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During the June 27 CNN presidential election debate between former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden, Trump made false and misleading claims about immigration and migrants seemingly drawn straight from the right-wing media echo chambers.

Trump falsely claimed that Biden “wants open borders” and “wants our country to … be destroyed,” as migrants are supposedly violent criminals stealing American jobs. He also pushed the “great replacement” theory, saying Biden wants to import migrants to vote Democratic.

Below are some of Trump’s debate claims and recent instances of right-wing media making the same points.

Claim: Migrants are stealing jobs from Americans

In the debate, Trump claimed that migrants “are taking Black jobs and they’re taking Hispanic jobs. And you haven’t seen it yet.” The New York Times, [6/27/24]|}:

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/bill-barr-had-deep-links-to-the-origins-of-central-american-migration-crisis-long-before-trump/

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JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Roberto, you begin the book talking about a tour you were giving in 1992 in Los Angeles at the time you were working with the immigrant rights group CARECEN in Los Angeles. And you’re touring around a foundation program officer, one of these people who decides whether to give money to worthy organizations. And you had very mixed feelings taking him around the Pico-Union area of Los Angeles. There’s a sudden shootout at one point. Could you talk about that whole part of your work with CARECEN? Also, what lessons might be drawn for a lot of activists today, Black Lives Matter activists and prison reform activists, who are suddenly being courted by foundations who suddenly have discovered that they haven’t been properly funding antiracism programs around the country?

ROBERTO LOVATO: That’s a great question, Juan. Yeah, the opening, the introduction of the book, is 1992, right after the L.A. riots had hit. We had foundations and corporations come in, along with scholars, and it was just people interested in post-riot L.A. And we were in MacArthur Park touring, like we did. I felt like — and I say at one point I felt like, you know, I was getting tired of being like Virgil to these Dantes, you know, these aspiring Dantes wanting to see the underworld. And so, I’m showing this guy, Leland, MacArthur Park,when I’m approached by the first MS-13 member I ever met, this kid named José. And, you know, we were — and I could tell that Leland was scared out of his wits, like he was in a lion’s den or something, and he was looking to me for security.

And so, I open it that way because it shows kind of the way that the whole issue of youth and urban youth and gangs, even foundations and corporations will kind of shy away from, as do legislators, including legislators of color here in California, where the gangs were born, in fact, where MS-13 and 18th Street were born. And then, after they were born, they kind of adopted the structures of like the Mexican Mafia. And so, I’m there when this is starting to escalate and get more violent.

And then, Attorney General William Barr, again, and at the avatar, from the Bush administration, who’s now in the Trump administration, deployed all these FBI resources to L.A. and other cities to start the gang war, which, you know, we see the products as we speak, right? And so, then he also introduced the INS to then join the LAPD and law enforcement to deport the “problem,” the gang structures, to El Salvador.

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AMY GOODMAN: Finally, William Barr, the current attorney general, the attorney general under George H.W. Bush — we just have a minute, but as you wrap up, Roberto, what is his connection to this story?

ROBERTO LOVATO: William Barr, as attorney general under the first Bush, redeployed FBI resources, in the greatest deployment of FBI resources up to that point, taking FBI agents who were fighting foreign — you know, looking at foreign “threats,” and started focusing them on gangs. And then he starts looking at MS-13 and other gangs right after the L.A. riots. You can see he was there in L.A., and he started us on the path to eventually, like, militarizing the police, that we have right now. And then, he then also had the INS deport the gang “problem” to El Salvador, and then he exported, after the war, U.S.-style policing. And then, I found out that military trainers from El Salvador actually came to train LAPD in counterinsurgency, and other police forces. It’s just when you start seeing the Robocopization of cop uniforms — right? — and that we have now. And William Barr had everything to do with — had not everything, but he had a lot to do with this. I had to sing his song, because he deserves all the credit he deserves for what he did to El Salvador and to L.A. and to our national situation long before Trump....

