WTF Border patrol Facebook group smears Latinx pols, jokes about migrant deaths, and more

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Now I wonder how many Republicans are going to be too dumb to spot the word satire on that page...

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Now I wonder how many Republicans are going to be too dumb to spot the word satire on that page...

You should have seen the comments that obscure little blog got when Michael Moore retweeted a piece about a GoFundMe for a privacy hedge between Canada and the US.

Canadian GoFundMe Raises $6B In Two Hours To Pay For Privacy Hedge Along Entire US Border

In a stunning rebuke of the 46th best president in American history, the United States’ northern neighbour shattered numerous crowdsourcing records today, when it raised billions and billions…

outabouter.com

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

This gives me so Borat like vibes:

 

[Kara Spengler]

"The Stench Was Horrendous": Pence Visited A Border Patrol Station Packed With Hundreds Of Immigrants In Cages









Your policy is creating this humanitarian crisis, you piece of shit. Again, we are responsible for their welfare the second you decide to cage them.

As can be guessed, twitter is having a field day with this not aligning with what he espouses.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Ocasio-Cortez hits DHS chief for ‘images of my violent rape’ in Facebook group

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on Thursday confronted acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan about a secret Facebook group in which Border Patrol agents shared racist and s…

thehill.com

This seems to be the original expose of the Border Patrol Facebook group, which I hadn't before seen

Inside the Secret Border Patrol Facebook Group Where Agents Joke About Migrant Deaths and Post Sexist Memes

The three-year-old group, which has roughly 9,500 members, shared derogatory comments about Latina lawmakers who plan to visit a controversial Texas detention facility on Monday, calling them “scum buckets” and “hoes.”

www.propublica.org

And here is the original Plain View Project database

Plain View Project

 

[Brenda Archer]

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Thread (about the UK but applicable elsewhere, I think):

 

[Ishina]

Ah by the way the official wording is "detention center", as being confirmed by a well known expert:

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

A group of American Jews has been protesting against Trump's camps using the slogan "Never again means now":

1,000 Protesters With Jewish Group Block Entrance to ICE Headquarters for Hours

Several protesters were arrested during the Tuesday afternoon demonstration, which was meant to disrupt the agency’s daily work.

www.thedailybeast.com

And here's another article about it, with a photograph of a Rabbi wearing a shirt "Resisting tyrants since Pharaoh":

As The US Debates “Concentration Camps,” These Jews Are Trying To Actually Shut Them Down

“My whole life I’ve been told these stories by my community,” said one young Jewish activist. “Those alarms are going off in my head.”

www.buzzfeednews.com

A tweet showing the cops lined up against the protesters, which looks really dark, grim and worrysome:

 

[Jolene Benoir]

A tweet showing the cops lined up against the protesters, which looks really dark, grim and worrysome:

Standard police procedure for any form of dissent. They are, very much, part and parcel of the structure designed to protect the powerful.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

US writers recall their migrant journeys in protest at asylum seekers' treatment

Khaled Hosseini, Ocean Vuong and Neil Gaiman among leading authors to sign a letter to the US Congress, urging action to remedy ‘atrocious conditions’

www.theguardian.com

A Call to Put an End to Inhumane Conditions at the Border

An open letter by Ariel Dorfman, Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Byrne, Neil Gaiman, Khaled Hosseini, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Wayétu Moore, Reza Aslan, and more.

www.thenation.com

 

[Arkady Arkright]

US writers recall their migrant journeys in protest at asylum seekers' treatment

Khaled Hosseini, Ocean Vuong and Neil Gaiman among leading authors to sign a letter to the US Congress, urging action to remedy ‘atrocious conditions’

www.theguardian.com

A Call to Put an End to Inhumane Conditions at the Border

An open letter by Ariel Dorfman, Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Byrne, Neil Gaiman, Khaled Hosseini, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Wayétu Moore, Reza Aslan, and more.

www.thenation.com

I hope someone sent a copy to our ever-more-xenophobic UK Home Office.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

I hope someone sent a copy to our ever-more-xenophobic UK Home Office.

