GOP Goes Down Mexico Way

At this point multiple GOP candidates for President are promising to commit acts of outright war in Mexico in order to try to stop the flow of drugs and migrants into the US, and even if somehow Trump isn't the candidate by some miracle, the also-rans are more than willing to run on invading our southern neighbor.

Ron DeSantis wants suspected drug smugglers at the U.S.-Mexico border to be shot dead. Nikki Haley promises to send American special forces into Mexico. Vivek Ramaswamy has accused Mexico's leader of treating drug cartels as his "sugar daddy" and says that if he is elected president, "there will be a new daddy in town."

Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner for the 2024 nomination and long the person who has shaped his party's rhetoric on the border, has often blamed Mexico for problems in the United States and promises new uses of military force and covert action if he returns to the White House.

Many of the GOP presidential candidates say they would carry out potential acts of war against Mexico in response to the trafficking of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. More than 75,000 people in the U.S. died last year from overdoses of synthetic opioids, an annual figure more than 20 times higher than a decade ago.

The candidates' antagonism toward Mexico is welcomed by some families who have lost loved ones to fentanyl and have argued that Washington has not done enough to address the worst drug crisis in U.S. history. However, analysts and nonpartisan experts warn that military force is not the answer and instead fuels the racism and xenophobia that undermine efforts to stop drug trafficking.

"You've got politicking on this side. And then on the Mexican side of the border, you've got a president who is turning a blind eye to what's going on in Mexico and who has completely gutted bilateral collaboration with the United States," said Arturo Sarukhan, Mexico's ambassador to the U.S. from 2007 to 2013. "That's a very combustible mixture."

Andrea Thomas' daughter died at age 32 after taking half of a counterfeit pill laced with fentanyl that looked like her prescription pills for abdominal pain. Thomas started the foundation Voices for Awareness in Grand Junction, Colorado, to raise the alarm about fentanyl.

Thomas says people she knows are interested in what the candidates are proposing and feel that President Joe Biden's administration has not properly responded to the crisis. In a letter to the presidential candidates, Thomas and an assembly of other groups urge the politicians to do "all that can be done" to stop the manufacturing and smuggling of the drug.

"This drug is like no drug we have ever seen before," she said. "We need some strong measures. We have no more time to waste."

Democrats also face immense political pressure on border issues heading into next year's election. The White House has funded national programs to reduce fentanyl overdoses and sanctioned Chinese companies blamed for importing the chemicals used to make the drug.

Mexico has failed to address its problem with fentanyl production and trafficking. Mexican President Andres Manuel López Obrador repeatedly denies his country is producing the synthetic opioid despite enormous evidence to the contrary.

Border agents seized nearly 13 tons (12,000 kilograms) of fentanyl at the U.S.-Mexico border between September 2022 and August, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

At the second GOP primary debate late last month, candidates reiterated that they would use military forces to go after drug gangs in Mexico.

"As commander in chief, I'm going to use the U.S. military to go after the Mexican drug cartels," said DeSantis, the Florida governor. He has promised that people suspected of smuggling drugs across the southern border would end up "stone cold dead." That raises the prospect of border agents being authorized to shoot people on sight before any investigation into whether those people were carrying drugs.

Of course if DeSantis, Trump, Haley and the rest really want to stop drugs from Mexico, we need to go after Americans, not Mexicans...

U.S. government data undercuts the claim that people seeking asylum and other border crossers are responsible for drug trafficking. About 90% of fentanyl seizures were made at official land crossings, not between crossings where people entered illegally. At a hearing in July, James Mandryck, a CBP deputy assistant commissioner, said 73% of fentanyl seizures at the border since the previous October were smuggling attempts carried out by U.S. citizens, with the rest being done by Mexican citizens.

Something tells me that the next Republican administration really will shoot first and ignore questions, or at least ignore answers that questions might raise. 

The Road To Gilead Does Not Go Through Mexico

With a new sweeping legal ruling where Mexico's Supreme Court has decriminalized abortion in all states in the country this week, our southern neighbor is now infinitely more enlightened than America is on women's rights.

Mexico’s Supreme Court threw out all federal criminal penalties for abortion Wednesday, ruling that national laws prohibiting the procedure are unconstitutional and violate women’s rights in a sweeping decision that extended Latin American’s trend of widening abortion access.

The high court ordered that abortion be removed from the federal penal code. The ruling will require the federal public health service and all federal health institutions to offer abortion to anyone who requests it.

“No woman or pregnant person, nor any health worker, will be able to be punished for abortion,” the Information Group for Chosen Reproduction, known by its Spanish initials GIRE, said in a statement.

Some 20 Mexican states, however, still criminalize abortion. While judges in those states will have to abide by the court’s decision, further legal work will be required to remove all penalties.

Celebration of the ruling soon spilled out onto social media.

“Today is a day of victory and justice for Mexican women!” Mexico’s National Institute for Women wrote in a message on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. The government organization called the decision a “big step” toward gender equality.

Sen. Olga Sánchez Cordero, a former Supreme Court justice, applauded the ruling, saying on X that it represented an advance toward “a more just society in which the rights of all are respected.” She called on Mexico’s Congress to pass legislation in response.

But others in the highly religious country decried the decision. Irma Barrientos, director of the Civil Association for the Rights of the Conceived, said opponents will continue the fight against expanded abortion access.

“We’re not going to stop,” Barrientos said. “Let’s remember what happened in the United States. After 40 years, the Supreme Court reversed its abortion decision, and we’re not going to stop until Mexico guarantees the right to life from the moment of conception.”

The court said on X that “the legal system that criminalized abortion” in Mexican federal law was unconstitutional because it “violates the human rights of women and people with the ability to gestate.”

The decision came two years after the court ruled that abortion was not a crime in one northern state. That ruling set off a slow state-by-state process of decriminalizing it.

Last week, the central state of Aguascalientes became the 12th state to drop criminal penalties.

Abortion-rights activists will have to continue seeking legalization state by state, though Wednesday’s decision should make that easier. State legislatures can also act on their own to erase abortion penalties.

For now, the ruling does not mean that every Mexican women will be able to access the procedure immediately, explained Fernanda Díaz de León, sub-director and legal expert for women’s rights group IPAS.

What it does do — in theory — is obligate federal agencies to provide the care to patients. That’s likely to have a cascade of effects.

Díaz de León said removing the federal ban takes away another excuse used by care providers to deny abortions in states where the procedure is no longer a crime.

It also allows women with formal employment who are part of the social security system and government employees to seek the procedure in federal institutions in states where the abortion is still criminalized, she said.

Díaz de León and officials at other feminist organizations worry that women, particularly in more conservative areas, may still be denied abortions.

“It’s a very important step,” Díaz de León said. But “we need to wait to see how this is going to be applied and how far it reaches.”

The battle to decriminalize the state laws will continue, but I don't see how they will survive in the wake of this ruling.

And yet in the US, we're headed for more bans and more evidence that the country being divided into states where a woman has a right to her own reproductive system and states where she 100% does not is unsustainable federally.

I expect a federal ruling is going to come sooner rather than later where there's five votes to say that the availability of abortions in blue states is infringing upon red state bans, and that it's the blue states who are wrong and that the whole thing has to go. That's the endgame.

How quickly we get there depends on a lot of things, but the more Republicans get into power, the faster this handbasket goes to hell.

 

Increasingly, America is the outlier rogue nation that other, more civilized countries are warning their own people about, and with good reason.

Last Call For Border Line Insanity, Con't

This is, potentially, a real, actual Biden administration scandal involving the Mexico border as DHS has searched the office of the agency's top border intelligence official and carted them off for questioning.

 

THE DEPARTMENT OF Homeland Security intelligence official in charge of tracking cross-border threats was escorted from his office on Monday by federal police and security after an afternoon search that left his office sealed with crime tape, according to four sources with direct knowledge of the events.

The official in question is Brian Sulc, executive director of the Transnational Organized Crime Mission Center at DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis in Washington. Sulc has been placed on administrative leave. He is under investigation for an alleged security violation, bringing a personal electronic device inside the secure office, where phones and electronic devices are prohibited. He has not been arrested nor charged with a crime.

