You can always count on Fox News to practice hypocrisy and disinformation at its highest “low.” It is now charging Joe Biden with “blundering” in the crisis in the Ukraine, that he was slow to react to it. What? This is a so-called “news” organization that still employs someone who is being charged with being an “agent” of the Kremlin (Tucker Carlson), and another (Laura Ingraham) who still thinks it was a “perfect call” when Donald Trump attempted to blackmail the Ukrainian president by withholding funds for military assistance in exchange for a political “favor.”
Even today Trump is claiming that the Ukraine is Europe’s “problem,” and the U.S. should “stay out.” And people still think what happened in the Afghanistan pullout wouldn’t have been much worse under a Trump administration, one that would have seen Stephen Miller try to block any refugees from coming into the country? But then again, we live in a country of contrary hypocrites without an “agenda.”
Fox News also “unearthed” the other day a cell phone video taken by a border patrol agent at a meeting with US Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz, which only showed how the Trump administration’s politicization of the organization and demonizing attitude toward migrants has dehumanized agents. We hear one agent saying “For evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing,” Who is “evil”—the migrants trying escape the violence that the U.S. helped to foster by supporting right-wing murder regimes, or the “export” of U.S.-bred gangs to Central America, its lax gun laws and thirst for illegal drugs—or border agents who see migrants with or without children as nothing more than “vermin” that needs to be exterminated?
Ortiz pointed out that the agents had signed up for this job, for whatever motivated them to do so. Ortiz criticized agents who were getting “bogged down in the policies and the politics” and for “getting caught up in semantics.” The word "criminals" was thrown around, but we have to remember that merely crossing the border was a "crime" under the zero tolerance policy. One agent complained about fentanyl; again, blaming this on Mexico is typical ignorance of the facts. Fentanyl was first developed in the U.S. in 1959; today, almost all of the drug is being produced in China, which has an unregulated pirated drug industry. However it gets into this country, whether through Mexico, Canada or however, this problem is far more complicated than simply blaming everything on Mexican migrants when this country is addicted to so many drugs, even “legal” ones like opioids, including fentanyl—and will get them however they can.
And by the way, FBI Director Christopher Wray in a speech the other day charged China with being more “brazen” in its attempts to undermine the U.S. economy, stealing intellectual property and technology through hacking and cyber-security threats—incidents which the FBI is opening new cases for every 12 hours. China has also passed Russia as the principle military threat against the U.S., again with the aid of technology stolen from U.S. data bases. But of course if you watch Fox News, migrants on the southern border are the most dangerous threat facing the survival of this country.
The politicization of the CBP isn’t new, it has just become more apparent. Ryan Devereaux of The Intercept wrote after the 2020 election about the task confronting the Biden administration to “depoliticize” the CBP, which is now more deeply-rooted than it’s ever been. The National Border Patrol Council, a union representing nearly 20,000 agents, had become little more than a propaganda organ of the Trump administration. On its Twitter account in months leading up to the 2020 election, the union fed “its followers an unending stream of hardcore ‘Make America Great Again’ election content.
Among the NBPC’s scores of posts were videos of pro-Trump caravans rolling through cities and towns across the country, baseless claims about voter fraud, and bilingual testimonials from Border Patrol agents heralding President Donald Trump’s regard for law and order.” After Trump lost the election, there were charges that there would be a “crazy uptick in lawlessness at the border” and “more hate and discontent towards our law enforcement” from the “socialist regime” of Joe Biden. "Lawlessness," as we shall see, is a word that some agents shouldn't be stoning others with.
There are agents who say that Trump actually did nothing of substance to help them, actually reducing boots on the ground because of the redirection of funding to his “beautiful wall.” But the behavior of some of the border agents at the meeting with Ortiz was clearly in response to the fact that they are no longer in control of narrative, and their abusive and often lawless behavior would not be “overlooked”—and in fact corruption in the ranks is rampant.
Not all border agents are happy about the extremism they see in the ranks; one told Devereaux that he hoped that the Biden administration would “bring balance back to homeland security”—meaning not white nationalist amateurs, but experienced professionals: “I think the Biden administration is going to come in with a plethora of more experience in disseminating regulations so that the agents, the boots on the ground, have a better direction of what to do [and] how to do it. It was just chaos under Trump.”
