The name was Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student murdered in Georgia, Greene’s home state, on February 22nd. The man accused of killing her, Jose Antonio Ibarra, had been identified as an illegal immigrant from Venezuela. Greene’s theatrics that night were obviously meant to put a spotlight on Biden’s immigration policies and blame him for Riley’s death.

Looking back at that moment, a fantasy forms in my mind of someone calling out to Greene (maybe even interrupting a speech of hers) and urging her to say different names: Evelyn Dieckhaus, perhaps, or William Kinney, or Hallie Scruggs.

Those names belonged to three nine-year-olds killed in a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, on March 27, 2023. That day, the shooter carried an AR-15 assault-style rifle, a 9 mm carbine, and a handgun into the school where he fatally shot those three kids, as well as Mike Hill, Katherine Koonce, and Cynthia Peak (respectively a custodian, the head of the school, and a substitute teacher). Six names, then. And speaking of numbers, a question comes to mind: is Marjorie Taylor Greene one of a kind — or not? Keep reading…

On the day those six people were shot in Nashville, Greene wasted no time turning the tragedy into fodder for a political message attacking President Biden and his record, not on immigration that time but on gun control. 

“Joe Biden’s gun free school zones have endangered children at schools leaving them as innocent targets of sick horrible disturbed people ever since he worked as a Senator to pass this foolish law,” she tweeted less than four hours after the shooting. (The apparent reference was to the Gun-Free Zones Act, passed by Congress in 1990. Biden was in the Senate then but wasn’t a sponsor of either that law or a subsequent version passed four years later.) A few sentences later, Greene mentioned the president again: “Gun grabbers like Joe Biden and Democrats should give up their Secret Service protection and put themselves on the same level as our unprotected innocent, precious children at school.”

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In other tweets that day Greene used the Nashville shooting as ammunition in the culture wars about gender identity. Citing accounts reporting that the shooter was a transgender male, Greene noted that “the female Nashville shooter identified as a man.” In separate tweets, she suggested a possible connection between the shooting and “Antifa’s plan for violence on the ‘Trans Day of Vengeance,’” while asking, “How much hormones like testosterone and medications for mental illness was the transgender Nashville school shooter taking?”

In fact, no evidence has ever surfaced indicating any connection between that shooting and Antifa or the “Day of Vengeance” organizers (who gave that name to a planned nonviolent demonstration in Washington, which was called off before it even happened). Nor has it been confirmed that the shooter was receiving hormone treatments.

Compassion or Exploitation?

Greene’s colleague Mike Collins, another Republican congressman from Georgia whose politics are similar to hers, had invited Laken Riley’s parents to attend the State of the Union address as his guests, but they declined. It’s hard to know what her family members might have felt, had they been sitting in the gallery when Greene broke into Biden’s speech with that shout. Would they have welcomed it as a sympathetic recognition of their tragedy or been angered at being made into props for a play-acting politician’s stunt? (After the incident, Laken’s father, Jason Riley, expressed his feelings to a television interviewer this way: “I’d rather [my daughter] not be such a political, how you say — it started a storm in our country, and it’s incited a lot of people.” He added that her death was “being used politically to get those votes. It makes me angry. I feel like, you know, they’re just using my daughter’s name for that. And she was much better than that, and she should be raised up for the person that she is.”  A few days later, though, Jason Riley delivered his own political message in a speech at the Georgia State House, where he exhorted state legislators to enact tougher laws to counter an “illegal invasion” by undocumented immigrants.)

It’s difficult to know how many of Greene’s fellow Republicans in the House really felt about her actions that night. It’s possible that some privately didn’t agree with her use of Laken Riley’s murder to all-too-loudly score a political point. But if any colleagues on her side of the aisle felt that way, they’ve remained silent, just as GOP politicians who know that Donald Trump’s stolen-election claims are false won’t, with pitifully few exceptions, say that truth aloud. 

Nor, of course, can we read Greene’s own mind on this. She obviously knew that she was making a political gesture, but perhaps she thought she was also expressing genuine sympathy for a murder victim and her family. From outside, though, it’s hard to see her actions as anything but a callous effort to exploit a tragic event. And of course, it wasn’t an isolated action by one insensitive congresswoman but one of many similar incidents, as anti-immigrant activists across the country loudly pointed to Laken Riley’s death as evidence for their cause, while politicians seized on it as a way to get votes.

Another List of Names

Here are some more names that someone might read out to Representative Greene:

Alyssa Alhadeff, Martin Duque Anguiano, Nicholas Dworet, Jamie Guttenberg, Luke Hoyer, Cara Loughran, Gina Montalto, Joaquin Oliver, Alaina Petty, Meadow Pollack, Helena Ramsay, Alex Schachter, Carmen Schentrup, Peter Wang.

Those were the names of the 14 students who were killed on February 14, 2018, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. They ranged in age from 14 to 18. The shooter in Parkland also used an AR-15 while slaughtering those 14 students, as well as three adult staffers: Chris Hixon, the wrestling coach and athletic director; Scott Beigel, 35, a geography teacher and cross-country coach; and Aaron Feis, an assistant football coach who, survivors said, was killed while attempting to shield students from the attacker’s bullets.

In the year after those deaths, a number of Parkland students who survived the shooting became activists promoting stricter gun laws. In March 2019, one of them, David Hogg, came to Washington to meet with lawmakers in advance of a Senate hearing on a proposed “red flag” gun-control bill.  Greene, not yet a member of Congress, saw Hogg, then 18 years old, walking on the grounds outside the Capitol building, where she had come to lobby against that very bill. A videotape, apparently filmed by someone accompanying Greene, shows her following Hogg and calling out angry questions and accusations: “Why are you supporting red flag gun laws that attack our Second Amendment rights? And why are you using kids as a barrier?… You are using your lobby and the money behind it and the kids to try to take away my Second Amendment rights!”

In the video, as Hogg keeps walking, Greene turns to face the camera and adds, “He has nothing to say because he’s paid to do this…. And he’s a coward. He can’t say one word because he can’t defend his stance.” On the tape, Greene refers to “George Soros funding” and “major liberal funding,” but she has never presented the slightest bit of evidence that Hogg was being paid by Soros or anyone else.

Nor was that the only time Greene responded unsympathetically to the Parkland murders. In 2018, on Facebook, Greene associated herself with the claim that it didn’t really happen, agreeing with a commenter who described the Parkland shooting as a planned “false flag” event. In a separate post, she implied that two nationally known Democrats might have been involved in staging a fake event: “I am told that Nancy Pelosi tells Hillary Clinton several times a month that ‘we need another school shooting’ in order to persuade the public to want strict gun control.”

And here’s one more list:

Makenna Lee Elrod, Layla Salazar, Maranda Mathis, Nevaeh Bravo, Jose Manuel Flores Jr., Xavier Lopez, Tess Marie Mata, Rojelio Torres, Eliahna “Ellie” Amyah Garcia, Eliahna A. Torres, Annabell Guadalupe Rodriguez, Jackie Cazares, Uziyah Garcia, Jayce Carmelo Luevanos, Maite Yuleana Rodriguez, Jailah Nicole Silguero, Amerie Jo Garza, Alexandria “Lexi” Aniyah Rubio, Alithia Ramirez, Irma Garcia, Eva Mireles.

The first 19 names on that list belonged to children ages 9, 10, and 11 who died in a shooting at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, 2022. The 20th and 21st names were teachers who were also killed. Like the shooters in Nashville and Parkland, the Uvalde gunman carried out the attack with an AR-15 rifle. (A few facts here: the AR-15 is a semi-automatic, military-style rifle; about one of every 20 Americans owns an AR-15 and, at present, an estimated 20 million of them are in circulation in this country.)

As she would do again after the Nashville shooting, Greene associated the Uvalde massacre with gender identity — in this case, a much less plausible connection. Speaking on Facebook Live a few days after the event, she repeated an unsubstantiated rumor that the shooter, a former student at the school, was transgender and had been “groomed” by a former FBI agent. That claim, based on some cross-dresser photos falsely identified as showing the suspect, spread widely in right-wing circles but was never backed up by any factual evidence. (In those same circles, the shooter was also regularly described as an illegal immigrant. In fact, as no less an authority than Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, confirmed, he was a U.S. citizen born in North Dakota.)

Returning to the subject a couple of months later, Greene tweeted that the Uvalde students “could have defended themselves” if they had been armed with JR-15 rifles. She was referring to a lightweight .22 caliber semi-automatic weapon designed for and explicitly marketed — hard to believe, but true! — to children. Beneath her written message Greene posted a composite photo showing a blown-up JR-15 marketing poster next to a picture of Nancy Pelosi, the context being a House debate where Pelosi denounced the sales campaign for that weapon, declaring: “It’s despicable and it reminds us that the crisis of gun violence requires action.”

I had never heard of the JR-15 rifle before reading about Greene’s tweet after the Uvalde shooting. What I found out about those weapons, and Wee1 Tactical, the Illinois company that sells them, were the most unexpected and chilling things I learned while researching this piece. As I discovered, the JR-15 is openly promoted as a weapon for children. “A perfect scaled-down replica of the AR platform with youth shooters in mind,” one gun blogger called it. Another pro-gun site praised it as “a great first rifle… the perfect rifle for training the little ones about the shooting sports and gun safety.”

