“In its efforts to arrest and deport, ICE has—without any judicial, legislative or public oversight—reached into datasets containing personal information about the vast majority of people living in the U.S.”
Archive for category: Immigration
First, it was the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) vehicles speeding along on the road in front of our campsite. Then it was the Border Patrol’s all-terrain vehicles moving swiftly on a ridge above us. I was about 10 miles north of the border with Mexico, near Peña Blanca Lake in southern Arizona, camping with my six-year-old son and some other families. Like fire trucks racing to a blaze, the Border Patrol mobilization around me was growing so large I could only imagine an emergency situation developing.
I started climbing to get a better look and soon found myself alone on a golden hill dotted with alligator junipers and mesquite. Brilliant vermilion flycatchers fluttered between the branches. The road, though, was Border Patrol all the way. Atop the hill opposite mine stood a surveillance tower. Since it loomed over our campsite, I’d been looking at it all weekend. It felt strangely like part of French philosopher Michel Foucault’s panopticon — in other words, I wasn’t sure whether I was being watched or not. But I suspected I was.
After all, that tower’s cameras could see for seven miles at night and its ground-sweeping radar operated in a 13-mile radius, a capability, one Border Patrol officer told me in 2019, worth “100 agents.” In the term of the trade, the technology was a “force multiplier.” I had first seen that tower freshly built in 2015 after CBP awarded a hefty contract to the Israeli company Elbit Systems. In other words, on top of that hill, I wasn’t just watching some unknown event developing; I was also in the middle of the border-industrial complex.
During Donald Trump’s years in office, the media focused largely on the former president’s fixation with the giant border wall he was trying to have built, a xenophobic symbol so filled with racism that it was far easier to find people offended by it than towers like this one. From where I stood, the closest stretch of border wall was 10 miles to the south in Nogales, a structure made of 20-foot-high steel bollards and covered with coiled razor wire. (That stretch of wall, in fact, had been built long before Trump took office.)
What I was now witnessing, however, could be called Biden’s wall. I’m speaking about a modern, high-tech border barrier of a different sort, an increasingly autonomous surveillance apparatus fueled by “public-private partnerships.” The technology for this “virtual wall” had been in the works for years, but the Biden administration has focused on it as if it were a humane alternative to Trump’s project.
In reality, for the Border Patrol, the “border-wall system,” as it’s called, is equal parts barrier, technology, and personnel. While the Biden administration has ditched the racist justifications that went with it, its officials continue to zealously promote the building of a border-wall system that’s increasingly profitable and ever more like something out of a science-fiction movie.
As March ended, one week before my camping trip, I saw it up close and personal at the annual Border Security Expo in San Antonio, Texas.
“Robots That Feel the World”
The golden chrome robotic dog trotted right up to me on the blue carpet at the convention center hall. At my feet, it looked up as if it were a real dog expecting me to lean over and pet it. According to the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate, this “dog” will someday patrol our southern border. Its vendor was undoubtedly trying to be cute when he made the dog move its butt back and forth as if wagging its tail (in reality, two thin, black antennae). Behind the vendor was a large sign with the company’s name in giant letters: Ghost Robotics. Below that was “Robots That Feel the World,” a company slogan right out of the dystopian imagination.
According to its organizers, this was the most well-attended Border Security Expo in its 15-year history. About 200 companies crowded the hall, trying to lure officials from CBP, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, border sheriffs’ departments, and international border forces into buying their technologies, sensors, robots, detectors, and guns. As I stood staring at that surreal dog, behind me the company Teledyne Flir was showing off its video surveillance system: a giant retractable mast sitting in the bed of a black pickup truck. On the side of the truck were the words “Any Threat. Anywhere.”
Another company, Saxon Aerospace (its slogan: “Actionable Intelligence, Anytime, Anywhere”), had a slick, white, medium-sized drone on display. One vendor assured me that the drone market had simply exploded in recent years. “Do you know why?” I asked. His reply: “It’s like when a dog eats blood and gets carnivorous.”
Elsewhere, the red Verizon Frontline mobile command-and-control truck looked like it could keep perfect company with any Border Patrol all-terrain vehicle unit; while Dell, the Texas-based computer firm, displayed its own frontline mobile vehicle, promising that “whether you’re providing critical citizen services, innovating for the next generation, or securing the nation, we bring the right technology… and far-reaching vision to help guide your journey.”
And don’t forget 3M, which has moved well beyond its most famous product, Scotch tape, to provide “rugged and reliable equipment across DoD [Department of Defense], DoJ [Department of Justice], DHS [Department of Homeland Security], and U.S. state and local agencies.” Top defense contractors like Airbus (with a shiny black helicopter on display in the center of the expo hall) were also present, along with top border contractors like General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and Elbit Systems.
Just the day before the expo opened, the Biden administration put out its fiscal year 2023 budget, which proposed $97.3 billion for the DHS, that agency’s largest in its two-decade history. The Customs and Border Protection part of that, $17.5 billion, would similarly be the most money that agency has ever received, nearly $1.5 billion more than last year. Although Immigration and Customs Enforcement received just a marginal increase, it will still get $8.5 billion. Combine just those two and that $26 billion would be the highest sum ever dedicated to border and immigration enforcement, significantly more than the $20 billion that the Trump administration started out with in 2017. As DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas put it, such a budget will help secure our “values.” (And in an ironic sense, at least, how true that is!)
“Notably,” Mayorkas added, “the budget makes smart investments in technology to keep our borders secure and includes funding that will allow us to process asylum claims more efficiently as we build a safe, orderly, and humane immigration system.”
What Mayorkas didn’t mention was that his border plans involve ever more contracts doled out to private industry. That’s been the case since 9/11 when money began to pour into border and immigration enforcement, especially after the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002. With ever-growing budgets, the process of privatizing the oversight of our southern border increased significantly during the administration of President George W. Bush. (The first Border Security Expo was, tellingly enough, in 2005.) The process, however, soared in the Obama era. During the first four years of his presidency, 60,405 contracts (including a massive $766 million to weapons-maker Lockheed Martin) were issued to the tune of $15 billion. From 2013 to 2016, another 81,500 contracts were issued for a total of $13.2 billion.
In other words, despite his wall, it’s a misconception to think that Donald Trump stood alone in his urge to crack down on migration at the border. It’s true, however, that his administration did up the ante by issuing 87,293 border-protection contracts totaling $20.9 billion. For Biden, the tally so far is 10,612 contracts for $8 billion. If he keeps up that pace, he could rack up nearly $24 billion in contracts by the end of his first term, which would leave Trump’s numbers and those of every other recent president in the dust.
