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Migrant Mass Drowning in Texas Spurs Renewed Calls for Immigration Reform
"Congress must act quickly to pass solutions that bring compassion and security to our border," said one advocacy group after at least nine people drowned trying to cross the Rio Grande.
Sep 03, 2022
Advocates on Saturday urged Congress to pass immigration reforms after at least nine migrants drowned while attempting to cross the swollen Rio Grande from Mexico into Texas earlier this week.
"Our border policies continue to kill."
According to reports, 37 migrants were rescued while trying to ford the surging river near Eagle Pass on Thursday, while eight other people are missing. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) spokesperson Rick Pauza said in a statement that federal and local authorities continue to search for possible survivors.
CBP said that U.S. authorities arrested 53 migrants at the scene, while their Mexican counterparts apprehended 39 others.
"My heart goes out to the families that have lost loved ones during their tragic journey to the U.S.," tweeted Rep. Jesus "Chuy" Garcia (D-Ill.) in response to the drownings. "This is an unfortunate reminder that we must prioritize our immigration laws along with the socio-economic policies that fuel displacement and migration."
\u201cAnother horrible tragedy at the border. A summer of drought brought river levels down, letting more people walk across the river to seek asylum in the US. But recent rains swelled the river to dangerous levels, and today dozens were swept away, killing 8. https://t.co/EuqIkaadcn\u201d— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@Aaron Reichlin-Melnick) 1662170077
Ieva Jusionyte, a professor of international security and anthropology at Brown University's Watson Institute, wrote that "our border policies continue to kill."
"Hardened borders are deadly," concurred Ruthie Epstein, a former deputy director of immigration policy at the ACLU.
The National Immigration Forum, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, tweeted, "This heartbreaking tragedy highlights once again the need for Congress to act and pass immigration reforms."
"Congress must act quickly to pass solutions that bring compassion and security to our border, in the names of human lives and human dignity," the group added.
According toThe New York Times:
The fire chief in Eagle Pass, Manuel Mello, said fierce currents had swept a number of migrants downstream as they attempted to cross about a mile south of the international bridge. Drownings have become an everyday occurrence in that section of the border, typically as many as one a day, and sometimes more, said the chief, a 58-year-old Eagle Pass native.
About two months ago, he said, 12 bodies were recovered on the same day--six by the Mexican authorities and six by U.S. rescue officials--after another large group tried to cross into the United States.
More recently, two boys, one 3 years old and the other 3 months old, slipped from the grasp of an uncle as they were attempting to cross, he said. The older boy drowned, and the infant was rushed to a San Antonio hospital in critical condition.
Belying Republican claims that President Joe Biden's "open border" policies are to blame for tragedies like the Eagle Pass drownings and the fatal asphyxiation of 53 people in a tractor-trailer near San Antonio in June, a Reutersinvestigation published earlier this year noted that "migrants have increasingly turned to riskier methods of entering the U.S. as enforcement policies along the border have strengthened."
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According to the Reuters report, there have been more than 1,000 border fatalities during Biden's tenure, both on land and in the river.
"The Rio Grande is treacherous unless you know the safe crossing points," saidMondoweiss editor James North. "Migrants should be able to cross at ports of entry and request asylum."
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, director of policy at the advocacy group American Immigration Council, noted that "migrants who try to go to the Eagle Pass port of entry and seek asylum have been completely turned away since March 2020, and largely turned away since April 2018."
"With the ports of entry shut except in limited circumstances, desperate people feel like they have no other options," he added.
In May, a federal judge issued an injunction blocking the Biden administration from lifting Title 42, a public health order first invoked during the Trump administration and used by both presidents to deport around two million asylum-seekers under the pretext of the Covid-19 pandemic.
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The Border-Industrial Complex in the Biden Era
Robotic dogs and autonomous surveillance towers are the new wall.
May 05, 2022
First, it was the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) vehicles speeding along on the road in front of our campsite. Then it was the Border Patrol's all-terrain vehicles moving swiftly on a ridge above us. I was about 10 miles north of the border with Mexico, near Pena Blanca Lake in southern Arizona, camping with my six-year-old son and some other families. Like fire trucks racing to a blaze, the Border Patrol mobilization around me was growing so large I could only imagine an emergency situation developing.
