Caravan – immigrationcourtside.com

THE HILL: RUTH ELLEN WASEM WITH SOME SAGE ADVICE ON THE CARAVAN — But, Is Anyone In The Administration Actually Interested In The Truth?

https://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/413206-caravan-hysteria-is-unwarranted-many-more-have-come-before

The hysteria over the caravan of Central American asylum-seekers traveling north towards the United States is spiraling out of proportion. A calm review of the facts and the historical context of migration from this hemisphere make clear that the United States has the laws and policies in place to respond humanely — in keeping with our values and our laws.

There are varied estimates of the number of people in the caravan, ranging from the Mexican government’s estimate of 3,630 migrants to the United Nations spokesperson’s estimate of 7,000 migrants. According to the Washington Post, Mexican officials report that they have processed 1,700 asylum cases. Whether the caravan will grow in numbers or dissipate remains to be seen.

What we do know is that the United States has handled much larger influxes of asylum-seekers. And we did so without sacrificing our laws and our values.

Cuba long has been a source of asylum-seekers, as Haiti has been. In 1980, for example, a mass migration of asylum-seekers, known as the Mariel boatlift, brought approximately 125,000 Cubans and 25,000 Haitians to South Florida over a six-month period. In 1992, the U.S. Coast Guard interdicted 37,618 Haitians who had set sail to the United States and took many of them to Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. While the treatment of the Haitians was not our finest hour as a nation, we did pre-screen those at Guantanamo for credible fear and return others to Haiti with the option of in-country refugee processing. The estimates of migrants in the caravan are comparable to the number of Cubans (7,163) the U.S. Coast Guard and Border Patrol picked up in fiscal year 1997.

The civil wars in Central America during the 1980s prompted asylum-seekers that numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Data on asylum cases filed with the then-Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) show that about 126,000 Nicaraguans, 126,300 Salvadorans and 41,942 Guatemalans applied for asylum in the United States from fiscal year 1981 through 1990.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch in November 1998, then-Attorney General Janet Reno designated temporary protected status (TPS) for unauthorized Hondurans and Nicaraguans in the United States. In 2001, the George W. Bush administration decided to grant TPS to Salvadorans following two earthquakes that rocked El Salvador. The number of Central Americans who received these various temporary protections approached 270,000.

For those who are fearful that bad actors are hiding amid the asylum-seekers in the caravan, rest assured that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) puts all such migrants through rigorous border security screening systems. CBP collects biometric data, performs background checks, and runs them through a host of criminal and national security databases.

Lest we forget, border apprehensions of all irregular migrants (including asylum-seekers) are now at historic lows. From a peak of 1.6 million in fiscal year 2000, the U.S. Border Patrol apprehended just under 304,000 last fiscal year. Research conducted by Stephanie Leutert at the University of Texas found that in fiscal year 2017 less than 0.1 percent of those apprehended — 228 migrants — were members of the MS-13 gang.

We do not need to send military troops to the border; rather, we need to adequately staff the asylum offices and immigration courts at the border. Funding for asylum officers and immigration judges has not been commensurate with the substantial increases in border security funding, despite the obvious interconnections among these functions. We also need to reinstitute in-country refugee processing in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, and extend it to include adults as well as minors. Cutting assistance to Mexico and Central America — which President Trump suggests would punish the source countries into stopping the migration — most likely would exacerbate the underlying problems and increase the number of people fleeing north.

It’s time to calm down and remember that we are a nation of laws and a people of values. We can handle this.

Ruth Ellen Wasem is a clinical professor of policy at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, the University of Texas in Austin. For more than 25 years, she was a domestic policy specialist at the U.S. Library of Congress’ Congressional Research Service. She has testified before Congress about asylum policy, legal immigration trends, human rights and the push-pull forces on unauthorized migration.