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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.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/bill-barr-has-done-this-before/

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Barr has done this before

Written by ProPublica July 31, 2020

As violent crime continued to climb in Chicago and other cities across the country, Attorney General William P. Barr announced that the U.S. Department of Justice was mobilizing to help: Dozens of federal agents would be sent to work with local police to combat gangs and illegal guns.

“Our message to gangs, gang leaders and gang members is this: When we throw the federal book at you, it will be a knockout blow,” Barr said.

That was in 1992, during Barr’s first stint leading the Justice Department, under former President George H.W. Bush.

If it sounds too recent or familiar to have happened nearly three decades ago, that’s because Barr, now attorney general under President Donald Trump, made a strikingly similar announcement on July 22.

Some of the details were different, of course. In 1992, Barr said the FBI was shifting about 300 agents from monitoring spies from the recently collapsed Soviet Union to taking on gangs and violent crime in American cities. Eighteen of the agents would be redeployed to Chicago.

This month, Barr stood next to Trump as he announced a Chicago “surge” of more than 100 agents from the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and other agencies, along with staffing increases in other cities where gun casualties were making headlines.

Residents of Chicago could be forgiven for concluding that they’ve heard this before, since, of course, they essentially have. Barr even acknowledged that federal law enforcement agencies have carried out such operations “for decades.” Every presidential administration in the last 30 years has announced it was sending more federal agents to Chicago to try to stem violent crime.

But this time the circumstances are different — the politics are shifting. After 3 ½ years of Trump’s inflammatory comments and tweets, some thinly coded and others overtly racist, his administration’s announcement is widely seen in Chicago as a political move to use the troubles of a majority-nonwhite city to fire up his supporters.

And it’s happening as a growing number of people are demanding that their governments send something into their communities other than more guys with guns.

Chicago has a long, ugly history of violence. As in other cities, violent crime surged in Chicago in the 1960s and ’70s, dropped and leveled off, then spiked again during the 1990s. But since then, as murder and shooting totals plummeted in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere, Chicago’s numbers didn’t fall as far or as fast, and they’ve climbed again during several devastating stretches in the last 10 years.

The reasons have long been debated and are probably more complex than most would acknowledge. But politicians, law enforcement leaders and many residents have repeatedly blamed Chicago’s gang culture and open-air drug markets, then called for policing strategies to attack them.

The fact that most of the hardest-hit neighborhoods have also been shelled out by segregation, business closures and job losses — including thousands of layoffs from government agencies and shuttered schools — is well known. Yet the need for immediate responses to the bloodshed, rather than those that tackle the deeper problems, always seems to consume political and financial capital in Chicago.

In 1992, the city banned loitering by people deemed to be gang members until the measure was ruled unconstitutional. Former Mayor Richard M. Daley led an effort to sue gun manufacturers for creating a public nuisance in Chicago and other cities; the case was tossed out of court. Speed bumps and cul-de-sacs were built on dozens of side streets to thwart drive-by shootings, though as police and paramedics discovered, such obstacles also made it harder for them to respond to emergencies.

Far more common have been announcements that more police will be deployed in high-crime areas, often under the banner of a new task force, program or initiative. That’s where the feds often come in — literally.

Soon after Trump took office in 2017, he called Chicago a “war zone” and blamed local leaders for being “politically correct.” He also threatened, via Twitter, “I will send in the Feds!”

Rahm Emanuel, then Chicago’s mayor and a frequent Trump sparring partner, rejected the idea of troops in the city. “I’m against it, straight up,” he told reporters. But Emanuel added that he welcomed additional resources to fight gun crimes. Within two weeks, CNN reported that 20 more ATF agents were being sent to Chicago.

Since Lori Lightfoot was elected mayor last year, she has repeatedly blasted Trump for racism and disrespect for civil rights — even as she’s been attacked in Chicago for not yet delivering on promises to reform the Police Department and drive up investment in underserved neighborhoods.

