Tag: border security
Border State Sheriffs Defying Trump On Mass Deportation Scheme

Border State Sheriffs Defying Trump On Mass Deportation Scheme

President-elect Donald Trump's advisors have been hoping county sheriffs in border states will assist with the incoming administration's mass deportation campaign. But several sheriffs are already publicly promising to not lift a finger.

According to a Tuesday report in WIRED magazine, top Trump immigration advisors like Tom Homan and Stephen Miller have been having conversations with several far-right sheriffs who have expressed an interest in helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) remove immigrants from the United States. But that effort is unlikely to pick up traction, both for legal reasons and because other sheriffs have said they already have their hands full and don't want to take on more work.

Currently, ICE's 287(g) program allows for state and local law enforcement to collaborate with ICE in its efforts "to protect the homeland through the arrest and removal of noncitizens." However, this does not include sheriffs themselves rounding up and detaining undocumented immigrants.

Additionally, no federal funding has been appropriated to any sheriffs' offices that help ICE, meaning just 125 out of 3,081 sheriff's offices in the U.S. have signed up. And Yuma County, Arizona Sheriff Leon Wilmot told WIRED that the Supreme Court has already established that enforcing immigration law is outside the jurisdiction of local police departments and sheriffs' offices.

"[T]hat's not our realm of responsibility," Wilmot said. "If we wanted to do immigration law, we would go work for Border Patrol."

The push for sheriffs to assist the incoming administration has been led by retired sheriff Tom Mack, who is the head of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA). Mack told WIRED he's been exchanging voice and text messages with Homan about getting more sheriffs involved with deportations. Homan has previously promised to build "the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen." But Wilmot said "no one listens to" Mack, that he "hasn't been a sheriff in a long time" and that he "pushes his own agenda."

Santa Cruz County Sheriff David Hathaway, who is a Democrat, told WIRED that he wasn't invited to an event Homan hosted in his state last month, even though Hathaway's jurisdiction includes some of the nation's biggest ports of entry. He added that he would refuse any calls to help the Trump administration deport immigrants, as it would hurt his standing in his county.

"I'm not going to cooperate, because 95 percent of the residents of the town where I live, where my county is, are Hispanic,” Hathaway said. “I'm not going to go checking the documents of practically every single person in my county to determine their immigration status, because that would create distrust between law enforcement and all the people in my community."

The sheriffs bucking calls to assist with mass deportations even include some of Trump's biggest supporters in the law enforcement community. Livingston County, Michigan Sheriff Mike Murphy — who hosted a pro-Trump rally in a building owned by the sheriff's office — told the outlet that he isn't interested in using county resources to help with federal immigration law enforcement.

"I still have a county to do police work in,” Murphy said. “Just because the president says, 'Hey, go out and round them up,' that is not all of a sudden gonna move to the top of my priority list. If somebody's house is getting broken into, that's my priority. If somebody's involved in an injury crash and they're laying on the side of the road, that's my priority. I've got cases that are open.”

Other border state sheriffs who have come out against calls to help the Trump administration round up migrants include Val Verde County, Texas Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez and Brewster County, Texas Sheriff Ronny Dodson. According to Dodson, the incoming Trump administration giving sheriffs the authority to jail migrants could "break" county law enforcement.

"I’m not gonna let the government tell me what to do in my job," Dodson said.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

We Can Enforce Border Security Without Trump’s Racist Cruelty

We Can Enforce Border Security Without Trump’s Racist Cruelty

You don’t have to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement or “decriminalize” illegal entry into the United States to humanize the Border Patrol. You don’t have to close all the detention centers into which migrants are now cramped and stacked as if, yes, they are in concentration camps (though that would help). You don’t have to give up enforcing the country’s borders.

You do have to replace President Donald J. Trump, who has stage-managed the cruelty and fed the racism that seeps through ICE. And you have to fire many of the men now working as Border Patrol agents — men so steeped in racism and misogyny and violence that they never should have been hired in the first place. The agency can be fixed, but many of its hirelings cannot be.

That is clear from reading some of the “secret” messages that were posted on a Facebook page that was closeted from public view — a page for retired and current Border Patrol agents. Aired earlier this week in an investigative report by ProPublica, the messages ranged from the crude to the violent. Some made light of the deaths of migrants trying to cross into the United States illegally. Others used racist language and ugly stereotypes to refer to both migrants and Latino members of Congress.

And then there were the vile posts that targeted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., one of the harsher critics of the inhumane border tactics currently favored by the Trump administration. One depicts her engaged in oral sex with a migrant. Another features a doctored photograph of her with Trump, who is forcing her head toward his crotch. The text reads: “That’s right bitches. The masses have spoken and today democracy won.”

This may be shocking, but it is hardly surprising. The vast majority of Border Patrol agents showed themselves to be comfortable with racism and misogyny in 2016, when Trump became the first presidential candidate their union had ever endorsed. He built his presidential campaign on a surprisingly frank racism. He was birther-in-chief, insisting that President Barack Obama was not an American citizen. He denounced Muslims and denigrated Mexicans. And he was caught bragging about groping women.

Once elected, Trump proceeded to cultivate a culture that favored white nationalism, a worldview made all the more desperate by the nation’s changing demographics. The president surrounded himself with advisers such as former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller, both of whom are anti-immigration fanatics who would curtail legal immigration. And the president has endorsed inhumane border tactics that he believes will discourage migrants from attempting entry without papers.

It’s no coincidence that the president’s underlings take to his policies with glee. They are chosen for their ruthlessness. If his immigration agency heads are insufficiently cruel, if they show a shred of mercy every now and then, they are publicly humiliated. In the last few months, the president has purged nearly every agency head at the Department of Homeland Security — including the hapless Kirstjen Nielsen, who was cabinet secretary — because he wanted more “toughness.”