With Priti Patel (God help us) as Home Secretary, I doubt it would do much good, though I can't imagine her remaining in office long -- she's clearly there until the UK leaves the EU or the Conservatives leave office, whichever comes sooner.

I'm really not sure what to do about the Home Office. They've been absolutely horrible for as long as I can remember, going back to the 1980s -- it's a combination of instututional racism, racist immigration policies, and catastrophic mismanagment (I've done voluntary work at a resource centre for asylum seekers, helping them deal with the Home Office, and I speak with some feeling here!).

 

[Arkady Arkright]

I'm really not sure what to do about the Home Office. They've been absolutely horrible for as long as I can remember, going back to the 1980s -- it's a combination of instututional racism, racist immigration policies, and catastrophic mismanagment

Given that they behave like this regardless of political party or minister in power, it has to be their senior civil servants - needs a damn good clear-out.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Given that they behave like this regardless of political party or minister in power, it has to be their senior civil servants - needs a damn good clear-out.

They need immigration to cease to be such a contentious political issue. Part of the problem is that successive Home Secretaries keep on announcing new initiatives and reforms and whatever, in response to whatever alien bees are invading and infesting the bonnets of the editors of the right-wing press that week and in response to whatever catastrophes and disruption were caused by the last-but-one set of reforms , so they're in a constant state of upheaval and reorganisation, and no corporate memory ever seems to develop -- just nasty and panicky impulses from overstretched staff trying to learn new systems and byzantine rules and regulations as they try to process the ever-expanding backlog of cases.

It's like Universal Credit, or large parts of the criminal justice system, only on steroids. I used to feel quite sorry for some of the assessors and decision makers who were trying to process the applications for asylum -- they struck me as well-intentioned and reasonable public servants who were struggling, without much success, with a massive backlog and ill-conceived and labyrinthine rules that increasingly seemed designed to make life difficult even for asylum seekers in general, even genuine ones, rather than to screen out fraudulent applications.

However, that's not half as sorry as I felt for the luckless Kurds and Pathans and Iraqis and Libyans and Somalis and Zimbabweans whom I was trying to help accessing the assistance they so badly needed and whose lives were on hold while the Home Office tried to get a grip.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

They need immigration to cease to be such a contentious political issue.

What makes you think that this is what politicians want to achieve? The immigrants are a good scapegoat to divert the rightful angriness of the people away from the rich. Working as intended.

 

[Rose Karuna]

What makes you think that this is what politicians want to achieve? The immigrants are a good scapegoat to divert the rightful angriness of the people away from the rich. Working as intended.

Look at these terrible immigrants taking your jobs and crowding your schools and hospitals. Don't look here where the richest 1% own half the worlds wealth and contribute next to nothing to the public good.

This is an interesting read: Paradise Papers leak reveals secrets of the world elite's hidden wealth

They used their power to manipulate the laws so that tax evasion is legal, it doesn't mean that it's moral.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

What makes you think that this is what politicians want to achieve? The immigrants are a good scapegoat to divert the rightful angriness of the people away from the rich. Working as intended.

I disagree with this analysis, though not for the obvious reason.

To my mind, blaming any human agents -- immigrants, the rich, welfare scroungers, the 1% , the few, or whoever -- as a group for any perceived unfairness or injustices in society suggests that the economic system as a whole is a neutral tool that would benefit everyone if it wasn't distorted by a selfish and undeserving group taking more than their fair share and spoiling it for all the rest.

This ignores the fact that inequalities and unfairness are inherent in the global capitalist economic system, which is the environment in which we all of us live since we have no choice to do otherwise. They are features rather than bugs, and to my mind the best a government can do is attempt to mitigate the worst of their ill-effects in the particular country, in rather the same way it can do its best to mitigate the effects of the local climate on the country (so prepare for seasonal droughts, monsoons, snow or whatever, as appropriate) but can't do much about the climate, or climate change, on its own.

