from the United States involved
less wealthy, less long-standing democracies, many of which had democratized quite recently. None of the wealthy, consolidated
democracies of East Asia, Oceania, or Western Europe, for example, have faced similar levels of polarization for such an
extended period, as figure 1 shows.11

Affirming increases federal control over the border, restoring

peaceful federalism.
[American Progress, "Understanding Immigration Federalism in the United States," Center for American Progress,
7-31-2024, url: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/understanding-immigration-federalism-in-the-united-
states/]

Affirming increases the prevalence and efficiency at the

Border - Solving Governors Needs

Davis 24
[Custom Border Protection, "Walls Work," U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 7-31-2024, url:
https://www.cbp.gov/frontline/walls-work] *Redacted Harmful Language* *brackets are for replacing
harmful language*

Wall, agents and technology have since proven most effective when used
in the right combination to improve border security. Today, the area along the
border near San Diego has a second layer of woven wire fence about 100 to 200 yards from that first fence to
 provide an enforcement zone for agents patrolling the border. With lighting, a state-of-the-art
surveillance system, and a paved road that gives access to Border Patrol vehicles,
agents respond more quickly and the flow of [unauthorized immigrants]
illegal aliens decreased even more. The same sector that annually
caught more than 500,000 illegal aliens [unauthorized immigrants] now
apprehends about 27,000 illegal aliens [unauthorized immigrants] each year.
Similar efforts along the Arizona-Mexico border in the last 18 years saw
corresponding success rates of cutting illegal crossings by 90-
plus percent. “We have proven that a wall system – that actually has
impedance and denial, physical barriers, combined with access roads so
agents can move east and west, laterally along the border, and the
latest technology and personnel – can secure the border,” said Scott. With
such a high success rate – along with a much lower volume even trying to cross illegally – some
might ask why a new border wall is needed. Scott said while the barriers are effective, the latest designs will be
The proliferation of battery
engineered make them harder for bad actors to damage or defeat.
powered tools allow smugglers to cut holes through the current
secondary fence in a matter of seconds, faster than Border Patrol agents
can respond to that location, even with the improved roads. Too many of
those getting through these days are bringing deadly drugs, such as
opioids, into American communities. “We have proven [the concept of
having a primary and secondary fence, along with the infrastructure and
high-tech surveillance equipment] works, now it’s time to upgrade it with sustaining and
enduring materials,” he said. “We need to replace that old, dilapidated, dated material with something that
matches the threat of 2018.”

Two Impacts - First Weak Federalism causes polarization and

gridlock

Polimedio 18

[Chayenne Polimedio and Elena Souris, writers for Vox; 2-27-2018, Vox, "Why federalism is hard," 9-10-
2021) url: https://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2018/2/27/17058498/federalism-hard]

Conflicts between levels of government can increase gridlockThe

2016 election showcased an interesting juxtaposition: a Republican majority at the federal and state level, accompanied by an
increase in support for local, progressive ballot measures like increased gun regulations, legalized marijuana, and higher minimum
wages. However, in the past, as Boston University professors Katherine Levine Einstein and David M. Glick have pointed out, this
contrast has translated into political battles between governments. In Texas, for example, local city ordinances in 2015
banning fracking and plastic bags were overturned by the Republican state government concerned about a “patchwork of
local regulations” governing oil and gas production, an interesting switch in the usual big government argument. North Carolina
back-and-forth is
and Tucson saw similar conflicts over LGBT protections and gun regulations. While this

important for the checks-and-balances aspect of federalism, it fights both inside their state and

against the federal government. can also increase polarization and

gridlock, as states find themselves engaging in never-ending
Mccoy, Benjamin Press, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1-18-
Polarization is a direct link to democracy Jennifer
2022 // Nonresident scholar in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program
 //What Happens When Democracies Become Perniciously Polarized? // https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/01/18/what-happens-
when-democracies-become-perniciously-polarized-pub-86190 // IA This survey also yielded a group (see table 3) of countries that
have experienced chronically pernicious levels of polarization for some time without undergoing democratic downgrading. Some
countries, like Bosnia and Ecuador, have managed to juggle pernicious polarization and at least somewhat functional democracy
for many years. While it is beyond the scope of this article to speculate as to why this might be, institutional factors like Bosnia’s
ethnoreligious power-sharing agreement backed by international institutions and neighboring countries may play a key role.
However, for other countries, like Brazil, Mexico, and the United States, the onset of pernicious polarization is a much more recent
phenomenon, and it is far from clear that their institutions will successfully manage the pressures of pernicious polarization.
Indeed, a more sensitive metric—V-Dem’s Liberal Democracy Index—shows that many members of this group, including Brazil,
the United States, have seen their democratic
Colombia, Georgia, Mexico, and

health suffer since becoming perniciously polarized, albeit not to the point where their
score on the Regimes of the World (RoW) index was downgraded. Especially for more recently polarized countries, their
membership on this list may be more transitory as they either find a way to depolarize or their democracies degrade. All of the
countries on this list, with the exception of the United States, are electoral democracies that lack the full protections of a liberal
The most common outcome of episodes where democracies
democracy.

reached pernicious levels of polarization was some form of major

democratic decline. In total, twenty-six out of the fifty-two observed episodes (or 50 percent of cases) saw their
twenty-three of twenty-six—
country’s RoW score downgraded, with the vast majority of those—

descending into some form of authoritarianism. The other three cases

underwent backsliding within democracy, falling from liberal democracy status to be reclassified as an electoral democracy. The
polarization have been
full list of such cases is shown in table 4. This list illustrates clearly that extraordinary levels of
an important feature of the ongoing wave of democratic decline . Indeed, fourteen of the
twenty-six countries in table 4 saw their democracies downgraded since 2005, the year widely observed to have been the
beginning of a new global wave of autocratization.10 Some of the world’s most prominent backsliders, including Hungary, India,
Poland, and Turkey, register on the list. This wide assortment of countries illustrates how polarization can contribute to democratic
In some cases, as in Bangladesh in 2002 or Thailand in 2006,
downgrading in multiple ways.
polarization—and government dysfunction—became so intense that security forces
stepped in and attempted to realign the country’s politics. In other cases, like Turkey and Poland,
leaders relied on explicitly polarizing populist strategies to gain and retain power, sowing division to energize their supporters
while claiming that it is necessary to curtail democracy in order to overcome opponents’ resistance and enact their
the United States is quite alone among the ranks of
agenda.Another troubling realization stands out:
perniciously polarized democracies in terms of its wealth and democratic
experience. Of the episodes since 1950 where democracies polarized, all of those aside from the United States involved less
wealthy, less long-standing democracies, many of which had democratized quite recently. None of the wealthy, consolidated
democracies of East Asia, Oceania, or Western Europe, for example, have faced similar levels of polarization for such an extended
period, as figure 1 shows.11

2nd - Federalism is net worse for solving all their impacts.