If so, the contracts of the Trump and Biden administrations would total nearly $45 billion, slightly surpassing the $44.3 billion spent on border and immigration enforcement from 1980 to 2002. In the media, border and immigration issues are normally framed in terms of a partisan divide between Democrats and Republicans. While there is certainly some truth to that, there are a surprising number of ways in which both parties have reached a kind of grim border consensus.
As Maryland Democratic Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger, a member of the House appropriations committee, said ever so beamingly on a screen at that Expo conference, “I have literally put my money where my mouth is, championing funding for fencing, additional Border Patrol agents, and state-of-the-art surveillance equipment.” And as Clint McDonald, a member of the Border Sheriff’s Association, said at its opening panel, the border is “not a red issue, it’s not a blue issue. It’s a red, white, and blue issue.”
When I asked the Ghost Robotics vendor if his robo-dog had a name, he replied that his daughter “likes to call it Tank.” He then added, “We let our customers name them as they get them.” While we were chatting, a prospective customer asked, “What about weapons mountable?” (That is, could buyers weaponize that dog?) The vendor immediately assured him that they were already working with other companies to make that happen.
Later, when I asked Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz about the surveillance dogs, he downplayed their significance, stressing the media hype around them, and saying that no robo-dogs were yet deployed anywhere on the border. Nonetheless, it was hard not to wander that hall and think, This, much more than a wall, could be our border future. In fact, if the “big, beautiful” wall was the emblem of Donald Trump’s border policy, then for the Biden moment, think robo-dogs.
Border Security Is Not a “Pipe Dream”
The night before I stood on that hill in Arizona, I had heard people passing through the campsite where my son and I were sleeping in a tent. Their footsteps were soft and I felt no fear, no danger. That people were coming through should hardly have been a surprise. Enforcement at our southern border has been designed to push such border-crossing migrants into just the sort of desert lands we were camping in, often under the cover of night.
The remains of at least 8,000 people have been found in those landscapes since the mid-1990s and many more undoubtedly died since thousands of families continue to search for lost loved ones who disappeared in the borderlands. Those soft footsteps I heard could have been from asylum seekers fleeing violence in their lands or facing the disaster of accelerating climate change — wilted crops and flooded fields — or economic dispossession in countries where foreign corporations and local oligarchies rule the day. Or all of that combined.
For years, I’ve been talking to migrants who crossed isolated and hazardous parts of the Arizona desert to bypass the walls and guns of the Border Patrol.
I thought of them when, on the last day of that Border Security Expo, I watched Palmer Luckey, the CEO of Anduril, a new border surveillance company, step up to the podium to introduce a panel on “The Digital Transformation of the Border.” The 20-something Luckey, already worth $700 million, had floppy brown hair and wore a Hawaiian shirt, cargo shorts, and flip-flops. He told the audience of border industry and Homeland Security officials that he was wearing shades because of recent laser surgery, not an urge to look cool.
He did look cool, though, as if he were at the beach. And he does represent the next generation of border tech. Since 2020, his company has received nearly $100 million in contracts from Customs and Border Protection.
His introduction to the panel, which sounded to me more like a pitch for financing, offered a glimpse of how the border-industrial complex now works. It was like listening to a rehearsal for the lobbying appearances he and his company would undoubtedly make in Congress for the 2023 budget. In 2021, Anduril spent $930,000 lobbying on issues that mattered to its executives. It also gifted political candidates with nearly $2 million in campaign contributions.
Luckey’s message was: fund me and you’ll create a “durable industrial base,” while ensuring that border security will not be a “pipe dream.” Indeed, in his vision, the new border-surveillance infrastructure he represents will instead be an autonomous “pipeline,” delivering endlessly actionable information and intelligence directly to the cell phones of Border Patrol agents.
I was thinking about his pitch again as I stood atop that hill watching the border apparatus quickly mobilize. I was, in fact, looking at yet another Border Patrol vehicle driving by when I suddenly heard a mechanical buzzing overhead that made me think a drone might be nearby. At our southern border, the CBP not only operates the sizeable Predator Bs (once used in U.S. military and CIA operations abroad), but small and medium-sized drones.
I could see nothing in the sky, but something was certainly happening. It was as if I were at the Expo again, but now it was real life. I was, in fact, in the middle of the very surveillance-infrastructure pipeline Luckey had described, where towers talk to each other, signal to drones, to the all-terrain vehicle unit, and to roving Border Patrol cars.
Then the buzzing sound abruptly stopped as a CBP helicopter lifted into the air, its loud propellers roaring.
The Real Crisis
After that dramatic helicopter exit, I wondered if there was indeed a border emergency and finally decided to get in my car and see what I could find out, leaving my son with our friends. As I rounded a corner, I came across Border Patrol agents and vehicles at the side of the road with a large group of people who, I assumed, were migrants. About four individuals had already been put in the back of a green-striped Border Patrol pickup truck, handcuffed and arrested. They had the tired look I knew so well of people who had walked an entire night in an unknown, hazardous landscape, had failed, and were now about to be deported. The agents of the ATV detail were lounging around in their green jumpsuits as their quads idled, as if this were all in a day’s (or night’s) work, which indeed it was.
I remembered then hearing those footsteps as my son slept soundly and thought: The border is not in crisis. That’s impossible. The border’s inanimate. It’s the people walking through the desert — the ones who crept past us and those in the back of that truck or soon to be put in other trucks like it, arrested so far from home — who are actually in crisis. And it’s a crisis almost beyond the ability of anyone who hasn’t been displaced to imagine. Otherwise, why would they be here in the first place?
The ongoing border-crisis story is another example of what Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano once would have called an “upside down” world, so twisted in its telling that the victim becomes the victimizer and the oppressor, the oppressed. If only there were a way we could turn that story — and how so many in this country think about it — right-side up.
As I was mulling all of that over, I suddenly noticed the omnipresent “eye” of the Elbit Systems tower “staring” at me again. Its superpower cameras were catching the whole scene. Perhaps its radar had detected this group to begin with. After all, the company’s website says, “From the darkest of nights to the thickest of brush, our border solutions help predict, detect, identify, and classify items of interest.” Not people, mind you, but the handcuffed “items of interest” in the back of that truck.
As I watched the scene unfold, I remembered a moment at that Expo when a man from the Rio Grande Valley asked a panel of Department of Homeland Security officials a rare and pointed question. Gesturing toward the hall where all the companies were hawking their wares, he wondered why, if there was so much money to be made in border security, “would you even want a solution?”