“The Enemy of the American People”

So… Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks it would be a good idea for third- and fourth-grade kids across the country to carry semiautomatic weapons and keep them in their classrooms in case they need to fire back if a shooter bursts in? And that would make those children and their teachers safer? There’s no chance that any of them might ever get into a fight with a classmate and shoot him or her (or them)? No child would fire a gun accidentally, killing or wounding someone else? No emotionally upset children would turn those weapons on themselves? Even for Greene, who has a long record of espousing nutty conspiracy theories, the idea that elementary-grade students could have access to guns at school should be considered an astoundingly delusional piece of thinking.

That and the record of Greene’s comments on school shootings, not to speak of so many other issues, are disturbing — and not just for what they tell us about one elected official. Far more troubling is what that record reflects about the broader state of this country’s political discourse at a time when one side in our ongoing arguments regularly promotes false reasoning, invented or distorted facts, and a lack of human sympathy except when it fits a partisan interest.

Greene is certainly an extreme example of that trend. However, she’s anything but one of a kind. Regrettably, she’s one of far too many politicians of this moment who think and speak with no regard for truth or reasonable argument. The real concern here shouldn’t be her personality or her flawed thinking, but what she shows us about the broader political landscape. We are, after all, in an era when her party’s dominant leader and presidential candidate and other Republican politicians are feeding voters a steady diet of untruths and twisted logic while repeatedly attacking the credibility of truth-tellers, as when Donald Trump labeled the news media “the enemy of the American people.”

Years of such false messaging, coinciding with the emergence of powerful new technologies for creating and spreading disinformation, have put us where we are now: seven months from an election that could be the most crucial test between truth and lies, and of basic democratic principles and practice, since the post-Civil War era a century and a half ago.

To add it all up: 43 names, 22 of them belonging to children 11 years old or younger, all killed in three school shootings carried out with assault-style semi-automatic weapons. I have no way of knowing if Marjorie Taylor Greene has ever looked at any of those names or spoken them aloud. Nor do I know — though I’d make a pretty big bet against it! — whether she’s ever thought about what those 43 people might say to her if they hadn’t been silenced by death. But I do know this: by any tenable standard of moral decency, intellectual honesty, or logic, the name Marjorie Taylor Greene is covered with shame.

Copyright 2024 Arnold R. Isaacs

Tomdispatch.com

Being “tough” on immigration doesn’t mean you have to support cruel or ineffective policies.

( Otherwords.com ) – When President Biden was campaigning in 2020, he pledged to strengthen our country by supporting and welcoming immigrants. Early in his presidency, he began taking steps in that direction.

On his first day in office, Biden proclaimed an end to his predecessor’s “Muslim ban,” which summarily banned migration from several Muslim-majority countries. And In February 2021, Biden introduced an executive order aimed at reversing some of the Trump administration’s damage to our immigration system, from family separations to backlogs in our asylum system.

“Securing our borders does not require us to ignore the humanity of those who seek to cross them,” Biden said at the time. “Nor is the United States safer when resources that should be invested in policies targeting actual threats, such as drug cartels and human traffickers, are squandered on efforts to stymie legitimate asylum seekers.”

Biden seemed to understand that being “tough” does not mean you have to support cruel and ineffective policies. Unfortunately, as immigration has become a more polarizing topic, the administration has backed away from this more humane approach.

Instead, in many ways Biden has actually continued down Trump’s path on immigration.

For example, the Trump administration enforced a rule called Title 42 during the height of the COVID pandemic, which severely limited entry into the United States — supposedly to protect public health. Biden continued to implement that policy for years, even without the flimsy public health justification.

The bipartisan Senate border bill Biden recently endorsed includes funding for a border wall he once promised not to fund — along with new restrictions on asylum and a measure that would authorize the president to shut the border down completely. Biden is also considering using the same authority the Trump administration invoked in its Muslim ban to restrict asylum access.

A few weeks ago, Biden and Trump separately visited the U.S.-Mexico border. Instead of proposing actual solutions to support our immigration system, Biden uplifted the failed Senate bill — and even went so far as to invite Trump to “join him” in working to it.

“Immigration is an Act of Love,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream / Dreamland v.3 / IbisPaint

During his State of the Union address in March, Biden had the opportunity to distinguish himself from Trump. Instead, his speech demonstrated a strong disconnect between his rhetoric and actions.

Biden said he would not demonize immigrants, but in the same speech used the offensive term “illegal immigrant.” No human being is “illegal.” Continuing to echo that language is dehumanizing and puts immigrant communities at risk of violence. (Biden later said he regretted using the term, but did not apologize for using it.)

Biden said he would not separate families, but his current and proposed immigration policies have separated and continue to separate families. He said he would not ban people from the country because of their faith, but his proposed action would make asylum harder for nearly everyone regardless of their faith.

Invoking his Irish heritage, Biden has alluded to the Great Famine in Ireland to sympathize with immigrants looking for a better life in the United States. But families seeking shelter today from similar hardship would have extreme difficulty getting into the country under the policies he wants to implement.

Biden once understood that punitive measures were not going to make either immigrants or U.S. citizens safer, or make our immigration system more orderly. He understood that we’d need to create pathways to legislation and citizenship, honor our responsibility to offer refuge to asylum seekers, and live up to our American values.

If Biden’s sincere about finding real solutions, he needs to remember those commitments. It’s time to stop playing politics with immigrants’ lives.

Otherwords.com

Juan Carlos Gomez is a senior policy analyst on immigration at the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP.org). This op-ed was adapted from a longer version at CLASP.org and distributed for syndication by OtherWords.org.

( Tomdispatch.com ) – On September 23rd, at about 2:30 a.m., a Border Patrol surveillance camera captured two people crossing the international boundary between Mexico and the United States on the outskirts of Nogales, Arizona. A Border Patrol vehicle arrived quickly, but not before one of them had fled back into Mexico. When an armed agent stepped out, dressed in a forest-green uniform, he found a 16-year-old girl from Mexico softly crying, while holding her month-old baby swaddled in a blanket.

The agent commanded her to get in the vehicle. As they then drove to the Nogales Border Patrol station, the girl, he later reported, tried to speak to him in Spanish through the security partition that separated them. Her tiny daughter, she was telling him, was in distress. Cameras showed that the vehicle stopped for all of 10 seconds before continuing. The agent later claimed he couldn’t understand what she was saying and that he wanted to find a fluent Spanish speaker at the station. He didn’t realize, he insisted, that the infant was struggling to breathe, though the child soon died.

This hellish story of suffering at our border is but one of hundreds of similar tales of horror from 2023. They illustrate a fundamental truth about that border: it neither is, nor ever was, an “open” one in the Biden years, nor does the president faintly have an open-border policy, though prepare yourself to hear otherwise — over and over again — in Trumpublican campaign ads next year. They’ll repeat what party officials are already saying all too repetitively: that “President Biden’s radical open borders policies” have created “the worst border crisis in American history.” (While those are the exact words of House Oversight Committee chair James Comer, similar sentiments are already being offered by countless members of the GOP.)

Comer’s claim is, of course, no less predictable than the hardships migrants like that girl are suffering as they try to reach this country. While such border narratives traffic in the unreal, what is real either isn’t effectively reported or gets lost amid all the politically motivated noise. Loud fantasies are expansively covered, while life-and-death stories, like those of that infant and her mother, are seldom reported and, if they are, quickly disappear.

Barely a week before that 16 year old was desperately trying to communicate to the agent in Spanish, the United Nations International Organization for Migration (IOM) labeled the U.S.-Mexico border the world’s “deadliest migration land route.” In 2022, a record 853 remains of dead border crossers were recovered (and this is the U.S. Border Patrol’s figure, which is even higher than the IOM’s), dwarfing the record of 568 set the previous year. Such numbers, the IOM stresses, are known to be distinct undercounts, leaving all too many families pining for lost loved ones.

But those border fatalities weren’t the only record breaker. Another was confirmed just a week after medical personnel at the Nogales station rushed to treat that girl’s baby. The number of border contracts issued to private industry also set a new record. Like those deaths, such contracts soared in fiscal year 2023 to $9.96 billion, instantly stripping the previous high, also set last year, of $7.5 billion.

And mind you, those gifts to industry were made from the highest budget ever (including in the Trump years) for border and immigration enforcement: $29.8 billion. So, don’t for a second think that the U.S. has an “open” border.  In fact, it’s never been more fortified or — something few even bother to mention — more profitable, if you happen to be part of the border-industrial complex.

Biden and the Border-Industrial Complex

If you count all the contracts for private industry from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since Joe Biden took office — for, that is, 2021, 2022, and 2023 — the number comes to $23.5 billion. And though you’d never guess it, given what we normally hear, that already beats Donald Trump’s total for his full four years in office, $20.9 billion. Or, to put the matter in a more historical perspective, private contracts for the Biden years already top the cumulative $22.5 billion spent in border and immigration enforcement budgets from 1975 to 1997. That’s 22 years if you weren’t counting.

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In other words, it’s essentially guaranteed that the Biden administration will break all records for paying border contractors. And, in truth, if it weren’t for the “open borders” political mania of the moment, this wouldn’t be a surprise at all. Remember, while running for president in 2020, Biden received three times more campaign contributions than Trump from members of the top companies in the border industry. (The Donald talked a good game, of course, and received his share of the industry pie over the years, but that same border-industrial complex was right if it thought Biden would all too literally pay off for them.)

