wall BORDER emergency

belated 2/19 and conflated

see border bs 2 1 24

no merri

see border patrol

ICE dhs

see caravan xeno

see refugee

fentanyl

HMMN 4? 26

A longtime supporter of Donald Trump joined him at the Turning Point USA MAGA rally in Phoenix.

The “Build the Red Wall” event backs GOP candidates in Arizona, Nevada, and New Hampshire.

Trump proudly showed his face to boost support.

A longtime supporter of Donald Trump joined him at the Turning Point USA MAGA rally in Phoenix. The “Build the Red Wall” event backs GOP candidates in Arizona, Nevada, and New […]

But it was the conduct of the people in the room that has people concerned.

‘Drunk?’: Bessent Visibly Squirms as Reporters Corner Him About Trump — Then Unleashes a Stuttering Spiral That Derails the Entire Briefing

Questions about Republican Rep. Paul Gosar condition gained traction after his praise fest went viral.

Partly because figures in Trump’s orbit have previously faced accusations of being under the influence while on the job.

Many viewers wondered whether Gosar may have been intoxicated.

Speculation about the Arizona congressman’s health has been circulating since 2015.

He exhibited neurological issues such as hand spasms in public and tried to hide them by putting his hands in his pockets.

Like the president, Gosar claimed to be healthy, but his recent appearance at the MAGA event proved otherwise.

Media footage captured him exhibiting balance issues.

He stumbled over his speech and slurred his words as he made some extraordinary remarks about Trump.

As Gosar claimed that the Democrats are evil incarnate, sent to silence folks such as himself, he praised Trump, as he declared the country was at a crossroads.

“We’ve got a president who reminds me of Atlas,” said Gosar.

“He carries this country on his back while the, while, the Democrats… the elites, the ‘fake news,’ and the leftist political classes try to tear him down every single day. But he keeps standing.”

Then he had the nerve to quote John F. Kennedy, the 35th president who was assassinated in 1963, 62 years before Trump slapped his own name on Kennedy’s living memorial, the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts.

“He keeps fighting. And so must we because, we believe in something simple. something powerful, like, like the words of a former President John F. Kennedy,” Gosar added.

“He once said, ‘Ask not what you can do for your country or what your country do for you, but ask what you can do for your country.

“Well, let me tell you, there’s something you can do. We, you can build, build what we’re calling tonight that red wall.”

...

judd pop info 4 24

in the 2024 presidential election, one of the central attacks that Trump and his political allies are levying against Biden is that Biden is responsible for a "migrant crime" wave. The argument was summarized by Trump in a March 22 video:

[A] real bloodbath is occurring right now under crooked Joe. It’s Biden’s Border Bloodbath. There’s never been anything like that. Every day, Joe Biden is setting loose thousands of unvetted, unscreened, military-age men into the United States from parts unknown… We had the safest border in history. Now we have the worst border probably in the history of the world. Every day innocent citizens are being killed, stabbed, shot, raped, and murdered because of Biden migrant crime. It’s a new word, a new term. It’s migrant crime, but we call it Biden migrant crime cause he’s responsible for it 100%... When I’m your president, we’re going to end this disgrace, and we’re going to stop Biden’s Border Bloodbath. It is a bloodbath indeed, and we’re going to get it stopped.

The Republican National Committee (RNC) has launched a website dedicated to the issue, BidenBloodbath.com. "History will remember Biden for his destruction, chaos, and failure. Lives of everyday Americans have been shattered as a direct result of Biden’s open border policies — and he doesn’t care," the RNC claims on the homepage. "We have to stand up and stop Biden before he destroys our nation. The cost of doing nothing is measured in the lives lost to the… crime wave washing across America."

This message has been amplified by the right-wing media. Fox News' Jesse Watters, who hosts the network's top-rated primetime show, offered this commentary on April 12:

Migrant crime is quickly becoming one of the largest issues affecting the American people. Communities all across the United States are being terrorized by violent illegals, while Biden rolls out the red carpet for them with his open border policies, but Donald Trump is pledging to take care of the problem and keep our citizens safe when Republicans get back in power

There are violent crimes committed by undocumented migrants, which are traumatic for the victims, their families, and their communities. That is why the accusation that Biden is responsible for a surge in violent crime by undocumented migrants is so politically potent. There are disturbing anecdotes of crimes that make powerful fodder for attacks during a political campaign. People, understandably, want to feel safe.

But is there evidence that, since Biden took office, there has been a surge in violent crime by undocumented migrants?

The most straightforward answer would be to look at crimes committed by undocumented migrants over time. Unfortunately, this data is unavailable because law enforcement agencies do not typically collect or report information about immigration status, analyst Jeff Asher notes.

In his newsletter, Jeff-alytics, Asher came up with the next best alternative. He looked at trends for "violent crime across the 14 counties along the Texas border with Mexico." If there is, in fact, a violent crime wave fueled by migrants, it would show up in these counties before anywhere else. The Texas Department of Public Safety maintains up-to-date, reliable crime data at the county level.

Asher found "no evidence of increasing violent crime along the US border with Mexico." In fact, these border counties "have seen a relatively steady violent crime rate below that of the rest of their state and the nation as a whole."

The same trends hold when you look at murder alone. The murder rate in border counties is consistently lower than the country as a whole, with little change over the last four years.

In other words, the best available data does not support the claim that Republicans have made a central issue in the 2024 campaign. There is no "bloodbath" at the border. These areas, in fact, have less crime than the nation as a whole.

The national crime decline

If there is no migrant crime wave at the border, perhaps it will show up in other areas of the country. The data does not support that claim either.

Nationwide, homicide and violent crime dramatically declined in 2023. According to the latest FBI’s Quarterly Uniform Crime report, which was released in March, homicides were down 13% in 2023 compared to 2022. Meanwhile, violent crime and property crime dipped 6% and 4% respectively. This data is preliminary and based on reports submitted by 15,199 of 19,152 law enforcement agencies across the country, reflecting “about 82% of the U.S. population.” (The FBI will release a more complete analysis for 2023 in the fall.)

Based on initial findings, Asher said “[t]he decline in murder in 2023 is likely the largest one year decline ever recorded.” The last time that happened was in 1996 when murder dropped 9.1%. In 163 of the 232 cities that submitted data, murder “was down or even,” Asher wrote. These findings were also mirrored in a survey by the Council on Criminal Justice, “which found that homicides were down an average of 10%” across 32 cities. The preliminary data also “suggests 2023 likely had the lowest reported violent crime rate nationally since the late 1960s,” Asher said. A few cities, including Chicago and DC, bucked the trend and saw an increase in violent crime in 2023. But there is no evidence this increase was attributable to migrants.

Asher said early data from 2024 shows that “murder is down around 20 percent in 2024 in more than 180 cities” compared to the same time period last year. In some cities, like DC, Las Vegas, and New Orleans, murder has declined by “more than 30 percent.” In Chicago, murder has declined 12%. But Asher concluded that the data, though incomplete, is encouraging overall. “A murder decline of even half the magnitude suggested by the early 2024 data would place the US murder rate this year largely on par with or below where it was from 2015 to 2019,” Asher noted.

The fact that we are not seeing evidence of a migrant crime surge is consistent with historical data that shows migrants, even undocumented migrants, are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. A peer-reviewed 2020 study, which used data from the Texas Department of Public Safety from 2012 to 2018, "found a lower felony arrest rate for immigrants in the U.S. illegally compared to legal immigrants and native-born U.S. citizens and no evidence of increasing criminality among immigrants." An upcoming study by a researcher at the libertarian Cato Institute similarly found that "undocumented migrants in Texas were about 26% less likely to be convicted of homicide than native-born Americans over the decade of 2013-22."

It appears, however, that Republican messaging around the issue is having an impact. Despite the data, most people believe crime is up. A Gallup poll in November 2023 found that 77% of Americans “believe there is more crime in the U.S. than a year ago.”

===

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

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

===

Right-wing media ignore GOP stonewalling in order to blame Biden and Democrats for lack of action on the border | Media Matters for America

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as kia covid 700K gop blames crisis at border

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Bannon falsely claims there’s “not one penny for quote-unquote border security” in new spending bill for Ukraine, Israel | Media Matters for America

How the border-cop-to-pundit pipeline fuels anti-immigrant coverage | Media Matters for America

for Tom Homan, the answer is always simple, no matter the question: Harsh punishment and brutal tactics get the job done. As a lifelong cop and former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement who has found a new career as a Fox News pundit, Homan deals in absolutes, regardless of his job title.

“Look, when it came to zero tolerance, it worked,” Homan said in a May 2020 interview, explaining and justifying the Trump administration’s family separation border policy, which he'd been advocating for since his time in the Obama administration. “Law enforcement uses zero tolerance across this country all the time, whether it’s drug enforcement or prostitution.”

