Tag Archives: immigration

Jeff Sessions Announces a New Crackdown on Immigrants and "Filth"

by ClaritaSambell Posted on April 11, 2017

Mother Jones

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This morning, Attorney General Jeff Sessions visited the US-Mexico border in Nogales, Arizona, to announce a new get-tough approach to immigration enforcement, directing federal prosecutors to pursue harsher charges against undocumented immigrants. “For those that continue to seek improper and illegal entry into this country,” Sessions said, “be forewarned: This is a new era. This is the Trump era.”

In his remarks, Sessions said nonviolent immigrants who enter the country illegally for a second time will no longer be charged with a misdemeanor—they’ll be charged with a felony. He also recommended that prosecutors charge “criminal aliens” with document fraud and aggravated identity theft, which carries a two-year minimum sentence. In January, President Donald Trump expanded the definition of which immigrants can be considered “criminal” to include anyone who has committed “a chargeable criminal offense,” which could include sneaking across the border.

As he proposed stiffer penalties for nonviolent immigrants, Sessions also targeted gangs and cartels “that turn cities and suburbs into war zones, that rape and kill innocent citizens and who profit by smuggling poison and other human beings across our borders.” Invoking unusually severe language in the written version of his announcement, Sessions proclaimed, “It is here, on this sliver of land, where we first take our stand against this filth.”

In contrast to the dire picture Sessions painted, crime rates in American border cities have been dropping for at least five years. Even after a year of increased violent crime—which officials said had nothing to do with cartels or spillover violence—El Paso, Texas, is among the safest of its size in the nation.

Sessions also promised to hire 125 new judges to address a backlog of immigration cases and prioritized the prosecution of offenses such as assaulting immigration authorities and smuggling more than three undocumented immigrants into the country. He urged prosecutors to crack down on people who reenter the United States after being deported. “The lawlessness, the abdication of the duty to enforce our immigration laws, and the catch and release practices of old are over,” Sessions stated.

Frank Sharry, the executive director of America’s Voice Education Fund, an immigration reform advocacy organization, issued a rebuke of Sessions’ statement. “Attorney General Sessions is grandstanding at the border in an attempt to look tough and scare immigrants. It’s yet another example of the Trump Administration treating all immigrants as threats and as criminals.”

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Jeff Sessions Announces a New Crackdown on Immigrants and "Filth"

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Leaked Email: President Trump’s Modeling Agency Is Shutting Down

by SFTKayleigh Posted on April 10, 2017

Mother Jones

One of President Donald Trump’s favorite businesses will go the way of Trump Steaks, Trump University, Trump Airlines, and Trump Magazine: his embattled New York modeling firm, Trump Model Management, has officially told its business associates around the world to prepare for its closure, according to an email obtained by Mother Jones.

Over the weekend, Corinne Nicolas, president of Trump Models, informed industry colleagues of the pending closure of the 18-year-old agency, in which Trump owns an 85 percent stake (according to his most recent financial disclosure). “The Trump Organization is choosing to exit the modeling industry,” Nicolas wrote in the email. “On the heels of the recent sale of the Miss Universe Organization, the company is choosing to focus on their core businesses in the real estate, golf and hospitality space.” (The Trump Organization sold the Miss Universe Organization, which also runs the Miss USA beauty pageant, to the talent agency WME-IMG about 18 months ago, following a controversy over then-candidate Trump’s remarks about Mexican immigrants.)

Mother Jones reported last week that the firm was on the brink of collapse, and the New York Post confirmed on Friday that Trump’s agency was indeed shutting down.

In her email, Nicolas did not provide a specific date on which operations will cease. Trump Models employees had assured Mother Jones as recently as last Wednesday that it was operating as normal and that the company was “of course” open for new business.

“Trump Models, during its 18-year run, was an amazing success and we are immensely proud of the opportunities that we have provided to so many talented individuals,” Nicolas wrote.

Mother Jones reported before the election that Trump’s modeling agency had a history of employing foreign models who said they violated immigration rules by working in the United States without work visas. That investigation also detailed how Trump Models forced its recruits to pay sky-high rent to live in crammed living quarters, while levying a dizzying number of fees and expenses on its talent that left some models in deep debt to the agency.

Former Trump model Rachel Blais appeared in this Elle fashion spread, published in September 2004, while working for Trump’s agency without a proper visa. Read Mother Jones‘ complete investigation here. Elle

Since Trump’s election, models and staff members have been fleeing his agency. Industry sources told Mother Jones last week that this was a direct result of Trump’s divisive politics, which have made his brand toxic in the modeling world.

Recent departures include modeling stars Katie Moore and Mia Kang and veterans Shirley Mallmann and Maggie Rizzer. The rest of Trump Models’ talent must now find new representation at other agencies. Nicolas promised business partners she would “be here to assist you throughout the process.”