And keep in mind as well that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas represented some of the top border companies like Leidos and Northrop Grumman at a private law firm (where he earned $3.31 million) before joining the Biden administration. While the president has certainly traded in the hostile rhetoric associated with the bombastic Trump for a far more sterile and bureaucratic language, while adding in a healthy dose of the “humane,” budgets and private-sector contracts tell an all-too-familiar story in which the border-enforcement apparatus only continues to grow ever larger, regardless of who’s president.

As 2023 nears its end, there have simply never been as many opportunities to make a killing (figuratively as well as literally) by surveilling, arresting, caging, and expelling people from this country. In 2023, there were 8,033 such opportunities — and I’m speaking here about contracts in play — or about 22 contracts a day.

Among this year’s top border companies is Classic Air Charter, a former CIA contractor that is now getting $793 million to provide flights expelling people from the United States. Since Biden took office, deportation flights for Immigration and Customs Enforcement Air Operations have increased, as have the number of people detained, while private prison companies like CoreCivic and Geo Group continue to receive plenty of contracts to lock up migrants.

Among border contract stand-outs, Fisher Sand and Gravel was recently awarded $259.3 million for “border infrastructure,” presumably the same sort of border wall construction it did in the Trump years (for which it received $2 billion in contracts). That company also got one from the scandal-ridden, Steve-Bannon-led “We Build the Wall,” a private outfit that solicited donations to construct portions of Trump’s wall. And, mind you, that September contract for border infrastructure came just before the Biden administration announced that it would waive 26 laws protecting people and the planet, including the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act, to put up a new section of border wall in Starr County, Texas.

In other words, just a glance at 2023 border contracts suggests that more walls, detention centers, and expulsion flights are coming. And don’t forget military monoliths like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman that also command hefty contracts to maintain CBP’s fixed-wing aircraft; or San Diego-based General Atomics that continues to make money off the Predator B unmanned drones it began selling to CBP in the early 2000s. No wonder some people think our borderlands are under military occupation.

In short (or long), that list of contracts speaks to anything but a “radical open-border policy.” Funds are being handed out for “unaccompanied alien children and family units transportation,” data centers, medical staffing services, infrastructure construction (lots of it), “soft-sided facilities” (meaning tent detention camps), surveillance system upgrades, software support, “travelers processing vetting software,” a “low energy non-intrusive inspection system” (whatever that may mean), detention centers, radios, data and analytical support services, guard and transport services — the list only goes on and on and on. Reading through it, one gets the impression that the border and immigration enforcement regime is its own civilization, with its own infrastructure and ever more expensive rhyme and reason.

And that fortification process is only poised to become yet more intensive. In October, buried in an emergency supplemental funding request addressing “key national security priorities” (included military assistance to Ukraine and Israel), the Biden administration included a whopping $14 billion in supplemental funding for that border and immigration apparatus. Added to a 2024 budget, which, at $28.2 billion, represented a slight decrease from 2023, if passed by Congress, that addition will further “bolster our nation’s border enforcement,” paving the way for an even more profitable 2024 for those border companies and, if that account of the mother and her baby is any indication, more suffering and death.

The “Radical Open Borders Policy” Does Not Exist

Near where that 16-year-old mother had crossed into the United States stood a Remote Video Surveillance System, a tower that the Border Patrol possessed courtesy of the military monolith General Dynamics.

Keep in mind that there was a reason that mother and daughter crossed in such grim terrain, near but not into the city of Nogales. Thanks to those hundreds of billions of dollars spent building up the “infrastructure” of border enforcement year after year after year, it’s become essentially impossible for migrants to cross directly into most border cities, forcing them out to the desert or to the sea and to far greater personal danger.

Since 2008 (as far back as you can see contract records at USAspending.gov), CBP and ICE have issued 115,484 contracts worth $68.7 billion, while their cumulative budgets since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002 add up to about $400 billion. If Representative Comer’s investigative team went to the city of Nogales to investigate Biden’s “radical open borders policy,” they could walk right up to a 20-foot-high border wall draped from top to bottom with rows of coiling razor wire. There, they might even see shreds from clothes caught in their barbs and imagine that people were still crossing at that spot (though few are anymore).

They would also immediately see green-striped Border Patrol vehicles like the one that picked up that mother and infant “sitting on their Xs” (meaning in stationary position) right up against the border. They’ve been doing so since the deterrence strategy was first officially implemented 30 years ago. If you want to enter this country unauthorized, in other words, you’re likely to have to risk your life.

And so, to return to where I began, a little after 3 a.m., the agent, young woman, and baby arrived at the Nogales Border Patrol station. Another agent spoke with the mother and quickly escorted her and her child to the medical screening area. According to the mother, her daughter “was not breathing and almost looked dead.” Medical personnel rapidly began resuscitation efforts, using an automated external defibrator, but sadly to no avail.

That infant joined the hundreds of human beings who perished crossing the border this year, a number still being tallied, but that, according to the Washington Office on Latin America, had hit about 650 in August.

And remember what planet we’re now on: this summer, relentless, record-breaking heat was the reality in the Southwestern U.S. (At one point, Phoenix, Arizona, had a record-breaking 31 consecutive days above 110 degrees and hit that temperature on a record 55 days in all.) The impact of such heat, only likely to increase in the years to come, on border-crossers remains to be determined, but migrant deaths in the Border Patrol’s El Paso, Texas, sector recently reached 148, more than doubling from the year before.

Consider this amid all the Republican open-border charges: 1,421 remains of dead people were recovered along the border during Biden’s first two years in office, higher in other words than the 1,133 during Trump’s full four years. Imagine the national news stories, if the remains of nearly 1,500 hikers had been found in the Southwest during a two-year period (and many more had simply disappeared). But for migrants in those ever more profitable, ever deadlier borderlands, mum’s the word. 

The details of that young mother’s desert border crossing are sparse. I don’t know how long she had been there, who the other person she was with might have been, if she had ever before tried to cross, where in Mexico she was from (though she was a Mexican citizen), or why she was leaving. According to Border Patrol interviewers, she had been with a group of migrants, but when she saw her baby laboring to breathe, she crossed ahead of them.

Once CBP’s medical staff realized the infant was in distress, they worked fast, but it was too late. The child died like 10,400 other migrants, if you count deaths from 1994-2022, according to sociologist and border scholar Timothy Dunn, who stresses that “many, many more were never found.”

With such figures in mind, it should become more difficult to ignore a simple reality: that the all-too-profitable border apparatus is designed to make people suffer and let some die. It may, in fact, be the world’s deadliest land border. That, however, is a “crisis” you’re not likely to hear much, if anything, about over the next year, even as candidates, officials, and congressional representatives like Comer continue to insist that we’re facing the “worst border crisis in American history” and a disastrously “open” border.

Copyright 2023 Todd Miller

Via Tomdispatch.com

( Georgia Recorder ) – WASHINGTON —  Two years ago, Farzana Jamalzada and her husband made the difficult decision to separately flee Afghanistan, after U.S. troops withdrew from the country and the Taliban took over.

It took days for the couple to be reunited at an airport in Qatar, where Jamalzada would show people a picture of her husband on her phone, asking them if they had seen him.

Once reunited, they were settled into the U.S. through the Biden administration’s humanitarian parole program for Afghans that extended protections for two years, allowing them to work and live in the U.S. Because Jamalzada worked for the U.S. government in Afghanistan, she was able to apply for a Special Immigrant Visa, which is available to those who were translators, interpreters or professionals employed by or on behalf of the U.S. government in Afghanistan or Iraq.

“It has been two years and every day we are in an uncertain situation,” she said in an interview with States Newsroom. “It is very frustrating.”

Legislation in Congress known as the Afghan Adjustment Act would allow Afghan refugees to apply for permanent legal residency after undergoing additional vetting, but it’s failed to advance. Without congressional action on a pathway to citizenship, most of the more than 76,000 Afghan refugees who came to the U.S. after the Taliban takeover are stuck in legal limbo.

The humanitarian program under which they arrived in the U.S., known as Operation Allies Welcome, does not provide a pathway to citizenship. But Afghans enrolled can apply for asylum, and those who qualify can apply for a Special Immigrant Visa. Claims for asylum and the Special Immigrant Visa have a major backlog.

“For most Afghans, they’re in this kind of limbo status and waiting to see,” said Julia Gelatt, the associate director of the Migration Policy Institute’s U.S. immigration policy program.

Jamalzada and her husband, now settled in New York City, have a hearing for their green cards scheduled for Sept. 12, but their work authorization expires at the end of August. The two-week gap means neither will be legally allowed to work in the U.S., risking termination from their jobs.

“You don’t have peace of mind,” she said. “Being away from your country, your family, you’re alone in a very strange world, and yet you don’t have that support,” she said, referring to permanent protections in the U.S.

Jamalzada, now 27, said she prays that either her and her husband’s work visas are reauthorized, or that Congress passes the Afghan Adjustment Act.