West 22

[senior fellow in the Center for Technology Innovation within the Governance Studies program and a co-editor-in-
chief of TechTank (Darrell, “Why federalism has become risky for American democracy,” ]

State and local governments long have been considered “laboratories of democracy” that
spawn valuable innovation. But recently states have taken this a step farther entering a
risky new phase that pits blue states against red ones and blue cities against red states, and threatens democracy as a
whole. As opposed to tolerating policy experimentation by different jurisdictions, some leaders are seeking to impose their own

policy views on other places. Taken to an extreme, this behavior likely would intensify conflict
and escalate policy nullification on a broad scale. Take, for instance,
the recent intensification of arguments over immigration. Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of
Texas have bussed unwanted arrivals from the southern border to New York City, Washington, DC, and Martha’s Vineyard as a
way to express their discontent with national policy. These leaders are upset over so-called “sanctuary cities” that are pro-
immigrant and seeking to attract media attention to their cause. While successful at generating press coverage, this
 confrontational stance puts innocent people in the middle of policy disputes and disrupts social service delivery in the targeted

states. Another area is abortion policy where the Supreme Court reversal of Roe v. Wade turned that issue back to the states
and transformed the politics of that subject. A number of states used that decision not only to outlaw abortion but to criminalize
actions that provided help for those wanting abortions. The stark differences in how state legislatures have responded to the Roe
aftermath suggests federalism is moving in a destructive direction and putting states on a collision path with one another. Similar

issues have popped in regard to marijuana legalization. For a number of years, that area has pitted states wanting to
relax prohibitions and spawn new businesses against existing laws preventing interstate commerce involving illegal drugs or
using the national banking system to transfer money. The resulting jurisdictional conflicts have strained federalism and made it
difficult for businesses to know whose laws they should obey. And in the gun area, California recently enacted a law allowing

people to sue those who make or distribute assault weapons. Modeled after Texas legislation that enabled
lawsuits against those who aid women seeking abortions, the legislation demonstrates how states are turning on one another and
restricting personal activity on a much broader scale than before. It no longer is enough for states and localities to take decisive
policy stances, but rather they are aiming their enforcement against people living elsewhere who have different points of view.
Even within individual states, there are risks for governance and democracy. Increasingly, there is preemption between red
states and blue cities whereby Republican-controlled legislatures are putting major restrictions on the ability of Democratically-
controlled cities to spend money, set policy, and address social issues. These within-state conflicts are eroding the capacity of
cities to innovate and undertake useful policy experiments. By restricting local prerogatives, state legislatures are upsetting the

balance of power within their boundaries and relegating cities to purely administrative functions. From these and
other actions, it appears federalism is entering an intolerant terrain
that threatens democracy itself. There is a power reshuffling
that likely will have profound ramifications for questions of who
decides and what they decide on many topics. Large-scale political and
institutional shifts on abortion policy, immigration enforcement, gun safety, and marijuana legalization are
rippling through many jurisdictions and eroding the traditional prerogatives of
state and local government.

Democracy solves extinction

Bayfield 23
[Haydn Belfield 23, Research Associate and Academic Project Manager at the University of Cambridge's Centre for
the Study of Existential Risk, 2023, “Collapse, Recovery, and Existential Risk,” in How Worlds Collapse: What
History, Systems, and Complexity Can Teach Us About Our Modern World and Fragile Future, p. 74-76]

Aworld dominated by totalitarian states would be more incompetent, more war-

prone, less cooperative, and more inhibitive of progress than one dominated by democratic
states. Our current world is not particularly competent, peaceful, cooperative, or progressive—a totalitarian-dominated world
It would increase the risk of another collapse and extinction and could
would be worse.
shape the future toward less desirable trajectories (Beckstead, 2013). Totalitarian states
are incompetent. They are bad at forecasting and dealing with disasters (Caplan, 2008).16 This can
be seen most clearly in the great famines of Communist China and the USSR, in which millions died (Applebaum, 2017; Becker,
1996; Dikotter, 2010; Snyder, 2010). In comparison, functioning multiparty democracies rarely, if ever, experience famines (Sen,
2010). “Established autocracies” (or “personal”/“sultanist”) are particularly bad, as there are few checks or restraints on
arbitrary rule and the whims and ideology of the single individual, even from other elites (Svolik, 2012). From the inside, the
“inner circle” around Mao, Stalin, and Hitler seems incredibly chaotic, with elites strongly incentivized to conceal information
and encouraged by the autocrat to squabble and feud—so they are divided (Conquest, 1992; Kershaw, 2008; Zhang & Halliday,
If totalitarian states are worse at addressing social, environmental, and
2006).
technological problems, then a world dominated by them would likely be worse at
responding to risks of

collapse and extinction. A world dominated by totalitarian states is more likely

to have major wars. States with near-universal adult suffrage rarely (if ever) go to war with one another
(Barnhart et al., 2020), so a world dominated by democracies has fewer wars. Miscalculation might be a
particular problem for totalitarian states due to personalization and
disincentives for accurate information , leading to well-known strategic disasters such as and Stalin’s
blunders in World War II (Bialer, 1970; Noakes & Pridham, 2001), or at a smaller level, Saddam Hussein’s rejection of
War makes collapse and extinction more likely, by
diplomacy (Atkinson, 1993).

raising the chance of weapons of mass destruction being used. Linked to

this, totalitarian states are less cooperative than democratic states. While
cooperation is possible (Ginsburg, 2020), their internal norms are characterized by paranoia and treachery, and their lack
of transparency limits their ability to credibly commit to agreements. This is bad for all risks that
require cooperation such as pandemics or climate change (Tomasik,
2015). Finally, continued social and scientific progress is likely to reduce
risks of collapse and extinction. Social progress could reduce global inequality and other
risk factors. Scientific progress could help address natural risks and climate
change (Sandberg, 2018), differentially increase defensive rather than offensive
power (Garfinkel & Dafoe, 2019), and solve safety challenges in AI or
biotechnology (Russell, 2019). However, as we will now discuss totalitarian states would
likely inhibit social progress. A central question from a longtermist perspective is: Which values
should shape the future? I would argue that we should prefer it to be shaped by liberal democratic values. This is not
to say that the current democracy-dominated world is perfect —far from it. The fate of
billions of factory-farmed animals or hundreds of millions of people in extreme poverty makes that abundantly clear.
However, democracies have two advantages. First, democracies have space for cosmopolitan
values such as human rights, plurality, freedom, and equality . These are better than
those that characterize life under totalitarianism: Fear, terror, subjection, and secrecy. Second, they have within
themselves the mechanism to allow progress . In the last 100 (or even 50) years, the lives of
women, LGBT people, religious minorities, and non-white people have dramatically improved. Our “moral circle” has
expanded, and could continue to expand (Singer, 1981). The arc of the moral universe is long, but given the right
global society dominated by these
conditions, it might just bend toward justice (King, 1968). A
values, and with the possibility of improving more, has a better longterm
potential. A totalitarian-dominated world, on the other hand, would reduce the space for resistance and progress—
distorting the human trajectory. We should be particularly concerned about “bottlenecks”
at which values are particularly important—where there is a risk of “locking-
in” some particular set of (possibly far from optimal) values. While they are currently far-off, future
technologies such as artificial general intelligence , space settlement, life
extension (of autocrats), or much better surveillance could enable lock-in
(Caplan, 2008).17 Conditional on them avoiding new catastrophes, world orders dominated by totalitarians could be quite
Democracies can undermine authoritarian and
long-lasting (Caplan, 2008).