:{Homan is one of three prominent border cops turned right-wing pundits who exert considerable influence in conservative media and policy circles. Along with Todd Bensman and Jaeson Jones, both former officers at the Texas Department of Public Safety, Homan pushes his hardline nativist messaging to any and all audiences that will have him. He and Bensman are both fellows at organizations founded by John Tanton, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “the racist architect of the modern anti-immigrant movement.”

...?

As ex-cops, Homan, Bensman, and Jones speak with a practitioner's authority. Their claimed expertise, supposedly gleaned from firsthand experience, allows them to mask xenophobia as hard-won knowledge about public safety. They provide a faux-empirical justification for anti-migrant policies, giving viewers a sense that they’re getting the unvarnished truth from people who have lived it. (In reality, border officers are frequently ignorant about basic immigration facts.) But the role these three play isn’t to inform; it’s to reinforce existing anti-immigrant prejudices and provide scaffolding for new laws and policies restricting immigration.

Tom Homan: From family separation architect to Fox News stardom

Of this cop-turned-pundit trio, Homan is the most influential. He has made at least 357 appearances on weekday Fox News since becoming a contributor in August 2018, affording him a massive platform to influence conservative thinking about immigration. Homan’s history in border enforcement — which dates back to 1984, when he became a Border Patrol agent and later joined the Immigration and Naturalization Service — is integral to the authority he commands among conservative activists, politicians, and audiences.

One Fox appearance from 2019 shows how Homan uses his sway to legitimize outlandish proposals — in this case, sending the U.S. military to Mexico to target drug cartels. In late November of that year, then-President Donald Trump floated the idea of designating Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations, which could potentially facilitate operations into the country. Days later, Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade interviewed Homan and asked about a recent mass shooting in Mexico that left 21 people dead.

“Tom, I know you say we should go help — but don’t we need to be asked?” Kilmeade said to begin the segment.

“Well, yeah. I think that would be great, and I think the Mexican president is going to ask,” Homan replied. “He has proven he can’t handle it. Mexico has failed at handling these cartels for the last three decades. They can’t succeed without us.”

Homan then approvingly referenced the U.S. invasion of Panama to oust its then-leader Manuel Noriega before arguing that Mexican drug cartels should be formally designated as terrorist organizations to empower federal law enforcement — and presumably the U.S. military — to wage war against Mexican drug cartels on their home soil.

“If we declare them [Mexican drug cartels] a terror group, what changes?” Kilmeade asked. “What does that legally let us do?”

“I think that helps the U.S. do some out-of-the-country operations to attack these organizations,” Homan responded.

If there was any confusion about where Homan stood, in its write-up of the interview, FoxNews.com characterized Homan’s remarks as “agreeing that the cartels should be designated as a terror organization by the U.S."

Homan wasn’t the only conservative pushing that idea, but he was an early adopter. Just as importantly, his years of appearances since then on Fox News have helped solidify the racist ideas used to justify the proposed terrorist group designation: that the United States is being invaded by migrants, and that those migrants are responsible for bringing a majority of the fentanyl that arrives in the country — which is factually incorrect.

Trump eventually backed off his threat to designate the cartels as terrorist organizations. But the idea of using such designations to confer authority on federal authorities to bomb or invade Mexico has essentially become a consensus position on the right. Nearly every candidate in the Republican presidential primary, for instance, sounds indistinguishable from Homan on immigration policy, with each of them pushing for hardline restrictionist policies that are justified by dehumanizing language about immigrants “invading” the southern border.

Nearly every candidate in the Republican presidential primary sounds indistinguishable from Homan on immigration policy.

Homan's hawkishness has been rewarded, as the conservative media and policy ecosystem has warmly embraced him since his departure from the Trump administration. In addition to his employment at Fox News, he was named a visiting fellow at the influential Heritage Foundation in 2022. He’s also a senior fellow at the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the nonprofit legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a branch of the Tanton network that the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated as a hate group.

Given Homan's association with that Tanton-founded organization, it’s not surprising that he has repeatedly pushed the great replacement theory, the racist idea that liberal elites are bringing people of color to the United States to replace white people. On October 11, Homan appeared on the show of a Hitler-praising antisemite where he claimed that the Biden administration is trying to purposely destroy the country by opening the borders to bring in “millions” of “future Democratic voters.”

Homan has pursued commercial endeavors as well. In 2020, Hachette Book Group published Homan’s Defend the Border & Save Lives, complete with a front-cover blurb from his Fox News colleague Mark Levin. He is a featured speaker at JL Wilkinson Consulting, a right-wing talent agency that also represents far-right cops Sheriff David Clarke and Sheriff Mark Lamb.

Homan also founded Homeland Strategic Consulting, which pulled in over $83,000 in consulting fees for services provided to Arizona businessman and failed Republican U.S. Senate candidate Jim Lamon, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Money began flowing Homan’s way just four months after he publicly endorsed Lamon’s candidacy. (Homan denied that the endorsement was related to the consulting contract.)

Homan has extensive links to extremist organizations and individuals, beyond his affiliation with the Tanton network. Earlier this year, Homan spoke virtually at an event honoring Mel K, a QAnon influencer and conspiracy theorist who has spread lies about the murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich and denied the results of the 2020 election.

In March 2022, HuffPost reported that Homan had been scheduled to speak at an event organized by white nationalist Nick Fuentes. When confronted by HuffPost about his appearance at the racist conference, Homan blamed his assistant for arranging the appearance and the fact that “so many names of conservative groups sound the same."

Homan then claimed that he left the conference after reading that Fuentes was supportive of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but he stopped short of criticizing the openly bigoted group. “I’m not saying this is a bad group,” Homan said, referring to Fuentes and his racist supporters, known as groypers. “I’m saying I don’t know."

Later that year, HTom Trentooman co-founded an anti-immigration organization that bears the same name as Homan’s book, Defend the Border & Save Lives, with fellow Islamophobe . In addition to helping Homan pilot the new group, Trento, who once told an audience at a 9/11 commemoration in 2013 that the goal of “all Islam” is to “get every single one of us to convert to Islam,” also runs an organization called The United West, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated as an anti-Muslim group.

This March, Homan was named CEO of election denialist organization The America Project, founded by far-right multimillionaire Patrick Byrne. In addition to his duties as CEO, Homan also heads the group’s Border911 initiative, which has sponsored anti-migrant events throughout the country. The organization frequently posts videos of its rallies on Rumble, an extreme right-wing YouTube clone. Newsmax’s Jaeson Jones is also part of Border911, and he spoke alongside Homan at many of the group’s recent events.

Homan frequently denies that he has any political agenda, instead couching his preferences simply as apolitical enforcement of existing laws enacted by Congress. In 2018, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Homan if ICE’s “zero tolerance” family separation policy, a policy Homan was overseeing at the time, was “humane."

“I think it’s the law,” Homan replied.

“It may be the law, it may be the policy, but is it humane?” Blitzer asked again.

“I think it’s the law, and I’m a law enforcement [officer],” Homan reiterated. “I must follow the law.”

But for Homan, not all laws are meant to be followed. In April, he headlined a Border911 fundraiser with Donald Trump at the former president’s residence and club Mar-a-Lago to raise money for families of people who participated in the January 6 insurrection. Speaking to the crowd, Homan reminisced about an early conversation in which Trump told him to “enforce the laws, that's all I'm asking you to do.”

“We kicked ass,” Homan reflected. “We kicked ass.”

Todd Bensman: Not an expert on immigration, by his own admission

Like Homan, Bensman has leveraged his history in law enforcement into a new career as an immigration restrictionist pundit and writer. Most of his work appears on the website for the Center for Immigration Studies — another branch of the anti-immigrant Tanton network — but he’s also written two books, and has published pieces at The Daily Wire, the Daily Mail, the New York Post, and other prominent conservative news outlets. He’s been on Fox News and Fox Business combined at least 27 times since 2017, according to a search of an internal Media Matters database and Bensman’s official website.

As Media Matters previously reported, Bensman has also appeared on extremist streaming programs as well. In June, he appeared on The Stew Peters Show, whose eponymous host is a white nationalist. He’s also been on at least three programs or platforms with ties to the QAnon conspiracy theory, including: The Mel K Show, Making Sense of the Madness (hosted by QAnon supporter Sean Morgan), and The Debbie Aldrich Show, from Creative Destruction Media, an outfit that in addition to endorsing QAnon also posts racist and anti-LGBTQ content.

In 2018, the Center for Immigration Studies brought Bensman on as a senior national security fellow. From his first days at the organization, Bensman stoked fears about terrorist “infiltration” at the southern border, a framing he regularly returns to despite evidence that conservatives wildly overstate the perceived threat as a way to demonize migrants.

In mid-September, Bensman spoke at a conference that also hosted John Eidsmoe, a retired Air Force officer who once spoke at a conference organized by a white supremacist group and has praised Confederate leader Jefferson Davis and pro-slavery advocate John C. Calhoun. QAnon-promoter Alex Newman was also a featured speaker at the event.

A granular look at how Bensman’s misinformation traveled is instructive.