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Right on, Ruth! Couldn’t agree with you more. But, sadly, I doubt that anyone in this Administration is paying attention. They aren’t trying to solve the problem. Rather they see the humanitarian plight and misfortune of others as an “opportunity” to promote and advance their White Nationalist agenda of lies, racism, and fear mongering to “energize their base” in advance of the midterms (and also to divert attention from Trump’s failure to deliver on his promise to build that wall).

But, setting the record straight is always a good idea even when it falls on deaf ears. Someday, we will have wiser leaders who will be generally interested in understanding the past and using its lessons to build a better future for everyone!

PWS

10-26-17

EUGENE ROBINSON @ WASHPOST – THE ST. LOUIS DOCKS AGAIN AT OUR SOUTHERN BORDER — TRUMP, SESSIONS & CO. WANT THE US TO FAIL THE MORAL TEST AGAIN – But, This Time It’s Anti-Hispanic Racism, Rather Than Anti-Semitism Behind Our Government’s Intentional Immorality — Trump & Sessions “are sincere in their desire to stanch the flow of Latino immigration — not, I strongly suspect, because of drugs or crime, but because they loathe the demographic and cultural change that is taking place.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-immigrant-caravan-is-a-test-trump-wants-us-to-fail/2018/04/30/124b975c-4cb4-11e8-84a0-458a1aa9ac0a_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.72fbc5bc8d11

The immigrant ‘caravan’ is a test. Trump wants us to fail.

By Eugene Robinson

The “caravan” of asylum-seeking migrants that has finally arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border is a test of American character and purpose — a test President Trump wants us to fail.

I put caravan in quotation marks because the group that reached Tijuana hardly qualifies for the term. Just a few dozen would-be entrants presented themselves at the Port of San Ysidro on Sunday — only to be told that U.S. immigration officials were too busy to attend to them. Another several hundred were reported to be in the general area, waiting their turn to attempt to cross the border.

Trump has spoken of these people as if they were some kind of rampaging horde. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has accused them of “a deliberate attempt to undermine our laws and overwhelm our system.” The truth is that this sort of thing happens every year: Would-be migrants seek safety in numbers as they make the long and perilous trek north through Mexico.

Sessions probably understands this context; Trump probably doesn’t. But I believe both are sincere in their desire to stanch the flow of Latino immigration — not, I strongly suspect, because of drugs or crime, but because they loathe the demographic and cultural change that is taking place.

While he and his administration were being appropriately roasted at the White House Correspondents’ Associationdinner on Saturday evening, Trump was at a rally in Michigan saying that our immigration laws are “corrupt . . . so corrupt” and that the motives of those who defend our nation’s traditional role as a haven for asylum seekers are political. “The Democrats actually feel, and they are probably right, that all of these people that are pouring across are going to vote for Democrats, they’re not going to vote for Republicans.”

They’re not going to vote for anybody, of course, since they’re not citizens. Truth doesn’t matter to Trump. But you knew that.

What seems to really drive the president crazy is that the United States remains a haven for those fleeing persecution. Trump laid out his complaint Saturday: “If a person puts their foot over the line, we have to take them into our country, we have to register them. We then have to ask them a couple of questions. Lawyers are telling them what to say. How unsafe they are. And once they say that, we have to let them go, to come back to court in like a year. Only one problem: They don’t come back, okay. That’s the end. Welcome to the United States.”

You will have noticed that missing from Trump’s rant is any sense of morality or mission.

There is a reason the law makes provision for those seeking asylum. In 1939, Congress rejected a bill that would have admitted 20,000 German Jewish children. Later that year, authorities refused to allow the St. Louis, a ship carrying about 900 German Jews, to dock in Miami; the Coast Guard sent out patrol boats to warn the ship away. The St. Louis was forced to return to Europe, and 254 of its passengers later perished during the Holocaust.

That shameful history led to changes in immigration policy that prohibit rejecting claims of asylum out of hand. The bar is high, but many of the Central American asylum seekers probably clear it.

In El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, the major threat comes from rampant gang violence. Boys are often offered a stark choice: Join a gang or be killed. Girls are threatened with rape. It is easy to say this is a problem local elected officials and police ought to solve, but government institutions are weak, and corruption is widespread. What choice does a family under imminent threat have but to flee? What would you do?