The long uncomfortable silence that followed told me all I needed to know about the real border crisis in this country.
The U.S. has hit a record number of apprehensions at the border shared with Mexico, arresting over 1 million asylum seekers in the past six months alone. We speak with immigration attorney Erika Pinheiro about the Biden administration’s unequal treatment of different nationalities, as refugees from countries like Haiti, Cuba and Cameroon face harsh restrictions on asylum, but Ukrainian refugees seem to be receiving special treatment and even exemption from Title 42. “Asylum is supposed to be a universal standard protecting individuals fleeing persecution from any country, but in practice it’s always been a political tool wielded by the United States to favor those fleeing regimes that the United States opposes,” says Pinheiro.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
We turn now to the U.S.-Mexico border, where Border Patrol officers have arrested over a million asylum seekers in the past six months — a record number in at least 20 years, that comes as many are fleeing economic and political crises, horrific violence, the impacts of the climate emergency, in Haiti, in Cuba, in Central and South America and Africa.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February, thousands of Ukrainian refugees have also trekked to the U.S.-Mexico border in search of safety. U.S. border officials have processed nearly 10,000 Ukrainians in the past two months, most at ports of entry. Hundreds of Ukrainians camped out in the border city of Tijuana, Mexico, earlier this month, hoping to be allowed into the United States.
VALENTINA SHYMANEVSKA: I couldn’t — I couldn’t cry in Ukraine. I didn’t cry in Ukraine at all. I thank you even for my tears. I thank you for this place, for this food and for our dream to give him a little bit calmer life until the victory. When the victory comes, we will go the same day, the same day, to Ukraine.
DAVID MIRAMONTES: [translated] Little by little, the camp started being formed, because this is going to go on for a long time. As long as the war continues and as long as there is no direct connection from Europe to the United States for the Ukrainians, they will continue to arrive here in Tijuana. They will have to depend on the charity and generosity of the people of Tijuana.
AMY GOODMAN: In addition to the camp at the border, Ukrainian refugees are also staying at a shelter in Tijuana.
YEVHEN SHYSHKIN: [translated] I’m really surprised about how people have been helping us here. The conditions in the shelter are perfect. The most impressive thing is how Mexican and American people are trying to help us and how everybody wants to offer us assistance somehow.
AMY GOODMAN: Immigrant justice advocates have welcomed efforts to process Ukrainian refugees at the border but are condemning the U.S. government’s hypocrisy as it brutalizes and criminalizes Black, Indigenous and other asylum seekers who don’t come from white European nations. Many have waited months, even years, to be a processed for asylum at a U.S. port of entry, forced to wait in Mexico often in very dangerous conditions. This is a Honduran asylum seeker at a shelter in Tijuana, Mexico.
AUGUSTO MARTINEZ: They got a war. We got worse than war in Central America. And they have a war from February to this time. We’ve got a war there with these gangs, you know what I mean, about 15, 20 years behind. And we have that war, same. Same bullet kill those people, same bullet kill us also. You know, I mean, why they’re treating Hispanic asylum people this way? You know what I mean? They can take all the Ukrainian people into the United States, but they don’t take the Hispanic people.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Erika Pinheiro, an immigration attorney based in Tijuana, Mexico, and the policy and litigation director of Al Otro Lado, a binational nonprofit helping asylum seekers on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. She herself was targeted by the Trump administration, monitored and surveilled.
Erika, if you can talk about this double standard, what it looks like where you are in Tijuana? We’re not talking about Ukrainians who are flying into the United States, where they can find a lot of bureaucracy. So, they, too, are coming through the southern border, but they’re allowed in.
ERIKA PINHEIRO: Yes. Hi. Yeah, we’ve seen thousands of Ukrainians coming through Tijuana. Their trips to Mexico are mostly financed by families and church groups in the United States who help them fly from Europe to Mexico City or Cancún, and then onward to Tijuana. Volunteer groups are standing by at the airport. They are coordinating with CBP to give Ukrainians a number on a list. And CBP, Customs and Border Protection, are processing up to a thousand Ukrainians per day, at a port of entry where border officials claimed they did not have capacity to even process 30 other asylum seekers per day for the past few years.
The Tijuana government has also provided an enormous amount of resources to Ukrainian migrants, even giving them a municipal-funded shelter, where they have food, shelter, bedding, all kinds of services available to them, months after they evicted violently a camp of Black and Indigenous asylum seekers who had camped at the border for more than a year waiting for their chance to seek asylum, many of whom have now ended up homeless on the streets of Tijuana.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Erika, these reports are astounding. I’ve heard reports that there was a special line set up at the border crossing in Tijuana just for Ukrainians, sort of like a TSA line, a special priority line. Is that true?
ERIKA PINHEIRO: That is accurate. So, part of the port of entry was closed down when Title 42, the COVID-related border restrictions, were put into place in March of 2020. Customs and Border Protection has since reopened this section of the port of entry, and it is solely dedicated to humanitarian processing of Ukrainians. As I mentioned, up to a thousand are being transported there each day by church groups and are being processed in a very orderly fashion by CBP. So this shows us that border officials do have the capacity to humanely process thousands of asylum seekers, if they have the political will to do so.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And the impact on others who are waiting, for instance, Hondurans and Guatemalans? There appear to be more Ukrainians being processed for asylum in a few weeks than in an entire year of Salvadorans and Hondurans who have been admitted for asylum into the United States, despite decades of having some of the highest homicide rates in the world in El Salvador and in Honduras. What’s the impact on those who are waiting and watching this?
ERIKA PINHEIRO: Well, I can say for myself and also on behalf of many of the migrants with whom we work, everyone wants to support the Ukrainians. Of course the war that they’re fleeing is horrific. The way that they are being treated at the border is the way that everyone should be treated.
So, migrants who have been waiting for years now in deplorable conditions, many of whom have suffered rape, attempted kidnappings, assaults while waiting in these dangerous Mexican border cities, are, of course, hurt and angry at seeing Ukrainians being processed at this clip, while they are left waiting.
