CLIMATE REFUGEE immigr 4

SEE IMMIGR 5 OPEN BORDER 3 24

goes back at least to arab spring syria, but official disambig sep category 12/19

NEW REPORT 3 24 BIG # INCLUDES US

this includes US immigration

see great replacement

NO MERRI

see eco-fascism

see fascism EU

see caravan

see xeno

see racism

see other enemy them INVASION

SEE BORDER WALL BS razor wire civil war truckers

see hype/fear

---

an 4 25

On February 13, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law a bill making it a first-degree misdemeanor to illegally enter the Sunshine State as an “unauthorized alien” and imposing additional penalties for reentry. But on April 4 in Miami, U.S. District Court Judge Kathleen Williams issued an order temporarily blocking the law.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, on Wednesday, April 23, sent Florida law enforcement a letter saying that he won't stop them from enforcing the law — which has already led to arrests. However, Pinellas County, Florida Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, according to Florida Phoenix reporter Jackie Llanos, is saying he plans to abide by Williams' order and is telling his deputies not to arrest anyone under the law.

Gualtieri told the Phoenix, "I don't think it changes anything. We take our direction on something like that from the judge, not from anybody else."

In his April 23 letter, Uthmeier — a DeSantis ally — wrote, "I cannot prevent you from enforcing §§811.102 and 811.103, where there remains no judicial order that properly restrains you from doing so."

IFrame Content

Regardless, Gualtieri, according to Llanos, said he is abiding by Williams' order.

DeSantis, meanwhile, is openly critical of Williams, who he described as an "activist judge" during an April 7 press conference. And in an April 23 post on X, formerly Twitter, the far-right Florida governor wrote, "The mission continues. Immigration law must be enforced and FL is leading on working with the Trump administration to get it done."

The Florida ACLU, the Community Justice Project and Americans for Immigrant Justice are among the groups and organizations fighting the law in court.

Community Justice Project Director Alana Greer, criticized Uthmeier's April 23 letter, saying, in a written statement, "A federal judge entered not one, but two clear and direct orders stopping enforcement of this law. The Attorney General's letter makes us gravely concerned that Floridians will continue to be arrested under this unconstitutional statute. We will be back in court to ensure their rights are protected."

Read the full Florida Phoenix article at this link.

Jesse Watters promotes Duane “Dog the Bounty Hunter” Chapman for Donald Trump's “deportation czar”

04/15/24

// rep collins bigot not 1st

'Disgusting': Maria Bartiromo ripped for linking Baltimore bridge collapse to Biden border policy - Alternet.org

fla doc sorta caves on vax?

Amid lack of vaccinations, Fox News baselessly blames migrants for Florida’s measles outbreak | Media Matters for America

The ugly history of right-wing media accusing migrants of bringing disease | Media Matters for America

Fox News' attempt to manufacture a Biden crime crisis runs into a problem: Violent crime is down | Media Matters for America

GOP candidate for governor outed as KKK member after cross burning photo emerges - Alternet.org

Ken Paxton’s new investigation another attack on religious organizations aiding migrants - Alternet.org

trump at eagle pass 'A pitched battle': Trump and Biden duel over 'broken immigration system' at Southern border - Alternet.org

'Grave irreparable harm': Judge blocks Texas’ draconian immigration bill from taking effect - Alternet.org

'There’s no evidence': Experts debunk Trump’s claims of 'migrant crime' wave in US cities - Alternet.org

PFAW 2 24 YMAIL

Welcome to our weekly “Trumptastrophe” email series that serves to remind us all of the destructive policies, decisions, and actions we encountered during the Trump presidency and the threats that he and others in the MAGA movement still pose – and to keep those moments clear in our memory as we fight to defeat Republican extremists during the upcoming elections.

This week’s Trumptastrophe brings into focus how Trump and his MAGA Republican enablers sow doubt about our elections – especially for those that they lose – and how it undermines our election integrity while fueling right-wing outrage that can sometimes lead to violence:

On February 9, 2017, President Trump told a group of senators that he would have won New Hampshire in the 2016 presidential election if it weren’t for “thousands” of people he claimed were bused in from Massachusetts to vote illegally in the state. Trump offered no evidence to back up his claim.

A few days later, Trump adviser Stephen Miller was asked about the bogus claim by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on “This Week.” Pressed repeatedly by Stephanopoulos on the lack of evidence for Trump’s claim, Miller doubled down, saying it’s “widely known by anyone who’s worked in New Hampshire politics,” and declaring, “It’s very real; it’s very serious.” Miller went on to claim that there are “massive numbers of noncitizens in this country who are registered to vote.”

Miller’s amplifying of Trump’s false claims led Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire to respond on social media, “As everybody knows, Stephen Miller has no evidence of voter fraud in NH. This has been debunked.” She noted that Trump had not called for a recount in the state.

This wasn’t the first time since his inauguration that Trump made false claims about the election in which he lost the popular vote by about 2.9 million votes while winning an Electoral College majority. A few weeks earlier, he told congressional leaders that he only lost the popular vote because 3 million to 5 million immigrants had voted illegally, a claim the Associated Press noted at the time had previously been debunked....

===

Fox News host asks if migrants are connected to a case of bubonic plague in Oregon | Media Matters for America

2 24 same day

Jesse Watters says Joe Biden is going to "drop a migrant bomb" on America | Media Matters for America

New York City is trying to streamline its spending on migrants. Fox News hypes false claim that it's giving them “prepaid credit cards.” | Media Matters for America

Fox News’ Trace Gallagher says we should stock the Rio Grande full of alligators to keep migrants from drowning | Media Matters for America

---

an 2 24

Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) isn't happy with House Speaker Mike Johnson's (R-Louisiana) promise to kill immigration legislation that the US Senate is working to pass.

According to reporter Emily Brooks of the Hill, Crenshaw railed against his Republican colleagues on Thursday for refusing to even consider any legislation to address the flow of migrants at the Southern border. Brooks tweeted that Crenshaw — while not naming names — specifically addressed his comments to "the right" in airing his frustrations.

:{"I'm

extremely disappointed in the very strange maneuvering by many on the right to torpedo a potential border reform bill. That's what we all ran on doing," Crenshaw said. "If we have a bill that decreases illegal immigration — and that's an if, right? … But if we have a bill that on net significantly decreases illegal immigration, and we sabotage that, that is inconsistent with what we told our voters we would do."}:

The US Senate is currently close to finalizing legislation aimed at providing additional funding for border security, as well as new authorities for the executive branch allowing for a temporary shutdown of the border if crossings number more than 5,000 in a given week. President Joe Biden has insisted he's done all he can to stem the flow of migrants without additional powers over the border that would have to be granted by an act of Congress.

:{Sens. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma), Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Arizona) have been leading the bipartisan negotiations since late last year, and the Democratic-controlled US Senate is poised to pass a legislative package that would include many items on the Republican wish list.

Included in the proposed framework is language that would allow for the automatic expulsion of asylum seekers and shortening the time for asylum to be considered to just six months (where it used to take up to 10 years). The Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) has criticized the framework as potentially committing "refoulement," which pertains to international law aimed at preventing governments from knowingly sending people fleeing danger back to their home countries.}:

"Refoulement was frequent during the Title 42 era. In addition to exposing some asylum seekers to the same perils they were originally fleeing, border expulsions placed them in new danger," WOLA wrote. "Despite the difficulty of monitoring during the pandemic, Human Rights First and border-zone partners tracked 13,480 attacks—killings, rapes, kidnappings, assaults, robberies—against people expelled into dangerous Mexican border cities."

Despite the conservative nature of the bill, former President Donald Trump has been reportedly lobbying Republicans to not support the legislation, hoping to prevent Biden from notching a win on a key campaign issue for Trump.

---

Fox News falsely claimed that airports are allowing migrants through security without identification | Media Matters for America

---

WALSH KIRK BLAZE?

Right-wing media escalate civil war rhetoric after Supreme Court rules against Texas in razor wire case | Media Matters for America

In response to a recent Supreme Court ruling allowing Border Patrol agents to cut razor wire Texas laid along the border with Mexico, right-wing pundits are claiming the Biden administration has sparked a second American Civil War. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, two members of the court’s conservative block, sided with the three liberal justices in ruling for the federal government.

The issue stems from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s decision to stretch razor wire over dozens of miles along the state’s southern border, a cruel policy that has failed in its stated objective of deterring unauthorized border crossings. The Biden administration opposes the measures, and has ordered the Border Patrol to remove the barriers. The stand-off between Border Patrol and the Texas National Guard escalated earlier this month, with federal officials blaming Abbott for the deaths of a mother and her two children who drowned in the Rio Grande. (Texas authorities dispute this version of events.)

For his part, Gov. Abbott pledged that Texas will “continue to deploy this razor wire to repel illegal immigration.” Although it may appear that Abbott is in direct defiance of the Supreme Court, the American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick explained that the ruling overturned an “order saying Border Patrol COULDN’T remove Texas razor wire to process migrants. It didn’t affirmatively rule that the Border Patrol COULD remove Texas razor wire.” Or, as the New Republic's Matt Ford put it, the Supreme Court “lifted an injunction” on the Department of Homeland Security, so there's “nothing in this case for Texas to obey or defy at the moment.”

This simmering confrontation is the new backdrop for an old story. During election years, conservative media outlets generally ramp up their attacks on immigrants. Separately, over the last year, conservatives have become increasingly comfortable calling for, threatening, or warning about a coming civil war in the country. Responses to the recent court ruling have married these two trends.

As the news broke on January 22, conservative YouTube streamer Tim Pool said it “looks like a Fort Sumter-esque type scenario,” referencing the first battle of the Civil War, adding that “it does feel like it could be escalating to this federal versus state conflict.”

That evening, former Fox News star Tucker Carlson posted on X (formerly Twitter), asking: “Where are the men of Texas? Why aren’t they protecting their state and the nation?”

The same night, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) wrote that “the feds are staging a civil war, and Texas should stand their ground.”

Then on January 23, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon appeared to favorably reference that post, saying “as Clay Higgins said” there is “kind of a civil war between the federal government and the state of Texas.”

Hours later, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk fantasized about Gov. Abbott openly defying the court’s ruling at the barrel of a gun.

Video CitationFrom the January 23, 2024, edition of Salem Media Group's The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble

“So someone says right here, ‘Charlie, what would happen if Texas ignores the ruling? Will the government go to war with Texas?’” he asked.

“The federal government would come in, and some people would say, ‘Well, that's the seeds of a civil war.’ Is that what you want? Where does this end?” Kirk added moments later. “By the way, I'm all on board.”

“If we had an actual governor of Texas that was willing — 100% defy this,” Kirk continued, before advising Abbott on the logistics.

“If you're going to defy, here's how it works: press conference flanked by your most loyal Texas Rangers. ‘I am ignoring the Supreme Court's decision,’” Kirk said, adopting Abbott’s point of view. “‘I will enforce the border of Texas. If you're going to arrest me, you have to go through the Texas Rangers.’”

“If we had more governors on the border, it would be even more powerful,” he added, implicitly invoking the Confederacy. “Get every red state on board. Fly in every Republican governor.”

On Wednesday afternoon Abbott issued a statement invoking “Texas’s constitutional authority to defend and protect itself,” which he claimed is “the supreme law of the land.” Throughout the day, at least nine governors backed Abbott on X, even if they fell short of Kirk’s demand that they travel to the border. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, Utah Gov. Spencer J. Cox, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp all posted their support for Texas, as did Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.

In the same episode, Kirk told his audience that they had “better buy weapons,” and “have a lot of guns at your disposal.”

That afternoon, The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh echoed Kirk. “Red state governors will need to ignore the Supreme Court and do what needs to be done to protect their citizens and the border,” Walsh said. He later added, “The last civil war was unimaginable until it wasn't.”

In the early evening, Bannon returned to the topic with guest Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). “That Supreme Court decision that was made has now put the federal government at war with the state of Texas,” Greene said.

“If they fund a war in Ukraine when Zelensky is raising the white flag, asking for peace talks in Switzerland, and they weaken our border policy while the federal government is at war with Texas, that is truly, possibly the start of a civil war in this country,” she added.

Blaze TV’s Steve Deace also invoked the memory of the Civil War. “Basically, the Supreme Court has told Texas your choices are: be invaded or secede,” Deace said.

Video

CitationFrom the January 23, 2024, edition of BlazeTV's The Steve Deace Show

On January 25, Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade adopted the same framing on Fox & Friends.

Video

CitationFrom the January 25, 2024, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends

“It feels like almost like a soft civil war,” Kilmeade said. “You’ve got all the Republicans saying, ‘Can we secure our borders?’ the Democrats saying, ‘I want this to go away’ and blaming Republicans, the President against the governor of Texas — the most independent state in the union. I mean, this is getting a little crazy.”

Fox News sounded little different than the fringe. “This is a constitutional crisis,” said conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, in a video titled: “Supreme Court Decision Provokes Civil War in Texas.”

The story was the same in the right-wing blogosphere, too, with conservative news site PJ Media asking, “Is Joe Biden Mounting a Civil War at the Border?”

Conservative influencer Jordan Peterson posted: “So is it the case that@TheDemocrats are truly ready to go to war with Texas?”

While right-wing media figures fantasize about a new civil war, their rhetoric has real implications for immigration policy. They are stoking xenophobia and nativism, and endorsing cruel policies that are already injuring and killing some of the most vulnerable people in the world.

---

{{MMA 1 24 ERUPTION?

SCOTUS let feds nat guard cut texas barbed razor wire?

BlazeTV host Steve Deace: "The Supreme Court has told Texas your choices are be invaded or secede" | Media Matters for America

Warning of civil war, Matt Walsh: "Red state governors will need to ignore the Supreme Court and do what needs to be done to protect their citizens and the border" | Media Matters for America

Charlie Kirk: There is a "border invasion" and "native-born Americans, you better buy weapons, everybody. Have a lot of guns at your disposal" | Media Matters for America

---

border is basically the only gop issue for 2024?

Laura Ingraham says details of immigration compromise “do not matter,” she will personally work towards defeating any Republican that votes for it | Media Matters for America

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end title 42 note mtg impeach biden mayorkas

===

12 23 dems cave to maga israel ukr $ ?

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~ baby jail?

Jesse Watters says migrants are "turning their children into little bandits -- banditos" | Media Matters for America

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Jesse Watters makes bizarre joke about cartoon characters murdering migrants | Media Matters for America

===

trump-advisor-stephen-miller-and-foxs-jesse-watters-fantasize-about-mass-deportations

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Fox News guest Stephen Miller: "What we are witnessing is the engineered political transformation of the country" | Media Matters for America

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see hype fear

Fox News’ Dana Perino says migrants are ushering major cities “into a death spiral” | Media Matters for America

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Right-wing media outlets resurface long-debunked myth that all migrants get $5,000 debit cards from the government | Media Matters for America

===

11 23 an

Tuesday, December 5, Democratic and GOP senators attended a closed-door briefing in which President Joe Biden's request for military aid to Israel and Ukraine was discussed. But according to NBC News reporters Frank Thorp V, Kate Santaliz and Lori Rampani, the briefing did not go well.

The briefing's leaders included, among others, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Alejandro Mayorkas as well as Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Senators who attended were invited to ask questions about Biden's request.

But according to Thorp, Santaliz and Rampani, the "heated" briefing "fell apart" when "Republicans began asking about the" U.S./Mexico border.

"GOP members in both chambers have demanded serious changes to immigration policy to address rising migrant crossings in exchange for passing new aid for Ukraine," the NBC News reporters explain. "They didn't like what they heard."

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) told NBC News there was "a lot of tension in the room." And Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) complained that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) didn't want to "talk about the border."