It is of course true that not every Central American who asks for asylum truly merits it. That’s why each case is examined and evaluated, with all the time needed to reach a proper determination — which is how the migrants now at the border must be handled, despite what Trump and Sessions might prefer.

To close our eyes and hearts to legitimate claims of persecution would be to repeat the shameful and tragic mistakes of the World War II era. If the subjects of Trump’s demagoguery were summarily denied entry, as he apparently would like, most would be forced to go home and some would be killed. That would be a terrible stain on the nation’s conscience.

I’m tempted to add that it would be a stain on Trump’s conscience as well, but it’s not clear that he has one.

Read more from Eugene Robinson’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook. You can also join him Tuesdays at 1 p.m. for a live Q&A.

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I remember walking through the “St. Louis Exhibit” at the Holocaust Museum (on an EOIR-sponsored tour, no less, for a long ago and far away Annual Judges Conference — my how official racism & xenophobia have changed things) and asking myself how we could have done that to our fellow human beings.

Then, we had a “special session” explaining the catastrophic failure and cowardice of the German Judiciary during the Nazi rise to power. Judge after judge “adhered to the rule of law” even when those laws unfairly disenfranchised Jews, deprived them of their properly and lawful occupations, and eventually sentenced them to mass death!

I’ve now come to the unhappy realization that the St. Louis might have represented the norm, rather than the exception, to the reality of American democracy and its serious anti-Semitic and racially biased undertones. And, the actions of the corrupt & cowardly German judges of that era are certainly what Trump, Sessions, and their cronies are referring to when they disingenuously pontificate about “the rule of law” and looking for judges, Government officials, and lawyers who are committed to applying it in a biased and one-sided fashion

It’s their rule of law, as they consistently misconstrue it to protect only their favored political and racial groups, and misuse it “punish enemies” and to carry our their increasingly racist, White Nationalist agenda.

And yet 40% of our fellow countrymen are enthusiastically supportive of this heinous agenda. What’s wrong with them? Why ask ourselves how Nazism could have overtaken Germany when we’re in the process of trying to repeat that sordid history here? It’s pretty easy to see Hitler rallies of the 1930s in the Trump rallies of today. The same vicious disregard of both the truth and humanity, scapegoating, and an attacks on the true rule of law and on those who stand up for democracy, all wrapped in an appeal to false religious nationalism!

We’re failing as a nation on both a moral and a legal basis. It remains to be seen whether the resistance to Trump, his supporters, and his enablers will be sufficient to preserve democracy and human decency in America.

PWS

05-01-18

CALL OUT THE CAVALRY, WE NEED REINFORCEMENTS! – “CARAVAN” OF A FEW HUNDRED MEEK REFUGEE WOMEN & CHILDREN REACH S. BORDER, THREATEN TO EXERCISE LEGAL RIGHTS TO APPLY FOR ASYLUM, AS TRUMP, SESSIONS, NIELSEN, HOMAN, & CO. COWER IN FEAR WITHIN “FORTRESS AMERICA” — Trump Administration Views Individual Constitutional Rights As “Dangerous Loopholes” & “Threats To National Security” That Must Be Eliminated – “Grandfathering” Sought For Current & Former Trump Officials, Friends, Family Who Might Need To Assert Fifth Amendment Right Against Self-Incrimination!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/at-the-us-border-a-diminished-migrant-caravan-readies-for-an-unwelcoming-reception/2018/04/27/7946a154-4a52-11e8-827e-190efaf1f1ee_story.html?utm_term=.cd296045d4c6

Nick Miroff reports for the Washington Post:

TIJUANA, Mexico — The American president, a former real estate mogul, does not want Byron Garcia in the United States. But the Honduran teenager was too busy building his own hotel empire this week to worry much about that.

Vermont Avenue and Connecticut Avenue were his. Now he was looking to move up-market.