But it’s worse than that, actually. Since Ukrainians and even Russians have been coming to Tijuana, in particular, whereas other asylum seekers could approach the border and ask for protection previously — you know, of course, they would be turned away — but now Mexican law enforcement officials are posted at the border with an immigration van. If a Honduran even tries to approach border officials, they will be arrested and detained in a Mexican immigration prison for even attempting to seek safety in the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: Erika, Axios reported on Tuesday that President Biden’s inner circle has been discussing delaying the repeal of Title 42 border restrictions now set to end May 23rd. Again, these are the Trump-era pandemic restrictions that prevent people from coming into the United States on public health safety grounds. And these have been suspended for Ukrainians. But if you can talk about the number of Democrats and Republicans who have been demanding that Biden reimpose, extend Title 42, and what that means, as well as this double standard of Ukrainians not being subject to it as others are?
ERIKA PINHEIRO: So, part of the problem here is really the way that the media has been talking about the repeal of Title 42. I have seen numerous stories in which the migrants, who have been waiting patiently at the border for the ports of entry to reopen, have been characterized as a “surge” or a “wave.” I’ve seen language referring to the repeal of Title 42 as a “crisis.”
Now, DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, estimates that approximately 25,000 asylum seekers are waiting at the border for Title 42 to be repealed. Now, again, keep in mind, in the past few weeks, U.S. border officials have processed over 10,000 Ukrainians. So, again, they have the ability, the capacity to process the number of asylum seekers who are waiting at the border easily, in an orderly and humane fashion, when the political will is there. Of course, the only difference here is that those waiting are largely Black and Indigenous and other asylum seekers who are not white Europeans.
So, you know, I really believe that we need to start speaking about the migrants who are waiting in a different way. I think that’s a huge part of the problem. But it’s really — seeing that kind of rhetoric in the media and seeing that repeated by members of Congress, who, frankly, should know better, is extremely disappointing, and it’s really dehumanizing for folks who have been waiting patiently at the border for it to reopen.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Erika, there appears to be not only, clearly, a racial context to this border policy, but also a political or foreign policy context. As I understand it, there’s been a significant increase over the past year in the number of Cubans crossing into the United States along the Mexican border and getting asylum. We saw, for instance, back in the Central American war period, that Nicaraguans who were fleeing from the Sandinista rule got much more a higher percentage of asylum grants from the United States than did Salvadorans and Guatemalans. What’s your sense of the political — that, basically, the United States favors granting asylum to refugees from those countries with which it has political — for which it politically supports?
ERIKA PINHEIRO: That’s always been the case with asylum. Asylum is supposed to be a universal standard protecting individuals fleeing persecution from any country, but in practice it’s always been a political tool wielded by the United States to favor those fleeing regimes that the United States opposes.
Now, it’s actually really interesting with the Ukrainians. The United States does not grant asylum for general conditions in a country. So, generally, I could not get asylum as a Ukrainian just because my country is at war. So, all of these — most of these asylum seekers, the 10,000 who have been processed from Ukraine, actually probably wouldn’t qualify for asylum under U.S. law, whereas many of those who are turned away, including Russians who are fleeing the same conflict — I’ve spoken with dozens of Russians here in Tijuana who protested the war against Ukraine, have been brutally repressed by the Putin regime, fled the same issue, and are — have been turned away from ports of entry and are waiting here in Tijuana. Now, they would actually qualify for asylum under U.S. law but are being turned away under the Title 42 policy.
So, I think there’s two things happening here. One is, certain nationalities are being allowed to even access humanitarian protections in the United States, while others are being turned away. And then, once in the United States, whether or not they gain asylum is really a political question rather than a legal one.
AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, the Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was born in Cuba, is a Cuban refugee in the United States. I wanted to ask you about the fact that you have Ukrainians given shelter in indoor facilities, while Haitians, Central Americans and others have had to sleep on the streets or makeshift camps outside ports of entry, and, finally, to ask you, yourself, Erika, the kind of work that you’re doing — the Trump administration — right? — was sued; the ACLU sued on your behalf because you were targeted by the Trump administration as they monitored and surveilled your immigration advocacy work — if there’s a difference under the Biden administration.
ERIKA PINHEIRO: I have seen signs that — very clear signs that the surveillance of my work continues under the Biden administration. Of course, it’s not to the same extent that it was under the Trump administration, during which I was detained in Mexico, removed from Mexico at the behest of the U.S. government. I am now in a very different position, where we are in more of a stakeholder relationship with the Biden administration.
But just with respect to the situation right now, I can tell you that had I done or even if I today would do for a Central American migrant what Ukrainian Americans or others helping the Ukrainians are doing for the Ukrainians, I would be in federal prison. And I will give you an example. These trips, like I mentioned, are being financed by U.S. citizens. In many cases, U.S. citizens have put Ukrainian refugees in their cars and driven them up to border officials. I absolutely believe that we should do everything we can to help people fleeing unspeakable violence, including the Ukrainians. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with doing that. But again, had I done the same thing or would I do the same thing for a Haitian migrant, if I put them in my car and just drove up to the border, I would be put in prison for smuggling. So, even that double standard, where those helping white migrants are given unfettered access to the ports of entry, are given — you know, are processed at a clip of a thousand a day, where those of us trying to organize on behalf of Black and Brown migrants are persecuted for the same activities, it’s really just — it’s hurtful, honestly, and it’s really astounding to see it play out like this.
AMY GOODMAN: Erika Pinheiro, I want to thank you for being with us, immigration attorney, policy and litigation director of Al Otro Lado, a binational nonprofit helping immigrants on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, speaking to us from Tijuana.
Next up, in one week, Texas plans to execute Melissa Lucio. She’d be the first Latina to be put to death in Texas. We speak to the Innocence Project lawyer who’s fighting to save her life. Stay with us.
Brandon Judd, the president of the The National Border Patrol Council told Fox News the only reason the Biden administration lifted Title 42 is because they want to replace white voters with foreigners so they can stay in power.
This is white supremacists’ “Great Replacement Theory” in a nutshell.
Scott Bixby has a nice rundown on Biden’s repeal of Trump’s Title 42, which Republicans and Fox News are using to have convulsions over today.
Fox News host Bill Hemmer asked, ” “Sir, why do you think this administration has allowed virtually an open border?”
Fox News continues distracting their viewers away from the Russian invasion and all other relevant news by flying in segments that Democrats have left the southern border undefended.
Did President Biden disband the Border Patrol when nobody was looking?
Brandon Judd quickly turned into Nick Fuentes.
“I believe that they’re trying to change the demographics of the electorate, that’s what I believe they’re doing” Judd said. “They want to stay in power and the only way to stay in power is to continue to get elected.”
That is how democracy works.
Judd said, “They can’t get elected on their policies.” Judd sounds like he came from a meeting with CPAC’s Matt Schlapp before appearing on Fox News.
