The far right is not just using the rhetoric of anti-immigration. It is using the actual immigrants themselves as weapons.

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – The immigrants were arriving on children’s bicycles and sometimes even in wheelchairs. According to Norwegian law, immigrants couldn’t cross the border by foot. So, in 2015, they were traveling from Russia to the far north of Norway on any conveyance they could find.

It was an odd choice of a place to cross into the West. Norway and Russia share a border way up north in the Arctic Circle. The 5,500 asylum-seekers were not Russians. They came from far away to the south: Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen, along with 43 other countries. What were they doing in this cold, remote part of the world?

The Norwegians were suspicious. Some of the new arrivals spoke Russian and had been living in Russia for some time. The Police Security Service (PST) had several theories. It believed that the Russians were using the immigrants as a wedge to disrupt Norwegian society by adding strain to the welfare state. Then there was the political angle. Norway’s far-right Progress Party, opposed to immigration from the Global South, could benefit from the crisis, disrupting the Scandinavian reputation for tolerance and complicating Norway’s relationship to the European Union. Given how integrated some of the migrants had been in Russian society, the PST also suspected that some of them were tasked with collecting information for Russian intelligence.

The strange saga of asylum-seekers from the Middle East riding bicycles into arctic Norway is not unique. Countries and non-state actors have long used migrants and refugees as a vehicle to achieve geopolitical ends. Think of how imperial states have sent their own citizens as migrants to expand colonial reach in Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

Nor is it unusual within countries for immigrants to be misused in this manner. The governors of Texas and Florida packed refugees onto buses and planes bound for northern cities, also to promote discord and burden social services in an effort to undermine Democratic-controlled municipalities.

Immigration is a go-to political weapon for the far right. It has used the issue to amplify the economic anxieties of the base (“they’ve coming to take our jobs”), the cultural fears of majority-white populations (“they’re coming to replace us”), and the specific political worries of conservatives (“they’re going to bankrupt our welfare state”).

The difference today is that the far right is not just using the rhetoric of anti-immigration. It is using the actual immigrants themselves as weapons.

The Russian Game

For Vladimir Putin, it’s a win-win stratagem to support a surge of migration into Europe.

From his point of view, waves of immigrants challenge the cohesiveness of the European Union—generating endless arguments among member states about how to address the problem—and boost support for his far-right political allies like the National Assembly in France and the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany.

Putin launched his war against Ukraine to seize control of his neighbor, not with the primary goal of sending Ukrainians streaming out of the country. But the exodus has served Putin’s purposes by once again ripping the bandage off the immigration question in the EU and challenging Europe’s commitment to supporting Kyiv. It has had the side benefit of triggering the exit of many Russians from Russia, depleting the ranks of the opposition.

The country that has hosted the most Ukrainians is Germany. Anger over the state’s generous treatment of these refugees was a major factor in the far right’s electoral victory in Thuringia and its second-place finishes in Saxony and Brandenburg. A bonus for Putin is that the “left” party—Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht—has adopted the same anti-immigrant, anti-Ukraine positions, which propelled it to unexpectedly strong results in those elections as well. Both the far right and this bogus left have adopted effectively pro-Russian positions around support for an immediate ceasefire in the war that locks in Russia’s territorial gains.

“Yearning to Breathe Free,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, Clip2Comic, 2024

Putin also acts through allied intermediaries. Belarus, for instance, has used a similar strategy against neighboring Poland. In 2021, the Belarusian government attracted migrants to Minsk with promises that they could get into Europe. It then helped ferry those immigrants to the frontier where border guards reportedly cut through fences to allow them into Poland. For years, Poland has been a home for activists trying to get rid of Aleksandr Lukashenko. The dictator has struck back not with bombs and missiles but with desperate refugees.

This year the problem reemerged as attempted border crossings from Belarus jumped from a negligible number to nearly 400 a day. A knifing of a Polish border guard, who died of his injuries, prompted Poland to establish a buffer zone with various walls and barriers. Poland’s fortification of the border achieves another Lukashenko goal: cutting Belarus off from Europe. Exiled Belarusian opposition leader, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, has appealed to Warsaw: “Initiatives to limit border traffic due to the regime’s ongoing provocations should target the dictator, not the people. We cannot abandon Belarusians to their fate behind a new iron curtain.”

