Jeff Danziger’s award-winning drawings are published by more than 600 newspapers and websites. He has been a cartoonist for the Rutland Herald, the New York Daily News and the Christian Science Monitor; his work has appeared in newspapers from the Wall Street Journal to Le Monde and Izvestia. Represented by the Washington Post Writers Group, he is a recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army as a linguist and intelligence officer in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. Danziger has published ten books of cartoons and a novel about the Vietnam War. He was born in New York City, and now lives in Manhattan and Vermont. A video of the artist at work can be viewed here.
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Behind Flat Migration Headlines Are Thousands Of Desperate Human Beings
I write about human beings in every one of my columns. To read more of my work about issues like immigration as more than numbers and pejoratives, you can buy a subscription here.
There was a headline in one of the major newspapers yesterday – I won’t say which one, because other papers have posted similar headlines before, and they will all post them again: “Illegal border crossings fell sharply in January, U.S. figures show.” Those figures! They’re always rising, or falling, or up slightly, or close to last month’s.
So many of the stories are about illegal border crossings, and why? Because they can count them, so some headline writer up in New York City or Washington D.C. can get a tight enough word count to fit in the space of a newspaper headline.
You want to know what’s wrong with these headlines and their numbers? They’re flat, they’re emotionless, they’re imprecise, and they don’t tell you what’s really going on. Oh, the story quoted above goes on to tell you that the Biden administration has come up with a program offering “parole” to a certain number of migrants from four countries, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Haiti after the U.S. expelled 30,000 of them – there’s another number -- back into Mexico earlier in January before following that move with the so-called “parole” program permitting migrants from those countries to enter the U.S. legally if they fill out an online application and have a sponsor in this country.
See how easy that was for me to write the word “people?” Because that’s what the newspaper headline is actually talking about. It is people who are crossing the border illegally, and people from the countries left out of the parole program, amounting to about 150,000 in January, “down from the record-high 251,487 tallied in December,” again using typically flat language to describe the ongoing humanitarian crisis along the U.S. border with Mexico.
A group of 20 states, which the post tells us were “led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R),” because of course they were, filed a lawsuit on January 24 against the new parole policy, calling it an “unlawful amnesty program, which will invite hundreds of thousands of aliens into the U.S. every year.” As if that prospect is a terrible thing that must be avoided because the United States, described in high school and college history text books as “a nation of immigrants,” might continue on that heretofore unthinkable path.
In other news this afternoon, Rep. Andy Biggs, a Republican from Arizona who was deeply involved in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, including speaking at the Trump rally on the Ellipse before the riot and voting to help Trump attempt to overturn the election results only hours later, filed articles of impeachment against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, accusing him of “high crimes and misdemeanors” for attempting to end Trump-era policies such as Title 42 that restricted immigration at the southern border.
Texas Republican Rep. Pat Fallon, another signatory to Biggs’ articles of impeachment, said in a statement that Secretary Mayorkas “has willfully abdicated his duties as Secretary of Homeland Security and actively misled Congress and the American people. To make any progress at our southern border, he must go.” The articles of impeachment have been referred to the Judiciary Committee, chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio.
You will not find the word “people” anywhere in the story posted today about “illegal border crossings.” You’ll find the words “migrant,” “individuals,” “aliens,” and “asylum seekers.” You’ll find “enforcement tool,” and “expulsion,” and “illegal entries,” but you won’t find the word “people,” which apparently does not fit into the dry language of these stories.
But sadly, every one of these stories is about the people who are attempting to immigrate to the United States. What must it be like to be one of these people? Some are men, some are women, some are children of school age, some are babies, but they are all people living lives of loud desperation. I say “loud” because everything about being a migrant is loud. It’s loud in the places where people attempt to cross the border, children yelling for parents who have slipped from their view in the crowds, babies crying from hunger and fatigue, husbands calling out to wives, and once across, border police yelling to crowd into the back of this truck or that van, to line up to file into pens and confinement facilities, more yelling to line up for food and water if they’re lucky.
Arrested for illegally crossing the border, people are penned up in wire enclosures and then crowded into temporary shelters like tents and converted schools and warehouses where frightened children and babies cry and guards yell and family members try to find each other by calling out names of wives or husbands or children. Try imagining the clamor of a crowded cafeteria in junior high school, two or three hundred kids all talking over each other trying to be heard, teachers yelling fruitlessly for order -- it's loud in a way we have conveniently forgotten at this point in our lives, and not just a 30-minute lunch hour.
Now imagine it is hundreds and hundreds of desperate frightened people crowded together hour after frightening hour, tumultuous and scary and frantic with no let-up, no one knowing what’s going on, what’s going to happen to them, watching fearfully as a man or two men or a whole family are escorted out of the big holding facility through a door, no one knows where, and never returning.
It is loud and it is desperate. People, these hundreds and hundreds of people from a dozen different countries, were desperate to flee from gangs in Guatemala and Nicaragua, from poverty and unrest in Venezuela, from crime in Columbia, some of them all the way from Ukraine, desperate from crime and hunger and war and persecution. They’re desperate on the other side of the border and desperate once they get across, hungry and frightened and desperate to be able to stay here, desperate for someone to listen to them, desperate for food and water and blankets to cover them from the unseasonable cold which has recently gripped the border region, desperate for their children not to be terrorized by men in helmets and bulletproof vests with guns, desperate from the noise and confusion in a place where everything is foreign and strange and threatening, desperate because money and papers were stolen from them along their journeys, desperate because in all of the noise and madness surrounding them there is plenty of terror and so, so little hope.