As temperatures climb with climate change, the world’s poorest will increasingly take the brunt of the heat, according to a new study in the journal Earth’s Future. Lower-income countries are already 40 percent more likely to experience heat waves than those with higher incomes. The researchers expect this disparity to widen in coming decades.
By 2100, the study says, people in the lowest-income quarter will experience 23 more days of heat waves each year than those in the highest. The top quarter is expected to maintain about its current level of discomfort, power outages notwithstanding.
Discrepancies were expected, said Mojtaba Sadegh, a climatologist at Boise State University, in a statement. “But seeing one-quarter of the world facing as much exposure as the other three-quarters combined … that was surprising.”
Location shapes exposure: Many lower-income countries, like Madagascar and Bangladesh, are in the tropics. Access to air-conditioning, water, cooling shelters, and electricity matters, too. Without them, heat waves hit harder.
Climate change exacerbates the problem, magnifying heat waves and upping their severity and frequency. Last year brought plenty of examples. In June, a heat dome gripped the Pacific Northwest — an event one expert said was “virtually impossible without human-induced climate change.” The event left some 600 excess deaths between Oregon and Washington, and another 600 in British Columbia, in its wake. The same month, temperatures in the Middle East spiked to 125 degrees, while extreme heat and drought in Kazakhstan killed scores of livestock.
Some countries are taking steps to protect the most vulnerable. After a deadly heat wave in 2010, the Indian city of Ahmedabad developed a comprehensive heat plan, which has since been scaled-up across the country. In the United States, outdoor workers, such as those in agriculture or construction, are more vulnerable to heat stress. Last October, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration began the process of setting the first national heat standard, a significant step toward improving protections for workers in a warming world.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The world’s poorest bear the burden of heat — and it’s getting worse on Feb 11, 2022.
Image Credit: Cynthia Briones
As the Omicron variant sets record-high COVID-19 infection rates across the United States, we look at the conditions in the sprawling network of jails run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement where the Biden administration is holding more than 22,000 people. “There’s still a lot of people detained. There’s no social distancing. People are still facing COVID,” says longtime immigrant activist Maru Mora Villalpando, who adds that most COVID infections are coming from unvaccinated workers who are coming from outside of the jails. She describes how people held in GEO Group’s Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington, say conditions have gotten even worse during the pandemic, after a federal judge ruled the company must pay detained people minimum wage for work like cooking and cleaning instead of paying them a dollar a day. GEO Group responded by suspending its “voluntary work program.”
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
As concerns grow about record COVID infections across the United States, we look now at conditions in the sprawling network of jails run by ICE — that’s Immigrant and Customs Enforcement — where the Biden administration is holding more than 22,000 people, who are often transferred around the country. ICE says fewer than 300 people in detention are being monitored for COVID. Rights advocates say this is surely an undercount.
Most of the ICE jails are run by private prison companies, like GEO Group, which are not transparent. In Washington state, people held in GEO Group’s Northwest ICE Processing Center say conditions have gotten even worse during the pandemic, after a federal judge ruled the company must pay detained people minimum wage for work, like cooking and cleaning, instead of paying them a dollar a day. GEO Group responded by suspending its so-called voluntary work program. On December 13th, GEO Group issued a memo at the Northwest ICE Processing Center that, quote, “no detainee is permitted to do any work previously done under the Program, including, but not limited to, work in the kitchen, the laundry areas, cutting hair, painting, waxing, or scrubbing floors, or cleaning the secure areas of the facility.”
This is Ivan Sanchez, held for more than a year at GEO Group’s ICE jail in Tacoma. In a call from inside to the group La Resistencia, he describes what happened after the federal judge ordered GEO Group to pay the detainees a living wage for their work.
IVAN SANCHEZ: We lost all our jobs and weren’t able to work anymore, so the facilities stayed dirty for about — since it lasted ’til now. They said they were going to hire a special crew to come and clean the facility, but that still hasn’t happened. And they don’t want none of us to clean. And some of the officers aren’t cleaning theirs, even though they do clean. Other than that, I’d like to say that I’ve worked for them for about three years, and I also cleaned floors in additional to that, and I did barbershop. And they wouldn’t pay me for that. So I would just get a soda or sandwiches or some chips and candy. That was it.
AMY GOODMAN: This comes as Washington state recently passed a law barring private, for-profit prison companies from contracting with agencies there, but GEO Group has signed a contract to keep its ICE jail in Tacoma open until 2025.
For more, we’re joined by Maru Mora Villalpando, the co-founder of La Resistencia and a longtime immigrant activist. In September, the government dropped its deportation case against her and granted her lawful permanent residency.
Welcome back to Democracy Now! Congratulations on your immigration status. Can you talk about why the Tacoma jail is open, and then talk about what’s happening inside with this change of what should happen to the prisoners who are also workers?
MARU MORA VILLALPANDO: Yes. Thank you. Good morning, Amy.
Yeah, what we’ve seen is that the detention center is still open. Although their contract says from 2015 that it will be open for 10 years, because that’s what the last contract was signed for, we know that every year Congress has to approve the budget for this kind of work — in this case, for detention centers to continue operating. Actually, the attorney general here in Washington filed a countersuit in September against GEO for remaining open regardless of our H.B. 1090 law. And so, according to the attorney general, for every day that they remain open, they will have to pay a fee. We assume that by next September we can actually get it shut down, because, yes, they are violating the law. Obviously, GEO filed a lawsuit — I’m sorry, an appeal to this lawsuit. And that’s what they spend the money on. They spend their money on fighting lawsuits of this kind, and they usually lose.
And in the meantime, what they decided to do was to remain — to keep people remaining detained in squalor conditions, in filth. It took over a month for GEO to actually hire an outside company. The company is called Trustus. And what we heard from people in detention is that there are some instances where about a crew of maybe two to three people show up to clean maybe for half-hour, maybe at the most an hour. And we’re talking about units that hold maybe 60 to 100 people in total. Maybe that’s not the total that we have right now in every pod. As far as we know, on December 30th, there were 411 people detained. It’s way less than the average that was 1,500 in the past, pre-pandemic. Yet there are still a lot of people detained.
There’s no social distancing. People are still facing COVID. Just from December 22 to December 30th, there were five cases of COVID in the detainee population. There were seven cases of GEO guards with COVID in that same period of time, plus three ICE employees also testing positive for COVID. So, having a crew of two to three people showing up for half-hour, maybe an hour, maybe two to three days sporadically here and there in different units, is not going to solve the problem of having unsanitary conditions.