Bensman frequently adopts a flood-the-zone style of content production, using his Center for Immigration Studies-sponsored trips to the border to create images and videos that confirm the bigoted prior assumptions of his intended audience. One of his recent successful operations was seeding a myth that the Biden administration was providing all migrant families with $2,200 monthly cost-of-living checks. Experts fact-checked the claim as false in real time, and news organizations have long debunked earlier versions of the persistent rumor,but a granular look at how Bensman’s misinformation traveled is instructive.

On September 6, Bensman posted a video on X purportedly showing a Border Patrol agent saying migrant families “get a check every month” of “about $2,200.” Bensman characterized the imaginary program as a “scam,” but acknowledged that he would have “to independently confirm” its existence, which he did not do. Instead, Bensman repeated the false claim three days later, even while admitting the accusation was “short of details” and “unverified.”

In the meantime, the conspiracy theory-amplifying pipeline kicked into overdrive. The same day he first posted on X about the supposed checks, Bensman went on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast and continued to spread the myth.

Video

CitationFrom the September 6, 2023, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

“The government gives them cost-of-living checks, for one family per month: $2,200. So if the father brings one of the kids and the mother brings another of the kids, and they just act like two families, they’re pulling in $4,400 a month, according to that Border Patrol agent,” Bensman told Bannon. Bensman again acknowledged he hadn’t confirmed whether it was true or not, but that didn’t stop him from spending more than two minutes spreading the misinformation.

On September 7, junk news site The Gateway Pundit picked up the story, citing Bensman as its primary source.

The same day, Fox host Rachel Campos-Duffy parroted Bensman’s conspiracy theory, telling Fox’s audience that the Biden administration was “paying $2,200 per family."

Republican politicians spread the myth even further. “We are literally subsidizing our own invasion,” Rep. Matt Gaetz said on X, reposting The Gateway Pundit’s story. Former Trump official and Christian nationalist Russ Vought, a well-connected policy adviser on Capitol Hill, then reposted Gaetz.

Rep. Lauren Boebert repeated the $2,200-per-month claim on X/Twitter without any sourcing. When asked by local 9News Denver where she got her information, Boebert’s press office sent a link to the Gateway Pundit story. (9News’s ruling on Boebert’s statement? “Not true.”)

IFrame Content

On September 10, Bensman obliquely walked back his initial claim, without clearly admitting he was wrong. He later defended himself to The Washington Post, saying: “I was hoping to get to the bottom of it. Maybe an expert would send a link or explain it.”

At least one element of Bensman’s story is true. As he inadvertently acknowledged, he is not an expert. He is a propagandist, and his distortions are all the more potent in right-wing media because of his history as a cop.

Jaeson Jones: Bringing the war on terror to Mexico

On May 19, Newsmax border correspondent Jaeson Jones posted a promotional video for The America Project and Border911 to his Instagram account. In the video, Jones, sitting alongside Homan, directly addresses Border Patrol agents.

“I’m Jaeson Jones, retired captain from the Texas Department of Public Safety, and someone who’s out there on the border every day working with you guys to try to get out what you’re going through to the American people,” Jones said.

No viewer would expect Newsmax, which has sought to outflank Fox News from the right, to adhere to journalistic standards of neutrality and balance, but it’s still remarkable that Jones would openly admit that his goal as a correspondent is to show what his fellow border cops are “going through” rather than gather facts. By his own admission, he’s not covering a story — he’s “working with” the Texas Department of Public Safety and Border Patrol agents.

When Jones, Homan, and Bensman speak, they are speaking on behalf of border cops and law enforcement writ large, acting as representatives of what journalist Jessica Pishko describes as a “baronial class” of public employees who enjoy special rights and privileges. These ex-cops are pushing the ideological and material interests of that class, with the end result of expanding law enforcement budgets and political influence. The explosion of federal spending on immigration and border enforcement stretches back for decades, but the fearmongering that Homan, Bensman, and Jones push has the predictable effect of directing ever more public funds to this repressive apparatus.

That dynamic explains, in part, why — like Homan — Jones has repeatedly called for the U.S. government to designate drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. Such a move would almost certainly open up vast resources for state and federal border officers, in addition to conferring more political power and legal authority on those departments.

In fact, Jones advocated for designating cartels as foreign terrorist organizations well before Trump ever publicly floated the idea.

Jones advocated for designating cartels as foreign terrorist organizations well before Trump ever publicly floated the idea.

During a June 18, 2019, interview with Lou Dobbs on Fox Business, Jones described cartels as “global violent networks who are acting as terrorist organizations around the world.” He added that several cartels had “gone through a quantum leap in capabilities,” in part because of “what they’ve learned from the FARC, which is a designated terrorist organization."

Jones was referring to the Colombian guerilla group that the United States designated as a foreign terrorist organization from 1997 to 2021, and the reference wasn’t incidental. In the early days of the war on terror, the group served a crucial role for another federal organization, the Drug Enforcement Agency.

As journalist Trevor Aaronson has described, in the wake of 9/11, the U.S. government began funneling money into any project that could be described as counterterrorism. With Washington focused on global terrorism, the DEA, a key combatant in the previous generation’s war on drugs, found itself sidelined and relatively starved of federal funds. To bolster its raison d'être, the agency invented a new category of crime — narcoterrorism — and used the FARC, a designated terrorist organization funded in part by drug trafficking, as a pry-bar to access all the counterterrorism money sloshing around Washington at the time.

Under the DEA’s new mission, agents and their informants pretended to be members of the FARC and engaged in elaborate sting operations targeting purported terrorists. Given the FARC’s designation as a terror group, the DEA could claim that it stopped a would-be terrorist if its undercover agents convinced FARC rebels to act on their behalf. (Nevermind that they would have manufactured those would-be terrorists.) With federal resources on the line, fighting terrorism was as much a bureaucratic turf war as it was about waging any other kind of war.

As a former counterterrorism official at Texas Department of Public Safety, Jones likely would have known that specific history. More broadly, he surely understood how the federal funding game is played, and he kept pushing the new line. In a July 2019 interview, also on Lou Dobbs Tonight, Jones was even more explicit in calling for cartels to be labeled terror groups, and again referenced the FARC.

“These are terrorist organizations that are no longer just drug trafficking organizations,” Jones said. “They have evolved into something much larger."

“The U.S. government has not transitioned yet to look at them as terrorists and to designate them as terrorists but yet, they employ the FARC — that is a designated terrorist organization,” he added.

Jones repeated his calls that August, September, October, and November — when Trump publicly contemplated moving forward — and then again the following December, February, March, and June, all on Lou Dobbs Tonight. In the September segment, Jones told Dobbs he had lobbied four members of Congress, “trying to get this foreign terrorist designation.” In 2021, he appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight to push for the change, and he continues to agitate for it from his new perch at Newsmax.

The once-fringe idea is now largely accepted as conventional wisdom on the right. Jones and Homan played a significant role in normalizing it, specifically by appealing to their identities as former cops. If their pitch is successful under the next Republican administration, their former agencies would almost certainly benefit handsomely from their advocacy.

The porous border between the hard-right and mainstream media

Homan, Bensman, and Jones are not the only former cops in the right-wing media and think tank ecosystem. One of Bensman’s colleagues at the Center for Immigration Studies, Jon Feere, is a former ICE and DHS official whom NPR quoted in June. Randy Clark, a writer at Breitbart, is retired from Border Patrol. Mark Morgan, former acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protections, is a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and is a member of Homan's Border911. The list goes on. These figures agitate for nativist immigration policies, channeling reactionary law enforcement attitudes into content served up in conservative media. The answer for them is always zero tolerance, harsher punishments, and more funding and discretion for cops.

The cop-turned-pundit pipeline isn’t unique to conservative outlets, but these figures loom especially large in their reactionary ecosystem given the centrality of nativist politics in the age of Trump. The programs where they appear, especially on Fox News, often set the tone for how mainstream outlets frame immigration, as mainstream outlets frequently adopt language that there is a “crisis” at the border.

One recent example perfectly illustrates how the Tanton network’s reactionary messaging seeps into mainstream news coverage. In mid-September, Washington Post columnist and CNN host Fareed Zakaria called for the president to “use the power he has in existing law to suspend entirely the admission of asylum seekers while the system digests the millions of immigration cases already pending."

To support this extreme and seemingly illegal position, Zakaria cited Nolan Rappaport, a former Department of Homeland Security official who now writes xenophobic op-eds at The Hill. Zakaria identified Rappaport only as “a longtime congressional expert on the issue,” but there’s much more to the story.

One recent example perfectly illustrates how the Tanton network’s reactionary messaging seeps into mainstream news coverage.

Rappaport, as it turns out, appears to be profoundly influenced by the organizations that employ Homan and Bensman. Rappaport blurbed Bensman’s first book, has cited him in at least three recent op-eds, and cited the Center for Immigration Studies in another. Rappaport frequently directs his stories, which he posts on X, at the Center for Immigration Studies’ policy director by tagging her username and at the account for Immigration Reform Law Institute, where Homan is a legal fellow. The Immigration Reform Law Institute then regularly reposts Rappaport’s stories to its own feed.