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-North Dakota) told reporters, "People got up and walked out, because this is a waste of time."

Schumer, however, complained that the briefing "was immediately hijacked by" Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), who asked Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma) to discuss the border.

READ MORE:[Mitch McConnell’s Ukraine policy puts him 'on a collision course' with House Speaker Johnson: report

Schumer said of McConnell, "The first question, instead of asking our panelists — he called on Lankford to give a five-minute talk about the negotiations on the border. And that wasn't the purpose of the meeting at all…. One of them started — it was disrespectful — started screaming at one of the generals and challenging him to why he didn't go to the border."

READ MORE:[Vivek Ramaswamy implies Hunter Biden is reason behind US aid to Ukraine: report

*Read NBC News' full report at this link.

===

JULY 25, 2023

AUTHOR: JACK JENKINS, RNS

In Targeting Catholic Charities, Republicans Amplify Right-Wing Catholic Fringe

WASHINGTON (RNS) — On Capitol Hill, a handful of Republican lawmakers are threatening to reduce or eliminate funding for Catholic Charities and other faith-based groups who offer aid to immigrants at the Southern border.

The members of Congress, who are echoing the campaigns of deeply conservative Catholic groups that vow to “#defund the bishops,” have already succeeded in inserting their agenda into legislation passed by the House earlier this year. Another attempt to zero-out appropriations for a key Department of Homeland Security program supporting faith-based border efforts is awaiting a vote in Congress.

[Migrants reach through a border wall for clothing handed out by volunteers, as they wait between two border walls to apply for asylum, Friday, May 12, 2023, in San Diego. Hundreds of migrants remain waiting between the two walls, many for days. The U.S. entered a new immigration enforcement era Friday, ending a three-year-old asylum restriction and enacting a set of strict new rules that the Biden administration hopes will stabilize the U.S.-Mexico border and push migrants to apply for protections where they are, skipping the dangerous journey north. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

In December, Republican Rep. Lance Gooden of Texas, who serves on the House Judiciary Committee, penned a letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. In the letter, co-signed by Reps. Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin and Jake Ellzey of Texas, the lawmakers complained that the Biden administration was “allowing non-governmental organizations … the freedom to aid and abet illegal aliens.” In addition, lawmakers also sent letters to Catholic Charities, Jewish Family Service and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service demanding they preserve documents “related to any expenditures submitted for reimbursement from the federal government related to migrants encountered at the southern border.”

Contacted by Religion News Service at the time, Anthony Granado, vice president of government relations at Catholic Charities USA, said, “We have not seen such a level of direct … attack against Catholic Charities USA.”

In May, when Gooden penned another letter to Mayorkas, this time with Rep. Tom McClintock of California and Committee Chairman Jim Jordan of Ohio, they accused the NGOs that use federal funds to aid immigrants of creating an “incentive” for illegal immigration and demanded access to a broad swath of records about DHS funding practices.

Days later, Gooden published an open letter to House colleagues that accused NGOs, including faith-based groups, of abusing their tax-exempt status by “play(ing) a disturbing role in the inflow and spread of illegal immigration throughout the country.”

Gooden, who worships at a Church of Christ congregation, expressed particular frustration with FEMA’s Emergency Food and Shelter Program — which is transitioning to an effort titled the Shelter and Services Program — that reimburses NGOs and local governments for offering certain aid to migrants. He singled out a number of faith-based groups in his solo letter, such as Jewish Family Services and LIRS, but criticized Catholic Charities at length.

For his part, Tiffany recently called for Catholic Charities USA to testify before the Judiciary Committee to explain “what they’re doing down on the border to facilitate this illegal immigration,” according to Bloomberg Government.

In a phone interview last week, Lee Williams, chief programs officer for Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, called the lawmakers’ allegations “preposterous” and “dangerous.” He also pointed out that LIRS aids immigrants after they are processed and released from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, work that is funded by private money.

Catholic Charities, for its part, receives ample government funds annually and operates as a network of local charities. In addition to anti-poverty programs, Catholic Charities also works with immigrants — including efforts to offer humanitarian aid to migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border.

It’s work that, not long ago, Republicans in Congress nearly uniformly praised. In 2014, amid a spike in border crossings by unaccompanied minors and mothers traveling with children, a delegation of Republican lawmakers led by talk-show host Glenn Beck visited a Catholic Charities respite center based in a church in McAllen, Texas. Sen. Ted Cruz, East Texas Rep. Randy Weber and then-Rep. Louie Gohmert, among others, toured the center and, in Beck’s case, donated toys to children.

“I want to thank Catholic Charities that are working to care for these children and care for these families,” Cruz told reporters at the time.

Weber was similarly effusive, quoting Scripture while describing the center’s work as a fulfillment of “the church’s role.”

Mistrust of faith groups that work with immigrants, but in particular Catholic Charities, has been growing in right-wing circles since at least February 2022, when CatholicVote, a conservative political group, sued the Biden administration in an effort to acquire copies of “all communications between the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol” and various Catholic bishops and Catholic Charities entities — including the respite center in McAllen.

The antipathy for Catholic Charities came up again last summer, when Michael Voris, founder of the conservative Catholic website Church Militant, interviewed Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a self-described Christian nationalist and former Catholic who converted to evangelicalism. Voris, whose organization has referred to Catholic Charities as an “enemy of the people,” complained to Greene about the American bishops supporting immigrant aid through religious agencies such as Catholic Relief Services and Catholic Charities. Greene responded by framing the work as “Satan controlling the church.”

Most recently, in Washington on Thursday (July 20), members of the Deposit of Faith Coalition, a group of activists who object to the direction the U.S. Catholic bishops are taking and accuse them of “standing with Marxists,” called on Congress — and particularly appropriations committees — to stop granting contracts to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Catholic Charities.

Addressing the crowd from a podium at the National Press Club that read “#DefundtheBishops,” Sheena Rodriguez, head of Alliance for a Safe Texas, insisted that Catholic Charities was one constellation of groups “incentiviz(ing) mass illegal migration worldwide” and “creating a modern-day slavery scheme.”

The gathering attracted only a small crowd, but their ideas have gained a footing on Capitol Hill. In April, Rodriguez was invited to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on border security, arguing that unaccompanied minors at the border were being mistreated under the Biden administration.

After her testimony, Rep. Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat, that Rodriguez was among the crowd that surrounded the U.S. Capitol when rioters attacked the building on Jan. 6, 2021, although there is no evidence Rodriguez entered the building that day. She had also taken part in the Christian nationalism-themed Jericho March at the Capitol the day before.

The movement to defund Catholic agencies also found its way into the GOP’s signature border security bill passed in May, known as the Secure the Border Act. It included a provision that would cut all funding to the Shelter Services Program.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops opposed the Secure the Border Act for multiple reasons, including how it treats DHS funding streams to NGOs. The bishops sent a letter to lawmakers urging them to vote against it. Sister Donna Markham, a Catholic nun who oversees Catholic Charities USA, also wrote a letter to congressional leadership at the time decrying the proposed cuts, saying they would “dismantle the public-private infrastructure currently in place to manage the humanitarian crisis at the southern border and its impact throughout the country.”

The bill passed the House largely along party lines, with Gooden, Tiffany and Weber all voting in favor.

The bill has little chance of passing the U.S. Senate, where Democrats enjoy a majority, but Gooden’s movement persists: Last month the House Appropriations Committee unveiled a DHS appropriations bill, which, like the border bill, eliminates funding for the Shelter and Services Program.

Markham said in a statement to RNS that the work of respite centers along the U.S.-Mexico border should be uncontroversial and invited members of Congress to tour their facilities.

“This work is humanitarian and motivated by the teachings of the gospels; it is not political, and it should not be controversial,” Markham’s statement read.

---

Charlie Kirk endorses a total moratorium on legal immigration | Media Matters for America

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massacre MBS

https://www.alternet.org/like-fields-report-says-saudi-border-guards-killed-hundreds-of-migrants/

---

Right-wing media figures exploit anti-immigrant riots in Ireland to demonize migrants and Muslims, and attack legal immigration

Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and others pushed the “great replacement” conspiracy theory and falsely portrayed immigrants as threats to public safety

WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM JACINA HOLLINS-BORGES, SOPHIE LAWTON & JACK WHEATLEY

PUBLISHED 11/30/23

Right-wing media figures reacted to anti-immigrant riots in Ireland by demonizing Muslims, falsely accusing migrants of being a risk to public safety and attacking the very idea of legal immigration. Their response is an escalation of the xenophobic rhetoric that right-wing media frequently direct at unauthorized migration, and is a clear attempt to push for policies that would drastically reduce legal immigration levels.

The riots in Dublin were sparked after early reports on November 23 that an Irish citizen who allegedly stabbed five people, including three children, was believed to have been born abroad — thus highlighting the suspect’s perceived foreignness. Subsequent reporting found that although the alleged attacker was apparently born in Algeria, he has lived in Ireland for at least 20 years, according to Irish authorities. Numerous studies have found that increased levels of immigration do not cause a rise in crime rates either in the United States or European countries.

This manufactured panic and demonization of a marginalized group echoes a similar episode from last week, when Fox News invented a terrorism scare over a car crash at the U.S.-Canada border and used the nonexistent plot to paint Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians, and their supporters as the culprits, only to retract its reporting hours later. Anti-Muslim hate incidents have also skyrocketed during Israel’s bombardment and invasion of the Gaza Strip after Hamas’ attack on October 7.

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon exploited the Dublin attack to spread his anti-immigrant message across multiple platforms, including his own War Room podcast as well as Tucker Carlson’s show on X (formerly Twitter) and Donald Trump Jr.’s streaming show on Rumble, a far-right competitor to YouTube. In several of these segments, Bannon and his interlocutors endorsed versions of the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which holds that liberal elites are attempting to change the demographics of white-majority countries through mass migration from the Global South to maintain political and economic dominance.

Prior to Fox News’ firing of Carlson, he was the network’s — and perhaps the entire country’s — most visible proponent of the great replacement theory. During Bannon’s appearance on Carlson’s show on November 27, both figures pushed openly nativist bigotry alongside the racist conspiracy theory.

Bannon referred to migrants to the United States and Ireland as “alien invaders,” adding that Irish politicians have “sold out the sovereignty of the Irish” and that the riots were “natural blowback.”

“The Irish government is trying to replace the population of Ireland with people from the Third World, obviously,” Carlson responded. “But why? What's the justification for that?”

“You talk about the great replacement theory and people are — oh, you know, people get very upset when you talk about it, but just look at the math,” Bannon answered.

“It’s not a theory,” Carlson interjected.

“This has happened across Europe,” Bannon continued. “It's happened in Germany.”

“In 100 years, there'll be a minority of Irish people in Ireland,” Carlson said. “That's a big change, and it's on purpose.”

Later in their conversation, Bannon endorsed mass deportations, saying: “I think illegal alien invaders are coming because they've gamed the asylum system. My belief is those people have to go home. They have to be returned, they have to leave our country or we're not going to have a country.”

Later that day, Bannon appeared on Donald Trump Jr.’s Triggered to celebrate Hungary’s far-right authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán and Irish mixed martial arts fighter Connor McGregor, who had come under police investigation following anti-migrant social media posts.

Video

CitationFrom the November 27, 2023, edition of Triggered, streamed on Rumble

Former President Donald Trump fought “for the sovereignty, not just of nation-states, but the sovereignty of the individual citizens in those nation-states,” Bannon said. “I think it's inspired Orban in Hungary. I think McGregor in Ireland standing up the other day was inspired by Donald Trump.”

The discussion then turned to the knife attack in Dublin, with the host claiming Arab and Muslim cultures celebrate anti-social violence.

“In their culture, they can stab people in the streets. It's fine. We must allow them to do that to our children,” Trump Jr. facetiously said, adding, “I mean, the government is taking an actively hostile position against their citizens in favor of, like, seemingly savages in many cases.”

Bannon returned to the subject the next day on his War Room podcast, calling for the “deportation of the 9 million — at least 9 million to 10 million — illegal alien invaders coming in the Biden regime.”

“What happened in Ireland — it's all coming here, folks,” Bannon warned ominously. “It’s all coming here.”

His guest the following hour was conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has been increasingly embraced by right-wing media in recent years. Jones falsely claimed that “illegal aliens or migrants” are responsible for “the majority of muggings, rape, and murder in every European country."

That evening, Bannon discussed the violence in Ireland in another episode of War Room, where his guest, author Michael Walsh, again pushed the great replacement conspiracy theory.

“This was the spark that set off what’s become a powder keg across the country, which is the notion — widely held among the Irish people — that they’re being replaced by foreigners,” Walsh said. He added that the Irish government “is committed to this program of quiet replacement and has demonized what we would have called Irish patriots,” referring to the far-right mobs.

Several other right-wing media figures also used the riots to spread anti-migrant bigotry.

BlazeTV’s Steve Deace defended the mob, arguing that “the Irish Proud Boy wannabes” are “not the villain here,” suggesting they “have had enough” and feel like “I’ve already lost my culture to Islam. Now our daughters are getting raped and assaulted” by the “rape-fugees we brought in.”
“Concerned citizens in Dublin, Ireland look on helplessly as busloads of undocumented migrants are brought into their community,” anti-LGBTQ social media account Libs of Tik Tok posted on X (formerly Twitter).
Salem Media’s Charlie Kirk questioned “how Ireland allowed so many foreigners and Third-Worlders into the beautiful country of Ireland?"
Self-described “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer blamed the attack on a “Muslim migrant."

"Across the West, the status quo has become intolerable,” Loomer added. “The endless waves of immigrants, the devastation of our culture, and the crackdown against anyone who dares to stand against it has all become too much to bear.”

“There can be no doubt that the average person is, at last, awake to the gravity of the situation, and their anger is brewing,” Loomer continued. “White people, in particular, have taken all of this on the chin for the last few decades, but that appears to be coming to an end.”

Former Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis argued that regardless of the suspect’s citizenship status, he “was an immigrant nonetheless,” claiming the incident was further evidence that “Europe is at the precipice of falling."

Following the riots, some observers of the far right argued that anti-immigrant sentiment had become a major issue in Ireland in recent years, and that politicians needed to do more to address the rising xenophobia. Right-wing media figures are determined to stand in the way.

---

no lnx $ ****

Worldwide fascism is being accelerated by the one thing few people want to talk about

Thom Hartmann

August 22, 2023

This article was paid for by AlterNet subscribers.

The government of the Netherlands fell this summer. The issue that tipped it over the edge was immigration driven by climate change. If Putin wanted to destroy democracy in Europe (and he does), back in 2015 he couldn’t have picked a better strategy. Odds are, though, he was just trying to protect his deepwater ports; it wasn’t until the crisis developed that he realized how he could exploit it to overthrow liberal democracies in the EU. The way it’s played out gives us a glimpse into our future — and the future of democratic republics all across the world — as the global climate emergency and the refugee crisis associated with it grows more severe over the next few years.

The current rise-of-rightwing-fascism crisis building in Europe began in 2010 and started with global climate change.

:{:{}:

The fall of that year saw unusually severe rainfall across the wheat-growing parts of Canada, cutting that nation’s wheat harvest, along with drought across Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and China. A La Nina caused crop failures in Argentina and Peru. Worldwide prices of staple foods, particularly wheat, exploded.

:{:{}:

On December 17 of that year a street vendor in Tunisia, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire to protest the high cost of the wheat he needed to make the foods he and his peers sold, and the harassment of police against their protests. It sparked what we referred to then as the Arab Spring, that lasted through most of 2011.

