Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

[seemslikeadream]

Nick Miroff

This is El Paso right now, where hundreds of migrant families are being held in the parking lot of a Border Patrol station because there is no room for them inside, or anywhere else.



Look at the babies.

https://twitter.com/NickMiroff/status/1 ... 5250764800

[seemslikeadream]

Fox & Friends Warns of New Wave of Migrants: ‘MOTHER OF ALL CARAVANS’
by Caleb Ecarma | Mar 29th, 2019, 9:10 am 69


The hosts of Fox & Friends warned viewers of the imminent “mother of all caravans” entering the U.S. in the coming days, even though there are reports disputing the migrant group’s size.


The network’s blaring “mother of all caravans” chyron was a quote from Mexico’s Interior Secretary Olga Sánchez Cordero, a nickname she gave the caravan amid her country’s crackdowns against migrants traveling through to reach the U.S.

“Sounds like it could be 20,000 in all. People coming from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala. One activist though said the reports calling this the mother of all caravans is false,” host Steve Doocy noted, before warning that is a report from the Associated Press citing activists close to the migrants who dispute the existence of a caravan even close to that large.

Honduras’ deputy foreign minister Nelly Jerez has also said, “There is no indication of such a caravan. This type of information promotes that people leave the country.”

“Listen, the caravans all were true,” Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade argued after his colleague acknowledged the reports countering the narrative. “They all got here and a lot of them got through… Now we’re going to be letting thousands go as they are welling up in El Paso in order to go forward in our country.”


He continued:

“The word is out that we can’t get together on a policy let alone we don’t even know the criminals percentage wise that are probably in that mix. Maybe most of them are probably great people. But they are just trying to bust through and now we have no place to put them and now they have to get through.”

After the cast read a tweet from Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) condemning the U.S. locking migrants in a fenced-in, outdoor area and calling it white nationalism, Kilmeade opined that “it’s unbelievable to someone who would see our border issue as white, black, or brown.”

Co-host Ainsley Earhardt suggested migrants are coming now because they are “afraid our laws are going to change and catch and release is going to be no more.”

“They want to get in when they can,” she added.
https://www.mediaite.com/tv/fox-friends ... -caravans/

Autopsy report: Detained Guatemalan girl died of 'rapidly progressive' infection
Kayla Melson
EL PASO, Texas (KTSM) - The 7-year-old Guatemalan migrant who died in Border Patrol custody last year faced a "rapidly progressive" bacterial infection, an autopsy report obtained by KTSM reveals.

As KTSM previously reported, Jakelin Caal and her father were apprehended with a large group of undocumented immigrants near Lordsburg on Dec. 6.

While in custody, Caal began vomiting and had a fever of 105 degrees. She was flown to an El Paso hospital where she died two days later.

The El Paso County Medical Examiner's office released the report on Friday, nearly four months after Caal's death.

According to the report, examiners found Streptococcus bacteria in Caal's adrenal gland, lungs, spleen, and liver, leading to the failure of multiple organs.

photo
Investigators also found Hemorrhaging and acute inflammation, or pneumonia, in her lungs.

According to the report, Caal's body was also tested for the flu, Parainfluenza, respiratory syncytial, and adenovirus viruses, which all came back negative.

"The manner of death is natural," the report states.
https://www.ktsm.com/immigration/autops ... redirect=1

[seemslikeadream]

Trump Admin Says It Wants Two Years To Find Immigrant Kids Separated From Parents

Mario Tama/Getty Images South America
SAN DIEGO (AP) — The Trump administration wants up to two years to find potentially thousands of children who were separated from their families at the border before a judge halted the practice last year, a task that it says is more laborious than previous efforts because the children are no longer in government custody.

The Justice Department said in a court filing late Friday that it will take at least a year to review about 47,000 cases of unaccompanied children taken into government custody between July 1, 2017 and June 25, 2018 — the day before U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw halted the general practice of splitting families. The administration would begin by sifting through names for traits most likely to signal separation — for example, children under 5.

The administration would provide information on separated families on a rolling basis to the American Civil Liberties Union, which sued to reunite families and criticized the proposed timeline on Saturday.

“We strongly oppose a plan that could take up to two years to locate these families,” said Lee Gelernt, the ACLU’s lead attorney. “The government needs to make this a priority.”

Sabraw ordered last year that more than 2,700 children in government care on June 26, 2018 be reunited with their families, which has largely been accomplished. Then, in January, the U.S. Health and Human Services Department’s internal watchdog reported that thousands more children may have been separated since the summer of 2017. The department’s inspector general said the precise number was unknown.

The judge ruled last month that he could hold the government accountable for families that were separated before his June order and asked the government submit a proposal for the next steps. A hearing is scheduled April 16.

Sheer volume makes the job different than identifying children who were in custody at the time of the judge’s June order, Jonathan White, a commander of the U.S. Public Health Service and Health and Human Services’ point person on family reunification, said in an affidavit.

White, whose work has drawn strong praise from the judge, would lead the effort to identify additional families on behalf of Health and Health and Human Services with counterparts at Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs and Enforcement. Dr. Barry Graubard, a statistics expert at the National Cancer Institute, developed a system to flag for early attention those most likely to have been separated.

The vast majority of separated children are released to relatives, but many are not parents. Of children released in the 2017 fiscal year, 49 percent went to parents, 41 percent to close relatives such as an aunt, uncle, grandparent or adult sibling and 10 percent to distant relatives, family friends and others.

The government’s proposed model to flag still-separated children puts a higher priority on the roughly half who were not released to a parent. Other signs of likely separation include children under 5, younger children traveling without a sibling and those who were detained in the Border Patrol’s El Paso, Texas, sector, where the administration ran a trial program that involved separating nearly 300 family members from July to November 2017.

Saturday marks the anniversary of the administration’s “zero tolerance” policy to criminally prosecute every adult who enters the country illegally from Mexico. The administration retreated in June amid an international uproar by generally exempting adults who come with their children. The policy now applies only to single adults.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trum ... ed-parents

[seemslikeadream]

The Confession of Kirstjen Nielsen
Forgive me America, for I have sinned.


Author’s note: This is what Kirstjen Nielsen should—but won’t—say after being fired by Donald Trump. She’s in a unique position to bring a moral and political reckoning. She may not, but she sure should.

The most common lie for Washington politicians facing political disgrace is this: “I take full responsibility.” Translated to English, it means, “I take no responsibility for anything, and may I have a lobbying job now, please?”

I cannot say I take full responsibility for my actions in the Trump administration without freely and fully admitting what I have done, and left undone.

I am Kirstjen Nielsen, and this is my confession.

I abandoned all principles, broke my Constitutional oath, and ignored my duty to the country in service to Donald Trump. I chose power and position over the law, ethics, standards, and decency.

I have been a party to evil.

No word more effectively describes the Trump administration’s actions on immigration. By acts of omission and commission, I have executed policies of deliberate cruelty, particularly to children, that were both in violation of the letter and the spirit of U.S. law and the most basic norms of humanitarian behavior.

I have served a president surrounded by men and women who represent the very antithesis of the American dream. Neither economics nor security drive their views on immigration and the border. Overt racism, isolationism, and the idea that America is being “browned” by immigrants inform their beliefs and actions. They view hostility to immigrants and immigration as a winning political issue, no matter the moral or humanitarian cost.

The beliefs of this president and his advisors on immigration and border security are a twisted mirror image of a nation where we once honored the histories of our immigrant forebears. They do not believe, as every generation before us has, that America is a propositional nation.

The president himself—and the men and women who surround him—view immigrants seeking a safer, better life in America as less than human. He has, in my presence, referred to immigrants as “animals.” (No, really. Look at the actual transcript and ignore the MS-13 spin.) His advisors and allies have joked that the deaths of large numbers of immigrants are a salutary deterrent.

I could tell you that I thought I would be a lone voice of sanity in a chorus of madness and hate. That would be a lie. I could tell you that without me standing boldly in the face of the president’s illegal and inhumane orders that the situation with tens of thousands of immigrant children would be even more terrible and dire. That too would be a lie.

Because the truth is that I knew that I would never bring to bear any meaningful influence. Stephen Miller is Trump’s brain. And I knew that.

But it’s worse than that. Because too often I was a coward in the face of his demands.

While I resisted some of their excesses as a matter of optics, I carried out orders. I obeyed. While I offered legal objections on why we could not execute some of the president’s orders and resisted them in private, I never took my concerns to Congressional oversight bodies in either the House or Senate.

There was no crisis on the border when President Trump took office, though he has tried his best to create one. There was never a basis for the president’s declaration of a national emergency. There is no viable mechanism for sealing the U.S. border that does not result in a massive humanitarian and economic catastrophe on both sides of the line.

And finally: There is no Wall. There is no plan for a Wall. No sections of “the Wall” have been, or will be, built. The Wall is a con on the American people.

I have played lawyerly word games to hide not only the depravity and cruelty of the policies of this administration but my role in them. I have been responsible for covering up the deaths of children in American captivity.

I freely and openly admit that I turned the Department of Homeland Security away from its mission to pursue violent internal threats to America’s security into the lavish anti-immigrant theater that the president and Mr. Miller desired.

The Department of Homeland Security was created in the wake of attacks from terrorists who wanted to destroy our Republic. I turned my department into an arm of the president’s war against people who want to join it.

I have shamed myself and shamed this country by allowing Donald Trump to stain the glorious legacy of our great nation. He is a man without better angels, and I will stand as a warning to others who continue to serve him.

My actions have not only destroyed my reputation and dishonored the image of America, but also stand as a profound affront to values and principles for which this country once stood.

I stand ready to testify to Congress on this and any other matters, and may God have mercy on my soul.
https://thebulwark.com/the-confession-o ... n-nielsen/

[seemslikeadream]

Donald Trump Created the Crisis at the Border

Mani Albrecht/U.S. Customs and Border Protection via ZUMA
I haven’t seen anyone make an argument about immigration that seems kind of obvious to me—and, I suspect, to President Trump himself. Here it is.

Up until 2017, illegal immigration across the southern border was fine. It had been decreasing for years; it was at historically low levels; and there were no regular caravans of asylum seekers coming up from Guatemala. The first of the recent caravans began in 2018, and at first they seemed like the ones we had seen before from time to time: they started with a few thousand people and then shrunk as they got farther north. By the time they reached the US border, they were modest in size and created only modest problems.

But then, later in 2018, as Election Day approached, Trump suddenly went bananas. There were armies of migrants marching toward our border! Mexico has to stop it! Build the wall!

But this backfired. Not only did Republicans get walloped at the polls, but Trump’s constant howling acted as a great marketing campaign for the caravans. Instead of scaring migrants away, he made them more aware of asylum as a way of escaping from their country. The result was more caravans than ever before, and eventually, enough people at the border that we really did have something of a crisis on our hands. But it’s a crisis mostly of Trump’s own making. He decided that yelling about the brown hordes was more useful than making a deal of some kind with Democrats, and the result was more families seeking asylum than ever before.

I suspect that Trump understands this at a gut level. The migrant crisis happened on Trump’s watch. Presidents get blamed for stuff that happens on their watch. So Trump is taking the blame for the migrant crisis. He can squawk forever about Democrats not being willing to build his wall, but in the end he owns the migrant crisis and the public will hold him to account for it. I think that’s fair, since I suspect that putting immigration front and center for the past two years has largely caused the crisis. But even if you disagree, it doesn’t matter. Trump is president. Fair or not, he takes the blame. He knows this, and it panics him.

Trump himself, of course, is too dimwitted to think of any solution other than getting even louder and tougher. That’s not likely to work, but it’s his only play.
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/ ... he-border/

Family Separation Has Scarred These Kids For Life
One year after Trump’s zero tolerance immigration policy, HuffPost spoke to families who say their children are withdrawn, depressed and self-harming.

Angelina Chapin

Isabella Carapella
One day after school in late March, 7-year-old Matías twisted colorful pipe cleaners into the shape of handcuffs. He slid the sparkly blue and bright-green circles over his small wrists and held them out proudly, as his mom, Victoria, watched silently from the door of their small bedroom.

“They grabbed my mom,” Matías said in a quiet voice, referring to immigration officials who shackled his mother. “Both her legs and her hands.”

A few minutes later, Matías tied a bright-pink pipe cleaner in a loop around his ankle, a toy version of the black ankle monitor his mom wears so that Immigration and Customs Enforcement can track her every step. Tears welled up in Victoria’s eyes as she thought about how being separated at the border more than 11 months ago continues to impact her son.

“That’s the way I was treated,” said the 23-year-old from Guatemala, who requested HuffPost use pseudonyms and not reveal the family’s location, because of safety concerns related to her asylum claim. “He remembers everything.”

Matías is one of nearly 3,000 children who were taken from their parents under the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy that was implemented a year ago on April 6 and ended in late June.

Almost a year later, most children from that group have been reunited with their mothers and fathers. But HuffPost spoke with six parents who said their kids remain deeply traumatized. They describe how their once affable sons and daughters are now angry, withdrawn and unable to sleep. Some don’t want to go to school or leave the house, for fear of being separated once again, and constantly burst into tears.

Other children have physical scars, from self-harming after prolonged periods in detention. And at least 200 children remain permanently separated from their parents who were deported back to life-threatening situations and opted to keep their sons and daughters safe in the U.S.

Mental health experts and lawyers told HuffPost that family separation, which happened to potentially thousands of families before the implementation of zero tolerance and which continues despite the policy’s termination, could traumatize children for the rest of their lives.

“There are real long-term consequences in developing brains,” said Elaine Weisman, the program and training manager at International Social Service, USA. “There are going to be lasting effects on a generation of kids and young people.”

Isidra Larena Calderon hugs her son Jonathan Leonardo on Aug. 7, 2018, in Guatemala City, Guatemala. A group of nine children
John Moore via Getty Images
Isidra Larena Calderon hugs her son Jonathan Leonardo on Aug. 7, 2018, in Guatemala City, Guatemala. A group of nine children were flown from New York and reunited with their families, months after U.S. border agents separated them and deported their parents.
‘I Don’t Want To Leave You, Mom’


Victoria brought her son to the U.S. last spring because she was the target of threats and violence. Her immigration lawyers requested that HuffPost withhold any more details of why she left her home country to protect her ongoing asylum case.

Matías was taken from Victoria on May 10, after she says an immigration officer mockingly told a group of sobbing parents, “Don’t cry today, today is a happy day. It’s Mother’s Day.” He was sent to a shelter in New York, and Victoria, who was shackled and sent to a detention center in Nevada, didn’t see her son again for 2 1/2 months.

During their time apart, Victoria suffered from chronic headaches. She said she sobbed constantly and barely slept or ate. Her son wasn’t faring any better. A social worker from the children’s shelter told Victoria he wouldn’t eat or get out of bed.

In June, on Matías’ seventh birthday, she cried thinking of her little boy spending the day by himself in detention.

Victoria says that since they were reunited in July in a family detention center and released from ICE custody five months later, her son is no longer the same child. He used to be talkative and affectionate. But now she says the 7-year-old is withdrawn, angry and frequently breaks into tears. He constantly wants to sleep, and though he used to love eating eggs with beans, and cottage cheese, he now barely has an appetite.