The pipeline from the Center for Immigration Studies and Bensman, and the Immigration Reform Law Institute and Homan, to Rappaport to Zakaria is invisible to the average reader. But Homan, for his part, sees it clearly.

“Please support CIS,” Homan said at the end of the conversation where he defended zero tolerance punishment against sex workers, people who use drugs, and families who crossed the southern border. He was speaking with Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “When I was the director of ICE, even when I was running ERO — Enforcement and Removal Operations, number three in ICE — CIS was a great help to the rule of law and helping ICE do their job."

“And they’re on the right side of the argument, folks, and we’re in a fight for our — we’re in a fight for our lives right now,” he continued. “We’re in a fight for this country. CIS gets it. They’re on the right side of the issues and they’re helping shape immigration in the future. So please support them.”

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an 7 23 no lnx

Fox hosts: Bombing Mexico 'a good idea' because shoplifting is 'terrorist activity'

Maya Boddie July 26, 2023

During the Wednesday, July 25, segment ofFox News' The Five, the conservative co-hosts Jesse Watters, Jeanine Pirro, Dana Perino and Greg Gutfeld suggested Mexican drug cartels are behind a shoplifting surge in America, and to combat the alleged issue — the U.S. military should bomb them.

Host Jesse Watters began the conversation saying, "While the liberal media gets a crash course on crime, we're learning that Mexican drug cartels are fueling America's shoplifting surge. They're selling the stolen stuff online and then laundering the profits through, guess where? Chinese brokers. So, Dana, CNN finally discovered crime is a crisis in San Francisco."

Dana Perino replied, "This is after they made fun of us for pointing it out last year...On this point, I think that finding out that there areMexican cartels behind this, makes me feel maybe there's hope that we could figure out a way to do something about it. So the state attorneys general are banding together and they're like let's go after it. But also they need help from the retailers. The retailers don't want to be looted like this either. But the problem, to me, is that all this stuff gets taken and then it's resold online. Like on Amazon, for example. So can Amazon help us out? Somehow, can they figure out a way to track them? We've got AI, we've got all these other tools. There must be a way to try to prevent all of this from happening."

READ MORE: Donald Trump complains that 'somebody leaked' his plans to launch Patriot missiles at Mexican cartels

In April, CNN interviewed Mission Local managing editor Joe Eskenazi about San Francisco's surge in crime, and the editor noted, "There is crime in downtown San Francisco, but there always has been.I think the notion that these businesses were driven out by crime is frankly dishonest. That's always been a factor."

Eskenazi later added, "San Francisco also has lots of property crime because there's a great divergence of wealth and people steal things. But San Francisco’s violent crime rate is at a near historic low right now."

Watters then said, "You can put up the task force, maybe with the FBI, bring in the DEA, make it transnational Greg, since the cartels are involved."

Greg Gutfeldreplied, "It's weird to see these cartels diversify. They're almost like Amazon now. They're doing drugs, smuggling and theft, pretty soon they're gonna have their own podcast. There's another thing that we said a long time ago and I bet we don't -- bombing the car-- remember we said we were talking about bombing the cartels? And people were going, 'No, no, no, that's an act of war, that's in another country.' Yeah, but we do that to terrorists as well, and this is kind of a terrorist activity. And the thing is, now, we see this at least on the Republican side, a lot of candidates are talking about doing it and I think it's a good idea. I think we need to elect a president who values a border. That's the important thing. Bomb these. And there's, like, one cartel we can cooperate with, let them kill the rest. Encourage them to kill the rest."

READ MORE: MTG says U.S. should be 'bombing Mexican cartels' and 'Antifa BLM rioters' instead of 'aiding' Ukraine

Watters then asked Pirro, "Remember when the Chinese were ripping off our DVDs and we sent the entire federal government after them and we actually were pretty effective. This is pretty similar in terms of now it's shoplifting.

She said, "Yeah, and I remember prosecuting a case for the Motion Picture Association because what they were doing was people were going in and they were just making copies of movies," to which Watters replied, "I've watched a few movies like that where the guy just holds the camcorder and the finger? I mean, my friend watched it."

Pirro added, "This is part of a, you know, global organized criminal activity. The problem is that this organization is not just doing retail theft. They're also doing human trafficking. They're doing fentanyl. They're doing all kinds of crime and so they're expanding their criminal network. And now they're going to be so powerful, I don't know if we're ever going to be able to defeat them. Because we've got a president right now, who, you know, with the border -- and they're in charge at the border -- there is nothing going on that's preventing the fentanyl from coming in. We hear about an arrest every now and then. It's usually the locals making the arrests, not the federal government. But the issue is whether or not these criminals are being prosecuted. That guy walked out, right, and then the person in the store says it's a police state for everyone. So for the victims it's a police state, with the criminal, it's not a police state.

That's the actual problem. It's low risk and it's high reward. Low risk because the employee's not gonna punch you out, you're not gonna get arrested, you're gonna make a fortune. You're gonna start this business and you're gonnalaunder your money through China. And unless we get serious about this, whether it's bombing or whatever -- you have to come up with something. These organizations are dangerous. They are absolutely dangerous. And for everybody at home, your insurance is gonna go up because of it. The cost of retail and consumer products are gonna go up. You're paying for this."

The New York Times' Maggie Haberman reported last year that "President Donald J. Trump in 2020 asked Mark T. Esper, his defense secretary, about the possibility of launching missiles into Mexico to “destroy the drug labs” and wipe out the cartels, maintaining that the United States’ involvement in a strike against its southern neighbor could be kept secret, Mr. Esper recounts in his upcoming memoir. When Mr. Esper raised various objections, Mr. Trump said that 'we could just shoot some Patriot missiles and take out the labs, quietly,' adding that 'no one would know it was us.'"

READ MORE: 'Bomb the Mexicans' is the GOP’s new 'build the wall': columnist

However, Haberman wrote experts argue that, "Patriot missiles are the primary surface-to-air missile used by the U.S. military, which is designed as anti-aircraft and anti-ballistic missile interceptors.As there are no reports of airborne drug labs in Mexican air space.

Trump supporter U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) complained earlier this year that American is "not bombing the Mexican cartels who are poisoning Americans every single day. And I know that sounds extreme. I'm not talking about the Mexican government or the Mexican people. I'm talking about the cartels. They're murdering Americans."

Miami Herald columnist Jean Guerrero notes the "Calls for U.S. attacks on Mexican drug cartels, recently discussed in secret if at all, have become a loudly expressed talking point for Republicans who are trying to exploit the violent rhetoric for political gain," highlighting Trump's 2024 GOP opponent and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' "recent promises to deploy the military against drug cartels, along with his support for executing smugglers and his assertion that 'you absolutely can use deadly force.'"

She argues, "Republicans aren't making a good faith argument, and that their rhetoric has more to do with racism than finding solutions to the ongoing opioid crisis."

Axios reports earlier this year, Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas) said, "If my colleagues were serious about addressing the cartels, they would start with addressing guns here in America," noting that the cartels "are able to outgun Mexican local law enforcement because of American guns."

READ MORE: 'Time to reverse course': NYT Editorial Board endorses ending the War on Drugs

Watch Media Matters' video below or at this link.

READ MORE: Lawmakers readying bipartisan bills to authorize Pentagon resources to combat fentanyl: report

CNN's full report is available at this link. Axios' report is here.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Republican senator: Mexico 'would be eating cat food' without the United States ›

Arizona GOP 'voter fraud' witness implicates Trump-loving lawmaker in drug cartel bribe claims ›

'Bomb the Mexicans' is the GOP’s new 'build the wall': columnist ›

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

ABBOTT PVT $ FOR wALL 621, ALSO TAX $?

we must keep the homeland pure, immaculate, virginal vs dark invasion/infection; we need strict fr and wALL TO REPELL THEM/OTHER/ENEMY

critics denounce Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick's 'invasion' rhetoric on immigration

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/dan-patrick/

pvt donor wall post bannon grift

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06:{/greg-abbott-:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:2653384985/

aha wow xenophobia weaponized and monetized

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/feds-charge-ex-trump-official-steve-bannon-with-criminal-fraud-in-crowd-funded-border-wall-campaign/

origin:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/01/trumps-wall-reportedly-a-gimmick-campaign-aides-came-up-with-so-hed-remember-to-talk-immigration.html

president Donald Trump’s obsession with a border wall with Mexico has now kept the government partially shut for three weeks. But the commander in chief didn’t always think it was such an essential idea. In fact, it started out as a gimmick, or, as the New York Times calls it, “a mnemonic device of sorts.” During the time when Trump was weighing his presidential candidacy, aides wanted to come up with a way to help him remember to talk about getting tough on immigration, which was always seen as a key issue in his campaign.