At about 4:15 p.m. on Monday, three squad cars from the Federal Protective Service — a DHS law-enforcement body tasked with protecting the department and federal buildings — drove into DHS’s northwest Washington complex with flashing lights. The FPS officers joined security on the third floor of the secure building to search Sulc’s office. While they were doing the search, Sulc was escorted out of the building flanked by security and FPS and taken to a different location on the DHS campus for questioning, two sources said.

The office has been sealed shut with crime tape, and evidence seals were placed around the door and across the keyhole so no one can enter.

Sulc is in charge of the office that produces intelligence assessments on border security, the opioid epidemic, and other high-stakes policy issues. Those assessments include intelligence on how fentanyl is crossing into the United States, as well as attempts to identify cartel members and human-trafficking operatives on both sides of the border. They’re used to inform policy decisions at the highest levels of DHS and elsewhere in the Biden administration.

“He is a big deal,” one source with direct knowledge of the search of Sulc’s office. “He does the border, all the big issues and crises. This is why this is all so shocking.”

Sulc is a career official who has held the post since March 2022, according to his LinkedIn profile. He has worked for DHS since September 2008.

Sulc did not respond to emails, calls, texts, or voice messages left on his home and cellphone numbers. His work-cellphone voice mailbox was full, and he did not respond to a LinkedIn message.

Asked about Sulc, a DHS official tells Rolling Stone: “DHS is committed to ensuring all operational security protocols are followed and is conducting an inquiry into a reported security incident. DHS will not comment on ongoing internal investigations. DHS conducts its national security mission with adherence to the highest standards.”

 

This of course coming on the heels of San Jose's police union head being arrested on charges of trafficking fentanyl from Mexico's cartels last month.

 

The executive director for a Northern California police union who was charged with attempting to illegally import synthetic opioids from India and other countries has been fired from her job, officials said Friday.

Joanne Marian Segovia, who was the executive director of the San Jose Police Officers’ Association, was arrested last week on charges she attempted to unlawfully import valeryl fentanyl, a synthetic opioid. If convicted, she faces up to 20 years in prison.

Starting in 2015, Segovia had dozens of drug shipments mailed to her San Jose home from India, Hong Kong, Hungary and Singapore with manifests listing their contents as “wedding party favors,” “gift makeup,” “chocolate and sweets” and “food supplement,” according to a federal criminal complaint.

Segovia, 64, at times used her work computer to make the orders and at least once used the union’s UPS account to ship the drugs within the country, federal prosecutors said.

Her attorney, Will Edelman, did not immediately respond Friday to a voicemail seeking comment.

The police association fired her after completing an initial internal investigation, union officials said in a statement.

An outside investigator will be hired to conduct a comprehensive “no-holds-barred” probe of Segovia’s alleged crimes, determine to what extent she utilized union resources and whether that could have been prevented, they said.

“The abhorrent criminal conduct alleged against Ms. Segovia must be the impetus to ensuring our internal controls at the POA are strong and that we enact any changes that could have identified the alleged conduct sooner,” said Sean Pritchard, president of the union.

Federal officials began investigating Segovia last year after finding her name and home address on the cellphone of a suspected drug dealer who is part of a network that ships controlled substances made in India to the San Francisco Bay Area, according to the complaint. That drug trafficking network has distributed hundreds of thousands of pills in 48 states, federal prosecutors said. 

 

We're going to find that these two stories are almost certainly related, and not in a good way.

 

House Republicans could have a real field day with this if they weren't so completely incompetent themselves.

We'll see how big this gets, but the connecting factor here is the Mexican border and drug cartels, and this could be massive.

South Of The War, Durr!

Republicans, especially Donald Trump, are openly saying that the use of military force against Mexican drug cartels is 100% justified and are vowing to strike with air and ground forces if they get control of the country in 2024.

 

In recent weeks, Donald Trump has discussed sending “special forces” and using “cyber warfare” to target cartel leaders if he’s reelected president and, per Rolling Stone, asked for “battle plans” to strike Mexico. Reps. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) and Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) introduced a bill seeking authorization for the use of military force to “put us at war with the cartels.” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said he is open to sending U.S. troops into Mexico to target drug lords even without that nation’s permission. And lawmakers in both chambers have filed legislation to label some cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, a move supported by GOP presidential aspirants.

“We need to start thinking about these groups more like ISIS than we do the mafia,” Waltz, a former Green Beret, said in a short interview.

Not all Republican leaders are behind this approach. John Bolton, Trump’s third national security adviser who’s weighing his own presidential run, said unilateral military operations “are not going to solve the problem.” And House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Mike McCaul (R-Texas), for example, is “still evaluating” the AUMF proposal “but has concerns about the immigration implications and the bilateral relationship with Mexico,” per a Republican staff member on the panel.

But the eagerness of some Republicans to openly legislate or embrace the use of the military in Mexico suggests that the idea is taking firmer root inside the party. And it illustrates the ways in which frustration with immigration, drug overdose deaths and antipathy towards China are defining the GOP’s larger foreign policy.

Nearly 71,000 Americans died in 2021 from synthetic-opioid overdoses — namely fentanyl — far higher than the 58,220 U.S. military personnel killed during the Vietnam War. And the Drug Enforcement Agency assessed in December that “most” of the fentanyl distributed by two cartels “is being mass-produced at secret factories in Mexico with chemicals sourced largely from China.”

Democrats, meanwhile, are allergic to the Republican proposals. President Joe Biden doesn’t want to launch an invasion and has rejected the terrorist label for cartels. His team argues that two issued executive orders already expanded law-enforcement authorities to target transnational organizations.

“The administration is not considering military action in Mexico,” National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said. “Designating these cartels as foreign terrorist organizations would not grant us any additional authorities that we don’t already have.” Instead, Watson said the administration hopes to work with Congress on modernizing the Customs and Border Protection’s technologies and making fentanyl a Schedule I drug, which would impose the strictest regulations on its production and distribution.

Gen. Mark Milley, the Joint Chiefs chair, told Defense One in an interview last month that invading Mexico was a bad idea. “I wouldn’t recommend anything be done without Mexico’s support,” he said, insisting that tackling the cartel-fueled drug trade is a law enforcement issue.

But should a Republican defeat Biden in 2024, those ideas could become policy, especially if Trump — the GOP frontrunner — reclaims the Oval Office.

 

Of course it's a stupid idea and Trump loves it, which means this will become the de facto position of the GOP by the end of spring. You'll have Republicans at the local and state level running on invading Mexico too. 

You'd better believe AMLO and all of Mexico is watching.

Mexico's popular president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador rallied more than 100,000 supporters Saturday in Mexico City, attacking the country's right, its "oligarchs" and the United States, just over a year before elections to choose his successor.

The rally marked the 85th anniversary of the nationalization of the oil industry, a key event in Mexican history.

Denouncing US Republican lawmakers' push to send the US military to battle Mexican drug cartels, Lopez Obrador told the crowd: "Cooperation yes, submission, no!"

"Mexico is an independent and free country and not a colony or a protectorate of the United States," he told his supporters, who gathered in the city's famous Zocalo main square.

Mexico could easily cut off trade with the US. I have no idea why the GOP would actually think they could do this, especially with Latin American countries increasingly joining Brazil in the BRICS nation group. This is geopolitical suicide.

The answer, of course, is to not elect Republicans.

Sunday Long Read: The Border Of Gilead

Our Sunday Long Read this week is from Stephania Taladrid at the New Yorker, who gives us the story of how abortion activists young and old are forming networks to get mifepristone and misoprostol from Mexico to women in red states in need of abortions.

 

The handoff was planned for late afternoon on a weekday, at an underused trailhead in a Texas park. The young woman carrying the pills, whom I’ll call Anna, arrived in advance of the designated time, as was her habit, to throw off anyone who might try to use her license plates to trace her identity. She felt slightly absurd in her disguise—sun hat, oversized sunglasses, plain black mask. But the pills in her pocket were used to induce abortions, and in Texas, her home state, their distribution now required such subterfuge, along with burner phones and the encrypted messaging app Signal. Since late June, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Texas and thirteen other states had effectively banned abortion, and more were sure to follow. In some of the states, laws that originated as far back as the nineteenth century had been restored. Providing the tools for an abortion in Texas had become a felony that could lead to years in prison, and a fellow-citizen could sue Anna and collect upward of ten thousand dollars for every abortion she was found to abet.

