Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s kidnapping of dozens of migrants as a political stunt is disturbing. More troubling is the help he seems to have gotten from the Department of Homeland Security, a pro-MAGA federal agency that’s been quietly amassing vast powers.
Venezuelan migrants gather at a ferry terminal in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. (Carlin Stiehl for The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
There are a lot of questions to be asked about Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s disgraceful stunt last week, tricking, kidnapping, and stranding a group of migrants in Martha’s Vineyard. One of the most important is the role in the scheme played by officers with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
In the press so far, the episode has largely, and with good reason, been framed around the loathsome figure of DeSantis. The governor, having built his planned political ascent on pretending to be Donald Trump to the point of shamelessly copying his mannerisms, clearly saw this as a way to prove he could be just as cruelly racist as the former president, whose administration infamously stole migrant children from their parents and tried to rehouse them with American families. And sure enough, the lawsuit filed by the migrants names and details the actions of only DeSantis and his cronies.
But then what about the words of Boston immigration lawyer Rachel Self, who briefed the press about what had happened to the migrants after meeting with them? Self told reporters that DHS agents had processed the migrants before boarding the chartered planes that took them to Massachusetts, that they’d “listed falsified addresses on the migrants’ paperwork,” naming “random homeless shelters all across the country” as their mailing addresses even when told they had no homes in the United States, and that the agents told the migrants they must check in with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices closest to those addresses within only a few days. The fact that those shelters were, according to Self, as far afield as Washington and Florida suggests they were deliberately being set up to fail and be deported.
“There is no other reason to list as someone’s mailing address a homeless shelter in Tacoma, Washington, when they ship him to Massachusetts,” a clearly livid Self had said.
Self’s charges were backed up by Elizabeth Ricci, a Tallahassee immigration lawyer, who insisted to the Orlando Sentinel that ICE “likely conspired with the governor’s office to pull off the stunt.”
“It couldn’t have been done without their direct involvement,” Ricci alleged.
If this is true, it’s not only doubly scandalous, but critically important to know as authorities work to ensure some accountability, and to prevent this kind of thing from being tried again. Unlike ladder-climbing politicians like DeSantis, immigration officers are, at least in theory, meant to be neutral actors simply enforcing the law — not immigration hawks working with unscrupulous lowlifes to deliberately sabotage the applications of asylum seekers.
It would be yet one more data point hinting at an alarming politicization of the DHS bureaucracy, particularly its immigration divisions. Under Trump, agencies like ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) made headlines for spying on anti-Trump protesters and putting journalists, activists, and immigration attorneys through extra screening, as well as putting out menacing videos like this one that showed militarized CPB officers training to put down civil unrest, and calling for the arrest of politicians from sanctuary cities.
This has come at the same time as revelations that the agencies have quietly assumed vast domestic surveillance powers. For years, ICE has been partnering with the data brokers who trade in the wide variety of intimate information the private sector collects on hundreds of millions of Americans, from addresses, phone numbers, and Department of Motor Vehicles records, to the geolocation data our phones are constantly pinging out. Best of all for these agencies, they can do it without a warrant, since they’re merely customers paying to access data that’s commercially available to anyone. Just last year, we learned that border officials are collecting and storing the content from as many as ten thousand electronic devices each year.
Given all this, it’s especially vital we find out for sure if Self’s charges are correct, that DHS agents really did abuse their power to help an anti-immigration official carry out what she calls a “sadistic lie” to fraudulently deport a group of asylum seekers.
Sadly, it would not be surprising. DHS agents and officials have already been variously accused of similar deceit and abuse. Human Rights Watch last year documented accusations against DHS officials in Del Rio, Texas, that they told migrants they’d be flown elsewhere in the United States for processing before deporting them to their home countries. A congressman accused DHS of putting out misleading photos showing processing facilities with few unaccompanied minors, when they had really just moved them to tents next door that were operated by different agencies. Its agents have been repeatedly accused of falsifying asylum seekers’ testimonies to undermine their cases.
The fact that a power-hungry politician would jeopardize desperate people’s hopes for escaping violence so that he could appeal to cruelty and hatred is disgusting, but perhaps not so surprising. But if he was being helped by the government agents of a sprawling bureaucracy responsible for dispassionately enforcing immigration law, we need to know if it’s true, and how far up it goes — and to aggressively clean house of such elements.
Yesli Vega celebrates her Republican primary win for the Seventh Congressional District in Woodbridge, Virginia, on June 21. | Nathan Howard/Getty Images
If there’s a red wave in 2022, it will be powered by Latina candidates.
Anna Paulina Luna is ready for people to get to know the “new GOP.”
Luna, 33, is an Air Force veteran, political activist,and likely future Congress member representing Florida’s 13th District, a seat that got safer for Republicans in the latest round of redistricting. She’s also a granddaughter of Mexican immigrants and one of a record 43 Republican Latina candidates who ran for House seats this year, 17 of whom have won their primaries so far.
“I think that the new GOP that exists is not your stereotype of what it used to be,” she tells Vox. “We’ve had to really push back against this narrative that Republicans are just older white males, which to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with that. However, it’s false. I mean, we’re so diverse.”
The “new GOP” Luna references doesn’t sound all that different in its policy goals from the one of years past. But if she and other members of her cohort win, the party will certainly look different. Currently, just 16 percent of House Republicans are women, while 9 percent are people of color. Should Luna and other Latina GOP candidates win this year, it would mark major progress for Republican efforts to broaden the party’s slate of lawmakers — and appeal to voters — an existential issue in a country that’s poised to be majority-minority by 2050.
There are two big factors driving the surge in Republican Latina candidates this year, says Olivia Perez-Cubas of Winning for Women, a group dedicated to electing Republican women.
“There’s also growing frustration in the Hispanic community that Democrats no longer reflect their values”
“There has been a concerted effort on the right to focus on the Hispanic and Latino community, and to recruit more diverse candidates who are reflective of their district,” she tells Vox. “There’s also growing frustration in the Hispanic community that Democrats no longer reflect their values, and we’re seeing more candidates willing to run because of it.”
Both factors contributed to Luna’s candidacy. She was formally brought into GOP politics after being recruited to lead Hispanic engagement for Turning Point USA, a right-wing advocacy group. And she feels the Democratic Party hasn’t spoken to her views, particularly on border security or the economy.
Luna and other candidates also say that Democratic missteps — including poor outreach and first lady Jill Biden’s comments comparing the Latino community to “breakfast tacos” — have shown just how out of touch its leaders are with Latino voters.
“I think the pandering that they’ve done to how they’ve treated us, you know, we’re not stupid, and they don’t own our vote,” she says.
A long game pays off for Republicans
The GOP has been laying the foundation to become more diverse since 2012 — and it’s accelerated these efforts since last cycle.
After losing the presidential election in 2012 — when candidate Mitt Romney won just 30 percent of Latino voters — the Republican National Committee commissioned a postmortem report. It concluded the RNC needed to “make certain that we are actively engaging women and minorities in our efforts” when it came to candidate recruitment and that “we need to strengthen our farm team to ensure that we are competitive in up-ballot elections in the future when the electorate will be considerably more diverse.”
The idea was that electing a more representative pool of officials to state and local office could help Republicans reach a broader base of voters, and establish a deep bench for federal seats down the line.
That RNC report boosted efforts like the Republican State Leadership Committee’s “Future Majority Project,” which is dedicated to identifying and backing women and people of color for Republican seats at the state level. The project had some success including wins by 43 of 240 recruits in 2014, and some participants — like now-Rep. Young Kim (R-CA), going on to higher office.