Victoria says most mornings he cries and says he doesn’t want to go to class, and cries again when she drops him off for the day.

He’s told her, “I don’t want to leave you, Mom,” said Victoria. “I don’t want the police to come get you, Mommy.”

The 23-year-old, who often tucked her hands into a short red jacket and hunched her shoulders during our interviews, is completely overwhelmed. She has no family in the U.S. and works seven days a week on mostly overnight shifts, cleaning offices and a bakery.

There are going to be lasting effects on a generation of kids and young people. Elaine Weisman, International Social Service, USA
Victoria rents a 200-square-foot room on the East Coast, much of which is taken up by the double bed she and Matías sleep on and a single bed another young immigrant boy shares with his aunt. The windows are blacked out by fleece blankets, a shiny Christmas garland decorates the wall, and small T-shirts hang on a curtain rod.

While Victoria is at work, her roommate puts Matías to bed, and if she doesn’t call him by 8 p.m., he cries. Up until recently, the child slept with a cellphone flashlight on due to nightmares about men watching him in the dark.

Victoria says he doesn’t do his homework or participate at school, and according to his teacher, won’t be moving on to second grade next year.

“He’s traumatized and we don’t talk,” she said. “It’s the most painful and worst thing that’s happened in my life.”

A Child’s Brain, Forever Changed


Psychologists say family separation can permanently damage a child’s brain, leading to mental illnesses such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, an inability to focus at school, and difficulty forming healthy relationships.

Dr. Yenys Castillo, a clinical psychologist who works with detained immigrant children, explained that when kids are taken away from their caregiver, they go into a state of toxic stress in which hormones flood their brains and affect its development.

“Everything gets disrupted,” says Castillo. “For kids, trauma can change their personalities, who they are, the way they view themselves in the world.”

Experts say it’s common for immigrant children to struggle with separation anxiety and constantly fear they will once again be taken away from their parents. Anilu Chadwick, a senior attorney at Kids in Need of Defense, said her colleague worked with a 5-year-old boy who was afraid to board the bus to his elementary school, which reminded him of the bus he took to a detention center after being separated from his parent.

Another mother told HuffPost that since reuniting with her son, the 9-year-old calls her constantly at work to ask where she is and when she’ll be home.

“He always says he is very scared,” said Griselda Mejia, who is from Honduras and now sells Mary Kay cosmetics in Louisiana. “He fears that if I go out somewhere I might not come back.”

Going to therapy can help children work through the damage, but most separated families don’t have access to or the resources for mental health services. In the U.S., only six states and the District of Columbia provide undocumented minors with health coverage. For families who were reunited back in Central America, there is often no therapy available in remote, poverty-stricken regions.

The almost 60 children who were separated under zero tolerance and remain in detention might still be in a state of toxic stress. But traumatic symptoms can also intensify once families are reunited, according to child psychiatrist Dr. Amy Cohen, who said children can then start to process their feelings.

“In some ways the hardest part is the aftermath [of family separation],” said Neha Desai, the director of immigration at the National Center for Youth Law. “You’re putting your life back together and uncovering layer upon layer of how the trauma has wreaked havoc on every aspect of your life.”

An emotional father embraces his son for the first time in months on Aug. 7, 2018, in Guatemala City, Guatemala.
John Moore/Getty Images
An emotional father embraces his son for the first time in months on Aug. 7, 2018, in Guatemala City, Guatemala.
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Violent Nightmares And Tears


On a recent morning before school, Victoria asked her son what he remembers about being separated at the border. Lying on their bed, he pulled a gray fleece blanket up to his nose and didn’t answer.

“Don’t cry, baby,” Victoria said in a soft voice and put her arm around him. “Don’t be sad.” In the background, a fire alarm chirped periodically, its battery begging to be replaced.

When she asked Matías about the children’s detention center he stayed in, the 7-year-old covered his entire body with the blanket and said, “I can’t tell.”

“He doesn’t want to talk about it,” said the young mother, who still hadn’t gone to bed after an overnight shift cleaning offices. “That’s always the way it is.”

Matías said thinking about that time period makes him feel “cold,” a reference to the notoriously freezing temperatures inside the Border Patrol stations and the frozen ham sandwiches he ate.

Experts say they’ve worked with many separated children who have become withdrawn. Dr. Cristina Muñiz de la Peña, a child psychologist, says kids deliberately disassociate from memories of the separation to avoid negative emotions. But as a result, many parents have no idea what their children went through in detention.

“They are working in a vacuum,” said Chadwick, the Kids in Need of Defense attorney. “They have to undergo the task of finding out, ‘What happened to my child and what can I do to fix it?’”

It’s the most painful and worst thing that’s happened in my life. Victoria, a parent who was separated from her son last May
Vicente, who asked that HuffPost use a pseudonym to protect his safety, says his 9-year-old daughter gets angry when he asks her about the separation. They were reunited back in Guatemala in late September, four months after crossing the border.

He says she often covers her face with a pillow and cries at night while thinking about what happened in detention. But when Vicente asks for details, a scared look comes across the child’s face and she says, “What do you care? Why is it important to you?” Although she used to be friendly and polite, he says, she now constantly lashes out at him and recently hit her 4-year-old sister.

Teresa Silvestre’s 13-year-old nephew also won’t talk to her about what happened when he was taken from his father after crossing the border last May. The teenager has been permanently separated from his dad, who was deported back to Guatemala and decided his son should stay in the U.S. because of violent gang threats.

“Most days he is shut down,” said Silvestre, a Florida-based real estate agent who sponsored her nephew out of detention. “I keep telling him, ‘Let it out,’ and, ‘It’s sad not to be with them, but you have to talk about it.’”

Two weeks ago, she says, the boy woke up crying after having a dream that his dad had been killed, and once a week he knocks on her door in the middle of the night to say he’s scared.

Occupants at Casa Padre, a shelter that houses separated and unaccompanied minors in Brownsville, Texas, are seen in this pho
Administration for Children and Families, Department of Heath and Human Services via Reuters
Occupants at Casa Padre, a shelter that houses separated and unaccompanied minors in Brownsville, Texas, are seen in this photo provided by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on June 14, 2018.
Self-Harm In Detention


Cohen, the child psychiatrist, says she worries most about children who become quiet and withdrawn, especially in detention. “They are highly susceptible to self-destructive behavior,” she said. “We have kids as young as 7-years-old who have tried to kill themselves.”

Some children who were separated under zero tolerance were detained for more than six months, and roughly 60 kids continue to be detained while they await sponsors. Chadwick worked with an 8-year-old who would scratch himself to the point of bleeding after he was separated from his dad last May and detained for half a year. She says the child now lives with family in the U.S. and remains permanently separated from his father, who was deported back to Honduras.

“The longer they are detained, the more they deteriorate psychologically,” said Castillo, the clinical psychologist. “The depression and the anxiety makes them cut [so] they feel a release.”

Cohen says self-harming behavior is often “highly addictive” and can continue even once children are reunited with their parents.

Paulo, who requested a pseudonym to protect his ongoing asylum claim, says his 9-year-old son developed suicidal thoughts and began to hurt himself after they were separated last May. According to a psychological evaluation his former lawyer sent HuffPost, the boy hit his head on a bunk bed in the shelter and repeatedly said, “I am going to die.” He also told his shelter counselor he wanted to take a sharp pencil, or part of a fan, and cut his leg.

Months after being reunited with his father in July, the child began regularly biting his right hand so hard that his knuckle swells up and bruises, which Paulo thinks is related to the trauma of being separated.

“He’s very sad all the time,” said the Brazilian father, who now lives in Philadelphia. “He’s a completely different child than he was before.”

Deisy Ramirez, who is from El Salvador, said her 15-year-old daughter also became suicidal after they were separated in December; the teenager was transferred to a New York-based hospital in March. They are now reunited in Seattle and the teenager is on antidepressants, but Ramirez knows the experience will stay with her for life.

“This is very hard for me,” she said, breaking into tears over the phone. “Sometimes I feel guilty because I took the decision to come here.”

In this July 10, 2018, photo, 3-year-old Jose Jr. from Honduras is helped by a representative of the Southern Poverty Law Cen
ASSOCIATED PRESS
In this July 10, 2018, photo, 3-year-old Jose Jr. from Honduras is helped by a representative of the Southern Poverty Law Center as he is reunited with his father in Phoenix.
Parental Trauma


Many parents are also traumatized from the experience of family separation, which affects their ability to support their children and help them heal, according to psychologists.

“The role of a parent is to provide comfort and security,” said Muñiz. “But these parents are [also] in a constant state of tension and anxiety and can’t fully provide that.”

Matías’ teacher says that he needs more help with his homework, but Victoria barely has time to sleep.

She gets headaches whenever she talks about what happened at the border and worries her son will be taken from her again. She says she feels “flattened,” but is too busy struggling to provide food and shelter to deal with her own mental health.

“I’m all alone,” she said, “and my feelings are about my son and what is going on with him.”

She and Matías are both in the process of seeking asylum, and if she isn’t granted status, she could be deported back to Guatemala.

Victoria says lately she’s noticed slight improvements in her son’s behavior and that she plans to take him to a psychologist soon. She’s also looking forward to them celebrating his birthday together this year, with a vanilla cake and pizza.

But the mother says it’s still painful to see him keep so much bottled up, and that since the separation, the “great love my child and I had together has gone away.”

“He doesn’t talk to me the way he used to talk in a happy way before,” Victoria said, “and so that hurts me again.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/family-s ... d3f5c50ede

[seemslikeadream]

WH Mulled Dumping Immigrant Detainees In Sanctuary Cities, Targeting Trump Foes
Nicole Lafond

Alex Wong/Getty Images North America
On at least two occasions in the last six months, the White House considered releasing immigrant detainees onto the streets of sanctuary cities as a way to target President Trump’s political foes, The Washington Post reported.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) district in San Francisco was one of the primary targets, Department of Homeland Security officials told the Post. The Post obtained emails that show the idea was first floated in November when a migrant caravan was approaching the U.S.-Mexico border. White House officials reportedly thought this would help relieve the shortage of space for housing immigrants caught crossing the border illegally, and give them an opportunity to jab Democrats.

But Immigration and Customs Enforcement shot down the idea and suggested there would be legal, budgetary and “PR risks” to carrying it out. When the administration tried to raise the idea again in February, ICE’s attorneys called it “inappropriate,” in the Post’s words.

The White House told the Post in a statement that this was “just a suggestion that was floated and rejected, which ended any further discussion.”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/wh-m ... trump-foes

[seemslikeadream]

Eleven-year-old ordered deported without her family
By Ileana Najarro8:01 pm CDT, Friday, April 12, 2019


Laura Maradiaga,11, becomes emotional as her family talk about her possible deportation back to El Salvador Thursday, April 11, 2019, in Houston. Photo: Steve Gonzales, Staff Photographer / © 2019 Houston Chronicle
Photo: Steve Gonzales, Staff Photographer
Image 1 of 20
Laura Maradiaga,11, becomes emotional as her family talk about her possible deportation back to El Salvador Thursday, April 11, 2019, in Houston.
Dora Alvarado felt something was off when she arrived at immigration court in Houston March 12 with her two daughters. A court translator told her that she and her 15-year-old, Adamaris Alvarado, were listed on the docket that day. Her 11-year-old, Laura Maradiaga, was not.

Days later, Alvarado received a letter in English — a language she cannot speak or read — bearing Laura’s name. It wasn’t until the trio returned to court this week that a different translator told her the letter was the 11-year-old’s removal order.


“I don’t want to leave my mom,” Laura said Thursday. “I want to stay with her.”

UPDATE: Motion to be filed to set aside 11-year-old’s deportation

At a news conference Thursday led by FIEL, a local immigration advocacy group, the family’s lawyer, Silvia Mintz, said she will file a motion to re-open the case. Mintz said immigration officials were at fault for the girl’s missed court appearance, which led to her deportation order.

The family entered through the southern border in early October, telling U.S. government officials that they feared returning to their native El Salvador. They were released to pursue their asylum case in the backlogged civil immigration courts, and since then have complied with court orders and appearance dates.

They are part of a record number of Central American parents and children fleeing poverty and gang violence who have arrived in recent months — more than 57,200 in March alone — even as the Trump administration has tried to curtail access to asylum to deter more from coming. The government has overturned a provision allowing those fleeing gang and domestic violence to qualify for the protection and made it more difficult for immigration judges to close cases on their own, exacerbating a backlog of more than 800,000 cases that was further jeopardized by the month-long government shutdown earlier this year.

The administration has also tried to ban those crossing illegally from seeking asylum and force others to wait in Mexico while their asylum cases proceed through the courts, though federal judges have blocked both the latter measures.

Mintz blamed the Executive Office for Immigration Review, a branch of the Justice Department overseeing immigration courts, for the error resulting in the 11-year-old’s deportation.

“This mistake done by the immigration court has put this family in jeopardy,” Mintz said. “They will be separated if this is not stopped.”

In a statement, the office said, "EOIR records show that on March 12, 2019 an immigration judge issued an Order of Removal for Respondent Laura Elizabeth Maradiaga-Alvarado."

The official order states that Laura is subject to deportation because she was not present for the March 12 court appearance. Whether the court translator available that day provided incorrect information, or the girl’s case fell through the cracks, is unclear.

Generally speaking, Laura’s attorney has about 30 days from the order’s date to try to re-open the case, said Ruby L. Powers, a Houston immigration lawyer. Powers noted that the immigration courts system has become chaotic; some clients have been given incorrect court dates, Powers said, while others have experienced clerical errors that led to serious consequences like deportation orders.

It is not uncommon for child migrants to be deported alone, but this typically happens when they arrive on their own rather than with their parents, other legal experts note.

Maradiaga’s fate, should she be deported without her family, could be dire.

Her home in a rural area of El Salvador’s La Paz region became a death trap when a relative testified against a local gang member, Alvarado said. Uncles, nephews, classmates and others have been kidnapped or murdered in retaliation, she added. At the news conference, she held up a photo of a young girl, a neighbor, left for dead on a dirt road close to her home.

Alvarado, who lived through El Salvador’s civil war in the 1980s, said the country was safer then.

“The gangs don’t play by the rules of war,” she said. “It’s just violence for the sake of violence.”

ON HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: Trump policy of returning asylum-seekers to Mexico upends lives before judge’s order

Late last year, Adamaris Alvarado told her mother that a gang member had been harassing her and threatened to kill the rest of her family if she spoke about it.

“That’s when mom told us we were going to the United States,” Laura said.

As the family pursued its case, a February court date was rescheduled to March 12 due to the government shutdown.

Alvarado said she trusted the court translator when she told her everything was going to be all right with Laura. But the removal order says otherwise.

Thanks to Alvarado’s elder daughter, who told her school counselor about the deportation threat, the family contacted FIEL and Mintz, who will represent Laura without a fee.