For 20 years, the U.S. government relied on Afghans to help the government and military following the 2001 invasion. Afghans worked as interpreters and helped run aid programs, such as Jamalzada, who worked on women’s empowerment projects with the United States Agency for International Development and at the Afghan presidential palace.

“Keep your promise and support the people who stood on your side and helped you,” she said.

U.S. Marine Corps Gen. Frank McKenzie, the commander of U.S. Central Command, prepares to depart Hamid Karzai International Airport, Afghanistan on August 17, 2021 accompanied by Afghan civilians seeking to exit the country following the Taliban takeover of Kabul. (U.S. Navy photo by Capt. William Urban). Courtesy of Centcom.

Parole set to expire

Operation Allies Welcome evacuated and paroled 76,200 Afghans from August 2021 to September 2022.  A majority settled in areas with large military bases such as Texas, California, Maryland, Virginia, Washington and New York.

But two years after the fall of Kabul, only a fraction — fewer than 10%  — in the humanitarian parole program have secured permanent protections, through either asylum or the Special Immigrant Visa, said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, the president of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. Her organization has helped settle more than 14,000 Afghans in the U.S.

“One of the biggest issues, I think, that remains uncertain is whether they will be allowed to remain permanently, and that relates to the Afghan Adjustment Act,” she said.

While those who worked for the U.S. government can apply for the Special Immigrant Visa program, many Afghans had to flee the country without the proper documentation needed to show their employment history.

“Part of that was because if they had the documentation on them, and were caught by the Taliban, that could be a death sentence,” O’Mara Vignarajah said.

O’Mara Vignarajah added that other Afghans applied for refugee status in other countries through Operation Allies Welcome and are waiting to be resettled in the U.S.

“The grim reality is that they’re likely waiting for years,” she said.

Laila Ayub, an immigration attorney and co-director of Project Afghan Network for Advocacy and Resources, said many Afghans have had no choice but to try to find a way into the U.S., even while they are waiting for their parole to be accepted by Operation Allies Welcome.

“We increasingly have been assisting people who have made a very long and difficult journey to the Southern border,” she said.

U.S. border agents apprehended more than 2,100 Afghans last year.

Grassley blocks resettlement plan

The closest Congress came to providing a quick pathway to citizenship for Afghans was last year, through the Afghan Adjustment Act, when Democrats controlled the House and Senate. However, those efforts were blocked by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, and the bipartisan proposal was not included in an omnibus spending bill.

Grassley objected to the security and vetting processes for those Afghans.

He, along with several Senate Republicans, now are backing another bill by GOP Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, known as the Ensuring American Security and Protecting Afghan Allies Act.

That bill would apply to those Afghans who were evacuated and who are ineligible for an immigration status that leads to a green card for citizenship. Those evacuees would be eligible for a four-year conditional resident status, to allow for vetting, and, upon successful completion, would become green card holders.

“The Biden Administration’s disastrous departure from Afghanistan caused a chaotic migration from the region, and our government repeatedly failed to thoroughly evaluate evacuees arriving in the United States,” Grassley said in a statement. “This bill restores order to the system by ensuring Afghan evacuees are able to assimilate while preserving American security and better supporting those who provided direct support to the United States military.”

However, the bill would limit the president’s authority to establish humanitarian parole programs, which the Biden administration has used as part of its immigration policy. It’s designated parole programs for nationals of Ukraine, Nicaragua, Haiti, Cuba and Venezuela.

The Cotton bill “is definitely throwing a wrench” in gaining support for the Afghan Adjustment Act, said Jennie Murray, president and CEO of the National Immigration Forum.

“We have used (humanitarian parole) several times in U.S. history across party lines, different presidents have used it, and it’s an important tool that we have to be able to use at a moment like World War II or the Cuban missile crisis,” she said. “It’s something that presidents have to be able to use, and so we’re very worried about that competitive legislation.”

Murray helped out evacuation efforts for Afghans when she worked for Upwardly Global, where she worked to put tougher a workforce plan for those Afghans arriving in the U.S.

She said a potential last shot at getting permanent protections for Afghans is through the National Defense Authorization Act, an annual must-pass defense policy measure.

“They cannot go back to Afghanistan,” she said. “They cannot go back to the Taliban-led state because they partnered with us.”

The NDAA does not currently include any provisions for a pathway to citizenship for those Afghans, but Murray notes that the measure is still in conference between the House and the Senate.

When the House passed its version of the NDAA, a bipartisan group of lawmakers reintroduced the Afghan Adjustment Act in the Senate and in the House.

Democratic U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota sponsored the bill in the Senate and Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa sponsored the bill in the House.

 

Ariana Figueroa

Ariana covers the nation’s capital for States Newsroom. Her areas of coverage include politics and policy, lobbying, elections and campaign finance.

Published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Via Georgia Recorder

( Tomdispatch.com ) – On May 11th, I was with a group of people at the bottom of the Paso del Norte bridge in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Suddenly, I realized that I didn’t have the small change needed to cross the bridge and return to El Paso, Texas, where I was attending the 16th annual Border Security Expo. Worse yet, this was just three hours before Title 42, the pandemic-era rapid-expulsion border policy instituted by the Trump administration, was set to expire. The media was already in overdrive on the subject, producing apocalyptic scenarios like one in the New York Post reporting that “hordes” of “illegals” were on their way toward the border.

While I searched for those coins, a woman approached me, dug 35 cents out of a small purse — precisely what it cost! — and handed the change to me. She then did so for the others in our group. When I pulled a 20-peso bill from my wallet to repay her, she kept her fist clenched and wouldn’t accept the money.

Having lived, reported, and traveled in Latin America for more than two decades, such generosity didn’t entirely surprise me, though it did contradict so much of the media-generated hype about what was going on at this historic border moment. Since Joe Biden took office in 2021, the pressure on his administration to rescind Trump’s Title 42 had only grown. Now, it was finally going to happen — and hell was on the horizon.

But at that expo in El Paso that brought together top brass from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), its border and immigration enforcement agencies, and private industry, I was learning that preparations for such a shift had been underway for years and — don’t be shocked! — the corporations attending planned to profit from it in a big-time fashion.

Seeing the phase-out of Title 42 through the lens of a growing border-industrial complex proved grimly illuminating. Border officials and industry representatives continued to insist that just on the other side of the border was a world of “cartels,” “adversaries,” and “criminals,” including, undoubtedly, this woman forcing change on me. By then, I had heard all too many warnings that, were the United States to let its guard down, however briefly, there would be an infernal “border surge.”

As I later stood in the halls of that expo, however, I became aware of another type of surge not being discussed either there or in the media. And I’m not just thinking about the extra members of the National Guard and other forces the Biden administration and Texas Governor Greg Abbott only recently sent to that very border. What I have in mind is the surge of ever higher budgets and record numbers of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contracts guaranteed to ensure that those borderlands will remain one of the most militarized and surveilled places on planet Earth.

Robo-Dogs at the Expo

Earlier that day, I found myself standing in front of the Ghost Robotics booth. There sat a vendor and, in front of him, a chrome-colored robotic dog on a puke-green carpet. Behind him, a large sign said: “Robots that Feel the World.” He was explaining to prospective customers that the robo-dog could run at a pace of up to nine miles an hour. A vendor in the adjacent booth, Persistent Systems, that claimed to connect “soldiers, sensors, unmanned systems, and cameras in a dynamic network,” was not impressed. (Those, by the way, were but two of nearly 200 companies in that large exhibition hall.). He said, “I’ll take my dog any day,” meaning his living and breathing dog.

The Ghost Robotics vendor responded earnestly, “We are not going to replace dogs!”

All around us, well-dressed corporate types, uniformed Border Patrol agents, and other police officials wandered the aisles, looking at retractable tower masts, taser demonstrations, Glock guns, and facial recognition and iris scanners, part of a border industry that’s been in a state of constant growth for two decades.

Honestly, walking through that exhibition hall was like being in a science-fiction novel that had come to life or perhaps a crystal ball for our border future. The Israel Aerospace Industries banner hovered on the rafters praising a company “Where Courage Meets Technology.” On the ground, the company highlighted its MegaPop high-powered surveillance camera.

The slogan of Tower Solutions, which sells body armor, was more typically down to earth (or do I mean sky-high?): “Speed, Strength, Stability, Elevated.” Armored Republic, which also sells body armor, offered religious fervor in a banner that said: “In a Republic There’s No King but Christ.” But Anduril, the new border darling — 11 contracts with CBP since 2018 — may have caught the enforcement future most perfectly with its “Autonomy for Border Security” banner. Autonomous sentry towers, autonomous drones, and autonomous robotic dogs were to be the true post-Title 42 future, and the exhibition hall was a crystal ball for such a time to come.

Contemplating the Ghost Robotic guy’s response, the Persistent Systems vendor then pointed at the robo-dog and said, “You can weaponize those things and they can go into barracks and blow a motherfucker’s face off.”

The Ghost Robotics vendor responded, “We’re already doing that.” Did he mean weaponizing robo-dogs or blowing a person’s face off? I had no idea.