Out of Latin America

Daniel Ortega doesn’t fit the usual definition of a far-right leader. After all, Ortega was a leader of the leftist Sandinistas who overthrew a Nicaraguan dictator allied with the United States. But when Ortega won reelection in 2006, he charted a different political path. He cracked down any and all opposition, including many leftists and former Sandinistas. He aligned himself with the Catholic Church and supported a complete ban on abortion. He has enriched himself and his family through corrupt practices.

But he remains consistent in one respect: he still deeply dislikes the United States. Nicaragua is suffering under U.S. sanctions, and Ortega has come up with a novel way of wreaking revenge. Ortega’s government has loosened restrictions so that around 200,000 people from a dozen countries—including Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Libya, India, and Uzbekistan—can come to Nicaragua and pay a fee of between $150 and $200 at the airport to enter the country. These mostly non-tourists who have taken advantage of the liberal visa regime do not stay for long in Nicaragua, itself a poor country. For another fee, “travel agencies” offer to bring them to the United States. Including all the Nicaraguans fleeing political repression or economic hardship, Ortega is responsible for an estimated 10 percent of the immigrant flow at the U.S.-Mexico border at peak times.

Like Putin, a close ally, Ortega wants to sow discord in the United States or, at least, force negotiations that could reduce sanctions against him and his family. As in Cuba and Venezuela, the outflow of disgruntled citizens also serves as a way of reducing the likelihood of opposition movements mobilizing enough support to force a change in government.

Why Anti-Immigrant?

Autocrats and right-wing ideologues hate diversity. They believe in political uniformity, preferably one-man rule. They also favor ethnic and/or religious homogeneity. They hold to anti-immigrant views even though they spell economic suicide for their countries. Their birthrates falling, European countries need immigrants to survive. The same holds true for the United States and most of Asia. But that hasn’t stopped these political forces from building walls, erecting bureaucratic obstacles, and even expelling people.

Autocratic regimes have used expulsions to get rid of demonized minorities and burden troublesome neighbors with the influx of immigrants. The Myanmar military, for instance, planned a campaign of intimidation and violence against the Rohingya minority that sent 800,000 desperate people over the border into Bangladesh. The Israeli government has supported an often-violent settler movement that has expelled Palestinians from their land in the West Bank. Turkey invaded Syria in 2019 and sought to clear Kurds from neighboring territory to disrupt cross-border cooperation with Kurds in Turkey.

The use of immigrant flows as a weapon is also a form of anti-globalization. The West, as Putin and his allies see it, are trying to transform their conservative societies by way of LGBTQ organizing, feminist and pro-choice messaging in movies and films, and pro-democracy campaigns that threaten the ruling parties. Although Putin and his allies criticize the “West” and “Anglo Saxons” for promoting these strategies, the far-right in the West also embraces this message. But here’s the twist—the far right argues that these emancipatory movements are in fact “anti-Western” for undermining “Western values” of family and nation.

Immigrants cannot be blamed for being confused. They are accused of being vectors of globalization, and yet the architects of globalization have never embraced the free movement of people across borders. Syrians desperate to leave a country at war, Rohingya forced out by a genocidal military, Nicaraguans escaping political repression: these are all the pawns in a chess game that Vladimir Putin, his global allies, and the far right are playing against “liberal elites” and “globalizers.” In reality, as the weaponization of immigrants demonstrates, Putin and friends are fighting a war against international law and human dignity.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

Haitian workers, having legally come into the U.S., started going to Springfield, Ohio, for jobs in 2018 when Trump was president. The Springfield municipal authorities needed workers and were happy to have them come in. Their numbers have almost certainly been vastly exaggerated.

In fact, the Trump administration did not cut immigration. Trump issued green cards at about the same annual rate as the Obama administration until the advent of COVID. The annual rate of green card issuance went back to normal under Biden-Harris but did not increase over what Trump had been doing. Trump’s immigration scare is just a scam — the US has been averaging about a million legal immigrants a year for a long time, and that continued under Trump before the pandemic.