The mini-Monopoly board on the dusty floor of the migrant shelter was small, but it fit well in the small space beside the tents. His older sister, Carolina, rolled a 2 and landed on Oriental Avenue.

“That’ll be $500,” said Garcia, 15, gleefully extending his hand. “I love this game!”

Garcia is coming to America on Sunday. Or maybe not. His mother, Orfa Marin, 33, isn’t sure it will be a good day to walk up to the border crossing and tell a U.S. officer that her family needs asylum. She knows President Trump wants to stop them.

Marin and her three children are among the 300 or so remaining members of the migrant caravan who have arrived here at the end of a month-long geographic and political odyssey, a trip that has piqued Trump’s Twitter anger and opened new cracks in U.S.-Mexico relations.

Central American migrant children play Monopoly at the Movimiento Juventud 2000 shelter on April 26, 2018 in Tijuana, Mexico. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)

The organizers of the caravan say they are planning to hold a rally Sunday at Friendship Park, the international park where a 15-foot border fence splits the beach. From there, activists and attorneys plan to lead a group of the migrants to the U.S. port of entry at San Ysidro, Calif., where they will approach U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers and formally request asylum.

. . . .

Trump has ordered U.S. soldiers to deploy and Homeland Security officials to block the migrants. But the diminished version of the caravan that has arrived here, mostly women and children, has only underscored its meekness.

Migrant families arrive on a bus at the Ejercito de Salvacion shelter on April 26, 2018 in Tijuana, Mexico after driving from Mexicali, Mexico. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)

The families are drained after weeks of travel, coughing children and pinto beans. They have crowded here into shelters in the city’s squalid north end, where the sidewalks are smeared with dog droppings and skimpily dressed women hand out drink promotions among the strip clubs and brothels. The tall American border fence is two blocks away.

Children play on the sidewalks outside the shelters, the boredom broken whenever a car with donations arrives to drop off clothes and toys.

Central Americans migrants in Mexico have long been treated as a kind of renewable natural resource, ripe for exploitation by thieves, predators and politicians. The geopolitical importance attached to this particular group was a sign to many here that the U.S. president had recognized an opportunity, too.

“We’re not terrorists or bad people,” Marin said.

Regardless of its size, Trump officials have measured this caravan in symbolic terms, as an egregious example of the “loophole” they want to shut and an immigration system whose generosity is being abused, they say, by hundreds of thousands of Central Americas trying to dupe it.

. . . .

“These people have no option but to seek refuge in another country, and they have every right to seek asylum, they have decided to face the consequences and to be strong in demanding what is their right,” said Leonard Olsen, 26, a law student and one of several caravan organizers from the United States. He wore a tattered Philadelphia Eagles cap and arrived in Tijuana on Thursday with a busload of women and children.

. . . .

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I can understand why guys like Trump, Sessions, Nielsen, and Homan would be scared by mothers with talented kids who show the kind of courage, honesty, humanity, and respect for law that they themselves so conspicuously lack.

Without 5th Amendment protections, who would join the Trump Administration?

PWS

04-28-18

BEYOND TRUMP’S LIES & RACISM, THERE’S REAL HUMAN TRAGEDY IN HIS MISTREATMENT OF CENTRAL AMERICAN REFUGEES — America’s Election Of Known Unethical Leader Will Haunt Us For Generations To Come!

https://flipboard.com/@flipboard/-most-people-in-the-caravan-are-from-hon/f-808a52c6f5%2Fbuzzfeed.com

Karla Zabludovsky reports for BuzzFeed News:

MEXICO CITY — Two out of three people making their way through Mexico as part of a “caravan” that drew President Donald J. Trump’s ire this week have fled Honduras — part of a recent trend that has seen growing numbers of people escape the country’s exorbitant homicide rates, crippling corruption, increasing political persecution, and a floundering economy.

That is a sharp, recent rise — the number of Hondurans apprehended by US Customs and Border Control increased by 66% from Dec. 2017 to March, according to the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group. In February, Mexican authorities detained and deported 4,128 Hondurans, up from 2,780 the previous month. It was the highest number since November 2016.