Political advisers Sam Nunberg and Roger Stone apparently came up with the idea. “How do we get him to continue to talk about immigration?” Nunberg claims he told Stone. “We’re going to get him to talk about he’s going to build a wall.” The plan worked like a charm. Trump talked about immigration in his speeches, and the wall narrative got huge reactions from the crowd, which obviously thrilled Trump. So he kept pushing the idea harder and harder.

The laser focus on the wall, though, makes even some immigration hardliners nervous, because most don’t actually see it as the most important priority. And some who agree with Trump that immigration needs to be curbed worry that he’ll be willing to trade away things that are far more important in order to get his wall. “I’ve always thought it created a danger that he would trade almost anything in order to get the wall,” said Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “I’m still worried about that now.”

Michael D’Antonio, a Trump biographer, says the wall is naturally appealing to Trump because of his background in real estate and the idea that he’d leave behind a legacy. “I think he’d like it being called the Great Wall of Trump,” D’Antonio said, noting he’d probably like it even more if there was a plaque honoring the president who built it “every mile or so.”

For now, it seems the wall remains an impasse, and negotiations to reopen the government aren’t really getting anywhere. “We didn’t make much progress at the meeting, which was surprising to me,” acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said Saturday. In a meeting that included Vice President Mike Pence, the administration continued pushing for cash to build the wall. Negotiations are set to continue Sunday. Trump wrote on Twitter that “not much headway made today” before continuing with his message: “After so many decades, must finally and permanently fix the problems on the Southern Border!”

1020 pro pub

records Show Trump’s Border Wall Is Costing Taxpayers Billions More Than Initial Contracts

As the presidential election nears, a review of federal spending data found modifications to contracts have increased the price of the border wall by billions, costing about five times more per mile than it did under previous administrations.

by Perla Trevizo and Jeremy Schwartz

Oct. 27,

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/trump-says-he-disagreed-with-privately-funded-border-wall-but-his-administration-awarded-the-builder-1-7-billion-for-more-walls/

720 mma

CEO won $1.7 billion in border wall contracts using the Trump-Fox feedback loop. His last wall project reportedly could collapse.

The lesson here is simple: Don't hand out federal contracts based on who catches President Trump's eye on Fox News.

Tommy Fisher received over a billion dollars in federal contracts for his construction company to build sections of Trump's wall by appealing directly to the president in appearances on Fox News. As we've previously reported in this space, Fisher made at least 11 appearances on Fox to claim that he could build the wall faster and cheaper than anyone else. It worked: He got $1.7 billion in federal contracts because Trump had seen his appearances on Fox -- including what was reportedly the largest border wall contract ever awarded.

And now, a new report by ProPublica reveals that a private wall project of Fisher's shows signs of "runoff erosion" and is in danger of collapsing into the Rio Grande, with experts saying that it was built far too close to the river.

an 220

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/19-state-attorneys-general-file-lawsuit-slamming-trumps-unconstitutional-and-unlawful-border-wall-scheme/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/trumps-secret-police-things-are-heading-in-that-direction/

no lnx

Trump’s secret police? Things are heading in that direction

[President Donald J. Trump speaks with U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers coming in for their shift change, after President Trump attended a Roundtable on Immigration and Border Security Thursday, January 10, 2019, at the U.S. Border Patrol McAllen Station in McAllen, Texas. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)]

Written by John Stoehr, The Editorial Board February 18, 2020

I wrote this morning about the president’s new intimidation of sanctuary cities. He’s deploying 100 CBP agents, including BORTAC, which is a SWAT team for border security. The official goal is increasing deportations by 35 percent, but it’s pretty clear the aim is bullying local law enforcement into cooperating with federal authorities. I set the Times report in historical context, trying to explain, as I see it, how 9/11 sparked a chain reaction leading to what appears to be Donald Trump’s secret police force.

I end the piece by quoting Jenn Budd, a former Border Patrol agent turned civil rights activist, who reported a conversation she had with a former CBP official. She wrote:

Border Patrol does not believe they are a civilian law enforcement agency. They believe they are kin to the Marine Corps. They do not believe they are accountable to Congress, which is why they have no issues lying to them even while under oath.

They believe they are only accountable to … presidents like Trump. Border Patrol believes it is not required to answer to local police, FBI, CIA or any other law enforcement agency. They claim to be the “premiere” law enforcement agency, superior to all others. They say they will become a “national police force” to be used by a president to enforce laws even among citizens. (Italics are mine.)

Check out the whole thing here.

And while you’re there, please support my work by becoming a member!

Thanks. —John Stoehr

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?

thru envir sensitive desert

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/private-landowners-are-fighting-trumps-border-wall/

if you own land on the Southern border, Big Government may be coming for it.

“On Friday, the federal government filed its first land acquisition case to condemn nearly 13 acres of private property in the Rio Grande Valley, a parcel near the river levee in Hidalgo County. The owner was offered $93,449 in compensation for the land,” reported The Washington Post.

Trump aims to build 166 miles of border barrier in Texas, almost all of it slated to go on private land that the government has yet to acquire — thousands of parcels along the river, an unknown number of them occupied by their owners, including churches and single-family homes. No new border wall has been built on private land in Texas since the president took office, but land acquisition in the Rio Grande Valley is about to enter a new phase this week, as U.S. attorneys began filing initial petitions in court while making cash offers to property owners….

The fight that likely will ensue pits Texans against Trump, who has long said he wants to take whatever land he needs to build his signature promise to America.

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-trump-feedback-loop-nets-company-400-million-contract

mma

construction company won a $400 million federal contract to build a portion of wall along the U.S. border with Mexico after the firm’s Fox News-centric strategy of capturing President Donald Trump’s attention through laudatory appearances on his favorite channel overcame the Army Corps of Engineers’ reported complaints that its design did not meet requirements.

Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade toasted the success of the company, North Dakota-based Fisher Sand and Gravel, during a Tuesday morning “News by the Numbers” newsbrief. “That’s good news for them,” he added after running down the contract’s particulars.

https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2019/12/03/business/ap-us-border-wall-fox-news-pitch.html

aha: border zone is place of max freedom loss, try out new techniques? facial recognition? airports? sold to rich white ppl as convenience? fake emergency, mil mobilization; "rapists" on the escalator? started as mnemonic?! reignite periodic/classic anti-immigrant hate in bad economic times [chinese exclusion after panicS?]

omg; border is our future, stalking horse trial balloons?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/a-consulting-firm-advised-ice-to-cut-migrants-food-and-medical-care-to-save-costs-worrying-agency-officials/

no lnx many

A consulting firm advised ICE to cut migrants’ food and medical care to save costs — worrying agency officials

Written by Ian MacDougall / ProPublica December 3, 2019

reporters detained at border, took their pix away? added them to dBase

https://theintercept.com/2019/08/01/perceptics-hack-license-plate-readers

lee fang contractor

bannon calls trump actions on border "humanitiarian"

https://theintercept.com/2019/10/03/climate-change-migration-militarization-arizona/

no lnx

To stand in the summer sun on Organ Pipe and contemplate the long walk north invites some startling realizations. One: Despite the heat and the militarization, generations of people have somehow survived this seemingly impossible journey. Two: No one is going to undertake such a journey without a deep motivating desire to move. And three: All of these factors — human migration, the desert’s capacity to kill, and the hardening of the American border security apparatus — are on a path to historic intensification in the coming years.

[Read Our Complete Coverage

Climate Crimes]

Right now there are construction crews at work on Organ Pipe, pumping water from a rare desert aquifer to mix concrete for Donald Trump’s long-promised border wall. The survival of a fragile and unique desert ecosystem hangs in the balance. Laiken Jordahl, a former employee of the U.S. National Park Service at Organ Pipe and now the borderlands campaigner for the Center for Biological Diversity, monitored the situation throughout the summer. Making the two-hour drive from Tucson to Organ Pipe, Jordahl would shoot video dispatches from the monument, detailing what was happening on the ground, cataloging the progress of the project and describing for viewers what was at stake.

“It’s basically just an all-out attack,” Jordahl told me. “It’s unbelievable. This would never be conceivable if normal environmental laws were in place.”

[Lukeville, Ariz. September 26, 2019: A tractor destroys the extant barrier in preparation for the installation of a new taller barrier to the east of Lukeville, Ariz. on Thursday September 26, 2019. (Ash Ponders for The Intercept)Lukeville, Ariz. September 26, 2019: Hand prints left by Southwest Valley Constructors worker as they pour the concrete base on the Mexican side of the new taller barrier being installed to the east of Lukeville, Ariz. on Thursday September 26, 2019. (Ash Ponders for The Intercept)]

Organ Pipe sits directly south of Ajo, an unincorporated community surrounded by a vast expanse of federally administered borderlands sometimes referred to as Arizona’s west desert. To the west of the monument is the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. To the east is the Tohono O’odham Nation, one of the country’s largest Native American reservations. The tribe’s ancestral homelands were split in two in 1853 with the Gadsden Purchase, which established the current U.S.-Mexico dividing line. Descended from the first people of the Sonoran Desert, the O’odham have been living with, and in many cases resisting, U.S. government notions of border enforcement ever since. In 2016, Verlon Jose, the former vice chairman of the nation, responded to the suggestion that Trump would build a wall on the reservation with the words “Over my dead body.”