Find more statistics at Statista

Why target Haitians? Some on social media have suggested that it is a slam at Kamala Harris’s paternal ancestry in Jamaica, an attempt to smear all Caribbean-Americans as deviants.

Haitians have fled Haiti in some numbers, but they aren’t the only emigrants from the Caribbean to the US and are not distinctive percentage-wise. There are about 1.1 million persons of Haitian descent in the U.S., while the population of Haiti is 11.5 million. That’s 9.5% of the population in the U.S. But there are 2.5 million persons of Dominican descent in the U.S., and the population of the Dominican Republic is almost identical to that of Haiti. That’s nearly 22% of Dominica in the US.

Haitian emigration, like all emigration, is driven by pull factors and push factors. The US economy and demand for jobs are pull factors. Natural disasters and gang governance are push factors. Hurricane Matthew in 2016 destroyed 200,000 homes and left over a million people without housing. Hurricanes have gotten more powerful and destructive because Americans put 4 or 5 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year from burning coal, fossil gas and petroleum. So Matthew was extra destructive and it is our fault. There are many reasons for which the US owes Haiti reparations.

The murder rate in Haiti is 40 per 100,000 per annum. In the US recently it is about 6 per 100,000 per annum. In France it is 1.4 per 100,000 per year, which shows just how violent the US is. But Haiti is more so.

The Trump-Vance smear of Haitians as eaters of family pets in part refers obliquely to the violent conditions from which Haitian immigrants have fled. There are some 200 armed gangs in Haiti. They have around 12,000 members. But obviously most Haitians are not gangbangers. In fact, 11,488,000 are not. As with Mexico, US-made semi-automatic weapons have flooded the island and worsened violence. But most Haitians are not violent or gangbangers, and the over one million in the US came here in part to get away from that kind of thing. Trump and Vance want to smear hard-working blue collar Haitian families.

This demonization of an entire ethnic group is typical of fascist politics. The Nazis also accused German Jews of spreading false rumors, of spreading diseases, and of being generally undesirable.

“Liberty Keffiyeh,” Digital, Dream / Realistic v2 / Clip2Comic, 2024

The targeting of Haitians resembles in some ways the demonization of Palestinians. Even their scarves, the keffiyeh, have been demonized. Palestinians have been accused of being intrinsically violent, as though it were a gene trait. I have long thought that given that they were kicked out of their own country and have been kept under a brutal occupation, they have responded with a remarkable lack of violence. Even now, as the Israeli military has slaughtered over 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the bulk of them women and children, the Palestinians of the West Bank have been long-suffering. Indeed, most of the violence in the Palestinian West Bank has been committed by militant Israel squatters determined to steal Palestinian land.

A lot of the 160,000 Palestinian Americans seem to be professionals and small business people. Some of them have staged protests. The biggest rap against them seems to be that they protested without a permit (a charge that seems oblivious to what “protest” means.)

Palestinians can be killed with impunity because they are not considered human beings. A whole panoply of Israeli leaders have said that there are no innocent Palestinians, which is a genocidal statement. Just switch it around and consider how horrible it would be for someone to say that there are no innocent Jews.

And now, courtesy of rising American fascism, there are no innocent Haitians.

(Ohio Capital Journal ) – Sometimes the disgusting sewer of presidential year politics hits a little too close to home, and you end up watching a national conversation play out largely divorced from reality or the actual experiences of communities intimately connected to your own life.

That’s what happened to me Monday as I watched Ohio U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance lie about legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, and — displaying no sense of conscience whatsoever — make an abhorrent insinuation about them. His purpose, it appears, was a trollish attempt to mislead the public and prey on people’s hatreds and fears. I suppose he thinks that’s good politics.

Meanwhile, after last week using Haitians in Springfield baselessly to attempt to justify his claim that migrants are “terrorizing our communities,” Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost followed up Monday by announcing court action to try to get a federal judge to limit migrants coming to Ohio.

Why is this all so disturbing to me?