The steady warming and drought in that area, though, never let up and the desert in North Africa relentlessly continued to eat up millions of acres of food-producing land, particularly across Syria. By 2015 it had pushed over a million Syrian subsistence farmers off their land — that had desertified — and into Syria’s cities, particularly Damascus and Aleppo.

Northern Africa became the world’s number one food importer, and the prices kept rising relentlessly.

Newly homeless, hungry, and destitute, these Syrian farmers began demonstrations in the streets demanding food, shelter, and employment or “welfare” payments from the Syrian government.

Bashar Assad, being a psychopathic dictator, ordered his troops to fire live ammunition into the crowds in 2012 and 2013, and soon a full-blown revolt was on: “rebels” seized Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, in early 2013.

Syria was also the base for Russia’s Mediterranean fleet, with multiple deep-water ports that Putin believed were critical to his nation’s military defense. By 2015 he had a dozen battleships there, along with submarines and other warships.

He had to prevent the Assad government from falling or risk an “Arab Spring democracy” emerging — as happened for a short while in Tunisia and Egypt — that might align itself with the West and kick Russia out.

Making a long story short, Putin bombed the crap out of Syria on Assad’s behalf, virtually leveling the city of Aleppo, killing hundreds of civilians.

It was one of the worst war crimes of this century, almost as deadly as George W. Bush’s brutal and criminal invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Millions of climate and war refugees fled the country, joining Bush’s wars’ fugitives making their way into Europe by any means possible.

:{:{}:

Thus began Europe’s refugee crisis, which just helped bring down Holland’s government. In two weeks, it may well cause the rightwing fascist-aligned anti-immigrant People’s Party to come to power in the Spanish elections on July 23.

As the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) noted in a 2021 report:

“By the end of 2016, nearly5.2 million refugees and migrants reached European shores,undertaking treacherous journeys from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries torn apart by war and persecution.”

This flood of brown-skinned Muslims fleeing African and Middle Eastern climate change and wars into Europe over the past decade is why Italy and Sweden now have rightwing leaders; why Viktor Orbán was able to gain and hold power in Hungary with his promise to “build a wall” along Hungary’s southern border (a promise he kept); and why rightwing parties are today growing so rapidly in Germany, Greece, Norway, Austria, Belgium and France.

The legacy of five centuries of racist imperialism across four continents has been that wealth and safety from the ravages of climate change are concentrated in mostly White-run nations, while vulnerability to desertification and poverty are concentrated in mostly Brown- and Black-run nations.

When Russia intervened in British politics to tear apart the EU, their trolls’ main Facebook pitch for Brexit was that “those [Brown and Black] people” the EU had let in were now making their way to the UK.

While every country in the world can accept refugees in small numbers without crisis, when “other people” begin showing up in large numbers the response by every nation in history typically tends toward rightwing nationalism and xenophobia, an obsession with borders, and demands for racial, cultural, and religious “purity.”

Here in North America we’re seeing a similar dynamic. Reagan so severely destabilized Central America and Venezuela with his sanctions, illegal Iran-Contra program, and support for rightwing death squads that those nations never recovered. In the years since, climate change has bit these weakened governments deep, forcing millions of subsistence farmers — just like in Syria but here mostly from hard-hit Guatemala — off land that once grew crops but is now, just a few years later, scrub desert.

Exploiting the climate refugee crisis on America’s southern border, Republican politicians have spent the years since Obama’s election in 2008 falsely claiming that Democrats had thrown the border “open,” producing thousands of news stories that have been used by coyotes — human traffickers — to draw even more refugees toward the United States.

Compounding that, Trump launched his 2016 campaign on keeping Brown people out of the United States, and today racism and xenophobia form the foundation of most Republican political campaigns (when they aren’t hating on queer people or women).

The result of these trends has been a worldwide shift to the right. As Freedom House noted in a 2022 report, over 60 countries experienced “declines” in democracy the previous year; only about 20 percent of people worldwide now live in “free” nations:

“Global freedom faces a dire threat. … Authoritarian regimes have become more effective at co-opting or circumventing the norms and institutions meant to support basic liberties, and at providing aid to others who wish to do the same. …

“The global order is nearing a tipping point, and if democracy’s defenders do not work together to help guarantee freedom for all people, the authoritarian model will prevail.”

So far, the western world’s refugee crisis has been mostly driven by massive policy errors and outright war crimes: Russia’s response to the Syrian farmers, the US invasion and destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, and American meddling in Central America and Venezuela.

But all have been either triggered or exacerbated by the worldwide climate emergency. And, as we can see from this summer’s weather worldwide, that emergency is building at a rate far more rapid than even alarmist climate scientists were predicting just a decade ago.

Recent projections show that within just the next two decades as many as three billion people could be fleeing areas that will soon only marginally support human life.

As equatorial regions become uninhabitable, the mostly darker-skinned people living there will be migrating north and south into areas controlled by lighter-skinned people in numbers that will make today’s Syrian, Iraq, and Afghan refugee crisis look like a statistical blip.

It will put worldwide white supremacist and Nazi movements into hyperdrive.

In addition to acting immediately to mitigate climate change and green the world’s economy, the free nations of the world must harden our democracies against reactive rightwing violence- and hate-based racist political movements.

That will also require radically reducing the Supreme Court-gifted political power of big money here in America — particularly from the fossil fuel industry and the billionaires it has created — and returning that power and wealth to the hard-hit majority. The Democratic Party in America is increasingly committed to this, but Republicans and the dozens of billionaires in their camp are prepared to spend heretofore unimaginable sums to keep climate deniers and race-baiters in office.

We also must help those nations most hard-hit by the warming — caused largely by our carbon pollution — to deal with their own refugees internally, lest they irrecoverably destabilize first their own governments and then ours.

To paraphrase JFK, we are not helpless before this task.

But it will require western and American media and political systems to take on these three crises — climate change, the refugees it produces, and politicians who demagogue the issue while blocking forward progress — now.

We are quite literally out of time.

From Your Site Articles

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How capitalism is leading us to instability, inequality, and fascism ›

Noam Chomsky: 'Proto-fascism' and 'white nationalism are prime ingredients of the GOP’s slow-motion coup ›

Eco-fascism: White nationalists' extreme solution to the coming environmental apocalypse ›

Climate Change and Conflict Are Wreaking Havoc in Somalia

Nick Turse

A historic drought, floods, and a widening war with al-Shabab have displaced more than a million people this year.

===

note the bad ppl coming to take what good ppl deserve

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/right-wing-media-figures-ran-bogus-ny-post-story-pitting-migrants-against-veterans

lana Bellamy , Phillip Pantuso , Brendan J. Lyons @ The Times Union: Story of homeless veterans displaced by migrants was false.

----

mma 5 23

right-wing media figures uncritically amplified a now-debunked New York Post story to demonize immigrants and attack Democratic lawmakers.

On May 13, the New York Post published a story alleging that a group of 20 homeless military veterans had been “evicted” from two upstate New York hotels to make room for immigrants who had settled in New York City. The Post claimed the supposed migrants were part of New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ plans to secure temporary housing for immigrants entering the city.

After the New York Post published its story, local outlet the Mid Hudson News spoke with hotel management and service providers the Post claimed were involved in the removals. On May 18, the paper reported that not only had no homeless veterans been removed, but they were never there to begin with — one hotel manager “had never heard of” the veteran's group supposedly involved, while another said it “had not put any veterans in the hotel for ‘a long time.’” The report also discredited a receipt presented by State Assemblyman Brian Maher as supposed evidence that the group representing the homeless veterans had paid for the rooms. The Post later reported that the group’s longtime advocate had lied to the newspaper about the entire situation, and today the Mid Hudson News uncovered that 15 homeless men were paid to pretend they were veterans who had been staying at the hotel.

[twt]

by the time the story fell apart, right-wing media had already latched onto the now-debunked narrative and immediately weaponized the shoddily reported story as part of their ongoingfear campaign over a so-called “invasion” of migrants coming across the southern border.

Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt said it was “astonishing that some of these hotels are getting migrants” and having to cancel other reservations, adding, “There are two couples that booked rooms for their wedding … and 20 vets also were in that hotel, they all had to move out because these migrants moved in.”
Later on Fox & Friends, guest co-host Will Cain claimed that a “flood of illegal immigrants” are taking up hotel rooms and other resources in New York. Cain went on to remind viewers “about homeless veterans booted from a hotel so that rooms could be given to illegal immigrants,” with Earhardt adding that “Eric Adams says they’re gonna stay there for four months, so 20 veterans had to move to another hotel.”
Fox anchor Harris Faulkner claimed the story showed “the disgraceful treatment of our military veterans played out in Orange County, New York,” as the nonexistent group of “at least 20 homeless veterans, some reportedly suffering from PTSD, had to give up their hotel rooms for illegals.” Fox contributor Johnny “Joey” Jones added a jab at the Biden administration, stating, “A president that would leave Americans stranded in Afghanistan probably doesn't see the onus to take care of 20 veterans in a hotel. And I hate to say it, but that's just the absolute truth of it.”
Outnumbered co-hosts Emily Compagno and Kayleigh McEnany expressed outrage over the New York Post story, with Compagno claiming “America's heroes are now paying the price” for the “Southern border crisis.” McEnany lamented, “I can't help but notice the contrast when you have a 24-year-old — a veteran, had been in Afghanistan — kicked out of his hotel room as an Afghan national on the terror watch list is crossing the border in San Diego.”
Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum complained, “You’ve got the hotels in New York that are having to take folks in. You had one in Newburgh, New York, where they had to cancel a wedding and kick out some homeless veterans to make room for incoming migrants.”
Conservative moving company owner John Rourke appeared on One America News and ranted, “It just drives me nuts when we have veterans sleeping on the streets of this country and committing suicide in record numbers … and here we are filling up hotel rooms with illegal aliens, giving them cell phones, giving them medical attention, giving them food and water, and then putting them on planes.”
On Twitter, Donald Trump Jr. used the story to attack Democrats, stating, “Honestly, this is just infuriating! Homeless vets are being booted from New York hotels to make room for migrants. Fuck Democrats & their bullshit policies! America last isn’t hyperbole it’s their goal.”
Students for Trump founder Ryan Fournier tweeted, “Unacceptable. Nearly two dozen struggling homeless vets have been booted from NY hotels… So illegal immigrants can have space. WHAT?!”
Conservative radio host Bo Snerdley tweeted, “This is about as ruthless, coldblooded, and incredibly heinous as anything Biden and Democrats have ever done. Kicking American veterans out of their lodging to make way for illegal immigrants? What country IS this?”
Newsmax contributor Tony Shaffer later tweeted, “This tells you everything you need to understand about the progressive left cult - they are out to expand political power and a permanent underclass that will vote for them even if it means sacrificing veterans.”
Fox News contributor and former Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted, “What could be more backwards than putting illegal immigrants ahead of American veterans? An insult to American sovereignty.”
2024 Republican presidential candidate and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley tweeted a link to the New York Post’s story, adding, “Liberal insanity at work.”

===

mma 5 23 no lnx

Following the tragic shooting that took five family members' lives in Cleveland, Texas, right-wing media are using the immigration status of the alleged shooter to fearmonger about the criminality of migrants and supposed open border policies instituted by President Joe Biden’s administration.

A man identified as Francisco Oropesa has been arrested by law enforcement for the killing of five of his neighbors in Cleveland, Texas. Following repeated gunshots past 11 p.m. close to their home, one neighbor filed a noise complaint while others tried to ask Oropesa to shoot further from the adjoining yard to not disturb a sleeping infant. After Oropesa refused, survivor Wilson Garcia reportedly called the police five times to no avail, and when police arrived five were already dead or fatally wounded. On May 2, days after Oropesa had fled the scene, authorities arrested him in a house only a few miles away from where the killings took place.

Despite his current immigration status being unclear, right-wing media has drawn attention to the killer’s four past deportations, weaponizing this tragedy to rehash old talking points suggesting that immigrants commit violent crimes. Multiple studies have shown that undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S. citizens by a significant margin. In a tweet in which he offered a $50,000 reward for information on Oropesa’s whereabouts,Texas Governor Greg Abbott labeled the victims as “illegal immigrants” despite a lack of confirmation from authorities about their immigration statuses.

Right-wing media have followed Abbott’s lead, taking the opportunity to make dishonest claims about Biden creating an “open border,” emphasize the killer’s immigration status, and harp on the immigration status of the victims and shooter.

Right-wing media capitalizing on this devastating shooting to make cheap shots at migrants and push the repeatedly debunked claim about Biden’s open border policies is a tired pattern used over and over again. In 2023 alone, right-wing media has baselessly fearmongered about Chinese asylum seekers spying and bringing in drugs, endorsed right-wing militia activity on the border to “curb” immigration, and made wild accusations that migrants are bringing in “fentanyl” and “rape.” Furthermore, right-wing media’s indignation over this particular shooting is transparently dependent on the immigration element of the story, as their coverage of shootings that don’t involve migrants mostly consists of complaints about gun control efforts and defenses of assault weapons.

Right-wing media emphasize the killer’s immigration status to suggest a link between migrants and violent crime

On the May 1 episode of Fox News’ Fox and Friends, co-anchor Brian Kilmeade criticized Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas for not mentioning the killer’s immigration status in an interview on MSNBC’s Meet the Press. According to Kilmeade, Mayorkas did not “want to entertain that aspect of this brutal murder.”

Washington Free Beacon published an article on May 1 titled “Suspect on Run in Texas After Mass Murder Is Illegal Immigrant Deported 5 Times,” spotlighting the alleged shooter’s immigration status rather than the tragedy itself.

National Review also framed an article around the killer’s deportations, citing an ICE statement to Fox News that stated that “the suspect was in the country illegally at the time of the shooting and had previously reentered the country illegally multiple times.”

In response to an ABC news piece on the shooting, right-wing media commentator Ann Coulter tweeted, “Everybody stand down. Shooter was a Mexican illegal alien.”

Fox host Harris Faulkner called foul on how a Time article labeled the killer, questioning, “Anybody at Time care to get the facts straight on this? He is NOT a Texas man. That’s an insult to Texans and to every American. No part of any of our United States should claim that illegal immigrant who was deported FIVE times… now wanted for mass murder.

Former Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke Jr. tweeted in reference to the outrage surrounding Abbott’s classification of the victims, “What’s the problem? If that’s what they are then that’s what they are. Should have called them 'illegal aliens'. So is the suspect who is probably already back in Mexico because our porous southern border makes it easy to illegally cross back and forth.”

A New York Post article discussing the “flak” Abbott has received for his comments calling the victims “illegal immigrants” conceded that the “police confirmed that all the victims in the shooting were from Honduras, but have not mentioned their immigration status.”

Right-wing media use the tragedy to make dishonest claims about Biden’s immigration policies

On the May 1 episode of Fox & Friends, president for the National Border Patrol Council Brandon Judd argued that the Biden administration has “blood on their hands” and that “they look at what their base wants and they pander to that rather than doing what is doing best for this country,” over putting in place policies that would “secure the border tomorrow.”

During the May 1 episode of Fox News’ Hannity, Mark Levin blamed Biden for the shooting, saying, “All the murders and rapes, all the assaults and batteries, all the theft that occurs from people who were here illegally. That's on Joe Biden's hands.”

In a May 1 Ingraham Angle segment discussing the shooting, Fox News hostLaura Ingraham claimed that Democrats “have no remorse for these deadly policies” and that “an open border is the most uncompassionate thing you could do, thank you very much.”

Tomi Lahren tweeted “I’m sure it was the gun’s fault,” and linked to a Fox News article whose headline directly referenced the immigrant status of the alleged shooter.