While her future remains uncertain, Laura is doing her best to live out her days in what she calls an unfamiliar yet beautiful new country. She takes comfort in studying her multiplication tables, in sharing a bed with her mom and older sister, and in caring for Lalo, the scruffy dog her mother and aunt got her when she arrived.

At her southwest Houston apartment complex, Laura said she still misses the friends she left behind. These friends, living in the same dangerous environment, would come to her home to study or walk with her to buy snacks at a corner store.

“I want to be a police officer when I grow up,” she said. “I want to keep people safe from the bad guys.”
https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texa ... mpid=hpctp

[seemslikeadream]

ICE deports spouse of U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan

Daniel GonzálezUpdated 5:23 p.m. MT April 15, 2019
Barbara Vieyra, 22, of Mesa, died of injuries suffered
Barbara Vieyra, 22, of Mesa, died of injuries suffered when her Army military police unit was attacked with an improvised explosive device and rocket-propelled grenade fire in the Kunar province of Afghanistan on Sept. 18, 2010. She was assigned to the 64th Military Police Company, 720th MP Battalion, 89th MP Brigade, Fort Hood, Texas. (Photo: Family photo)
Immigration officials have deported the spouse of a U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan, leaving the couple’s 12-year-old daughter, a U.S. citizen, in Phoenix without parents, according to the deported man's lawyer.

Jose Gonzalez Carranza, 30, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers last Monday on his way to his welding job and then deported to Nogales, Mexico, on Wednesday, said Ezequiel Hernandez, a Phoenix attorney.

Reached by phone, Gonzalez said he has been living in a shelter for deported migrants in Nogales, Mexico, a city he doesn't know, and is worried about his daughter.

"I feel so bad," Gonzalez said. "I'm thinking about, I might never see her again."

Gonzalez was married to Army Pfc. Barbara Vieyra, who was killed on Sept. 18, 2010, while serving in the U.S. Army in Afghanistan. She was 22.

MORE: Missing migrant caravan organizer was deported to Honduras, group says

Vieyra was mortally wounded when insurgents attacked her unit using an improvised explosive device and rocket propelled grenade fire in Kunar Province, Afghanistan, the Pentagon said at the time. Her unit had been sent to Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom.

"She sacrificed her life for this country" and now her daughter does not have a parent to raise her in the United States, Gonzalez said.

The daughter is living with her grandparents in Mesa, he said.

Gonzalez said he came to the U.S. illegally from Veracruz, Mexico, in 2004, when he was a teenager. He said he and Vieyra married in 2007.

After his wife was killed in Afghanistan, Gonzalez was granted what is known as parole in place, which allows immigrants in the country illegally to remain in the U.S. without the threat of deportation, Hernandez said.

For more stories that matter, subscribe to azcentral.com.

An immigration judge then terminated deportation proceedings against Gonzalez based on the parole in place, Hernandez said.

However, ICE refiled the case in 2018, Hernandez said.

A judge ordered Gonzalez deported in December 2018 after Hernandez didn't show up for his court hearing, Hernandez said.

But the reason Gonzalez didn't show up is because he never received the notice, Hernandez said. He said ICE sent it to the wrong address.

Gonzalez didn't find out a judge had ordered him deported until ICE officers came to his house last Monday and took him into custody, Hernandez said.

MORE: Why Donald Trump's sanctuary cities plan faces roadblocks

Hernandez said he filed a motion to reopen Gonzalez's deportation case. The motion triggered an automatic stay of removal, but ICE deported him anyway, Hernandez said.

On Monday, Hernandez sent out a news release to draw attention to Gonzalez's case.

Hernandez said he can't understand why ICE deported him. Gonzalez has no criminal record, he said.

"This guy's wife died in action in Afghanistan," he said.

After speaking to The Arizona Republic, Hernandez said he received a call from an ICE officer who told him the agency was making arrangements to allow Gonzalez back into the U.S.

ICE, however, did not immediately provide information on the case.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/po ... 477332002/

Border Patrol Holds Hundreds of Migrants in Growing Tent City Away From Prying Eyes
Asylum-seekers are forced to wait days inside surplus Army shelters in a parking lot, with no beds and little food or showers.
Justin Glawe,
Justin Hamel
04.15.19 11:18 AM ET

Justin Hamel
EL PASO, Texas—Hundreds of migrants are being held for days in an emerging tent city at a Border Patrol station in a preview of what the Trump administration is reportedly considering to absorb a surge on the border.

Five U.S. Army tents meant for battlefield hospitals have been repurposed to hold men, women, and children, including infants. Two of the tents were erected over the past week, expanding the facility’s capacity by several hundred people. The tents are tightly surrounded by fences topped with barbed wire, leaving virtually no space for people to roam outside. Inside the tents, according to a congresswoman who was granted access, hundreds languish in fetid conditions.


Tents in the parking lot the El Paso Border Patrol Station where migrants are being held for up to five days before being released to local shelters. April 11, 2019.
Justin Hamel
Rep. Nanette Barragán (D-CA) visited the facility in early April with a congressional delegation.

“One woman had a baby, a five-month-old baby and said she’d been there for five days. The baby had filthy clothes,” Barragán said. “The situation is unhealthy. People are in a confined space, they’re not getting showers, their clothes are dirty, babies are not getting Pampers like they should be. These ladies were crying and telling us their stories and it was just heartbreaking.”

Barragán was banned from taking photos of migrants, but she described a desperate scene inside. The tents contained no cots and migrants slept on a temporary floor that covered the asphalt parking lot beneath, with babies sometimes sleeping on their parents’ legs to avoid the hard floor.


Migrants gathering around a space heater outside at the El Paso Border Patrol Station where they are being detained in a tent on the morning of April 11, 2019
Justin Hamel
“We were stepping over people to walk around in the tent,” she said. “And the food is… We’re talking ramen and Cup of Noodles, Capri Suns and juice boxes, maybe a frozen burrito if you’re lucky.

“I was really taken aback by the smell. I was in there for five minutes and I just became nauseous, I hate to say it. It’s just too many people for that size area and people hadn’t had a shower for many days. Border Patrol told us it was their goal to get people a shower every three days, but the mother I spoke to there hadn’t had one and she’d been there for five.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to detailed questions regarding conditions and capacity in the tents.

Reporters are forbidden from the facility, leaving The Daily Beast to observe the operation through a telephoto lens from nearly a quarter-mile away.

Outside the tents last week, buses dropped off as many as 60 migrants at a time. After receiving mylar blankets and paperwork, the migrants were led by agents into the tents, which are approximately 75 feet long and 20 feet wide. The tents have with a cot capacity of 148 people, according to the Army. Some are tattered, with sections of fabric flapping in the wind.

Surge with no end in sight
The practice of keeping migrants in tents appears to be part of the Trump administration’s plan for dealing with the surge of Central American asylum-seekers who have overwhelmed the U.S. government at the border in recent months.

Apprehensions across the border are at a 12-year high, with nearly 100,000 migrants apprehended in March, according to DHS. Most are Central American families seeking asylum, and many are crossing in the El Paso sector, where apprehensions over the last several months are up more than 1,000 percent compared to the same period last year.

RELATED IN U.S. NEWS
Kevin McAleenan, the commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection holds a press conference just down the road from a makeshift detention center in El Paso, Texas on Wed. March 27, 2019. Border Patrol in El Paso is saying that they are overwhelmed with unprecedented number of migrants at over 12,000 currently in custody. Kevin McAleenan, the commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection is calling the situation at the El Paso border a "crisis" and asking for Congressional assistance.
New DHS Boss Is the Guy Who Led Family Separations
Armed forces stand onboard the Turkish oil tanker El Hiblu 1, which was hijacked by migrants, in Valletta, Malta, Thursday March 28, 2019. A Maltese special operations team on Thursday boarded a tanker that had been hijacked by migrants rescued at sea, and returned control to the captain, before escorting it to a Maltese port.
Migrants are the New Pirates of the Mediterranean
leader of right-wing League party and Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini arrives for a rally in Rome, Italy, December 8, 2018. REUTERS/Alessandro Bianchi - RC1302A04860
‘Italy’s Trump’ Launches a Campaign to Destroy Europe
Last Tuesday, officials from the Defense Department and Homeland Security met at the White House to discuss using military resources to construct and staff new tent cities in El Paso and Donna, Texas, NBC News reported. It’s a favorite idea of White House senior adviser Stephen Miller.

“Basically, people are packed into these tents,” Barragán said. “They haven’t fixed the problem; they just moved it.”

Many migrants walk into U.S. territory and approach Border Patrol agents to turn themselves in and request asylum. From there, they are usually taken to rooms at border crossings known as “processing centers” for initial asylum interviews. After they’re processed, migrants are either released by Customs and Border Protection or transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention. But there isn’t enough space in the rooms for the hundreds arriving daily in El Paso, so they are being held for processing at the tent city and under bridges spanning El Paso and Juárez. (ICE facilities in the area are also supposedly full.)


Migrants waiting in line for Border Patrol agents to escort them inside the building on the morning of April 11, 2019.
Justin Hamel
Advocates and attorneys question why the tent city is needed at all, considering the Trump administration and DHS have said for months that the number of migrants arriving at the border was skyrocketing. Following her visit to El Paso, Barragán drove an hour and a half north to Alamogordo, New Mexico to visit an empty Border Patrol station there. “Why can’t the migrants go there?” she said.

Additionally, Barragán and others want to know why it is taking so long for migrants to be processed and released.

Lourdes Ortiz, a member of El Paso’s Detained Migrant Solidarity Committee, said she has little faith that conditions will improve and questioned why asylum-seekers were being held in processing centers like the new tent city for so long.

“There’s no need for them to taking this much time to process people,” Ortiz said. “Even if the excuse is that there’s no capacity to house people to process, that to me is a result of refusing to acknowledge the change in the numbers of people who have been coming to the border.”

Exacerbating the crisis?
Despite pulling agents from inland border checkpoints to process migrants at the border, CBP and Border Patrol have been unable to reduce the bottleneck. The Trump administration has requested $192 million from Congress to hire nearly 300 more officers to work the border.

“One of my concerns is they’re slowing down the process almost intentionally and they’re helping create the appearance of this backlog,” Barragán said. “I don’t know this for sure, and I have nothing to point to other than our history of not getting truthful information from this administration and these agencies.”

In fact, Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General did find evidence that officials were intentionally causing a bottleneck by “metering” asylum-seekers at ports of entry. Then came an executive order that required asylum-seekers to apply only at ports of entry or forfeit their asylum case. The government’s own lawyers admitted that the order would result in even more backups at ports, but that it was “preferable to the status quo.” (The order has been put on hold by a judge.) DHS statistics suggest that metering continues, despite some of the highest numbers of border apprehensions in years.


Migrants waiting in line for Border Patrol agents to escort them inside the building on the morning of April 11, 2019.
Justin Hamel
“If you look at the patterns you’ll see apprehensions between ports of entries skyrocketing but the number of people taken in at ports stays roughly the same,” said Stephanie Leutert, Director of the Mexico Security Initiative at the University of Texas at Austin. “Metering is absolutely still happening just as it has been for some time now.”

Limited efforts to bring more accountability to the asylum process got underway last week when Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX) introduced a bill that would require DHS to provide Congress with regular reports about staffing at ports of entry.

Despite all of the administration’s efforts to deter migrants from coming to the border to seek asylum—family separations, metering, the now-failed change to asylum law, and Trump’s promised wall—they have continued to arrive in greater numbers than ever before. It is possible, advocates say, that undesirable conditions in processing centers themselves could be seen as a deterrent by the administration. Still, no amount of deterrence can overcome the desperation of migrants fleeing crushing poverty and violence in their home countries, said Erika Andiola of RAICES Texas, a migrant advocacy organization.

“The fact is that none of this has worked.” said Andiola. “Conditions in Central America are terrible and people are willing to make the sacrifice to give their families a better future. It is up to us whether we welcome them in a humane way, or we torture them for no good reason.”

If conditions at facilities where migrants are being held are meant to be a deterrent, the growing tent city in El Paso could be a test case for how bad conditions could be.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/border-pa ... ref=scroll

[seemslikeadream]

ACLU

BREAKING: Attorney General William Barr tonight directed immigration judges to deny bond hearings to asylum seekers.

Our Constitution does not allow the government to lock up asylum seekers without basic due process.

We'll see the administration in court. Again.

Denials of U.S. immigrant visas skyrocket after little-heralded rule change
WASHINGTON/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - When Arturo Balbino, a Texas construction worker, walked into his visa interview at the American consulate in the northern Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez in March, he wasn’t nervous. He felt good.

Balbino, a 33-year-old Mexican national who had entered the United States illegally 14 years ago, thought he had a strong case for a spousal visa: a wife and children who are U.S. citizens, a father-in-law who had pledged in an affidavit to financially support him if necessary, and a letter from his employer guaranteeing him an $18-per-hour job upon his return.

When he went for the interview, he was at the final step of legalizing his status, which would, he hoped, pave the way for a more stable life for himself and his family.

Instead, the consular officer denied his application on the grounds that he could become a drain on U.S. taxpayers by requiring government financial assistance, according to documents reviewed by Reuters.

That decision stranded Balbino in Mexico indefinitely and upended his family’s life.

More and more aspiring immigrants – especially Mexicans – are being denied visas based on determinations by the U.S. State Department that they might become “public charges,” dependent on the government for support, according to official data and interviews with attorneys, immigrants and their family members.

Lawyers for some immigrants say consular officers are denying visas even when applicants fulfill legal requirements to prove they will be financially independent.

The refusals, capping an often complex and lengthy application process, can trap people for months or longer outside the United States, separated from American spouses and children, as they renew their efforts to legally return. Some may never be able to go back.

One reason for the rise in refusals are little-known changes last year in the State Department’s foreign affairs manual that gave diplomats wider discretion in deciding visa denials on public-charge grounds.

The changes occurred in January 2018 as the Department of Homeland Security was preparing a separate, highly controversial proposal to restrict immigration on public-charge grounds. The regulation, officially proposed in October, received more than 200,000 public comments, which will likely take months longer to fully evaluate.

Some critics say the State Department is using a back door, tightening immigration policy without going through a similarly high-profile rulemaking process.

“The State Department is trying to bypass public comment and implement changes to public-charge (policy) all on its own,” said Charles Wheeler, an attorney with the Catholic Legal Immigration Network. “These changes are already having a terrible effect on people.”

Arturo, 33, a Mexican migrant, who was denied a visa to the United States, reacts next to his sons Juan (C), 10 and Javen, 6, inside their house in Neutla, Guanajuato state, Mexico, April 9, 2019. Picture taken April 9, 2019. REUTERS/Edgard Garrido
The State Department declined to comment, citing pending litigation over the manual changes.

In the lawsuit in a Maryland federal court, the government rejected accusations that the manual changes are motivated by any antipathy toward immigrants and argued that such “guidance” is not subject to court review or laws requiring public comment.

The guidance, government lawyers wrote in a February court filing, is neutral and implements a long-standing U.S. law meant to exclude immigrants who are likely to become burdens on the United States.