While the Biden administration has ditched the racist justifications that went with it, its officials continue to zealously promote the building of a border-wall system that's increasingly profitable and ever more like something out of a science-fiction movie.
I started climbing to get a better look and soon found myself alone on a golden hill dotted with alligator junipers and mesquite. Brilliant vermilion flycatchers fluttered between the branches. The road, though, was Border Patrol all the way. Atop the hill opposite mine stood a surveillance tower. Since it loomed over our campsite, I'd been looking at it all weekend. It felt strangely like part of French philosopher Michel Foucault's panopticon--in other words, I wasn't sure whether I was being watched or not. But I suspected I was.
After all, that tower's cameras could see for seven miles at night and its ground-sweeping radar operated in a 13-mile radius, a capability, one Border Patrol officer told me in 2019, worth "100 agents." In the term of the trade, the technology was a "force multiplier." I had first seen that tower freshly built in 2015 after CBP awarded a hefty contract to the Israeli company Elbit Systems. In other words, on top of that hill, I wasn't just watching some unknown event developing; I was also in the middle of the border-industrial complex.
During Donald Trump's years in office, the media focused largely on the former president's fixation with the giant border wall he was trying to have built, a xenophobic symbol so filled with racism that it was far easier to find people offended by it than towers like this one. From where I stood, the closest stretch of border wall was 10 miles to the south in Nogales, a structure made of 20-foot-high steel bollards and covered with coiled razor wire. (That stretch of wall, in fact, had been built long before Trump took office.)
What I was now witnessing, however, could be called Biden's wall. I'm speaking about a modern, high-tech border barrier of a different sort, an increasingly autonomous surveillance apparatus fueled by "public-private partnerships." The technology for this "virtual wall" had been in the works for years, but the Biden administration has focused on it as if it were a humane alternative to Trump's project.
In reality, for the Border Patrol, the "border-wall system," as it's called, is equal parts barrier, technology, and personnel. While the Biden administration has ditched the racist justifications that went with it, its officials continue to zealously promote the building of a border-wall system that's increasingly profitable and ever more like something out of a science-fiction movie.
As March ended, one week before my camping trip, I saw it up close and personal at the annual Border Security Expo in San Antonio, Texas.
"Robots That Feel the World"
The golden chrome robotic dog trotted right up to me on the blue carpet at the convention center hall. At my feet, it looked up as if it were a real dog expecting me to lean over and pet it. According to the Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate, this "dog" will someday patrol our southern border. Its vendor was undoubtedly trying to be cute when he made the dog move its butt back and forth as if wagging its tail (in reality, two thin, black antennae). Behind the vendor was a large sign with the company's name in giant letters: Ghost Robotics. Below that was "Robots That Feel the World," a company slogan right out of the dystopian imagination.
According to its organizers, this was the most well-attended Border Security Expo in its 15-year history. About 200 companies crowded the hall, trying to lure officials from CBP, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, border sheriffs' departments, and international border forces into buying their technologies, sensors, robots, detectors, and guns. As I stood staring at that surreal dog, behind me the company Teledyne Flir was showing off its video surveillance system: a giant retractable mast sitting in the bed of a black pickup truck. On the side of the truck were the words "Any Threat. Anywhere."
Another company, Saxon Aerospace (its slogan: "Actionable Intelligence, Anytime, Anywhere"), had a slick, white, medium-sized drone on display. One vendor assured me that the drone market had simply exploded in recent years. "Do you know why?" I asked. His reply: "It's like when a dog eats blood and gets carnivorous."
Elsewhere, the red Verizon Frontline mobile command-and-control truck looked like it could keep perfect company with any Border Patrol all-terrain vehicle unit; while Dell, the Texas-based computer firm, displayed its own frontline mobile vehicle, promising that "whether you're providing critical citizen services, innovating for the next generation, or securing the nation, we bring the right technology... and far-reaching vision to help guide your journey."
And don't forget 3M, which has moved well beyond its most famous product, Scotch tape, to provide "rugged and reliable equipment across DoD [Department of Defense], DoJ [Department of Justice], DHS [Department of Homeland Security], and U.S. state and local agencies." Top defense contractors like Airbus (with a shiny black helicopter on display in the center of the expo hall) were also present, along with top border contractors like General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and Elbit Systems.