Conspiracy theorist and actor James Woods tweeted, “Close the damned border already, for the love of God. #BidenBorderCrisis,” with a link to the same Fox News article Lahren tweeted.

===

https://www.alternet.org/greg-abbott-migrants-christmas-dc/

===

mma 5 23

===

https://www.alternet.org/kari-lake-rancher-mexican-migrant/

murder

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===

hanty --> rw

https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/sean-hannity-encourages-caller-who-claims-hes-stockpiling-military-weapons-southern

===

mma 2 23

hannity

https://www.mediamatters.org/immigration/right-wing-media-outlets-are-endorsing-border-militias-tool-curb-immigration

===

mofo tucker

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/tucker-carlson-offers-fund-militia-southern-border

===

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-host-claims-biden-administration-hopes-rescind-title-42-goal-changing-america-forever

---

JEANINE PIRRO (CO-HOST): The amazing thing is, they're saying, “Oh, no, Title 42 is keeping people out. And -- but even if -- when Title 42 goes away, because it's no longer a pandemic, the truth is that we're still going to keep it closed.”

Are you kidding me? You're fighting in the Supreme Court to get Title 42 out so that they can come in. We're seeing people in foil there, those foil blankets, tens of thousands of people, half a million in one sector since October. This country is being invaded.

===

https://www.mediamatters.org/white-nationalism/marjorie-taylor-greene-gave-interview-white-nationalist-who-has-said-peaceful

mma 11 22

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) did an interview several months ago with a white nationalist commentator who previously said that he thinks “peaceful coexistence” with Black people isn’t “possible” and “the war on whites is escalating very quickly. Plan accordingly.” Greene’s interview, which hasn’t been previously reported, is another example of how the Republican congresswoman has been reaching out to fellow extremists to appeal for support.

Republican House leadership is set to give committee assignments back to Greene and has reportedly told her that it would support her potential investigations.

Before entering Congress in 2021, Greene was a right-wing pundit who pushed conspiracy theories about school shootings, satanic child blood drinking, “Pizzagate,” 9/11, and Jewish people using a space laser to start fires. She has also endorsed violence against politicians, the QAnon conspiracy theory, and bigoted rhetoric.

She has continued to promote toxic rhetoric since taking office, including associating with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, toxic conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and grifting election denier Steve Bannon; and posting on the white nationalist and antisemitic social media haven Gab.

Infowars foreign correspondent Dan Lyman interviewed Greene for his Infowars-affiliated site Border Hawk,where he fearmongers about the supposed danger of undocumented immigrants. Greene’s interview was posted and promoted on Jones’ website, which means that Infowars is monetizing it.

Lyman received a press pass and attended the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit in late July, where he interviewed right-wing extremists including Jack Posobiec, Alex Stein, and Greene, calling her “one of our great immigration patriots in Congress.”

During the interview, Greene echoed white nationalist rhetoric by claiming: “It's not just a border invasion. It's an invasion of our entire country because these people are spreading to every single state, all 50 states.” She also said that the Republican-backed House would be “investigating all of the wrongdoing and the corruption” of the Biden administration; claimed that “Democrats don’t want” the U.S. to have “a border any more”; and declared that“we should investigate” the United Nations,nonprofits, and other “globalist groups and networks” for supposedly contributing “to the invasion of America."

[vid]

greene isn’t a stranger to pushing white nationalist talking points regarding immigration. In 2018, she shared an anti-Muslim and antisemitic video that quotes a Holocaust denier claiming that “Zionist supremacists have schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation.”

Lyman is a “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist and white nationalist who has repeatedly made racist and anti-Muslim remarks. Here’s a sampling of his rhetoric:

Lyman tweeted in November: “Wake up, White folks. The nation your ancestors sweat, bled, and died to build for you is being ripped out of your hands.”
In September 2021, Lyman appeared on Red Ice Radio, a white nationalist program that has also promoted Holocaust denial. At the start of the interview, Lyman said that he’s “been a big fan of Red Ice for years and it's truly an honor to join you today.” He later blamed non-white migrants for a “pattern” of “heinous sexual crimes” and “pretty crazy rape stories,” stating: “They [refuges from Afghanistan] really don't care what they're going after as long as it's has a pulse. And so to see that there's going to be so many more of them coming over, you know, I say the worst people that have invaded Europe in recent years have to be either Afghans, Pakistanis, or Somalis.”
Lyman tweeted in July 2020: “All Whites with any sense should flee diversity zones immediately. Peaceful coexistence no longer appears possible. Get out ASAP.”
Lyman tweeted in July 2020: “The war on whites is escalating very quickly. Plan accordingly.”

===

https://www.mediamatters.org/sinclair-broadcast-group/sinclair-broadcast-group-justifying-republicans-despicable-migrant-flights

===

also texas az reverse freedom rides;own libs just helping sanct states smirk, cheer

https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/us-attorney-doj-ron-desantis/

===

see hype, fear, fox

7 22

https://www.mediamatters.org/immigration/first-half-2022-fox-news-feverishly-pushed-debunked-racist-and-inflammatory-narratives

===

an 7 222

lt **Governor Dan Patrick**, a far-right Republican, is comparing migrants crossing the border into Texas to Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor that killed 2335 people. He is calling it an “invasion” and says that gives the state the right to “put hands on people.”

Patrick, who because of Texas’ unique structure is more powerful than the governor, told Fox News on Tuesday, “we are being invaded, and if we’re being invaded under the constitution I think that gives us the power to put hands on people and send them back. Put hands on people and send them back,” he said repeatedly.

“These people are a danger to America,” Patrick said in a rant. It was unclear if he was referring to migrants or President Joe Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

The Lt. Governor, who has hawked the racist “great replacement theory” repeatedly, and used the term “invasion” repeatedly, told Fox News that Texas is now spending $4 billion annually on the border, while Texas National Guardsmen and Texas Rangers complain of being called up to serve, having to abandon their regular jobs, for no apparent reason.

“This is the biggest danger we have, to your family,” Patrick says of the fentanyl crossing the border. “It’s all on Biden,” he claimed.

Last week **Texas Governor Greg Abbott** drew extensive criticism for using thedeaths of more than 50 migrants packed into an 18-wheel tractor-trailer as a political opportunity to attack President Biden. Even some conservatives attacked Abbott for his inhumane remarks..

===

yikes

2022 6 22 an

international delegates left Germany Friday following the Bonn Climate Change Conference, climate campaigners called the talks, which lasted 10 days this month, an "utter failure" for neglecting to establish plans to support the Global South in adapting to the planetary crisis—months after developing countries demanded aid at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Scotland.

"It is unconscionable that developed countries continue to kick the issue of financing for loss and damage down the road—first COP26, now Bonn," saidJeni Miller, executive director of the Global Climate and Health Alliance, referring to the impacts of the climate crisis which developing nations have already suffered and demanding that the issue get badly-needed attention at upcoming talks.

"Such financing would enable countries to deal with the impacts on their people’s lives and livelihoods, homes and health systems, and must be a core component of the COP27 agenda," Miller added.

deepening campaigners' anger was the fact that European countries present at the Bonn conference are currently boosting fossil fuel imports to replace the gas shipments they previously received from Russia, which were largely discontinued after Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine earlier this year.

"The E.U. completely misses the point of what it is to be a climate leader," said Chiara Martinelli, director of Climate Action Network Europe. "European countries also urgently need to massively ramp up their climate and energy targets, rather than displace oil and gas from Russia with those from developing countries, further locking them into fossil fuels. That's what climate leaders should do."

Focusing on sourcing new fossil fuels from overseas while "consistently" blocking discussions about loss and damage financing in Bonn "exposed [the E.U.'s] hypocritical stance," saidHarjeet Singh, the group's senior climate impacts advisor.

Patricia Espinosa, the outgoing executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), claimed the talks in Bonn took steps "in several technical areas" including a "global stocktake" mechanism, which will allow officials to assess international progress toward the target of limiting planetary heating to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

That view,said Aurore Mathieu, international policy coordinator for Climate Action Network France, highlights "the huge disconnect between the urgency of the climate crisis and the inability to progress on concrete outcomes to respond to it."

"Climate impacts are worsening throughout the world, hitting the most marginalized communities, and rich countries are still refusing to acknowledge their climate debt by providing finance for loss and damage," said Mathieu.

Wealthy countries, added Sara Shaw of Friends of the Earth International, are "sleepwalking us all into catastrophe," noting that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned that the world only has three years at most to reach peak carbon emissions before they must begin reducing them.

"The disconnect between the accelerating climate crisisoutside the conference halls and the lack of concrete action inside is palpable," saidShaw. "Developed countries refuse to even discuss long owed and vital loss and damage finance. Instead of taking action, rich countries are trying to shift responsibility for action to developing countries, while expanding their own plans to extract fossil fuels and chasing unproven technofixes."

"We know the solution is a rapid and equitable phase out of fossil fuels and a shift to people-centered renewables," she added.

The climate talks took place as Delhi, India faced a severe heatwavein which meteorologists have recorded temperatures of 107°F and above for 25 days since the summer began.

Indian delegates were among those who demanded in Bonn that wealthy countries help provide "massive funding so the government can prepare for extreme weather events by building early warning systems."

The climate emergency has also pushed Madagascar toward the planet's first climate-fueled famine and is expected by 2050 to internally displace 86 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa, 40 million in South Asia, 19 million in North Africa, and 17 million in Latin America.

"One out of five people in Africa are suffering from hunger, and this is just one of countless ways the climate crisis is spurring devastation that is ripping through our communities," said Hellen Neima, Africa climate director for Corporate Accountability International. "We have had enough of rich, polluting countries silencing those trying to fight for justice."

"We have had enough of you offering crumbs with one hand while you starve the world with the other," Neima added. "We have had enough of our lives being valued as less worthy than Big Polluters' profits... Your empty words cannot fill our stomachs or protect our homelands. People in Africa are rising up and will continue to rise up, until the justice that is owed is delivered at COP27."

===

nice network viz widget

https://plotagainstimmigrants.com/network/

===

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/eco-fascism-rise-and-its-anti-immigrant-beliefs-have-bullhorn-fox-news

the far right is increasingly embracing an extremist ideology known as “eco-fascism,” which seeks to co-opt legitimate environmental concerns and repurpose them to support white nationalism. The alleged shooters who carried out racist, xenophobic attacks in Buffalo, New York; El Paso, Texas; and Christchurch, New Zealand, all either identified as eco-fascists or espoused eco-fascist views, but these beliefs are also being spread by mainstream conservative media figures. Fox News and other right-wing outlets regularly put forward eco-fascistic arguments that either implicitly or explicitly adopt the racist “great replacement” theory, which holds that a cabal of elites is seeking to displace white people through increased immigration.

Eco-fascism holds that immigrants are to blame for a scarcity of resources and, therefore, must be prevented from entering the United States, Europe, or other countries coded as “the West.” “If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable,” the El Paso shooter allegedly wrote. That statement echoed the nativist and proto-eco-fascist Garrett Hardin’s argument that rich countries are like a “lifeboat” with limited social, economic, and natural resources – including food and housing stock – that needed to turn away immigrants, or else the “boat swamps, everyone drowns.”

In addition to this supposed competition for resources, eco-fascists hold racist beliefs about immigrants’ hygiene, respect for nature, and perceived higher birthrates. Historically, eco-fascism has held that the “purity” of a land’s natural resources should be reflected in racist ideas of a nation’s racial “purity,” most explicitly in the Nazi “emphasis on ‘blood and soil’” and “the need for a living space purified of alien and undesirable elements.” Just as the great replacement theory says that white people are being politically marginalized and subjugated, eco-fascists say they are being denied their rightful resources.[vid

November 11, 2019, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight]

The ideas that immigrants are a “drain” on resources or present an environmental risk to the United States are not limited to explicit eco-fascists though. Both of those narratives are common on Fox News, including from the network’s top star Tucker Carlson. On April 25, after Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) blamed migrants for causing “environmental degradation” at the southern border, Carlson thanked him for mentioning the “effect on the physical landscape, on the land.” The host added, “Where is the Sierra Club, you know, as our country is being trampled?”

Carlson has discussed this theme repeatedly over the years. The Potomac River “has gotten dirtier and dirtier and dirtier and dirtier,” he said in a 2019 interview in The Atlantic. “I go down there and that litter is left almost exclusively by immigrants.” (The Potomac Conservancy condemned Carlson’s remarks, calling them “racist plain and simple.”)

“I actually hate litter which is one of the reasons I'm so against illegal immigration. It produces a huge amount of litter,” he said in August 2018.

That December, Carlson said that immigrants make “our own country poorer, and dirtier, and more divided.” He faced a significant backlash following those remarks, including from 26 companies which pulled advertisements from his show. But he doubled down on the comments just days later in a monologue that explicitly called increased immigration levels – not just the act of migrating – a threat to U.S. natural resources.

“Thanks to illegal immigration, huge swaths of the region are covered with garbage and waste that degrade the soil and kill wildlife,” he said. “Illegal immigration comes at a huge cost to our environment.”

“The left used to care about the environment – the land, the water, the animals,” he continued. “They understood that America is beautiful because it is open and uncrowded. Not so long ago, environmentalists opposed mass immigration. They knew what the costs were.”

Far-right website The Federalist wrote up that segment under the headline: “Tucker Carlson Is Absolutely Right: Illegal Immigration Is Destroying The Environment.”

One year earlier, far-right pundit Ann Coulter wrote an opinion piece for the Daily Caller titled “Choose Between A Green America And A Brown America,” criticizing the Sierra Club for adopting progressive immigration policies. In the piece, she made a racist reference to a “Mexican cultural trait of littering” and promoted “taking white Western European immigrants” over “Mass Third World immigration.”

The eco-fascistic right often couches its anti-immigrant conservationism in Malthusian anxieties about overpopulation. “A sensible environmentalism” would have to ask “is it good for us or the environment that the population grows artificially through the mass introduction of foreigners?” Christopher Roach wrote in a piece for American Greatness, a hotbed of far-right Trumpist nationalism. Roach also referenced “an immigration regime that transports billions from the fertile—though impoverished—Third World,” highlighting again the overlap between great replacement panic and eco-fascist narratives.

The far right’s demonization of immigrants as “dirty” or bad stewards of the environment goes hand-in-hand with the lie that they steal wealth from the United States, or otherwise don’t contribute their fair share.

“Our national wealth is up for grabs by whomever gets here first, and they are coming,” Carlson on May 21, 2019. “The United States is being plundered.”

That segment was based on a report from an immigration restrictionist group that has deep ties to the far-right ecology movement, called the Federation for American Immigration Reform. The group seeks to drastically reduce the level of authorized immigration and stop all unauthorized border crossing, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has designated FAIR as an extremist group.

In a recent blog post, FAIR government relations manager Preston Huennekens argued that “any increase in our population is going to our tax natural resources” and that migration had negative environmental impacts “through the physical act of migrating itself,” including “border trash, smuggling trails destroying fauna, etc.”

The idea of scarcity is crucial to the racist appeal of eco-fascism, and Fox News regularly suggests that municipal and federal resources can’t accommodate increased migration.

“At a time when there were more than half a million Americans homeless living on the streets – a crushing number that our leaders ignore but that rises every single year – at that moment, Joe Biden is giving hotel rooms to illegal aliens,” Carlson declared. “It's hard to believe that's real. Oh, but it is real.”

Anchor Harris Faulkner played that clip on her March 23, 2021, show, to which Fox News’ Will Cain responded: “Welcoming in migrants from Central America, that's all fine and good but not if it’s coming at the expense of a limited amount of resources that we're depriving of Americans.” As Media Matters noted at the time, immigrants contribute more to governmental resources than they use[vid]

March 23, 2021, edition of Fox News' The Faulkner Focus ]

In fact, Cain’s entire premise is wrong. The world has enough wealth and productive capacity to feed every human being. The United States could house every person living here, and the choice not to is due to a lack of political will, not limited environmental resources.