On July 20, after another weekend of appalling violence in Chicago — dozens of people were reportedly wounded in shootings and at least 12 people killed — Trump suggested at a press conference that he was again ready to send in federal agents. Lightfoot responded with a letter that criticized his administration’s “incendiary rhetoric” as well as the tactics of Department of Homeland Security agents who had seized people off the street in Portland, Oregon.

Yet Lightfoot also said the city could use other kinds of federal help, including “more federal prosecution or investigatory resources” to pursue violent crime and gun cases. She added that the government could help Chicago invest in underserved neighborhoods. “The violence our city is confronting is symptomatic of a larger public health and economic crisis.”

Trump and Barr announced the latest “surge” of federal agents to Chicago that week,describing it as part of a national crime-reduction initiative called Operation Legend. The FBI, ATF, DEA, U.S. Marshals Service and Homeland Security would together send dozens of investigators and agents to the city, with the U.S. attorney in Chicago, John Lausch Jr., overseeing the operation.

Underneath the politics and symbolism, the announcement signaled that federal and local officials were returning to their old strategy: send in more cops.

Shifting federal agents to cities under fire is “commonly done, and as a matter of fact, when I was the special agent-in-charge there, I asked for it,” said Jack Riley, who formerly served as the top agent in the DEA’s Chicago office. “It’s been called 20 different things in the past. [Operation Legend] is just the newest version of it.”

This federal surge may involve more agents than previous efforts, and Riley believes it could help tamp down violence in Chicago if it is carefully coordinated and sustained. Operations on the street should be carried out by agents who know the city, with those from out of town used in support roles. And as agents are conducting investigations and making arrests, the U.S. attorney’s office needs enough staff to prosecute the increased caseload, said Riley, who went on to serve as the No. 2 official in the DEA, overseeing global operations, before retiring.

“Are there going to be additional prosecutors?” he said. “That’s been an issue before.”

The U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago received a staffing boost in 2018, but no additional prosecutors are included in the latest operation. A spokesman for the office declined to comment.

Plus, the agent surge is only likely to last until fall, when the city’s usual spike in violence typically recedes along with the warm weather. So, like previous efforts, the surge is temporary.

If those earlier short-term operations worked to reduce gun violence, it’s hard for city residents to see as shootings spike again.

Over the last three years, the U.S. attorney’s office here has prosecuted more than 500 defendants on weapons charges, records show. Some of the defendants are traffickers or leaders of other criminal enterprises. But many tend to be lower-level players caught with illegal guns that have traded hands multiple times. Law enforcement officials argue that prosecutions for illegal possession help deter others. Still, the approach hasn’t shut down the gun marketplace, as firearms continue to flow into the city from suburbs and neighboring states.

So far Operation Legend appears to be following the playbook of those earlier initiatives. The first three arrests made as part of the Chicago surge were all for illegal gun possession, according to court filings.

On July 23, the day after the latest federal deployments were announced, Black Lives Matter Chicago and 10 other organizations sued Barr and other administration officials. The groups, seeing no reason to trust the Trump administration, asked for a federal court order to protect their right to protest in the event of any Portland-style tactics. In addition, they made what amounted to a defund-the-federal-police argument, claiming federal resources would be better spent on investing in their communities than flooding them with more law enforcement officers.

“We should take their money and use it to help people facing eviction, use those resources for people who need access to food,” Amika Tendaji, an organizer with Black Lives Matter, said in an interview. “The police haven’t been able to do anything [about the violence]. We need to actually address the root causes.”

More and more leaders are signing on to this approach. Over the last week, advocacy groups, churches and more than 30 state and local elected officials added their names to a letter urging Lightfoot and Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart not to cooperate with the federal operation.

“Donald Trump has repeatedly demonstrated both his callous disregard for Black, indigenous, and immigrant lives, and his increasing inclination towards fascism and authoritarianism,” the letter said. “We grieve deeply the lives lost to gun violence in Chicago. … At the same time, we are clear that we cannot police ourselves out of this terrible situation.”