For Jordahl, Organ Pipe was the place where he first fell in love with the Sonoran Desert. It’s easy to see why. With its rolling hills, wide-open vistas, and still, soul-settling silence, the monument is as breathtaking as it is deadly. Jordahl bristles at the media’s habit of saying that much of Trump’s wall-building in places like Organ Pipe is merely the replacement of existing barriers, and thus not a win for the president.

“That grossly misconstrues this issue,” he said.

There’s a difference between a Normandy barrier, Jordahl noted, which people and animals can pass over and under and exists in many parts of Arizona, and the 30-foot steel bollard walls, topped with floodlights, that Trump administration contractors are planting deep into the ground. It’s all the more serious in the case of Organ Pipe, where the water used to mix the concrete to support those walls is sucked out of a rare aquifer. According to the Arizona Republic, U.S. Customs and Border Protection estimates that it will need 84,000 gallons of water each day to complete the Organ Pipe project, which was awarded to Southwest Valley Constructors, a New Mexico-based firm. At a rate of roughly 1.85 million gallons per mile, 43 miles of bollard fencing “could require a total of 79.56 million gallons of groundwater,” the paper reported.

“We’re literally mining it out of the earth here,” Jordahl said. “It will take generations to regenerate, if it does at all.”

The drain on the groundwater could have disastrous consequences for Quitobaquito Springs, an oasis that provides the only source of natural, permanent fresh water for hundreds of species of animals.Some of those species are endangered. Others, like the Quitobaquito pupfish, exist nowhere else in the world. But the implications of the construction run even deeper. In Arizona, the federal government has long weaponized the desert as a tool to stop migration, one used in concert with an army of federal agents, the best technology money can buy, and network of immigrant detention centers. While these get-tough deterrence strategies rarely achieve their stated goals, they do provide powerful political fodder and line the pockets of those with a stake in the game, from government contractors to organized crime.

Conditions that made the Sonoran Desert a deadlier and more politically fraught space over the last two and half decades will soon go into overdrive. According to the latest National Climate Assessment, delivered to Congress and the president in November 2018, the southwest United States is on track for severe water shortages, multidecade droughts, and increased wildfires. Already home to the hottest temperatures ever recorded, the region is expected to see an increase in public health problems stemming from extreme heat, with children, the elderly, and Native Americans at particularly high risk.

Tucson, Ariz. September 25, 2019: Laiken Jordahl along the banks of the newly flowing Santa Cruz River in Tucson, Ariz. on Wednesday September 25, 2019. (Ash Ponders for The Intercept)Laiken Jordahl stands along the banks of the newly flowing Santa Cruz River in Tucson, Ariz. on Sept. 25, 2019. Photo: Ash Ponders for The Intercept]

South of the border, regional vulnerability to the climate crisis is already an issue. In the summer of 2016, as Trump was campaigning on his promise to build a wall to keep migrants out, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reported that drought in Central America’s dry corridor had left 3.5 million people in need of humanitarian assistance. USAID called it “one of the worst droughts in 35 years in Central America.” The agency’s grim climate forecasts for the countries of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador suggest more hardship to come, with rising temperatures, food scarcity, and extreme weather threatening rural populations in a region still struggling to overcome legacies of Cold War interventionism, corporate exploitation, and war-zone levels of violence and insecurity.

Stories linking migration and climate change have proliferated during the Trump era, so much so that researchers at a recent conference at the University of Arizona raised concerns that other factors driving people to move — poverty, violence, institutional failures — risk being overshadowed. The concerns are not without merit. Migration is not monolithic, and the reasons people choose to move are as varied as people themselves. At the same time, projections about the role climate could play in shaping the calculus of individual people are quite dire, and traditional factors that have driven migration are increasingly bound up in the environmental crisis. The International Organization for Migration, for example, has forecasted that there could be anywhere from 25 million to 1 billion climate refugees in the world by 2050. The World Bank, meanwhile, has estimated that there could be more than 17 million people internally displaced in Latin America alone by that time. Just last month, a report from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre found that climate disasters forced a record-setting seven million people from their homes in the first six months of 2019. That was before Hurricane Dorian hit the Bahamas in what’s been described as potentially “the longest siege of violent, destructive weather ever observed.”

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.”

...

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.

In tiny Ajo, where providing water to migrants is a decades-old tradition, the prosecution of Warren and other aid volunteers has prompted a fierce and defiant response. In August, members of the humanitarian community there opened up a permanent aid building for migrants on the main road running through town. What the future will mean for a place like Ajo remains to be seen. The management of water will be key, Garfin told me.

If anyone is likely to endure the coming years, he continued, it’s the O’odham. “We’re talking about people who have lived in this super extreme environment for thousands of years,” he said. “The one thing that’s different is that they previously had the ability to migrate. Now, that’s very restricted. But they have traditional knowledge that I think will help them to adapt.”

Amy Juan is certainly confident in her people. “I think we already have what it takes,” she told me. “It’s just going to be a regeneration of who we already are.” Juan is well aware of the projections DHS and the Pentagon have made for the years to come. “They’re preparing for climate change,” she said. “They’re preparing for mass migration and the wall is a part of that. They don’t want people to migrate or move.” It’s a threat to the O’odham way of life, to the ability of the O’odham to connect with thousands of relatives living on the other side of the international divide. “This border, it is a moral issue,” Juan said, a question of “who’s human and who has the right to life.”

Juan knows that she’s in for a long haul, that border militarization isn’t going away tomorrow. “That’s where I’m at now — accepting that,” she said. “Accepting it and preparing myself to work within that, to find solutions and build towards our future, and hoping that this isn’t going to be the situation that we’re going to be in forever. Because it’s crazy. I have to remind myself that not everybody lives like this.” When we spoke last, one of Juan’s colleagues was on his way back from a two-week conference on desertification in India. “We’re really anxious for him to come back,” she said. Heat and militarization, these are things the O’odham know well, she explained. Sharing that knowledge with others, making that the O’odham contribution to this historic moment, fills her with excitement and a sense of purpose. “We are beginning to see our role in helping other people around the world understand what that looks like, what it means, and what it’s going to take to survive,” she said. “We know what that life is like.”

The U.S. Border Patrol and an Israeli Military Contractor Are Putting a Native American Reservation Under “Persistent Surveillance”GARFIELD COUNTY, UT - OCTOBER 11: Cloud cover and rainfall in the Circle Cliffs region, an area removed from Grand Staircase - Escalante National Monument, in Garfield County, Utah on October 11, 2018. (Photo by Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post via Getty Images)Hikers, Trump, and the Capitalist Conspiracy to Ruin Public LandsIndustrialized Militaries Are a Bigger Part of the Climate Emergency Than You KnowTOPSHOT - Central American migrants heading in caravan to the US rest beside the road between Metapa and Tapachula in Mexico on April 12, 2019. - A group of 350 Central American migrants forced their way into Mexico Friday, authorities said, as a new caravan of around 2,500 people arrived -- news sure to draw the attention of US President Donald Trump. Mexico's National Migration Institute said some members of the caravan had a "hostile attitude" and had attacked local police in the southern town of Metapa de Dominguez after crossing the border from Guatemala.

THE SHAPE OF the Trump administration’s approach to policing immigration is at this point familiar. Since January 2017, federal agents and officers have been under orders to enforce a harsh interpretation of immigration laws without restraint. The result has most infamously manifested in the forced separation of immigrant parents from their children and, more recently, a series of horrific reports detailing conditions in border-area detention centers.

Though undocumented people have always been the core target of this campaign, the blast radius of the government’s hyper-politicized crackdown has steadily expanded over the years. A new report published by Amnesty International on Tuesday details a two-yearlong attack on human rights defenders, attorneys, and journalists working along the U.S.-Mexico border, calling out a pattern of escalating enforcement in violation of domestic and international law.

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The U.S. “government has executed an unlawful and politically motivated campaign of intimidation, threats, harassment, and criminal investigations against people who defend the human rights of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers,” the report said, adding that both the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice “have increasingly misused and leveraged the criminal justice system to deter and punish those individuals for challenging — or even simply documenting — the systematic human rights violations by US authorities against migrants and asylum seekers.”

Brian Griffey, a lead researcher on the report, wrote to The Intercept: “These attacks on human rights defenders are an integral part of the Trump administration’s broader campaign of human rights violations against people seeking asylum on the U.S.-Mexico border.”

“The Trump administration’s contempt for lawyers, journalists, and good Samaritans shows its greater contempt for the rule of law and the judiciary, as it continues to apply human rights-violating policies broadly and as quickly as it can, to do maximum damage to vulnerable communities,” before courts are able to rein them in and restore order, he added.