But that is a minority opinion at the CBP. The disrespectful behavior of some of the border agents at the meeting with Ortiz (meant to be a “morale booster”) came out of the Trump administration allowing agents to view themselves as “Rambos” in an action movie who were not inhibited by any rules of behavior save their own. The agent who questioned this went on to say this mindset during the four years of the Trump administration was “shameful” and “What exactly did Border Patrol agents receive under Donald Trump? We didn’t get anything. We didn’t get extra funding. We didn’t get our overtime pay back. We took all these hits for this guy and we got nothing—we got a border wall while we’re suffering a manpower shortage across the nation. That’s what we got.”
Devereaux noted that “Under Trump, the nonunion leadership of the Department of Homeland Security often sounded less like apolitical public servants and more like the Fox News talking heads, which a number of them in fact were. In the meantime, their agencies were routinely employed in hyper-politicized applications of federal law enforcement power, including the systemic separation of migrant families…the prosecution of humanitarian aid workers, the destruction of sacred and protected wilderness…and the deployment of homeland security surveillance and special operations elements against protesters and journalists in American cities”—most notoriously in Portland.
Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli were particularly involved in these “commando” operations, aiding Trump in “manipulating intelligence reports to align with Trump’s talk of a dangerous left-wing menace.” Also noted was the DHS leadership support of Kyle Rittenhouse, who was found “non-guilty” for the murder of two unarmed men in a city and state he did not even live in. Wolf and Cuccinelli even dreamed up a “fictionalized video of an immigrant knifing an American citizen to death” and warning of the “evil people who seek to travel to the United States with the intent of harming and killing Americans.” Are they talking about migrant families from Central America?
Now let’s talk about reality rather than propaganda. The southern border becoming a “real” problem dates back to the Reagan administration. Despite the 1986 “amnesty” law—which he hoped would convert Mexican migrants into reliable Republican voters—Reagan issued forth a series of policies that upended what had been a “manageable” border situation. As chronicled in the book Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration In An Era Of Economic Integration by Douglas Massey, Jorge Durand and Nolan Malone, “If there is a constant in U.S. border policy, it is hypocrisy. Throughout the 20th century the United States has arranged to import Mexican workers while pretending not to. With the sole exception of the 1930s, when the Great Depression effectively extinguished U.S. labor demand, politicians and public officials have persistently sought ways of accepting Mexicans as workers while limiting their claims as human beings.”
In 1986, the U.S., Mexican and Canadian officials were working toward a trade agreement similar to what was then the Common Market in Europe, but with a significant caveat: the prevention of the integration of their labor markets, which the U.S. codified with the Immigration Reform and Control Act. The U.S. insisted on imposing major restrictions on the ability American companies to employ Mexican labor. The authors noted that
Thereafter the United States would pursue a politics of contradiction—simultaneously moving toward integration while insisting on separation. In time-honored fashion, the United States sought to have its cake and eat it too—to move headlong toward a consolidation of markets for capital, foods, commodities, and information, but simultaneously to pretend that North American labor markets would remain separate and distinct.
Of course the reason for this is typical for English-speaking countries: nativism, racism and the hypocrisy of denying this. In order to keep the “Mexicans” out, a “border crisis” had to be “manufactured.” Up until the 1980s, illegal immigration remained controllable:
By the early 1980s Mexico-U.S. migration evolved into a stable system based on the circulation of undocumented labor. This migration system began to take shape in 1965 to replace the bracero system that had prevailed between 1942 and 1964. Movements under the undocumented regime were governed by stable parameters, which yield relatively steady probabilities of first migration, border crossing, remitting, return, and remigration. Border enforcement selected for working-age males who were married but traveling without dependents. Migrants were very likely to remit money home to return after limited sojourns north of the border. As documented (before), there is little evidence that the likelihood of undocumented migration was rising before 1986, or that the total rate of Mexico-U.S. migration exceeded that which had prevailed during the bracero era.
It would only be when it became more difficult for these border transfers to occur that more migrants saw that their only "best option" was to migrate to stay. The authors noted that “Neither the numbers nor the legal status of immigrants is particularly relevant to understanding the policy regime that emerged after 1986. More important are U.S. political and economic conditions which provided a context that allowed immigration to be framed in crisis terms.” When
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Faced with voter anger over intractable economic problems that lacked obvious or easy solutions, Reagan fell back on two-time honored strategies—ideology and scapegoating. During the 1980s immigrants increasingly were cast in the role of the scapegoats for the nation’s ills. Ronald Reagan led the way by framing border control as an issue of national security. As a result of Communist insurgencies in Central America, he foresaw “a tidal wave of refugees—and this time they’ll be ‘feet people’ and not boat people—swarming into our country seeking safe haven from communist repression tom the south.” The media immediately picked-up on the imagery of the “tidal wave” and extended the metaphor, referring to Latin American migrants as a “steady stream” or a rapidly rising “tide” that was close to becoming a “flood.”