The Budget Surge

A few hours earlier, DHS Chief Information Officer Eric Hysen assured industry officials that his agency had the “largest budget ever enacted” in its 20-year history. Formerly a Silicon Valley software engineer and program organizer for Google, he had arrived in Washington in 2014 to work in the Obama White House. The next year, he created a Digital Services Team at DHS and “never looked back.” His technocratic language had no Trumpian bluster or hyperbole. It was grounded in numbers and budgets with a bit of social justice spun in (including a mention of a program to hire more women and assurances that, no matter the invasive surveillance technology DHS was developing, privacy issues were taken quite seriously by the department).  

At $29.8 billion, the CBP/ICE portion of the DHS budget he praised was not just the highest ever but a $3 billion jump above 2022, including $2.7 billion for “new acquirements in our southwestern border.” In other words, the coming surge at the border was distinctly budgetary.

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For context, when Donald Trump took office in 2017 his CBP/ICE budget was $21.2 billion. By 2020, it had gone up to $25.4 billion. In other words, it took him four years to do what the Biden administration essentially did in one. The last time there had been such a jump was from $9.4 billion in 2005 to $12.4 billion in 2007, including funding for huge projects like the Secure Fence Act that built nearly 650 miles of walls and barriers, SBInet which aimed to build a virtual wall at the border (with special thanks to the Boeing Corporation), and the largest hiring surge ever undertaken by the Border Patrol — 8,000 agents in three years.

But if that’s what $3 billion meant in 2005-2007, what does it mean in 2023 and beyond? Gone was the Trump-era bravado about that “big, beautiful wall.” Hysen’s focus was on the Department of Homeland Security’s launching of an Artificial Intelligence Taskforce. A technocrat, Hysen spoke of harnessing “the power of AI to transform the department’s mission,” assuring the industry audience that “I follow technology very closely and I am more excited by the developments of AI this year than I have been about any technology since the first smartphones.”

That robo-dog in front of me caught the state of the border in 2023 and the trends that went with it perfectly. It could, after all, be controlled by an agent up to 33 miles away, according to the vendor, and apparently could even — thank you, AI — make decisions on its own.

The vendor showed me a video of just how such a dog would work if it were armed. It would use AI technology to find human forms. A red box would form around any human it detects on a tablet screen held by an agent. In other words, I asked, can the dog think?

I had in mind the way Bing’s Chatbox, the AI-powered search engine from Microsoft, had so infamously professed its love for New York Times reporter Kevin Roose. A human, using an Xbox-like controller, the vendor told me, will be able to target a specific person among those the dog detects. “But,” he reassured me, “it’s a human who ultimately pulls the trigger.”

The Title 42 Surge

In Mexico, when I walked to a spot where the Rio Grande flowed between the two countries, I ran into a small group of migrants camped out at the side of the road. Near them was a fire filled with charred wood over which a pot was cooking. A pregnant Colombian woman told me they were providing food to other migrants passing by. “Oh,” I asked, “so you sell food?” No, she responded, they gave it away for free. Before they had been camped out for months near the immigration detention center in Ciudad Juárez where a devastating fire in March killed 40 people. Now, they had moved closer to the border. And they were still waiting, still hoping to file applications for asylum themselves.

Behind where they sat, I could see the 20-foot border wall with coiling razor wire on top. There was nothing new about a hyper-militarized border here. After all, the El Paso build-up had begun 30 years ago with Operation Hold the Line in 1993. A desert camo Humvee sat below the wall on the U.S. side and a couple of figures (Border Patrol? National Guard?) stood at the edge of the Rio Grande shouting to a Mexican federal police agent on the other side.

The clock for the supposed Title 42 Armageddon was ticking down as I then crossed the bridge back to El Paso, where more barriers of razor wire had only recently been emplaced. There was also a slew of blue-uniformed CBP agents and several jeeps carrying camouflaged members of border units. Everyone was heavily armed as if about to go into battle.  

At the Border Security Expo, Hysen pointed out that fear of a Title 42 surge had resulted in an even more fortified border, hard as that might be to imagine. Fifteen hundred National Guard troops had been added to the 2,500 already there, along with 2,000 extra private security personnel, and more than 1,000 volunteers from other agencies. Basically, he insisted, they had everything more than under control, whatever the media was saying.

At another panel entitled “State of the Border,” Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz joked that he would prefer discussing his golf game, only reinforcing that by adding, “As all of America and the political pundits and the reporters run around and say when we lose Title 42 the sky is going to fall, it ain’t gonna fall. We will process people as we normally have during my 32-year career.”

As Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas similarly pointed out, Title 8 authority, the pre-Title 42 enforcement program to which DHS will now return, “carries stiff consequences for irregular migration, including at least a five-year ban on reentry and potential criminal prosecution for repeated attempts to cross unlawfully.” In addition, the Biden administration expects to aggressively expand the process, including implementing a plan to ramp up enforcement far south of the border in the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama. It’s even possible that U.S. troops will be deployed there for the job. And in a repetitive note at that expo, American officials indicated in a variety of ways that help would, above all, be needed from the corporate world.

Biden Is Already Out-Trumping Trump at the Border

Since the Department of Homeland Security was established 20 years ago, Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have given private companies 113,276 contracts (yes, you read that right!), or on average 5,664 contracts annually, 16 per day. In the 15 years since 2008, the money spent on such contracts has amounted to $72.6 billion dollars and such figures have only been on the rise since Joe Biden entered the White House.

The 4,465 contracts CBP and ICE have agreed to so far this year (at a price of $4.1 billion) put them on pace to surpass 2022’s record-setting $7.5 billion. In 2022, CBP and ICE offered 9,909 contracts, an average of 27 per day, all of which means the Biden administration is likely to be the largest border-enforcement contractor ever.

Only recently, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman suggested that President Biden should “out-Trump Trump” and  “do everything possible to secure the border like never before — more walls, more fences, more barriers, more troops, the 82nd Airborne — whatever it takes. Make Democrats own border security.” What Friedman apparently didn’t realize was that Biden had already taken just that border path.  

From his first days in office, the president had stressed technology over wall-building and (not surprisingly) received three times more campaign contributions from top companies in the border industry than Trump did in 2020. And unlike the former president’s Title 42, this policy of contracts, campaign contributions, and lobbying that will push for endlessly higher border budgets is not set to expire.  Ever.

At the Edge of Everything — and Nothing At All

On the morning of May 12th, I was with border scholar Gabriella Sanchez at the very spot where the borders of Texas, New Mexico, and Chihuahua meet near El Paso. Title 42 had expired the night before and I asked her what she thought. She responded that she considered this the border norm: we’re regularly told something momentous and possibly terrible is going to happen and then nothing much happens at all.

And she was right, the predicted “surge” of migrants crossing the border actually decreased — and yet, in some sense, everything keeps happening in ways that only seem grimmer. Perhaps 100 yards from where we were standing, in fact, we soon noticed a lone man cross the international boundary and walk into the United States as if he were taking a morning stroll. Thirty seconds later, a truck sped past us kicking up gravel. For a moment, I thought it was just a coincidence, since it wasn’t an official Border Patrol vehicle.

Then, I noted an insignia on its side that included the U.S. and Mexican flags. The truck came to a skidding stop by the man. A rotund figure in a gray uniform jumped out and ran toward him while he raised his hands. Just then, a green-striped Border Patrol van also pulled up. I was surprised — though after that Border Security Expo I shouldn’t have been — when I realized that the initial arrest was being made by someone seemingly from a private security firm. (Remember, Hysen said that an extra 2,000 private security agents had been hired for the “surge.”)

In truth, that scene couldn’t have been more banal. You might have seen it on any May 12th in these years. That banality, by the way, included a sustained violence that’s intrinsically part of the modern border system, as geographer Reece Jones argues in his book Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move. In the days following Title 42’s demise, an eight-year-old Honduran girl died in Border Patrol custody and a Tohono O’odham man was shot and killed by the Border Patrol. In April, 11 remains of dead border crossers were also recovered in Arizona’s Pima County desert alone (where it’s impossible to carry enough water for such a long trek).

In the wake of Donald Trump, everything on the border has officially changed, yet nothing has really changed. Nothing of note is happening, even as everything happens. And as Hysen said at that border expo meeting, big as the record 2023 border budget may be, in 2024 it’s likely to go “even further” into the stratosphere.

Put another way, at the border, we are eternally at the edge of everything — and nothing at all.

Copyright 2023 Todd Miller

Via Tomdispatch.com

Human beings fleeing persecution are not a “flood” or “surge.” And it’s not “illegal” when they cross the border to seek asylum.

( Otherwords.org ) – Last year, my client Susan called me to discuss her immigration case.

During our conversation she referenced the news that immigrants were being bused from the southern border to cities in the North, often under false promises, only to be left stranded in an unknown city.

In confusion and fear, Susan asked me: “Why do they hate us so much?”

While I couldn’t answer Susan’s question, her underlying concern highlights a startling escalation of public aggression against migrants over the past year.

There seems to be a growing “us” versus “them” mentality towards immigrants. This divisive language serves no purpose other than to divide our country, undermine the legal right to seek asylum in the United States, and cultivate a fear of the most vulnerable.

A clear example is showcased in recent media coverage of northbound migration across the U.S.-Mexico border. Many outlets describe recent migration through the Americas as a “flood,” “influx,” “wave,” or “surge”— language that reinforces the notion that migration is akin to an imminent, uncontrollable, and destructive natural disaster.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

These descriptions are accompanied by sensational photographs and videos of long lines of brown and Black immigrants wading across the Rio Grande, crowding along the border wall, or boarding Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) vehicles to be transported to detention.