Anna wasn’t a fainthearted woman—someone who had recently approached her for pills noted her “cottage-core vibes” and steely calm—but she wasn’t reckless, either. She and other women defying abortion bans had turned to a model developed by Verónica Cruz, a prominent Mexican activist. Until last year, abortion was considered a crime in most of Mexico, the second-biggest Catholic country in the world, and women there had become adept at providing safe abortions in secrecy. (Given the legal exposure, pseudonyms have been used for Anna and other American women who let me into their underground networks.)

By the time the pregnant woman for whom Anna was waiting walked up, the trailhead was quiet enough to make the chirping of birds seem jarring. As Anna pulled a plastic bag of pills from her pocket and settled across from the pregnant woman at a picnic table, she registered the fear on the woman’s face. Her distress, as Anna understood it, was less about a breach of Texas law than about the possibility that her husband, who was violent, might find out what she was doing. Hands shaking, the woman told Anna that she was already raising three children and had been trying to save enough money to remove them from a dangerous home. The prospect of having another child, she said, was like “getting a death sentence.” She couldn’t vanish from her household for a day without explanation, travel to a state where abortion is legal, and pay seven hundred dollars to a doctor for a prescription. Anna’s pills, which were free, were her best option. Taking the baggie and some instructions on how to take the medication, the woman thanked Anna and fled the park, hoping that her husband would never realize she’d been gone.

he town of San Miguel de Allende, in central Mexico, is known as the birthplace of legendary independence leaders. It is just as famous for its charm: cobblestone streets, Baroque churches, bright houses, and lively cantinas once frequented by Mexican muralists and Beat poets. Some Americans visit for a week and decide to stay. Among those expats is Liz, a retired Southern woman in her seventies. On the morning of June 24th, as she was making coffee in a kitchen where photographs of her great-grandchildren covered the fridge, she heard on the radio that the constitutional right to abortion in the United States had ended. She maneuvered her walker to a nearby chair and sank down. She felt as she had as a child, in a house by the sea where she’d once lived, when a hurricane she’d been dreading made landfall. It was awful, yes, but knowing what was coming had given her a chance to gather her courage and make a plan.

Five years earlier, Liz had met Verónica Cruz, who runs a nonprofit called Las Libres—the Free Ones—out of the city of Guanajuato, some fifty miles west of San Miguel. At the time, Cruz was defying Mexican law by helping women—mostly poor women—abort at home. In part because activists like Cruz successfully reduced the stigma of abortion, the Supreme Court of Mexico decriminalized it in September, 2021. That same month, Texas moved in the opposite direction: a state law known as S.B. 8 banned nearly all abortions past the sixth week. Since then, Cruz had widened her remit, supplying free abortion pills to undocumented women in Texas.

Liz figured that, with Roe overturned and states from Arkansas to South Dakota implementing abortion restrictions, the demand for Mexican abortion pills would soar. If she lacked Cruz’s decades of experience working on the cusp between the lawful and the criminal, she was neither too old nor too diminished to take a risk. She picked up the phone to call Cruz and then some friends, to find out which of them would be game to join an underground network.

Locals called expats like Liz “the Old Hippies,” in English. In early July, weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision negated Roe, six of them joined Liz on her terrace for hibiscus tea and a talk with Cruz. Most of the Americans were over sixty and recalled what life was like before the 1973 Roe ruling. One tactic Liz remembered for ending an unwanted pregnancy was to alternate between a tub of ice-cold water and a tub as scalding as you could bear it. Those who tried this method suffered, then usually had a baby anyway. Liz had a baby, too, as a teen-ager. Although she had cheered when the Roe decision was announced, knowing how many lives it would change, it had come too late to change hers.

Cruz, the fifty-one-year-old daughter of farmers, has appraising dark eyes and a booming voice, and is direct by nature. She asked the Old Hippies if they would raise money and buy pills in Mexico that would be distributed across the border. Cruz paused to let an Old Hippie translate for those whose Spanish was weak.

Medication abortion in the United States is typically a two-day process that involves taking mifepristone, which blocks progesterone, and misoprostol, which causes uterine contractions. The Food and Drug Administration approves the use of this two-pill regimen under a doctor’s supervision up until the tenth week of pregnancy. A prescription, which can be obtained in states where abortion is legal, is required. In Mexico, Cruz explained, misoprostol is sold over the counter. Mifepristone still requires a prescription, but Cruz had found suppliers, and when she ran short she relied solely on misoprostol, which can cause an abortion on its own.

Immediately after Dobbs, Cruz said, her existing crew of volunteers had slipped enough medication across the border to help two thousand American women have abortions. If the Old Hippies agreed to aid distributors in abortion-ban states, Cruz told them, Las Libres could help many more women. Each cell in the supply chain would know little about the other cells—safer for everyone that way.

Several Old Hippies wondered aloud about consequences, as the legal terrain was decidedly unsettled. In Louisiana, anyone who “knowingly performs” a medication abortion is subject to a five-year prison sentence and a fifty-­thousand-dollar fine. In Oklahoma, it’s a ten-year sentence and a hundred thousand dollar fine. More such laws were likely to come, although no criminal convictions had yet been reported. If charged, an Old Hippie told Cruz, they might end up at the mercy of a district attorney in, say, Mississippi, facing years of jail time. But Liz was an optimist—“You have to be,” she always said—and by meeting’s end everyone in the room had signed on to her plan.

 

It's a fascinating story, but the real problem is that Republicans made this necessary. And networks like the Old Hippies will become more and more of a necessity in the years ahead unless Republicans are stopped.

Sunday Long Read: Border Line Insanity

Our Sunday Long Read comes to us from Gaby Del Valle at The Verge, with the story of how relentless surveillance of the Arizona-Mexico border by Homeland Security, the Border Patrol, Arizona police and the US Air Force isn't deterring migrants at all, the end results of billions in technology, equipment, materiel and trained agents mean it's just finding new and novel ways of the United States killing them in the desert.

 

It's unlikely the hikers knew they were being watched. They had tried to blend in: all 11 were wearing camouflage with the intention of vanishing into the desert scrub. They were on a remote mountain trail on the outskirts of Ajo, Arizona, a former mining town of about 3,000 people just a few dozen miles north of the Mexican border. It was a warm November morning, still early enough in the day that the sun must have felt good on their skin — the air is cold up in the mountains, colder still in the dry desert winter, though the heat always finds you eventually. The sky was bright and endless, punctuated by just a few clouds. But even if the migrants looked closely, there’s no way they could have noticed the MQ-9 Predator B drone stalking them from 20,000 feet above.

Nearly 150 miles away at the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona, the migrants were on display. Two Customs and Border Protection agents tracked the group from a cramped shipping container on base that was being used as a temporary ground control station. Each agent sat before five monitors: the pilot flew the drone while the camera operator focused on tracking the group’s movements. The 11 migrants appeared as small figures on a pair of screens, bright white smudges moving across a gray background. Their clothing may have helped them blend in with the cholla cacti and spiky ocotillo plants of the Sonoran Desert, but it couldn’t fool the Predator’s infrared camera. They had been betrayed by their own body heat.

The migrants must have noticed the helicopter first: an EC-120 Colibrí, Spanish for “hummingbird.” Then came a pair of Border Patrol agents on foot. “On your tail, there’s another group of two, probably about 50 yards behind you,” the camera operator in Tucson told one of the ground agents by radio.

Then he turned to me and explained what we were looking at. “That’s the agent,” he said, pointing at a vaguely person-shaped silhouette on one of the screens. He had to raise his voice so I could hear him over the endless hum of the servers that took up half the 16-by-20-foot room. “He just apprehended that guy, and that’s the group right there.” We watched as one member of the group tried to wrestle the Border Patrol agent. The others walked toward him, ready to give up.

From the shipping container, it was impossible to know anything about the group aside from what was visible on-screen. They could have been from Guatemala or El Salvador or Mexico or anywhere else. They could have been asylum seekers or drug runners or neither. Maybe it was their first time trekking through the desert; maybe it was their fifth. Maybe they were headed for Phoenix or Boston or for one of those tiny towns that have become Central American enclaves through the availability of agricultural jobs and word of mouth. These details were irrelevant to the CBP drone operators watching the migrants from Tucson, the Border Patrol agents tracking them through the mountains, and the crew following along in the helicopter. Their job was to find and apprehend anyone crossing the border illegally, no matter who they were.

