Republicans Rev Up Racist Immigrant Invasion Rhetoric
Hear ye! Hear Ye!
Scary brown people are coming! Terrorists! COVID-19 Superspreaders! MS-13!
That’s the rhetoric coming from the right this week.
After failing to land a blow against the Biden administration with faux outrage over Mr. Potato Head, mythology over an exploding national debt, and #pressconferencegate, Republicans and their allies are reviving the old narratives about border security.
The number of migrants being stopped at the U.S.-Mexico border has been rising since last April, and most single adults and families are still being refused entry under a pandemic public health order issued by President Trump last year.
These human beings are not terrorists and they’re not roaming the streets of San Diego looking to cough up coronavirus droplets on passersby. But they are largely from Central America, and many of them are --gasp-- brown.
Unaccompanied teens and children are being allowed to stay, at least temporarily, and they have been coming in ever larger numbers. According to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, 80% of the children have a relative in the U.S. and 40% have a parent.
The Biden administration has ended a Trump policy discouraging potential sponsors of unaccompanied migrant children, including parents and relatives, from coming forward.
Asylum seekers returned to Mexico under the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” program and who still have active immigration court cases in the U.S. are eligible to enter the country, pending a painfully slow processing system.
This reality translates into an easy set up for anti-immigrant forces, whose ideological heritage can be traced to eugenicists like John Tantun, who founded or sponsored many groups overlapping with the right wing of the GQP.
Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy visited the southern border near El Paso, Texas on Monday, saying he was there out of concern for refugee children arriving to the U.S. Riiiight.
Here’s Gabe Ortiz:
“Speaking outside El Paso on Monday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said border agents he had met earlier that day issued dire warnings that suspected terrorists are trying to cross into the United States via Mexico,” The Washington Post reported. “They talked about, ‘They’re on the list,’” Kevin claims border agents said. “The terrorist watch list.” He claimed, “You saw it in their eyes.”
It truly is Academy Award season, because I haven’t seen drama like that since The Notebook. The problem is there’s plenty of reason to believe Kevin’s full of shit. “I have have the same security clearance as you do,” Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego, a military veteran and member of the House Armed Services committee, tweeted at McCarthy. “Can you have your office arrange for a classified briefing for members to see where this info derived from?”
MSNBC’s Steve Benen had a great write-up that more than generously noted that perhaps McCarthy is privy to some classified information as a Gang of Eight member. But at the same time, Kevin “wasn't referencing a briefing or classified intelligence; he said he'd spoken to border agents who allegedly told him about apprehended members of the terrorist watch list.” Nor had Customs and Border Protection itself said anything remotely resembling Kevin’s claim, and you know they’d love any excuse to expand their bloated agency even more.
It’s likely that there were more terrorists hunting for Vice President Mike Pence in the Capitol building on January 6th than have been caught at the border.
https://twitter.com/JulianCastro/status/1371620396294942720?s=20
If all this fear and loathing (and lying) about the border seems familiar, it’s because it’s been used before, with US Border Patrol agents including the leadership of the their pro-Trump labor union, working to undermine the current administration. In 2000, it was the Clinton administration. In 2016, it was the Obama administration.
With their endorsed candidate in the White House over the past four years, the National Border Patrol Council’s influence was unchallenged in the Trump White House.
Andrew Feinberg interviewed a former DHS official who said union leaders felt emboldened to go directly to the Oval office with their ideas.
“My impression was that Chris [Crane, Immigration and Customs Enforcement union president] and Brandon [Judd] were texting buddies with the president, and we frequently had to scramble… to try to tamp down whatever was ramping them up,” said the official. Trump’s various homeland security secretaries often had to drop what they were doing to address demands made by both union presidents, who frequently went directly to Trump rather than go through proper channels, they added.
“Having a cabinet member have to so frequently engage with these GS-14s was just weird and odd and a waste of a cabinet member’s time, but you had to do that to keep those two satiated,” they said.
Ultimately, Judd’s direct line to Trump and influence over rank-and-file agents meant that any attempt by DHS leaders to effect a change policy that wasn’t to union leaders’ liking was effectively vetoed, the official continued, adding that the dynamic most likely persists even though Trump has left the White House: “You have way too many scenarios where the secretary or the head of CBP issues a directive, and there’s just an absolute recalcitrance in the organization. There is a lack of command and control in a way that is dangerous.”
An example of the Border Patrol’s aggressive campaign would be the recent coverage on CNN of what viewers were led to believe was dramatic footage of dozens of immigrants crossing the Rio Grande.
A Republican wannabe named Tim Wilkins arranged for CNN to be at a specific place and time on the riverbank to film human trafficking. Not coincidentally, Breitbart news and the Border Patrol were also on hand to capture the intrusion. The “cartel smuggler” knew the camera crews would be there and even wore a disguise.
https://youtu.be/X5UIYqAdzSI
As the "bad hombre" approaches the riverbank, he and the men on shore exchange happy greetings and laughter that all is good. Then the man filming alongside a US Border Patrol agent talk about how the human trafficker is "nervous as fuck." The agent confirms, then says he's "taken like 7 something from him over the last..." He's interrupted and asked, "Do you ever hook those guys up?" To which the agent replies, "Yeah, two or three of them and they're always great." This video ends there...but the questions about it and whether US border Patrol works with cartels and has staged this crossing for media in order to influence public policy should not.