totalitarian regimes through the following ways: Control, including conquest; contagion through
proximity; and consent, promoting receptivity toward democratization (Whitehead, 2001). Democracies can actively
undermine these regimes through war, sanctions, hosting rebellious exiles, or sponsoring internal movements. Passively,
through contagion, they offer a demonstration that a better, more
prosperous life is possible. For example, in the final years of the USSR, ordinary Soviet citizens were able to
see that the West had a higher standard of living—more innovation, more choice, and more consumer goods. The elites
were able to read books from the outside, and travel—Gorbachev’s contacts and friendships with European politicians may
have made him more favorable to social democracy (Brown, 1996). Democracies can undermine the
will and capacity of the coercive apparatus (Bellin, 2004). However, in a world not
 dominated by democracies, all these pressures would be far less . A world in which,
say, totalitarian regimes emerged as dominant after World War II (for example if the USA was defeated) could be self-
reinforcing and long-lasting, like the self-reinforcing relationship of Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia (Orwell, 1949). Orwell’s
fictional world is characterized by constant low-grade warfare to justify emergency powers and secure elites, and with
shifting alliances of convenience as states bandwagon and balance, thereby preventing any resolution. A
totalitarian-dominated world order could be rather robust, perhaps for decades or even
centuries. A long-lasting totalitarian-dominated world would extend the period
of time humanity would spend with a heightened risk of collapse or extinction,
as well as increased potential for distortion of the human trajectory and the possibility that a “lock-
in” event may occur. This example illustrates the possibility of a “negative recovery,” resulting in a trajectory with less or
no scientific and social progress and a less favorable geopolitical situation, which would threaten the destruction of
humanity’s longterm potential.

Contention 3 is Terror

Right now ISKP is seeking to exploit the southern border.

Sayeh 24
[Janatan Sayeh, (a research analyst at the foundation for defense of democracies focused on iranian domestic
affairs and the Islamic Republic’s regional malign influence), 6-12-2024, "Islamic State operatives arrested after
illegally crossing the US border," FDD's Long War Journal, https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2024/06/islamic-
state-operatives-arrested-after-illegally-crossing-the-us-border.php] // doobz

On June 11, eight Tajik nationals with ties to the Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISKP), the terrorist group’s
branch in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia, were arrested in New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia.
Utilizing wiretaps to track their movements, the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force apprehended the suspects on
immigration charges in close coordination with the Department of Homeland Security. Immigration and Customs

Enforcement is holding the eight men in custody pending extradition. It appears that ISKP
members who have infiltrated the Taliban’s security apparatus have
now tapped into a vast network of Tajik Islamists to expand the
group’s operational capacity beyond Central Asia and the Middle East.
Tajik jihadists fight for both the Islamic State and its rivals, the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The emergence of the
Tajikistan Taliban Movement (TTM) in northern Afghanistan made headlines shortly after the US withdrawal from
Afghanistan. TTM, a terrorist organization banned by Russia and operating under the
banner of Jamaat-e Ansarullah, recruited Tajik nationals with the aim of overthrowing
Tajikistan’s government and expanding the Taliban’s regional influence . It
now seems that TTM’s rivals in ISKP, including fighters who previously fought alongside the Taliban, have settled in
Badakhshan Province near the Tajikistan border. The surge of Tajik nationals joining ISKP
indicates the group’s access to a network of Islamists aiming to carry out
attacks in Russia, Germany, Italy, and Turkey. The recent arrests also
highlight how ISKP may be seeking to exploit the US border crisis
while confirming speculation about the group’s capacity to carry out
operations in the US and Europe. The eight Tajik nationals crossed the southern border
separately, with at least two men entering the US in spring 2023. According to a senior Department of Homeland
Security official who spoke to CBS News, the men “lacked proper documents and were subsequently released into
In September 2023, authorities also
the U.S. with notices to appear in immigration court.”
identified a Turkish smuggling ring that had trafficked Islamic State
members into the United States. As illegal border crossings from Mexico spiked to record levels
earlier this year, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned of a heightened threat level. “Our most immediate concern
has been that individuals and small groups will draw a sort of twisted inspiration from the events in the Middle East
to carry out attacks here at home,” Wray said. House Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Mark E. Green
also raised alarms about the risks associated with losing control of the border last December: “ The number
of individuals apprehended illegally crossing the Southwest border
and found to be on the terrorist watchlist has increased 2,500
percent from Fiscal Years 2017-2020 to Fiscal Year 2023.” The recent arrests
underscore the possibility that ISKP and other Islamist terrorist groups are exploiting the ongoing US border crisis

with the intent to strike American soil. The 2021 US withdrawal from Afghanistan
has enabled terrorist networks to regroup in that country and
regionally, contributing to the ISKP’s resurgence and empowering the
group to expand its operational capacity. This resurgence and the US
government’s failure to stem illegal border crossings could enable the
infiltration of terrorists into the US via Mexico.