Woven into this framing is the near-constant use of the term “illegal” or “unlawful” to describe unauthorized crossings. As an advocate for immigrant survivors of domestic violence, sexual violence, and trafficking, I’m alarmed by the use of this language to describe a migrant’s attempt to survive.

Moreover, it’s often simply incorrect. A noncitizen who has a well-founded fear of persecution in the country from which they’ve fled has a legal right — protected under both U.S. and international law — to enter the United States to seek asylum.

When mainstream media wield the term “illegal” as though it were synonymous with “unauthorized,” they misinform readers and falsely paint asylum seekers as criminals.

Worse still, they encourage politicians who call immigrants themselves “illegals,” a deeply dehumanizing term. And the more dehumanizing language we use, the more likely it is that we will see immigrants as the “other” to justify cruel immigration policies.

We must retire the use of this inflammatory rhetoric, which distracts from real solutions that would actually serve survivors arriving at our borders.

Migrants expelled back to their home countries are at grave risk of severe harm or death at the hands of their persecutors. Those forced to remain in Mexico as they await entry to the United States are increasingly vulnerable to organized crime or abusive and dangerous conditions in detention.

And those who have no choice but to desperately navigate dangerous routes to the United States to avoid apprehension are increasingly dying by dehydration, falling from cliffs, and drowning in rivers.

The words we use in everyday discourse mean something — they can spell out life or death for those among us who are most vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Now more than ever, I’d urge the public and the media to retire the use of sensationalizing, stigmatizing, and misleading imagery and rhetoric surrounding immigration.

Now is the time to apply accuracy and humanity in our depictions of migrants. Let’s not repeat the errors of our past.

 

Daniella Prieshoff

Daniella Prieshoff is a Senior Supervising Attorney at the Tahirih Justice Center, a nonprofit that supports immigrant survivors of gender-based violence. She thanks Phoebe Quinteros for her contributions to the research for this piece.

Otherwords.org

( Tomdispatch.com ) – It’s not often that conservative lobbyists beat the drum for increased environmental oversight and regulation. But that’s what happened this month when the far-right Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), through its legal arm, filed a brief in federal court demanding that the Department of Homeland Security conduct an extensive environmental impact study examining, of all things, immigration policy.

In a press release, the group laid out its reasoning: “Clearly, DHS desperately wants to avoid the impossible task of explaining, in detail, why adding millions of illegal aliens to our population does not harm the environment, or why the harm it does cause is somehow ‘worth it.’”

Ostensibly green rationales for ever harsher immigration policies are hardly a new phenomenon. U.S. and European anti-immigrant movements have long used the real need for environmental protection as an excuse for demanding ever harsher treatment of immigrants. Now, with drought, flooding, storms, and other manifestations of climate disruption swelling the ranks of people seeking refuge outside their home countries, far-rightists are dialing up their evocations of nature to push ever greater cruelty toward immigrants.

The pervasive theme in such circles is that, in an already overpopulated America, more millions of dark-skinned immigrants, having supposedly wreaked ecological destruction in their own countries in the Global South, are now crossing our borders in ever larger numbers. They will, so the thinking goes, despoil this country’s environment, too — and the only way to stop them is by using ever more violent means. The extremists peddling such propaganda are coming to be known these days as “ecofascists.” Above all else, they insist, the United States must maintain white control over “our” country — you know, the lands that our ancestors stole from Native peoples who actually knew how to live in harmony with nature.

In the process, such white supremacists are, without the slightest sense of irony, increasingly adopting the language of environmentalism to push both grotesque anti-immigrant bigotry and a broader, genuinely unnerving far-right agenda.

A Crueler Shade of Green

In the past few years, ecofascism has broken into the mainstream news cycle several times, most notably in connection with a grim set of mass shootings.

Nineteen-year-old Payton Gendron, who pled guilty to murdering 10 Blacks in a Buffalo grocery store last year, explicitly called himself an ecofascist. In the manifesto he left behind, he wrote,

“For too long we have allowed the left to co-opt the environmentalist movement to serve their own needs. The left has controlled all discussion regarding environmental preservation whilst simultaneously presiding over the continued destruction of the natural environment itself through mass immigration and uncontrolled urbanization.”

Urbanization, you see, because you know what kind of people live in cities. (Wink, wink.)

Patrick Crusius, who killed 23 people in an El Paso Walmart in 2019, left behind a manifesto raising false alarms about a “Hispanic invasion.” He wrote: “The environment is getting worse by the year. Most of y’all are just too stubborn to change your lifestyle. So the next logical step is to decrease the number of people in America using resources. If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable.”

Both men drew inspiration from Brenton Tarrant, the white supremacist who, earlier in 2019, had murdered 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Tarrant wrote a manifesto in which he declared, “The invaders are the ones over-populating the world… Kill the invaders, kill the overpopulation and by doing so save the environment.”

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Florid rhetoric notwithstanding, those mass killers did not actually have ecological sustainability at the top of their minds. They just put a green veneer on their hatred of immigrants, an increasingly familiar tactic of the racist right. Philip Santoro, in a rant for the white nationalist publication American Renaissance in 2017, slathered on an early and especially rancid coat of green:

“The Left’s ‘green politics,’ combined with support for mass immigration and opposition to nuclear power, would mean a future of overcrowding, poverty, and the displacement of whites. When the Left tackles climate change, it wants to ‘save the planet’ — but apparently for someone else’s babies. The population explosion in the global south combined with climate change and liberal attitudes towards migration are the single greatest external threat to Western civilization.”

At the Global Network on Extremism and Technology, Frederike Wegener reported that, on social media, violent extremists increasingly “disguise racist and nativist ideas behind environmental concerns to lure in young people and environmental activists,” utilizing slogans like “Love Nature, Kill Non-Whites” and “Save Bees, Plant Trees, Shoot Refugees.” Creating an overwhelming sense of imminent ecological catastrophe, he wrote, can induce nonviolent, climate-conscious citizens to make common cause with violent nativists.

Deploying bees and trees as a cover for such right-wing policies has a long history in America. The growth of the anti-immigration movement over the past half-century in particular is widely credited to a Michigan ophthalmologist named John Tanton, who, as Paloma Quiroga wrote for Wellesley College’s Environmental Synthesis and Communications blog in 2021, “viewed overpopulation and immigration as a threat to the environment and to the future of white America — views that are explicitly ecofascist. In his efforts to thwart immigration, he ended up creating a vast loose-knit network of anti-immigration groups and lobbyists, now dubbed the Tanton network.” Since the 1980s, that network has managed to sabotage all attempts to develop humane federal immigration policies.

Today, the most powerful group in the network is the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the outfit pressuring the Department of Homeland Security on the supposed environmental impact of immigrants. On its website, FAIR dwells on the evils of population growth — and by that it means only the growth of “certain” populations:

“Currently, there are 326 million people residing in the U.S., so immigration alone will be responsible for an additional 78 million people over the course of just 40 years… Growth of the population at those levels are certain to impact both the quality of life for average Americans and the sustainability of the environment. The threat of overpopulation is not to our economic health, but also to the present and future quality of life and environmental sustainability… The progress the nation has made toward increased conservation and fuel and energy efficiency will continue to be eroded…”

Connecting anti-immigrant and racist ideas via population growth to environmental degradation is nothing new. The racism of the conservation movement’s founding fathers, including John Muir and John James Audubon, have been widely discussed in recent years. In the late 1990s, Tanton, at the time still a member of the Sierra Club, pushed for that venerable environmental organization to adopt an explicitly nativist position. That proposal was voted down, but only by a very narrow margin. In 2004, anti-immigrant members again tried to seize control of the organization — and once again they failed. In recent years, in fact, the Sierra Club has forcefully renounced its former toleration of nativist sentiment within its membership and has come to actively support immigrant rights.

Ecofascist arguments serve not only as an excuse for abusing immigrants, but are also being deployed by a broader, more violent range of far-right groups and movements on both sides of the Atlantic. Environmental and anti-industrial calls to action have been a staple of the leading U.S. neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer, along with several far-right groups, including The Base, the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division (rebooted as the National Socialist Order), and the Pine Tree Gang. Far-right political parties in France, Austria, and Germany have similarly espoused the merging of “ecological civilization” and “ecocentric nativism.”

Equal-Opportunity Collapse?

The ecofascists’ use of green rhetoric is, of course, wholly disingenuous. But frightening as well is the way similar impulses have crept into the edges of the actual environmental movement, most of which is still identified not just with the leftward reaches of American politics, but with nonviolence. Still, in a country filled to the brim with weaponry and displaying a growing urge for violence (of which ecofascism is such a painful example), even those genuinely encouraging the greening of the planet have, sadly enough, not proven completely immune to the urge to deploy such tactics.

Last October, I experienced this personally. I gave an online talk about the role that rationing could play in curbing ecological destruction. The audience, including members of several West Coast environmental groups, seemed quite receptive. So, I was shocked when, as the hour ended, the moderator wrapped by veering into distinctly weird territory. Resolving the ecological crisis, he suddenly suggested, might require us to consider the “value” of “authoritarianism,” or more specifically, of “green fascism, or maybe green ‘equitable’ fascism.” As the session had already spilled into overtime, there was no opportunity for me to consider, much less discuss, how such ideas might have infiltrated a green movement that had long been peaceable indeed.