The government acknowledged in the filing that the guidance “could potentially lead” to more frequent public-charge denials.

The changes to the manual are not the only reason for the increase in refusals of immigrant visa applications on public-charge grounds. Those have risen since 2015, when fewer than 900 were issued, according to government data.

But after the manual changes in January 2018, the refusals shot up. In the 2018 fiscal year, which ended in September, nearly 13,500 immigrant visa applications were refused on public-charge grounds - quadruple the number in the previous fiscal year and the highest total since 2004.

FEWER VISAS FOR MEXICANS

Although the State Department does not release visa refusal data by nationality or consulate, immigration lawyers said public-charge enforcement is particularly rigorous at the U.S. consulate in Ciudad Juarez, where all Mexican immigrant visa applications are processed.

Mexicans received 11 percent fewer immigrant visas in fiscal year 2018 compared to 2017. That compares to a 4.6 percent overall decline in such visas to people of all nationalities during that period.

Previously, the State Department typically considered an “affidavit of support,” signed by an American citizen or permanent resident offering to act as a sponsor of the immigrant, sufficient evidence that the person would not become a government burden, immigration lawyers said.

To qualify as a sponsor, a person must make at least 125 percent of the U.S. poverty level for that person’s household size. According to the affidavit from Balbino’s father-in-law, seen by Reuters, he made almost $90,000 a year – tens of thousands of dollars more than the government requires for a household of his size.

Now, according to the manual, the affidavit is just one factor among many. Consular officers are also now allowed to consider past or current use of public benefits – including health and nutrition services. And that includes use by an immigrant’s family, even if they are citizens.

Under the previous version of the manual, consular officials were not permitted to consider the use of non-cash benefits.

Balbino’s children’s use of the Medicaid program for low-income households and food stamps was an issue that came up in his visa interview, along with questions about his father-in-law’s commitment to supporting him, Balbino said.

TRAPPED IN MEXICO

Public-charge denials can be particularly devastating for people like Balbino, who entered the United States illegally, built lives and have an opportunity to legalize their status through marriage.

It’s a complex process, but one many immigrants like Balbino are willing to complete. U.S. law requires people who have been present in the United States illegally for longer than six months to leave and remain abroad for several years before attempting to re-enter.

But visa applicants can ask for waivers that allow them to return more quickly. Balbino obtained such a waiver in 2017. Once a visa is refused on public-charge grounds, however, such waivers are revoked, trapping the person outside the country for months or years.

With Balbino’s waiver now revoked, his wife, Darlene, is considering moving with her children to Balbino’s hometown in the Mexican state of Guanajuato. She doesn’t work and is struggling to pay the bills.

“We can’t make it on our own any more,” she said.

Because the family is so strapped, two of the five children, aged 6 and 10, have already been sent to live with Balbino - a move they are finding difficult. “They’ve spent their whole life in the United States,” Balbino said in an interview. “They don’t speak much Spanish.”

The 6-year-old boy had been receiving therapy for a speech impediment at his Texas school, but after the move to Mexico his speech has started to regress, said Darlene Balbino, who is still in Texas with her two older daughters and a toddler while she figures out what to do next.

Her husband is contemplating the possibility that the family will be apart for years.

“At times I want to think that everything will be okay and I’ll be able to be with my family again,” Arturo Balbino said. “It’s very difficult to think that I won’t be able to return to watch my children grow up.”

Reporting by Yeganeh Torbati in Washington and Kristina Cooke in San Francisco; Editing by Julie Marquis and Ross Colvin
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa- ... SKCN1RR0UX

Border Patrol Holds Hundreds of Migrants in Growing Tent City Away From Prying Eyes
Asylum-seekers are forced to wait days inside surplus Army shelters in a parking lot, with no beds and little food or showers.
Justin Glawe,
Justin Hamel
04.15.19 11:18 AM ET

Justin Hamel
EL PASO, Texas—Hundreds of migrants are being held for days in an emerging tent city at a Border Patrol station in a preview of what the Trump administration is reportedly considering to absorb a surge on the border.

Five U.S. Army tents meant for battlefield hospitals have been repurposed to hold men, women, and children, including infants. Two of the tents were erected over the past week, expanding the facility’s capacity by several hundred people. The tents are tightly surrounded by fences topped with barbed wire, leaving virtually no space for people to roam outside. Inside the tents, according to a congresswoman who was granted access, hundreds languish in fetid conditions.

Tents in the parking lot the El Paso Border Patrol Station where migrants are being held for up to five days before being released to local shelters. April 11, 2019.
Justin Hamel
Rep. Nanette Barragán (D-CA) visited the facility in early April with a congressional delegation.

“One woman had a baby, a five-month-old baby and said she’d been there for five days. The baby had filthy clothes,” Barragán said. “The situation is unhealthy. People are in a confined space, they’re not getting showers, their clothes are dirty, babies are not getting Pampers like they should be. These ladies were crying and telling us their stories and it was just heartbreaking.”

Barragán was banned from taking photos of migrants, but she described a desperate scene inside. The tents contained no cots and migrants slept on a temporary floor that covered the asphalt parking lot beneath, with babies sometimes sleeping on their parents’ legs to avoid the hard floor.


Migrants gathering around a space heater outside at the El Paso Border Patrol Station where they are being detained in a tent on the morning of April 11, 2019
Justin Hamel
“We were stepping over people to walk around in the tent,” she said. “And the food is… We’re talking ramen and Cup of Noodles, Capri Suns and juice boxes, maybe a frozen burrito if you’re lucky.

“I was really taken aback by the smell. I was in there for five minutes and I just became nauseous, I hate to say it. It’s just too many people for that size area and people hadn’t had a shower for many days. Border Patrol told us it was their goal to get people a shower every three days, but the mother I spoke to there hadn’t had one and she’d been there for five.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to detailed questions regarding conditions and capacity in the tents.

Reporters are forbidden from the facility, leaving The Daily Beast to observe the operation through a telephoto lens from nearly a quarter-mile away.

Outside the tents last week, buses dropped off as many as 60 migrants at a time. After receiving mylar blankets and paperwork, the migrants were led by agents into the tents, which are approximately 75 feet long and 20 feet wide. The tents have with a cot capacity of 148 people, according to the Army. Some are tattered, with sections of fabric flapping in the wind.

Surge with no end in sight
The practice of keeping migrants in tents appears to be part of the Trump administration’s plan for dealing with the surge of Central American asylum-seekers who have overwhelmed the U.S. government at the border in recent months.

Apprehensions across the border are at a 12-year high, with nearly 100,000 migrants apprehended in March, according to DHS. Most are Central American families seeking asylum, and many are crossing in the El Paso sector, where apprehensions over the last several months are up more than 1,000 percent compared to the same period last year.

Armed forces stand onboard the Turkish oil tanker El Hiblu 1, which was hijacked by migrants, in Valletta, Malta, Thursday March 28, 2019. A Maltese special operations team on Thursday boarded a tanker that had been hijacked by migrants rescued at sea, and returned control to the captain, before escorting it to a Maltese port.
Migrants are the New Pirates of the Mediterranean

‘Italy’s Trump’ Launches a Campaign to Destroy Europe
Last Tuesday, officials from the Defense Department and Homeland Security met at the White House to discuss using military resources to construct and staff new tent cities in El Paso and Donna, Texas, NBC News reported. It’s a favorite idea of White House senior adviser Stephen Miller.

“Basically, people are packed into these tents,” Barragán said. “They haven’t fixed the problem; they just moved it.”

Many migrants walk into U.S. territory and approach Border Patrol agents to turn themselves in and request asylum. From there, they are usually taken to rooms at border crossings known as “processing centers” for initial asylum interviews. After they’re processed, migrants are either released by Customs and Border Protection or transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention. But there isn’t enough space in the rooms for the hundreds arriving daily in El Paso, so they are being held for processing at the tent city and under bridges spanning El Paso and Juárez. (ICE facilities in the area are also supposedly full.)

Advocates and attorneys question why the tent city is needed at all, considering the Trump administration and DHS have said for months that the number of migrants arriving at the border was skyrocketing. Following her visit to El Paso, Barragán drove an hour and a half north to Alamogordo, New Mexico to visit an empty Border Patrol station there. “Why can’t the migrants go there?” she said.

Additionally, Barragán and others want to know why it is taking so long for migrants to be processed and released.

Lourdes Ortiz, a member of El Paso’s Detained Migrant Solidarity Committee, said she has little faith that conditions will improve and questioned why asylum-seekers were being held in processing centers like the new tent city for so long.

“There’s no need for them to taking this much time to process people,” Ortiz said. “Even if the excuse is that there’s no capacity to house people to process, that to me is a result of refusing to acknowledge the change in the numbers of people who have been coming to the border.”

Exacerbating the crisis?
Despite pulling agents from inland border checkpoints to process migrants at the border, CBP and Border Patrol have been unable to reduce the bottleneck. The Trump administration has requested $192 million from Congress to hire nearly 300 more officers to work the border.

“One of my concerns is they’re slowing down the process almost intentionally and they’re helping create the appearance of this backlog,” Barragán said. “I don’t know this for sure, and I have nothing to point to other than our history of not getting truthful information from this administration and these agencies.”

In fact, Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General did find evidence that officials were intentionally causing a bottleneck by “metering” asylum-seekers at ports of entry. Then came an executive order that required asylum-seekers to apply only at ports of entry or forfeit their asylum case. The government’s own lawyers admitted that the order would result in even more backups at ports, but that it was “preferable to the status quo.” (The order has been put on hold by a judge.) DHS statistics suggest that metering continues, despite some of the highest numbers of border apprehensions in years.


Migrants waiting in line for Border Patrol agents to escort them inside the building on the morning of April 11, 2019.
Justin Hamel
“If you look at the patterns you’ll see apprehensions between ports of entries skyrocketing but the number of people taken in at ports stays roughly the same,” said Stephanie Leutert, Director of the Mexico Security Initiative at the University of Texas at Austin. “Metering is absolutely still happening just as it has been for some time now.”

Limited efforts to bring more accountability to the asylum process got underway last week when Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX) introduced a bill that would require DHS to provide Congress with regular reports about staffing at ports of entry.

Despite all of the administration’s efforts to deter migrants from coming to the border to seek asylum—family separations, metering, the now-failed change to asylum law, and Trump’s promised wall—they have continued to arrive in greater numbers than ever before. It is possible, advocates say, that undesirable conditions in processing centers themselves could be seen as a deterrent by the administration. Still, no amount of deterrence can overcome the desperation of migrants fleeing crushing poverty and violence in their home countries, said Erika Andiola of RAICES Texas, a migrant advocacy organization.

“The fact is that none of this has worked.” said Andiola. “Conditions in Central America are terrible and people are willing to make the sacrifice to give their families a better future. It is up to us whether we welcome them in a humane way, or we torture them for no good reason.”

If conditions at facilities where migrants are being held are meant to be a deterrent, the growing tent city in El Paso could be a test case for how bad conditions could be.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/border-pa ... ref=scroll

[seemslikeadream]

Xeni
‏
“If these people follow our verbal commands, we hold them until Border Patrol comes. Border Patrol has never asked us to stand down.” Confederate militia detains migrants at gunpoint — with Border Patrol's tacit OK, they claim. They post videos to YouTube. https://boingboing.net/2019/04/19/racis ... -deta.html …

Sam Levin
‏
An armed pro-Trump militia in New Mexico appears to be detaining migrants at the border and working with Border Patrol agents to coordinate their arrests. ACLU says these are kidnappings by vigilantes:

Videos appear to show armed militia detaining migrants at US-Mexico border
The American Civil Liberties Union is calling the actions a ‘kidnapping’ and a flagrant violation of the law

Sam LevinLast modified on Thu 18 Apr 2019 20.03 EDT
A group of migrants in Sunland Park, New Mexico, where the United Constitutional Patriots, an armed rightwing militia, patrol the US-Mexico border.
A group of migrants in Sunland Park, New Mexico, where the United Constitutional Patriots, an armed rightwing militia, patrol the US-Mexico border. Photograph: Paul Ratje/Getty Images
Armed rightwing militia members detained a large group of migrants at the US-Mexico border and coordinated with US border patrol agents to have them arrested, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, in a series of actions the civil liberties organization called a “kidnapping” and a flagrant violation of the law.

Several videos taken at the border in New Mexico this week appeared to show men belonging to a group that calls itself the United Constitutional Patriots approaching migrant families and children, ordering them to sit down, calling federal agents on them, and at one point potentially misrepresenting themselves by saying “border patrol” as they approached.

“The Trump administration’s vile racism has emboldened white nationalists and fascists to flagrantly violate the law,” the ACLU of New Mexico said in a letter to the state’s governor and attorney general, urging them to “immediately investigate this atrocious and unlawful conduct”.

The ACLU described the group as “an armed fascist militia organization” made up of “vigilantes” working to “kidnap and detain people seeking asylum” and accused the group of directly making illegal arrests.

The group has repeatedly appeared in local news stories in recent weeks, expressing support for Donald Trump’s proposed border wall and presenting themselves as “volunteers” aiding border patrol efforts.

In recent years, there has been a reported surge in paramilitary groups and xenophobic activists having a presence at the border in an effort to target undocumented people.

The United Constitutional Patriots posted several live-stream Facebook videos this week that appeared to detail their activities at the border.

A video posted Monday night by Jim Benvie, a member of the armed group, appeared to show the militia ordering around a large group of migrants, including many children, and telling them to sit on the ground. As he filmed the migrants kneeling in the dirt, Benvie narrated on his video: “There’s no border patrol here. This is us.”

It’s difficult to decipher exactly what’s happening in the dark footage, but border patrol agents eventually appeared in the footage. “We finally got BP here,” Benvie said about six minutes after the footage started.

The ACLU’s letter said the group was targeting nearly 300 migrants in Sunland Park, New Mexico, which is along the Mexico border and adjacent to El Paso, Texas. In the video, the migrants sitting on the ground said they came from Guatemala. Benvie mirrored Trump’s anti-immigrant language in his videos, saying, “This is an invasion. Gotta build the wall.”

In another video posted Wednesday, Benvie filmed himself stopping a group of four adults and three children and said “border patrol” to them as he approached, before calling for another member of his group to join. The second man who arrived wearing camouflage pants then ordered the migrants to sit on the ground. The men subsequently appeared to call border patrol, with one saying, “Hello, I’ve got seven over here.”

“There’s very dangerous people here. That’s the reason we carry guns,” Benvie narrated on the video just before encountering the group. “This is why we’re here, guys. Cause there’s no border patrol.”

Benvie did not respond to a request for comment.

US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) declined to answer specific questions about the militia group and its actions, but a spokesperson said in an email that CBP “does not endorse private groups or organizations taking enforcement matters into their own hands”, adding, “Interference by civilians in law enforcement matters could have public safety and legal consequences for all parties involved.”

The CBP statement continued: “Border Patrol welcomes assistance from the community and encourages anyone who witnesses or suspects illegal activity to call 911.”