This, the way we see it and based on what people in detention have told us, is nothing but retaliation against people detained, that thanks to their work, thanks to the hundreds of thousands of people going on hunger strike, they sounded the alarm about this exploitation. And now that Washington state passed the law against this kind of detention centers, and also a federal jury and a federal judge determined that this should not be the case and people should be paid for their labor, what GEO does is they come against people in detention, and they retaliate, and they just create further worse unsanitary conditions in the middle of a global pandemic.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Maru, I wanted to ask you — the GEO Group obviously is a national private prisons company. It has more than a hundred jails and detention centers around the country. Could you talk about what, in the lawsuit, that exposed the exploitation of people there? There was something called the sanitation memo you found, that you referred to as the hunger games? Could you explain that memo and what it signified?
MARU MORA VILLALPANDO: Yes. So, we knew, once the first hunger strikes started happening here in the detention center in Tacoma, and, really, throughout the country, that GEO has relied on the voluntary work program, which they pay a dollar a day for all this kind of work, really to create people detained as slave labor to be the backbone of the detention center.
But there’s also a part of that program that doesn’t give any money to people in detention. So, another way to make people — everyone, regardless of you choosing to go into this voluntary work program or not, everyone had to clean. That meant that every week there will be a contest, that we called the hunger game, a contest so every pod will compete against each other to see who’s the cleanest pod. And the reward was a night with the Xbox, that you can borrow, and chicken for the night, because, obviously, the food that is given to people in detention is nothing but trash. That’s another of the demands that people that have staged hunger strikes have actually named as number one. They want real food. And so, the conditions that GEO created in the first place of hunger, it’s used by pushing people to clean the units.
So, the most recent one that we saw, in early December, there were these two pods that won — C3 and A2, I believe — and, actually, one of the pods, that remained in third place, called us, and the people in that pod told us, “Well, yeah, C3 is going to win, because there’s very few people there. But if you compare to our pod, there’s way many of us here. We cannot compete against a pod that there’s less people, and they produce less trash, let’s say.”
So, this is another way in which GEO profits from not only the detention of people, but to actually make them clean, make them sustain the facility. People in detention did everything except security in the detention center. And now that GEO is saying, “No, no, they’re not going to do it,” because they refuse to pay the minimum wage, people still feel obligated to clean, because they don’t want to live in squalor, they don’t want to live in filth, and they’re afraid of the conditions in regards to COVID, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally —
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And in relation —
AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead, Juan.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: In relationship to COVID, you mentioned ICE has said that nine people held in its sprawling network of for-profit jails have died from COVID. What is your sense, especially with the Omicron, the spread of the Omicron variant, what is happening in terms of COVID in these detention facilities?
MARU MORA VILLALPANDO: Well, it’s spreading fast. We saw an uptick in June. We actually kept track of numbers since June. When actually the Biden administration started transferring more people throughout the country, we’ve seen an increase in detention. You know, the numbers of people detained have grown since Trump left. When Trump left, we were at 15,000 capacity; now we’re now at 21,000 throughout the nation. We even receive calls from other detention centers, such as Georgia. Yesterday, we received like five calls.
People are really worried about it, because not only it means transfers are happening and ICE doesn’t give absolutely no information about what they do in regards to COVID or anything in general, but also what we’ve seen is that guards and ICE employees might not be vaccinated. And the way we find out is because in this case in Washington, the notices that ICE has to give to the judge, the immigration judge, because there’s a lawsuit pending also in regards to COVID cases — when there’s a case, a positive case of COVID, ICE needs to notify this judge. And we get these notices. And what we can tell is that most of the guards and the ICE employees are not vaccinated; otherwise, the notice will say this person was vaccinated. And so, what people in detention have said, not only here but throughout the nation, is most of the COVID cases that we’re going to get in detention come from outside. That means all these employees that refuse to get vaccinated, they bring the COVID in, and we have no recourse, knowing also that we have suffered medical neglect for years and years in detention centers.
AMY GOODMAN: Maru Mora Villalpando, we want to thank you so much for being with us, a well-known immigrant rights activist. As we turn to Europe, where a French humanitarian group has filed a complaint against Britain and France over the drowning of 27 refugees. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: “The Lost Singer” by Ismail Kaseem. The song was part of The Calais Sessions, a benefit album recorded at the Calais refugee camp with refugees and professional musicians years ago.
The New York Post (11/4/21) was either lying, was never told or had forgotten about the dubiousness of Peter Doocy’s question.
Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy asked a bizarre question at President Joe Biden’s November 3 press briefing. The president seemed to misunderstand the question, which referred to potential settlements of a lawsuit stemming from the Trump administration’s notorious 2017–18 family separation policy. Biden bungled his response, apparently calling reports about the settlement “garbage.”
Not surprisingly, the media ran with the story of Biden’s blunder. Doocy’s question, on the other hand, was mostly ignored or played down.
The Fox reporter had asked whether the possible settlements, reportedly as high as $450,000 a person, “might incentivize more people to come over illegally.” But as the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake (11/4/21) noted, the question didn’t make sense: “The [family separation] policy is no longer in effect (thus rendering such future payments inapplicable for would-be border-crossers).”
Other reporters, however, didn’t seem to notice this issue. CNN’s Daniel Dale (11/5/21) factchecked Biden’s answer, but not the notion that a settlement based on a terminated policy could somehow incentivize future migration. Over at Politico (11/3/21), Myah Ward reported Doocy’s question, but not how strange it was. New York Times White House correspondent Zolan Kanno-Youngs (11/3/21) didn’t even bother to report the question, merely noting that Biden was “asked on Wednesday about compensating the migrants.”
In contrast, the New York Post (11/4/21) (owned, like Fox, by the Murdoch family) responded with an editorial backing Doocy’s implication that the settlement could encourage unauthorized migration. This followed an earlier Post article (10/29/21) that quoted a total of 11 Republican politicians denouncing the reported settlement amount. Neither piece mentioned the public outrage at the practice of tearing apart children and parents fleeing violence (PBS, 6/18/18)—an outrage so intense that the Trump administration was forced to end the policy in June 2018 (NPR, 6/20/18).
Misperception or misrepresentation?
Unfortunately, this imbalance is typical of much corporate media immigration coverage. Right-wing media figures and Republican politicians get little pushback when they promote evidence-free, often absurd claims about incentives for unauthorized immigration.