The agents on the ground would get more details: names, ages, nationalities. After that, the specifics would matter a little. If the hikers were carrying drugs, they’d be prosecuted. If they had been deported before, they could be charged with illegal reentry. But if this was their first time — if they were crossing the border for work or to reunite with family on the other side or because they were in danger in their country — they’d likely be sent back to Mexico, regardless of where they had come from. There would be no hearing before an immigration judge, no chance to plead their case. And if the migrants were really desperate, they might try to cross again. Maybe they’d choose a different route. If they were with a smuggler, he’d know which trails to take to avoid the network of hidden cameras and underground sensors that CBP has scattered throughout the desert — but that route would likely be more remote and more treacherous than the one they were already on. All the surveillance technology in the world won’t stop people from trying to cross the border; it’s an obstacle, not, as Customs and Border Protection would have you believe, a deterrent.

Every unauthorized crossing is a justification for more drones in the air and boots on the ground, but none of that will stop people from coming. It just means more migrants are dying.

President Joe Biden promised that “not another foot of wall” would be built if he was elected president. Instead, his administration would use “high-tech capacity” to secure the border. Drones, cameras, and sensors would be more effective and more humane than a physical barrier, he claimed. What Biden’s promises ignored, however, is that the federal government has spent billions on border surveillance technology for the past three decades — and that despite these efforts and aside from a brief lull in crossings early in the pandemic, the number of unauthorized border crossings has gone up year after year. Since the ’90s, the question hasn’t been whether to fund border technology but how to get more of it. The fact that some migrants still make it across the border undetected — or that they attempt the journey at all — isn’t seen as a failure of technology or policy. Instead, it is used to justify more surveillance, more spending, and more manpower.

I first traveled to Arizona to meet with groups that wanted Biden to not only reverse Trump’s policies and halt construction but also to tear the wall down. The wall, they said, was an ecological and humanitarian catastrophe; leaving it up wasn’t an option. Early on in Biden’s presidency, it seemed like such things were possible: in his first few months in office, he had sent a comprehensive immigration reform bill to Congress and ended Trump-era policies like the Muslim ban and Remain in Mexico. His administration had created an exemption process to Title 42, a public health policy implemented in March 2020 that lets Border Patrol agents quickly send migrants back to Mexico without a hearing. It seemed like the Biden administration would end the policy altogether last summer.

When I first started reporting this story in the spring of 2021, there was a feeling of cautious optimism in the air — a feeling that, with the right prodding, Biden would usher in a more welcoming immigration system. By the time I first visited Arizona last summer, that feeling was mostly gone. Migrant deaths in the desert were on the rise for the second consecutive year, and no one in the federal government seemed to be doing anything about it. The previous summer had been the hottest and driest in the state’s history — and the deadliest for migrants in a decade. The Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office recovered remains of 227 suspected border crossers in the desert in 2020, and the summer of 2021 was on track to be just as fatal. By the time I arrived in Tucson, there were 137 known migrant deaths that year. Another 10 sets of human remains were recovered in the nine days I spent in Arizona.

There were a few theories as to why migrant deaths in Arizona had reached the highest rate since 2010. Some speculated that the border wall had pushed border crossers into more isolated, dangerous terrain. Advocates suggested that Title 42 was encouraging repeat attempts across the border, often through more remote paths. Greg Hess, the chief medical examiner for Pima County, said two consecutive years of record-breaking summer heat was likely a contributing factor. Triple-digit temperatures made the difficult, often fatal journey through the Sonoran Desert that much more so. Maybe it was policy. Maybe it was the weather. Maybe it was both. The common denominator in all these explanations was the inhospitality of the desert, the ruggedness of the landscape.

 

The US border with Mexico has been a failure all of my life. Democrats have failed to build any sort of fair or humane system because they don't want to deal with it. But a humane immigration system in the US will never happen with Republicans able to stop it, either.

And as climate change gets worse, as the border region becomes more and more inhospitable and deadly, more people fleeing South and Central America will die.

Should Arizona Republican candidate Kari Lake win, she will put armed National Guard troops on the border with orders to shoot to kill, and dare Biden to stop her.

It will get worse before it gets any better.

Last Call For Time For Some Traffic Problems On The Border, Con't

The backlash over Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott's new truck inspection regime on incoming trucks from Mexico was so massive this week that Abbott has now dropped the program completely.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Friday repealed his traffic-clogging immigration order that backed up commercial trucks at the U.S.-Mexico border, after a week of intensifying backlash and fears of deepening economic losses.

The Republican governor dropped his new rules that had required all commercial trucks from Mexico to undergo extra inspections to curb the flow of migrants and drugs and ratcheted up a fight with the Biden administration over immigration policy.

Some truckers reported waiting more than 30 hours to cross. Others blocked one of the world’s busiest trade bridges in protest.

Abbott, who is up for reelection in November and has made the border his top issue, fully lifted the inspections after reaching agreements with neighboring Mexican states that he says outline new commitments to border security. The last one was signed Friday with the governor of Tamaulipas, who this week said the inspections were overzealous and created havoc.

When Abbott first ordered the inspections, he did not say lifting them was conditional on such arrangements with Mexico.

Pressure was building on Abbott to retreat as gridlock on the border worsened and frustration mounted. The American Trucking Association called the inspections “wholly flawed, redundant and adding considerable weight on an already strained supply chain.”

The U.S.-Mexico border is crucial to the U.S. economy and more of it is in Texas — roughly 1,200 miles (1,931 kilometers) — than any other state. The United States last year imported $390.7 billion worth of goods from Mexico, second only to China.

Abbott began the inspections after the Biden administration said pandemic-related restrictions on claiming asylum at the border would be lifted May 23. He called the inspections a “zero tolerance policy for unsafe vehicles” smuggling migrants. He said Texas would take several steps in response to the end of the asylum restrictions, which is expected to lead to an increase in migrants coming to the border.

State troopers inspected more than 6,000 commercial vehicles over the past week, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety. Nearly one in four trucks were pulled off the road for what the agency described as serious violations that included defective tires and brakes.

The agency made no mention of the inspections turning up migrants or drugs.

 

So the inspections failed to turn up any drugs or human trafficking that the Feds missed, which was ostensibly the whole point of the exercise, but it instead forced three Mexican governors into unenforceable agreements and cost the country at least $150,000,000 and probably closer to several billion in economic damage, all of which he can now blame on Biden.

Let's see, there's a legal term for someone who forces change in government policy through damage or disruption to systems, isn't there?

Oh right, terrorism.

This was a terrorist attack that cost billions.

Greg Abbott should be in a cell awaiting trial.

Last Call For Deportation Nation, Con't

Why yes, Trump immigration czar and avowed white supremacist asshole Stephen Miller wanted to militarize the border with Mexico using a quarter of a million troops and then send in special forces kill squads and drones to wipe out drug cartel dealers in the name of fighting terrorism. Defense Secretary Mark Esper refused to go along with the plan, and Esper later quit in November after the election when it became clear that Trump was going to consider using the military to stay in power after his loss.

President Trump’s defense secretary thought the idea was outrageous.

In the spring of 2020, Mark T. Esper, the defense secretary, was alarmed to learn of an idea under discussion at a top military command and at the Department of Homeland Security to send as many as 250,000 troops — more than half the active U.S. Army, and a sixth of all American forces — to the southern border in what would have been the largest use of the military inside the United States since the Civil War.

With the coronavirus pandemic raging, Stephen Miller, the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda, had urged the Homeland Security Department to develop a plan for the number of troops that would be needed to seal the entire 2,000-mile border with Mexico. It is not clear whether it was officials in homeland security or the Pentagon who concluded that a quarter of a million troops would be required.

The concept was relayed to officials at the Defense Department’s Northern Command, which is responsible for all military operations in the United States and on its borders, according to several former senior administration officials. Officials said the idea was never presented formally to Mr. Trump for approval, but it was discussed in meetings at the White House as they debated other options for closing the border to illegal immigration.

Mr. Esper declined to comment. But people familiar with his conversations, who would speak about them only on condition of anonymity, said he was enraged by Mr. Miller’s plan. In addition, homeland security officials had bypassed his office by taking the idea directly to military officials at Northern Command. Mr. Esper also believed that deploying so many troops to the border would undermine American military readiness around the world, officials said.