In 2020, Trump’s share of Latino voters grew by 8 percentage points compared to 2016
Such progress looked likely to be squandered in 2016, when Donald Trump entered the Republican primary and trounced the competition on a message that seemed tailor-made to put off Hispanic voters: He infamously described some immigrants from Mexico as “rapists,” questioned a federal judge’s ability to fairly make decisions because he is Mexican American, and pledged harsh border enforcement and a wall along the US border with Mexico.
All the while, Republicans at the state and federal levels continued to work on efforts like the ones recommended in the 2013 report. As chair of House Republican recruitment in 2018, Rep. Elise Stefanik focused on bringing on more women, Hispanic, and African American candidates, who she described as often more effective than white, male candidates in swing districts. And in 2021, the RSLC established the “Right Leaders Network,” which is dedicated to providing mentorship and training for women and candidates of color.
Ahead of 2020, Trump and the Republican National Committee made key investments in wooing Latino voters as well, including opening up field offices in predominantly Latino areas. This cycle, the RNC has set up more than 30 community centers including at least a dozen focused on Hispanic voters. These centers serve as key locations for campaign events and voter registration, as well as other social gatherings, according to RNC spokesperson Danielle Alvarez.
Ben Gray/AP
Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel speaks to a packed room at the opening of the RNC’s new Hispanic Community Center in Suwanee, Georgia, on June 29.
Such investments appeared to pay off in 2020; Trump’s share of Latino voters grew by 8 percentage points compared to 2016, according to data from Catalist, a Democratic firm. And several places saw rightward shifts: Zapata County in South Texas flipped from previously voting Democratic to voting for Trump, while multiple counties in that region and in South Florida shifted right, with Joe Biden winning by much smaller margins than former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton did. Florida Reps. Maria Salazar and Carlos Gimenez, both of whom had support from Republican leadership, flipped Democrat-held districts.
Of the 14 Democratic-held House seats that Republicans flipped last cycle, 13 of those were won by a candidate that was either a woman or person of color, the Christian Science Monitor reported. Additionally, Republicans more than doubled the number of women in their House caucus, from 13 to 29.
That meant Republicans narrowed Democrats’ control of the House to a super-slim margin, a feat they chalked up to the strength of candidates in swing districts. Essentially, one big lesson Republicans took from 2020 was that diverse candidates can provide electoral advantages.
“We learned that we could overperform in new kinds of districts by recruiting compelling candidates with interesting stories and different profiles that reflect the districts they are trying to represent,” says Calvin Moore, a spokesperson for the Congressional Leadership Fund, a political action committee endorsed by House Republican leadership.
One big lesson Republicans took from 2020 was that diverse candidates can provide electoral advantages
In practice, that has led the GOP, and notable outside groups, to put more resources behind a wide range of candidates.
“For minority candidates who are not in the political industry whatsoever, it can be really intimidating to jump in and run for office if you have the passion, but you don’t have the infrastructure to do that,” says Lorna Romero, an Arizona-based Republican strategist who previously served as a communications director for John McCain’s 2016 Senate campaign.
Such efforts have significant support from the most powerful Republicans.
“I think that Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise, the Republican leadership, has been the most receptive leadership group on these issues, of making sure … we’re recruiting good candidates in every part of the country,” says Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL), a founder of the Hispanic Leadership Trust, a political action committee started in May that’s dedicated to supporting Hispanic and Latino candidates.For example, McCarthy has personally backed Juan Ciscomani, a former adviser for Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, while party leaders advocated for Chavez-DeRemer to run in Oregon.
Other candidates — like Luna, Vega, and Garcia — have been elevated as part of the National Republican Congressional Committee’s Young Guns program, which highlights strong campaigns to donors and provides national exposure.
“They’re very much encouraging all candidates from different walks of life to step up to the plate,” Luna told Vox.
Brett Carlsen/Getty Images
Anna Paulina Luna, right, speaks with conservative commentator Candace Owens during a taping of her show in Nashville, Tennessee, on January 4.
The mentoring and attention provided by initiatives like the Young Guns program and Right Leaders Network have helped candidates build out their infrastructure, but so has money from a slew of political action committees.
In addition to the Hispanic Leadership Trust, there’s been an explosion of PACs dedicated to funding Republican women candidates as well as minority candidates. Both Stefanik’s Elevate PAC and Winning for Women were started to bolster the number of women in the GOP conference. Catalyst PAC was also founded by Republican strategists Larissa Martinez and Rina Shah in 2019 to promote candidates who are underrepresented in the Republican Party including people of color and LGBTQ candidates.
Together, these PACs — as well as the Congressional Leadership Fund — have spent heavily to boost Latina candidates. For instance, CLF spent $164,000 on ads to support Monica De La Cruz in Texas’s 15th District and $200,000 to support Mayra Flores in Texas’s 34th District during their primaries.
This influx of money and infrastructure make the process of running for office more feasible for candidates who were previously reluctant to take it on.
This influx of money and infrastructure make the process of running for office more feasible
Those candidates — including at least 17 Latina candidates who’ve won House primaries this year — span the GOP’s ideological spectrum. Some, like Flores, are more conservative and have backed hardline immigration policies much like Trump’s. Others, including lawyer and former radio host Yuripzy Morgan, in Maryland’s safely Democratic Third District, are closer to the center and more focused on pocketbook issues.
“I know it is a bit of a dirty word in politics. But you know what, the majority of Americans are moderate, I am moderate. And I’m not afraid to say it,” Morgan tells Vox.
Multiple Republicans emphasized the importance of backing candidates with “authenticity” and connections to their communities. Among those running in Texas, for example, Monica De La Cruz is a small business owner, Flores is a respiratory care therapist who worked with Covid-19 patients, and Garcia is a former congressional staffer. Some, including Luna and Vega, also have experience in the military or law enforcement; Flores and Irene Armandariz-Jackson, a real estate agent and anti-abortion activist running in Texas’s 16th District, are married to partners who’ve worked as border patrol agents.
Several candidates are running in swing districts, where Republicans hope they will be more appealing to independent and moderate voters. In 2022, at least 10 of the most competitive battleground House districts — the ones that have been listed as toss-ups by Cook Political Report as of early September — have Republican challengers that are either women or people of color. The GOP has a good chance of retaking the House this fall, and it’s counting on candidates like De La Cruz, Garcia, and Chavez-DeRemer to make that happen.
Brandon Bell/Getty Images
US Rep. Mayra Flores, second from right, speaks on a panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas, Texas, on August 5.
Republicans are likely looking beyond 2022 with their recruitment efforts as well.
The party’s ability to connect with different minority groups is becoming more critical as the country becomes increasingly more diverse: In 2000, Hispanic voters made up 7 percent of the US electorate. In 2018, they comprised 13 percent. According to a US Census projection, the US population will be majority-minority by 2045.
“The math just doesn’t add up for Republicans in places like Texas if they can’t bring people of color to their side. This is a last ditch effort to hold onto power without actually changing their policies,” argues Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, the executive director of progressive advocacy group NextGen America and founder of Jolt, an organization dedicated to mobilizing Latino voters in Texas.
Republicans believe Democrats are giving them a big opportunity
Republicans see a major opening with Latino voters both because of the support they’ve already received, and their belief that Democrats are neither doing sufficient outreach nor speaking to the top concerns that voters have.
“We often hear … minority voters feel like Democrats are taking their vote for granted,” the RNC’s Alvarez tells Vox. Strategists within the Democratic Party, too, have repeatedly warned the party that they needed to get involved in voter outreach earlier in the campaign cycle, rather than doing so just ahead of Election Day.