This exodus comes at a time of extraordinary tensions even for Honduras, a country still reeling from the effects of a coup d’état in 2009. A highly contested presidential election in November drew thousands of demonstrators to the streets, where at least 22 protesters and bystanders were killed, most of them by security forces.

“Honduras is a pressure cooker in every single aspect,” said Bertha Oliva, director of the Committee for Families of the Disappeared and Detainees in Honduras. “We are seeing an unprecedented violation of human rights.”

Repression by the state has continued even months after the election, analysts say. According to Annie Bird, director of the Guatemala Human Rights Commission, government forces have been intimidating protest leaders — people have reported receiving threatening phone calls and being followed by unmarked cars.

Some in the caravan brought their politics with them, shouting slogans against Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who narrowly won a second term last year and is often referred to by his initials, JOH. He has received support from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former President Barack Obama, and Trump, but Hernández’s popularity at home is suffering: Many in the caravan yelled “Out with JOH!” as they set off.

The large number of Hondurans caught Trump’s attention.

“The big Caravan of People from Honduras, now coming across Mexico and heading to our “Weak Laws” Border, had better be stopped before it gets there,” Trump tweeted on Tuesday. In subsequent tweets, Trump renewed calls for his border wall and tougher immigration laws, warning about a “massive inflow of drugs and people” across the border.

Victoria Razo / AFP / Getty Images

A man holds a Honduran national flag as Central Americans -taking part in a caravan called “Migrant Viacrucis”- rest in Matias Romero, Oaxaca state, Mexico on April 2, 2018.

Conditions in Honduras were dire even before the election, with 43.6 murders per 100,000 inhabitants, 55% of the workforce underemployed, extortions to small businesses reportedly on the rise, and endemic corruption.

The Central American nation has one of the highest homicide rates in the world and was called the most dangerous country for environmental activists last year. The government’s efforts to clean up the police force were dealt a severe blow earlier this year, after the Associated Press revealed that the head of the national police had helped a cartel leader deliver nearly a ton of cocaine in 2013. And corruption is widespread: the former first lady was arrested in connection to a graft case in February.

Even the anti-corruption mission backed by the Organization of American States, known for its Spanish initials as Maccih, is languishing without a director after Juan Jiménez Mayor resigned in February, citing a lack of support by the head of the OAS.

In the meantime, Hernández has quietly cemented his power, taking control of most of the country’s institutions, including the Supreme Court, which in 2015 struck down a law forbidding presidents from seeking a second term. His administration continues to receive a portion of the $644 million appropriated by the US Congress to assist Central American governments.

Orlando Sierra / AFP / Getty Images

Left, thousands of supporters of the presidential candidate Salvador Nasralla, hold a demonstration in Tegucigalpa on Dec. 3, 2017. Right, riot police officers and army soldiers, use tear gas and a water cannon to disperse supporters of opposition candidate Salvador Nasralla during protests in Tegucigalpa, on Dec. 18, 2017.

Hondurans went to the polls on November 26 in a tense and highly polarized environment. Already distrustful, many voters were incensed after the Honduran electoral commission mysteriously stopped releasing results for 36 hours just as the opposition candidate, Salvador Nasralla, took a 5 point lead over Hernández. When it resumed, Hernández quickly overtook Nasralla.

Violent protests ensued, with people defying a 10-day curfew declared by the government, which deployed the military and police to the streets. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Honduras, at least 23 people were killed and at least 60 were injured during the following weeks.

Two days after the election, the State Department certified that the Honduran government had been combating corruption and supporting human rights, a requirement for the US to continue sending it millions of dollars worth of aid.

But a report by the United Nations’ office said that the use of live bullets by security forces “raise serious concerns about the use of excessive lethal force and may amount to extra-judicial killings.”

“The level of desperation has risen since the election,” said Dana Frank, professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “All signs indicate that the situation is only going to worsen politically, economically, on the human rights front.”