Just the day before the expo opened, the Biden administration put out its fiscal year 2023 budget, which proposed $97.3 billion for the DHS, that agency's largest in its two-decade history. The Customs and Border Protection part of that, $17.5 billion, would similarly be the most money that agency has ever received, nearly $1.5 billion more than last year. Although Immigration and Customs Enforcement received just a marginal increase, it will still get $8.5 billion. Combine just those two and that $26 billion would be the highest sum ever dedicated to border and immigration enforcement, significantly more than the $20 billion that the Trump administration started out with in 2017. As DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas put it, such a budget will help secure our "values." (And in an ironic sense, at least, how true that is!)
"Notably," Mayorkas added, "the budget makes smart investments in technology to keep our borders secure and includes funding that will allow us to process asylum claims more efficiently as we build a safe, orderly, and humane immigration system."
What Mayorkas didn't mention was that his border plans involve ever more contracts doled out to private industry. That's been the case since 9/11 when money began to pour into border and immigration enforcement, especially after the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002. With ever-growing budgets, the process of privatizing the oversight of our southern border increased significantly during the administration of President George W. Bush. (The first Border Security Expo was, tellingly enough, in 2005.) The process, however, soared in the Obama era. During the first four years of his presidency, 60,405 contracts (including a massive $766 million to weapons-maker Lockheed Martin) were issued to the tune of $15 billion. From 2013 to 2016, another 81,500 contracts were issued for a total of $13.2 billion.
In other words, despite his wall, it's a misconception to think that Donald Trump stood alone in his urge to crack down on migration at the border. It's true, however, that his administration did up the ante by issuing 87,293 border-protection contracts totaling $20.9 billion. For Biden, the tally so far is 10,612 contracts for $8 billion. If he keeps up that pace, he could rack up nearly $24 billion in contracts by the end of his first term, which would leave Trump's numbers and those of every other recent president in the dust.
If so, the contracts of the Trump and Biden administrations would total nearly $45 billion, slightly surpassing the $44.3 billion spent on border and immigration enforcement from 1980 to 2002. In the media, border and immigration issues are normally framed in terms of a partisan divide between Democrats and Republicans. While there is certainly some truth to that, there are a surprising number of ways in which both parties have reached a kind of grim border consensus.
As Maryland Democratic Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger, a member of the House appropriations committee, said ever so beamingly on a screen at that Expo conference, "I have literally put my money where my mouth is, championing funding for fencing, additional Border Patrol agents, and state-of-the-art surveillance equipment." And as Clint McDonald, a member of the Border Sheriff's Association, said at its opening panel, the border is "not a red issue, it's not a blue issue. It's a red, white, and blue issue."
When I asked the Ghost Robotics vendor if his robo-dog had a name, he replied that his daughter "likes to call it Tank." He then added, "We let our customers name them as they get them." While we were chatting, a prospective customer asked, "What about weapons mountable?" (That is, could buyers weaponize that dog?) The vendor immediately assured him that they were already working with other companies to make that happen.
Later, when I asked Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz about the surveillance dogs, he downplayed their significance, stressing the media hype around them, and saying that no robo-dogs were yet deployed anywhere on the border. Nonetheless, it was hard not to wander that hall and think, This, much more than a wall, could be our border future. In fact, if the "big, beautiful" wall was the emblem of Donald Trump's border policy, then for the Biden moment, think robo-dogs.
Border Security Is Not a "Pipe Dream"
The night before I stood on that hill in Arizona, I had heard people passing through the campsite where my son and I were sleeping in a tent. Their footsteps were soft and I felt no fear, no danger. That people were coming through should hardly have been a surprise. Enforcement at our southern border has been designed to push such border-crossing migrants into just the sort of desert lands we were camping in, often under the cover of night.
The remains of at least 8,000 people have been found in those landscapes since the mid-1990s and many more undoubtedly died since thousands of families continue to search for lost loved ones who disappeared in the borderlands.