Three generations of my family called Springfield home, and it’s played a huge role in my life. My parents both grew up in Springfield and I’ve been visiting my whole life. Two sets of my great-grandparents raised their families there. I had one grandfather who retired from International Harvester and another who was an insurance agent in Springfield for decades. I had one grandmother who was a librarian at North High School and another who worked for the local bank. Both of my parents (and two of my grandparents) graduated from Wittenberg. Mike and Rosy’s Deli, Cassano’s Pizza, fishing at the C.J. Brown Dam, family parties at the Polo Club, trips down to Young’s Jersey Dairy or Clifton Gorge, these are all staples of my childhood. I have nothing but love for Springfield and the whole area.

Meanwhile, my partner’s parents are Haitian immigrants who moved to America in their teens and have led such impressively successful lives it blows me away. They’ve shown me nothing but love and kindness and have also played a huge role in my life. Haitian food has become something I can’t go without. I have jars of epis and pikliz in my fridge at all times. I am obsessed with diri kole ak pwa and griot and boulette. I have been working on learning both Spanish and Haitian Creole for several years now; I read every book I can find on Haitian history; and have danced the night away with the most kind and loving people I can imagine more times than I can remember. I have nothing but love for them and their whole family.

Even though they’ve never lived in Ohio, this is what makes this conversation about Haitians in Springfield so difficult for me to stomach. Both the Haitian community and Springfield community live in my heart, and I’m disgusted by the politics being played on both of them.

Using people’s lives and communities as a political cudgel to stoke fear and hatred and outrage with lies and innuendo is a low, base, nasty, reckless, destructive thing to do, and I do not understand what is in the hearts of politicians who indulge in it.

So let’s just clear away the muck before we can proceed to a more adult conversation: Vance keeps incorrectly claiming the Haitian community in Springfield are illegal immigrants. They are not illegal immigrants. They are legal immigrants. They are lawfully in the country. Some are newly arrived legal migrants with work permits, some are fully naturalized U.S. citizens.

What Vance insinuates about “pets” is indefensible. It’s sad that the Springfield News-Sun even had to fact-check it. It’s a disgusting racist lie from the extremist right-wing internet, and Vance perpetuated it to millions of followers. Shame on him.

As for Vance’s claim that Haitians are “causing chaos all over Springfield,” and Yost pointing to Haitians in Springfield as an example of migrants “terrorizing our communities,” I have no idea what they’re talking about. Go to Springfield and tell me where to find the chaos and terror, because every time I’ve been the last four years, I haven’t seen it.

Something extraordinary has happened in Springfield since the pandemic though, with the influx of thousands of Haitian immigrants. The actual number is hard to pin down. City officials have estimated up to 20,000, but estimates of 10,000 and 15,000 have also been made.

“By most accounts, the Haitians have helped revitalize Springfield,” the New York Times reported last week. “They are assembling car engines at Honda, running vegetable-packing machines at Dole and loading boxes at distribution centers. They are paying taxes on their wages and spending money at Walmart. On Sundays they gather at churches for boisterous, joyful services in Haitian Creole.

“But the speed and volume of arrivals have put pressure on housing, schools and hospitals. The community health clinic saw a 13-fold increase in Haitian patients between 2021 and 2023, from 115 to 1,500, overwhelming its staff and budget.”

The Times details how, after decades of shrinking and uncertainty, Springfield was able to attract new manufacturing and business with a strategic plan, and by 2020 had drawn in food-service firms, logistics companies, and a microchip maker, among others:

“But soon there were not enough workers. Many young, working-age people had descended into addiction. Others shunned entry-level, rote work altogether, employers said. Haitians who heard that the Springfield area boasted well-paying, blue-collar jobs and a low cost of living poured in, and employers were eager to hire and train the new work force. The Haitians had Social Security numbers and work permits, thanks to a federal program that offered them temporary protection in the United States. Some had been living for years in places like Florida, where there is a thriving Haitian community.”

So what, in fact, do we have going on here?

We have a large population increase over a short period of time; we have a language barrier that can cause various strains; we have housing, schooling, and health services that need adequate resources to deal with a massive and rapid adjustment.

We also have an eager, dutiful, law-abiding, and peaceful workforce helping revitalize a city and helping local businesses thrive; we have a city’s population swelling instead of declining; we have an influx of new taxpayers and consumers filling blue-collar jobs, paying property taxes, shopping at local stores, and contributing to their community.

Are there struggles? Absolutely.