Radical movements to achieve a green, equitable society have been around at least since the rise of groups like Earth First! in the 1980s. In more recent times, however, movements like the Earth Liberation Front advocated damaging or destroying industrial infrastructure as an essential step toward a more ecologically sound society. For the past decade, the Deep Green Resistance movement has gone even further, insisting that the goal of such sabotage should be the complete collapse of industrial society. Only a return to pre-industrial civilization, it maintains, will give the planet room to heal, while creating opportunities for us to develop autonomous, egalitarian societies that exploit neither our fellow humans, nor nature.

In the 2011 book Deep Green Resistance, movement authors Lierre Keith, Aric McBay, and Derrick Jensen similarly argued that civilization’s industrial foundation needed to be completely pulverized, sooner rather than later. Convinced that “the vast majority of the population will do nothing unless they are led, cajoled, or forced,” they urged that “those of us who care about the future of the planet have to dismantle the industrial energy infrastructure as rapidly as possible.”  Precipitous de-industrialization is necessary, they wrote, because so little time remains to prevent an ecological collapse complete enough to render the world unlivable for humanity. Therefore, “rapid collapse is ultimately good for humans — even if there is a die-off — because at least some people survive.” This is jarring stuff, to say the least, and it has rightly been subjected to withering criticism,

So far, the deep green resistance people have stuck to proselytizing and organizing, rather than any kind of real-world sabotage. On the political right, however, incidents of eco-infrastructure sabotage are indeed on the increase. Over the past year, for instance, there have been a rash of attacks on power grids nationwide by right-wing extremists, not environmentalists. A man and a woman arrested in February for planning to take down four power substations in the Baltimore area proved, not surprisingly, to espouse neo-Nazi views. And successful attacks on two North Carolina substations last December were also linked to neo-Nazism and white supremacy. In late 2022, the Department of Homeland Security warned that there had been a significant rise in online discussions among far-right elements focused on assaulting the power grid to trigger cascading blackouts across the country. That, they believed, could lead to a governmental collapse and so create openings for a fascist takeover. (In a country already featuring the Trumpublican Party, this should be unnerving, even if not exactly surprising.)

Hunter Walker, a reporter for Talking Points Memo, recently obtained a copy of an online magazine that advocated attacks on power substations and provided coaching to would-be saboteurs, while announcing, as if they were greens, “It is our belief that the techno-industrial system presents an absolute and urgent existential threat to all life on earth.”   

Walker managed to track down one of the authors who told him that their aim was indeed to motivate not the far right but “militant groups of educated anarchists.” As the author acknowledged, however, the far right is “far better armed” and better prepared for shooting out transformers “than the Left or post-Left.” That being the case, the manual’s author added, if the question was whether “I would accept assistance or ‘alliance’ with any far-right group, I would hesitate to say no. I would much rather turn the lights out and then fight them in the quiet dark afterwards.”

This raises a question: Might radical individuals or even groups at opposite ends of the political spectrum ever converge on the same violent direct-action tactics?

Brian Tokar is on the faculty and board of the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfield, Vermont, which offers courses on ecofascism. I asked him how much overlap he and his colleagues had noticed between violent, racist, ecofascist movements and nonviolent, anti-racist, radical environmental movements. Tokar responded, “I don’t think there’s a lot of overlap, but there’s certainly enough that it’s deeply disturbing.”

“This goes back,” he said, “to the… eighties when Dave Foreman and Edward Abbey [of the Earth First! movement] were saying a lot of disturbing things, including a lot of anti-immigrant stuff — especially Abbey, who was all about protecting the borders against people who, he said, would spread pollution. It was just blatantly racist… but there were also a lot of people who vocally challenged it from the beginning.”

“Fast forward to more recent times,” Tokar continued, “and my colleagues have documented stories of people who started out in leftist ecological circles and drifted over into an overtly ecological neo-fascist or neo-Nazi anti-immigrant kind of politics.” In fact, the ecofascists’ strategy, he added, “seems to be that if they can skim off a few people, especially people who have a following, they can shift the discussion in their direction.”

A Future in Danger

I feel confident in predicting that the ecofascists won’t manage to seize power by taking down the national electric grid. Still, by fueling human-rights abuses, racial hatred, and deadly violence, their toxic propaganda has made the United States a more perilous place to live if you weren’t born white and within its borders. By hijacking the message of ecological renewal and using it to persecute the powerless, they could, at a minimum, make it far more difficult for this country to act boldly in the future when it comes to the climate crisis and environmental justice. That’s why the message of such ecofascists has to be verbally shredded wherever and whenever they try to spread it.

 Copyright 2023 Stan Cox

Via Tomdispatch.com

Let us, as the intel people say, “walk the cat backwards” — ask a series of questions, each reaching further back in time and leading to some logical conclusions.

Santos is openly gay. He says he has a husband and wears a wedding band. Fine. But why then did he marry an American women in 2012 and stay married to her seven years, until 2019? If he were born in the U.S., he wouldn’t need a marriage of convenience. But if he were born in Brazil, he would. 

Is there any record of Santos and his wife actually cohabiting? Where did they live? Do friends and neighbors confirm that? The Immigration and Naturalization Service tries to guard against fake marriages by asking the American spouse detailed questions, such as the applicant’s toothpaste brand. Did the INS do this? 

After several years with a green card, holders may apply for naturalization. Did Santos? Or did he merely proclaim he was a U.S. citizen and nobody checked? Much could be cleared up if Santos merely showed the media and law enforcement his birth certificate. Why has he not done this? The listed hospital could be checked with a phone call. If it’s a U.S. birth certificate, end of story. But if it’s Brazilian, story is just beginning. Well, Republicans invented birtherism.

And what’s the story with Santos’s “wife”? Why has she never been interviewed? What, in fact, is her name? Did she receive any money from Santos? She seems to be making herself scarce. Why would she do that? Because if she participated in a “green-card marriage,” she committed fraud and could suffer fines and jail time along with the applicant. 

A green card issued under false pretenses is invalid. And using it to apply for naturalization is invalid. Therefore, any such naturalization and subsequent awarding of U.S. citizenship would be invalid. The applicant would remain a foreigner. 

Did New York’s third congressional district (on Long Island) elect a foreigner to Congress? Well, Brazil is a very important country and deserves representation on Capitol Hill.

The New York Times reports that Republican state leaders were early and amply warned about Santos’s fabrications but chose to remain silent. The investigators who discovered this either resigned or were fired. They could be called upon to testify. Non-disclosure agreements cannot be used to cover up wrongdoing. 

Instead, the New York GOP endorsed Santos. Repudiating this would have hugely embarrassed them. But the longer it went on, the bigger the embarrassment. Now it has national repercussions. It is likely that the major media are working on this story.

(Tomdispatch.com) – Almost anyone would agree that war is horrifying and peaceful countries should do their best to help its victims. The widespread eagerness to welcome fleeing Ukrainians after Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded their country last February is a heartening example of such aid. But behind that altruism lies an ugly truth: most of the countries embracing Ukrainians are simultaneously persecuting equally desperate refugees from elsewhere.

Such unequal mercy would be no surprise from nations like Ukraine’s neighbors Hungary and Poland, controlled by nationalist parties that have rarely welcomed anyone not white and Christian. However, the same thing is happening in Western Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia, and here in the United States, the very democracies sworn to protect those fleeing war and persecution and that, in the case of America, sometimes turned those people into refugees in the first place. Our Global War on Terror alone has displaced an estimated 37 million people since we invaded Afghanistan in 2001.

One of the worst examples of this unequal mercy is taking place in Greece, a major gateway to Western Europe for anyone fleeing the Middle East or Africa. Between February and mid-April of this year, some 21,000 Ukrainians made it to Greece — more in three months than the total number of asylum seekers who entered the country in all of 2021. There, the Ukrainians were instantly granted temporary protection status, giving them access to medical care and jobs, subsidized housing and food allowances, schooling for their children, and Greek language classes for adults.

Buy the Book

This is an admirable example of how all people who flee danger and war should be welcomed. But I’ve been visiting Greece for years now to research my new book, Map of Hope and Sorrow: Stories of Refugees Trapped in Greece, and I know a lot of refugees there who have found no such generosity. Most are Syrian, Afghan, or Iraqi, but some are Kurdish or Palestinian, while others come from African countries, including Cameroon, Eritrea, Gambia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and the Republic of Congo.

They, too, escaped war, violence, and other kinds of persecution. In fact, the Syrians, just like the Ukrainians, fled Putin’s bombs when he was helping Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, hold onto power. Yet unlike the Ukrainians, these refugees are forced to languish for years in inhumane, slum-like camps, while their children are denied schooling. They are routinely turned away from hospitals, doctors, or dentists, and are all too often treated with disrespect, even hatred, by landlords, employers, and regular citizens. That hurts. As my friend and co-author, the Syrian writer and refugee Eyad Awwadawnan, whom I first met in Greece, put it, “I think the world should do all it can for Ukrainian refugees, but we are getting a clear message from the Greek government that we are worth less than they are.”