It is unclear whether the post-electoral crisis will push more Hondurans than usual to emigrate this spring, when migrants usually undertake the trek. But despite a clampdown on immigration, Honduran migrants’ are increasingly looking to settle in Mexico, rather than continue on to the US. Last year, 4,272 Hondurans requested asylum in Mexico, up from 1,560 in 2015.

In July, about 86,000 Hondurans living in the US could be forced to leave if their Temporary Protected Status is not renewed. (In January, the Trump administration announced it was ending the program for 200,000 Salvadorans in the country.)

Honduras would struggle to absorb the return of thousands of people and the economy would suffer from the decrease in remittances likely to follow — possibly pushing another wave of Honduras toward the US.

“I call it a self-inflicted wound,” said Eric Olson, deputy director of the Latin America program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.

“You could create further instability, which leads to further migration.” ■

We can diminish ourselves as a nation, but that won’t stop human migration.

PWS

04-06-18

OUR FEAR-MONGERING LEADERS WANT YOU TO BE SCARED OF REFUGEES ARRIVING AT OUR SOUTHERN BORDER – DON’T BE! – Here’s What The Overhyped “Caravan” Actually Looks Like! — “Who wants to leave their country, the comfort of their home, their families?” she asked. “It’s a very difficult thing.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/world/americas/mexico-trump-caravan.html

Kirk Semple reports for the NY Times:

Inside an Immigrant Caravan: Women and Children, Fleeing Violence

By KIRK SEMPLE APRIL 4, 2018

Photo

Central American migrants, members of a group making its way through Mexico, waited in line on Wednesday to review their visa status at a temporary camp in Matías Romero.
CreditBrett Gundlock for The New York Times

MATÍAS ROMERO, Mexico — With a sarcastic half-smile, Nikolle Contreras, 27, surveyed her fellow members of the Central American caravan, which President Trump has called dangerous and has used as a justification to send troops to the border.

More than 1,000 people, mostly women and children, waited patiently on Wednesday in the shade of trees and makeshift shelters in a rundown sports complex in this Mexican town, about 600 miles south of the border. They were tired, having slept and eaten poorly for more than a week. All were facing an uncertain future.

“Imagine that!” said Ms. Contreras, a Honduran factory worker hoping to apply for asylum in the United States. “So many problems he has to solve and he gets involved with this caravan!”

The migrants, most of them Hondurans, left the southern Mexican border city of Tapachula on March 25 and for days traveled north en masse — by foot, hitchhiking and on the tops of trains — as they fled violence and poverty in their homelands and sought a better life elsewhere.

This sort of collective migration has become something of an annual event around Easter week, and a way for advocates to draw more attention to the plight of migrants.

But this particular caravan caught the attention of Mr. Trump, apparently after he heard about it on Fox News. In a Twitter tirade that began Sunday, he conjured up hordes of dangerous migrants surging toward the border. He demanded that Mexican officials halt the group, suggesting that otherwise he would make them pay dearly in trade negotiations or aid cuts.

Mr. Trump even boasted that his threat had forced Mexico’s government to halt and disperse the caravan participants. But there was no evidence of that on Wednesday.

. . . .

Irineo Mujica, Mexico director of People Without Borders, an advocacy group that is coordinating the caravan, called Mr. Trump’s Twitter attacks and promise of a militarized border “campaign craziness.”

“There are 300 kids and 400 women,” he said. “Babies with bibs and milk bottles, not armaments. How much of a threat can they be?”

. . . .

The group, organizers and advocates said, represented a regional humanitarian problem, not a security crisis for the United States, as Mr. Trump has suggested.

“What he’s attacking is a supremely vulnerable population,” said Gina Garibo, projects coordinator in Mexico for People Without Borders.

In response to Mr. Trump’s tweets and his plans to militarize the border, the Mexican Senate unanimously passed a nonbinding statement on Wednesday urging President Enrique Peña Nieto to suspend cooperation with the United States on immigration and security matters — “as long as President Donald Trump does not conduct himself with the civility and respect that the Mexican people deserve.”