While Democrats are preparing to run campaigns centered on abortion access, their climate achievements, canceling student loan debt, and their success in lowering the cost of certain prescription drugs, Republicans argue voters — including Latino voters — are more worried about energy costs, education, and public safety. Many GOP candidates say that voters in their district are most concerned about the same issue: the economy.
“This inflation affects everyone,” says Armendariz-Jackson, who is running in Texas’s 16th. “It doesn’t matter if you’re Black, brown, or white. We’re all hurting.”
Woke Democrats think Hispanics are tacos. Unfortunately for them, we’re voters.
— Cassy Garcia for Congress (@CasandraLGarcia) July 12, 2022
Republicans believe focusing on the economy will pay particular dividends with Latino voters because it’s also a way to talk about shared values, says Geraldo Cadava, a Northwestern University political scientist and author of the book The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of An American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump.
“I think Latino conservatives are doubling down on free enterprise, they are still preaching a prosperity gospel, that wealth creation is the specialty of the Republican Party,” he tells Vox.
Broadly, Republicans feel Democrats still treat the group as a monolith, and have been using Jill Biden’s “breakfast taco” gaffe to sell Latino voters on that idea. Garcia’s campaign, for example, is selling a line of merch that reads “unique as a taco.”
“I think Democrats have … put us in a box where if we’re Latino we’re supposed to be Democrats, we’re supposed to want illegal immigration,” says Armendariz-Jackson. “And that couldn’t be further from the truth, especially those who have immigrated to the United States legally.”
What will representation deliver?
Latina candidates Vox spoke with were clear about why they felt the Republican Party was a good fit for them. But the rise of Latina Republican candidates has prompted debate about what such representation means when Republicans have promoted xenophobic rhetoric and harmful policies directed at Latino people.
Some Republicans argue that Trump’s racist remarks aren’t offensive to Latino voters, and that they’ve been taken out of context. “You have many Latino conservatives flatly denying that Trump was saying anything racist against their community as a whole because they say that he was talking about a very specific group of immigrants who had broken the law by entering the country without papers,” says Cadava.
Strategists and candidates note, too, that the GOP is bigger than Trump’s particular views. It’s a dynamic that reflects an ongoing tension in the party, which has tried to make its tent a little bigger, while being dominated by Trump and other leaders who espouse racist and xenophobic viewpoints.
Despite Trump’s past rhetoric, the party is successfully diversifying.And that has led to the rise of candidates who are able to deliver Trump’s talking points in bold new ways. Because Latino candidates share certain aspects of their identity with the voters they’re speaking to, they can sometimes be more effective messengers for Republican ideas than white men.
“If you put Donald Trump and Mayra Flores side by side, they are largely saying the same thing”
“If you put Donald Trump and Mayra Flores side by side, they are largely saying the same thing,” said Cadava. “But for Latinos, hearing that same message from Mayra Flores would be more compelling to them than from Trump.”
Critics of the GOP’s effort to expand its Latino base argue its central problem is that the Republican platform does little to center the needs of Latino voters.
“Republicans have done a great job showing off their Latina candidates, but they’ve done a terrible job addressing the actual concerns of the Latino community,” says Maria Teresa Kumar, president and CEO of Voto Latino, a group dedicated to turning out Latino voters, in a statement. Republicans have opposed policies like the Affordable Care Act and a $15 minimum wage, both of which would disproportionately benefit Latinos.
But Republicans — including the party’s Latina candidates — say such points of view are shortsighted and narrow-minded. Most of all, they say, arguments like Kumar’s miss the genuine connection that Republican messaging has for a segment for voters.
“That’s kind of offensive that just because you’re of a certain descent, you need to vote a certain way. And if you don’t vote that way, you’re not representing your community,” says Romero, the Republican strategist. “That’s one of the things that upsets me most.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, having dominated the past several news cycles by flying Venezuelan migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard without notice—a move his critics depict as a particularly cruel attempt to “own the libs” for political gain—has announced that he’s doubling down.
“We’ve got an infrastructure in place now. There’s going to be a lot more that’s happening,” DeSantis said Friday, according to CNN.
He noted that he plans to use “every penny” of the $12 million that Florida legislators had allocated to relocate migrants. Further flights are “likely,” and he is considering sending migrant buses like those Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey have used to shuttle thousands of asylum seekers to DC, New York City, and other urban Democratic strongholds, leaving officials and nonprofit workers scrambling to accommodate the newcomers.
He might even try and collaborate with Abbott, DeSantis said.
He denied reports, however, that some migrants had been misled about where they were headed and/or what awaited them on the other end—reports that have sparked Twitter accusations of “human trafficking.”
Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott belong in prison for human trafficking.
It is unclear, as yet, whether the governors have violated any laws, but their behavior certainly has a sordid history. My colleague Isabela Dias posted a new article today detailing how southern white supremacists used remarkably similar tactics 60 years ago in an attempt to flummox northern liberals. Under false pretenses, they recruited and bused Black southerners and their families north. In that case, the stunt backfired.
To embarrass Northern liberals and humiliate Black people, southern White Citizens Councils started their so-called “Reverse Freedom Rides,” giving Black people one-way tickets to northern cities with false promises of jobs, housing, and better lives.https://t.co/xLpTjxG0PDpic.twitter.com/voiPBbwRuN
The use of low-status groups as political pawns and scapegoats to drum up regionalist and nationalist sentiment has an even longer history, of course, here in the United States and elsewhere. Black Americans have been used as political scapegoats since well before Emancipation. Anti-immigrant scapegoating has fueled the rise of right-wing and authoritarian leaders in Europe in recent decades, and it also was a key ingredient of European fascism between the world wars.
In his new book “Slouching Towards Utopia,” which covers this history, economist Brad DeLong identifies six elements common to regimes that have self-identified as fascist: “a leadership commanding rather than representing; a unified community based on ties of blood and soil (and rejecting and degrading those who are not of the community); coordination and propaganda; support for at least some traditional hierarchies; hatred of socialists and liberals and—almost always—hatred of ‘rootless cosmopolites’ which, in their antisemitic worldview, meant Jews and people who acted like Jews, in some form or another.”
Sound familiar?
The Border Patrol has largely avoided the scrutiny that police have come under in recent years. That should change: the Border Patrol’s powers are increasingly authoritarian, with few legal checks, and expanding throughout the United States.
A US Border Patrol agent checks the passports of immigrants after they crossed the border with Mexico on May 18, 2022, in Yuma, Arizona. (Mario Tama / Getty Images)
Inspired by the violent culture of the Texas Rangers, the US Border Patrol was established in 1924 as a relatively small agency with little oversight and limited domain. Existing only along the US-Mexico border, the agency’s early goal was to enforce immigration restrictions.
On July 1, 2020, former acting secretary of Customs and Border Patrol Mark Morgan tweeted that the agency was working alongside local law enforcement across the nation to protect cities amid protests of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. “As a federal law enforcement agency, it’s our duty and responsibility to respond when our partners request support,” he asserted on Twitter.
Soon after, videos surfaced online of armed men with few official markings other than the word “POLICE” written across their clothing hauling away Black Lives Matter protesters from the streets of Portland, Oregon. As later evidence would show, these mysterious agents came from the Border Patrol. Far from the border and with authority beyond the confines of the Constitution, including the power to carry out unwarranted stops and interrogations, the Border Patrol’s presence in Portland represented a further advancement of the agency’s mission to become a national police force.