Thats Now,

Lillis 24
[Katie Bo Lillis, Josh Campbell (Katie Bo Lillis is a CNN reporter covering intelligence and national security, including
all related federal agencies and Congressional committees. Josh Campbell is an award-winning CNN correspondent
covering national security, guns, and law enforcement), 6-14-2024, ‘ISIS isn’t done with us’: Arrested Tajiks
highlight US fears of terror attack on US, CNN,
https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/14/politics/isis-us-fears-terror-attack/index.html,]

ISIS isn’t done with us’: Arrested Tajiks highlight US fears of terror attack on US CNN — The recent arrest of eight Tajik nationals believed to have
‘

connections to ISIS has heightened concerns among national security officials that a dangerous affiliate of the now-
splintered terror group could potentially carry out an attack on US soil , according to multiple US officials who spoke to CNN. Members of the
group initially entered the US at the southern border and requested asylum under US immigration law . It’s unclear whether they
entered at the same time and place. By the time intelligence collected on overseas ISIS targets connected the men to the terror group, they had already been vetted by immigration authorities and allowed into the country, officials
said. Though there is no hard evidence indicating they were sent to the US as part of a terror plot, at least some of the Tajik nationals had expressed extremist rhetoric in their communications, either on social media or in direct
private communications that US intelligence was able to monitor, three officials said. That discovery set off a flurry of emergency investigative efforts by federal agents and analysts across the country, sources said, including
physical and electronic surveillance of the men — a counterterrorism operation reminiscent of the years immediately following 9/11, when the FBI investigated numerous homegrown plots. After a period of surveillance, federal
officials in recent days faced a difficult decision: whether to continue surveilling the men in order to determine if they were part of any potential plot or wider terrorist network, or to move in and take them off the street. Rather than
risk the worst-case scenario of a potential attack, senior US officials decided to move in and have the men apprehended by ICE agents, one source told CNN. The men remain in federal custody on immigration charges and will

Tajikistan, a corner of Central Asia that in recent

eventually be deported following the counterterror investigation into them. Tajiks recruited by ISIS Of particular concern to US officials was that the men hail from

years has been a source of steady recruitment by ISIS-K, the Afghanistan-based affiliate of the Islamic terrorist group. ISIS-K is led primarily by
Tajiks, who have carried out a series of recent attacks in Europe on behalf of the group, including the Crocus Hall attack in Moscow in March that
killed more than 100 people. National security officials fear that at least some of the eight Tajiks were ripe for radicalization by ISIS-K while they were inside the United States, potentially struggling with isolation, financial stress or

discrimination — all things that could make a person susceptible to ISIS propaganda glorifying violence. Senior officials now see a so-called “lone-wolf” attacker who
emerges seemingly from nowhere as perhaps the more likely — and potentially equally dangerous — threat, rather than the more traditional coordinated plot carried out
by trained operatives.Compared to terror networks, whose communications can provide possible avenues for
surveillance exploitation, lone individuals who do not telegraph their attack plans to anyone present an additionally
difficult challenge for security officials. “We can’t assume it’s not all of the above,” said one senior US official.
“We’re too early to know everything we want to know about the depth and texture of the links that might be there”
between these eight people and ISIS. The episode comes as senior intelligence officials have
been publicly warning that global conditions have put the risk of a
terror attack on US soil at its highest level in recent memory — at the same time
that many national security officials also acknowledge that American drawdowns in Afghanistan and elsewhere in
the Middle East have reduced intelligence-gathering on traditional terrorism threats. “It’s no secret that since our
drawdowns in various places around the world, we collect less intelligence. This was always a tradeoff we knew we
Former acting CIA Director Michael Morell this week co-
were making,” the senior US official said.
wrote a widely circulated piece in Foreign Affairs warning that terrorism warning lights are
“blinking red,” echoing a recent warning by FBI Director Christopher Wray, who
said he sees “blinking lights everywhere I turn.” “The combination of
stated intentions of terrorist groups, growing capabilities they have
demonstrated in recent successful and failed attacks around the world,
and the fact that several serious plots in the United States have been
foiled, point us to an uncomfortable but unavoidable conclusion,” the Foreign
Affairs piece read. “Put simply, the United States faces a serious threat of a terrorist

attack in the months ahead.” Gaps in intelligence collection Intelligence officials are keenly
aware of gaps in intelligence collection in Afghanistan, where ISIS-K is primarily based. While officials believe that
ISIS-K mainly tries to radicalize and inspire attackers rather than train and field operatives, the group’s rise to
prominence is a relatively new phenomenon. That means that there is much that US counterterrorism analysts
don’t know about its strategy, recruitment efforts and operational tactics. US officials and analysts who closely
track Islamist terror groups do know that ISIS-K has dramatically ramped up its online propaganda machine. Rather
than training and deploying fighters — as al Qaeda did in the 9/11 a ttacks, for example — ISIS-K has instead focused on radicalizing vulnerable populations.
Tajikistan, for example, is one of the poorest countries in the world and its population faces extreme religious repression, both factors that terrorism experts say can make a population vulnerable to radicalization. Colin Clarke, a
researcher who specializes in terrorism, said the group is creating “charismatic propaganda” to reach “out to diasporas that are already in place in Europe, in North America and in the region in Central Asia, and attempting to inspire
people to conduct attacks.” “It seems like it’s just a matter of time before they’re able to pull something off successfully,” Clarke said. Concerns about the border The arrests also puts a spotlight on
vulnerabilities at the US southern border, an issue Republicans have amplified in the midst of a presidential election year. “We are literally living on borrowed time,” Republican Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford said from the
Senate floor on Wednesday during a speech about the threat of terrorists entering the US through the southern border. A June 7 report released by the DHS inspector general found that asylum seekers were not always screened in
a timely fashion and that border agents could not access all the federal data they needed to vet noncitizens seeking admission into the US. The US is “at risk of admitting dangerous persons into the country or enabling asylum
seekers who may pose significant threats to public safety and national security to continue to reside in the United States,” the report said. US officials have been paying particular attention to immigrants from Central Asian
countries including Tajikistan since last summer, when a group Uzbek nationals who had crossed the southern border were later found to have been assisted in traveling to the United States by a facilitator who had ties to ISIS. The
episode sparked a scramble across the US government to locate and investigate those people. Two US officials also said that it spurred national security officials to ensure that immigration and intelligence authorities were
appropriately monitoring anyone traveling from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. “I think what [the incident with the Uzbek nationals] did last summer was suggest central Asians are potentially a population of concern, given
what we know about the global ISIS network right now,” the senior US official said. In 2023, CBP reported 169 encounters with individuals identified as “potential matches” with names on the terrorism watch list. But that’s not
necessarily a reliable gauge of the number of actual terrorists who may be trying to enter the United States, US officials argue. When a name pings on a terror watch list, it could mean any number of things: a person could have a
very loose, attenuated connection to a known terrorist. Or they could belong to a legacy terror group — like the FARC — that isn’t known for conducting attacks on US soil. Or they could simply have a similar name as a person of

the gates of the US Marines base at Quantico earlier this year, two US
legitimate concern. That’s what happened with the Jordanian national who was arrested at

officials said. Although his name returned a hit against one of the watch lists, it turned out to be a “bad match,”
according to the senior US official. The blending of criminality and terrorism in poor countries — like Tajikistan —
can also prove incredibly difficult for law enforcement officials to unravel. A person may have regular contact with a
family member who has done some paid work for ISIS, for example, without themselves sharing any sympathy for
the group. But, Clarke said, the risk is there: “Crushing poverty [and] an extremely
religious population that’s suppressed by its leaders — it’s almost a
perfect formula for exporting jihadists.” Said one law enforcement source: “It’s
become cliché, but remains absolutely true: We may be done with ISIS, but ISIS isn’t done
with us.”