Caravan organizers also said their intent was never to storm the border, especially not with a caravan of this size. While the original plan included the possibility of escorting the caravan to the northern border of Mexico, organizers had expected the group to mostly dissolve by the time it had reached Mexico City.

. . . .

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Read the complete article along with more pictures of ordinary folks forced to make an extraordinary journey at the link.

There has never been any doubt that folks like Trump, Sessions, Miller, Nielsen have nothing but contempt for the truth, laws, and human life. But, they also think that the American people are pretty stupid to fall for the “fantasyland claptrap” that they throw out to drum up support for their racist restrictionist ambitions.

Although you’ll never hear it from the disingenuous Trumpsters, individuals arriving at our borders have a legal right to apply for asylum guaranteed by both U.S. and international law. Most of the “law-breaking” involves the actions of the Trump DHS. By refusing to properly process asylum applicants at legal ports of entry, the Administration actually encourages illegal entry and the use of smugglers.

The only real “crisis” at the Southern border is a humanitarian one that this and past Administrations have had key roles in creating through failed immigration and foreign policies. Without better, smarter government, we’re bound to deep repeating the same mistakes.

Don’t fall for it!

PWS

04-05-18

YUP, TRUMP’S RIGHT: They’re Laughing In Mexico, But It’s At Trump’s Immigration Lunacy!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/04/01/why-a-u-s-bound-caravan-of-central-american-migrants-is-getting-trumps-attention/?utm_term=.4d9526258823

Alex Horton reports for WashPost:

In a three-tweet salvo Sunday morning, Trump decried recent struggles with congressional Democrats to reach a deal that would legalize the status of millions of “dreamers” — undocumented immigrants who were brought to this country as children.

“Border Patrol Agents are not allowed to properly do their job at the Border because of ridiculous liberal (Democrat) laws like Catch & Release,” Trump said in his first tweet. “Getting more dangerous. ‘Caravans’ coming. Republicans must go to Nuclear Option to pass tough laws NOW. NO MORE DACA DEAL!”

DACA refers to the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which Trump ended in the fall. The program had allowed dreamers to live in the country without fear of deportation.

Trump, a self-proclaimed “Fox & Friends” fan, appears to have fired off the tweets in response to a segment on the program in the morning (at least the National Border Patrol Council sees a connection, it claimed in a post afterward).

Why are they moving in a caravan?

The Fox News opinion segment was in response to a BuzzFeed report on Friday that more than a thousand Central Americans, primarily from Honduras, were winding their way up through Mexico to the U.S. border on a nearly month-long trip that began March 25. These migrants are looking to seek asylum from criminal elements back home or slip into the United States undetected.

Moving in a large group is expected to blunt the efforts of criminal gangs and cartels known to isolate and later rob immigrants, many of whom bring large sums of money to make the long journey north through Mexico. The caravan organizers, Pueblos Sin Fronteras, or People Without Borders, appeared to have concluded that it is safer for these people to travel together.

[ Trump keeps calling the Southern border ‘very dangerous.’ It is — but not for Americans. ]

That trip can be deadly as people find their way along various routes that go directly north to Texas, northwest to Arizona or along the coast to California.

Just about every route is more than a thousand miles long and is canvassed by robbers and corrupt police who shake down the immigrants, who have little access to legal recourse. A network of commercial locomotives is veined throughout Mexico in a 1,450-mile cannonball run. Migrants ride on top of the trains, occasionally falling off and breaking bones or suffering severe dehydration.

Central American immigrants get on the “La Bestia” cargo train in Arriaga, Mexico, on July 16, 2014, in an attempt to reach the Mexico-U.S. border. (Elizabeth Ruiz/AFP/Getty Images)

Members of the caravan said they would attempt to ride the trains, but in 2014, more guards and trains moving faster through stations made it more difficult for migrants to catch rides.