In his recent book Nobody Is Protected: How the Border Patrol Became the Most Dangerous Police Force in the United States, political geographer Reece Jones tells the story of how the US Border Patrol developed into the powerful, lawless agency it is today. While historians have previously provided excellent historiography of the Border Patrol, the narrative in Jones’s book urges an imperative question for immigrants’ rights activists and all Americans alike: For how long are we willing to allow the Border Patrol to exert and expand its extraconstitutional power?
In the following interview with Jones, he lays out the story of how a number of landmark but little-talked-about Supreme Court cases shaped the Border Patrol’s current powers, the role of race in the rise of the Border Patrol, the post–September 11 “border-industrial complex,” and why all Americans should pay attention to the dangerous possibilities of the Border Patrol’s expanding powers.
Conner Martinez
Race plays a major role in the development of the Border Patrol throughout your book. Could you explain how?
Reece Jones
The Border Patrol was established in 1924 to enforce the Immigration Act passed that year, often referred to as the National Origins Quota Act. That act was a law based on racial exclusion. The people who wrote it were drawing on eugenics and race science, and it was meant to prevent nonwhite people from entering the United States and to orient immigration toward Northern Europe. The Border Patrol was established two days after that law went into force, so the original purpose of the agency was as a racial police force whose job was to locate nonwhite people entering the country and remove them. This role has continued through the present.
In Nobody Is Protected, I talk about how some key Supreme Court cases defined the parameters of what the Border Patrol can do. In two of those cases, United States v.Brignoni-Ponce in 1975 and United States v.Martinez-Fuerte in 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that the Border Patrol can use race as one of the primary criteria to stop individuals while on patrol. So we can see that the Border Patrol was founded as a racial police force and is allowed to continue racial profiling today. This has always been a key part of its ethos.
Conner Martinez
You just mentioned two Supreme Court cases. Multiple such cases play a prominent role in your narrative of the Border Patrol’s extraconstitutional power. What are these cases, and how did they shape the Border Patrol’s authority today?
Reece Jones
One of the interesting things about the Border Patrol is that upon its establishment, it was given really expansive authority. Agents were allowed to stop people without a warrant inside the United States. Eventually in the 1940s, this power was set within a hundred miles of borders and coastlines, allowing agents to both stop and search people without a warrant in this area.
This law was not put in front of the Supreme Court until the 1970s, when finally the contradiction between the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure were weighed against the Border Patrol’s authorization to stop and search anyone in the border zone. In the 1973 case Almeida-Sanchez v. United States, which was about whether the Border Patrol could carry out searches anywhere in the border zone, the Supreme Court came within just a few weeks of deciding that yes, it could search any vehicle, but a justice switched his vote at the last minute, and the court decided searches needed probable cause just as in the case of the police.
In 1975 and 1976, the Supreme Court had two more cases dealing with making stops in the Border Zone. Something additional to note about the Brignoni-Ponce decision in 1975 is that it established that the Border Patrol could stop virtually any vehicle if they had at least two facts justifying the making of that stop. Race was one. In the Martinez-Fuerte case in 1976, it was then established that race alone can be used at a border checkpoint to send someone to a secondary inspection.
Conner Martinez
What exactly is the border zone?
Reece Jones
The original idea of the Border Patrol was that it would only operate at the border line. But the agents started to encroach into the United States in order to make apprehensions. So, in the 1940s, Congress revised the Border Patrol’s authorization to say that it could operate at a reasonable distance from the border. However, it didn’t specify how far.
Later in 1947, the Department of Justice released a simply routine interpretation of the laws in the federal register, and without any input or public debate, they set the reasonable distance as one hundred miles from any borders and coastlines, which is an extremely vast area that includes around two-thirds of the US populations and many of the largest cities in the country. New York, Washington, Boston, Seattle, and Chicago are all within that one-hundred-mile zone. Even a number of entire states are within that zone.
And what makes the zone significant is, again, the lower standards of evidence that the Border Patrol has in terms of stopping vehicles without probable cause and without a warrant. It can even set up checkpoints on roads deep within the United States.
Conner Martinez
During the protests of the police killing of George Floyd in Portland, Oregon, a series of videos came out showing mysterious detentions of protesters by heavily armed agents with few official markings. As it turns out, these were Border Patrol agents. What was the Border Patrol doing so far from the border in Portland? And is this something we can expect more of in the future?
Reece Jones
Something I highlight specifically in my book is that the Border Patrol has all of this sophisticated military gear and almost 20,000 agents in the field, but it has relatively little work to do when it comes to immigration. This makes it available to be deployed for other purposes.
During the protests, Donald Trump’s administration decided to use a “war on terror”–era law that says that the secretary of homeland security could assign federal officers to protect federal buildings. But the regulation is actually quite broad, because it says they can do investigations on-site and off-site for any felony cognizable under the law. This allowed the agents to police social justice protests and also grab people off the street in the middle of the night in unmarked vans in things that have nothing to do with immigration work.
The major concern then is that these laws are still on the books. And the Border Patrol is eager to do this kind of work. One of the alarms I’m trying to raise in my book is that these laws need to be fixed before a future authoritarian president comes into power and uses them even more expansively.
Conner Martinez
Part of this shift in the Border Patrol’s work has been about rebranding. In the years after September 11, the war on terror led to a rebranding of the Border Patrol as an agency focused on terrorism. Has this rebranding worked, and does the Border Patrol actually prevent terrorism?
Reece Jones
The Border Patrol will often issue press releases where it says that it has arrested someone at the border who is on the terrorism watch list, but often the people it finds have nothing to do with terrorism. It also tends to release press releases when it arrests someone with the same name as someone on the terrorist watch list, even when in reality it’s not the person who is on the watch list. So the Border Patrol claims that it does make a number of terrorism-related arrests at the border, but no significant prosecutions have happened based on arrests by the Border Patrol.
What we do see in the post–September 11 era is that the Border Patrol is doing a kind of repositioning. Prior to September 11, the Border Patrol was primarily focused on immigration and drug enforcement. But after the attacks, the atmosphere of fear allowed the Border Patrol to reposition itself as primarily a front line against terrorism. This resulted in a lot of money flowing to the Border Patrol, giving it access to more agents it could hire and access to much more military gear it didn’t previously have. This also coincides with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the procurement of military gear that also ends up eventually in the hands of security services within the United States.
After September 11, we can see that the agency has transformed into a much more aggressive, violent organization, even though in practice it’s interacting with the same kinds of people as before. And who is it finding at the border? It’s encountering people who are coming to the country to work and increasingly finding families who are trying to apply for asylum. So instead of trying to evade the Border Patrol, these people often turn themselves in after they cross the border.
What the United States should then be investing in is aid to people who are on the move — social workers and others who can handle asylum claims and families in need, instead of the militarized force we are currently spending on. This leaves us not equipped in any way for dealing with what is actually going on at the border.
Conner Martinez
Where is support for the militarization and growth of the Border Patrol coming from?
Reece Jones
There has become a border-industrial complex. What we saw with the military — corporations donating to members of Congress, setting up factories in congressmembers’ districts that provide jobs and foster a cycle of military spending — we’re seeing with border security. The whole security industry has become extremely lucrative for corporations.
Additionally, the border is one of the main issues for the Right. This fear of immigration is often depicted in the racialized terms of the white-supremacist “great replacement” theory. It has become a motivating force for right-wing voters, with politicians on the Right then becoming more supportive of higher spending on border security, even if the crisis at the border they’re depicting doesn’t exist.
