Reports of children in warehouses or jaillike facilities have set President Joe Biden on the defensive about what critics refer to as a “crisis at the border.” In his first press conference, on March 25, 2021, Biden repeatedly stressed that his practice is different from that of former President Donald Trump, who introduced a policy of separating migrant children from their parents and detaining them in cages. Continue reading.
There may come a time when top officials of the Trump administration, including the president himself, will no longer be able to travel abroad without fear of arrest by international authorities. Every day now, evidence accumulates that Trump and his appointees are perpetrating crimes against humanity on the southern border.
Even Trump’s conscience seems to have been shocked, momentarily, by the wrenching news video of a father and his little daughter drowned in the Rio Grande last Sunday. Or so he wants us to believe. The images of Oscar Alberto Martinez holding his 23-month-old Angie Valeria, their bodies face down in the river, forced the nation’s attention to the terrible effects of his administration’s crackdown. Driven away from safer ports of entry, those innocents perished as the father tried to save his child at a dangerous crossing point.
Trump being Trump, he immediately sought to deflect blame onto “the Democrats,” suggesting that his opponents’ humane attitude draws refugees northward at their peril. But by now he knows that his ill-treatment of those migrants has done nothing to dissuade them from fleeing violence and starvation in their home countries — a consequence of U.S. foreign policy that predated Trump but that he has only made worse.
Taxpayer dollars are being used to spy on migrants fleeing violence, adding to the huge cost of Trump’s wasteful border stunt.
The Trump administration is reportedly paying undercover informants to infiltrate the migrant caravan and spy on the group as they make their way north after fleeing violence in Central America.
According to NBC News, the Department of Homeland Security is overseeing the operation to gather intelligence from the group of about 4,000 asylum-seeking migrants.
In addition to placing undercover informants within the caravan, DHS personnel are also reportedly collecting intelligence from migrants using WhatsApp groups to communicate along their journey.
The migrant caravan now consists of nearly five thousand people, about a third of whom are under the age of eighteen. Credit: Adriana Zehbrauskas, The New Yorker
Since last week’s midterm elections, Donald Trump has spoken less frequently about the migrant caravan, but the subject is still plainly on his mind. On Friday, he signed a Presidential proclamation (“Addressing Mass Migration Through the Southern Border of the United States”), which suspended the possibility of asylum for anyone entering the country between officially designated ports of entry. By U.S. and international law, migrants are allowed to seek asylum “whether or not” they do so at an official checkpoint along the border; Trump’s measure, which was immediately challenged by advocacy groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, aims to override explicit provisions of an existing federal statute in order to thwart the entry of tens of thousands of Central American migrants. As Lee Gelernt, the A.C.L.U.’s lead litigator in the case, told me, “It would mean the President could literally sit down with a copy of the immigration act that Congress wrote and cross out any provision he didn’t like.”
The night before the President issued his proclamation, members of the caravan gathered in Mexico City, where they’d paused for a week of rest, to vote on a final destination for the group. Of the big border cities in northern Mexico, Tijuana was considered the safest—the route skirts territory controlled by violent cartels—but it was also the farthest away. The caravan now consists of nearly five thousand people, about a third of whom are under the age of eighteen. An estimated three hundred of them are younger than five. Because of the punishing physical toll of the trip, the group has tried, with mixed success, to arrange van and truck transportation the rest of the way. Hundreds of them have either turned back or have been deported by Mexican authorities, while some twenty-six hundred others, according to the Mexican government, have received temporary legal status to remain in Mexico.
The relative success of the group, coupled with the continued desperation of residents in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, has prompted a string of smaller caravans, consisting of several hundred people each, to travel in its wake. In recent years, under pressure from President Barack Obama, Mexico has redoubled its efforts to intercept Central Americans heading north, earning its own reputation for aggressive immigration enforcement. At the same time, the U.S. has invested about seven hundred million dollars in an aid package, called the Alliance for Prosperity, to try to address the corruption and rampant crime that are seen as the root causes of emigration from the region. “The caravans are not the problem,” Tonatiuh Guillén López, the incoming head of Mexico’s National Migration Institute, said this week. “The issue is the movements we do not see, those who are not in the caravan, that is the big issue.”
The Department of Homeland Security is stretching for data to back up the president’s assertions. (Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)
“Think of it, 300 people. You know, we’re getting a lot of heat because, I was saying, there were some bad people in that caravan. Right? So we checked, 300 people.”
“You know, every time I say, ‘You have some rough people in there,’ the media says, ‘How dare you. We want to see proof.’ Well, they gave you 300 names yesterday. These are rough, rough people in many cases and if they’re allowed to break through our borders, only larger and bigger, we have emboldened these people.”
President Trump often makes pronouncements and assertions, and then his aides scramble to try to fill in the blanks. During his rallies before the midterm elections, the president all but acknowledged that he had been claiming the “caravan” of migrants traveling from Honduras contained criminal elements without evidence. But then the Department of Homeland Security came to the rescue.
What do women want? President Donald Trump thinks he knows.
“Women want security,” Trump said about the caravan of migrants heading to the U.S. border with Mexico during a rambling press conference on Thursday. “Women don’t want them in our country. You look at what the women are looking for: They want to have security.”
He again proclaimed, without evidence, that the migrants were “tough people,” and warned that if they throw rocks at troops he’s sending to the border, “I say, consider it a rifle.”
‘I have no words for my anger over this,’ one veteran writes.
Credit: Pablo Martinez Monsivais, AP Photo
Veterans are calling out Trump’s unprecedented decision to send armed troops to the Mexico border just days before the midterm elections, denouncing the move as a political stunt.
“Donald Trump thinks unarmed people who are fleeing horrors and are still 1,000 miles away are a national security threat a week before election day?” says Will Fischer, a former Marine now with the advocacy group VoteVets.
“I don’t think so. It’s a political ploy to blow upon the embers of racism and nativism, and he is using the military again as a political prop to advance his own agenda.”
There may come a time when top officials of the Trump administration, including the president himself, will no longer be able to travel abroad without fear of arrest by international authorities. Every day now, evidence accumulates that Trump and his appointees are perpetrating crimes against humanity on the southern border.