Nor can it, of course, exercise its sovereignty by passing laws -- desirable though they may be in themselves -- reducing carbon emissions and greenhouse gasses, and then declare that it's solved the problems of climate change in one country.

This is complicated by the fact that "fair" in this context can mean three different, and sometimes mutually contradictory, things. Is a fair share an equal share, so fair in the sense that everyone gets the same, or a proportionate share, so fair in the sense that if I contribute more, I get more, or fair in the sense everyone gets what an impartial provider says they need (so the NHS will provide me with the medical care my doctor considers necessary, regardless of my ability to pay) ?

All of those are perfectly reasonable definitions of fair, depending on the context, but I think a lot of political arguments faare really about disagreements about which definition of "fair" to use in any particular set of circumstances.

I stress the point because one of my big worries about Jeremy Corbyn's economic rhetoric is that when he promises that Labour will ensure that the economy will work in the interests of the many, not the few, he's promising something no more realistic than was the promise of a great big beautiful wall for which Mexico would pay, and that when the international economic system refuses to respect the democratic decision of the British people that it should work the way the Labour Party manifesto says it should, we'll need someone to blame, be it immigrants or someone else.

To my mind, this failure to acknowledge the limits of government power to make significant changes to the workings to the international economy, and thus to the workings of the domestic economy in any any way that has predictable medium to long term effects without also producing plenty of unpredictable (and probably unwanted) ones is, while understandable on the part of government, absolutely bedevils serious political discussion and underlies most of the nonsense we've heard recently about sovereignty and taking back control, and is responsible for successive governments making promises that simply can't be kept because they're promising things that aren't under their control.

The movement of money round the various interlocking national and international economies isn't controlled by any particular agents or organisaitons -- corrupt banks, globalists, neo-Liberal Zionists, the Davos elite, George Soros or the Illuminati. Rather, it's the result of countless individuals and businesses, and their automated trading systems, taking their own individual decisions -- good or bad -- about transactions that are important to them, and the cumulative effect of all those transactions on each other.

It's no more predictable nor controllable other than the weather in London on September 1st, and for the same reasons -- while the underlying rules and mechanisms that determine are reasonably well understood (though much better in the case of the weather, which is essentially simple fluid mechanics) there are too many variables to make efforts to control it or even to predict it with any degree of accuracy.

/stops ranting about her favourite hobby-horse, at least for the time being.

 

[Jolene Benoir]

Trump asylum ban is illegal, federal judge rules

While I see this as a good thing, I have no doubt that Trump and company will continue to violate the law and/or continue to push it so that they can get it to the SC (that has been compromised). Then, there are the Federal Judges that have been installed by "the Republican regime" many of which have less love of the law than partisanship.

McConnell is one of the worst things to happen to our perception of and independence of the judicial system. We aren't seeing the effect now, but we will and it is going to be bad. Many of them are not even qualified. They were nominated purely because they are willing to circumvent the law and they are being approved at breakneck speed.

Republicans are playing the long game.

 

[Jolene Benoir]

Man dies in front of 11-year-old daughter at US border detention camp

While it is indeed possible that he would have died, even with medical assistance, despite being 32 years old, what are the odds that he wasn't given proper, or any, medical assistance? In this atmosphere I would put it fairly high. We will never know because those who have the means to tell us will likely not.

It's about CYA. Corporations are running these facilities. Corporations that only care about the bottom line. It doesn't really matter to some that these are human beings.

Again, I keep repeating: Once they are in our custody we are responsible for their welfare. Yes, some people will die, either due to previous unknown medical reasons or due to their arduous journey, but we, their family deserve to know and I don't think we will get answers, unless perhaps some high profile candidate/politicians begins to demand answers. Even then, I'm not sure we will get them and I'm fairly positive that we won't be told whether he received medical aid or we will be lied to. If we can have surveillance everywhere we go, I want to see video of any attempted aid. Only then, would I believe that they had tried.