Conner Martinez
Why do you think the Border Patrol’s activities away from the border often fly under the radar of the US public?
Reece Jones
For a long time, the Border Patrol simply wasn’t that big. With so few agents, its work within the interior of the United States wasn’t able to affect many people’s lives. But after the rapid growth in the agency, it can now operate in many of the places they didn’t in the past. So I think more people are actually running into the Border Patrol in their daily lives.
A recent report on checkpoints has shown that from 2016 to 2020, 250 million vehicles passed through an interior checkpoint. That’s 50 million a year, which is a huge number of people who are subjected to a violation of their rights to be stopped and have their vehicles briefly seized in order to ask them questions about immigration — even though they’re driving on an American road in between two American towns.
We’re seeing more people come into contact with the Border Patrol and becoming aware of it. But the question is also in many ways why I wrote this book: to raise attention to these exceptions the Border Patrol has to the Constitution and the impact the Border Patrol has on both immigrants and, increasingly, US citizens alike.
Conner Martinez
Is there any constitutional authority within the border zone?
Reece Jones
Of course, the Constitution exists within the boundaries of the United States. But what we have seen is that Congress has authorized exceptions to it and the Supreme Court has decided to defer to Congress on those exceptions, providing the Border Patrol special authority to circumvent the law and make stops without a warrant or probable cause and to stop vehicles at checkpoints and ask anyone about immigration.
These exceptions have an impact on US citizens and immigrants. They are directly related to the increases in deaths at the border, where border crossers have to go past the one-hundred-mile mark to get out of the border zone, and they result in many drug-related citations for American citizens at interior checkpoints. What they don’t serve is any deep immigration enforcement purpose.
Over 50 percent of the Border Patrol’s immigration apprehensions happen at the border. We need to reconsider this vast authority that has been given to the Border Patrol’s expansive zone at the border before the power expands even further. We’ve seen a dramatic expansion of its activities over the last fifty years, and it only makes sense to ask what it will look like in another fifty years. How far into the United States will it be operating? How will it be setting up its checkpoints? Because right now, it can do all of this in an area that includes two-thirds of the nation’s population. All of this needs to be reconsidered before it expands those powers.
Dispossessed at home, people who historically never left their Indigenous lands are steadily migrating to the U.S. in outstanding numbers.
Nearly everything Americans hear about the U.S.-Mexico border is wrong, and it’s very likely because of one relatively small but extremely well-funded and influential group of American racists.
On July 5, 2022, a group of officials in Texas held a curious press conference. It consisted of a handful of politicians from across the state praying and insisting, using openly white supremacist rhetoric about immigrant “hordes” and “invasions”, making terrifying claims, without a shred of evidence, that the United States was living through a disastrous attack on its very integrity at the hands of refugees and asylum seekers attempting to cross into the country.
Misleading statements about the security of the border have been escalating for years. What was remarkable was the brazenness of the extremist, nativist framing that the Texas politicians were pushing, and the fact that their rhetoric had absolutely no relationship with reality. “We’re under attack like Pearl Harbor!” Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick told Fox News, as though bombs were raining down on him at that very moment.
This line of false and nakedly racist rhetoric, comparing immigrants and refugees to attackers and diseases, is no accident. One could argue that it was the very reason for the press conference’s existence in the first place. The increasingly blatant bigotry in immigration discourse is the culmination of decades of targeted influence by an assortment of largely unknown groups known as the Tanton network.
The Tanton network is, as its name suggests, a criss-crossing mesh of politicians, lobbyists, think tanks, non-governmental organizations, pundits legitimized by op-eds in major newspapers, and billionaire money.
John Tanton. Photo source: Tanton Estate.
This network is named after its creator, John Tanton, a retired Michigan ophthalmologist and birdwatcher by the time he discovered the spectre of overpopulation, courtesy of entomologist Paul R. Ehrlich’s book “The Population Bomb“, which ushered in decades of policies of coercive sterilization and worse, worldwide. The spectre is kept alive by a network of disinformation purveyors whose only goal is to, in its founder’s own words, maintain a ruling white majority in the United States.
Ehrlich went on to sit on the advisory board of Tanton’s flagship organization, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), for many years; he was also a founder of another Tanton-linked group, Zero Population Growth. “We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail,” Ehrlich wrote. But he didn’t stop there. “We must use our political power,” he also wrote, “to push other countries into… population control.”
Tanton’s obsession was initially with overpopulation as a whole – he felt that there needed to simply be fewer people on the planet. He preached for efforts such as contraception and abortion (he and his wife Mary Lou were frequent donors to groups like Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club) in order to bring progressives around to what he perceived as an overwhelming need for population control.
As so often happens, however, Tanton quickly decided that only some populations might need controlling — those he personally found the most questionable. He quickly changed tactics to settle on immigration restriction after realizing that eugenics might not be palatable to most Americans in the decades following the revelations about Nazi atrocities during World War II. Tanton ultimately decided that “population control” should be inflicted more on certain people than others, and advocated for a “Euro-American majority, and a clear one at that.” And thus was the eugenics movement reborn, couched as “immigration restriction.”
Tanton reportedly loved to sit at his typewriter and tap out long letters to various groups asking for funding. In fact, much of Tanton’s available correspondence appears to be a nearly inexhaustible supply of fundraising letters to as many groups as he could.
Wealthy Backers for Tanton’s Cause
John Tanton’s letters often detailed a plan that he came to call “passive eugenics,” which consists of ideas such as coerced sterilization, restricting childbearing ages, and anti-immigrant disinformation campaigns. He even published an essay in 1975 called “The Case for Passive Eugenics.” In this way, Tanton apparently discovered that he shared many ideals with the richest people in the country— his first and primary funder, Cordelia Scaife May, believed that immigration should be sharply limited in the United States.
May, whom Tanton affectionately called “Cordy” in letters, began life with progressive leanings, but ended up detesting most humans, particularly immigrants and people of color, and she had the inherited wealth to go a good long way toward bringing about her particular vision for the world. She wrote to a cousin in the 1980s in language that by now is likely familiar to all Americans:
“When we hear of immigrants, we instinctively think of Mexicans because they are the most numerous and given the greatest press coverage. In truth, we are being invaded on all fronts. Filipinos are pouring into Hawaii. Almost anyone from the Caribbean countries and Eastern South America who can make it to the Virgin Islands or Puerto Rico can eventually make it to the U.S. mainland. Orientals and Indians come across the long stretches of unmanned border we share with Canada.
“When the Mariel boat people arrived in Florida from Cuba, much was made of the possibly deleterious impact they might have on American life… criminal habits, radical political thought, exotic diseases, neighborhood disruption, etc., …but no reporter, columnist, nor commentator cited their most dangerous contribution of all: a birth rate far higher than that of our native population. They breed like hamsters.”
– Cordelia Scaife May
May and her foundation effectively financed Tanton’s efforts and inroads for years. The warm, lucrative relationship between Tanton and “Cordy” continued until her apparent suicide in 2005. By 2013, May’s Pittsburgh-based Colcom Foundation was the single biggest bankroller of the anti-immigration movement. (May also contributed funds to white nationalist group VDARE and paid to republish Jean Raspail’s work of deeply racist fanfiction, “The Camp of the Saints”, which former Trump adviser Steve Bannon calls his favorite book.)
But the family connections didn’t end with Cordelia May. Her brother, Richard Mellon Scaife, a major early funder and board trustee of The Heritage Foundation, gave his blessing to Tanton’s efforts through the Colcom Foundation.