Peter Ibaro, a spokesman for the city of Sunland Park, was dismissive of concerns about the militia group violating laws.

“As far as we know, they are just observing and reporting,” he told the Guardian, saying, “I think they are just out there exercising their constitutional right.”

United Constitutional Patriots member Jim Benvie, 43, stands in a camper near the US-Mexico border wall in Anapra, New Mexico, on 20 March 2019.
United Constitutional Patriots member Jim Benvie, 43, stands in a camper near the US-Mexico border wall in Anapra, New Mexico, on 20 March 2019. Photograph: Paul Ratje/Getty Images
Rachel Lederman, a California civil rights lawyer not involved in the case, said it was illegal for a private citizen to “interfere with somebody’s freedom of movement”, and that in a situation like this, prosecutors could potentially allege “false imprisonment” and “kidnapping”.

The migrants could also have a strong civil case if the state did not file charges, she added.

“There’s an implied threat with the firearms,” she said, adding that if the men were directing the migrants to sit on the ground, “it doesn’t seem that hard to prove, especially if they’re broadcasting videos of themselves”.

The militia members could also potentially face consequences for acting as “unregistered and unlicensed people pretending to be security”, said Michael German, a former FBI agent.

“These videos are very, very heartbreaking,” said Stephanie Corte, an immigrant rights campaign strategist with the ACLU in New Mexico, which has not yet been able to contact the migrants captured on the videos. “They treat these asylum seekers … as less than human beings. They’re taking away their dignity and terrifying them. They are gathering them all together like they’re animals and holding them there.”

Nora Meyers Sackett, the spokesperson for New Mexico governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, told the Guardian her office was working with the attorney general to “verify what exactly happened regarding this group”, adding in an email, “If migrant families feel menaced or threatened at all when they arrive at our border, that’s completely unacceptable, and it should go without saying that regular citizens have no authority to arrest or detain anyone.”

Families crossing the border are typically coming from Central America and fleeing severe violence and poverty.

The militia action comes amid reports of law enforcement aggressively cracking down on a different class of volunteers at the border – people helping migrants in need. People who have left water for migrants and helped border crossers facing health crises have increasingly faced criminal prosecution.

Law enforcement should intervene and treat the militia actions as a kidnapping offense, said Corte, adding that the solution was not to bring out more border patrol officers, but to stop arresting asylum seekers.

“From the families’ perspective, it’s incredibly traumatizing to have these people who are not law enforcement, who are carrying guns in the middle of the night … rounding them up,” she said, adding that the state needed to “put an immediate stop to this”.


https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... a-detained

I watched a series of these videos, which showed the militia men targeting migrant families and children, ordering them to sit down on the dirt, calling federal agents on them, and at one point potentially misrepresenting themselves by saying “border patrol” as they approached.


“There’s very dangerous people here. That’s the reason we carry guns" - one of the militia men narrated on his video before stopping a migrant group with three young children and had them sit on the ground until Border Patrol arrived.


"The Trump administration’s vile racism has emboldened white nationalists and fascists to flagrantly violate the law. We cannot allow racist and armed vigilantes
to kidnap and detain people seeking asylum." - @ACLUNM


Response from Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham



CBP response: “Border Patrol welcomes assistance from the community...”

[seemslikeadream]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3a1e_J-XRc

Cruelty Is the Point: Communities Fight Back as Threat of ICE Raids Terrorize Immigrant Families
STORY
JULY 15, 2019



Elora Mukherjee
professor of law and director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School.
This weekend, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents launched a handful of raids across the country as part of President Trump’s push to detain and deport thousands of undocumented migrants in 10 major cities. Agents in Chicago reportedly arrested a mother and her children only to quickly release them. Arrests were also attempted in New York City, in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and Harlem, where immigrants reportedly refused to open their doors to ICE agents because they did not have warrants. Authorities say more raids are planned this week, prompting fear but also generating mass protests on the ground. We speak with Elora Mukherjee, a professor of law and director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School. She has spent the past 12 years representing immigrant children and adults along the U.S.-Mexico border. “The raids will leave children without their parents. The raids will leave children without their caregivers,” Mukherjee says. “The raids will leave U.S. citizen children without anyone in America to care for them. It is a heartbreaking situation.”

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Widespread immigration raids did not materialize across the country this weekend, after President Trump announced them in advance. A handful of raids, however, did still unfold and prompted protests in support of immigrant communities. Agents in Chicago reportedly arrested a mother and her kids only to quickly release them. Arrests were also attempted here in New York City, but migrants reportedly refused to open their door to agents. Authorities say more raids are planned this week.

Democracy Now! was in Queens Sunday when residents protesting the raids were joined by local lawmakers, including Tiffany Cabán, who recently declared victory in the highly contested Queens district attorney’s race that is now facing a recount.

TIFFANY CABÁN: Today our community is getting together, not only to protest the raids, the ICE raids, but also to call for the abolition of ICE, you know, acknowledging the fact that it is a rogue agency that puts a lot of our families, especially here in Queens, in danger of family separation and deportation. And really proud of the efforts, actually. You know, we know that there has been an ICE presence in the city, but we also know that, so far, you know, we haven’t had folks in Queens picked up. And I think that that speaks to the strength of our communities, the ways that we are standing together, the ways that we’re coming out and saying we’re going to let people know their rights. We’re going to do what we can to protect our neighbors. And we’re going to continue to do it for as long as we need to.
AMY GOODMAN: This comes amidst growing outrage over dire conditions for migrants held in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions by Customs and Border Patrol, including children and families seeking asylum. On Friday, Vice President Mike Pence toured two migrant detention centers in Texas, including one in McAllen where hundreds of men were crowded into dirty cells without cots to sleep on. Many said they were hungry, had been detained for 40 days. Trump tweeted the children’s rooms Pence saw were well run and clean, and facilities for single men were clean but crowded. Pence defended conditions during an interview on CNN and refused to tell CNN’s Pamela Brown—

PAMELA BROWN: What we saw today was very different for the families versus the single adult—
VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE: Pamela, Pamela, what you—
PAMELA BROWN: —migrants. It wasn’t the same level of care.
VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE: Well, what you saw today was a—was a very clean facility where people were being detained indoors, and then you saw a temporary facility that was constructed because this—this facility is overcrowded. … But everyone even in that temporary facility, Pamela, is getting three meals a day. They’re getting healthcare. They’re getting hygiene.
AMY GOODMAN: Pence refused to say whether children would be separated from their parents during immigration raids announced by President Trump. Video of Pence visiting the Border Patrol facilities, looking at men in the overcrowded cells without speaking to them, then walking away, was broadcast around the world.

At the same time, people held “Lights for Liberty” in at least 900 cities in what organizers called one of the largest global mass mobilizations in history. They called for the closure of detention centers and an end to inhumane treatment in them. This is activist Linda Sarsour speaking at the vigil in New York City’s Foley Square, just across from an ICE processing center.

LINDA SARSOUR: I want to remind people that there are children who have died in these camps. And I will say their names here today: Darlyn Cristabel Cordova-Valle, 10 years old, from El Salvador.
CROWD: ¡Presente!
LINDA SARSOUR: Jakelin Caal Maquín, 7 years old, from Guatemala.
CROWD: ¡Presente!
LINDA SARSOUR: Felipe Gómez Alonso, 8 years old, from Guatemala.
CROWD: ¡Presente!
LINDA SARSOUR: Juan de León Gutiérrez, 16, from Guatemala.
CROWD: ¡Presente!
LINDA SARSOUR: Wilmer Josué Ramírez Vásquez, 2-and-a-half years old, from Guatemala.
CROWD: ¡Presente!
LINDA SARSOUR: Carlos Hernández Vásquez, 16 years old, from Guatemala.
CROWD: ¡Presente!
LINDA SARSOUR: One day, 30, 40 years from now, people are going to ask you, “Where were you when children were being stripped from the hands of their mothers? What did you do? What did you say?” And you all get to say that “I showed up and added my voice and chose not to be part of the silent majority in these United States of America that have allowed injustice to happen for far too long.”
AMY GOODMAN: That was Linda Sarsour, speaking at Friday’s “Lights for Liberty” vigil in New York, was called to denounce the conditions in jails, child detention centers, adult detention facilities along the border, as well as what people believed, because President Trump tweeted it, that there would be widespread immigration raids across the country, which ultimately did not materialize, at least at this point.

For more, we’re joined by Elora Mukherjee, a professor of law and director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School. She spent about a week at the facility in Clint, Texas, interviewing dozens of detained children. She also represents Constantin Mutu, the youngest child separated from his family at the border, when he was just 4 months old.

Welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us.

ELORA MUKHERJEE: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I want to talk about both issues, the raids and also your trip to Clint, which is where we want to begin. Pence went there and talked about the conditions being humane and acceptable. You found something extremely different in the Clint facility. Describe what you saw.

ELORA MUKHERJEE: We found children who were hungry, who were dirty, who were sick and who were scared. We found children who had been detained far longer than the 72-hour limit for CBP facilities for children. We found children who had been detained a week, even longer, weeks, nearly a month. We found children wearing dirty clothing, clothing covered with nasal mucous urine, vomit, breast milk. We found children who hadn’t brushed their teeth for days, hadn’t showered for days or weeks. We found children who smelled really bad because they had no opportunity to shower or change their clothes.

We found children who were hungry. We found children who were so traumatized that they cried consistently and wept in their interviews with me. We found children who had been separated from a parent and from other family members. We found children who had been detained incommunicado, without an opportunity to make a single phone call to their loved ones. So we took out our own phones, and we allowed the children to make calls to their family members for the first time, sometimes in days, sometime in weeks.

AMY GOODMAN: So, these children actually could reach someone in the United States. Did some wear bracelets with numbers on them, at least one?

ELORA MUKHERJEE: One child wore a bracelet that said “U.S. parent” on it. Other children—

AMY GOODMAN: With a phone number?

ELORA MUKHERJEE: With either a phone number or some other kind of identifier. Other children had little scraps of paper tucked into a pocket in their shirt or in their pants, that had the name of a family member.

You know, what’s so important for America to realize is that the overwhelming majority of these children have family members in the United States who are desperate to have their kids back. So, nearly 100% of children who are released from ICE custody are released to a parent or other family member. More than 80% of children released from ORR custody, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, are reunited with a family member in the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: So, explain the decision to come forward. These visits, like you had, a group of lawyers, to interview the children, are not usually made public. Is that right?

ELORA MUKHERJEE: That’s right. That’s right. So, I have been doing this work for 12 years along our southern border, representing detained immigrant children and families. I have been a monitor for the Flores settlement agreement numerous times. Last July, I was in Brownsville, Texas, at Casa Padre, which is a controversial facility. In March, I was in Homestead interviewing children at an even more controversial facility. And in those two instances, I didn’t go public with my findings, and I expressed concern about numerous violations of the Flores settlement agreement to the plaintiffs’ counsel in that case.

But what we found in Clint was different. What we found in Clint was more appalling than anything I’ve seen in my entire professional career. I have never seen such degrading and inhumane treatment of children in federal immigration custody.

AMY GOODMAN: So, what’s going to happen? And did you testify before Congress?

ELORA MUKHERJEE: I testified before the House Oversight Committee on Friday. We are demanding immediate congressional oversight to protect vulnerable children in custody. We are also seeking the assistance of the federal courts to protect the children in federal immigration custody and to make sure that their rights, under federal law and under our Constitution, are protected.

We are also enlisting the support of the fourth branch of government—the free press—because we need assistance from everyone to make sure that children are not being abused, in our name, with our taxpayer dollars, and in our country. The American people have risen up and, across party lines, have spoken out, have participated in a public outcry to let the executive branch know that children must not be abused in our country and in our name.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the independent organization or person who has been authorized to go in, that the Trump administration has accepted to do oversight here.

ELORA MUKHERJEE: So, since the mid-1980s, there has been a case called the Flores case. In 1997, a settlement agreement was reached in that case. Part of the settlement agreement allows the Flores plaintiffs’ counsel—so, the lawyer for the children—to go into the facilities where children are being detained, to monitor compliance with that Flores settlement agreement. The Flores settlement agreement sets forth that children must be detained in safe and sanitary conditions, and, more importantly, that children must be released from federal immigration custody as quickly as possible. So, I’ve been a monitor for the Flores case.

AMY GOODMAN: During an interview on CNN this weekend, Pamela Brown pressed Vice President Pence in questions about family separation. She asked him if he was, quote, “concerned families will be separated.” And this has to do with the raids. She kept saying, “Will families be separated?” Pence replied, “People will be separated from this country who our courts have ordered to be deported.” When pressed again if families would be separated, Pence said, quote, “The priority is going to be on individuals who have committed crimes in this country, people who—members of MS-13, and people who have engaged in violent acts in this country in many cases.”

So, let’s go to the second point, these nationwide immigration raids that President Trump threatened the country with. They may not have materialized in force across the country, but certainly the terrorizing of immigrant communities did. But also, the flipside of that is the organizing.

ELORA MUKHERJEE: Right. So, the point of these raids is cruelty. These raids are not necessary. The data is very clear that when asylum-seeking families have access to counsel, they show up for their immigration proceedings 99% of the time. When asylum-seeking families participate in the ICE case family management program and are paired with a social worker, they show up for their immigration court proceedings 99% of the time. The point of the raids is cruelty. The point of the raids is terrorizing immigrant communities and playing to Trump’s base.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, oddly, just him announcing this—it was amazing to see Pence say he wasn’t going to say when they would happen, because, you know, that would undercut the effectiveness of the raids, and yet his own president, who he works for—his own president was the one who announced it around the country. Maybe his point was not actually to carry them out, but just to terrorize. Maybe it was because of, you know, this census question, that he didn’t get, that he wanted, the question of citizenship, that he wanted some kind of retaliation for not being able to identify undocumented immigrants.

ELORA MUKHERJEE: It is a heartbreaking situation. And the raids will leave children without their parents. The raids will leave children without their caregivers. The raids will leave U.S. citizen children without anyone in America to care for them. It is a heartbreaking situation.

AMY GOODMAN: Knowing your rights—forums were held, workshops, people calling in to find out what their rights are. Explain the issue of the warrant. While there weren’t nationwide raids on the level that President Trump promised, there were reports, here in New York, of people not opening their doors to agents. Explain.

ELORA MUKHERJEE: Right. So, if you are someone who is undocumented and ICE is knocking at your door, here are your rights. You do not need to open the door. You should ask, through the door, whether the officers have a warrant. If they have a warrant, ask the officers to slip it under the door. Then check the warrant to make sure that it is signed by a judge. Very often ICE shows up to carry out raids without a warrant or with a warrant that is not signed by a judge. Unless the warrant is signed by a judge, you do not need to open the door.

You also have a right to remain silent when ICE is carrying out a raid. You do not need to provide your name. You do not need to state where you are from. You can state, if you want, that you wish to speak with an attorney. If ICE breaks down your door and comes into your house without your consent, you may also state, “I do not consent to this search.”