Chicago is now on a pace to record one of its highest annual murder totals in two decades. It’s hard to argue that the old strategies have worked.

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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

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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

no lnx

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

President Donald J. Trump participates in a bilateral meeting with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2019, at the InterContinental New York Barclay in New York City. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

Written by The Conversation February 7, 2020

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 Rights Watch, which investigates human rights abuses worldwide.

The 117-page report also says researchers identified at least 70 deportees who were sexually assaulted, tortured or kidnapped. Many victims were asylum-seekers attacked or killed by the gangs they originally fled.

The findings show that “the U.S. is repeatedly violating its obligations to protect Salvadorans from return to serious risk of harm,” Human Rights Watch says.

The group used court records, police reports, interviews with victims and their families and news articles to document the fates of deportees. It is the first systematic effort to find out what happened to Salvadorans whose asylum claims were rejected in U.S. immigration courts because they failed to demonstrate “credible fear” of violence in El Salvador.

International asylum laws created after the Holocaust require countries to take in people who are persecuted for their race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.

El Salvador has one of the world’s highest homicide rates. It is one of the main sources of migration to the U.S.

As part of its immigration crackdown, the Trump administration in September signed an agreement with El Salvador requiring the Central American country to keep asylum seekers there while they await the results of their asylum claims.

But the murders of 138 deportees belie any notion that El Salvador can protect citizens who are under threat.

Roots of impunity

Roughly the size of New Jersey, El Salvador is densely populated and highly connected by cellphone service and social media. The vulnerable groups protected under international asylum law cannot easily go under the radar or relocate if targeted by gangs, corrupt police or domestic abusers.

Hundreds of Salvadorans are killed every month. Murders, disappearances and tortures almost always go unsolved in El Salvador. Criminals, especially those with access to power, are rarely punished for their wrongdoing.

I have documented this culture of impunity across Central America and Mexico, focusing on the indigenous people, women and political dissidents who are so often victims of political violence.

This violence dates back centuries, to Spain’s bloody conquest of the Americas. As in the U.S., colonial-era brutality has lasting impacts on the region’s race, class and gender divisions.

In 1932, the massacre of indigenous Salvadorans and leftists who rebelled against dictator Maximiliano Hernández Martínez left between 10,000 and 30,000 dead.

Communist Party member Farabundo Martí, who led Salvadoran peasant farmers in their revolt against political corruption and unjust resource allocation, was assassinated after the massacre. But the struggle continued.

By the 1970s, dissident factions again organized against state oppression. United as the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, these groups eventually waged war on the ruling ARENA party, which they blamed for oppressing the Salvadoran working class.

The subsequent Salvadoran civil war killed 75,000 people. In 1992, with intensive military support from the United States, ARENA defeated the rebels.

The 1992 El Salvador peace accords, overseen by the United Nations, were meant to bring national reconciliation. A truth commission documented widespread human rights abuses committed by state and paramilitary forces during the war. But days after the report was released, in 1993, El Salvador’s ARENA-controlled congress passed an amnesty law that excused most government and military officials.

As a result, the root causes of El Salvador’s conflict – particularly, unequal access to insufficient resources – still plague society. So does the very weak rule of law that allowed civil war criminals to go unpunished.

Neither the rightist or leftist governments that have held power since have managed to change this.

El Salvador’s defense minister recently assessed that there are more gang members than soldiers in his country. Police in El Salvador are extremely aggressive in pursuing them, and civilians can get caught in the crossfire, Human Rights Watch finds.

The resulting dangerous disarray sent 46,800 residents to seek asylum in the U.S. last year. Risking the unknown violence of migration over guaranteed violence at home is, for many Salvadorans, a logical decision.

Human security

Crime and violence in El Salvador has declined since President Nayib Bukele took office in June 2019, according to the government.

The president credits his tough-on-gangs policing with improving security in the country. But some crime analysts say the apparent drop in homicides is actually a manipulation of crime data. The government recently changed how it counts murders, eliminating deaths that result from confrontation with security forces – police killings – from the homicide category.