Map of interlocking relationships including the Colcom Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation, and Tanton Network entities like the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). Note: some entities shown here do not support Tanton-style agendas, but share some funding and personnel links. Source: sousmarin on Littlesis.org.
Colcom’s vice president of philanthropy, John Rohe, wrote a glowing biography about the Tantons called“Mary Lou and John Tanton: A Journey into American Conservation.” (Rohe also wrote something called “A Bicentennial Malthusian Essay: Conservation, Population and the Indifference to Limits.”)
Their efforts paid massive dividends. In 1986, American immigration law was changed for the far more draconian, even as it offered asylum to millions already within the United States, with IRCA, the Immigration Reform and Control Act.
Mary Lou and John Tanton. Photo source: Tanton Estate.
By the 1990s, misleading “overpopulation” narratives were accepted by the American public at large, with national magazines blaring terrifying narratives about all the evils that overpopulation could bring, playing directly into national debates over immigration and overcrowding. These were the results of extensive efforts by the Tanton network, as Tanton himself makes clear in an “oral history” with Dan Stein (who still heads FAIR) in 1994.
“I agree with you that special interests are misunderstood. One reason special interest groups go up is because the system is so complicated that you have to, as Pat Noonan says ‘Focus, Focus, Focus,’ if you hope to get anything done. I used to tell people that FAIR’s role in the 1986 Immigration Act cost us eight years and eight million dollars for whatever it was we were able to accomplish in that particular act.“
– John Tanton
The duo also detail their working relationship with then-Senator Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyoming), listed as the bill’s author, and how they were able to leverage that into greater visibility:
“Well, the organization was not well-known at that point in time. It was well-known enough to be known to the editors of The New York Times, and there were some letters to the editor there. It was well-known enough to have retained a high- powered lobbying firm , and it was well-known enough, thanks in part to Senator Simpson’s alliance with FAIR early on, to secure occasional appearances on MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and a couple here and there, maybe the Today Show.“
U.S.-Mexico border fence near San Diego & Tijuana. Photo by Brooke Binkowski.
Tanton Network Advances in the Trump Era
By 2015, when Donald Trump first announced that he planned to run for U.S. President, these groups were well known throughout the political and media ecosystem. Indeed, its relative obscurity was due to the fact that until Trump’s openly nativist campaign, news organizations by and large had begun to understand that the network of nonprofits and lobbying groups was not representing its true aims.
“The anti-immigrant movement’s talking points and tactics during the current immigration debate are remarkably similar to the ones used during the last major push for immigration reform in 2007,” reads one representative article published by the Anti-Defamation League in 2013. “Reestablishing and buttressing front groups is an example of the movement’s repeat tactics.”
But by 2016, the ‘Overton window’ of acceptable discourse was sliding rapidly to the far right, thanks to concerted efforts from the Tanton network’s disinformation purveyors and their “objective” enablers in the popular media. Soon, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the Center for Immigration Studies, and other affiliated groups and organizations that had once been recognized as serving up nothing more than white supremacist fare, such as The Social Contract Press, were regularly quoted in news stories, tapped by pundits, invited onto televised panels, all without revealing their true affiliations and goals, such as seeding white supremacist conspiracy theories such as “the Great Replacement” into the mainstream.
This nearly immediate acquiescence to disinformation purveyors by the national press paved the way for Tanton network operatives to be brought into the federal government en masse by the Trump administration. A 2016 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story shows many links between the Trump campaign and Scaife money. Many of those named in the report are likely familiar to Americans, such as former transportation secretary Elaine Chao, former education secretary Betsy Devos, billionaires Peter Thiel and Rebekah Mercer, and more.
By 2017, many of those same Tanton affiliates were either embedded in or directly influencing Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, enacting their agenda mainly against immigrant women and children. Key figures included USCIS Ombudsman Julie Kirchner, fresh off a years-long stint at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, Ken Cuccinelli in the Department of Homeland Security, whose legal stunts included a 2008 attempt to overturn birthright citizenship, and Kris Kobach, a pet lawyer for the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s legal wing, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, or IRLI.
But now, although Trump and his administration are out of power, there has been no real pushback or consequence for these acts which are clearly classified as acts of genocide under the Geneva Convention. Instead, Joe Biden’s administration, constrained by Trump appointed judges, hostile Republicans, and political “norms,” has continued much of Trump’s policies at the border.
In the absence of legal or social consequences for any of these acts or the rhetoric that inevitably accompanies and justifies such acts, the Tanton network has once again upped its game as catastrophic climate change looms, giving authoritarian leaders the excuses they need to shut down international points of entry. They no longer seem to feel constrained to wrap their nativism in pseudoscience and dogwhistles, but instead push warlike language of “hordes” and “invasion” in what appears to be an effort to spark stochastic violence — acts of terror whose likelihood can be statistically but not individually predicted, encouraged by signaling aggression against specific groups of people.
But while the Tanton network is skilled at nuisance lawsuits, weaponized rhetoric, and fundraising, they are also a relatively small group of people who are highly vulnerable to counter messaging and losing their positions of power. Their narratives are closed loops that can be derailed with transparency and fact-based reporting.
Photo by Brooke Binkowski.
Private Papers Sought in Michigan
Hassan Ahmad, a Virginia based immigration lawyer, has spearheaded an ongoing transparency effort around John Tanton’s private papers, which he donated to the University of Michigan with the caveat that some not be unsealed until 2035. Ahmad and supporters argue that these papers contain a wealth of knowledge about Tanton’s plans and contacts that, in light of the Trump presidency and all its corrosive effects on American immigration, are squarely in the public interest.
As of 2022, the case over Tanton’s papers has been dragging on for five years. Many of its twists and turns make little sense, Ahmad said, noting that at least three of the now-sealed boxes had once been open to the public. “They could have stopped a long time ago if they wanted to,” he said. “If Tanton had really wanted to keep these papers secret, there were other ways to do it. He didn’t do it.” The University of Michigan is arguing that opening the sealed boxes of papers would constitute an invasion of privacy.
The boxes of paperwork would bring new life to journalists and researchers working to shed light on John Tanton’s destructive legacy. Over time, link decay, changes in editorial direction, and paywalls have increasingly interfered with efforts to track down background information on the Tanton network and its allies, at the same time that transparency and equality have become crucial in the age of hybrid attacks and catastrophic climate change, particularly around the future of migration and immigration. As the Tanton network’s influence and funding continues to grow, so do the calls to uncover the truth about the history, and the future, of the United States’ immigration policies.
The Biden administration says it is officially ending the controversial Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy that forces asylum seekers to wait in Mexico as their cases wind through court, often in grueling conditions for months or years. We speak to attorney and activist Efrén Olivares with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Project about the impact of this policy, as well as ongoing efforts to reunite families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy in 2018. Olivares represented some of the children and their parents, and wrote about them in his new book, My Boy Will Die of Sorrow: A Memoir of Immigration from the Front Lines.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN:This isDemocracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
The Biden administration said Monday it’s officially ending the controversial Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy and will no longer force asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases are resolved in U.S. courts over months and years. The announcement came just hours after a judge lifted an injunction, in effect since December, blocking Biden officials from terminating the program, formally known as theMPP, the Migrant Protection Protocols. The Supreme Court ruled in June the Biden administration had the authority to end the policy.
Some 70,000 asylum seekers were subjected toMPPfrom January 2019 to January 2021, when President Biden suspended the policy, fulfilling a campaign promise. But a federal court in Texas last December ordered the administration to restart the program after legal challenges from Texas and Missouri. Since then, nearly 6,000 more asylum seekers were enrolled inMPP. Most have been forced to live in squalid makeshift border camps. Others found shelter in towns near the U.S.-Mexico border. This is an asylum seeker from Nicaragua who was living at a border camp in Matamoros, Mexico, in 2020.