And for anyone else who is witnessing a raid, I encourage everyone to be an upstander. Stand there. Bear witness. Take videos. Document what is happening. Try to protect those in our community who are asylum-seeking families, who are refugees, and who have the right to due process while they are in our country.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to end by going to Brooklyn’s Sunset Park. While the wholesale raids did not happen, the immigrant community was terrorized. Fabiola Mendieta is an organizer with the New Sanctuary Coalition. She told Democracy Now! about the effects of just the threat of the ICE raids.

FABIOLA MENDIETA: Fifth Avenue, I have to say, if you come on a regular day, if you come on a Saturday, Sunday, if you go up to the park, up to Sixth Avenue, you see a lot of people. If you go to the laundromat, you see we’re full of people, because usually people is off on Saturday and Sunday. Today, we’ve been in the neighborhood since 6:00 in the morning. Some of my and other friends, they’ve been here since 5:00 in the morning. Everything was empty—no people in the streets, no people in the supermarkets, no people in the restaurants. … I think everybody is just afraid to go out, and, you know, even to go to the supermarket. They don’t want to do that anymore, at least, you know, for—I guess, for this weekend and the days for this week.
AMY GOODMAN: Elora Mukherjee, your final response? Because the week isn’t over. President Trump has threatened that these will—the raids will materialize.

ELORA MUKHERJEE: Yes, it’s certainly possible that more raids will be carried out, that more families will be targeted. But Immigrants’ rights lawyers will fight back. We will represent these families. We will ensure that they have a chance to present their asylum cases to the courts. And it’s telling that one of the families that was arrested in Chicago was immediately released—a mother and her children. These are not people who pose a danger to our communities.

AMY GOODMAN: Elora Mukherjee, I want to thank you so much for being with us, professor of law and director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, spent about a week at the facility in Clint interviewing dozens of detained children.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we go to Mancos, Colorado. Denver was one of the places they threatened these raids. Well, hours away is a woman who has taken sanctuary in a church. Stay with us.
https://www.democracynow.org/2019/7/15/ ... _mukherjee

Trump: We 'will take a look' into Peter Thiel's claims of Google working with China

George Joseph
‏
Verified account

@georgejoseph94

SCOOP: @PalantirTech has tried to distinguish its work with ICE from deportations. But internal emails prove ICE agents are **actively** deploying Palantir tech during workplace raids:

Data Company Directly Powers Immigration Raids in Workplace

| WNYC News | WNYC
Palantir, a secretive data-mining firm co-founded by Trump adviser Peter Thiel, is facing mounting criticism for its work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In response, the company has tried to distance itself from ICE’s controversial treatment of undocumented immigrants.

But now, emails obtained by WNYC show that Palantir software has directly powered ICE’s accelerating workplace raids.

In the final weeks of 2017, special agents in ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations’ division were planning a worksite blitz across New York City. As part of their preparation, an ICE supervisor notified staff that they needed to use a Palantir program, called FALCON mobile, for the operation.

“[REDACTION] we want all the team leaders to utilize the FALCON mobile app on your GOV iphones,” wrote the agent, after mentioning several “assignment” locations across all five New York City boroughs.


The email, obtained by WNYC under the federal Freedom of Information Act, continues: “We will be using the FALCON mobile app to share info with the command center about the subjects encountered in the stores as well as team locations."

FALCON mobile allows agents in the field to search through a fusion of law enforcement databases that include information on people’s immigration histories, family relationships, and past border crossings.

The email was sent in preparation for a worksite enforcement briefing on January 8, 2018. Two days later, ICE raided nearly a hundred 7-Elevens across the country, including at least sixteen in New York City. At the time, the raids constituted the largest operation against a single employer in the Trump era.

Other records in the release show just how looped in Palantir employees are with ICE operations, at worksites and otherwise.

In one email from April of last year, a Palantir staffer notifies an ICE agent that they should test out their FALCON mobile application because of his or her “possible involvement in an upcoming operation.” Another message, in April 2017, shows a Palantir support representative instructing an agent on how to classify a datapoint, so that Palantir’s Investigative Case Management [ICM] platform could properly ingest records of a cell phone seizure.

Advocates say the use of Palantir software in these raids contradict the company’s public attempts to draw a clean line between its work and the detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants.

“What these records show is that Palantir’s programs are being used in the field everyday when ICE is conducting their raids,” said Jacinta Gonzalez, field director with Mijente, an immigrants’ rights group. “Everywhere you go you see people, average families, going to work and being detained in the raids, and it’s all because of Palantir’s FALCON and ICM product.”

From October 2017 to 2018, ICE workplace raids nationwide led to 1,525 administrative worksite-related arrests for civil immigration violations, compared to just 172 the year prior. One of the largest of these raids came last April, when ICE agents stormed into a Tennessee meatpacking plant and put 54 workers in immigrant detention.

Palantir declined WNYC’s requests for comment. Citing law enforcement “sensitivities,” ICE also declined to comment on how it uses Palantir during worksite enforcement operations.

But former ICE HSI agents familiar with Palantir’s capabilities say the data-mining software offers significant support for workplace investigations.

Claude Arnold, a former ICE HSI special agent in Los Angeles, praised Palantir’s ability to connect the dots for law enforcement. “It was just amazing how stuff would get linked by this phone number, by this address. And not only linking, but it would show you who or what is at the center of all that,” said Arnold, who retired in 2015.

James T. Hayes, Jr., former Special Agent in Charge at New York’s HSI office, said the ability to look up unknown subjects with Palantir’s mobile app in the field could also crack open investigations.

“When you encounter individuals through an enforcement operation, whether they’re targets of the operation or not, you’re going to make an effort to question those people,” he said. “If you are looking for a particular individual on site at that time, they might know where they are. They might know other places they work.”

In addition to arrests for civil immigration violations, ICE worksite enforcement operations also led to over seven hundred criminal arrests in the fiscal year 2018. But the majority of these charged were undocumented workers, not their employers.

News of Palantir’s role in workplace raids come at a critical time for the firm. In May, Bloomberg reported that the company may be planning to go public next year. At the same time, it is facing considerable backlash, internally and externally, for its work with ICE.

In May, a coalition of tech workers protested Palantir after Mijente, the immigrants’ advocacy group, pointed to documents showing how Palantir software may have been used to investigate the parents of unaccompanied minors who crossed the border.

For years, Palantir’s contracts with federal agencies like ICE went under the radar, and helped keep the company growing. But today its shadowy reputation has sometimes made sales harder, especially in the Trump era. “There are lots of customers globally and some domestically who feel they do not want to be affiliated with a company that powers the clandestine agencies of the world,” Palantir CEO Alex Karp told the Wall Street Journal last year.

Activists are doing their best to publicize Palantir’s record in an effort to get the firm to cut ties with ICE. “Big industries and big companies and big banks are saying, ‘I will not invest in private prisons. I will not invest in private detention centers. I will not help strengthen this infrastructure,’” said Gonzalez. “Palantir should take notice because investors are going to notice as well.”

Palantir’s latest software development efforts could further improve ICE’s attempts to identify undocumented immigrants. Last July, the company filed a patent application for a mobile image recognition program.The outline describes how users could take a picture of a subject’s face in the field and then run that face against a database, identifying possible facial matches.

George Joseph can be emailed securely with a protonmail email account at gmjoseph@protonmail.com. You can also text him, via the encrypted phone app Signal or otherwise, at 929-486-4865.
https://www.wnyc.org/story/palantir-dir ... ails-show/

[seemslikeadream]

julia reinstein
‏
Hundreds of Jews, immigrants, and all sorts of allies are marching from the National Mall to protest ICE.

“Never again means close the camps.”




The #JewsAgainstICE protest has marched all the way to ICE headquarters, and several protestors are already blocking the doors to the building


“We will not allow ICE to continue with business as usual, and that is why we are here today.”


The #JewsAgainstICE protestors have dropped a banner: “Pelosi, never again is now. #DignityNotDetention”



The #JewsAgainstICE protestors have blocked the streets and all the entrances to ICE headquarters.

“It’s not just symbolic - we’re actually shutting down ICE,” organizer @aly_mixed_up told me.




An ICE employee (who wouldn’t tell me his name) came out of the building, and Natalie, this protestor said he called her “a little bitch.”

The employee wouldn’t confirm he’d said it, but said he “didn’t like her sign.” “I’m not a Nazi, I’m a hardworking government employee.”



Sarah, 30, brought her 4-month-old, Norah, out to the #JewsAgainstICE protest. She’d just changed a diaper outside ICE headquarters.

“We’re both descendants of refugees, and it’s important we stand with other refugees against hate and demonization. We know what it feels like.”


Worth noting it is ridiculously hot and humid outside. The #JewsAgainstICE protestors came prepared, with designated volunteers distributing sunscreen, granola bars, and water to everyone. One of them is spritzing people with a spray bottle of water. (It is extremely needed.)



While blocking the front doors of ICE headquarters, the #JewsAgainstICE protestors are singing Oseh Shalom, the Jewish prayer for peace.

There’s now a large and tense police presence as the protestors block the road. One of the organizers told me an estimated 15 people were already arrested when they entered the ICE HQ. More may be arrested here soon.



A number of ICE employees just exited the building, walking past the protestors. One man appeared to mock the protestors, dancing along as the protestors chanted “quit your jobs, stand with us” and “the whole world is watching”

The standoff has continued and more cops have arrived on motorcycles


All the lines of protestors have joined into one giant line, facing all the cops, as they chant “shut down ICE.”

https://twitter.com/juliareinstein/stat ... 9366361088

[seemslikeadream]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qubr4MZZSfU


“Hitler’s American Model” with James Q. Whitman


https://vimeo.com/229320949

April 30, 2018 Issue
How American Racism Influenced Hitler
Scholars are mapping the international precursors of Nazism.

By Alex Ross
April 23, 2018

Hitler, circa 1923. Five years later, he noted, approvingly, that white Americans had “gunned down . . . millions of redskins.”Photograph from Hulton-Deutsch Collection / Corbis / Getty

“History teaches, but has no pupils,” the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote. That line comes to mind when I browse in the history section of a bookstore. An adage in publishing is that you can never go wrong with books about Lincoln, Hitler, and dogs; an alternative version names golfing, Nazis, and cats. In Germany, it’s said that the only surefire magazine covers are ones that feature Hitler or sex. Whatever the formula, Hitler and Nazism prop up the publishing business: hundreds of titles appear each year, and the total number runs well into the tens of thousands. On store shelves, they stare out at you by the dozens, their spines steeped in the black-white-and-red of the Nazi flag, their titles barking in Gothic type, their covers studded with swastikas. The back catalogue includes “I Was Hitler’s Pilot,” “I Was Hitler’s Chauffeur,” “I Was Hitler’s Doctor,” “Hitler, My Neighbor,” “Hitler Was My Friend,” “He Was My Chief,” and “Hitler Is No Fool.” Books have been written about Hitler’s youth, his years in Vienna and Munich, his service in the First World War, his assumption of power, his library, his taste in art, his love of film, his relations with women, and his predilections in interior design (“Hitler at Home”).

Why do these books pile up in such unreadable numbers? This may seem a perverse question. The Holocaust is the greatest crime in history, one that people remain desperate to understand. Germany’s plunge from the heights of civilization to the depths of barbarism is an everlasting shock. Still, these swastika covers trade all too frankly on Hitler’s undeniable flair for graphic design. (The Nazi flag was apparently his creation—finalized after “innumerable attempts,” according to “Mein Kampf.”) Susan Sontag, in her 1975 essay “Fascinating Fascism,” declared that the appeal of Nazi iconography had become erotic, not only in S & M circles but also in the wider culture. It was, Sontag wrote, a “response to an oppressive freedom of choice in sex (and, possibly, in other matters), to an unbearable degree of individuality.” Neo-Nazi movements have almost certainly fed on the perpetuation of Hitler’s negative mystique.

Americans have an especially insatiable appetite for Nazi-themed books, films, television shows, documentaries, video games, and comic books. Stories of the Second World War console us with memories of the days before Vietnam, Cambodia, and Iraq, when the United States was the world’s good-hearted superpower, riding to the rescue of a Europe paralyzed by totalitarianism and appeasement. Yet an eerie continuity became visible in the postwar years, as German scientists were imported to America and began working for their former enemies; the resulting technologies of mass destruction exceeded Hitler’s darkest imaginings. The Nazis idolized many aspects of American society: the cult of sport, Hollywood production values, the mythology of the frontier. From boyhood on, Hitler devoured the Westerns of the popular German novelist Karl May. In 1928, Hitler remarked, approvingly, that white settlers in America had “gunned down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand.” When he spoke of Lebensraum, the German drive for “living space” in Eastern Europe, he often had America in mind.

Among recent books on Nazism, the one that may prove most disquieting for American readers is James Q. Whitman’s “Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law” (Princeton). On the cover, the inevitable swastika is flanked by two red stars. Whitman methodically explores how the Nazis took inspiration from American racism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He notes that, in “Mein Kampf,” Hitler praises America as the one state that has made progress toward a primarily racial conception of citizenship, by “excluding certain races from naturalization.” Whitman writes that the discussion of such influences is almost taboo, because the crimes of the Third Reich are commonly defined as “the nefandum, the unspeakable descent into what we often call ‘radical evil.’ ” But the kind of genocidal hatred that erupted in Germany had been seen before and has been seen since. Only by stripping away its national regalia and comprehending its essential human form do we have any hope of vanquishing it.

The vast literature on Hitler and Nazism keeps circling around a few enduring questions. The first is biographical: How did an Austrian watercolor painter turned military orderly emerge as a far-right German rabble-rouser after the First World War? The second is sociopolitical: How did a civilized society come to embrace Hitler’s extreme ideas? The third has to do with the intersection of man and regime: To what extent was Hitler in control of the apparatus of the Third Reich? All these questions point to the central enigma of the Holocaust, which has variously been interpreted as a premeditated action and as a barbaric improvisation. In our current age of unapologetic racism and resurgent authoritarianism, the mechanics of Hitler’s rise are a particularly pressing matter. For dismantlers of democracy, there is no better exemplar.

Since 1945, the historiography of Nazism has undergone several broad transformations, reflecting political pressures both within Germany and abroad. In the early Cold War period, the emergence of West Germany as a bulwark against the Soviet menace tended to discourage a closer interrogation of German cultural values. The first big postwar biography of Hitler, by the British historian Alan Bullock, published in 1952, depicted him as a charlatan, a manipulator, an “opportunist entirely without principle.” German thinkers often skirted the issue of Hitler, preferring systemic explanations. Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism” suggested that dictatorial energies draw on the loneliness of the modern subject.