In any case, levels of violence in El Salvador are still among the world’s highest.

Police regularly turn a blind eye to violence by gang members, including both MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangs, either due to corruption or concern for their own safety. As a result, Salvadoran police frequently fail to meaningfully protect people from gang violence.

In these circumstances, deporting Salvadoran asylum-seekers may violate an international law called “non-refoulement.”

According to the 1954 United Nations Convention on the Status of Refugees, which both the U.S. and El Salvador signed, states cannot expel refugees to a territory “where his life or freedom would be threatened.”

Migrants know El Salvador can’t protect them. That, of course, is why they flee. Now the United States government has to know that, too.

This story has been modified to more accurately characterize the methodology used by Human Rights Watch. It is an updated version of an article originally published Oct. 10, 2019.The Conversation

Mneesha Gellman, Associate Professor of Political Science, Emerson College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-officials-use-secretive-gang-databases-to-deny-migrant-asylum-claims

With scant public notice, federal immigration officials are relying on databases run by foreign police and militaries to check whether migrants crossing the United States border have gang affiliations, which would allow officials to detain and eventually deport them.

The information is being provided through a new “fusion” intelligence-gathering center in El Salvador that is funded by the State Department and works in tandem with the Department of Homeland Security.

But legal experts and human rights advocates say the government has kept the use of databases at the border largely secret, subverting potential challenges to the reliability of the information in them. An attorney in Texas recently discovered that her Salvadoran client had been falsely accused of being in the MS-13 gang based on intelligence from the center. The man was jailed in a maximum-security facility for violent criminals for six months, and his two children were taken away.

Government attorneys, pressed repeatedly in court to provide evidence, eventually dropped the allegation of gang membership against him without explanation.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/heres-what-trump-should-know-about-the-us-insidious-role-in-driving-migration-from-honduras/

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STORYNOV 27, 2018

How a Climate Change-Fueled Drought & U.S.-Fed Violence Are Driving Thousands from Central America

Trump is urging Mexico to deport the thousands of Central American migrants who are at or approaching the U.S. border in an attempt to seek asylum, days after U.S. border authorities fired tear gas into a crowd of asylum seekers as some tried to push their way through the heavily militarized border near San Diego. Trump tweeted, “Mexico should move the flag waving Migrants, many of whom are stone cold criminals, back to their countries. Do it by plane, do it by bus, do it anyway you want, but they are NOT coming into the U.S.A. We will close the Border permanently if need be. Congress, fund the WALL!” This comes just days before Andrés Manuel López Obrador is sworn in as Mexico’s new president. López Obrador’s incoming government has denied it made any deal with the Trump administration to force asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while their U.S. asylum claims are processed. We speak with John Carlos Frey, Emmy Award-winning investigative reporter and PBS NewsHour special correspondent. He recently returned from reporting trips in Guatemala, Mexico City and Tijuana, where he was documenting the migrant caravan.

Transcript

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: To take a broader scope on this issue, you have traveled throughout Mexico and trying to deal with how—and to report on how these caravans and Central American migrants and refugees have developed. I’m wondering if you could talk about two aspects that don’t get very much attention in terms of what drives the migrants and the refugees. One is the issue of the growingdrought recently in Central America.And two is also this whole issue of the deportation of felons who were convicted in the United States, maybe raised in the United States, but were originally from El Salvador or Guatemala or Honduras, and have been deported in recent decades.

I think The Washington Post reported El Salvador alone, over a 20-year period, 95,000 people were deported from the U.S. after getting out of prison, back to El Salvador. That is 1.5 percent of the entire population of El Salvador—people that were deported back to the country after serving time here in the U.S. The impact of these criminals then going down to their countries where maybe they were born in but they don’t really know and developing the kinds of drug gangs that then force people to flee?