Trump’s vile policies and procedures have promoted a reaction among progressives that now disdains the very notion of border control. Some leading Democrats have spoken openly about abolishing ICE, while others would so curtail its authority that it would effectively be out of business. That’s likely a mistake. Even in our modern, globalized age, nations need to control traffic flows — human and otherwise — across their borders. The U.S. has managed to do so for a very long time without resorting to the terror that Trump has inflicted.

Trump’s successor can start the process of cleaning house at the agencies charged with policing the borders, deporting immigrants who have proved themselves unfit to stay here and — not coincidentally — naturalizing those who have completed the process for citizenship. That will take time and effort, but it can be done. (Trump’s successor would also do well to get out of the for-profit prison business, not only for migrant detainees but also for federal inmates. Nothing good comes from prisons for profit.)

Even with a more humane approach to immigration, some hearts will be broken, some dreams dashed. Not everyone who wishes to come in can be admitted. Still, cruelty need not be a policy feature.

IMAGE: A Salvadoran father (R) carries his son while running next to another immigrant as they try to board a train heading to the Mexican-U.S. border, in Huehuetoca, near of Mexico City. REUTERS/Edgard Garrido/File Photo

Why We Should Reach Across Borders, Not Close Them

Why We Should Reach Across Borders, Not Close Them

A nation’s border is nothing in and of itself. It’s just an inanimate line on a map, in the dirt, on a riverbank. It has no philosophy, personality, feelings or meaning — beyond what people on either side attribute to it.

Unfortunately, thanks to Donnie Trump’s xenophobic demagoguery in this presidential election, America finds itself in a destructive border war — not with Mexico, but with itself. In his rallies, he leads his true believers in angry chants of “Build that wall!” He’s demanding that our Southwestern border with Mexico be turned into a hostile barrier of national, cultural and racial separation that will physically scream at Latino people: “KEEP OUT!”

This isn’t conjecture — you can see it for yourself, for about a third of that 2,000-mile frontier has already been desecrated with a massive metal wall, thrusting up to 30 feet high. It scowls at Mexico with such military fortifications as pole-mounted cameras, 24-hour radar, vibration sensors, all-seeing drones, surveillance balloons, and Blackhawk helicopters.

It has made the border mean, yet — get this — it doesn’t work! Migrants and traffickers continually overcome it. “The wall is a fantasy,” says an Arizona border sheriff. A rancher and diehard Trump supporter dismisses Donnie’s barrier scheme as a “farce.”

Worse, the existing wall and Trump’s extension of it is a perversion of what this border has been for centuries: An enriching connection point for people on either side. In fact, there were no sides — festivals paraded from Mexico into the U.S. and back again, businesses were totally bi-national, families extended across the so-called-line, kids played together on both sides, and the community was an organic whole.

However, Trump doesn’t concern himself with the hardship his wall extension would have on the hard-working people living along the border. He has convinced himself that hordes of rapists and drug dealers are pouring into the country in droves. Indeed, Donnie warned his supporters that if he does not win the election, we “…could have 650 million people pour in and we do nothing about it. Think of it: That’s what could happen. You triple the size of our country in one week.” That’s more than the entire populations of Mexico, Central America, and South America combined.

Not that there’s not an issue with border security. For example, at one part of the border, three Guatemalans waited until dusk to make their move, evading security in the remote expanse, illicitly slipping into our country. As the New York Times recently reported, “This area is a haven for smugglers and cross-border criminal organizations.” If Donald Trump were to witness such a scene, his hair would burst into flames and he’d fall into such a furious rant his lungs would explode! But The Donald will never see it, speak about it, or even know about it, because he’s always facing south, fulminating against Mexicans, Central Americans, and South Americans who cross our southern border.

Meanwhile, the scene described by the New York Times took place way up north, where rural Vermont connects to Canada. With so many of our nation’s political and security officials obsessed with the southern border, more and more criminal action — including smuggling people, drugs and weapons — has been coming across our 5,500-mile Canadian border, the longest in the world between two countries. Running from the Atlantic to the Pacific through sparsely-populated and heavily-wooded terrain, there’s often no clear demarcation of where Canada ends and the U.S. begins. Some farms, homes and businesses actually sprawl across the border.

Meanwhile, only about 2,000 agents patrol this vast stretch, and officials concede they don’t even have a good guess of how many people and how much contraband is coming across, or where.

So, Mr. Trump, shall we wall off Canada, too? And how much of our public treasury, democratic idealism and international goodwill shall we dump into the folly of militarizing both borders? By simply thinking we can wall the world out, we’ll be walling ourselves in — and that’s suicidal. Trump’s wall won’t keep undocumented migrants out, but it will lock out America’s egalitarian ideal of cross-cultural community. Rather than walling-off borders, our true national security requires that we reach across them in all directions.

To find out more about Jim Hightower, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Trump Says He, Mexican Leader Discussed Border Wall But Not Who Pays

Trump Says He, Mexican Leader Discussed Border Wall But Not Who Pays

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – U.S. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said on Wednesday he and Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto discussed Trump’s proposal for a border wall between the countries but not the New York businessman’s demand that Mexico pay for it.

Trump and Pena Nieto emerged from about an hour of talks at the presidential palace in Mexico City to deliver statements to the news media and take questions.

“We did discuss the wall, we didn’t discuss payment of the wall, that will be at a later date, this was a very preliminary meeting, it was an excellent meeting,” Trump said.

Pena Nieto, in his statement, said the border must be seen as an asset for the region. He said undocumented immigration from Mexico to the United States had dropped considerably since reaching a peak a decade ago.

(Reporting by Steve Holland,; Ginger Gibson, Caren Bohan and Amanda Becker; Editing by James Dalgleish)

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