Empirics prove
Sayeh 24
[Janatan Sayeh, 6-12-2024, "Islamic State operatives arrested after illegally crossing the US border", No Publication,
https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2024/06/islamic-state-operatives-arrested-after-illegally-crossing-the-us-
border.php]

On June 11, eight Tajik nationals with ties to the Islamic State in
Khorasan Province (ISKP), the terrorist group’s branch in Afghanistan,
Pakistan, and Central Asia, were arrested in New York, Los Angeles, and
Philadelphia. Utilizing wiretaps to track their movements, the FBI’s
Joint Terrorism Task Force apprehended the suspects on immigration
charges in close coordination with the Department of Homeland Security.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is holding the eight men in custody
pending extradition. It appears that ISKP members who have infiltrated the Taliban’s security apparatus
have now tapped into a vast network of Tajik Islamists to expand the group’s operational capacity beyond Central
Asia and the Middle East. Tajik jihadists fight for both the Islamic State and its rivals, the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The
emergence of the Tajikistan Taliban Movement (TTM) in northern Afghanistan made headlines shortly after the US
withdrawal from Afghanistan. TTM, a terrorist organization banned by Russia and operating under the banner of
Jamaat-e Ansarullah, recruited Tajik nationals with the aim of overthrowing Tajikistan’s government and expanding
the Taliban’s regional influence.

Increased surveillance prevents attacks

Heyman 08
[Josiah Heyman (professor of anthropology and chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the
University of Texas at El Paso), Autumn 2008, "Constructing a Virtual Wall: Race and Citizenship in U.S.–Mexico
Border Policing," Journal of the Southwest, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40170393] //doobz

The ideal port would have an efficient, rapid detection process that sorted out law-violating from non-law-violating
entries, that registered entries, and that assigned them regulations and tariffs as appropriate. Ports are far from
this ideal, but their operations and technologies have strengthened in the last decade. First, the documentation
needed to enter the United bn has become more rigorous. The Border Crossing Card is now hard to counterfeit, has
a good-quality photograph, and has biometric identification (fingerprints) loaded on a computer-readable strip.
Misuse of legitimate cards to reside and work in the United States continues, however, because few card-bearers
are pulled aside for thorough questioning about their activities in the United States. As for false claims to
citizenship, these have 308 ✜ Journal of the Southwest become much harder to make in 2008, as land border
entrants need to have a passport (possibly a less-expensive border identification card may also be issued). Border
inspectors vary in how carefully they examine documents and ask questions, however, and they often do not or
cannot enter computer-readable documents into databases, meaning that watch lists are not checked and entry

registration does not occur. Second, ports are being equipped with advanced
detection technologies. Radiation detection devices, chemical signature
“sniffers,” and activated neutron scanners can potentially detect both
terrorist materials and (infinitely more frequently) smuggled drugs.
Such devices are, however, inconsistently deployed and most
commercial cargoes are not inspected with or without advanced detection
technologies. The volume of border commerce is simply too great and the
time required for inspection, even with such devices, too long for each and
every shipment to be examined without bringing cross-border trade to a
halt. Another development is separate ports for privileged border crossers (both commercial shippers and
noncommercial vehicles). To be predesignated as trusted, the border crosser registers with the U.S. and Mexican
governments, pays substantial fees, passes a background check, and, in the case of shippers, follows security
procedures in documentation, warehousing, loading, and trucking. In turn, the trusted entrant can go through
special lanes with faster transit times, while the U.S. government can dedicate less effort to examining such
entrants, shifting resources to scrutinize nontrusted entrants. Most non-borderlanders think of the border as those
segments that are fenced or otherwise closed off, however, and not as open places of interchange. It is illegal to
cross the border outside the ports of entry, and the Border Patrol works to detect and interdict such entries,
The Border Patrol can either deter crossings
including unauthorized migrants and drugs.
by making the entrance too risky, or apprehend law violators, seizing
contraband and returning or deporting migrants. The land border between ports can be
roughly divided into two tactical zones: in or near densely populated areas and away from such areas. In the
former, such as the boundary in San Diego County from the Pacific Ocean to the Otay Mountains; at and near
Nogales and Douglas, Arizona; and so forth, the government has already implanted walls of solid iron plates or
razor wire–topped chain-link fence, accompanied by high-intensity outdoor lighting and constant air surveillance.
Since late 1993 in these locales the Border Patrol has stationed units in close proximity to the boundary
Constructing a Virtual Wall ✜ 309 and in tight spacing relative to one another, which has had the effect of
discouraging most unauthorized crossers from entering there. This has not, however, stopped or slowed the flow of
undocumented migrants, but rather has displaced that flow along the border to more remote desert and mountain
crossing areas. The concomitant rise in injuries, deaths, and smuggling costs will be discussed shortly. The
remote border areas have long been prime locations for drug
smuggling, although most drugs probably pass through commercial
corridors. After the change in migration policing tactics in late 1993, undocumented human crossing also rose
dramatically in those areas. The government raced to catch up by deploying large numbers of patrol officers and

extensive surveillance systems into the expanses of rural border. Such areas are too large for
massed policing, however; urban deterrence strategies do not work in
rural areas. Rather, people cross the boundary in these areas and move
northward, while the Border Patrol attempts to detect their movement at
or shortly after entrance, cut off southward escape routes, trap them, and
effect arrests and seizures. This takes place over wide swaths of small settlements, farms, and
deserts (including badlands and mountains), usually shot through with roads and trails. Walls and fences
may be constructed but are constantly being cut, climbed over, or
otherwise bypassed, and cannot in themselves constitute meaningful
barriers without the activity of Border Patrol officers. It is to this situation
that the high-technology, virtual wall responds for the most part.2 For
decades, the Border Patrol has used fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters to monitor border areas from the air (as well
as for other needs, such as emergency evacuation). Likewise, since the Vietnam War era the Border Patrol has used
electronic motion detectors. Beginning in the late 1980s, heavily instrumented balloons and airplanes monitored