Nevertheless, over a 12-week period in 2021, Fox News repeated some version of Cain’s lie, fearmongering about immigrants taking resources from American citizens in at least 46 segments, according to a Media Matters study. The same research found that Fox News hosts demonized migrant children in 32 segments, accusing them of being a burden on the educational system, such as when Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade said on March 1, 2021, that migrant children who “don't speak English” were “taking time and energy away from your kids.”

Environmentalists have worked for decades to successfully expel any strains of eco-fascism from their movement. Now, right-wing media have openly adopted eco-fascistic rhetoric to conflate an ideology grounded in white supremacy with genuine environmental concerns, all in their crusade against immigration.

To paraphrase the Potomac Conservancy: These attacks are racist, plain and simple.

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an 10 21

The Conversation October 21, 2021

by Jane McAdam AO, UNSW

As world leaders prepare for the COP26 climate talks next month, it's worth recalling a sobering line from the royal commission's report into the 2019-20 Australian bushfires: “what was unprecedented is now our future".

The bushfires saw the largest peacetime evacuation of Australians from their homes, with at least 65,000 people displaced. As climate change amplifies the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, evacuations are likely to become increasingly common – and costly – in human and economic terms.

Numbers of displaced people on the rise

Globally, the displacement of people due to the impacts of disasters and climate change is now at a record high.

In 2020, nearly 31 million people were displaced within their own countries because of disasters, at least a third of which resulted from government-led evacuations. And people in poorer countries are six times more likely to be evacuated than those in wealthier countries, according to some estimates.

Already, close to 90% of the world's refugees come from countries that are the most affected by climate change – and the least able to adapt.

Evacuations are an important life-saving emergency response – a temporary measure to move people to safety in the face of imminent harm. Under human rights law, states are obligated to protect people from threats to life, including the adverse effects of disasters and climate change.

At times, this may include an obligation to evacuate people at risk.

However, without careful planning and oversight, evacuations can also constitute arbitrary displacement. They can uproot “significant numbers" of people for prolonged periods of time. And they can expose people to other types of risks and vulnerabilities, and erode human rights.

For example, in 2020, wildfires and flooding exacerbated the existing humanitarian crisis in Syria, prompting the evacuation of thousands of already internally displaced persons who were forced to move yet again.

Too little support after disasters

Unfortunately, the “rescue" paradigm that characterises the way we typically think about evacuations means such risks are too often overlooked. As a result, national responses may fail to appreciate the scale of internal displacement triggered by evacuations, or to identify it at all.

In practice, this may mean there is insufficient support for those who are displaced, and little accountability by the relevant government authorities. Moving people out of harm's way during a disaster may be one element of an effective government response. Ensuring people can return, safely and with dignity, however, is crucial to economic and social recovery.

This is particularly prescient given that evacuations can create significant economic and social disruption.

For instance, the cost of a year's temporary housing for Australia's 2019–20 bushfire evacuees amounted to A$60–72 million. Each day of lost work cost A$705 per person.

Such costs are amplified in the Asia-Pacific region, which accounted for 80% of global disaster-related displacement from 2008–18.

Small island states are particularly affected by disasters and the impacts of climate change. For instance, large proportions of Vanuatu's population were displaced by Cyclone Pam in 2015 and by Cyclone Harold just five years later.

According to a UN forecast, such countries could face average annual disaster-related losses equivalent to nearly 4% of their GDPs. The impact on the long-term prosperity, stability and security of individuals and communities cannot be overstated.

The point is that with greater investment in disaster risk reduction and planning, many of these outcomes could be avoided.

Currently, the amount of money allocated in development assistance to prepare for disaster risks is “miniscule" compared to aid funding for post-disaster responses.

This is clearly is the wrong way around – especially when the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction estimates each dollar spent on preparation could have a 60-fold return.

What leaders at COP26 need to do

The ABC television's miniseries Fires shows that people's decisions about whether to stay or go in an emergency are not simple. People are influenced not only by their perceptions of the risk of harm, but also by the desire to protect relatives, property and animals, or a belief that they can withstand the disaster.

Well-planned, evidence-based strategies are important when an emergency requires rapid decision-making, often in changing conditions and with limited resources to hand. If lines of authority are unclear, or there is insufficient attention to detail during the planning process, evacuation efforts may be hampered further, putting lives and property at greater risk.

It is essential for policymakers to recognise that a government's “life-saving" response to a disaster, such as an evacuation, can itself generate significant human and financial costs. Governments need to incorporate principles from human rights law into their response plans to help protect people from foreseeable risks and to enhance their rights, well-being and recovery.

Climate change is only going to exacerbate increasingly extreme weather events that force people from their homes. At next month's climate talks, leaders must agree on climate change mitigation targets and adaptation policies that avert the need to evacuate people in the first place.

However, achieving change on the ground will require a far more linked-up and integrated approach to climate change, disaster risk reduction, sustainable development and mobility. This includes systematically implementing the recommendations not only of the Paris Agreement, but other international agreements focused on these goals.

The Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at UNSW is holding a conference this week bringing together experts to share evidence, experiences and solutions for people at risk of displacement in due to climate change and disasters. A schedule of events and more information can be found here.The Conversation

Jane McAdam AO, Scientia Professor and Director of the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, UNSW no lnx

strict fr pathological strain?

1021 an

So much depends on respectable white people. Those are white people who care about appearing respectable to other white people, who themselves care about appearing respectable to other white people. They are the great globular middle of American politics that determines electoral outcomes in this country.

For the longest time, they sided with the Republican Party on account of tax cuts and other goodies. My hope is that, for the foreseeable future, they will side with the Democrats on account of tax cuts and other goodies being a banner for hiding the fact that sadism is the GOP's point.

Sadism isn't only about sex, though it can be, obviously. When I say "sadism," I mean the pleasure derived from seeing other people suffer. The Republicans have no policy goals. Their only goal is creating legal and political conditions in which the in-group is protected while the out-group is punished. But it doesn't end with punishment. It can't.

When the out-group gains power, the in-group feels powerless. When the in-group feels powerless, the in-group feels oppressed. When the in-group feels oppressed, it cries out for freedom. But in order to feel free, the in-group must do more than merely punish the out-group. It must derive pleasure from seeing pain and suffering. This is what I want respectable white people to understand. When they vote for tax cuts and other goodies, they are doing far more. They are helping the GOP's authoritarian base feel a freedom that depends on suffering.

When white police officers pulled a Black paraplegic man out of his vehicle by his hair last month in Dayton, Ohio, on illegal drug suspicion, that might appear to be another case of police brutality. (Body cam footage of the incident was released Friday. An investigation by the police department is underway.) But to the authoritarian base of the Republican Party, what the Dayton cops did was the goal itself. Seeing the man's pain produced pleasure. It made them feel free.

It is sadism. It is not cruelty. Cruelty is not the point. Sadism is. You can be cruel without meaning to. You can be cruel without taking pleasure in pain. You can be cruel because you can't help it (on account of repeating past traumas, for instance). But sadism takes intention. It takes the desire to set aside priorities, like tax cuts and other goodies. It is its own cause. It is its own effect. This is another thing I want respectable white people to understand. Sadism isn't an unintended consequence. It's the point. When you vote for the Republican Party, when you give money to Republican candidates, you are joining a concerted effort to bring more suffering to more people, and you are complicit in the derivation of pleasure from suffering. You have become a sadist.

This sounds extreme. That's because sadism cancels equality. If the Republicans had some degree of commitment to equality, they might seek conditions in which the in-group feels free regardless of whether the out-group feels pain. But there is no equality. Therefore, there is no equal protection under law. Therefore, there is a one-to-one relationship between in-group freedom and out-group pain. Put another way, it's quite impossible for the in-group to feel free when the out-group does not feel pain. Sadism is the GOP's vital link.

Given the reality of this one-to-one relationship, you can see they don't mean freedom when they say freedom. They don't mean the presence of choice. They don't mean the absence of coercion. They don't mean freedom in any conventional sense. What they mean is the pleasure of seeing other people's pain, because their freedom can't exist without their suffering. Respectable white people need to understand this. Cries for freedom are in fact cries for sadism.

Just as they don't mean freedom when they say freedom, they don't mean borders when they say borders. Ten Republican governors went to the southern border to pressure the president to do more about immigrants coming in. Most of them were from non-border states. And that's the tell. The border they are defending isn't the border. It is the border between us and them, between the GOP's authoritarian base that can't feel free unless someone suffers, like immigrants, and everyone else who can feel free as they share power with others.

This is the last thing I want respectable white people to understand. There is no middle way. There is no neutral position. "Every state is now a border state," said Wisconsin Congressman Tom Tiffany last week while visiting the border. Every state is a border state. Every issue is a border issue. Every person is a border person who must choose a side. Are you with us or against us. Sadism is the point.

===

https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/lindsey-graham-immigration/

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an 1021

blanca explains how her family affected by immigr law, ks broke campaign promise to help?]

...The video captures the senator stating, "Actually, I am heading out," and locking herself into a bathroom stall as hecklers pepper her with remarks from the bathroom's entryway.

Following the sound of a flushing toilet, an activist speaks up, arguing they are holding her "accountable."

"We need to hold you accountable to what you told us, what you promised us that you were going to pass when we knocked on doors for you," the activist who identified herself as Blanca says. "It's not right!"

A Sinema spokesperson didn't return a Salon request for comment about the confrontation. In a statement released on Twitter, however, Sinema said the bathroom encounter "was not legitimate protest."

"It is unacceptable for activist organizations to instruct their members to jeopardize themselves by engaging in unlawful activities such as gaining entry to closed university buildings, disrupting learning environments, and filming students in a restroom," her statement added.

Right-wing media quickly seized upon the unlikely task of defending a Democratic senator against people who (very likely) voted for her.

Coup-crazed former Trump adviser Steve Bannon suggested that the progressive activists who confronted the senator might have been "Illegal aliens."

"By the way, no illegal aliens vote in Arizona. They are bragging about it," he added Monday morning on his podcast. "Out there, they're stalking Sen. Sinema and bragging about how they organize and vote out in Arizona. Just saying."

"Watch — Leftist Protesters Stalk, Harass Sen. Kyrsten Sinema in a Restroom," the far-right Breitbart site flashed on its homepage early on Monday. The conservative blog RedState asked its readers a rhetorical question: "Did Leftists Who Stalked and Filmed Sinema in the Bathroom Commit a Crime?" (The answer would almost certainly be no.)

Stephen Miller, the former speechwriter and adviser to Donald Trump, who has often expressed an affinity for white nationalist views, also took up Sinema's cause, expanding on Bannon's illogical views.

"An illegal alien is stalking a US Senator to demand passage of Biden's reconciliation bill [because] it includes mass amnesty for illegals," he tweeted, citing the ruckus on the Arizona State campus. "In a functioning democracy, ICE would swiftly deport this person, but under Biden's new edict (as the lawbreaker knows) she's immune from removal."

"Did we #DeportBlanca yet?" former Trump official Steve Cortes asked aloud on Twitter....

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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/tucker-carlson-fully-embraced-white-supremacist-replacement-theory-and-fox-personalities

no lnx

Fox News personalities, guests, and elected Republican Party officials appearing on the network have launched nativist attacks that resemble the explicit white nationalist “great replacement” conspiracy theory pushed by host Tucker Carlson.

In an interview with NPR, historian Kathleen Belew explained that the nativist arguments stem from the “great replacement theory,” which imagines “nonwhite people or outsiders or strangers or foreigners will overtake the United States via immigration, reproduction and seizure of political power.”

Fox prime-time star Tucker Carlson has long pushed the theory with full corporate support from Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch. In the process, he has gained praise from white nationalists while the Anti-Defamation League has repeatedly called for his firing.

Fox's decision to enable Carlson’s white supremacist rhetoric has led to more Fox hosts and guests pushing similar talking points. But it's not a completely new look for the rest of the network. Back in 2019, the manifesto of the El Paso, Texas, mass shooter closely echoed nativist Fox talking points. And Fox News personalities responded to that shooting by defending their dehumanizing rhetoric and denying that white supremacy was a problem in the United States. The only question now is what tragedy will ensue this time.

Here are a few examples from just one week in September of the kind of rhetoric Fox airs, echoing nativist and the “great replacement” conspiratorial claims.

9/19/21

Fox’s Carley Shimkus claimed that the Biden administration looks at illegal immigration as “a political opportunity, especially when it comes to Mexicans, because Mexicans typically vote Democrat.” [Fox News, The Big Sunday Show, 9/19/21]

9/20/21

Co-host Brian Kilmeadecommented on Democrats’ efforts to pass legislation to provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, saying that “8 to 14 million would have been instantly legalized” and “that would have benefited, in theory, Democrats when it comes to voting because they were the ones who got it." [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 9/20/21]

Fox & Friends hosted Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxtonto complain that the Biden administration “want[s] illegal immigration, they want what that brings.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 9/20/21]

Host Pete Hegseth argued, “Democrats don't care about protecting you or me or the border or our nation. They only care about protecting themselves, their political position, and their livelihood. And that's why they're ignoring the border. It doesn't affect them, except they hope in the future at the ballot box.” [Fox News, Fox News Primetime, 9/20/21]

Guest Charlie Kirkwarned that through encouraging illegal immigration, the Biden administration is “trying to fulfill Barack Obama’s promise” of “a fundamental transformation of America.” [Fox News, Fox News Primetime, 9/20/21]

Guest and white nationalist Stephen Miller said that the Biden administration’s “goal is as much immigration as quickly as possible, as fast as possible, to destroy the working class.” [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 9/20/21]

9/21/21

Tom Homan, Fox contributor and former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, fearmongered that migrants will “compete with low-level wage jobs and middle-class jobs. So this is not good for the American worker.” [Fox News, America Reports, 9/21/21]

Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum emphasized the number of migrants compared to the population of Del Rio: “Del Rio has a population of 35,000 people — 35,000 Texans live there. Now, they’ve got 12,000 -- as many as 20,000 at one point -- refugees living in their town." [Fox News, The Story with Martha MacCallum, 9/21/20]

Host Pete Hegseth called Haitian migrants coming into the U.S. a “full-scale invasion" of the country, warning that the migrants are “coming to a neighborhood near you. … They’re coming to our backyard.” [Fox News, Fox News Primetime, 9/21/21]

Host Tucker Carlson declared that Biden’s immigration policy is an “attempt to change the demographics of the United States in order to give permanent power to the Democratic Party. That's all it is, no matter what they tell you.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 9/21/21]

9/22/21

America’s Newsroom hosted residents of Del Rio, Texas, who discussed their frustrations with what they called a “planned" crisis: “What frightens us is we have a madman and racist making -- who’s using people to advance his political agenda, to collapse our border, and change our style of government, and that's scaring us.” [Fox News, America’s Newsroom, 9/22/21]

Co-host Jesse Watters opened The Five by fearmongering about a “large scale" release of migrants in the U.S. [The Five, 9/22/21]

Host Pete Hegseth accused the Biden administration of “releas[ing] thousands of residents of Bidenville” and complained that “family units and pregnant women [are] being allowed to stay, meaning more anchor babies and more illegals.” [Fox News, Fox News Primetime, 9/22/21]

Frequent Fox guest Victor Davis Hansonaccused Democrats of being “unhappy with the present electorate” and allowing Afghan refugees and other migrants to “change the demography” of the country and “change the electorate” for the advantage of the Democratic agenda. [Fox News, Fox News Primetime, 9/22/21]