The remains of at least 8,000 people have been found in those landscapes since the mid-1990s and many more undoubtedly died since thousands of families continue to search for lost loved ones who disappeared in the borderlands. Those soft footsteps I heard could have been from asylum seekers fleeing violence in their lands or facing the disaster of accelerating climate change--wilted crops and flooded fields--or economic dispossession in countries where foreign corporations and local oligarchies rule the day. Or all of that combined.
For years, I've been talking to migrants who crossed isolated and hazardous parts of the Arizona desert to bypass the walls and guns of the Border Patrol.
I thought of them when, on the last day of that Border Security Expo, I watched Palmer Luckey, the CEO of Anduril, a new border surveillance company, step up to the podium to introduce a panel on "The Digital Transformation of the Border." The 20-something Luckey, already worth $700 million, had floppy brown hair and wore a Hawaiian shirt, cargo shorts, and flip-flops. He told the audience of border industry and Homeland Security officials that he was wearing shades because of recent laser surgery, not an urge to look cool.
He did look cool, though, as if he were at the beach. And he does represent the next generation of border tech. Since 2020, his company has received nearly $100 million in contracts from Customs and Border Protection.
His introduction to the panel, which sounded to me more like a pitch for financing, offered a glimpse of how the border-industrial complex now works. It was like listening to a rehearsal for the lobbying appearances he and his company would undoubtedly make in Congress for the 2023 budget. In 2021, Anduril spent $930,000 lobbying on issues that mattered to its executives. It also gifted political candidates with nearly $2 million in campaign contributions.
Luckey's message was: fund me and you'll create a "durable industrial base," while ensuring that border security will not be a "pipe dream." Indeed, in his vision, the new border-surveillance infrastructure he represents will instead be an autonomous "pipeline," delivering endlessly actionable information and intelligence directly to the cell phones of Border Patrol agents.
I was thinking about his pitch again as I stood atop that hill watching the border apparatus quickly mobilize. I was, in fact, looking at yet another Border Patrol vehicle driving by when I suddenly heard a mechanical buzzing overhead that made me think a drone might be nearby. At our southern border, the CBP not only operates the sizeable Predator Bs (once used in U.S. military and CIA operations abroad), but small and medium-sized drones.
I could see nothing in the sky, but something was certainly happening. It was as if I were at the Expo again, but now it was real life. I was, in fact, in the middle of the very surveillance-infrastructure pipeline Luckey had described, where towers talk to each other, signal to drones, to the all-terrain vehicle unit, and to roving Border Patrol cars.
Then the buzzing sound abruptly stopped as a CBP helicopter lifted into the air, its loud propellers roaring.
The Real Crisis
After that dramatic helicopter exit, I wondered if there was indeed a border emergency and finally decided to get in my car and see what I could find out, leaving my son with our friends. As I rounded a corner, I came across Border Patrol agents and vehicles at the side of the road with a large group of people who, I assumed, were migrants. About four individuals had already been put in the back of a green-striped Border Patrol pickup truck, handcuffed and arrested. They had the tired look I knew so well of people who had walked an entire night in an unknown, hazardous landscape, had failed, and were now about to be deported. The agents of the ATV detail were lounging around in their green jumpsuits as their quads idled, as if this were all in a day's (or night's) work, which indeed it was.
I remembered then hearing those footsteps as my son slept soundly and thought: The border is not in crisis. That's impossible. The border's inanimate. It's the people walking through the desert--the ones who crept past us and those in the back of that truck or soon to be put in other trucks like it, arrested so far from home--who are actually in crisis. And it's a crisis almost beyond the ability of anyone who hasn't been displaced to imagine. Otherwise, why would they be here in the first place?
The ongoing border-crisis story is another example of what Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano once would have called an "upside down" world, so twisted in its telling that the victim becomes the victimizer and the oppressor, the oppressed. If only there were a way we could turn that story--and how so many in this country think about it--right-side up.
As I was mulling all of that over, I suddenly noticed the omnipresent "eye" of the Elbit Systems tower "staring" at me again. Its superpower cameras were catching the whole scene. Perhaps its radar had detected this group to begin with. After all, the company's website says, "From the darkest of nights to the thickest of brush, our border solutions help predict, detect, identify, and classify items of interest." Not people, mind you, but the handcuffed "items of interest" in the back of that truck.