JOHN CARLOS FREY: You bring up two very good reasons for people to leave Central America. And the one that you were just mentioning, we have a program in California and now in the United States, where we will deport people who have Green Cards, people who are in the country legally, if you are a gang member. And it really doesn’t matter if you have been in the United States most of your life. It also doesn’t matter necessarily what crimes you may have committed. If you are a gang member, we’re going to deport you. We have every right to rescind your legal status, and we’re going to send you back to the country of origin, even if you came to the United States as a child.

That is exactly what we have done. That number, 95,000, is actually a bigger number than I even thought. But we have deported tens of thousands of gang members back to Central America, many of them back to El Salvador. And El Salvador just experienced its own civil unrest about 25, 30 years ago. We were deporting a criminal entity into a country that didn’t even have law enforcement. They were not stable. So what happened is these gangs reconstituted in El Salvador and they are now ruling the country. They joined back up in the prisons, and the criminal enterprise in El Salvador, also in Guatemala and Honduras, for the most part, are running the show. That is where the violence is coming from, a seed that we planted from the United States into countries that were not stable.

We didn’t even give any sort of a dossier or any sort of paperwork that allowed the countries to understand who and what we were deporting. We did not give them the crimes that they had committed, how much time they had served in prison or who these individuals were. We basically just said, “Here, you guys deal with this problem. We’re going to wash our hands of it.” Now we’re reaping the rewards of deporting this criminal element.

In addition to that, you mentioned the drought. There is a four- to five-year prolonged drought in Central America in a region known as the Dry Corridor. It encompasses parts of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. This year was one of the worst years of the drought. In some regions, there was 90 to 100 percent crop failure. Eighty percent of the region of this Dry Corridor is rural. It relies solely on agriculture as the base of the economy. And if the crops fail, there are no other jobs, there is no other place to go and people are starving.

I’ve interviewed dozens if not more people who have left Central America who are part of this particular migrant caravan who are hungry. They cannot feed themselves or their families. They have lost their crops. They don’t have any other way to make a living. And they are coming to the United States basically for food. I talked to a woman who was 25 years old. She was with her two-year-old. She was living on one tortilla a day. That’s all she could afford, and she came because there was just no other way for her.

So we’re not dealing with these factors that are sending people here. Putting concertina wire up at the border is not going to solve someone’s poverty, it’s not going to solve the violence in Central America and it’s certainly not going to put food on the table, which is why people are coming.

AMY GOODMAN: And you spent time just last week in Tijuana. Talk about the situation there, John.

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https://www.propublica.org/article/politic-il-insider-additional-gang-databases-illinois-cook-county

last 25 years, Illinois State Police have built a database of more than 90,000 people they deem to be gang members — but won’t say what gangs they’re in or where they live.

The Cook County sheriff’s office has a gang database, too. It includes 25,000 people, including hundreds whose gangs aren’t known and hundreds who are dead.

And the Illinois Department of Corrections says the only information it can provide about its gang database is that it can’t provide any information.

The Chicago Police Department’s massive gang database has received considerable scrutiny in recent months. But it’s not the only gang tracking system used by area law enforcement. Police and other authorities have been keeping files of alleged gang members for decades now. A Chicago officer recently told me that when he first joined the force in the 1980s, police bought high school yearbooks to help them keep track of names and faces in their districts.

Nowadays, the databases maintained by law enforcement are far bigger, more efficient and easier to share. But most still include information that’s subjective, unverified or simply wrong — though officials at hundreds of government agencies, and even some private institutions, can access and use them, with potentially troubling consequences. ... Some of the mistakes are so obvious as to be absurd. The Chicago Police Department’s gang database included 13 people who were supposedly 118 years old, as I reported in April. Two others were listed as 132.

In response, the department promised to limit outside access to the database while allowing people listed in it to challenge the information. A police spokesman told me they’re still working on the changes. But last month four Chicago men filed a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging that false information in the database led to them being harassed by police, losing out on jobs and, in one case, facing deportation proceedings.

The databases maintained by the state police, the sheriff’s office and the Department of Corrections raise another round of questions about the fairness and accuracy of lists kept secret from the public but circulated widely among government officials.