In the sixties and seventies, as Cold War Realpolitik receded and the full horror of the Holocaust sank in, many historians adopted what is known as the Sonderweg thesis—the idea that Germany had followed a “special path” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, different from that of other Western nations. In this reading, the Germany of the Wilhelmine period had failed to develop along healthy liberal-democratic lines; the inability to modernize politically prepared the ground for Nazism. In Germany, left-oriented scholars like Hans Mommsen used this concept to call for a greater sense of collective responsibility; to focus on Hitler was an evasion, the argument went, implying that Nazism was something that he did to us. Mommsen outlined a “cumulative radicalization” of the Nazi state in which Hitler functioned as a “weak dictator,” ceding policy-making to competing bureaucratic agencies. Abroad, the Sonderweg theory took on a punitive edge, indicting all of German history and culture. William Manchester’s 1968 book, “The Arms of Krupp,” ends with a lurid image of “the first grim Aryan savage crouched in his garment of coarse skins, his crude javelin poised, tense and alert, cloaked by night and fog, ready; waiting; and waiting.”

The Sonderweg argument was attacked on multiple fronts. In what became known as the Historikerstreit (“Historians’ Dispute”), right-wing scholars in Germany proposed that the nation end its ritual self-flagellation: they reframed Nazism as a reaction to Bolshevism and recast the Holocaust as one genocide among many. Joachim Fest, who had published the first big German-language biography of Hitler, also stood apart from the Sonderweg school. By portraying the Führer as an all-dominating, quasi-demonic figure, Fest effectively placed less blame on the Weimar Republic conservatives who put Hitler in office. More dubious readings presented Hitlerism as an experiment that modernized Germany and then went awry. Such ideas have lost ground in Germany, at least for now: in mainstream discourse there, it is axiomatic to accept responsibility for the Nazi terror.


“It’s not what it looks like. The sex is horrible, and we’re miserable.”
Outside Germany, many critiques of the Sonderweg thesis came from the left. The British scholars Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn, in their 1984 book “The Peculiarities of German History,” questioned the “tyranny of hindsight”—the lordly perspective that reduces a complex, contingent sequence of events to an irreversible progression. In the allegedly backward Kaiserreich, Eley and Blackbourn saw various liberalizing forces in motion: housing reform, public-health initiatives, an emboldened press. It was a society riddled with anti-Semitism, yet it witnessed no upheaval on the scale of the Dreyfus Affair or the Tiszaeszlár blood-libel affair in Hungary. Eley and Blackbourn also questioned whether élitist, imperialist Britain should be held up as the modern paragon. The Sonderweg narrative could become an exculpatory fairy tale for other nations: we may make mistakes, but we will never be as bad as the Germans.

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Ian Kershaw’s monumental two-volume biography (1998-2000) found a plausible middle ground between “strong” and “weak” images of Hitler in power. With his nocturnal schedule, his dislike of paperwork, and his aversion to dialogue, Hitler was an eccentric executive, to say the least. To make sense of a dictatorship in which the dictator was intermittently absent, Kershaw expounded the concept of “working towards the Führer”: when explicit direction from Hitler was lacking, Nazi functionaries guessed at what he wanted, and often further radicalized his policies. Even as debates about the nature of Hitler’s leadership go back and forth, scholars largely agree that his ideology was more or less fixed from the mid-twenties onward. His two abiding obsessions were violent anti-Semitism and Lebensraum. As early as 1921, he spoke of confining Jews to concentration camps, and in 1923 he contemplated—and, for the moment, rejected—the idea of killing the entire Jewish population. The Holocaust was the result of a hideous syllogism: if Germany were to expand into the East, where millions of Jews lived, those Jews would have to vanish, because Germans could not coexist with them.

People have been trying to fathom Hitler’s psyche for nearly a century. Ron Rosenbaum, in his 1998 book “Explaining Hitler,” gives a tour of the more outré theories. It has been suggested, variously, that the key to understanding Hitler is the fact that he had an abusive father; that he was too close to his mother; that he had a Jewish grandfather; that he had encephalitis; that he contracted syphilis from a Jewish prostitute; that he blamed a Jewish doctor for his mother’s death; that he was missing a testicle; that he underwent a wayward hypnosis treatment; that he was gay; that he harbored coprophilic fantasies about his niece; that he was addled by drugs; or—a personal favorite—that his anti-Semitism was triggered by briefly attending school with Ludwig Wittgenstein, in Linz. At the root of this speculative mania is what Rosenbaum calls the “lost safe-deposit box” mentality: with sufficient sleuthing, the mystery can be solved in one Sherlockian stroke.

Academic historians, by contrast, often portray Hitler as a cipher, a nobody. Kershaw has called him a “man without qualities.” Volker Ullrich, a German author and journalist long associated with the weekly Die Zeit, felt the need for a biography that paid more heed to Hitler’s private life. The first volume, “Hitler: Ascent 1889–1939,” was published by Knopf in 2016, in a fluid translation by Jefferson Chase. Ullrich’s Hitler is no tyrant-sorcerer who leads an innocent Germany astray; he is a chameleon, acutely conscious of the image he projects. “The putative void was part of Hitler’s persona, a means of concealing his personal life and presenting himself as a politician who completely identified with his role as leader,” Ullrich writes. Hitler could pose as a cultured gentleman at Munich salons, as a pistol-waving thug at the beer hall, and as a bohemian in the company of singers and actors. He had an exceptional memory that allowed him to assume an air of superficial mastery. His certitude faltered, however, in the presence of women: Ullrich depicts Hitler’s love life as a series of largely unfulfilled fixations. It goes without saying that he was an extreme narcissist lacking in empathy. Much has been made of his love of dogs, but he was cruel to them.

From adolescence onward, Hitler was a dreamer and a loner. Averse to joining groups, much less leading them, he immersed himself in books, music, and art. His ambition to become a painter was hampered by a limited technique and by a telling want of feeling for human figures. When he moved to Vienna, in 1908, he slipped toward the social margins, residing briefly in a homeless shelter and then in a men’s home. In Munich, where he moved in 1913, he eked out a living as an artist and otherwise spent his days in museums and his nights at the opera. He was steeped in Wagner, though he had little apparent grasp of the composer’s psychological intricacies and ambiguities. A sharp portrait of the young Hitler can be found in Thomas Mann’s startling essay “Bruder Hitler,” the English version of which appeared in Esquire in 1939, under the title “That Man Is My Brother.” Aligning Hitler’s experience with his own, Mann wrote of a “basic arrogance, the basic feeling of being too good for any reasonable, honorable activity—based on what? A vague notion of being reserved for something else, something quite indeterminate, which, if it were named, would cause people to break out laughing.”

The claims of “Mein Kampf” notwithstanding, there is no clear evidence that Hitler harbored strongly anti-Semitic views in his youth or in early adulthood. Indeed, he seems to have had friendly relations with several Jews in Vienna and Munich. This does not mean that he was free of commonplace anti-Jewish prejudice. Certainly, he was a fervent German nationalist. When the First World War commenced, in 1914, he volunteered for the German Army, and acquitted himself well as a soldier. For most of the war, he served as a dispatch runner for his regiment’s commanders. The first trace of a swing to the right comes in a letter from 1915, in which Hitler expressed the hope that the war would bring an end to Germany’s “inner internationalism.”

The historian Thomas Weber, who recounted Hitler’s soldier years in the 2010 book “Hitler’s First War,” has now written “Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi” (Basic), a study of the postwar metamorphosis. Significantly, Hitler remained in the Army after the Armistice; disgruntled nationalist soldiers tended to join paramilitary groups. Because the Social Democratic parties were dominant at the founding of the Weimar Republic, Hitler was representing a leftist government. He even served the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic. It is doubtful, though, that he had active sympathies for the left; he probably stayed in the Army because, as Weber writes, it “provided a raison d’être for his existence.” As late as his thirtieth birthday, in April, 1919, there was no sign of the Führer-to-be.

The unprecedented anarchy of postwar Bavaria helps explain what happened next. Street killings were routine; politicians were assassinated on an almost weekly basis. The left was blamed for the chaos, and anti-Semitism escalated for the same reason: several prominent leaders of the left were Jewish. Then came the Treaty of Versailles, which was signed in June, 1919. Robert Gerwarth, in “The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), emphasizes the whiplash effect that the treaty had on the defeated Central Powers. As Gerwarth writes, German and Austrian politicians believed that they had “broken with the autocratic traditions of the past, thus fulfilling the key criteria of Wilson’s Fourteen Points for a ‘just peace.’ ” The harshness of the terms of Versailles belied that idealistic rhetoric.

The day after Germany ratified the treaty, Hitler began attending Army propaganda classes aimed at repressing revolutionary tendencies. These infused him with hard-core anti-capitalist and anti-Semitic ideas. The officer in charge of the program was a tragic figure named Karl Mayr, who later forsook the right wing for the left; he died in Buchenwald, in 1945. Mayr described Hitler as a “tired stray dog looking for a master.” Having noticed Hitler’s gift for public speaking, Mayr installed him as a lecturer and sent him out to observe political activities in Munich. In September, 1919, Hitler came across the German Workers’ Party, a tiny fringe faction. He spoke up at one of its meetings and joined its ranks. Within a few months, he had become the leading orator of the group, which was renamed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.

If Hitler’s radicalization occurred as rapidly as this—and not all historians agree that it did—the progression bears an unsettling resemblance to stories that we now read routinely in the news, of harmless-seeming, cat-loving suburbanites who watch white-nationalist videos on YouTube and then join a neo-Nazi group on Facebook. But Hitler’s embrace of belligerent nationalism and murderous anti-Semitism is not in itself historically significant; what mattered was his gift for injecting that rhetoric into mainstream discourse. Peter Longerich’s “Hitler: Biographie,” a thirteen-hundred-page tome that appeared in Germany in 2015, gives a potent picture of Hitler’s skills as a speaker, organizer, and propagandist. Even those who found his words repulsive were mesmerized by him. He would begin quietly, almost haltingly, testing out his audience and creating suspense. He amused the crowd with sardonic asides and actorly impersonations. The musical structure was one of crescendo toward triumphant rage. Longerich writes, “It was this eccentric style, almost pitiable, unhinged, obviously not well trained, at the same time ecstatically over-the-top, that evidently conveyed to his audience the idea of uniqueness and authenticity.”

Above all, Hitler knew how to project himself through the mass media, honing his messages so that they would penetrate the white noise of politics. He fostered the production of catchy graphics, posters, and slogans; in time, he mastered radio and film. Meanwhile, squads of Brown Shirts brutalized and murdered opponents, heightening the very disorder that Hitler had proposed to cure. His most adroit feat came after the failed Beer Hall Putsch, in 1923, which should have ended his political career. At the trial that followed, Hitler polished his personal narrative, that of a simple soldier who had heard the call of destiny. In prison, he wrote the first part of “Mein Kampf,” in which he completed the construction of his world view.

To many liberal-minded Germans of the twenties, Hitler was a scary but ludicrous figure who did not seem to represent a serious threat. The Weimar Republic stabilized somewhat in the middle of the decade, and the Nazi share of the vote languished in the low single-digit figures. The economic misery of the late twenties and early thirties provided another opportunity, which Hitler seized. Benjamin Carter Hett deftly summarizes this dismal period in “The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic” (Henry Holt). Conservatives made the gargantuan mistake of seeing Hitler as a useful tool for rousing the populace. They also undermined parliamentary democracy, flouted regional governments, and otherwise set the stage for the Nazi state. The left, meanwhile, was divided against itself. At Stalin’s urging, many Communists viewed the Social Democrats, not the Nazis, as the real enemy—the “social fascists.” The media got caught up in pop-culture distractions; traditional liberal newspapers were losing circulation. Valiant journalists like Konrad Heiden tried to correct the barrage of Nazi propaganda but found the effort futile, because, as Heiden wrote, “the refutation would be heard, perhaps believed, and definitely forgotten again.”

Hett refrains from poking the reader with too many obvious contemporary parallels, but he knew what he was doing when he left the word “German” out of his title. On the book’s final page, he lays his cards on the table: “Thinking about the end of Weimar democracy in this way—as the result of a large protest movement colliding with complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture increasingly prone to aggressive mythmaking and irrationality—strips away the exotic and foreign look of swastika banners and goose-stepping Stormtroopers. Suddenly, the whole thing looks close and familiar.” Yes, it does.

What set Hitler apart from most authoritarian figures in history was his conception of himself as an artist-genius who used politics as his métier. It is a mistake to call him a failed artist; for him, politics and war were a continuation of art by other means. This is the focus of Wolfram Pyta’s “Hitler: Der Künstler als Politiker und Feldherr” (“The Artist as Politician and Commander”), one of the most striking recent additions to the literature. Although the aestheticizing of politics is hardly a new topic—Walter Benjamin discussed it in the nineteen-thirties, as did Mann—Pyta pursues the theme at magisterial length, showing how Hitler debased the Romantic cult of genius to incarnate himself as a transcendent leader hovering above the fray. Goebbels’s propaganda harped on this motif; his diaries imply that he believed it. “Adolf Hitler, I love you because you are both great and simple,” he wrote.

The true artist does not compromise. Defying skeptics and mockers, he imagines the impossible. Such is the tenor of Hitler’s infamous “prophecy” of the destruction of the European Jews, in 1939: “I have often been a prophet, and have generally been laughed at. . . . I believe that the formerly resounding laughter of Jewry in Germany has now choked up in its throat. Today, I want to be a prophet again—if the international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” Scholars have long debated when the decision to carry out the Final Solution was made. Most now believe that the Holocaust was an escalating series of actions, driven by pressure both from above and from below. Yet no order was really necessary. Hitler’s “prophecy” was itself an oblique command. In the summer of 1941, as hundreds of thousands of Jews and Slavs were being killed during the invasion of the Soviet Union, Goebbels recalled Hitler remarking that the prophecy was being fulfilled in an “almost uncanny” fashion. This is the language of a connoisseur admiring a masterpiece. Such intellectual atrocities led Theodor W. Adorno to declare that, after Auschwitz, to write poetry is barbaric.

Hitler and Goebbels were the first relativizers of the Holocaust, the first purveyors of false equivalence. “Concentration camps were not invented in Germany,” Hitler said in 1941. “It is the English who are their inventors, using this institution to gradually break the backs of other nations.” The British had operated camps in South Africa, the Nazis pointed out. Party propagandists similarly highlighted the sufferings of Native Americans and Stalin’s slaughter in the Soviet Union. In 1943, Goebbels triumphantly broadcast news of the Katyn Forest massacre, in the course of which the Soviet secret police killed more than twenty thousand Poles. (Goebbels wanted to show footage of the mass graves, but generals overruled him.) Nazi sympathizers carry on this project today, alternately denying the Holocaust and explaining it away.

The magnitude of the abomination almost forbids that it be mentioned in the same breath as any other horror. Yet the Holocaust has unavoidable international dimensions—lines of influence, circles of complicity, moments of congruence. Hitler’s “scientific anti-Semitism,” as he called it, echoed the French racial theorist Arthur de Gobineau and anti-Semitic intellectuals who normalized venomous language during the Dreyfus Affair. The British Empire was Hitler’s ideal image of a master race in dominant repose. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a Russian forgery from around 1900, fuelled the Nazis’ paranoia. The Armenian genocide of 1915-16 encouraged the belief that the world community would care little about the fate of the Jews. Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Hitler spoke of the planned mass murder of Poles and asked, “Who, after all, is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians?” The Nazis found collaborators in almost every country that they invaded. In one Lithuanian town, a crowd cheered while a local man clubbed dozens of Jewish people to death. He then stood atop the corpses and played the Lithuanian anthem on an accordion. German soldiers looked on, taking photographs.