As I watched the scene unfold, I remembered a moment at that Expo when a man from the Rio Grande Valley asked a panel of Department of Homeland Security officials a rare and pointed question. Gesturing toward the hall where all the companies were hawking their wares, he wondered why, if there was so much money to be made in border security, "would you even want a solution?"
The long uncomfortable silence that followed told me all I needed to know about the real border crisis in this country.
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Drug Policy Alliance Applauds Biden's Embrace of Harm Reduction
"Despite over one million lives lost to drug overdose over the last 20-plus years, this is the first time an administration has included harm reduction in the National Drug Control Strategy."
Apr 21, 2022
A leading U.S. drug policy reform advocate on Thursday welcomed the inclusion of harm reduction policies in President Joe Biden's inaugural National Drug Control Strategy, a plan that comes amid a record surge in fentanyl-driven overdose deaths.
"We must embrace the evidence-based public health approaches we know work and save lives."
"We applaud the Biden-Harris administration for taking the historic step--to support access and funding for harm reduction services and reduce barriers to lifesaving medications," Grant Smith, deputy director of the Office of National Affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance, said in a statement. "Despite over one million lives lost to drug overdose over the last 20-plus years, this is the first time an administration has included harm reduction in the National Drug Control Strategy."
"The administration should continue to focus on its promise of equity by decreasing racial disparities in drug policy and the overdose crisis," Smith asserted.
"From 2020 until now, Black people have experienced a 48.8% increase in overdose mortality, Hispanic or Latino people experienced a 40.1% increase, and American Indians and Alaska Natives experienced the highest increase in overdose mortality of all ethnic groups" he noted. "This cannot continue."
Citing the "heartbreaking toll" of 106,854 U.S. overdose deaths over the past year, the White House said its 2022 National Drug Control Strategy "focuses on two critical drivers of the epidemic: untreated addiction and drug trafficking."
\u201cNEWS: Today, @POTUS released his inaugural National Drug Control Strategy, a whole-of-government approach to beat the overdose epidemic.\n\nThe Strategy focuses on two critical drivers of the epidemic: untreated addiction and drug trafficking. Read more \u2b07\ufe0f https://t.co/WoMg1ktyGy\u201d— ONDCP (@ONDCP) 1650545335
In addition to addressing untreated addiction for people at risk of overdose, the administration's plan "calls for greater access to harm reduction interventions including naloxone, drug test strips, and syringe services programs."
Naloxone--sold under the brand name Narcan--is an opioid blocker than can rapidly reverse the life-threatening effects of an overdose. Testing strips detect fentanyl--a powerful synthetic opioid added to various drugs to increase their potency--but are outlawed as paraphernalia in many states.
Dr. Rahul Gupta, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, toldNPR that "the most important action we can take to save lives, right now, is to have naloxone in the hands of everyone who needs it without fear or judgment."
"The most important action we can take to save lives, right now, is to have naloxone in the hands of everyone who needs it without fear or judgment."
Biden's strategy "directs federal agencies to integrate harm reduction into the U.S system of care to save lives and increase access to treatment." It also calls for "collaboration on harm reduction between public health and public safety officials, and changes in state laws and policies to support the expansion of harm reduction efforts across the country."
The strategy's anti-trafficking elements include a proposed $300 million increase--"one of the largest ever"--in U.S. Customs and Border Protection funding, as well as " efforts to strengthen domestic law enforcement cooperation."
While the White House says the plan aims to "advance racial equity in the investigation, arrest, and sentencing for drug-related offenses," Smith expressed disappointment in the administration's perpetuation of the failed War on Drugs.
"Criminalization approaches only saddle mostly Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous people with criminal legal records and often incarceration, which increases their risk for infectious diseases, overdose, and death," he said. "Prioritizing federal spending on public health rather than enforcement and interdiction is the best path forward."
Smith contended that with so U.S. overdose deaths and a crisis that costs the nation's economy more than $1 trillion annually, "we must embrace the evidence-based public health approaches we know work and save lives."
"But," he stressed, "it must be done outside of the harmful apparatus of the drug war to be effective and provide the kind of racial equity this administration has long promised."
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