After a brief but contentious confrontation with Mr. Miller in the Oval Office, Mr. Esper ended consideration of the idea at the Pentagon.

Mr. Trump’s obsession with the southern border was already well known by that time. He had demanded a wall with flesh-piercing spikes, repeatedly mused about a moat filled with alligators, and asked about shooting migrants in the leg as they crossed the border. His aides considered a heat-ray that would make migrants’ skin feel hot.

Around the same time that officials considered the huge deployment to the American side of the border with Mexico, Mr. Trump also pressed his top aides to send forces into Mexico itself to hunt drug cartels, much like American commandos have tracked and killed terrorists in Afghanistan or Pakistan, the officials said.

Mr. Trump hesitated only after aides suggested that to most of the world, military raids inside Mexico could look like the United States was committing an act of war against one of its closest allies, which is also its biggest trading partner, the officials said.

In the end, rather than a vast deployment of the military to the border, the Trump administration used an obscure public health rule — which remains in effect to this day — to deny asylum and effectively shut down entry into the United States from Mexico during the pandemic. But taken together, the ideas under discussion that spring underscore the Trump administration’s view of the armed forces as a tool of the presidency that could be wielded on behalf of Mr. Trump’s domestic political agenda in an election year. And it further reveals the breach between Mr. Trump and his top military officials, who worked behind the scenes to prevent what they viewed as the president’s dangerous instincts.

Several aides to the former president did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

The Last laugh of course belongs to Miller, as Biden is using his "Remain in Mexico" plan to banish thousands of refugees due to COVID-19, and continues using ICE facilities to detain undocumented immigrants inside the US. Nothing's really changed on America's border plan from Trump to Biden, only now that Biden's doing it, it's an "unprecedented border crisis".

Of course, if Trump had won and Miller had gotten his way in a second term, we'd be talking about the thousands of refugees shot and killed by US Army troops on the border instead.

I guess that's progress, right?

The Vax Of Life, Con't

The Biden administration will finally lift border restrictions for fully vaccinated travelers from Canada and Mexico starting next month.

The U.S. government next month will lift pandemic-era travel limits along the Canadian and Mexican borders for travelers who are vaccinated against the coronavirus, allowing them to enter the U.S. for non-essential activities, like tourism and family visits, for the first time since March 2020.

Starting in early November, the Department of Homeland Security will exempt travelers who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 from the non-essential travel restrictions in place along both U.S. land borders, senior Biden administration officials told reporters during a call Tuesday.

Those who can't provide proof of vaccination will continue to be banned from crossing the land borders if their travel is deemed to be "non-essential." U.S. citizens, green card holders and individuals traveling for medical care have been exempted from the non-essential restrictions since they were instituted.

Starting in January 2022, the U.S. will require all travelers — including those engaging in essential travel, like truck drivers — to show proof of vaccination before entering a land border crossing, the officials said.

"This phased approach will provide ample time for essential travelers such as truckers and others to get vaccinated, enabling a smooth transition to this new system," one administration official said.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection will accept paper or digital proof of vaccination, an official said. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has not yet determined which vaccines the U.S. will recognize, the officials added.

Tuesday's announcement is likely to be welcomed by Mexican and Canadian travelers, as well as U.S. border community leaders, who have been urging the Biden administration for months to lift the travel limits, which have hurt local economies that rely on tourism and commerce.

"There's been a lot of struggle in the community because of the closure, not just financial struggle but a lot of families who have been separated and a lot of literal emotional hardship," Democratic Congresswoman Veronica Escobar, who represents the Texas border city of El Paso, told CBS News. "This is very welcomed news."

You notice Mexican and Canadian citizens aren't screeching about "mah freedumbs" over this, they'll be vaccinated and come in to the States to do what they want to do. I don't know why though, Canada's a hell of a lot safer than the US as far as the virus.

Deportation Nation, Con't

Just a reminder that in the COVID-19 era, the Trump regime still keeps migrant kids in cages and separates them from their parents in order to deport them to an unknown fate.

A 2-year-old boy locked in detention wants to be held all the time. A few girls, ages 10 to 15, say they’ve been doing their best to feed and soothe the clingy toddler who was handed to them by a guard days ago. Lawyers warn that kids are taking care of kids, and there’s inadequate food, water and sanitation for the 250 infants, children and teens at the Border Patrol station.

The bleak portrait emerged Thursday after a legal team interviewed 60 children at the facility near El Paso that has become the latest place where attorneys say young migrants are describing neglect and mistreatment at the hands of the U.S. government.

Data obtained by The Associated Press showed that on Wednesday there were three infants in the station, all with their teen mothers, along with a 1-year-old, two 2-year-olds and a 3-year-old. There are dozens more under 12. Fifteen have the flu, and 10 more are quarantined.

Three girls told attorneys they were trying to take care of the 2-year-old boy, who had wet his pants and had no diaper and was wearing a mucus-smeared shirt when the legal team encountered him.

“A Border Patrol agent came in our room with a 2-year-old boy and asked us, ‘Who wants to take care of this little boy?’ Another girl said she would take care of him, but she lost interest after a few hours and so I started taking care of him yesterday,” one of the girls said in an interview with attorneys.

Law professor Warren Binford, who is helping interview the children, said she couldn’t learn anything about the toddler, not even where he’s from or who his family is. He is not speaking.

Binford described that during interviews with children in a conference room at the facility, “little kids are so tired they have been falling asleep on chairs and at the conference table.”

She said an 8-year-old taking care of a very small 4-year-old with matted hair couldn’t convince the little one to take a shower.

“In my 22 years of doing visits with children in detention, I have never heard of this level of inhumanity,” said Holly Cooper, who co-directs University of California, Davis’ Immigration Law Clinic and represents detained youth.

This repulsive inhumanity makes grim sense when you remember our federal government is run by a lifelong white supremacist eugenicist who hired other lifelong white supremacist eugenicists in order to dehumanize migrants and immigrants on purpose (committing human rights violations on a massive scale) as a deterrent to end immigration period.

When you remember that this regime believes tens of millions of Americans should be stripped of their citizenship and rights, and be shipped off to who knows where, everything they have done in the last four years clicks into place.

They are hateful on the scale of 1930's Germany and we have one chance to stop them.

Deportation Nation, Con't

How's this for upside-down: Mexico's Health Minister is definitely hinting that they might close the border with the US in order to stop COVID-19.

For once, the conversation over closing the US-Mexico border is being driven by Mexican health officials who say they are considering shutting out Americans to keep coronavirus out of their country.

There are currently more than 2,000 cases of the virus in the US and it is spreading rapidly. Forty-three people have died from it.

By contrast in Mexico, there have only been 16 confirmed cases and no deaths.

At a press conference on Friday, health minister Hugo Lopez-Gatell said: 'Mexico wouldn't bring the virus to the United States, rather the United States would bring it here.

'The possible flow of coronavirus would come from the north to the south.

'If it were technically necessary, we would consider mechanisms of restriction or stronger surveillance,' he said.

I'd close the border with us, too.

I mean, have you seen the guy in charge of that whole America hellhole?

Meanwhile, that whole "deport refugees to Guatemala" thing is shelved indefinitely after the first known cases of COVID-19 were detected today because of undoubtedly the thousands of untested cases of COVID-19 sweeping through ICE detainment camps.

Guatemala will from Monday widen travel restrictions to fight the spread of coronavirus, banning arrivals from the United States and Canada, President Alejandro Giammattei said on Friday. 

"We are therefore announcing that everyone who arrives from Canada and the United States between now and midnight on Monday will be subject to quarantining," Giammattei said in a televised address. 

The president said he had also asked the Mexican government to halt deportations of migrants by land to Guatemala. 

No cruise ships will be allowed to dock, but public events and school classes would go ahead for the time being, he added. 

Yankees, go home!

And stay home. 

Trump Trades Blows, Con't

We're going to be constantly reminded in 2020 just how much of Donald Trump's worldview is driven by his insatiable need for petty vengeance against slights both real and perceived, but if Trump wants to take full credit for and invite zero Democrats to his signing of NAFTA 2.0, that's actually a win for the Dems.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed his signature trade deal with Mexico and Canada into law, sealing a big bipartisan win for him during his heavily partisan impeachment trial. 