Ignored was the fact that the repression was actually the work of right-wing murder regimes supported and supplied with arms by the Reagan administration, particularly in El Salvador and Guatemala. Reagan also played up “hysteria” about the “threat” of cross-border “terrorism,” claiming that “terrorists and subversives are just two days’ drive time from (the border crossing at) Harlingen, Texas.” Can you name or recall a single “terrorist” incident that was carried out by someone who crossed the southern border? Probably not; I doubt even Stephen Miller could name one if a gun was put to his head.
The authors also noted that “The demonization of Latino immigrants as “invaders’ and ‘terrorists,’” the linking of border control to national security, and the cultivation of public hysteria about undocumented migration was not lost on enterprising INS bureaucrats, who detected a means of increasing both their prestige and their resources; we can see this happening with the Department of Homeland Security—the creation of which was supposed to be to stop terrorism, not immigration—thus the border “emergency” is as much a “business” deal as is a matter of ‘law.’”
In an article in Politico Magazine, Garrett Graff wrote that in regard to the politically-created border “crisis,”
The problems underlying CBP’s almost theatrical failures trace back to its creation amid the post-9/11 reorganization of the Department of Homeland Security and have been exacerbated by a long-standing failure of leadership that goes up to both Congress and the White House and has lasted through three administrations. Both the modern Border Patrol and its parent CBP have been plagued by poor leadership and management at all levels, and by recruiting challenges that have left them with a subpar, overstressed workforce and a long-running toxic culture. Most deeply, however, they are plagued today by a huge and unresolved mismatch between the agency’s founding identity and its current mission.
For most of its existence, the Border Patrol was a “tiny” agency that did not have “operational control” over 97 percent of the border; its principle mission was controlling contraband. Controlling illegal immigration was mainly the domain of immigration agents. For many decades, the border operated like this: people came in, people came out. Border agents were few in number and patrolled the most obvious crossing points. If there was work, people came in; if there wasn’t any, they went back. If they needed something to do, immigration agents made workplace raids. There was no real “crisis,” just something for nativists and racists to complain about.
But “That all changed after al-Qaida’s terror attacks,” wrote Graff. “Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge was brought to Washington to serve as George W. Bush’s first homeland security adviser and later the first secretary of the newly formed Department of Homeland Security. He recalled to one interviewer that he faced a seemingly unending supply of federal funding: ‘People just wanted to give me unlimited amounts of money.’” The U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency was created, and it was quickly filled with agents who were not qualified and by low hiring standards. Graff wrote that by the end of the Bush administration, “agent misconduct and criminality were on the rise—the lax hiring standards and background checks had populated the new border army with the wrong sort of person.”
Between 2006 and 2016, the Cato Institute found that the “CBP and the Border Patrol’s misconduct and disciplinary infractions outstripped all other federal law enforcement,” and “it is virtually impossible to assess the extent of corruption or misconduct in U.S. Customs and Border Protection…because most publicly available information is incomplete or inconsistent.” James Tomsheck, a former head of CPB internal affairs, charged that in all cases where border agents killed a migrant, they literally got away with murder. Some border agents were even cartel members who secretly aided in the transportation of drugs; yet in order to keep the number of criminal incidents down, what constituted as “corruption” was “redefined” as to keep Congress and the public blind to the reality.
Devereaux in The Intercept also points out that the Border Patrol is not “restrained” by rules that other law enforcement agencies are obligated to abide by, which allows them to view migrants as less than human. Graff adds that after 9/11, border agents began to view themselves as “commandos” fighting “terrorism” which had no reality to what was actually happening on the border; “CBP went out and recruited Rambo when it turned out the agency needed Mother Teresa.” The CBP is ill-equipped to be what it needs to be in most cases, when most migrants simply cross the border and give themselves up to border agents to make asylum requests; this “frustrates” agents who see themselves more as “action figures” in a movie than as “humanitarian” workers. This was certainly made clear in the interaction between Ortiz and the politicized agents.
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