Illinois State Police

The state police have refused to release copies of what officials call its “gang file,” denying multiple requests I submitted under the state’s Freedom of Information Act. Police officials said only authorized agencies are allowed to access the information, known as Law Enforcement Agencies Data System, or LEADS, which includes the gang database.

The state police eventually provided some figures that offer a glimpse of its gang records, but they raise as many questions as they answer.

As of July, more than 90,000 people are in the gang database, the state police said.

They were added not just by state troopers — more than 1,500 police departments, correctional facilities and other law enforcement agencies also have access to the database. In fact, two-thirds of the people in the database were entered by officials at county jails and state prisons, according to state police officials and records.

The other 31,000 were added by state police and local departments. A file provided by the state police shows that the biggest group was put into the system in the 1990s. Almost half are listed as white — though that also includes Hispanics.

The file is missing plenty of other important details. “We do not collect an ‘age’ data set,” a state police official wrote me. “We are also unable to provide data on ‘gang affiliation’ or ‘where the individual was first entered,’ nor are we able to provide the ‘reason the individual was entered’ because that is not included in our data sets.”...

tats?

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https://www.alternet.org/heres-how-decades-paranoid-urban-legends-about-gang-violence-led-voters-believe-trumps-ms-13-lies

amanda marcotte salon

Trump appears to have settled on a campaign strategy to defeat Democrats in the 2018 midterms and to justify his escalating efforts to kick out every non-white immigrant he can. He's told his base of aging white suburbanites and rural residents that a gang called MS-13 has overrun the country. It's unsafe even for white people to leave their homes, the president implies, lest they get murdered by roving bands of marauding Latino immigrants.

"A vote for the Democrats in November is a vote to let MS-13 run wild in our communities," Trump claimed in one of his who-are-you-calling-a-fascist rallies last week in Montana.

On June 30, Trump tweeted: "I have watched ICE liberate towns from the grasp of MS-13," which was a blatant and easily debunked lie.  Despite this, the president doubled down on Friday, insisting on Twitter, "Every day, the brave men and women of ICE are liberating communities from savage gangs like MS-13."

In reality, there are about 10,000 members of this gang in the United States, a number that falls far short of the invading army that Trump suggests has conquered hundreds of American communities. And while Trump wants his followers to believe this alleged army of Latino gang members is murdering white folks left and right, the reality is that the people targeted by the gang for violence are nearly all Latino immigrants themselves.

Why is it, then, that so many white Americans are lapping up Trump's lies? They can open up their doors and see for themselves that their communities are not being occupied by MS-13. If they're still unsure, they can read their own paper and discover that the mass murders their president suggests are happening are nowhere to be seen.

Well, one major reason that many white conservatives are so ready to swallow these falsehoods is the decades-long hysteria over gang violence, which waxes and wanes but never really disappears. Through email forwards, gossip mills and social media posts, white people have traded lurid but false urban legends about how a cousin's friend's friend's sister heard about random gang violence aimed at strangers.

The website Snopeshas been tracking urban legends about gangs — stories, typically false, that are passed by word of mouth — for decades now.

“All of the contemporary legends mentioning gang initiations contain several similar elements," folklorist Gail de Vos writes in her 2012 book "What Happens Next? Contemporary Urban Legends and Popular Culture." Those include "demands that the initiates commit violence against random strangers; the victims are most often women or children; the violence seems pointless and its only purpose is to fulfil the demands of the initiation rite; and gang members are frequently identified as members of ethnic minorities while their victims, implicitly if not explicitly, belong to the white majority.”Brooke Binkowski, a researcher for Snopes, said when she first started out, the urban legends about gang violence had racial elements, but by and larger still functioned more as warnings, like, "Don’t stay out too late, otherwise the gang members will get you." Now, she says, the versions of the tales they gather have become more explicitly racist.