Based on nearly two dozen interviews, the report drew on dozens of cases in Texas, Arizona, and California from 2018 to 2019, in which immigration advocates, attorneys, and journalists were targeted by law enforcement with actions ranging from surveillance and prolonged detention to the charging of serious felonies. The human rights organization argued that by unlawfully choking off asylum access at ports of entry and dumping asylum seekers who have made it to U.S. soil back into dangerous Mexican border towns, U.S. officials and their Mexican counterparts first manufactured a crisis, then criminalized the civilian response to it.

“By discriminatorily targeting human rights defenders — most of them US citizens — based solely on their political or other opinions, speech and activities, the Trump administration has violated international law, the US Constitution, US laws, and corresponding DHS policies that acknowledge those legally binding civil liberties protections,” the report said.

Amnesty specifically pointed to violations of “freedom of expression; right to privacy; equality under the law; and freedom from discrimination, including on the basis of political or other opinion” by U.S. law enforcement under international law. In the domestic context, the organization said the administration’s crackdown violated “constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech under the First Amendment; and equal protection under the law, without discrimination, under the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Two episodes documented by Amnesty, and previously exposed by The Intercept, have emerged as the clearest examples of law enforcement targeting people whose work does not align with the Trump administration’s border and immigration agenda: an expansive, binational, multi-agency, intelligence-gathering operation focused on migrant caravan-related advocacy and journalism in the Tijuana-San Diego area, and the criminal prosecution of nine human aid volunteers working with migrants crossing the Arizona desert. In both cases, Amnesty found that law enforcement leaned heavily on a portion of the U.S. criminal code — known as 1324 — to justify its targeting of advocates in the borderlands. Noting that “a federal appellate court struck down the human smuggling crime being applied by DHS to justify its politically motivated surveillance,” Griffey, the Amnesty researcher, said the “laws being applied by US authorities are vague and inconsistent with international standards.”

The best known Trump administration smuggling prosecution is the case of Scott Warren, an Arizona-based humanitarian aid volunteer who was arrested in January 2018and accused of providing two undocumented men with food, water, and a place to sleep over two days. Charged with two counts of harboring and one count of conspiracy, Warren faced up to 20 years in prison. In June, a federal judge declared a mistrial in Warren’s case.

Describing his arrest as a “retaliatory attack” — Warren was arrested hours after a group he volunteers with published a report implicating the Border Patrol in the destruction of thousands of gallons of water left for migrants in the desert — Amnesty spearheaded an international campaign calling for the charges against Warren to be dropped.

“If Dr. Warren were convicted and imprisoned on these absurd charges, Amnesty International would recognize him as a prisoner of conscience — detained for his volunteer activities motivated by humanitarian principles and his religious beliefs — and would continue to campaign for his immediate and unconditional release, and for his criminal record to be expunged,” the report noted.

Warren and his attorneys, along with the government’s prosecutors, were back in court Tuesday, just as the Amnesty report was made public.

Two DHS officials who spoke to Amnesty on the condition of anonymity questioned the propriety of using smuggling statutes against individuals involved in humanitarian aid or asylum advocacy. In May, The Intercept reported on the case of Ana Adlerstein, who was detained by Customs and Border Protection officials and threatened with smuggling charges after she accompanied an asylum seeker to an Arizona port of entry. “That’s not the purpose of 1324, and no US Attorney would prosecute that,” a CBP investigator told Amnesty. “The purpose of that is if 10 people sneak across the border, and there’s someone waiting on the other side with a car.”

...

omg

Potential DHS senior official Ken Cuccinelli suggested that states invoke “war powers” to turn back migrant “invasion”

Right-wing pundit Ken Cuccinelli is an anti-LGBTQ bigot, and Trump is set to appoint him to a senior DHS position

contractor direct line to trump brain // whitaker:

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/05/24/how-one-company-used-fox-centric-pr-strategy-try-get-trump-give-it-lucrative-federal-contract/223793

omg

Fox News has unprecedented influence over President Donald Trump’s decision-making. Trump’s worldview is shaped by the hours of propagandistic and sycophantic programming he often watches in a day, as well as his private consultations with many of the network’s stars on a wide variety of topics. As a result, Fox’s commentators have at times dictated the president’s policy agenda and political strategy, harnessed the news cycle by directing his attention to their particular obsessions, provided staffers for his administration, and hand-picked the recipients of his pardons.

And now, the network is emerging as a platform that can determine who could receive hefty federal contracts.

The Washington Post reported Thursday that Trump has “alarmed” military commanders and Department of Homeland Security officials by aggressively lobbying them to grant a border wall contract to Fisher Industries, a North Dakota-based construction company whose CEO, Tommy Fisher, has regularly appeared on Fox and other conservative outlets to promote his company’s bid.

Fisher claims that his company can build a border wall both faster and cheaper than his competitors thanks to a patent-pending installation system, but the Army Corps of Engineers determined that Fisher’s design “did not meet its requirements and lacked regulatory approvals” and that the firm’s previous work on a barrier project “came in late and over budget,” the Postreported. Rejected through the procurement process, Fisher is trying to go around it through the right-wing media, a method that has allowed him to reach the president. Trump is now trying to sidestep the contracting process because, as Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) explained to the Post, he “had seen [Fisher] on television” -- specifically on Fox -- “advocating for his version of the barrier.”

Fisher has used a Fox-centric PR strategy to directly pitch the president in hopes of obtaining a federal contract, making at least 10 appearances on Fox News and its sister network, Fox Business, since January 2018, according to a Media Matters review. Programs the president regularly watches, including Fox & Friends and The Ingraham Angle, have repeatedly granted Fisher an uncritical platform to shill for his company.

Fisher’s strategy mimics that of K Street lobbyists who pay off TV pundits to promote their messages during on-air appearances and lawyers who put their clients and their relatives on Fox to ask the president for pardons.

The CEO has honed his pitch to appeal to the president in particular, as demonstrated by his March 5 appearance on Fox & Friends, during which co-host Ainsley Earhardt asked him to explain “why should the president, or why should his administration, choose your company?"

[vid]

Fisher first appealed to the president as a businessman, saying Trump should know that his company would do the work for less money than other companies, get it completed faster, and throw in access roads and other additions.

He went on to describe his company as “the first responder” of the industry, appealing to Trump’s well-known obsession with police officers and firefighters.

And he also tried to link the bid to one of Trump’s notable construction successes, the renovation of the Wollman Rink in Central Park in the 1980s. “I think he’ll understand,” Fisher argued, “just like the Central Park deal with the ice skating rink, if you need it done now, nothing against government bureaucracy, but it takes time, so you need an expert to come in there and do it now and do it right.”

Earhardt ended the interview by giving Trump another reason to prefer Fisher: “You might be able to build it just in time for that election, too.”

And Fox’s promotion of Fisher’s bid has not been limited to the network’s supposed “opinion” shows. On April 19, the network’s flagship “news” broadcast, Special Report, ran a packaged report that essentially served as an infomercial for Fisher’s proposal. Introduced by anchor Bret Baier and reported by national correspondent William La Jeunesse, the segment featured an interview with Fisher and credulously repeated his claims that he could construct the wall “faster, better, and cheaper."

[vid]

All of this laudatory coverage has had Fisher’s desired effect, with the president reportedly promoting the company’s bid in meetings with senior military and DHS officials and forcing them to explain “that the president could not just pick a company” to get the contract in defiance of the federal procurement process.

Fisher harnessed the incredible power of Fox’s hold on the president to get much closer than he should have to taxpayer dollars. He won’t be the last to try to do so.

nice case study: escalator effect

ref no lnx twit

https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2018/10/31/george-soros-and-migrant-caravan-how-lie-multiplied-online/1824633002/

How a lie about George Soros and the migrant caravan multiplied online

USA TODAY followed the rapid spread of a social media conspiracy theory about George Soros and migrants that grew from obscurity to the political mainstream.

Brad Heath, Matt Wynn and Jessica Guynn, USA TODAY

Updated 12:27 p.m. PDT Oct. 31, 2018

How a George Soros conspiracy theory spread from online to cable news

USA TODAY followed the spread of a social media conspiracy theory about George Soros and migrants that grew from obscurity to the political mainstream.

This is the life of a lie.

Three weeks ago, a caravan of Hondurans began walking nearly 2,000 miles to the United States. Their ranks grew as they inched north and, along with them, falsehoods grew, too. But one stands out: aconspiracy theory that liberal billionaire George Soros, a Jewish immigrant, is paying the migrants to make the journey – or even orchestrating it.

Members of Congress and the president’s son both repeated it. Conservative celebrities, too.

It also may have resonated in darker places. Cesar Sayoc, the man charged with mailing pipe bombs to Soros and other prominent critics of President Donald Trump, dwelled at length online about conspiracy theories involving the Hungarian-American philanthropist.

Robert Bowers, charged with killing 11 people worshiping in a Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday, used his social media accounts to post extensively about the caravan, including circulating an image of refugees in Guatemala purportedly climbing into a truck with a Star of David on the side.