Migrants have many names for the trains, such as “El tren de los desconocidos” (the train of the unknowns) and “El tren de la muerte” (the train of death).

But its most common name is “La Bestia”: the Beast.

What is Mexico doing about the flow of migrants?

“Mexico is doing very little, if not NOTHING, at stopping people from flowing into Mexico through their Southern Border, and then into the U.S. They laugh at our dumb immigration laws. They must stop the big drug and people flows, or I will stop their cash cow, NAFTA. NEED WALL!” Trump said in his second tweet.

Mexico is doing something — with the help of the United States. Hundreds of millions of dollars in aid flow to Mexico every year, including funds for strengthening its border with Guatemala, where migrants generally cross.

[ Trump threatens to ‘stop’ NAFTA if Mexico doesn’t better secure border ]

Billions in additional spending authorized by President Barack Obama in 2014 was prompted by thousands of unaccompanied minors arriving on the U.S.-Mexico border, mostly Central Americans fleeing horrific crime waves and economic crises in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. About 300,000 migrants were detained by Mexican authorities in the next two years.

The caravan began in Tapachula, BuzzFeed reported, nestled just on the other side of the border, and no authorities in Mexico appear to have stopped it as of Friday.

What is Trump doing about it?

Trump’s proposals to reduce aid to Mexico would raise the possibility that the country would be less able to stem flows of migrants and drugs coming across its border.

The president has been caught in a contradiction of policy on the border before.

The budget for the U.S. Coast Guard stayed flat in 2018 despite spending increases across the Pentagon (the Coast Guard falls under the Department of Homeland Security). But the service seizes three times as much cocaine moving by sea as what U.S. agencies intercept at border checkpoints, putting a dent into Trump’s argument that a border wall would dry up the supply of hard drugs in the United States.

Trump has been more focused on DACA and the border wall lately. He has suggested that the program may be the reason the caravan has massed.

“These big flows of people are all trying to take advantage of DACA. They want in on the act!” Trump said in a tweet.

He later said outside a church before Easter services Sunday: “A lot of people are coming in because they want to take advantage of DACA. They had a great chance. The Democrats blew it.”

But that description of DACA appears to misrepresent the program’s intent, which was to provide protection for immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally as children. The adults in the caravan wouldn’t qualify for DACA. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders did not respond to a request for comment on the matter.

“I asked some of the migrants on the caravan what they thought about Trump saying they were going to the US for DACA,” BuzzFeed reporter Adolfo Flores tweeted Sunday. “Some laughed and others said they thought (correctly) they wouldn’t qualify.”

Flores reported Friday afternoon that the caravan had gone more than 200 miles northwest in less than a week, crossing into the Mexican state of Oaxaca.

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Trump, Sessions, Miller, Homan, Nielsen and the rest of the White Nationalist cabal live in their own parallel universe where bias, hate, racism, xenophobia, lies, fears, cowardice, and political manipulation block out any rays of truth or reason. It’s certainly bad for our country to have such distorted, divisive, dishonest, and incompetent leadership. But, it’s a fact of life that the rest of us just have to deal with if we want to live in the present moment and try to prevent future disasters.

Undoubtedly, the Trump Administration’s inhumane and short-sighted policies will inflict some unnecessary pain and hardship on individuals who otherwise would be our friends and become loyal and productive members of our society. But, it’s unlikely that any of Trump’s blustering or the Administration’s “Gonzo” immigration enforcement policies and “Alice in Wonderland” pronouncements will have much lasting effect on migration patterns except, perhaps, to increase the number of people living in the United States without documents by artificially shutting down some of the existing paths that encourage individuals to come forward and obtain documentation or to enter the U.S. through the legal system in the first place. As with so much that this Administration is doing, it will be left for future generations to clean up the mess.

Wow, if these pathetic Dudes who supposedly govern us are this afraid of a few ragtag scared refugees moving north, what would they do in the face of a real army, a real invasion, and a real danger to our country? There wouldn’t be enough desks in Washington for them all to hide under!

PWS

04-02-18

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