ASYLUMSEEKER:[translated] I know this is not the ideal place for any child or any teenager. But while we’re here, we’re doing our best to save them from mental health problems. Sometimes the sadness is overwhelming, but you have to stay strong. I want my granddaughters to have a better future.
AMYGOODMAN:Well, for more, we’re joined by Efrén Olivares, the deputy legal director at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Project, formerly with the Texas Civil Rights Project in South Texas, where we met him. His new book isMy Boy Will Die of Sorrow: A Memoir of Immigration from the Front Lines.
Efrén, welcome back toDemocracy Now!If you can talk about the significance of the end ofMPP? And then we want to ask you about the separation of children and how many are still separated.
EFRÉNOLIVARES:Hi, Amy. Good morning. Thank you for having me.
Yeah, the end ofMPP, or “Remain in Mexico,” is a long time coming. We were pleased to see that the administration suspended the program right at the beginning of the Biden administration. Unfortunately, litigation and the court got in the way and had prevented it from fully winding down the program, and, in fact, the administration was forced to enroll additional people inMPP. Now that the Supreme Court has ruled and that the district court has dissolved the injunction, there’s nothing stopping the Biden administration from promptly and orderly disenrolling everyone who is inMPPand allowing them to face their asylum cases or immigration proceedings from the United States, where they will have access to counsel, the ability to gather evidence, present that evidence, and everything that comes with presenting an immigration or asylum case.
JUANGONZÁLEZ:And, Efrén, you worked legally on behalf of many immigrant families that were separated under the “zero tolerance” policy of former President Trump. What’s the status with those separated families today?
EFRÉNOLIVARES:Well, it varies. There’s a lot of situations. Some families have been reunited. Many are litigating their cases against the government as a result of that policy, which, remarkably, the Biden administration is defending in court. There are dozens of lawsuits still ongoing, and the Biden administration is defending Trump policies and Trump administration officials.
And some families, unfortunately, are still separated. Some children who were taken from their parents are still in the U.S., either with relatives or in the foster care system. And some parents were deported to their home countries, have not been located. So, not every family has been reunited — excuse me. And some never will, unfortunately.
JUANGONZÁLEZ:And also, the Biden administration is still enforcing the Title 42 pandemic policy, and nearly 2 million asylum seekers were expelled without due process as a result of Title 42. What do you see happening with that policy in the future?
EFRÉNOLIVARES:Well, now theCDCand a host of scientists and public health experts have confirmed that there’s no public health justification for Title 42 expulsions. Unfortunately, the ending of Title 42, of that practice of expelling immigrants and asylum seekers, has also been stopped in litigation. The administration has said multiple times that it intends to end that policy, but the courts have prevented it from doing so. We were pleased to see that in Congress there was no codification of Title 42. So, as the administration continues to litigate that against Texas and other states, we look forward to having a science-based policy around the pandemic, as well as a commonsense immigration and asylum policy, so that those seeking safety in this country have an orderly way to do so.
AMYGOODMAN:I wanted to go to a clip. I mean, as you’ve said, you represented many of the separated families at the border and have spoken about this over the years onDemocracy Now!, as you write about in your book,My Boy Will Die of Sorrow: A Memoir of Immigration from the Front Lines. This is what you write about a day in 2018 in McAllen, Texas. You said, “I came back to the Bentsen Tower. Standing outside, on the corner of 17th and Austin streets, I waited as the reporter set up the camera. Renée Feltz, withDemocracy Now!, had traveled from New York City to McAllen to cover the separations. She was the first reporter who reached out to us about the brewing crisis, and we saw this as an opportunity to break the story to a wider audience, which was not yet aware of what we were seeing and hearing in court every day.” Let’s go to Renée’sinterviewin 2018 outside that federal courthouse in McAllen. AGEOGroup private prison transport bus backed up behind you.
EFRÉNOLIVARES:These are the buses in which the immigrants, many of whom are parents who have had their children taken away, are transported to and from the courthouse, probably to aCBPdetention facility. The sad thing is that many of those people have children, and many of them were separated this morning, before they came to court, and were led to believe that when they return to the detention facility, their children are going to be there. But we know that the children will not be there, because the government is separating them.
AMYGOODMAN:So, it may surprise some to know, Efrén Olivares, that some 1,000 children are still separated at this point. I believe when the Biden administration came in, they put Dr. Jill Biden, President Biden’s wife, the first lady, overall in charge of reunification. If you can talk about the effect — in your book, you also write about your own experience so many years ago being separated from your family.
EFRÉNOLIVARES:Yes. You know, that interview that you played, it was before this crisis had made national news, and we were struggling to break through and make sure that the public knew what was really happening at the border. And one of the saddest things is that we will probably never know how many families were actually separated. Given the government’s intentional lack of record-keeping, we will not know. Many families were separated, and the children ended up at a shelter, but the shelter never knew that that child had been traveling with a family, with a parent, a father or a mother, because there was no record-keeping. And if the children were too little to be able to explain that, we will never know truly how many children were separated.
And as far as the lifelong consequences of that, you know, there’s been widespread reporting on the trauma that that experience, the violent ripping apart of a child from his or her mom or her dad — you know, just thinking of that audio that leaked, if that doesn’t convey what this policy caused to children and to parents. It is still hard to understand how in this country, in 2018 and ongoing, it was possible to see such a cruel violation of human rights against children.
AMYGOODMAN:And, Efrén Olivares, we’re going to do apost-show interviewwith you, post it online at democracynow.org, to hear about your own life experience, as you write about in your book, your bookMy Boy Will Die of Sorrow: A Memoir of Immigration from the Front Lines. Efrén Olivares, deputy legal director now at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Project. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Stay safe.
At two federal detention centers in California, more than 50 immigrant workers are on strike over unsafe working conditions and low wages.
“We are being exploited for our labor and are being paid $1 per day to clean the dormitories,” said strikers at a central California detention center in a June statement received by public radio station KQED.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
I am appalled at the intentional cruelty and shocking incompetence that drove the Trump administration’s family-separation tragedy.
Welcome to the week, and allow me to introduce—or reintroduce—myself to you. I’m Tom Nichols, a staff writer here at The Atlantic, where I’m also the proprietor of the Peacefield newsletter. If you’re a regular Daily reader, you might remember that I authored this newsletter in June; I’m back, and I’ll be writing the Daily most days of the week. Along with some of my Atlantic colleagues, I’ll be sharing thoughts and analysis about the day’s news and other issues.
I write, among other things, about the perilous state of democracy in the United States and around the world. Today, I urge you to read The Atlantic’s new cover story by my colleague Caitlin Dickerson about the origins and consequences of the disastrous decision by President Donald Trump and his advisers to curtail illegal immigration by instituting a brutal family-separation policy in which children—including infants and toddlers—were intentionally taken from their parents.
Caitlin’s intense and detailed examination shows that the family-separation policy was not a misunderstanding, or a bureaucratic error, or some sort of overzealous interpretation of otherwise sensible rules. It was, as one government figure told her, “evil,” and intentionally so: The goal of the policy was to pull children from their parents at the border as a deterrent, to inflict so much pain on people trying to enter the United States illegally that no one would be brave or tough enough to keep trying to do it.