But the celebration on Wednesday was far from bipartisan, as Trump excluded Democrats from the ceremony despite their key role in securing the final version of the deal that passed with overwhelming majorities in both the House and Senate.

Instead, Trump used the signing of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement as a chance to keep ownership of his deal in a White House ceremony with dozens of Republican lawmakers, local officials and business, industry and union leaders present.

“We have replaced a disastrous trade deal,” Trump said in the ceremony on the White House South Lawn. “This is something we really put our heart into.” 

Signing the USMCA into law is a rare legislative achievement for the president going into his reelection campaign. But Trump will not be able to say he fully delivered on his 2016 campaign promise to replace NAFTA until Canada ratifies the deal and all three countries meet many of their obligations — and that could take months. 

Still, Trump will take his USMCA victory lap to Michigan on Thursday, where he will host an event at an auto parts supplier to tout the benefits of the pact. 

Meanwhile, Democrats and many labor unions have also been largely supportive of the deal after they secured changes that make the USMCA one of the most progressive trade agreements ever negotiated by either party.

There really are big wins for labor unions as far as enforceable labor rules to keep jobs from going to Mexico and big pharma got screwed out of their bio-drug sweetheart deal, Nancy Pelosi and House Dems actually did secure some serious concessions.  But Trump wants to make sure the Dems get no credit for those, and given the obnoxious anti-free trade stance by the Democratic purity pony crew, it's probably best that nobody reminds them of USMCA anyway.

Deportation Nation, Con't

Meanwhile, with the last major logistical hurdle stopping the Trump regime's plan for mass deportations of undocumented removed with Guatemala offering itself up to take America's cash in exchange for becoming our dumping ground for undesirables, it looks like the Stephen Miller plan will soon be in full swing.

Mexicans seeking asylum in the United States could be sent to Guatemala under a bilateral agreement signed by the Central American nation last year, according to documents sent to U.S. asylum officers in recent days and seen by Reuters.

In a Jan. 4 email, field office staff at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) were told Mexican nationals will be included in the populations “amenable” to the agreement with Guatemala. 

The agreement, brokered last July between the administration of Republican President Donald Trump and the outgoing Guatemalan government, allows U.S. immigration officials to send migrants requesting asylum at the U.S.-Mexican border to apply for protection in Guatemala instead. 

Mexico objects to the plan, its foreign ministry said in a statement late on Monday, adding that it would be working with authorities to find “better options” for those that could be affected. 

Trump has made clamping down on unlawful migration a top priority of his presidency and a major theme of his 2020 re-election campaign. His administration penned similar deals with Honduras and El Salvador last year. 

U.S. Democrats and pro-migrant groups have opposed the move and contend asylum seekers will face danger in Guatemala, where the murder rate is five times that of the United States, according to 2017 data compiled by the World Bank. The country’s asylum office is tiny and thinly staffed and critics have argued it lacks the capacity to properly vet a significant increase in cases. 

Guatemalan President-elect Alejandro Giammattei, who takes office this month, has said he will review the agreement. 

Acting Deputy U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Ken Cuccinelli said in a tweet in December that Mexicans were being considered for inclusion under the agreement.

USCIS referred questions to DHS, which referred to Cuccinelli’s tweet. Mexico’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Deporting Mexicans at the US border to Guatemala is being done on purpose to get Mexico to play ball, and all indications are the President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador will give in. Mass deportations of asylum seekers will begin in 2020, followed of course by mass deportations of undocumented in the US, rounded up by ICE.  Sure to be a number of actual US citizens who are going to get one-way trips to Central America, but who in this government will give a damn?

That pipeline is going to start gushing pretty soon.  It's an election year, and should Trump win, it's a flood that won't cease anytime soon.

The Drums Of War (On Drugs)

The brutal massacre of an American Mormon missionary family in Mexico by drug cartel soldiers has Donald Trump howling for military action.

At least 10 members of a prominent Mormon family – three mothers and their young children – were killed in a shooting attack relatives suspect might have been a case of mistaken identity by drug cartel gunmen. About a dozen family members remain missing.

The victims were U.S. citizens and members of La Mora, a decades-old settlement in Sonora state founded as part of an offshoot of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It's located about 70 miles south of Douglas, Arizona. 

The mothers were driving from Bavispe to a wedding in LaBaron, another Mormon community in the state of Chihuahua, when their three vehicles loaded with children were attacked by gunfire, causing one of the vehicles to explode in flames. 

Leah Staddon, a relative who grew up in the same Mormon community before moving to Arizona, said her nephew's wife and her four children died in the blaze.

She said her brother discovered the bullet-ridden vehicle still smoldering.
"It's devastating," Staddon said. "It's incomprehensible, the evil. I don’t understand how someone could do that."

The attack happened near Rancho La Mora on the border between Sonora and Chihuahua, the Mexican newspaper El Diario reported.

The vehicle exploded when bullets hit the gas tank, the newspaper said.

Trump hates Mexicans, who he thinks are all drug criminals and child-killers anyway, so actual Mexican criminals killing kids has sent him into paroxysms of rage on Twitter this morning.

President Trump said Tuesday the U.S. is ready to "wage war" on the drug cartels and "wipe them off the face of the earth" after at least 10 members of a prominent Mormon family were killed in an ambush attack near U.S.-Mexico border.

In a series of tweets, Trump said the U.S. was willing to aid Mexico in "cleaning out these monsters" and that "sometimes you need an army to defeat an army." 

"We merely await a call from your great new president!" he said.

Sending in thousands, maybe tens of thousands of US troops into Mexico to kill cartel soldiers would be quite the escalation of the War on Drugs, now in its sixth decade, and would certainly serve to get impeachment off the front page.  Trump is at best unstable but controllable by his inner circle, but this is a rage boner that may not be able to be contained right now.

We'll see if Republicans talk him down or enable him with legislation.

Trump Trades Blows, Con't

Time to check in with apparently the only voters who actually exist in America, white red state farmers getting wrecked by Trump's trade wars.

Some rural residents are growing increasingly frustrated with the ongoing trade feuds and wonder how long Trump will call upon farmers to make sacrifices as the country’s “patriots.”

“People are starting to say, ‘I don’t know how we’re going to survive this,’ ” said [South Dakota farmer Ray] Martinmaas, who voted for Trump in 2016, but says he’s open to a Democrat like Montana Gov. Steve Bullock this time. “You know, we’re the ones taking the brunt of it in all these negotiations, so they need to be kind of helping us out right now.”

Martinmaas, whose family homesteaded this land in 1888, said his farm operation lost more than $700,000 last year. He’s had to put a moratorium on buying new equipment, and he’s stuck with grain bins full of soybeans, because China isn’t buying. Other farmers can’t pay their bills for the hay and grain they bought from him.

Martinmaas, 69, says he’s skeptical that Trump’s aid package will help, given the uncertainty about how much individual farmers will receive and who will qualify.

Trump’s 2016 victory hung largely on support from rural and small-town Americans like Martinmaas. His approval rating with them remains strong — 57 percent, far higher than the 39 percent of Americans overall, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll in late April.

But a survey of farmers released this month by Purdue University’s Center for Commercial Agriculture shows rising pessimism, with only 20 percent saying they believe the trade war with China will be resolved by July 1, down from 45 percent in March.

But in tiny Orient — population 63 — farmers are beginning to voice disillusionment and frustration. More than a dozen farmers did not have their operating loans renewed for the coming year, according to a local lender, with at least one farmer losing it all and a land auction planned for the courthouse steps later this month. Agriculture exports from the state to China — a big soybean buyer — fell 40 percent in the state last year, part of a $10 billion loss nationally, according to an American Farm Bureau Federation analysis.

But they'll vote for Trump anyway.  Every single one of them.  Worst case scenario is that a state that Trump won by 40 points he only wins by 30 in 2020.

Bonus hatred for coastal elites:

Martinmaas runs his farm operation — including Angus beef cattle, corn, soybeans, sunflowers and hogs — with his three brothers. He was born and raised in Orient, in a tiny house with no electricity or running water, one of 12 children of conservative Catholic parents. Now he lives with his wife, Becky Martinmaas, in a cozy house decorated in a lodge theme, with a gun room, workshop, horse barn, skinning shed and a salt-lick pallet out front, which Becky hand-painted in the colors of the American flag and the words “Let Freedom Ring.”