Another way the narrative about undocumented immigrants is being manipulated shows up in news accounts making a comparison between 2020 and 2021. Numbers for 2020 were seriously lower due to the pandemic. A better gage for comparison would be 2019, but that won’t show the huge spike the Border Patrol and GQP enablers want us to see. It’s also true that migrations follow a seasonal cycle, increasing as weather conditions make transit less dangerous.
Union-Tribune Michael Smolens made note of attempts to put a partisan framework around what’s happening as Democrats are doing a victory lap in the wake of a victory providing substantial assistance to Americans impacted by the coronavirus:
For now, the situation both north and south of the border looks desperate, and Republicans say that’s no coincidence.
“You can’t help but notice that the administration changes, and there’s a surge,” Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., recently told Fox News.
But the argument doesn’t fit neatly into a partisan framework.
Similar increases of unaccompanied children at the border occurred in 2014 under former President Barak Obama and in 2018-19 under Trump. Poverty, violence and natural disasters have been identified as underlying causes.
As Max Nadler at KPBS documented in a story last June, a big part of the $800 million allocated by Congress in 2019 to improve conditions for children in border facilities, went instead to buy dirt bikes, ATVs, and its canine program.
In a legal decision published on Thursday, the GAO said the Border Patrol spent part of the money on things like dirt bikes, ATVs, and its canine program. The GAO said all that spending was against the law.
“Congress appropriated additional amounts to CBP in July 2019 to respond to a significant rise in individuals at the southwest border,” Chuck Young, a spokesperson for the GAO, told KPBS in a statement. “Such amounts were available only for the purposes for which Congress had provided them, including 'consumables and medical care' and ‘establishing and operating migrant care and processing facilities.'"
He also said CBP violated the law when it used the money for other purposes, which also included buying vans and computer network upgrades.
While the Border Patrol told KPBS the discrepancy was due to an accounting error, the fact remains that the facilities being listed as overcrowded didn’t get promised upgrades.
https://twitter.com/TalKopan/status/1371908153105915904?s=20
The kernel of truth involving what’s going on at the border is that there is a humanitarian crisis precipitated by migrant children (mostly) attempting to enter the country legally after being illegally forced into camps in Mexico.
At a recent press briefing Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, pushed back against the notion that this situation amounts to a disaster.
She replied: “I know we always get into the fun of labels around here, but I would say our focus is on solutions and this is one of the steps that the president felt would help – not become a final solution – but help expedite processing, help ensure that people who are coming across the border have access to health and medical care.”
The press secretary was also challenged on reports that children are going hungry, sleeping on cold floors and not being allowed outside. The conditions are “not acceptable”, she acknowledged.
“This is heartbreaking. It’s a very emotional issue for a lot of people and it’s very difficult and challenging … We want to expedite getting these kids out of these CBP facilities as quickly as possible.”
In a swipe at Donald Trump’s administration, Psaki added: “We are trying to work through what was a dismantled and unprepared system because of the previous administration.”
Beyond that, you can be certain the agencies with Trump loyalists in charge are doing their level best to make life miserable for these humans.
From the New York Times:
The administration has announced multiple long-term strategies to deter migration, including investing foreign aid in Central America and restarting a program allowing some migrant children to apply for refugee status in the United States from their home countries and avoid making the dangerous journey north to join parents already in the United States.
But Mr. Biden faces an immediate humanitarian crisis at the border. He has placed Health and Human Services officials inside border detention centers to try to quickly identify sponsors for the children. Mr. Biden also deployed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help identify shelter space to move the children and teenagers out of the border jails.
As Brian Karem, the senior White House correspondent for Playboy magazine (who you might remember as the guy Trump tried unsuccessfully to exile) put it in an essay at The Bulwark, President Biden’s biggest challenge will be to keep the issue from being framed by the Trumpanistas:
We continue to act like the southern border of the United States is a different country—hard to understand and deal with. Pick up a phone and call the mayors in Laredo, McAllen, El Paso, San Diego. Ask them what will work. Ask the police chiefs, some of whom still have family members living in Mexico, what the real problem is. Listen to the members of Congress who still live near the border. Everyone I’ve talked to down there in the year since I last traveled to the border appreciates the changes the Biden administration has made. They tell me the administration listens. But they are also concerned that President Biden and his team “still don’t get it.”
Put simply: Donald Trump, who routinely demonized undocumented immigrants, calling them drug dealers, criminals, and rapists, should not be allowed to frame this issue. Nor should anyone whose interests are in keeping the status quo so cheap labor can be provided to American companies. Nor should the racists who believe that the people seeking asylum from a situation we helped to create are less human than we are.
The people coming here, in whatever numbers, are a symptom, not a cause.
The sooner the Biden administration understands that, and reframes the issue based in reality rather than in Trump’s dramatic and self-serving terms, the better.
***
More of Trump’s border legacy...
https://twitter.com/maddow/status/1371851951906951168?s=20
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