Doomed to Helplessness

During my visits to Greece between 2018 and 2022, I witnessed many examples of its appalling treatment of refugees. At one point, in a camp on the Northern Aegean island of Samos, I found more than 3,000 people living in shipping containers or tents in and around an old military base, surrounded by piles of garbage swarming with rats. They had no potable water, the few toilets were broken, the food mostly inedible, and there was no security for women, children, LGBTQ+ people, or anyone else particularly vulnerable to bullying, assault, or rape. Thousands more asylum seekers were similarly trapped on other islands with nowhere to go and nothing to do, while yet others were locked up in Greek prisons for merely exercising their right to seek asylum. In our book, Eyad and I describe the way people are arrested and imprisoned simply for steering their boats to Greece, or for coming from the wrong country.

Since its New Democracy government took power in 2019, well into the anti-immigrant, Muslim-bashing administration of Donald Trump here in the United States, the Greek government has been ratcheting up its mistreatment of Middle Eastern and African refugees even further. One of its first acts was to evict everyone granted asylum from subsidized housing or camps, while also withdrawing all financial aid. In this way, they were flung into a homeless, jobless void — that is, into forced helplessness. Winning asylum is supposed to mean winning international protected status as a refugee, but in Greece it now means the opposite — getting no protection at all.

Then, in June 2021, just before the Taliban took over Afghanistan, the Greek Minister of Migration, Notis Mitarachi, announced that all new arrivals from Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Somalia, and Syria would be denied the chance to apply for asylum and deported to Turkey, which he deemed a “safe third country,” a legal term for a safe haven for asylum seekers. Yet as human rights groups have made clear, Turkey is anything but safe for those in flight from war or persecution. Not only does Turkey refuse to recognize Syrians as refugees, but it never signed onto the part of the U.N. 1951 Refugee Rights declaration banning refoulement, the term used for returning refugees to a country where they may be subjected to persecution. This means that Turkey can legally send refugees back to the nations they fled, no matter what dangers await them there.

Last April 16th, Greece upped its persecution even further by closing the housing it offers vulnerable people, such as victims of torture, trafficking, and rape, and sending them to live in camps where there is no security at all. 

None of these policies apply to Ukrainians.

At sea, matters are even worse. The Greek authorities and Frontex, Europe’s border and coast guard agency, have been pushing refugees back out to sea instead of rescuing them. They have left families and children abandoned on flimsy rafts or inflatable boats, or on tiny islands without shelter or food. During the pandemic, Greece and Frontex treated some 40,000 refugees this way, causing at least 2,000 to drown — abuse that’s been well-documented by human rights groups. Yet Greece’s immigration minister has denied that any of this is happening. 

No less shocking is the way Greece has criminalized the rescue of refugees at sea. Volunteers who go out to search for and rescue the capsized boats of desperate immigrants are being arrested and charged with human trafficking. Sara Mardini, a Syrian professional swimmer portrayed in Netflix’s new movie The Swimmers, is one of these. If convicted, she faces 20 years in prison.

Hard as it may be to grasp the idea of making it illegal to rescue drowning people, Greece is far from alone in engaging in such behavior. Just this month, Italy, Malta, and Cyprus banded together with that country to call for the European Union (EU) to take measures against civilian sea rescuers. Of course, the train drivers and airplane pilots who brought Ukrainians into the rest of Europe are never similarly targeted.

The Greek government has justified all this unequal mercy with chilling language, declaring Ukrainians “real refugees” and everyone else an “illegal migrant.” In just that spirit, last month, Greek authorities forced Afghans in a camp outside Athens to cede their housing to Ukrainians and instead live in filthy and derelict shipping containers. 

That government has long claimed that it is not at fault for treating refugees so badly because it lacks the money and personnel to handle so many of them. But the minute those 21,000 Ukrainians arrived, the same officials suddenly found themselves able to help after all.

Greece is not entirely to blame for such violations of international law, because many of them are underwritten by the EU, which has been pumping money into the country to keep refugees out of Western Europe since 2016. Recently, for example, the EU paid $152 million to the Greek government to build five remote prisons for asylum seekers. I saw the prototype for them on the island of Samos: Camp Zervou, a collection of white metal shipping containers on a bare patch of land in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a double layer of hurricane fences topped with barbed wire and surveilled by closed-circuit cameras. It is hot, bare, and hideous. Such prisons will not, of course, hold Ukrainians.

Breaking Hearts and Laws

Greece is hardly the only country meting out all this unequal treatment. The persecution of non-white refugees seems to be on the rise not just in countries with far-right governments, but in those previously known for their liberality. Along with this persecution, of course, goes the same sort of racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric Donald Trump (not to speak of the Republican Party as a whole) continues to use about those crossing our own border.

Take the United Kingdom, for example. The new Conservative Party Prime Minister Rishi Sunak just offered France $74 million to increase its border security by 40% with the goal of arresting more “illegal migrants” and smugglers to stop them from crossing the English Channel.  (An asylum seeker, by the way, is not an “illegal migrant.” The right to cross borders to seek asylum is enshrined in the 1951 Refugee Convention.) That same $74 million could have been put toward legal and humanitarian services for asylum seekers, helping them find safe ways to apply for protection in either France or the United Kingdom, and so depriving smugglers of business without throwing those refugees into even further danger.

Within France itself, while President Emmanuel Macron quarrels with the British over who is to blame for the rising number of refugees trying to cross the Channel, Jordan Bardella, the new leader of the country’s increasingly popular far-right party, has rested his entire platform on closing France’s borders to “drastically limit” immigration. He has made it clear that he’s talking about Muslims and Africans, not immigrants like his own Italian parents.

Meanwhile, in Italy, Giorgia Maloni, the new right-wing prime minister, has just issued a decree forbidding male refugees from getting off rescue boats or setting even one foot on Italian soil. Similarly, Sweden, once a bastion of progressive ideas, elected a new government this past September that cut its refugee quota from 5,000 people a year to 900, citing the white supremacist trope that non-white, non-Christian refugees will otherwise “replace” traditional Swedes.

I could go on: France, Greece, Italy, Malta, and Spain are fighting over who will (or won’t) take stranded boats of refugees, pushing those desperate seagoers from shore to shore like so much litter. The Danes are sending Syrians back to Syria, even after they’ve lived in Denmark for years. Australia is incarcerating asylum seekers under horrifying conditions in detention centers and on isolated islands. And Britain has locked thousands of refugees in warehouses, passed laws denying them basic services like health care and housing, and tried to implement a policy of forcibly deporting some of them to Rwanda.

Here in the U.S., we’re not doing much better. True, President Biden has managed to curtail some of the worst of Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, undoing the former president’s Muslim ban and raising the number of refugees allowed into the country every year, but his efforts have been inconsistent. Just this October, shortly before the Democrats barely held onto the Senate in the midterm elections, he expanded the Trumpian Title 42 border policy to include Venezuelans, who, only a week or so earlier, were being welcomed into the country. That policy uses Covid fears to force asylum seekers to stay in dangerous, sometimes deadly camps in Mexico, while rendering it virtually impossible for them to even apply for, let alone win, asylum in the U.S. (Biden originally promised to do away with Title 42 altogether, but the Supreme Court blocked his effort. After declaring that he would continue the fight, he now appears to have reversed course.)

Ukrainians are, however, exempted from this Mexican purgatory as a way of “recognizing the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine” (to quote the Department of Homeland Security). Some Afghans are similarly exempt, but only those who worked with the U.S. during our devastating 20-year war in their country. Everyone else is kept waiting for months or even years for their asylum decisions, many of them in detention, regardless of the humanitarian crises they also fled.

All the unequal mercies described here are not only breaking hearts, but laws. A little history: In 1948, Eleanor Roosevelt and the newly formed United Nations created the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in reaction to the shocks of the Holocaust and the mistreatment of Jews seeking asylum. Three years later, the U.N. held a convention in Geneva to create a bill of refugee rights, which were ratified into law by 149 nations, including Australia, Britain, Canada, Greece, most of the rest of Europe, and the United States. (Some countries didn’t sign on until 1967.) The idea was to protect the dignity and freedom of human beings everywhere, while never again spurning refugees in the way that had sent so many Jews back to their deaths.

The Geneva Convention defined refugees as people forced to flee their countries because of “a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group” and who “cannot return home or [are] afraid to do so.” It gave them the right to international protection from discrimination and persecution; the right to housing, schooling, and the chance to work for a living; the right not to be criminalized for simply seeking asylum; and, most importantly, the right not to be subjected to refoulement — and be returned to the countries they had fled.

Thanks, in part, to that convention, when people are driven to flee their countries, they head for the safety and dignity they believe they will find in the West, a belief we are now betraying. To rectify this, the EU’s governing arm, the European Commission, must insist that Europe’s unequal treatment of refugees be replaced with humane, accessible processes that apply consistently to all asylum seekers, regardless of where they come from. The same should be done in Australia, Britain, and the United States. After all, the way we treat refugees today speaks volumes not only about how humanitarian we are, but about how we are likely to act in the future when climate change forces ever more people to flee their homes just to stay alive.

On the other hand, should we continue to favor white Christian refugees over everyone else, we will not only shred the promises and values enshrined in our democracies, but fertilize the poison of white supremacy already festering in the very heart of the West.

Copyright 2022 Helen Benedict