Married 31 years, they share a commitment to hard work and family, a love of sport shooting and hunting, and a distaste for coastal elites.

“I always say the West Coast and East Coast can each be a country and the rest of us will be just fine,” Martinmaas said from his kitchen table one recent Sunday, as Becky made butter biscuits.

“But they’d starve!” she said.

“Here in flyover country, we have everything we need — food, oil,” Martinmaas said.

“Except voters,” his wife responds.

They hate, hate, hate the fact that city slickers actually matter more than their heroic farmer selves that feed an ungrateful nation, and they will lay down their livlihoods for the man who promises them that America will be run by farmers in South Dakota and not those people in South Harlem.

Oh, and they fully expect Trump to fix that "Except voters" problem.  That's why they elected him.  That's why they'll vote for him again.

Why is anyone expecting anything different?

Deportation Nation, Con't

To the surprise of no one, the actions Mexico agreed to take "this week" to stop the flow of asylum seekers to the US from Central America were actually agreed upon earlier this year, but Trump decided he was going to nearly break the deal in order to create news to get the Democrats (and the bad jobs report) off the front page.

The deal to avert tariffs that President Trump announced with great fanfare on Friday night consists largely of actions that Mexico had already promised to take in prior discussions with the United States over the past several months, according to officials from both countries who are familiar with the negotiations.

Friday’s joint declaration says Mexico agreed to the “deployment of its National Guard throughout Mexico, giving priority to its southern border.” But the Mexican government had already pledged to do that in March during secret talks in Miami between Kirstjen Nielsen, then the secretary of homeland security, and Olga Sanchez, the Mexican secretary of the interior, the officials said.

The centerpiece of Mr. Trump’s deal was an expansion of a program to allow asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico while their legal cases proceed. But that arrangement was reached in December in a pair of painstakingly negotiated diplomatic notes that the two countries exchanged. Ms. Nielsen announced the Migrant Protection Protocols during a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee five days before Christmas.

And over the past week, negotiators failed to persuade Mexico to accept a “safe third country” treaty that would have given the United States the legal ability to reject asylum seekers if they had not sought refuge in Mexico first.

Mr. Trump hailed the agreement anyway on Saturday, writing on Twitter: “Everyone very excited about the new deal with Mexico!” He thanked the president of Mexico for “working so long and hard” on a plan to reduce the surge of migration into the United States.

It was unclear whether Mr. Trump believed that the agreement truly represented new and broader concessions, or whether the president understood the limits of the deal but accepted it as a face-saving way to escape from the political and economic consequences of imposing tariffs on Mexico, which he began threatening less than two weeks ago.

Having threatened Mexico with an escalating series of tariffs — starting at 5 percent and growing to 25 percent — the president faced enormous criticism from global leaders, business executives, Republican and Democratic lawmakers, and members of his own staff that he risked disrupting a critical marketplace.

After nine days of uncertainty, Mr. Trump backed down and accepted Mexico’s promises.

Officials involved with talks said they began in earnest last Sunday, when Kevin K. McAleenan, the acting secretary of homeland security, met over dinner with Mexico’s foreign minister. One senior government official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the closed-door negotiations that took place over several days, insisted that the Mexicans agreed to move faster and more aggressively to deter migrants than they ever have before.
Their promise to deploy up to 6,000 national guard troops was larger than their previous pledge. And the Mexican agreement to accelerate the Migrant Protection Protocols could help reduce what Mr. Trump calls “catch and release” of migrants in the United States by giving the country a greater ability to make asylum-seekers wait in Mexico.

Once again, I smell Stephen Miller's spoor all over this mess.  This looks like a concerted effort to bury Kirstjen Nielsen's involvement and success in these negotiations completely while buying Trump several news cycles as a bonus.

Mission accomplished there, I guess.  But the real problem is now Mexico has given in to the bully's demands, and in the immortal words of Darth Vader in Empire...

Deportation Nation, Con't

It seems that Mexico's offer to put federal troops on its southern border area with Guatemala was enough to get Trump to fold on tariffs for now.

President Donald Trump said Friday he will not put tariffs on Mexico after all, saying it has agreed to take new measures to stop the illegal flow of migrants into the United States.

"The Tariffs scheduled to be implemented by the U.S. on Monday, against Mexico, are hereby indefinitely suspended," the president tweeted.

He added: "Mexico, in turn, has agreed to take strong measures to stem the tide of Migration through Mexico, and to our Southern Border."

Mexico Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard in a tweet confirmed the agreement. In a separate tweet, he thanked all who supported Mexico through its negotiations with the United States.

Mexican Ambassador Martha Bárcena also wrote in a tweet translated into English: After several days of negotiations and 12 hours today in the State Department, we reached an agreement with the United States to address the humanitarian crisis stemming from the recent migratory flows that have affected our two countries.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a statement said the joint obligations that the U.S. and Mexico negotiated will benefit both countries.

"The United States looks forward to working alongside Mexico to fulfill these commitments so that we can stem the tide of illegal migration across our southern border and to make our border strong and secure," Pompeo said.

But as I said earlier, once you give in to the bully...

Both countries agreed to "take further actions" if the measures adopted do not result in limiting migrants seeking asylum. It is unclear at the moment what the new actions might be. It is also unclear how the U.S. and Mexico will measure results.

Want to know what really happened on Friday to make Trump fold?

Job creation decelerated strongly in May, with nonfarm payrolls up by just 75,000 even as the unemployment rate remained at a 50-year low, the Labor Department reported Friday.

The decline was the second in four months that payrolls increased by less than 100,000 as the labor market continues to show signs of weakening. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for a gain of 180,000.

In addition to the weak total for May, the previous two months’ reports saw substantial downward revisions. March’s count fell from 189,000 to 153,000 and the April total was taken down to 224,000 from 263,000, for a total reduction of 75,000 jobs.

Stock futures fell and bond yields dropped in reaction to the report. Dow Jones Industrial Average futures turned negativebefore reversing course and turning positive. The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to its lowest level since September 2017.

With the downward revisions, zero net jobs were created in May.

Zero.

Even Trump can count that high.  So he declared victory and ran.  Mexican tariffs will cost the US millions of jobs and he knows it. He's used up all his economic cushion losing to China.  He doesn't have anything left to hide job losses of a Mexican trade war.  The one thing keeping him in office is the economy he inherited, and he's coming close to breaking it now.

He'll try again of course, but it sure took that awful jobs number off the front page, didn't it?

Deportation Nation, Con't

Mexico is actually making a serious effort to stave off Trump's tariffs, but the Obrador government just doesn't understand that once you pay the bully, he always ups the toll. 

U.S. and Mexican officials are discussing the outlines of a deal that would dramatically increase Mexico’s immigration enforcement efforts and give the United States far more latitude to deport Central Americans seeking asylum, according to a U.S. official and a Mexican official who cautioned that the accord is not final and that President Trump might not accept it. 

Faced with Trump’s threat to impose steadily rising tariffs on goods imported from Mexico beginning Monday, Mexican officials have pledged to deploy up to 6,000 national guard troops to the area of the country’s border with Guatemala, a show of force they say will make immediate reductions in the number of Central Americans heading north toward the U.S. border.

The Mexican official and the U.S. official said the countries are negotiating a sweeping plan to overhaul asylum rules across the region, a move that would require Central Americans to seek refuge in the first country in which they arrive after leaving their homeland. 

Under such a plan, the United States would swiftly deport to Mexico any Guatemalan asylum seekers who set foot on U.S. soil. And the United States would send Honduran and Salvadoran asylum applicants to Guatemala, whose government held talks last week with acting Homeland Security secretary Kevin McAleenan. Central American migrants who express a fear of death or torture if they are repatriated would be interviewed by U.S. asylum officers to determine whether the chances of such harm were more likely than not — a screening standard with a greater likelihood of rejection than current procedures. 

Mexico has repeatedly said it will not accept the kind of “Safe Third Country” agreement that the United States has with Canada, a pact that requires asylum seekers to apply for refuge in whichever country they first arrive in, as each is considered safe. But the Mexican official said the government is willing to make asylum changes for the sake of a coordinated regional approach.