For instance, Snopes has collected email forwards claiming that gangs use dolls in car seats as bait to catch women as murder victims, that they set a quota of 31 women to kill on Halloween night, that they flash their headlights at random people and kill whoever flashes back, and many other stories in this vein. Many tales go back decades and resurface periodically in updated versions and different communities. Details change from telling to telling, but the basic parameters stay the same.

“It’s remarkable how little the stories change. It’s always about the ‘other’ bringing in disease and violence," Binkowski said.

One thing that does change, Binkowski said, is which specific racial or ethnic group is being accused of the violence. Right now, the gangs haunting white imaginations are primarily assumed to be Latino. In the past, the paranoia was primarily directed at African-Americans or, going back far enough, Chinese immigrants, who were subject to similar accusations of preying on white women in the 19th century.

When I was in high school myself, there was a national panic over gang warfare that reached levels of silliness rivaling the nonsense Trump spouts on the regular. To be clear, gangs were a problem in the 1990s in some communities, but the stories about them roaming suburban malls preying on white women were just as fanciful then as they are now. The hysteria got so out of control that my high school in rural Texas, which had fewer than 400 students, even got caught up in claims that "gang violence" was going on that we somehow weren't personally witnessing.There urban legends are ludicrous, free of any factual evidence and easily debunked by, but the very fact that they are spread by word of mouth is what gives them so much power. People are far more likely to trust in information they hear from friends and relatives than what they gather from supposedly neutral or objective sources.

In 2008, Snopes noted another escalation of panic about gangs, which the site attributed to "a change in national leadership looming just over the horizon," a gentle way of suggesting that white people where panicking at the idea of a black president. Barack Obama and his family have since been targeted by a number of urban legends linking them to gangs, including a 2017 rumor that Malia Obama had been arrested "when she decided to join a gang of thugs in Chicago for a day of drinking, drugs and dogfighting at a public park in Chicago."

(Needless to say, this did not happen.)

Urban legends about gangs frequently get support from the right-wing media,directly or otherwise. Sites like Breitbart and Drudge reliably whip up hysteria about gangs, misleading their readers into thinking that they are in immediate danger from these groups. Over the years, Fox News has run stories falsely claiming, for instance, that young black people were randomly punching white people in an effort to knock them out, echoing urban legends about violent "gang initiation" practices.

Binkowski suggests that these racist urban legends are reinforced in a couple of key ways. First, there are TV and movies "where you rarely have a Latino character" that isn't portrayed as some kind of violent gangster. Then there are active propaganda efforts, conducted by the president himself as well as right-wing groups like the Remembrance Project that try to provide evidence that the urban legends are true.

One of Trump's favorite tactics is to flank himself with groups of mostly white people whose have had a family member killed by an undocumented immigrant.He did this, for instance, as a rebuttal to those who criticized his policyof separating parents and children at the border. These white people offer what appears to be visual proof that the urban legends are right, and MS-13 is killing random white people for sport. But digging into their unquestionably tragic stories, it quickly becomes evident that most have no real relationship to gang violence — some of them are literally accidents. It bears repeating that immigrants are less likely to commit crime than native-born citizens, and that most murder victims are killed by someone they know.

In contrast, a large percentage of the people who are detained and treated like violent criminals for crossing the border without papers are genuinely victims of MS-13 and other gangs, and are trying to reach the United States to escape them. In that light, Trump is actually a great friend to MS-13: His crackdown on refugees is making it easier for the gang to terrorize people in Central America, where, unlike in small-town Montana or Iowa, gangs have real power.

Urban legends have been a part of human culture for centuries, and are frequently used to reinforce ugly social prejudices that can't be justified by facts. Under Trump's presidency, however, the situation has grown worse, as he is able to use his power and the bully pulpit to give credibility to stories that have no basis in reality. So millions of white people have become convinced, even in an era of historically low rates of violent crime in America, that their sleepy little suburbs are being invaded and controlled by invisible and imaginary gangs.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvadoran_Civil_War

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https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/10/05/445382231/how-el-salvador-fell-into-a-web-of-gang-violence

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