The virtual wall, in part, involves increasing the

the airspace over the border.
density of and upgrading these existing technologies—to take just one
example, by deploying unmanned aerial vehicles (“drones”) to carry
surveillance cameras over the boundary. The application of new detection
technologies forms a parallel development. They widen the ranges of
electromagnetic radiation used in surveillance, deploy near-ground radar,
place high-resolution visual cameras on high towers, and possibly use the
satellites of the military or the National Security Administration. Another
important development is computer integration of information from these detection systems, using landscape and
movement models with multiple data inputs to guide Border Patrol 310 ✜ Journal of the Southwest units on the
ground to arrest unauthorized entrants. But it does still take ground units—no matter how much data is gathered,
no matter how effective the models—to handle encounters in the field; to arrest people; to deal with emergencies;
to transport people and contraband back to be processed; and to do the processing for seizure, voluntary
departure, or deportation. Some contraband and some undocumented immigrants remain in the borderlands, but
This movement
mostly they move northward, precisely because these flows are embedded in U.S. society.
north requires transiting the roads of the border region, waiting in safe
houses, and being transported through interior checkpoints by car, truck,
and airplane. There is thus enforcement not only at or near the boundary,
but in a heavily policed zone in the entire borderlands, including large
cities, many small cities and towns, and farm districts. Almost all of these areas count
majority Latino populaces. Houses are watched, streets cruised, and strip malls and swap meets monitored.
Transportation points, such as bus stations, are checked often, and main airports always have officers watching
passengers. Roughly twenty-five to fifty miles into the interior, fixed Border Patrol checkpoints halt traffic on all
major highways, constituting a second line of questioning and identification before vehicles enter the rest of the
nation. The whole border zone virtually becomes a wall. People arrested for immigration violations are subject to
criminal charges for illegal entry. But almost all such people are instead expelled through one of two administrative
law processes: (1) deportation, a formal process of removal from the country, conveying a legal record and various
consequent penalties (barriers to subsequent legal immigration, criminal penalties for reentry after deportation);
and (2) voluntary departure, in which the migrant and the government waive the deportation process for quick (in
the Mexican case, near immediate) removal to the home country. For Mexicans, this option allows for repeated
attempts at entry until the person finally makes it through the border, meaning that all the efforts at enforcement
are for naught. This practice of voluntary departure crucially allows for the steady influx of undocumented workers
into U.S. society in spite of apparently massive efforts at border enforcement. Since 2005, the U.S. government has
held for formal deportation larger numbers of undocumented migrants, especially Central Americans but also many
Mexicans. The government’s motivation is more effective deterrence, an effect which has not been demonstrated. It
certainly is Constructing a Virtual Wall ✜ 311 more legally punitive and involves time in prison (euphemistically
known as a detention center). Small-scale smugglers rarely face significant penalties, unless they are abusive or
defiant, simply being deported or given minor criminal charges (misdemeanor illegal entry, for example) because of
the burden that border enforcement places on federal prosecutors, courts, and prisons in this region. In general, the
high volume of arrests at the border imposes significant logistical barriers to full use of legal penalties as tools of
deterrence or punishment. The border has been partially militarized since the late 1970s, even though U.S.
relations with Mexico are quite peaceable. National Guard units recently have been deployed to the border, as other
military units have been in years past. One component of their work is logistical (such as construction and
maintenance) and another is rear-echelon assistance in training in and using surveillance technologies. But, often
military units are assigned to frontal listening post/operation post positions, where they conduct observations (but
Joint Task Force North,
not arrests) and their visible, armed presence presumably acts as a deterrent.
operating out of Fort Bliss, Texas, coordinates military support to border
law enforcement, especially in the areas of intelligence and surveillance . A
web of civilian and military intelligence units also operates out of this location. In addition to literal military
involvement in law enforcement, the border police organizations themselves have adopted approaches and tactics
drawing on or related to military low-intensity conflict doctrine, bringing about the militarization of responses to
civilian policy issues such as migration. Immigration law enforcement is disproportionately concentrated along the
border, although interior enforcement has modestly increased in the last three years (see Coleman 2007). The
overall unauthorized immigration process—which we can think of as involving not only entry but transportation,
employment, residence, consumption, and community life—extends far from the boundary and involves not only
illegal entrants but also employers, landlords, stores, churches, and so forth. However, more than 90 percent of
immigration arrests are made within twenty-five miles of the border. Also, these arrests are almost entirely of
migrants, who are the most powerless people in the process, and to a very small extent of petty smugglers.
Employers and other interior participants in the migratory process are rarely touched by law enforcement, and if
affected at all, they are usually inconvenienced (temporary loss of employees) or fined; criminal prosecutions occur
but are exceedingly rare. The geography of drug law 312 ✜ Journal of the Southwest enforcement is more complex
(there is more interior enforcement), but has a comparable overemphasis on the border. Likewise, migrant- and
drug-producing processes occur far from the border in the interiors of the United States, Mexico, and the rest of
Latin America and the Caribbean. These observations pose an important question. If these processes span such a
wide range of locales and could be regulated or reshaped at those locales, why does law enforcement focus so
disproportionately on one boundary? That puts into question the very essence of the “wall.” Furthermore, because
of the disproportionate enforcement focus on illegal entry at the border, Mexicans and Central Americans who enter
without documents (about 60 percent of unauthorized migrants) are greatly overrepresented (well more than 90
percent of arrestees), while people who violate the terms of their nonimmigrant visas by staying past the expiration
dates and working without authorization (about 40 percent of the unauthorized migrant population) are
underrepresented in enforcement actions. Visa violators are more diverse by national origin and, it is worth
mentioning, included most of the 9/11 terrorists (some were still within the legal terms of their visas). Control
of terrorism includes identification of small numbers of people by
intelligence operations; their interdiction at airports, seaports, and the
northern and southern land borders; and long-term law-enforcement
operations against them within the nation. It is thus very different from the current U.S.–
Mexican border obsession. The post-9/11 persistence and growth of unselective, non-intelligence-based, and non-
investigative mass enforcement along the southern land border thus represents a policy choice to deemphasize
protection from terrorist threats to civilian lives in favor of the regulation of Mexican and Central American service,
construction, farm, and manufacturing workers. It uses the tools and rhetoric of national security for policy concerns
about the class, ethnic, and citizenship composition of the nation. This review of U.S. operations and tactics may
prove a bit overwhelming. It is therefore worth highlighting its basic assumptions. Illegal activities, including
unauthorized migration and drug smuggling, are to be kept out of the country at the place of entry, the border
zone, rather than addressed within society. Such police action rests on the fundamental idea that the people
involved in these activities can be deterred in two ways: being turned away by the visible presence of a border
enforcement “wall,” or being discouraged by effective detection, arrest, seizure, and expulsion from the country.