Host Tucker Carlson called Biden’s immigration policy “the great replacement” and “eugenics.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 9/22/21]

Host Sean Hannitysuggested that Democrats were offering citizenship to migrants “in the hopes that they’ll vote for Democrats.” [Fox News, Hannity, 9/22/21]

Hosts Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannitysaid that the Democratic National Committee voter registration desks were set up at the border. [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 9/22/21]

Ingraham said the Biden administration is overseeing a “purposeful resettlement of -- it’s going to be millions of illegal immigrants" and complained that migrants get benefits like public schooling and health care. [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 9/22/21]

9/23/21

Jesse Watters claimed that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) “[let] the truth slip” and revealed that Democrats want “the votes” from immigration and amnesty. [Fox News, The Five, 9/23/21]

Pete Hegseth said that the Biden administration was encouraging migrants to come to the U.S. because “they want more illegals" and warned viewers that migrants were being flown “to the destination of their choice, maybe your hometown.” [Fox News, Fox News Primetime, 9/23/21]

On Sean Hannity’s show, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich said -- without any pushback -- of Haitian migrants, “There are some folks that probably think this is the equivalent of an invasion.” [Fox News, Hannity, 9/23/21]

Host Laura Ingraham claimed that Democrats are “panicked that men of color are beginning to turn away from the Democrat Party. They need a new constituency. They hope [for] a constituency that may be dependent on the government.” White nationalist Stephen Miller agreed, adding, “This is all about … cheap labor for Biden’s wealthy backers, ... and it’s about new votes.” [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 9/23/21]

9/24/21

Fox & Friends guest Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX) complained that the Democrats’ “grand strategy” is to “change America” and “replace the American electorate with third world immigrants.” He continued that Democrats will then give immigrants citizenship and “enfranchise them with a vote and have a permanent majority.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 9/24/21]

Faulkner Focus guest Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL) claimed that Democrats have a “broader political agenda” to encourage illegal immigration to the size of “one of the largest cities in America.” [Fox News, The Faulkner Focus, 9/24/21]

Tucker Carlson Tonight guest Horace Cooper attacked the Biden administration for shirking its “number one responsibility … to protect us from invasion.” [Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, 9/27/21]

Ingraham Angle guest Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) said that Democrats “want to flood the United States with cheap labor and they want to grant amnesty to all of these illegals that are coming into our country and turn them into Democrat voters. That’s their last great hope for keeping the majority in the midterm election.” (Banks' communications director is Tucker Carlson's son.) [Fox News, The Ingraham Angle, 9/24/21]

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gobsmacking bigotry boebert jenna on afghan refugees

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ctr to huge fatal fail of gop gov run 2024 on mask and vax is emergency at border where presumably covid cases are coming from?!

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gOP Rep. Elise Stefanik gets slammed for ‘vile’ and ‘xenophobic’ anti-immigrant ads

Alex Henderson

September 16, 2021

In the past, Rep. Elise Stefanik of Upstate New York had a reputation for being a moderate Republican and was critical of Donald Trump's far-right hyper-nationalist agenda. But Stefanik has since flip-flopped and gone

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alrt rt EUR

Krange, O. Kaltenborn, B.& Hultman, M. (2018). “Cool Dudes in Norway: Climate Change denial among conservative Norwegian Men”, Environmental Sociology.

McCright, A., Dunlap, R (2011). "Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States", Global Environmental Change.

In their article ‘Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States’ the authors state: ‘Clearly the extent to which the conservative white male effect on climate change denial exists outside the US is a topic deserving investigation.’ Following this recommendation, we report results from a study in Norway. McCright and Dunlap argue that climate change denial can be understood as an expression of protecting group identity and justifying a societal system that provides desired benefits. Our findings resemble those in the US study. A total of 63 per cent of conservative males in Norway do not believe in anthropogenic climate change, as opposed to 36 per cent among the rest of the population who deny climate change and global warming. Expanding on the US study, we investigate whether conservative males more often hold what we term xenosceptic views, and if that adds to the ‘cool dude-effect’.1 Multivariate logistic regression models reveal strong effects from a variable measuring ‘xenosceptic cool dudes’. Interpreting xenoscepticism as a rough proxy for right leaning views, climate change denial in Norway seems to merge with broader patterns of right-wing nationalism.

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omg

Unbelievably dangerous': Top Democrat slams Gov. Noem for using the National Guard as a 'private militia'

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

July 01, 2021

The top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee is blasting South Dakota Republican **Governor Kristi Noem** for fulfilling the request of a wealthy GOP donor who asked her to deploy....nat'l gd in texas abbott border

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621 an

A huge victory': Advocates cheer the end of Trump's cruel 'Remain in Mexico' asylum policy

Brett Wilkins Common Dreams

Migrant rights advocates on Tuesday welcomed an announcement by the Biden administration that it is ending the so-called Migrant Protection Protocols—commonly known...

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an 521 ME

Former Trump White House senior adviser Stephen Miller developed a reputation for giving white supremacy a mainstream voice. Although his time in the White House has passed, he is still working to advance his white nationalist campaigns by way of Fox News and other right-wing platforms as he perpetuates his dangerous, deluded ideology of anti-white racism.

Now, Miller's non-profit organization "America First Legal" is launching attacks against the Biden administration's steps to establish a more humane immigration structure that would ultimately lead to a more equitable America.

However, The Nation has**dissected Miller's playbook and highlighted ways the Biden administration could actually use it to combat the United States' decades-long white supremacy problem**. "What Biden's team must understand is that the radicalized Republican Party is going to use immigration to attack him regardless of what he does," the publication notes.

Per the publication, there are several steps the Biden administration must deploy to counter Miller's dangerous strategies to promote hatred. In a nutshell, the goal would be to use the mainstream media as a vehicle to counter Miller's attacks.

"Use vivid, visceral anecdotes about immigrants' contributions to the United States in speeches, press releases, news articles, interviews, and more."
"Hold press conferences, roundtables, and other reality-TV-style events that celebrate and inform about the above immigrant contributions to US national security, health, and the economy, while sharing accurate statistics."
"Promote literature, websites, andthink tanksthat center immigrants and refugees and depict them as they really are."
"Call anti-immigrant rhetoric what it is: a tactic of largely white elites to distract from the real problems they created for working people of all colors."
"Forge alliances with other people in positions of power to accomplish the above goals and, crucially, to inspire hope."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

federal judge rules Trump's DHS secretary was illegally appointed — so his anti-immigrant moves are invalid

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/climate-change-future/

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deport ms 13 [ELO every last one]

https://theintercept.com/2020/10/09/amy-coney-barrett-immigration/

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upping fees for immig struck down by ct in part b/c gig not official

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https://www.democracynow.org/2020/9/24/headlines/trump_administration_restores_public_charge_wealth_test_for_green_card_applicants

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/did-donald-trump-help-an-anti-corruption-probe-in-guatemala-to-aid-his-re-election-bid/

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman. “How Donald Trump took down the Robert Mueller of Latin America.” That’s the headline of a new investigation by Reveal at The Center for Investigative Reporting and in The Daily Beast that looks at how the Trump administration aided Guatemala’s right-wing government to kill a powerful anti-corruption commission.

The story centers on Iván Velásquez, a Colombian prosecutor who headed the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, known as CICIG, from 2013 to ’19. A leading backer of the commission in the United States was former Vice President Joe Biden. After leaving office, Biden wrote, quote, “I made it clear that U.S. funding for Guatemala hinged on CICIG being allowed to continue its work."

but the Trump administration took the opposite approach and agreed to withdraw support for the commission in apparent exchange for Guatemala’s support of Trump’s immigration and Middle East policies. In 2018, Guatemala moved its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem just after the United States did. A year later, Guatemala’s then-president, the former comedian Jimmy Morales, agreed to make Guatemala a “safe third country,” quote-unquote, for migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. The agreement requires asylum seekers who journey through Guatemala en route to the United States to apply for asylum in Guatemala instead of at the U.S.-Mexico border.

On August 31st, 2018, Guatemalan President Morales announced he was shutting down the anti-corruption commission, which had begun investigating Morales himself, his son and his family. Morales was flanked by 50 military officers. Soon tanks and jeeps with mounted artillery, provided by the United States, circled around the office of the commission.

Reporters Aaron Glantz and Anayansi Diaz-Cortes write, quote, “All of this shook Guatemalan society to the bone — a dark reminder of the civil war and military rule,” unquote. Before it was disbanded, CICIG have prosecuted over 100 cases, including one against former Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina, who was forced to resign in 2015 after months of massive protests and remains in jail.

Well, Aaron Glantz and Anayansi Diaz-Cortes both join us to talk about their reporting for Reveal and the report in The Daily Beast.

Aaron, why don’t you talk about the significance of releasing this now? I mean, this is a story that involves President Trump, that involves Vice President Pence, that involves Sheldon Adelson, the big Republican donor, in connections to Israel, that involves Colombia itself. Iván Velásquez is a crusading human rights prosecutor, who was attempting to do this work in Guatemala.

AARON GLANTZ: Iván Velásquez, who is the person who blew the whistle to us, had taken down presidents and paramilitaries in Guatemala and in Colombia. And he was known as the Robert Mueller of Latin America. He was brought to Guatemala in 2013 — as you mentioned, he had the strong support of Vice President Joe Biden — with the idea that if tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors are arriving at the U.S. border every year, that it’s in the U.S. interest to improve conditions in Guatemala by lessening the amount of corruption and impunity in that country. And so, as you mentioned, Iván Velásquez, shortly after he arrives in Guatemala, he throws the president, Otto Pérez Molina, a former member of the ruling military junta from earlier, in prison for running a customs ring at the airport, his involvement in that.

But, as you mentioned, then Donald Trump comes in office. And we see an entirely different dynamic take place, where these two former television stars, Donald Trump and Jimmy Morales, both with a documented history of racism, band together to kill this anti-corruption force and save themselves.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to Iván Velásquez himself, the head of CICIG, talking about what happened.

IVÁN VELÁSQUEZ: [translated] President Jimmy Morales tells President Trump, “I understand what you’re going through. You are being persecuted by Robert Mueller in the States. I am being persecuted by Iván Velásquez in Guatemala. I know how much you’ve suffered through all this.” When Ambassador Nikki Haley visits Guatemala, it is an explicit show of support for Morales. She has a series of complaints for me: stop doing press conferences, anonymity. That is what is expected of my role at CICIG. It’s a transaction where both parties seem to win something: You help us by ending this persecution unleashed by the CICIG, and we will help you. And how do you shut down CICIG? By cutting the funds. And that is exactly what happened.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I want to go to March 2018, when then-U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley spoke to AIPAC, the policy conference in Washington, D.C., and thanked Guatemala for supporting the Trump administration’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

NIKKI HALEY: Last week I took a trip to Guatemala and Honduras. And I thanked them both for voting with us. God bless Guatemala. They’ve even joined us in moving their embassy to Jerusalem.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Anayansi Diaz-Cortes, if you could talk more about this? Then you have Sheldon Adelson chartering a private plane for Morales and the leadership of Guatemala to go to Jerusalem, when the U.S. was recognizing their moved embassy to Jerusalem. How this is all a part of this story?

ANAYANSI DIAZ-CORTES: Well, I think the important thing to remember, Amy, is that this commission was basically set up to do kind of the hard labor, the boring labor, of institution building, after decades of civil war and U.S. involvement in supporting military dictatorships here.

So, you know, when we look at Biden’s support of the CICIG and the contrast to what begins to happen once Velásquez starts going after Jimmy Morales for corruption, then you see lobbying on the part of, you know, Guatemala sending signals to the U.S. to then support the United States in moving the Guatemalan Embassy to Jerusalem as a way to tell Trump, “I understand your suffering. You have Robert Mueller” — like he said, “You have Robert Mueller in the United States. I have Iván Velásquez here. Get the CICIG out of my hair, in exchange for a pliant immigration policy in Guatemala.”

And we see how that timeline takes place, first with Nikki Haley visiting Guatemala and telling Iván Velásquez, “Tone it down. Stop it with the ‘I heart CICIG’ bumper stickers. Don’t hold press conferences.” And then, kind of days later, she is at AIPAC — with Jimmy Morales there, as well — announcing this, and that leads to a slow demise, over the year, of the CICIG.

It’s also important to just acknowledge that in order for CICIG to work, CICIG can make recommendations based on what they believe should happen, but really it is the attorney general and the Guatemalan Congress who implement these recommendations. So, at some point, Morales, you know, Thelma Aldana, who was the attorney general then, and Velásquez were a dream team. They were kind of working together. The moment that Velásquez goes under Morales’s family, that then changes, right? Morales refuses to stand before a judge, and Velásquez doesn’t back down.

AMY GOODMAN: And Thelma Aldana — people can go to our website at democracynow.org to see our interview with the former Guatemalan attorney general, who then Morales goes after and indicts. And this weekend, Interpol said they’re not going to honor any arrest warrant for her.

ANAYANSI DIAZ-CORTES: That’s correct, Amy. That is correct. And we don’t get into that story in our radio story because there’s so much to get into, but her leaving Guatemala was like a key moment, where suddenly you have the attorney general that Velásquez was working so closely with is no more, as well. So, he’s slowly isolated. And once the U.S. support is taken away, well, CICIG is basically left not only without teeth, but without substance.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can wrap this up, Aaron Glantz, and talk about what came of this, what this means that you had Morales surrounded by military tanks, a number provided by the United States, announcing CICIG was being dissolved and Iván Velásquez was being thrown out?

AARON GLANTZ: Well, as you said in your intro and we say in our piece, it was a dark reminder of the days when Guatemala had previously been ruled by U.S.-backed military juntas. And the whole purpose of this international anti-corruption force was to help turn the page and move towards a more just society.

And that was visually — you know, all those military members, the U.S.-provided military vehicles in the streets sent a clear message. When Velásquez leaves the country to attend U.N. meetings in the U.S., he tries to get back in, they won’t let him in. And they send his belongings to Colombia, which is where he’s from, and it’s where Anayansi and I went earlier this year to interview him and get his story.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you so much for being with us. We’re going to link to your story in The Daily Beast at democracynow.org, Aaron Glantz and Anayansi Diaz-Cortes with Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, the piece called “How Donald Trump took down the Robert Mueller of Latin America.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/president-trump-is-the-child-trafficker-in-chief/

President Donald Trump thinks of himself as a champion against human trafficking. He addressed a White House Summit on the issue in January claiming there was a “humanitarian crisis” at the border fomented by criminal organizations and that “traffickers victimize countless women and children.” He signed an executive order and diverted $400 million in funding to combat the issue, boasting in his usual manner that “we have signed more legislation on human trafficking than any other administration has ever even thought about.” But in recent months, the administration has been found to be flouting the United States’ own anti-trafficking laws by deporting thousands of children and families seeking asylum, practically delivering them into the hands of traffickers across the border in Mexico.

Dr. Amy Cohen, executive director of Every Last One, explained to me in an interview that under the Trump administration’s so-called “Remain in Mexico” program, “the United States has been essentially feeding vulnerable migrant children and families to cartel traffickers in Mexico continuously.” The program, officially known by the Orwellian-sounding title of “Migrant Protection Protocols” (MPP), sends immigrants seeking entry into the United States across the border to Mexico to await the adjudication of their cases. While the Department of Homeland Security claimed that MPP would “decrease the… ability of smugglers and traffickers to prey on vulnerable populations,” in fact it does the opposite.