But it began with a handful of posts in the caravan’s early days.

One of the first was from a North Carolina writer who goes by the screen name “lorettatheprole.” Loretta Malakie has more than 6,000 followers on Twitter,to whom she directs frequent posts about “white genocide,” Jews and the “invading force” approaching the border.

On Oct. 14, Malakie posted a link to an article about the caravan, with a single word of commentary: “Soros.”

That same day, identical posts appeared over the course of 20 minutes in six pro-Trump Facebook groups. Combined, those six groups had 165,000 members. A user who gave the name Philip Balzano, a Trump supporter from Chicago, wrote to the Trump Train group: “Here Comes ANOTHER Group of Paid for New Demoncratic Voters Just in Time for the Primaries... The Financier aka ‘Win at All Costs’ ‘Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste’ the Evil George Soros and His 140+ Orgs, Should Be Classified as Terrorist and Terrorist Orgs.”

Malakie declined to comment, though on Twitter she panned the USA TODAY reporter who called her as “evil.” Balzano did not respond to an interview request sent through Facebook.

The Soros theory was not new – it had made the rounds during previous caravans in the spring and again in August. In fact, one Facebook user posting in October provided as evidence a video of Glenn Beck discussing the spring caravan’s alleged connections to Soros.

GEORGE SOROS WEBSITE

This time, though, the theory snowballed, gaining political purchase as the caravan became a flashpoint in the final weeks of a contentious midterm campaign.

“It’s really significant how these memes can go from feverswamp-ish places to be amplified by lawmakers, even the president," said David Carroll, associate professor at The New School's Parsons School of Design in New York. “From there, the impact on world events can’t be underestimated.”

Lies, of course, are not new either. But social media can turn a breeze into a hurricane. It carried this falsehood to millions with a few taps on a screen. It also left a distinct trail that makes it possible to follow how lies spread and who told them, a map of their trajectory from the darker corners of the internet to the political mainstream.

USA TODAY followed that path by examining tens of thousands of social media posts on three major mainstream social media sites: Twitter, Facebook and Reddit.

Over the next three days, a few louder social media voices weighed in. By Oct. 16 – four days after the caravan departed – the combined following of accounts mentioning both Soros and the caravan had reached 2 million, still a pebble in the flood tide of social media.(The total includes some duplicates because people follow more than one account.)

On Twitter, someone with the username “LibertyBell1000” warned about 42,000 followers that Soros had “manufactured yet another immigrant caravan ‘crisis.’ ” Another, using the name “WhoWolfe,” asked “Anybody else think Soros and the Dirty Dems are behind this?”

More posts spread across Facebook. Trump supporter Randy Penrod posted in a group called “The Deplorable's,” with about 186,000 members, “Our stable leader just called out the Soros conspired invasion of new Democrat voters in a tweet just moments ago.”

Tap, tap, tap.

It took just one more day for the theory to reach critical mass, breaking through into widespread public consciousness.

The evening of Oct. 17,a Republican member of Congress posted a video on Twitter of what he said was people in Honduras handing out small sums of money to migrants.

“Soros? US-backed NGOs? Time to investigate the source!” he wrote.

Rep. Matt Gaetz would later concede that he was mistaken about where the video was shot (it was Guatemala). But by then his message had metastasized, spreading far beyond the 153,000 people who follow the north Florida congressman’s tweets.

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter retweeted it to her 2 million followers. So did Sarah Carter, a journalist who’s a frequent guest on Fox News.

Jack Posobiec – a correspondent for conservative cable news television channel One America News Network – got more specific, implying Soros was renting RVs for the migrants.

Posobiec was among the early proponents of “Pizzagate,” a social-media conspiracy that falsely claimed then-candidate Hillary Clinton and other Democrats were running a pedophile sex trafficking ring from the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria. It drew a man with a gun to Comet Pizza, where he intended to rescue the children.

The next day, even more influential voices repeated it.

One was the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., who retweeted Gaetz’s post to his 3.1 million followers. The younger Trump has been actively campaigning for Republicans on television and the campaign trail in the lead up to the midterm elections. A spokesman for Donald Trump Jr. declined to comment.

On Twitter alone, at least 43,000 accounts with a combined 127 million followers carried some message linking Soros to the caravan over those two days; most fanning the conspiracy, a few seeking to knock it down.

On Reddit, where users share and comment on news and memes, the lie exploded. Five posts in The_Donald subreddit tied Soros to the caravan. Within a week, there would be 10 times more. The_Donald has 675,000 members.

Ten days after the caravan began in Honduras, police started intercepting what appeared to be pipe bombs – PVC tubes packed with what the FBI later called “energetic material,” wrapped with tape and attached to a clock – that had been sent to Soros and other prominent critics of President Trump.

By the time police found the first of those bombs in Soros’ mailbox in Westchester County, New York, the lie about his involvement with the caravan had been posted by 20,000 more users on Twitter – to a combined audience of 117 million – and more weighed in on Facebook, Reddit and other sites.

It was like a runaway train. Unstoppable.

Another member of Congress, Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, said in a Fox News interview that he couldn't “help but think that Democrats, perhaps Soros and others, may be funding this thinking it will help them.”

By then, the lie also was at an inflection point. Online, the biggest voices were those debunking it.The day before the bomb was found at Soros’ house, the most prominent people mentioning the theory on Twitter had no longer been conservative commentators but instead New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and Chelsea Clinton.

But researchers say repetition is repetition. Even exposing a lie plays a central role in mutating fantasy into fact, or at least a matter of debate. Here, news coverage – including this story – play a significant role.

“The choices reporters and editors make about what to cover and how to cover it play a key part in regulating the amount of oxygen supplied to the falsehoods, antagonisms, and manipulations that threaten to overrun the contemporary media ecosystem,” Syracuse University professor Whitney Phillips wrote in a paper this year on disinformation.

Attention alone can lend credence to the very information critics mean to undermine.

By Oct. 22, posts debunking the theory also emerged. One from Arizona Christian conservative Joshua Feuerstein was among Facebook’s most-viewed videospushing the Soros-caravan connection. Feuerstein is best known for characterizing Starbucks’ shift to generic red holiday cups as a war on Christmas.

His video purported to show Honduran migrants on a truck. Accompanying text popularized a direct connection not just to Soros, but to the midterms: “They are not coming on foot as CNN #FakeNews says! George Soros is paying for them to show up at the border by mid term elections!”

The video and text drew 137,000 views.

Exactly how far the lie linking Soros to the migrant caravan has traveled is impossible to measure in full. Messages on 4chan and other sites where conspiracies germinate disappear quickly. Gab – a social media site that attracted right-wing figures banished from more mainstream platforms – itself was on the verge of disappearing this week. Even on mainstream sites like Facebook and Instagram, many messages are private.

Still, by the morning of Oct. 27, it had spread to hundreds of millions of users onmainstream social media, and found its way to many more on cable news.

That morning, federal prosecutors allege that trucker Robert Bowers stormed into the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and shot 11 worshipers to death. The authorities have offered few details about what might have motivated him to attack, but online Bowers left his own trail of grievance and conspiracy.

Using the handle OneDingo on Twitter, Bowers shared anti-Jewish content and criticized President Trump. Since January, he was a regular on Gab, too, where his bio read: “Jews are the children of Satan.” The image on his Gab account referred to a white supremacist meme. His last message read: “Screw your optics, I'm going in.”

And by the next day, he did.

In the aftermath, as the news media rushed to cover the killings and to explain the internet conspiracies that might have precipitated such a massacre – the lie spread anew.

Originally Published 6:54 a.m. PDT Oct. 31, 2018

Updated 12:27 p.m. PDT Oct. 31, 2018

not currently related but could converge?

President Donald Trump appeared in the Oval Office with the Secretary General of NATO Tuesday afternoon, and re-issued his threat to close the southern U.S. border to Mexico.

But it was his description of the situation – and what he sees as wholly acceptable goals – that was stunning.

The President of the United States repeatedly insisted that civil rights should be ignored and rescinded. Regardless out immigration or citizenship status, every person in the U.S. has constitutional rights that cannot be summarily dismissed.

“What we have to do is Congress has to meet quickly, and make a deal,” Trump said to reporters. “I could do it in 45 minutes,” he claimed, which is false, given his track record.

“We need to get rid of chain migration, we need to get rid of catch and release, and visa lottery, and we have to do something with asylum, and to be honest with you – have to get rid of judges,” Trump said casually, not realizing – or not caring – that he is literally talking about taking away civil rights, the civil rights of people who are fleeing violence, gangs, drugs, and oppression.

“Every time you catch somebody that’s come illegally into your country, and they bring them to a court,” Trump railed, again attacking civil rights.

Many on social media expressed concern....

100k this mo so border, 40% kids? deport 7 yo solo?!

Trump cuts aid for Central American countries, threatens border shutdown

House Democrats called the move "entirely counterproductive."

https://www.ecowatch.com/trump-border-wall-endangered-species-2410320620.html