In turn, deterrence is enabled by information about movement

through the border area; that is, by comprehensive intelligence,
surveillance, and assignment of police resources to prevention and
interdiction. At the same time, the virtual wall must apply only to illegal flows, and must not misidentify or
impede legal flows. This means that the virtual wall must also include an effective
means of identifying and selecting those people and goods to be trusted
as they cross the border or move near the border, versus those to be
distrusted and targeted for law-enforcement operations. Again, deterrence is key:
legitimate movers are not to be deterred, and illegitimate ones are. The Ideal of a Virtual Wall The ideal virtual wall
would be smart and secure in several senses. Through advanced technology and tactics,
the government would have the ability to sense and respond to
almost all unauthorized incursions. The border would thus function
as a hermetic seal against “bad forces” coming into the home space. Also,
ports would intelligently and efficiently distinguish among people,
vehicles, and shipments to sort out the law breakers, or at least those
meriting close scrutiny, from trustworthy entrants. In other words, the border would be
smart enough to deliver security to the United States while at the same time not impeding the cross-border flows
crucial to Mexico’s serving as a low-wage export platform for U.S., Asian, and European corporations. The home
space would thus be open to “good,” or at least profitable, outside forces. The ideal border would be a powerful and
intelligent filter. An underlying ideal of the smart and secure border sharpens the distinction between legal and
illegal. The ideal situation is that people with legal and trusted status would be able to move about near or across
the border without inappropriate stops, detention, and arrest, because of highly effective systems of surveillance
and identification. U.S. citizens and legal immigrants would have nothing to fear, as stated so often in the current
immigration debate, because they would not have broken the law. Privileged cross-border commuters and
commercial shippers would actually move faster and with less scrutiny and inconvenience because of their high
value, command of resources (ability to pay the costs of the program), and trusted status with the government.
Only lawbreakers would have reason to fear surveillance, detention,
interrogation, and arrest by the border-enforcement apparatus. 314 ✜ Journal
of the Southwest With respect to illegality, the smart and secure border would largely resolve three major societal
problems: terrorism, psychotropic drug use, and unauthorized migration. This assumption posits that such problems
come from outside the national territory. Hence, they would decline or disappear were they prevented from

Unauthorized migrants, for example, would be so

entering the home space.

discouraged by the difficulty of crossing the boundary that they

would quit coming in meaningful numbers. The United States would be saved from the
illegal immigrant “problem.” The assumption states that the United States itself is not involved in the creation and
perpetuation of these three issues—for example, that the U.S. domestic economy is not really involved in the
employment, housing, and so forth of undocumented immigrants, and that the North American economy does not
Rather, bad actors from outside
mobilize them from their homes in Mexico and Central America.
who penetrate an insecure boundary are entirely to blame, and the
solution is having a comprehensively smart and secure border.

ISKP terror causes intervention in Central Asia

Hill 01
[Fiona Hill (Fiona Hill is a senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe within the Foreign Policy
program at Brookings. She also holds the prestigious position of chancellor at Durham University in the United
Kingdom and was recently elected to the Harvard University Board of Overseers), 5-1-2001, The Caucasus and
Central Asia: How the United States and Its Allies Can Stave Off a Crisis, Brookings,
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-caucasus-and-central-asia-how-the-united-states-and-its-allies-can-stave-off-
a-crisis/, accessed 7-2-2024] // doobz

the surrounding states of the Caucasus and Central Asia

The Caspian Basin and
have crept from obscurity onto the U.S. foreign policy agenda. While the individual
countries of the two regions may not be of vital interest to the United States, the countries that border them are.

Four have nuclear weapons, one is an important NATO ally, and two are states that have
posed direct challenges to U.S. security by their support for
terrorist movements. There is great potential for interstate conflict
involving these border countries. So even if the United States did not consider the
Caucasus and Central Asian states of vital interest, it might be drawn in by the actions
of others. Keeping the regions off the crisis response list should be a priority for the U.S. and Western
governments. POLICY BRIEF #80 A number of developments in the Caucasus and Central Asia underscore the need
The border
for the United States and its allies to pay closer attention to the area around the Caspian Basin.
states of Russia, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, China and, more distantly,
Pakistan and India, have close links with the region and are critical to U.S.
foreign policy. The Caspian Basin itself has become one of the principal points of tension in U.S.-Russian
relations, and the Caucasus and Central Asia are focal points for a range of issues on America’s

global agenda: the rise of militant Islamic groups, international terrorism, drugs and
weapons trafficking, human rights abuses, ethnic conflicts, humanitarian disasters, environmental catastrophe, and
energy security. In the next two years, the Caucasus and Central Asian states could become zones
of interstate competition similar to the Middle East and Northeast Asia. Economic and political crises,
or the intensification of war in Chechnya or Afghanistan, might lead to the “Balkanization” of the regions.

This, in turn, could result in military intervention by any of the major

powers. Given the fact that both Turkey and Iran threatened intervention in the
Caucasus at the peak of the Nagorno-Karabakh war in 1992-1993, this risk should be
taken seriously.

That goes nuclear

Mcdermott 11
[Roger Mcdermott (Honorary senior fellow, department of politics and international relations, university of Kent at
Canterbury and senior fellow in Eurasian military studies, Jamestown Foundation), 12-6-2011, General Makarov
Highlights the “Risk” of Nuclear Conflict, Eurasia Daily Monitor, https://jamestown.org/program/general-makarov-
highlights-the-risk-of-nuclear-conflict/]

In the current election season the Russian media has speculated that the Defense Minister Anatoliy Serdyukov may
be replaced, possibly by Dmitry Rogozin, Russia’s Ambassador to NATO, which masks deeper anxiety about the
future direction of the Armed Forces. The latest rumors also partly reflect uncertainty surrounding how the switch in
the ruling tandem may reshuffle the pack in the various ministries, as well as concern about managing complex
Russia’s Chief of the General Staff,
processes in Russian defense planning. On November 17,
Army-General Nikolai Makarov, offered widely reported comments on the potential for
nuclear conflict erupting close to the country’s borders. His key observation was
controversial, based on estimating that the potential for armed conflict along the entire
Russian periphery had grown dramatically over the past twenty years (Profil,
December 1; Moskovskiy Komsomolets, November 28; Interfax, November 17). During his speech to the Defense
Ministry’s Public Council on the progress and challenges facing the effort to reform and modernize Russia’s
conventional Armed Forces, Makarov linked the potential for local or regional conflict to escalate into large-scale
warfare “possibly even with nuclear weapons.” Many Russian commentators were bewildered by this seemingly
“alarmist” perspective. However, they appear to have misconstrued the general’s intention, since he was actually
discussing conflict escalation (Interfax, ITAR-TASS, November 17; Moskovskiy Komsomolets, Krasnaya Zvezda,
November 18). Makarov’s remarks, particularly in relation to the possible use of nuclear weapons in war, were
quickly misinterpreted. Three specific aspects of the context in which Russia’s most senior military officer
addressed the issue of a potential risk of nuclear conflict may serve to necessitate wider dialogue about the
dangers of escalation. There is little in his actual assertion about the role of nuclear weapons in Russian security
policy that would suggest Moscow has revised this; in fact, Makarov stated that this policy is outlined in the 2010
Military Doctrine, though he understandably made no mention of its classified addendum on nuclear issues
(Kommersant, November 18). Russian media coverage was largely dismissive of Makarov’s observations, focusing
on the idea that he may have represented the country as being surrounded by enemies. According to Kommersant,
claiming to have seen the materials used during his presentation, armed confrontation with the West could occur
partly based on the “anti-Russian policy” pursued by the Baltic States and Georgia, which may equally undermine