Cohen elaborated on this horrific phenomenon, saying, “migrants are dropped off with nothing on the other side of the border, with no shelter, with no protection, with no food, with no money. And within minutes, they are picked up by cartel gangs that are waiting.” As a child and family psychiatrist who works closely with traumatized migrant children, she did not mince words, saying that families are, “kidnapped and used for extortion, which is a form of trafficking. Sometimes they are tortured. Sometimes they are raped. Children are compelled to watch. Sometimes children themselves are raped.”

The only way to view the outcome of this policy is that the United States is actively participating in a trafficking operation. The Trump administration cannot claim ignorance of the outcome of MPP. According to Cohen, “This is happening in cities literally all along the border. This is not a secret; this is widespread.” So extensive is the abuse that according to her, “The vast majority of asylum seekers who we’ve placed into the MPP program have at one time or another experienced at least one, sometimes multiple, episodes of what I would consider trafficking, of kidnapping, and some form of psychological or physical torture."

because of the extreme danger that the Trump administration has put families in, according to Cohen it has “forced many parents into a decision” about whether to keep their children with them or send them unaccompanied across the U.S. border.

But under cover of the coronavirus pandemic, the federal government has accelerated the expulsion of even unaccompanied children to Mexico and Central America—in violation of federal law. The Associated Press explained that “More than 2,000 unaccompanied children have been expelled since March under an emergency declaration enacted by the Trump administration, which has cited the coronavirus in refusing to provide them protections under federal anti-trafficking and asylum laws.”

Now reports have emerged of the government hiring a private security and transportation firm to move immigrant families and children into hotels in the United States before expelling them. According to the New York Times, which broke the story, the Trump administration has created “a largely unregulated shadow system of detention and swift expulsions without the safeguards that are intended to protect the most vulnerable migrants.” Children, some as young as one year old, are being cared for in hotels like Best Western and Hampton Inn by private security personnel who have no childcare training.

Cohen says advocates like her believe that “this has been a way for the United States to try to hide a number of these children who they are deporting.” Those children held in government facilities have to be registered as having entered the United States, which then triggers legal protections for them. But by holding children in hotels, effectively off the books and out of public view, “government attorneys are denying that they are actually in the custody” of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, says Cohen. Bizarrely, they are claiming that the children are in the custody of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) over concerns of COVID-19, and thereby flouting the legal mandate known as the Flores Settlement to maintain the safety, care, and oversight of the children.

Where the children end up once they are removed from the U.S. is not known, and the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency will not say. According to Reuters, “Between April and June, U.S. officials arrested more than 3,300 unaccompanied children on the southwest border, but CBP has declined to say how many have been expelled under the new process or give a breakdown of arrests by nationality for that time period.” During that same time frame, out of the thousands of children apprehended, only about 160 remain in U.S. custody.

It is ironic, to say the least, that some of Trump’s most loyal followers are conspiracy theorists who label themselves QAnon claiming that the president is facing off against a “cabal of Democratic pedophiles.” So mainstream is this movement that one of its followers just won a GOP congressional primary in Georgia. QAnon is now appropriating the social media hashtag #SaveTheChildren and promoting fantastical claims of a widespread child sex trafficking ring. Its followers have even joined the anti-trafficking movement in the United States. But they have entirely ignored the very real trafficking and exploitation of children at the U.S. border that their president has unleashed.

More than two years ago, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions claimed that the government cared about children when he officially announced Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, saying, “If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you as required by law.” It was a thinly veiled attempt to punish those fleeing poverty and violence for a better life in America. And while mass public outrage forced Trump to back off (he signed an executive order in June 2018 to end what his own discretionary policy initiated), in truth the torture and trauma facing immigrant families did not end. It was simply moved out of our view across the border into even more dangerous conditions.

As America hurtles toward November 3 with a desperation unlike any we’ve felt for previous presidential elections, the issue of how President Trump has treated immigrant families and children has been largely off the radar. But if we care about children and about protecting them from horrific torture and abuse, Trump’s role as Child-Trafficker-in-Chief ought to be central to our election discourse.

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/first-sessions-now-kobach-america-first-candidates-are-flopping-at-the-voting-booth/

Far-right anti-immigration hardliner Kris Kobach lost the Kansas Republican Senate primary to Rep. Roger Marshall by more than 50,000 votes, marking the latest defeat for far-right “America First” candidates at the ballot box.

In 2020, several high-profile Republican candidates championed by far-right and white nationalist political activists have been rejected by their constituencies. Right Wing Watch reported in January that white nationalists were excited by the prospect of Kobach, the former secretary of state of Kansas, serving in the Senate. White nationalist podcaster James Allsup told listeners at the time that “having somebody like Kobach in the upper house, in a position of power, as an anti-immigration, as an immigration restrictionist leader, that would be immensely powerful going forward.”

On Tuesday night the race was called, and the far-right activists who had supported Kobach’s bid mourned his electoral loss online. Many “America First” white nationalist movement figures blamed the GOP for Kobach’s defeat.

“Back to the hills. Of course, we’ve been there before,” Peter Brimelow, editor of the anti-immigrant, white nationalist publication VDARE, said. He added that it was “annoying” that far-right commentator Ann Coulter was right about President Donald Trump. Coulter, once an avid supporter of Trump, has attacked the president in recent years and called Trump the “most disloyal actual retard” after he endorsed former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ Republican primary opponent Tommy Tuberville in Alabama.

“Fuck the weak Kansas Republicans who are looking at this primary as a ‘victory.’ No matter what you’re electing a member of the monoparty in November who hates you and will continue to sell you out to our globalist elites,” far-right Kansas State student Jaden McNeil said. “Enjoy your state’s continued degradation.”

Scott Greer, a former editor at The Daily Caller who was revealed to be writing alt-right columns under a pseudonym, only offered one comment on Kobach’s loss: “Damn.”

White nationalist and alt-right poster boy **Richard Spencer** theorized that Kobach’s loss reflected the unpopularity of “conservative nationalism.” Spencer has been vocal in his disdain for the elements of the far-right that overtook him in popularity and the flaws he sees in those ranks.

“Steve King . . . Jeff Sessions . . . Kris Kobach . . . then Donald Trump in November . . . The’America First’ conservatives and supposed ‘immigration hawks’ are falling like dominos,” Spencer tweeted. He later added, “You can blame Trump’s tactical failures—and there are many—you can blame Jared and Ivanka, etc. At some point you must conclude that conservative nationalism isn’t going anywhere, and it’s simply not very popular.” 

Joshua Foxworth, a Republican “America First” candidate in Texas who was trumped by incumbent Rep. Randy Weber in a blow-out loss in March, blamed Kobach’s loss on the media.

“The loss of Kobach in Kansas is upsetting but not surprising,” Foxworth said. “Almost no one can overcome a media that constantly promotes or opposes a candidate. Deplatforming of supporters doesn’t help. The GOP is in danger of becoming a party without core issues and without a base.”

But Kobach’s loss does not exist in a vacuum. Other far-right supported candidates, like Sessions, Iowa Rep. Steve King, and Arizona former sheriff Joe Arpaio have seen their hopes for high office dashed.

Sessions’ campaign attempted to earn the support of far-right and anti-immigration voters, going so far as to tap far-right columnist Michelle Malkin to author a fundraising letter in May. Malkin made the play obvious, opening the letter by calling Sessions “an old friend of the America First movement.” But President Donald Trump, nursing a grudge against Sessions for recusing himself from the probe of Russian influence in the 2016 election, urged Republican voters to reject Sessions. Last month, Sessions lost Alabama’s Republican runoff election to Tuberville by more than 100,000 votes.

King, who has a sordid history of racist remarks during his nine terms serving in the U.S. House, lost the Iowa Republican primary to Randy Feenstra by nearly 10 percentage points.

And in Arizona, former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is facing a close contest against challenger Jerry Sheridan in a race to get his old job back after receiving a pardon from Trump in 2017. (Arpaio was convicted of criminal contempt in going after undocumented immigrants.) With 90 of 99 vote centers counted at the time of publication, Sheridan is shown slightly ahead. Arpaio has not yet conceded the race.

William Gheen, president of the anti-immigrant Americans for Legal Immigration PAC mourned the loss of Sessions, Arpaio, Kobach, and King.

“All four of America’s top illegal immigration fighters have fallen. Farewell Joe Arpaio, Kris Kobach, Jeff Sessions, and Rep. Steve King,” Gheen said. “ Who would have ever guessed after four years of Trump our top voices against illegal immigration would [be] gone.”

“America First is inevitable,” white nationalist and anti-Semitic podcaster Nick Fuentes declared on July 7.

It would seem that it’s actually anything but.

However, these far-right losses at the ballot box are not indicators that extremism in the Republican Party is retreating, rather the opposite appears to be true. For certain far-right causes—like the “America First” movement—the defeats may prompt an exploration of options beyond electoral politics. And while extremists gaining legislative power can have disastrous consequences for a democracy, history has shown that extremists seeking solutions outside of the political system can also prove to be dangerous.

Tags: Jeff Sessions Joe Arpaio Kris Kobach Nick Fuentes Peter Brimelow Scott Greer Steve King Alt-Right anti-immigrant white nationalism VDARE

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820

border Patrol Launches Militarized Raid of Borderlands Humanitarian Aid Camp

Ryan Devereaux

For the second time in two years, Border Patrol launched a raid against No More Deaths within days of the group releasing embarrassing information about the agency.

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koch Group Pushing for Employer Immunity Takes $3.5M From Company with COVID-19 Outbreaks

By David Armiak | July 27th, 2020 at 11:55 AM (CDT)

Owner of Mountaire Farms, one of the nation’s largest poultry processors with multiple COVID-19 outbreaks, gives millions to American for Prosperity’s PAC, which is advocating for state and federal legislation to protect employers with workplace coronavirus cases

‘Invalid in its entirety’: Trump’s racist ‘remain in Mexico’ policy get halted by appeals court David Badash / The New Civil Rights Move

llegal border crossings ‘nearly double’ thanks to $5 ladders that easily hook onto Trump’s new wall

David Badash / The New Civil Rights MovementFebruary 17, 2020

President Donald Trump has diverted billions of dollars from the Pentagon to ensure his campaign promise to “build a wall” from coast to coast is being kept before the November 2020 election. But what if that wall was not only ineffective, but led to more illegal border crossings?

https://www.vox.com/2020/2/14/21138272/cbp-tactical-ice-immigrants-sanctuary-cities

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an 220

deported to death: US sent 138 Salvadorans home to be killed

The Conversation

by Mneesha Gellman, Emerson College At least 138 people deported from the United States to El Salvador since 2013 have been killed, according to a new report by Human Right

===

not climate per se

interesting long v short, me v we: limit immigrant will hurt economy

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/trumps-most-lasting-legacy-analyst-reveals-the-presidents-worst-mistake-in-economic-policy/

...Admitting fewer immigrants generally means less economic growth, since labor force growth is an important element of economic growth,” Anderson explains. “It is economic growth that improves the standard of living in a nation. Using the public charge rule to reduce legal immigration means lower long-term economic growth may be Donald Trump’s most lasting legacy.”

Anderson backs up his assertions by citing data from Macroeconomic Advisers as well as economists at Oxford University. Macroeconomic Advisers’ Joel Prakken, Anderson notes, has estimated that cutting legal immigration in half in the U.S. would reduce the country’s rate of economic growth by about 12.5%. And Oxford economists, Anderson observes, have said that the majority of economic gains the U.S. enjoyed from 2011-2016 would have been wiped out without immigration

Anderson also points out that Ruchir Sharma, chief global strategist for Morgan Stanley, has cited immigration as an importance source of economic growth....

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https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-refugees-un-2644864652.html

Refugees fleeing the impending effects of the climate crisis cannot be forced to return home, according to a new decision by the United Nations Human Rights Committee, as CNN reported. The new decision could open up a massive wave of legal claims by displaced people around the world.

The first-of-its-kind ruling opens the door for a new kind of legal claim to future protections for people whose lives and health are threatened by a warming planet and sea-level rise, according to legal experts, as The Guardian reported. The ruling is expected to have profound consequences as the impacts of the climate crisis are predicted to displace tens of millions of people.

The UN Human Rights Committee ruling started from the case of Ioane Teitiota, who applied for refugee protection from New Zealand, claiming that his life was at risk in his home country of Kiribati, which is predicted to be one of the first countries lost due to sea-level rise, as CNN reported. Kiribati is an equatorial island nation in the middle of the Pacific that spans 1.3 million square miles, but only has 310 square miles of land and roughly 110,000 people.

The committee heard Teitiota's claim that his home island South Tarawa had increased in population by nearly 50 times from 1,641 in 1947 to 50,000 in 2010 due to sea level rising, leading to other islands becoming uninhabitable. That explosion in population has led to violence and social tensions, as The Guardian reported.

Teitiota claimed that a shortage of freshwater and difficulty growing crops because of the salinity of the water posed a threat to him and his family. Further, he argued that because the island is predicted to be uninhabitable in 10 to 15 years, his life was in danger if he remained there, according to The Guardian.

The committee did not fully agree with him. It rejected his claim that he faced an imminent threat to his life. It said, "sea level rise is likely to render the republic of Kiribati uninhabitable … the timeframe of 10 to 15 years, as suggested by [Teitiota], could allow for intervening acts by the republic of Kiribati, with the assistance of the international community, to take affirmative measures to protect and, where necessary, relocate its population," according to the The Guardian.

However, the committee added that New Zealand and every country would violate a person's international rights if they force them back to countries where the climate crisis poses an immediate threat, according to CNN.

That decision, which is not legally binding to countries, does point to obligations that developed countries will face as the climate crisis intensifies. In addition to sea-level rise, CNN pointed out that droughts and crop failure are also expected to contribute to the tens of millions who will need to move to other areas in coming years. Furthermore, a World Bank study from 2018 found that 143 million people across South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America are at risk of becoming climate migrants.

"Without robust national and international efforts, the effects of climate change in receiving states may expose individuals to a violation of their rights," its ruling said, as CNN reported.

"What's really important here, and why it's quite a landmark case, is that the committee recognized that without robust action on climate at some point in the future it could well be that governments will, under international human rights law, be prohibited from sending people to places where their life is at risk or where they would face inhuman or degrading treatment," said Jane McAdam, director of the Kaldor center for international refugee law at the University of New South Wales, to The Guardian. "Even though in this particular case there was no violation found, it effectively put governments on notice."

climate refugees climate crisis sea level rise drought

mex under us pressure offer jobs to refs who sign up but fear deport scam 1/20 kpfa

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120

trump admin. expands under-the-radar and deadly policy to strand asylum-seekers hundreds of miles away from the border

Gabe Ortiz / Daily Kos

Some asylum-seekers who will be forced to wait out their cases in Mexico will now have to figure out on their own how to travel hundreds of miles to their…

michael klare: all hell breaking loose

military DoD

https://kpfa.org/episode/talkies-january-2-2020/

[talkies 1/2/20 2010 drought russia lost 1/3 wht crop --> arab spring?! food scarce africa and ME, food #1 expense in poor ppl budget --> anger at elites, libya, syria WAR, threat multiplier] desertification push nomadic into sub-s different ethnic and religion, jihadis exploit; nigeria boko; mali niger

ctr for naval CNA report 2007

migrants tend to be rural ppl: carrib, centr am ...got to city for jobs (gangs)

intercept

...

As life becomes increasingly untenable for people across the world, authoritarian, anti-migrant politics continue to demonstrate their potency as a track to American political power. Whether migrants are appearing at the border or not, these forces point to the threat of their arrival to impose lockdown conditions on border communities. The swirling mix of far-right politics and the actual threats posed by the climate crisis raise profound questions about what’s happening in the Arizona desert right now: Will the coming decades see a border more militarized than the last? What happens if people start showing up in truly unprecedented numbers with no livable homeland to return to? What moral obligations does that reality pose? What does the border become in that world?