They may be seeking asylum, they may be migrants, they may have indeed broken a law by not crossing at a customs and immigration checkpoint and gone through the proper, lawful process, but they are people, each and every one of them. They are our parents 50 years ago, our grandparents 100 years or even 200, or 300 or 400 years ago. In 10 years, or 20 years, they will be Americans, but even right now, right this minute, they are human beings and they are us.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.
Please consider subscribing to Lucian Truscott Newsletter, from which this is reprinted with permission.
Arizona's Top Election Official Urges State Investigation Of Kari Lake
Kari Lake
Republican Kari Lake, who lost the 2022 Arizona governorship election to her Democrat counterpart but has refused to acknowledge that outcome, has landed in legal hot water for posting voter information online as part of her continued effort to overturn her defeat.
Insisting that electoral misconduct had cost the GOP victory in Arizona’s gubernatorial race last November, Lake has for months flooded the airwaves with baseless claims of fraud, mimicking her endorser, serial election denier and ex-president Donald Trump.
Lake’s election denialism escalated to outlandish levels on January 23 when she claimed without evidence in a Twitter post that election officials “illegally counted” nearly 40,000 ballots with mismatched signatures and appended a graphic showing 16 voter signatures.
\u201c\ud83d\udea8 BOMBSHELL DISCOVERY \ud83d\udea8\n\nToday\u2019s Senate Testimony CONFIRMS nearly 40,000 ballots illegally counted (10% of the signatures reviewed).\n\nI think all the \u201cElection Deniers\u201d out there deserve an apology.\u201d— Kari Lake (@Kari Lake) 1674514511
That graphic may have run afoul of state law, said Adrian Fontes, Arizona's Secretary of State, in a letter to the state’s attorney general, Kris Mayes, on Monday, citing Arizona law (ARS 16-168, Section F). It prohibits “records containing a voter's signature” from being “accessible or reproduced by any person other than the voter [or] by an authorized government official in the scope of the official's duties.”
“The protections afforded by this subsection prohibit posting any information derived from voter registration forms or precinct registers to the internet, and under no circumstance may a person other than the voter or an statutorily authorized person reproduce a voter’s signature,” Fontes noted in the letter.
Violating that law is a felony, Fontes wrote, asking Mayes to “investigate and take proper enforcement action against” Lake. A representative for Mayes confirmed receipt of the complaint, the Washington Post reported on Monday.
\u201cIn AZ\u2014> Arizona\u2019s new Secretary of State Adrian Fontes sent the following letter to AZ AG Kris Mayes this afternoon, referring Kari Lake for investigation for what, he says, was a violation of state law by tweeting out copies of voter signatures in her tweet, below.\u201d— Vaughn Hillyard (@Vaughn Hillyard) 1675123105
In a statement on Monday, Tim La Sota, a Pheonix-based conservative lawyer representing Lake, denounced Fontes’ request as “another attempt to weaponize the justice system with a phony allegation against a Republican” and possibly an infringement of Lake’s “absolute right under the First Amendment.”
\u201c\ud83d\udc40 ICYMI \ud83d\udc40\n\n@KariLake lawyer Tim LaSota's statement on Cartel-lawyer @Adrian_Fontes's request that the Acting Attorney General pursue criminal charges against Lake, for sharing Senate testimony about the massive signature verification violations that occurred under HIS watch.\u201d— Kari Lake War Room (@Kari Lake War Room) 1675283877
Lake, a former news anchor and rising MAGA star, trafficked in false claims of election fraud — many borne of Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen — long before losing her governorship bid to Arizona Democrat Gov. Katie Hobbs by over 17,000 votes.
Like Trump, Lake has disseminated a hodgepodge of disproven conspiracy theories alleging voter fraud on social media and appearances on conservative media outfits, alleging that both Democrat and Republican election officials had a hand in her loss.
A former senior elections analyst with the Arizona secretary of state’s office, Garrett Archer, blew a hole in Lake’s new “bombshell,” stating that the voter signatures hailed from the 2020 elections and there was more than one way by which officials authenticate ballot signatures.
\u201cMs. Lake, These signatures are from 2020.\n\nThey use recent affidavit envelopes to verify as well. That way if the MVD signature comes across wrong they have in-house to compare to.\n\nSo this doesn't confirm anything.\u201d— The AZ - abc15 - Data Guru (@The AZ - abc15 - Data Guru) 1674600971
According to the Arizona Republic, the Senate testimony on which Lake based her latest ballot signature allegation originated from an activist with a far-right election-denying group, We the People Arizona Alliance, with ties to pillow salesman and hoax peddler Mike Lindell.
The communications director for the Maricopa County Elections Department, Megan Gilbertson, labeled the assertions made by that activist, Shelby Busch, as “textbook misinformation” and accused Lake of seizing on “a common situation that occurs at a voting location and twisting it to cast doubt on the integrity of our elections,” according to the Arizona Mirror.
Votebeat reporter Jen Fifield noted on Twitter that Republican lawmakers in the Arizona Senate and election denial groups had first circulated the voter signatures and that it remains uncertain how the confidential voter information was leaked.