Moscow’s future relations with NATO. Military conflict may erupt in Central Asia,
caused by instability in Afghanistan or Pakistan; or western intervention against a nuclear Iran or North Korea;
energy competition in the Arctic or foreign inspired “color revolutions” similar to the Arab Spring and the creation of
a European Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) system that could undermine Russia’s strategic nuclear deterrence also
featured in this assessment of the strategic environment (Kommersant, November 18). Since the reform of Russia’s
conventional Armed Forces began in late 2008, Makarov has consistently promoted adopting network-centric
capabilities to facilitate the transformation of the military and develop modern approaches to warfare. Keen to
displace traditional Russian approaches to warfare, and harness military assets in a fully integrated network,
Makarov possibly more than any senior Russian officer appreciates that the means and methods of modern warfare
have changed and are continuing to change (Zavtra, November 23; Interfax, November 17). The contours of this
evolving and unpredictable strategic environment, with the distinctions between war and peace often blurred,

concern about nuclear conflict: highlighting

interface precisely in the general’s expression of

the risk of escalation. However, such potential escalation is linked to the reduced
time involved in other actors deciding to intervene in a local crisis as well as the
presence of network-centric approaches among western militaries and being
and Russia. From Moscow’s perspective, NATO “out of area
developed by China

operations” from Kosovo to Libya blur the traditional red lines in escalation;
further complicated if any power wishes to pursue intervention in complex cases such as Syria. Potential escalation
resulting from local conflict, following a series of unpredictable second and third order consequences, makes
Makarov’s comments seem more understandable; it is not so much a portrayal of Russia surrounded by “enemies,”

as a recognition that, with weak conventional Armed Forces, in certain crises

Moscow may have few options at its disposal (Interfax, November 17). There is also the
added complication of a possibly messy aftermath of the US and NATO drawdown
from Afghanistan and signs that the Russian General Staff takes Central Asian
security much more seriously in this regard . The General Staff cannot know whether the threat
environment in the region may suddenly change. Makarov knows the rather limited conventional

military power Russia currently possesses, which may compel early nuclear
first use likely involving sub-strategic weapons, in an effort to “de-escalate” an
escalating conflict close to Russia’s borders . Moscow no longer primarily fears a theoretical threat
of facing large armies on its western or eastern strategic axes; instead the information-era reality is that smaller-
scale intervention in areas vital to its strategic interests may bring the country face-to-face with a network-centric
adversary capable of rapidly exploiting its conventional weaknesses. As Russia plays catch-up in this technological
and revolutionary shift in modern warfare capabilities, the age-old problem confronts the General Staff: the fastest
to act is the victor (See EDM, December 1). Consequently, Makarov once again criticized the domestic defense
industry for offering the military inferior quality weapons systems. Yet, as speed and harnessing C4ISR (Command,
Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) become increasingly decisive
factors in modern warfare, the risks for conflict escalation demand careful attention—especially when the disparate
Unlike other nuclear powers, Russia has to consider the
actors possess varied capabilities.
proximity of several nuclear actors close to its borders. In the coming decade and
beyond, Moscow may pursue dialogue with other nuclear actors on the nature of conflict escalation and de-
with a multitude of variables at play ranging from BMD, US Global
escalation. However,
Strike capabilities, uncertainty surrounding the “reset” and the emergence of an
expanded nuclear club, and several potential sources of instability and conflict, any
dialogue must consider escalation in its widest possible context. Makarov’s
message during his presentation, as far as the nuclear issue is concerned, was therefore a much tougher bone than
the old dogs of the Cold War would wish to chew on.

MAD ensures extinction

Avery 20
[theoretical chemist at the University of Copenhagen. Since 1990 he has been the Chairman of the Danish National
Group of Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. Between 2004 and 2015 he also served as Chairman
of the Danish Peace Academy. He founded the Journal of Bioenergetics and Biomembranes, and was for many
years its Managing Editor. He also served as Technical Advisor to the World Health Organization, Regional Office
for Europe . (John Scales, 1-4-2020, "Attacks On Iran, Past And Present", Countercurrents,
https://countercurrents.org/2020/01/attacks-on-iran-past-and-present/]

World War I, and we should remember

An attack on Iran could escalate We recently passed the 100th anniversary
that this colossal disaster escalated uncontrollably from what was intended to be a
minor conflict. There is a danger that an attack on Iran would escalate into a large-
scale war in the Middle East, entirely destabilizing a region that is already
deep in problems. The unstable government of Pakistan might be overthrown, and
the revolutionary Pakistani government might enter the war on the side of Iran,
thus introducing nuclear weapons into the conflict. Russia and China, firm
allies of Iran, might also be drawn into a general war in the Middle East. In the
dangerous situation that could potentially result from an attack on Iran, there is a risk that nuclear
weapons would be used, either intentionally, or by accident or miscalculation. Recent research has
shown that besides mak[e]ing large areas of the world uninhabitable

through long-lasting radioactive contamination , a nuclear war would

damage global agriculture to such a extent that a global famine of
previously unknown proportions would result. Thus, nuclear war is the ultimate
To risk such a
ecological catastrophe. It could destroy human civilization and much of the biosphere.

war would be an unforgivable offense against the lives and

future of all the peoples of the world, US citizens included. Recent research has
shown thatthick clouds of smoke from firestorms in burning cities would rise to the stratosphere, where they would
spread globally and remain for a decade, blocking the hydrological cycle, and destroying the ozone layer. A decade

Global agriculture would be

of greatly lowered temperatures would also follow.

destroyed. Human, plant and animal populations would perish.

We must also consider the very long-lasting effects of radioactive contamination. One can gain a small idea of what
it would be like by thinking of the radioactive contamation that has made large areas near to Chernobyl and
Fukushima permanently uninhabitable, or the testing of hydrogen bombs in the Pacific in the 1950’s, which
continues to cause leukemia and birth defects in the Marshall Islands more than half a century later. In the event of
a thermonuclear war, the contamination would be enormously greater. We have to remember that the total
explosive power of the nuclear weapons in the world today is 500,000 times as great as the power of the bombs

that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What is threatened today is the

complete breakdown of human civilization and the destruction
of much of the biosphere.