Is it chaos and terror? Absolutely not.

Is there opportunity for both the city of Springfield and the Haitian community to thrive together? Without a doubt.

“Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing,” Digital, Midjourney, 2024.

Will it all be easy? No. Will it be worth it in the long-run? Yes.

Serious people should discuss serious solutions to serious issues. Politicians using dangerous rhetoric to whip people up into a frenzy of misinformed anger and viciousness is not needed and not helpful.

With Nazis already marching through downtown Springfield, I’m sickened that statewide elected leaders would instigate and inflame the situation even further.

We must be better than that, and we must demand better than that from our elected officials.

To any Haitians new to Springfield, “Sak pase, zanmi m. Mwen akeyi ou!”

And to my friends and family in Springfield, I hope you will welcome the stranger, too. In them you’ll find some of the kindest, warmest, most remarkable people you will ever meet.

Springfield’s decline looks like an awful lot of Rust Belt cities and towns. And behind those numbers is a lot of human suffering.

Corporations engineered trade deals that made it cheaper to move jobs abroad, where they could pay workers less and pollute more with impunity. As the region’s secure blue collar jobs dried up, so did the local tax base — and as union membership dwindled, so did social cohesion.

Young people sought greener pastures elsewhere while those who remained nursed resentments, battled a flood of opioids, and gritted their teeth through empty promises from politicians.

It’s a sad chapter for countless American cities, but it hardly needs to be the last one. After all, the region’s affordable housing — and infrastructure built to support larger populations — can make it attractive for new arrivals looking to build a better life. And they in turn revitalize their new communities.

So it was in Springfield, where between 15,000 and 20,000 Haitian migrants have settled in the last few years. “On Sunday afternoons, you could suddenly hear Creole mass wafting through downtown streets,” NPR reported. “Haitian restaurants started popping up.”

One migrant told the network he’d heard that “Ohio is the [best] place to come get a job easily.” He now works at a steel plant and as a Creole translator. Local employers have heaped praise on their Haitian American workers, while small businesses have reaped the benefits of new customers and wages have surged.

Reversing decades of population decline in a few short years is bound to cause some growing pains. But on balance, Springfield is a textbook case of how immigration can change a region’s luck for the better.

“Immigrants are good for this country,” my colleagues Lindsay Koshgarian and Alliyah Lusuegro have written. “They work critical jobs, pay taxes, build businesses, and introduce many of our favorite foods and cultural innovations (donuts, anyone?)… They make the United States the strong, diverse nation that it is.”

In fact, it was earlier waves of migration — including African Americans from the South, poor whites from Appalachia, and immigrants from abroad — that fueled much of the industrial heartland’s earlier prosperity.

“Lady Liberty,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2024.

But some powerful people don’t want to share prosperity equally. So they lie.

“From politicians who win office with anti-immigrant campaigns to white supremacists who peddle racist conspiracy theories and corporations that rely on undocumented workers to keep wages low and deny workers’ rights,” Lindsay and Alliyah explain, “these people stoke fear about immigrants to divide us for their own gain.”

So it is with an absurd and dangerous lie — peddled recently by Donald Trump, JD Vance, Republican politicians, and a bunch of internet trolls — that Haitian Americans are fueling a crime wave in Springfield, abducting and eating people’s pets, and other racist nonsense.

“According to interviews with a dozen local and county and officials as well as city police data,” Reuters reports, there’s been no “general rise in violent or property crime” or “reports or specific claims of pets being harmed” in Springfield. Instead, many of these lies appear to have originated with a local neo-Nazi group called “Blood Pride” — who are about as lovely as they sound.

“In reality, immigrants commit fewer crimes, pay more taxes, and do critical jobs that most Americans don’t want,” Lindsay and Alliyah point out.

Politicians who want you to believe otherwise are covering for someone else — like the corporations who shipped jobs out of communities like Springfield in the first place — all to win votes from pathetic white nationalists in need of a new hobby. It’s lies like these, not immigrants, who threaten the recovery of Rust Belt cities.

Springfield’s immigrant influx is a success story, not a scandal. And don’t let any desperate politicians tell you otherwise.

Otherwords.org

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.

Buy the Book

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