For Jordahl, and for many others in the borderlands, these are the questions ringing out from the desert right now. In a sense, Jordahl explained, it’s as though the Trump administration is providing a dark model of what’s to come: using the impacts of the climate crisis that it is exacerbating as an asset to support its anti-migrant ends. “It’s a story that really hasn’t been told yet,” he said.

Draining Life From the Desert

Amy Juan grew up on the Tohono O’odham Nation. She graduated college there, and she’s 33 now, working as office manager of the International Indian Treaty Council in Tucson. Her dad’s side of the family comes from Newfield, a tiny O’odham community right on the border. She remembers days spent riding in the back of her grandpa’s pickup truck, rumbling over the steel cattle guard at the San Miguel gate. Sometimes they would be heading to a funeral, and sometimes they would be visiting family. Often, the trips were a treat: a chance to buy a soda or a quesadilla from the vendors on the other side of the crossing. For a kid growing up on the nation, “It was a cool place to go,” Juan told me. “I never knew it was a border.”

Juan was about 8 years old when she started noticing the changes. Though she didn’t know it at the time, the Clinton administration had passed a trade deal that would have devastating consequences for working Mexicans. Around the same time, in 1993, the U.S. Border Patrol apprehended more than 1.2 million people attempting to enter the United States without papers. Democrats and Republicans agreed: This was a crisis.

The following summer, the Border Patrol and the Pentagon developed “Prevention Through Deterrence,” a strategy for stemming illegal immigration by locking down border cities, thus driving migration flows into the border’s deadliest places, such as the Sonoran Desert.Virtually overnight the number of dead bodies found along the border began to explode, eventually surpassing the death tolls of Hurricane Katrina and the September 11 attacks combined, as desperate people tried their luck in one of the planet’s most unforgiving ecosystems. In Pima County alone, the remains of roughly 3,000 people have been recovered in the desert since 2001. Border-wide, the government has tallied more than 7,500 migrant deaths over the last two decades, though experts agree the true toll is certainly higher. U.S. lawmakers have largely treated these deaths as the cost of doing business, agreeing year after year to pour an ever-increasing stream of money, manpower, and technology into the most elaborate border and immigration enforcement system the world has ever known.

CBP border patrol station where Dr. Warren was held in custody after his arrest.The Border Patrol’s Ajo station on July 10, 2018. Photo: Laura Saunders for The Intercept

At its core, Prevention Through Deterrence was a massive redirection of traffic. The Tohono O’odham went from seeing 200 or so migrants crossing the reservation every month to 1,500 people a day. There was litter and there was theft but that was just the beginning of it.

As Juan went from elementary to high school, the Border Patrol moved in. It began with the agency setting up a “forward operating base” near her grandparents’ house. At first, it was little more than a spare modular building in the desert. Today, Juan said, it’s a self-sufficient facility with a helicopter pad and detention pens indoors and out. As the years went by, the skies over the reservation became dotted with choppers, and later drones. The old adobe Border Patrol station outside Ajo was replaced with a state-of-the-art, multimillion-dollar facility. Its agent capacity went from 25 to 500. And then there were the checkpoints. “I think once the checkpoints were established that really, really was a big transition to understanding, like, yeah, we are militarized,” Juan said. “That’s what this means, having to check in and check out of our own lands, our own community.”

To get anywhere north of the reservation requires submitting to inspection by armed federal agents. This means a kid on the nation today might be less likely to grow up remembering happy trips over the border in the back of a relative’s truck, and more likely to grow up remembering agents flashing lights into their car and questioning their parents. “It has psychological effects,” Juan said. “Especially for a young kid.”

[Related

The U.S. Border Patrol and an Israeli Military Contractor Are Putting a Native American Reservation Under “Persistent Surveillance”]

Juan became politically conscious in her early 20s, as she began to realize that what her community was experiencing was both exceptional and unacceptable. “We started to see a lot of Border Patrol abuse and assault, especially on elders and children,” she explained. She’s spent the last decade speaking out, challenging the imposition of constant surveillance on the O’odham people, such as the recent fight to block the installation of a powerful Israeli spy company’s surveillance towers on the reservation. She recently traveled to the Arctic Circle and Palestine, and she sees clearly that militarized borders and the climate crisis are interwoven.

“Part of my work now is really having conversations within the community about how we’re going to survive,” she told me. “Talking about water.”

Draining groundwater at a place like Quitobaquito Springs might seem like a small thing, Juan explained, but it’s not. “It’s so representative of the danger that we’re in. This spring has been able to survive for thousands of years, and it’s still here,” she said. “It’s a watering hole for all life, anybody that’s out there in the desert.”

If the springs are sucked dry, the desert becomes even more deadly. It feels almost intentional, Juan said, like someone “thinking that this watering hole is important for migrants — and it is — and wanting to make sure that it’s not there.”

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Until recently, most of Organ Pipe was closed to the public, a decision that was made after park ranger Kris Eggle was shot to death following a car chase with drug traffickers in August 2002. Following the killing, Organ Pipe became known as the country’s “most dangerous” national park. With nearly 70 percent of the monument off-limits to visitors until just five years ago, the wilderness was effectively transformed into a closed-off space where Border Patrol agents chased their targets with little notice from the world at large.

During his time at the Park Service, Jordahl became obsessed with figuring out exactly how many “renegade roads” Border Patrol agents were making on Organ Pipe. He eventually found the data he was looking for. “In one year, Border Patrol reported driving 17,000 miles, off road, in designated wilderness,” he told me. “And that’s just what they reported to NPS. Just in Organ Pipe, not even factoring in Cabeza Prieta.” Like the draining of water happening on the monument today, Jordahl said, the degradation only helped make Organ Pipe a more deadly place.

“When we’re talking about climate change, all of this off-road driving basically disturbs all of the biological soil crust there and that increases erosion, that decreases the soil’s ability to retain water,” he explained. “It dramatically increases the desertification of the region.”

Garfin, the climate scientist, said the same. Just above Organ Pipe is the Barry Goldwater bombing range, an active bombing range for the U.S. military. If you look at Barry Goldwater, Organ Pipe, and the other lands in the area, including the Tohono O’odham reservation, you see a region dramatically shaped by human activity over the last 30 years, Garfin explained. “Between the human migration and the Border Patrol efforts to police that area, there’s been a lot of environmental damage,” he said. “Going through this pristine desert in big vehicles increases the probability of erosion.” Add extreme storms to that picture and you begin to see “a real threat to infrastructure,” including roads and culverts. Not only does that pose a challenge to the military’s training mission, Garfin said, it also places migrants in increased danger. On top of all that, there are a number of threatened and endangered species in the area that require protecting. It is the climate crisis colliding with life in the borderlands and, in Garfin’s words, that “makes for a very, very challenging situation.”

State of Exception

The federal government’s tendency to treat the border as aplace where the rules do not apply,where thousands of people can die without a major public outcry, and whole communities can be placed under constant surveillance, only increased after the September 11 attacks. This “state of exception,” as the anthropologist Jason De León has called it, helped pave the way for the anti-environmental efforts of the Trump administration.

Folded into the newly established Department of Homeland Security, the Border Patrol exploded in size after 9/11 and its agents were conditioned to see themselves as front-line soldiers in the global war on terrorism. Along with the new mission came new powers. In 2005, Congress passed the REAL ID Act, which gave DHS sweeping powers to waive local, state, and federal laws in order to construct barriers along the border. The act was emblematic of other war-on-terror legislation of the time; though it was passed under the Bush administration, it had bipartisan support — including the likes of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and current presidential front-runner Joe Biden — and its detrimental impacts continue to this day.

For years, REAL ID waivers were rarely used. Then came Trump and his plans for a wall. A sampling of the dozens of laws DHS has waived in service of realizing the president’s core campaign promise includes: the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, and the Farmland Protection Policy Act. The list goes on.

“Take the land,” the president has told advisers. “Get it done.”

In February, Trump declared a national emergency on the border, bringing an end to the longest government shutdown in American history, which he began after Democrats refused to provide full funding for the wall. Months later, the Supreme Court ruled that the administration could tap into $2.5 billion from the Pentagon for the project. That sum has since grown. Last month, the secretary of defense notified Congress that he would be moving an additional $3.6 billion in Pentagon funds to wall-building on the border, bringing the total amount the Defense Department has repurposed for Trump’s top reelection priority to $6.1 billion.

The administration has used the REAL ID waivers to push hundreds of miles of border wall construction, rumbling through whatever patch of sacred Native American sites, private property, or federally protected land gets in its way. With 66 miles completed thus far, the president is nowhere near the 500 miles of border wall he promised for his first term, and there are signs his already limited patience is growing thin. According to multiple accounts, Trump — who has expressed a desire for the border wall to be painted black, topped with spikes, and guarded by a moat filled with alligators or snakes — has gone so far as to offer pardons to officials who are charged with crimes while attempting to complete the construction.

In June, a team of Park Service archeologists visited Organ Pipe to assess potential threats to the monument’s many historical sites, which help to tell the story of the desert peoples who have inhabited the region for more than 10,000 years. In a 123-page report, first obtained by the Washington Post, the experts identified 22 sites that would be partially or wholly destroyed by border wall construction, which is slated for completion in January 2020.

“As soon as the Supreme Court green-lighted that military funding, I mean — it’s pretty much limitless,” Jordahl said. TheCenter for Biological Diversity was among the first organizations to sue over the border wall expansion, arguing that Congress never intended the waivers to exist in perpetuity; that they were designed for expeditious construction in 2005; and that construction projects beginning in 2019 no longer qualify as expeditious. Jordahl described the entire ordeal as a bizarro world version of the way the law is supposed to work in cases involving construction on protected lands.

“There’s no check on where they can build and how much money they can use,” he explained. “With the REAL ID Act waivers in place, the courts can’t step in. It’s like the definition of single branch government. Congress plays no role. The courts play no role. It’s an autocracy.”

Rising Fascism

In the last year, there have been at least three high-profile terror attacks involving white gunmen targeting immigrants or the people perceived to support them. Two were committed in the U.S., in El Paso, Texas, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The third, carried out by a self-described “eco-fascist,” targeted Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand. In each case, the killers had previously shared posts online that cribbed the “invasion” language so commonly heard from Trump and other far-right leaders. The El Paso and Christchurch shooters in particular put forth warped views of environmentalism that required them to kill competing races.

None of these ideas were particularly new. There is a long, dark history linking elements of the environmental movement, nativists, and white nationalists. John Tanton, a recently deceased Michigan ophthalmologist and godfather of the modern American nativist movement, once held a senior position in the Sierra Club. Bankrolled by an heiress obsessed with overpopulation and the environment, he went on to create the three most influential anti-immigrant groups in modern American history, while also running a publishing house popular with pseudo-intellectual white nationalists. Over the last decade, those groups cultivated a close-working relationship with former Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions and his young, ultra-hard-line underling, Stephen Miller. With Trump in office, staffers from the Tanton organizations took up policymaking positions across the government. Sessions, meanwhile, became Trump’s first attorney general, and Miller became one of the president’s most trusted and powerful advisers.

The precise number of people who will emigrate to the U.S. as a result of the climate crisis is difficult to predict, but it’s also somewhat irrelevant to the question how future far-right governments, like the one in Washington, D.C., will respond to increased flows of people.

Authoritarian governments don’t need actual crises to initiate authoritarian policies. When the Trump administration came to power, Border Patrol apprehensions were at a historic low, and yet by the end of his first week in office, the president had signed executive orders banning travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries and laying the groundwork for an unprecedented attack on the legal systems designed to protect the world’s most vulnerable populations. Despite the fact that border apprehension levels still have not hit the highs of the early 2000s, the administration has nonetheless used current levels to justify declaration of a national emergency, the separation of thousands of children from their parents, and the dumping of tens of thousands of asylum-seekers in the border’s most dangerous cities.

While the president and his party may be unwilling to acknowledge the climate crisis, the institutions responsible for maintaining the border take a different view. “Climate change will contribute to food and water scarcity, will increase the spread of disease, and may spur or exacerbate mass migration,” read the Pentagon’s 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review Report. Reports published by DHS in 2012 and 2014 echoed that language, referring repeatedly to the possibility of “mass migration” events.

These are the kinds of signals that Todd Miller, a Tucson-based journalist and author of the new book,“Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World,” encourages people to pay attention to. In 1993, the year before Prevention Through Deterrence got started, the budget for the Immigration and Naturalization Service was $1.5 billion. Today, the amount of money spent on the nation’s border and immigration enforcement agencies exceeds all federal law enforcement agencies — including the FBI, the DEA, and the ATF — combined, with $324 billion doled out since 2003 and $24 billion appropriated in 2018 alone. According to Miller, there are nowmore than 70 border walls around the world, compared to just 15 when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Some market forecasts in the border security world describe the current moment as an “unprecedented boom period,” he said.

That boom translates to more surveillance equipment and more boots on the ground in border communities. “Analysts are thinking that there’s only going to be more and more buying of these technologies,” Miller explained. “So when you think about the future, well, then it’s a future of more of all this.”

There are no asylum protections for climate refugees, certainly not in the United States, where a cabal of anti-immigrant hard-liners are working day and night to dismantle, rather than expand, existing asylum protections. With research pointing to mass migration in the years to come, particularly poor people coming from countries that were not responsible for the climate crisis, Miller believes countries like the U.S. are presented with an enormously important moral decision. It’s a question of human mobility and freedom of movement, he said, and recognizing when the border has gone from an “obstacle or an impediment” to an actual “human rights violation for even being there in the first place.”

In the west desert of Arizona, where groups of asylum-seekers numbering in the hundreds turned themselves in to Border Patrol agents over the summer, the intersection of climate, migration, and border enforcement is already providing a glimpse at possible futures.

In addition to the border wall construction, the Trump government has charged nine people over the last two years with federal crimes for providing humanitarian aid to migrants crossing the desert in areas near the Tohono O’odham Nation and Organ Pipe. Working closely with the Border Patrol, senior U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials have built blacklists of aid volunteers, arguing that the provision of water in the desert degrades protected wilderness areas. In the most serious case to result from the crackdown, Scott Warren, a 36-year-old geographer from Ajo, was charged with two counts of harboring and one count of conspiracy for providing food, water, and shelter to two young undocumented men over the course of three days in 2018. Facing up to 20 years in prison, his trial ended in a hung jury over the summer. His retrial is scheduled for November.

The Trump administration’s efforts to reshape the borderlands in the president’s nationalist image is facing real resistance on the ground. Since filing their first suit challenging the president’s border wall expansion, Jordahl and his colleagues at the Center for Biological Diversity have brought more than a half-dozen other environmental lawsuits against the administration’s border construction efforts. They are not alone. The Sierra Club, having distanced itself from the Tanton stance of nativist environmentalism years ago, is also challenging the Trump’s border wall, as is the American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern Border Communities Coalition.

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https://www.democracynow.org/2019/12/13/climate_refugees_climate_fueled_drought_sea

new report reveals how long-term disasters, including sea level rise and desertification, and short-term disasters, such as storms and fires, are especially threatening to people living in the Global South and island nations. We speak with the co-author of a new study that finds the climate crisis is already leading to a massive increase in the number of refugees being displaced around the world. Hossein Ayazi is a policy analyst with the Global Justice Program at the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. We’re also joined at the U.N. Climate Summit in Madrid by Saleemul Huq, climate scientist and the director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh. He is advising the bloc of Least Developed Countries in the climate negotiations.

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