Chart: Manhattan Institute/National Immigration Forum (3/30/06)
Doocy didn’t answer emails asking him to explain his November 3 question, but presumably he was referring to a misperception migrants might have that the Biden administration was handing out money to border crossers—a misperception the right has worked overtime to create. But two surveys of unauthorized immigrants indicate that misperceptions about US migration policies don’t actually play a significant role in spurring unauthorized border crossing.
In 2005, the Bendixen & Associates polling company interviewed 233 undocumented immigrants for a study sponsored by the National Immigration Forum and the conservative Manhattan Institute. The study reported that 68% of the subjects said they’d migrated here to work, 15% to get better education and healthcare for themselves and their families, 12% to escape violence and 3% to join their families. Just 2% cited other reasons.
Eight years later, Latino Decisions surveyed 400 undocumented immigrants for the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) Educational Fund and America’s Voice Education Fund. This study reported that 39% of the people interviewed came for better jobs and economic opportunities, 38% for a better life for family or children, 12% to join family members, and 4% to escape political oppression. Other reasons accounted for 6%.
What history shows
Migration patterns over the last half-century support the findings of the two surveys. Increases and declines in unauthorized immigration mostly correlate with changes in job opportunities and other economic conditions in the United States and in nearby countries.
The US undocumented population grew at a fairly steady rate during the first half of the period, but the pattern had started changing by the mid-1990s, when the undocumented population increased sharply, tripling by 2007. It then gradually declined through 2019. There was an increase in asylum seekers after 2010, although not enough to reverse the overall decline.
The population of unauthorized immigrants has been mostly declining since 2007. (Chart: ProCon.org)
Vox (7/4/21) pointed out that a “law to legalize the undocumented population…could actually reduce unauthorized immigration and give the US economy a boost.”
The US economy was growing during most of the 1990s, but Mexicans continued to suffer from the effects of the 1982 debt crisis. Their situation worsened after a 1994–95 financial crisis, and NAFTA’s disruption of the rural economy left millions of Mexicans unemployed or underemployed. The resulting increase in undocumented immigration from Mexico eased a little in the early 2000s, as the Mexican economy stabilized; border crossings dropped further when the 2007–09 Great Recession knocked out millions of US jobs.
The more recent increase in asylum seekers came as levels of violence rose in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
It’s true that one US policy helped swell the undocumented population, but not because the policy attracted migrants. The Clinton White House started a significant intensification of border enforcement; this continued through subsequent administrations. The policy made border crossings more dangerous, resulting in at least 7,000 border deaths from 1998 to 2020 (Guardian, 1/30/21).
And as Vox reporter Nicole Narea (7/4/21) explained, Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey and other scholars have found that the stepped-up enforcement ended a circular pattern in which Mexicans had alternated periods working in the United States with periods spent at home. As crossing the border became riskier and more expensive, many Mexican workers chose to settle here instead of returning to Mexico.
Long wait for ‘amnesty’
The New York Times (2/22/00) blamed the rise in unauthorized immigration on a 1986 amnesty—not on the trade policies that it editorially supported.
This history explains most spikes in unauthorized immigration, but anti-immigrant forces prefer to make up their own explanations.
Their favorite centers on a 1986 law that provided a path for legalization to some 2.7 million immigrants during the Reagan administration. The right claims that the sharp increase of the undocumented population during the mid-1990s—seven or eight years after the law went into effect—somehow resulted from this “Reagan amnesty.” So legalizations must “beget more illegal immigration,” as the New York Times (2/22/00) announced in a 2000 editorial:
Amnesties signal foreign workers that American citizenship can be had by sneaking across the border, or staying beyond the term of one’s visa, and hiding out until Congress passes the next amnesty.
The Times and other centrist media now seem to have backed away from this post hoc, propter hoc argument, but they often don’t challenge others who make it, despite studies by demographers that undercut the premise.
LA Times (3/18/21): “As each side seeks to rally supporters and shape public opinion, the parties have pressed dueling narratives.”
US News & World Report (2/18/21) quoted Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s claim that Biden’s proposed immigration reforms would create “huge new incentives for people to rush here illegally,” but the publication failed to present any alternative view. The Los Angeles Times (3/18/21) deferred in the same way to Sen. Lindsey Graham when the South Carolina Republican charged that legalization without increased border enforcement would “continue to incentivize the flow” of migrants.
Reporters often ignore a rather obvious problem with this argument: the fact that no legalization bill has been passed since 1986.
“Legalizing countless millions of illegal aliens—even discussing it—rings the bell for millions more to illegally enter the US to await their green card,” Heritage Foundation researcher Lora Ries announced in January, according to New York Times reporter Miriam Jordan (1/27/21). The paper’s Nicholas Fandos (3/18/21) cited Rep. Tom McClintock, a California Republican, as claiming in March that a new legalization would mean border crossers “need only wait until the next amnesty.”
Apparently neither reporter thought to point out that based on past experience, the wait “until the next amnesty” could last as long as 35 years, nearly half a lifetime.
The center does not hold
Washington Post (10/7/21): “The journey starts with a calculation: What am I willing to sacrifice to reach the United States?”
What’s striking about corporate media’s immigration coverage is that conservative think tankers and Republican politicians so often get a platform, while the US public hardly ever learns about immigration from the immigrants themselves (FAIR.org, 6/19/21).
There are important exceptions. Jordan’s January New York Times article failed to question the notion of “awaiting” the next amnesty, but it did include valuable reporting on migrants’ point of view. A recent Washington Post feature (10/7/21) by Arelis Hernández provided nuanced descriptions of the complex motives that have led Haitians to appear at the US border. And the Vox explainer cited above is a good example of how the media can present a realistic picture of immigration patterns.
But there’s too little reporting of this caliber. The right wing goes all out; the center rarely provides the necessary balance. Coverage of the poverty and violence that actually drive migration—and the role of US policies in creating them—appears in left media, as in a Jacobin piece (6/8/21) by Suyapa Portillo Villeda and Miguel Tinker Salas, but this sort of reporting is marginalized in corporate media.
The result is a public that’s primed to believe a Republican politician like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz when he casually distorts a lawsuit’s possible settlement into “@JoeBiden wants to give $450k to every illegal immigrant.”
The post Media Don’t Factcheck Right-Wing Migration Myths appeared first on FAIR.
While today’s confirmation hearing for President Joe Biden’s pick to lead Customs and Border Protection didn’t produce fireworks, it was notable in at least one aspect: The Biden administration is still firmly committed to the controversial Trump-era policy that has essentially closed the border to migrants and asylum seekers for almost two years.