Mexican negotiators also have made clear that they will withdraw their offers if Trump imposes the tariffs, telling their U.S. counterparts that the economic damage would undermine Mexico’s ability to afford tougher immigration enforcement.

The problem with reasonable, good faith efforts like Mexico's here in response to belligerent bully tactics is the bully always smashes you in the face again while yelling "What else ya got?"

The correct response for Mexico is hardball, not appeasement.  Closing the Nuevo Laredo crossing for "repairs" for instance for all southbound traffic for a week might get the attention of some big corporate donor types, for example.

But this plan?  It's already dead on arrival, hombre.

President Trump is planning to declare a new national emergency in order to implement sweeping tariffs on Mexico over the flow of Central American migrants to the U.S., according to a draft document of the declaration reviewed by The Hill. 

According to the document, the new emergency is necessary due to “the failure of the Government of Mexico to take effective action to reduce the mass migration of aliens illegally crossing into the United States through Mexico.” 

The new emergency declaration would follow a February emergency declaration, which Trump used to justify sending National Guard troops to support Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials at the southern border. 

The draft document signals that the White House believes that imposing the tariffs under the February emergency declaration might not pass legal muster. But it remains unclear if a final decision has been made to invoke another emergency. The White House did not answer questions about the document. 

Officials from the White House counsel’s office and the Justice Department floated the idea of a new declaration this week during a closed-door meeting with Republican senators. 

The White House has said it plans to impose the tariffs under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which allows the president to take unilateral action to counter an “unusual and extraordinary threat” in times of national emergency. 

But a new national emergency is likely to spark widespread opposition on Capitol Hill from Republicans and Democrats who say Trump is overstepping his tariff authority and also could draw fresh legal challenges.

So all those Republican Senators worried about how tariffs would affect constituents in 2020 folded in just a couple of days as they were told what Trump was going to do, and that they were going along with it.

And don't expect a Roberts Court that sided with Trump on his Muslim ban to lift a finger here.

Like I said, give in to the bully once...

Last Call For It's The Economy, Dems

Here's why Joe Biden is ahead right now: white Democratic voters are almost solely concerned with health care and climate change, but for black and Hispanic Dems, it's health care and jobs as the Great Recession wiped out black and Hispanic wealth in 2007 and we're still dealing with that 12 years later.

A key base of support for the Democratic Party, black America, is lagging in its recovery from the recession and demanding more attention to economic issues than white voters. That divide could complicate presidential contenders’ attempts to woo African-American votes in 2020.

A decade after the financial crisis, with national employment below 4 percent and wage gains slowly accelerating for typical workers, white Democrats largely see economic issues as a lower priority, according to polling conducted for The New York Times by the online research firm SurveyMonkey. The opposite is true for African-Americans, who are struggling even as the economy is growing relatively fast, and who want candidates to focus on job creation above all else.

Black Democrats are more likely than white Democrats to say they benefit “less than most others” from the current economy. They are significantly more likely than whites to call jobs and the economy the most important issue facing the nation. White Democrats are significantly more likely to cite health care as the top issue, followed by the environment, with jobs a distant third.

The difference holds even when controlling for age, education, employment status and other voter traits that are not related to race.

“There has been an economic boom for some people but not enough people, and certainly not enough people who look like me,” said Joyce Wilson Harley, a survey respondent and former Democratic elected official in South Orange, N.J.

Ms. Harley, who is black, said she was doing fine financially. But she said she didn’t have to look far to see people who were struggling. And she said mainstream Democrats, including many presidential candidates, had focused too little on jobs, wages and other core economic issues. If Democrats were listening to black voters, she said, “you’d be hearing more about economic opportunities.”

“It’s almost like they don’t get it,” Ms. Harley, 68, said. “The black women who carry the party, we were ignored and really highly disrespected, and our issues weren’t as important to the Democrats as they should be given that we’re the base of the Democratic Party.”

And the guy whose stump speeches every time are about how Trump is wrecking jobs and how he wants to bring back the good things Obama did is winning because that's what black and Hispanic voters want to get fixed.

Yes, Joe Biden is bullshit on Anita Hill, he's bullshit on the Clinton Crime Bill, he's bullshit on the Hyde Amendment.  But he's got a lot of juice with black folk especially for being Obama's veep, and he's talking jobs that are passing us by in the era of Trump's white supremacist bullshit.

Next week Trump's Mexico tariffs go into effect.  That's going to be a direct tax on American consumers and the folks who can afford it the least are gonna be black and Hispanic.  I want to hear Democrats shouting this fact from the mountaintops.

Everyone says the economy is "good".  It's not.  It's getting worse, and quickly, for those of us on the margins.  Joe Biden, for all his patriarchal Good Catholic space-invading carcerial state garbage, actually seems to understand that the most.

The point is, if other Dems hit this same message?  Other Dems who were, you know, better candidates overall than Biden, without sliding into "we've got to win back white working class America!" territory?

There's your path.

Last Call For Trump Trades Blows, Con't

Politico 2.0 notes that if Trump goes through with those 5% Mexico tariffs he threatened on Friday, it will be a massive tax hike on American consumers at the checkout counter.

If Trump's 5% tariff on Mexican goods takes effect later this month, the president's trade policies would constitute a bigger tax hike than Bill Clinton’s in 1993.

By the numbers: Tariffs already in place against Mexico will increase revenues by $69 billion, the Tax Foundation estimates — or about 0.32% of GDP. Add in the threatened 5% tax on Mexican imports, and that rises to about 0.40% of GDP.

That’s more than Clinton’s tax bill in 1993, which brought in revenues of about 0.36% of GDP after the first year, and just shy of George H.W. Bush’s increase in 1990, which amounted to 0.41% of GDP after year 1.

What to watch: If Trump follows through on his threats — 25% on all Chinese and Mexican imports — those revenues would amount to 1.45% of GDP. You’d have to go back to the 1968 tax hike for a bigger revenue measure, per data compiled by the Treasury Department.

That means 1.45% of GDP would be about $300 billion in new taxes on American consumers, or $1000 bucks per American.  That's a recipe for a GOP wipeout at the polls.

It’s no coincidence that most of the Republican senators who spoke out against Trump’s move late last week are up for reelection next year. Even many reliable Trump allies came out with rare expressions of opposition, knowing their own political survival is on the line.

Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, representing a state whose farming industry has already been hit by Trump’s trade policies, was one of the first Republicans to call foul on his latest tariffs. "While I support the need for comprehensive border security and a permanent fix to illegal immigration, this isn’t the right path forward," Ernst said in a statement. "The livelihoods of Iowa farmers and producers are at stake.”

Sen. Martha McSally of Arizona, who stood with Trump throughout her ill-fated 2018 campaign before being appointed to the state’s other seat, finally had enough. “While I support the President's intention of stopping unchecked illegal immigration, I do not support these types of tariffs, which will harm our economy and be passed onto Arizona small businesses and families,” she said.

The move is especially awkward for McSally, coming just days after the administration’s petty request for the Navy to keep the USS John McCain warship out of the president’s sight during his recent trip to Japan. McSally, who holds McCain’s seat, has been trying to win back moderates alienated by Trump’s actions without losing support from his sizable base of supporters back home.

Even in Texas, where Sen. John Cornyn looks to be in solid shape, the senator isn’t taking any political chances. Mexico is Texas’s top foreign trading partner, and the state would face the equivalent of $27 billion in taxes if all the threatened tariffs were implemented. “Senator Cornyn supports the president’s commitment to securing our border, but he opposes this across-the-board tariff which will disproportionately hurt Texas," a spokesman for the senator told The Dallas Morning News.

What’s notable about these defections is that two of the senators hail from border states, where fighting illegal immigration is a top priority. When a bipartisan majority of senators rebuked Trump for overreaching his authority to declare an emergency at the border, McSally and Cornyn both stuck with the president.

This time, however, the economic pain threatens to be so significant that they’re no longer willing to stand pat. With their political careers at stake, there wasn’t enough benefit to blindly stick with the president.

Again, I predict Trump will fold on these tariffs when Mitch McConnell makes it clear that even if should Trump somehow survive, he'll face a Democratic House AND Senate in 2021, and that's the end for Donald.

Democrats should already be running commercials in swing states over this.