The mass killings by Stalin and Hitler existed in an almost symbiotic relationship, the one giving license to the other, in remorseless cycles of revenge. Large-scale deportations of Jews from the countries of the Third Reich followed upon Stalin’s deportation of the Volga Germans. Reinhard Heydrich, one of the chief planners of the Holocaust, thought that, once the Soviet Union had been defeated, the Jews of Europe could be left to die in the Gulag. The most dangerous claim made by right-wing historians during the Historikerstreit was that Nazi terror was a response to Bolshevik terror, and was therefore to some degree excusable. One can, however, keep the entire monstrous landscape in view without minimizing the culpability of perpetrators on either side. This was the achievement of Timothy Snyder’s profoundly disturbing 2010 book, “Bloodlands,” which seems to fix cameras in spots across Eastern Europe, recording wave upon wave of slaughter.

As for Hitler and America, the issue goes beyond such obvious suspects as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh. Whitman’s “Hitler’s American Model,” with its comparative analysis of American and Nazi race law, joins such previous studies as Carroll Kakel’s “The American West and the Nazi East,” a side-by-side discussion of Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum; and Stefan Kühl’s “The Nazi Connection,” which describes the impact of the American eugenics movement on Nazi thinking. This literature is provocative in tone and, at times, tendentious, but it engages in a necessary act of self-examination, of a kind that modern Germany has exemplified.

The Nazis were not wrong to cite American precedents. Enslavement of African-Americans was written into the U.S. Constitution. Thomas Jefferson spoke of the need to “eliminate” or “extirpate” Native Americans. In 1856, an Oregonian settler wrote, “Extermination, however unchristianlike it may appear, seems to be the only resort left for the protection of life and property.” General Philip Sheridan spoke of “annihilation, obliteration, and complete destruction.” To be sure, others promoted more peaceful—albeit still repressive—policies. The historian Edward B. Westermann, in “Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars” (Oklahoma), concludes that, because federal policy never officially mandated the “physical annihilation of the Native populations on racial grounds or characteristics,” this was not a genocide on the order of the Shoah. The fact remains that between 1500 and 1900 the Native population of U.S. territories dropped from many millions to around two hundred thousand.

America’s knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death struck Hitler as an example to be emulated. He made frequent mention of the American West in the early months of the Soviet invasion. The Volga would be “our Mississippi,” he said. “Europe—and not America—will be the land of unlimited possibilities.” Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine would be populated by pioneer farmer-soldier families. Autobahns would cut through fields of grain. The present occupants of those lands—tens of millions of them—would be starved to death. At the same time, and with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticization of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’s less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors.

Jim Crow laws in the American South served as a precedent in a stricter legal sense. Scholars have long been aware that Hitler’s regime expressed admiration for American race law, but they have tended to see this as a public-relations strategy—an “everybody does it” justification for Nazi policies. Whitman, however, points out that if these comparisons had been intended solely for a foreign audience they would not have been buried in hefty tomes in Fraktur type. “Race Law in the United States,” a 1936 study by the German lawyer Heinrich Krieger, attempts to sort out inconsistencies in the legal status of nonwhite Americans. Krieger concludes that the entire apparatus is hopelessly opaque, concealing racist aims behind contorted justifications. Why not simply say what one means? This was a major difference between American and German racism.

American eugenicists made no secret of their racist objectives, and their views were prevalent enough that F. Scott Fitzgerald featured them in “The Great Gatsby.” (The cloddish Tom Buchanan, having evidently read Lothrop Stoddard’s 1920 tract “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy,” says, “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged.”) California’s sterilization program directly inspired the Nazi sterilization law of 1934. There are also sinister, if mostly coincidental, similarities between American and German technologies of death. In 1924, the first execution by gas chamber took place, in Nevada. In a history of the American gas chamber, Scott Christianson states that the fumigating agent Zyklon-B, which was licensed to American Cyanamid by the German company I. G. Farben, was considered as a lethal agent but found to be impractical. Zyklon-B was, however, used to disinfect immigrants as they crossed the border at El Paso—a practice that did not go unnoticed by Gerhard Peters, the chemist who supplied a modified version of Zyklon-B to Auschwitz. Later, American gas chambers were outfitted with a chute down which poison pellets were dropped. Earl Liston, the inventor of the device, explained, “Pulling a lever to kill a man is hard work. Pouring acid down a tube is easier on the nerves, more like watering flowers.” Much the same method was introduced at Auschwitz, to relieve stress on S.S. guards.

When Hitler praised American restrictions on naturalization, he had in mind the Immigration Act of 1924, which imposed national quotas and barred most Asian people altogether. For Nazi observers, this was evidence that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality. The Immigration Act, too, played a facilitating role in the Holocaust, because the quotas prevented thousands of Jews, including Anne Frank and her family, from reaching America. In 1938, President Roosevelt called for an international conference on the plight of European refugees; this was held in Évian-les-Bains, France, but no substantive change resulted. The German Foreign Office, in a sardonic reply, found it “astounding” that other countries would decry Germany’s treatment of Jews and then decline to admit them.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans died fighting Nazi Germany. Still, bigotry toward Jews persisted, even toward Holocaust survivors. General George Patton criticized do-gooders who “believe that the Displaced person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals.” Leading Nazi scientists had it better. Brian Crim’s “Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State” (Johns Hopkins) reviews the shady history of Wernher von Braun and his colleagues from the V-2 program. When Braun was captured, in 1945, he realized that the Soviets would become the next archenemy of the American military-industrial complex, and cannily promoted the idea of a high-tech weapons program to ward off the Bolshevik menace. He was able to reconstitute most of his operation Stateside, minus the slave labor. Records were airbrushed; de-Nazification procedures were bypassed (they were considered “demoralizing”); immigration was expedited. J. Edgar Hoover became concerned that Jewish obstructionists in the State Department were asking too many questions about the scientists’ backgrounds. Senator Styles Bridges proposed that the State Department needed a “first-class cyanide fumigating job.”

These chilling points of contact are little more than footnotes to the history of Nazism. But they tell us rather more about modern America. Like a colored dye coursing through the bloodstream, they expose vulnerabilities in the national consciousness. The spread of white-supremacist propaganda on the Internet is the latest chapter. As Zeynep Tufekci recently observed, in the Times, YouTube is a superb vehicle for the circulation of such content, its algorithms guiding users toward ever more inflammatory material. She writes, “Given its billion or so users, YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.” When I did a search for “Hitler” on YouTube the other day, I was first shown a video labelled “Best Hitler Documentary in color!”—the British production “Hitler in Color.” A pro-Hitler remark was featured atop the comments, and soon, thanks to Autoplay, I was viewing contributions from such users as CelticAngloPress and SoldatdesReiches.

In 1990, Vanity Fair reported that Donald Trump once kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed. When Trump was asked about it, he said, “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.” Since Trump entered politics, he has repeatedly been compared to Hitler, not least by neo-Nazis. Although some resemblances can be found—at times, Trump appears to be emulating Hitler’s strategy of cultivating rivalries among those under him, and his rallies are cathartic rituals of racism, xenophobia, and self-regard—the differences are obvious and stark. For one thing, Hitler had more discipline. What is worth pondering is how a demagogue of Hitler’s malign skill might more effectively exploit flaws in American democracy. He would certainly have at his disposal craven right-wing politicians who are worthy heirs to Hindenburg, Brüning, Papen, and Schleicher. He would also have millions of citizens who acquiesce in inconceivably potent networks of corporate surveillance and control.

The artist-politician of the future will not bask in the antique aura of Wagner and Nietzsche. He is more likely to take inspiration from the newly minted myths of popular culture. The archetype of the ordinary kid who discovers that he has extraordinary powers is a familiar one from comic books and superhero movies, which play on the adolescent feeling that something is profoundly wrong with the world and that a magic weapon might banish the spell. With one stroke, the inconspicuous outsider assumes a position of supremacy, on a battlefield of pure good against pure evil. For most people, such stories remain fantasy, a means of embellishing everyday life. One day, though, a ruthless dreamer, a loner who has a “vague notion of being reserved for something else,” may attempt to turn metaphor into reality. He might be out there now, cloaked by the blue light of a computer screen, ready, waiting.
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The (McAllen) Monitor

Updated on July 24, 2019 at 7:40 p.m. with a joint statement from immigration officials


Francisco Erwin Galicia, a Dallas-born U.S. citizen, spent 23 days in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection in conditions that made him so desperate he almost opted to self-deport.

Galicia says he lost 26 pounds during that time in a South Texas immigrant detention center because officers didn’t provide him with enough food.

He said he wasn’t allowed to shower and his skin was dry and dirty.

He and 60 other men were crammed into an overcrowded holding area where they slept on the floor and were given only aluminum-foil blankets, he said. Some men had to sleep on the restroom area floor.

Ticks bit some of the men and some were very sick, Galicia said. But many were afraid to ask to go to the doctor because CBP officers told them their stay would start over if they did, he said.

“It was inhumane how they treated us. It got to the point where I was ready to sign a deportation paper just to not be suffering there anymore. I just needed to get out of there,” he said.

Galicia spoke to The Dallas Morning News on Wednesday, one day after he was released by federal officials who had earlier refused to acknowledge his citizenship when presented with his birth certificate.

CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials did not respond to Galicia's claims of poor conditions at the CBP holding facility. But the agencies issued a joint statement Wednesday evening addressing their decision to detain him. The explanation came two days after The News first broke the story of his detention and made repeated requests for comment to both agencies.

"Generally, situations including conflicting reports from the individual and multiple birth certificates can, and should, take more time to verify," the statement read. "While we continue to research the facts of the situation, this individual has been released from ICE custody. Both CBP and ICE are committed to the fair treatment of migrants in our custody and continue to take appropriate steps to verify all facts of this situation."

For most of the time Galicia was held by federal authorities, he said he lived under conditions that many asylum-seeking immigrants have reportedly faced over the past year, leading to much public outcry from politicians and public figures.

Galicia said he met people from all over: Nicaraguans, Hondurans, Salvadorans, Colombians.

“It’s one thing to see these conditions on TV and in the news. It’s another to go through them,” he said.

Galicia was released Tuesday afternoon from the ICE detention center in Pearsall where he’d been since Saturday. His release came less than 24 hours after The News first reported on his detention. Before Saturday, he’d been held for about three weeks at a CBP facility in Falfurrias, where he reported the squalid conditions.

Galicia’s ordeal began on June 27 when he and his younger brother Marlon Galicia and three friends set out for Ranger College in North Texas from Edinburg where the Galicia family lives.

They were heading to a soccer scouting event where the brothers, who both play defense for the Johnny Economedes High School soccer team, were hoping to land scholarships.

“We’re supposed to graduate from high school next year, and we wanted to do something to secure our education,” Francisco Galicia said.


Francisco Galicia embraces his mother Sanjuana Galicia at the McAllen Central Station. Galicia, 18, who was born in Dallas and is a U.S. citizen, was released Tuesday after being wrongfully detained for more than three weeks.

(Delcia Lopez/The (McAllen) Monitor )


But the boys had to pass through a CBP checkpoint in Falfurrias, about 50 miles north of Edinburg. It was there that CBP agents asked the group to pull over and asked the passengers their statuses.

Marlon Galicia and another passenger lacked legal status. Francisco Galicia told Border Patrol agents that he was a citizen and presented them with a Texas ID, Social Security card and a wallet-sized birth certificate.

But agents doubted the validity of his documents right away, Galicia said.

Agents then took the brothers and another passenger into custody. They held them at the checkpoint for a day and then moved them to a CBP holding facility, where Francisco hoped he would be allowed a phone call.

“I told them we had rights and asked to make a phone call. But they told us, ‘You don’t have rights to anything’,” Francisco Galicia said.

Two days after they were taken into custody, Marlon, who was born in Mexico, decided to voluntarily deport so that he could tell their mother, Sanjuana Galicia, about Francisco’s situation. He is now in Reynosa, a dangerous border city.

Claudia Galan, Galicia’s attorney, told The News that CBPs decision to hold Galicia despite his citizenship was likely tied to the issuance of a visitor’s visa that agents found in their records after they scanned his fingerprints.

Galicia’s mother obtained the visa for him when he was a minor and claimed he was born in Mexico.

He didn’t have a U.S. passport because when he was born in Dallas, Sanjuana used a fake name on his birth certificate.

She feared the only way she’d be able to legally travel across the border with her U.S. citizen son was with the visa.

But Galicia says CBP agents doubted the validity of his documents even before he was fingerprinted.

“Powerless. That’s how I felt. How with all this proof that I was giving them could they hold me?” he said.

Galicia says the documents he presented at the CBP checkpoint have not been returned to him.

CBP has not confirmed whether the old visa was why they detained Galicia.

Sanjuana Galicia said she was just glad to have her son home.

“I’m just so thankful to God and to everyone who spoke up about my son’s situation. I’m glad to have him back home, but I need my other son back,” she said.
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Horror. A man, his partner, & 2 children. 11 y/o & 6 months. Stopped by ICE. On way to doctors appointment for the baby. Local police shattered his window, ripped him out, & handed him to ICE. Only let him say goodbye to one of his 2 kids. “I want daddy.”
https://twitter.com/ScottHech/status/11 ... 8827817985

[seemslikeadream]

Active troops monitor detained migrants in Texas

This image shows an aerial shot of the detention center in Donna, Texas
Detention center in Donna, Tex. in 2017. Photo: John Moore/Getty Images
Active-duty troops are monitoring migrants from inside a Border Patrol holding facility in Donna, Texas, to perform welfare or "wellness" checks, NBC reports.

Why it matters: According to a congressman and a former defense official interviewed by NBC, these stationed troops are potentially in danger of violating the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of the military in civilian law enforcement.

What's happening: 4 defense officials — 2 current and 2 former — told NBC that the troops are stationed in Donna to perform wellness checks requested by Homeland Security last year. According to those officials, troops began those welfare checks earlier this summer.

These checks are reportedly intended to identify migrants' responsiveness and check for "signs of illness, any signs of violence, and signs of suspicious behavior," per NBC.
"The checks started with troops walking through the facility every 15 minutes, but troops now stand above the migrants and monitor them constantly," NBC reports.
What they're saying: Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) told NBC that having active duty troops supervise detained migrants is "teetering on the edge of the posse comitatus law."

A former defense official told NBC that if a service member responds to a fight, they'd play a different role than what is legally permitted under the Posse Comitatus Act, adding, "They should be way behind the fence of the border to help CBP."
John Cornelio, a spokesperson for the U.S. military's Northern Command, told NBC that, "In the event of a medical emergency or other reportable event, our military personnel immediately notify CBP personnel on-site who respond to the incident or event in question."
Go deeper: Trump administration sends 2,100 more troops to southern border
https://www.axios.com/active-troops-mon ... gn=organic