“Do you believe it’s necessary to maintain the Title 42 public health expulsion order at the border?” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) asked the nominee, Tucson Police Chief Chris Magnus, on Tuesday.
“I think it’s absolutely imperative that we do everything possible to stop the spread of COVID.”
“As a paramedic for 10 years, public health has always been one of my top concerns, and because of that I think it’s absolutely imperative that we do everything possible to stop the spread of COVID,” Magnus said. Title 42, he concluded, “helps with this.”
This answer isn’t exactly a surprise—Magnus wants to get confirmed, and the Biden administration has hid behind the oh-its-a-public-health-policy-not-immigration-policy refrain to keep Title 42 in place for just about its entire tenure. Still, Magnus’ testimony was striking for someone who openly called Trump’s immigration policies dangerous and who was nominated by an administration with promises of more humane border policies.
Since the Trump administration invoked the obscure public health authority known as Title 42 back in March 2020, allowing border officials to quickly turn migrants back at the US-Mexico border on the grounds that they could spread the virus, it’s created something of a humanitarian disaster. Tens of thousands of individuals have been robbed of their legal right to petition asylum and have become more vulnerable to crime in Mexican border cities. Many people who are returned to Mexico quickly end up attempting to cross again, some multiple times. Each time more physically and emotionally drained, each time more desperate. This has led to more than 1 million expulsions since it was implemented. Recent data showed that only about 3,000 people who were processed were referred for asylum screenings.
Immigrant rights groups, humanitarian organizations, and physicians criticized the Trump administration for implementing the policy, and since Biden took office, have urged him to end it. Perhaps they expected that Biden’s more “humanitarian” approach would mean an end to the border closure for migrants, but even as the president has rescinded some of Trump’s cruel immigration policies, he made no public indication that he will revoke Title 42.
The report pointed out the “lack of epidemiological evidence for only banning this category of entrants to the United States.”
The nonprofit advocacy organization Physicians for Human Rights published a report over the summer titled “Neither Safety nor Health: How Title 42 Expulsions Harm Health and Violate Rights,” pointing out the “lack of epidemiological evidence for only banning this category of entrants to the United States while keeping the borders open to other travelers.” While government officials have said Title 42 is stopping the spread of COVID-19, the United States has kept land border crossings open to US citizens and some travelers without testing. Travel to and from Mexico by air hasn’t been affected. (Last week, the Biden administration announced it would begin lifting restrictions to non-essential travel at the land ports of entry—which might make it harder for it to use the pandemic as rationale for keeping Title 42 in place.)
My colleague Isabela Dias recently wrote about the cruel legacy of Title 42:
Several reports show the widespread harm inflicted on adults and families who had been expelled to Mexico without being given an opportunity to seek safety in the United States. As of mid-June, Human Rights First had documented 3,250 instances of extortion, kidnapping, and rape since President Biden took office. In May, Andrew Calderón and I analyzed years’ worth of sector-level data from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) on rescues and deaths along the Southern border. We learned that Title 42 is leading single adults—many of whom are Black or LGBTQ—to attempt repeated crossings through more dangerous routes, increasing their chances of needing to be rescued by Border Patrol agents, drowning in the Rio Grande, or dying in the desert.
Earlier this month, a high ranking State Department official resigned from his post, saying Biden’s continuation of Title 42 expulsions was “illegal and inhumane.” State Department legal adviser Harold Koh said the policy was “not worthy of this Administration I so strongly support.” He urged the administration “to do everything in your power to revise this policy… into one that this worthy of this Nation we love.”
And yet, there’s still no apparent movement from the powers that be—or the powers that are about to be. Magnus said that his bottom line is complying with the law “even as it changes, perhaps regarding Title 42, no matter what it is that the courts decide.” He added that he didn’t have enough information to comment on Biden’s humanitarian exclusions to Title 42 that apply to unaccompanied children and some families.
Magnus explained that his father was an immigrant from Norway, his mother the daughter of a German immigrant, and his husband immigrated from Hong Kong.
While he’s spent a career in law enforcement, he’s also a self-described progressive. Magnus has been the police chief in Tucson since 2016. Last year his department came under scrutiny after video showed a 27-year-old crying out for his grandmother in Spanish and saying he couldn’t breathe as police officers handcuffed and pinned him face down. Magnus said that if the officers involved in the death of Carlos Adrian Ingram-Lopez hadn’t resigned, he would’ve fired them; he also submitted his resignation to Tucson city officials after the incident, but the city manager and Democratic mayor rejected it, saying he had brought “forward-thinking” changes to the police department and was “exactly what we need in these difficult times.”
Before moving to Tucson, Magnus was the police chief in Richmond, California, for 10 years. There, he got national attention for joining a Black Lives Matter peaceful protest in 2014. He also faced backlash from the police union for wearing his uniform while holding a BLM sign.
In his opening testimony Tuesday, he said that as CBP Commissioner he would work to strike a balance between law enforcement and treating people humanely. “CBP is a key part of our immigration system that has welcomed so many immigrant families to our country, including my own,” Magnus said. He explained that his father was an immigrant from Norway, his mother the daughter of a German immigrant, and his husband immigrated from Hong Kong.
Magnus’ confirmation could come down to a party-line vote, with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking the tie. If confirmed, Magnus won’t be without major challenges. He’ll have to build a relationship with an agency 60 times larger than the Tucson Police Department—and one that is already largely skeptical of his leadership. His relationship with the Border Patrol Union has been troubled for years, and the union went after Magnus for publicly questioning the morals of law enforcement involved in separating migrant families in 2018. “Leave your personal political beliefs and your so-called ‘morals’ at home where they belong,” the union posted on Facebook in 2018. “Magnus does realize that coming into this country without using a designated port of entry is a crime…Why not just have everyone crash the border wherever they want?”
Only time will tell if he leaves his morals at home—though it won’t be much time. As I wrote recently, there’s the immediate issue of accountability for CBP agents who for years have acted cruelly and with impunity, most recently against Haitians in Del Rio. And, of course, the tricky issue of squaring a “humane” immigration policy with the very inhumane Title 42 might not be going anywhere anytime soon.
Joan Walsh
His latest racist rant about the “great replacement theory” was particularly unhinged.
The post Tucker Carlson’s Nightly Toxicity Is Poisoning His Brain appeared first on The Nation.
The contradictions of Black citizenship are intricately linked to movement and migration, despite common perceptions that exclude Black people from migrant struggles today.