Heartbreaking stories of children torn from their parents and then subjected to inhumane detention conditions should afflict the conscience of any decent person. But Americans should also be enraged by the completely dysfunctional nature of their own government. Even if you believe in taking a tough stand against illegal immigration (as I do) the combination of moral rot and bureaucratic incompetence produced outcomes that were far worse than the policy’s designers expected—and they already expected it to be bad.
When Trump officials such as Stephen Miller and Jeff Sessions finally got the family-separation policy under way, the immigration system’s courts, shelters, and other assets were almost instantly overwhelmed by a flood of traumatized children. The fallout was so awful and so obvious that soon, even Trump’s people began to backpedal away from it. Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen—who spoke with Caitlin on the record—admitted that she did not understand how bad the situation would get and that she regretted caving to the pressure to sign the order.
The family-separation nightmare is what can happen when zealots who have no idea what they’re doing get control of the levers of a gigantic and powerful government. Not only were Trump’s aides clueless about how the immigration system worked, but they took pride in their ignorance and saw any attempt to inject facts or caution into the debate as a sign of weakness. “There’s this worship of process,” one member of Miller’s team said. “Process, process, process. Process is code for ‘We can slow down the quick impulses of a fiery political administration with no experts.’ Well, that’s not what was voted for.”
The public never votes for “process,” but that’s how governments work, and it is how, in a system of separated powers, policies are formed, funded, and implemented. But immigration was merely one of many areas in which the Trump White House regarded the Constitution and federal law as little more than annoyances. At one point, according to the notes of a senior DHS official, Trump told Chief of Staff John Kelly “to tell Nielson to, ‘Round them all up and push them back into Mexico. Who cares about the law.’”
According to this official’s notes, “silence followed.”
This silence was part of a persistent cowardice among senior figures in the U.S. government. Opponents of the policy thought that the system, or the courts, or the person in the next office down the hall would somehow stop the cruelty. But the people who wanted to do the right thing—or, at the least, knew how the immigration system actually worked—were shouted down by low-level minions such as Katie Waldman (who was soon to be Mrs. Stephen Miller). This kind of bullying, Caitlin writes, was part of “an administration plagued by insecurity and imposter syndrome.” Whether out of misplaced loyalty or fear of professional repercussions, the professionals just took it. “They made me lie,” claimed one government official who misled Caitlin when she was reporting an earlier story about the policy.
This remarkable article is a cautionary tale for Americans and other citizens of democratic nations, a story of a political monkey’s paw. When people vote for incompetent and cowardly leaders to execute policies founded on ignorance and cruelty, they will get what they asked for—to their shame and regret.
Join Caitlin Dickerson and Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg for a live discussion about the secret history of the U.S. government’s family-separation policy on August 12 at 2 p.m. ET.Register here.
Today’s News
The three men convicted in the 2020 Georgia murder of Ahmaud Arbery were sentenced by a federal judge for hate crimes.
President Joe Biden visited Kentucky, where severe flooding has killed more than 30 people.
June 29 was found to be the shortest day on record since scientists began using atomic clocks in 1960.
Dispatches
I Have Notes: Nicole Chung argues that the proposed Penguin Random House–Simon & Schuster merger would threaten the survival of indie publishers—to the detriment of both writers and readers.
At first, it was all very exciting. In 1971, a team of Danish researchers stationed on Greenland’s northwest coast found that a local Inuit community had remarkably low levels of diabetes and heart disease. The reason, the researchers surmised, was their high-marine-fat diet—in other words, fish oil. Incidence of heart disease, which once afflicted relatively few Americans, had shot up since the turn of the century, and here, seemingly, was a simple solution. “I remember how exciting those studies were when they first came out,” Marion Nestle, a professor emerita of nutrition and food studies at NYU, told me. “The idea that there were populations of people who were eating fish and were protected against heart disease looked fabulous.”
The launching of the Webb space telescope has, for many of us, rekindled a fascination with space. I feel it, and I’m now binge-watching two television shows about it: The Star Trek series Strange New Worlds on Paramount+, and the Apple TV+ series For All Mankind—a “what if” alternate history of the Cold War space race. Both of them are throwbacks to a time in the late 1960s‚ when Americans took the conquest of space as their birthright, a natural extension of our technological optimism and can-do approach to the world. I won’t spoil the major plotlines of either for you, but I recommend them both. I miss the days when Americans were space pioneers, and now that the Russians have threatened to pull out of international space cooperation with the United States, I hope that the Americans take up the challenge of space once again.
Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.
The June 2022 deaths of 53 people, victims of heat stroke, in the back of a tractor-trailer in San Antonio, Texas, show the dangers of crossing the U.S. southern border without authorization.
Such fatalities result from two intersecting phenomena. One is the massive growth in the federal government’s policing system in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands since the mid-1990s. The other is the strong and profoundly unequal ties between the United States and the home countries of most unauthorized — or undocumented — migrants.
The number of Border Patrol agents has grown from roughly 4,200 in 1994 to more than 20,000 today. Typically, 80% to 90% of them are stationed in the U.S. Southwest. Spending has increased as well. In 1994, the Border Patrol’s budget was US$400 million. In 2021, it was $4.9 billion — an approximately 700% increase in inflation-adjusted dollars in less than 30 years.
U.S. officials anticipated that unauthorized border crossings “would go down to a trickle once people realized what it’s like.” Instead, the deterrence policy has compelled migrants to take ever greater risks, resulting in more deaths.
Since these deaths occur among a clandestine population, no one knows what percentage of total migrant trips end in tragedy.
But research on the location of human remains does demonstrate that high-tech surveillance towers have pushed migrants to more remote, and more lethal, travel routes beyond the zones of detection.
The official death tolls cited above are likely severe undercounts. They are based on bodies or human remains that are retrieved. But many corpses are never recovered because of the region’s arduous terrain and enormous size: The U.S.-Mexico boundary is about 2,000 miles long. A combination of bodily decomposition and the scattering of remains by animals further exacerbates the undercounting problem.
In the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector, for example, there were more than twice as many deaths as the agency reported from fiscal year 2015 to 2019, according to the report.
Back then, Mexico was the United States’ second-most important trading partner. It was also the source of 98% of people apprehended by the Border Patrol in the U.S. Southwest. The free movement of people, unlike commercial goods, was not included in NAFTA, the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement.
Today, one could easily make an observation similar to Heyman’s about Guatemala and Honduras in relation to the United States. Both maintain deep and broad social, political and economic ties with the United States. But those ties are profoundly unequal. The United States also has a history of intervention in Central America that, research shows, directly contributes to the instability and insecurity that set the stage for today’s migration.
Such responses are typical from Washington following such tragedies. But this framing obscures that migrants’ heavy reliance on smugglers is a direct result of the dramatic growth in the federal government’s Southwest border policing system and the associated deterrence strategy. In its official 1994 document outlining the Prevention Through Deterrence strategy, the Border Patrol even included among its “indicators of success” higher fees charged by smugglers and increasingly sophisticated smuggling methods.
In other words, U.S. authorities anticipated growth in the very industry they now decry. Consequently, deaths remain a way of life in the borderlands.
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John Tanton. Photo source: Tanton Estate.
Paul R. Ehrlich, author of “The Population Bomb”. 
Map of interlocking relationships including the Colcom Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation, and Tanton Network entities like the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). Note: some entities shown here do not support Tanton-style agendas, but share some funding and personnel links. Source: 
Mary Lou and John Tanton. Photo source: Tanton Estate.
U.S.-Mexico border fence near San Diego & Tijuana. Photo by Brooke Binkowski.
Photo by Brooke Binkowski. 
Photo by Brooke Binkowski.