Trump founded his modeling agency in 1999, augmenting his business brand with what would become one of the top modeling agencies in the country. Since his election, ethics experts and others have focused on how Trump might use the presidency to benefit his businesses. At least in the case, his presidency appears to have had the opposite effect.

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Leaked Email: President Trump’s Modeling Agency Is Shutting Down

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How the Ebola Crisis Helped Launch Donald Trump’s Political Career

by GabrielWithrow Posted on April 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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In July 2014, as the largest Ebola outbreak in history was ravaging West Africa, Donald Trump took to Twitter to complain that two sick American health workers were being flown back to the United States for treatment. “Ebola patient will be brought to the U.S. in a few days—now I know for sure that our leaders are incompetent,” wrote the future leader of free world. “KEEP THEM OUT OF HERE!” Over the months that followed, Trump would tweet about the outbreak more than 50 times.

Trump’s social-media outbursts were among the earliest shots fired in the political war over Ebola. The timing of the Ebola outbreak could not have been more propitious for Republicans, many of whom echoed Trump’s calls for a temporary travel ban. In the run-up to the 2014 midterm elections, the specter of a lethal African virus being spread through the United States by migrants stoked fears not only among the GOP base, but also among many voters who leaned Democratic. By October, two-thirds of respondents to a Washington Post/ABC News poll said they favored restricting travel from Ebola-affected countries.

I thought about Trump’s Ebola tweets last year as I was completing a memoir about my work treating Ebola in rural Liberia at the height of the outbreak. By early 2016, the Republican presidential primaries were dominating the headlines, and Ebola had long since faded from the front page. But the two events seemed connected to me; it was clear the outbreak had taken its toll on public debate.

St. Martin’s Press

The naked and brutal nativism on display at right-wing political rallies obviously had much deeper roots than Ebola. But from my standpoint, the outbreak helped legitimize a kind of language previously relegated to the fringes of American politics. Looking back on the campaign, I firmly believe Ebola was one of the key events that made Trump’s candidacy possible.

Insofar as Trump expresses a coherent political philosophy, those expressions can be found not in policy papers or major addresses, but in his tweets. When examining Trump’s tweets on the Ebola outbreak, the main features of his approach are plainly evident. It’s all right there: The shallowness, willful ignorance, mean-spiritedness, and empty boasting infuse every 140-character burst. And Trump’s views on the issue received massive media attention. His tweets were written up everywhere from Breitbart to USA Today to Mother Jones. He elaborated on them in his regular Fox News appearances.

Trump’s very first tweet is as clear a display as one could imagine of the kind of arch-nativism that would animate his campaign and the first few months of his presidency. It came on July 31, in response to news that two American medical workers infected with Ebola were being airlifted out of West Africa to the United States for advanced care in the most secure conditions (so-called Biosafety Level 4 facilities). Right from the start, he highlighted the central animus of his foreign policy in an all-caps summary, even when, as in this case, THEM might be US citizens.

Health officials assured the public that Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol—the doctor and nurse who had braved the outbreak to serve at a hospital on the outskirts of Monrovia—posed little risk of spreading the disease in the United States. But Trump wasn’t satisfied. “The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back,” he wrote on August 1. “People that go to far away places to help out are great—but must suffer the consequences!” In other words, the Ebola fighters’ “greatness” didn’t override Trump’s desire to see them suffer because of their selfless actions.

By that time, it was clear that the outbreak was overwhelming the governments of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, and that without substantial international help, the virus would likely spread unchecked across borders. It could turn what was already a substantial regional problem into a profoundly more complicated (and expensive) international crisis. And it meant that resource-wealthy nations needed to provide help to contain the spread.

Trump certainly didn’t want to treat Ebola patients in the United States, but he did initially seem to agree that Americans should provide some sort of medical assistance to the affected countries. “A doctor on NBC Nightly News agreed with me—we should not bring Ebola into our country through two patients, but should bring docs to them,” he wrote on August 4. It was a bizarre statement for someone who just three days earlier had said that doctors who put themselves in harm’s way should be left to “suffer the consequences.” By September, he seemed to have changed his mind entirely about sending help. “Can you believe that the U.S. will be sending 3000 troops to Africa to help with Ebola,” he wrote. “They will come home infected? We have enough problems.”

Listen to Steven Hatch discuss the Ebola crisis on a recent episode of our Inquiring Minds podcast:

Trump wasn’t simply calling for patients infected with Ebola to be excluded from the country. In one August tweet, he wrote, “The U.S. must immediately stop all flights from EBOLA infected countries or the plague will start and spread inside our ‘borders.’ Act fast!” Two days later, he extended his proposed travel ban to all of West Africa. “The bigger problem with Ebola is all of the people coming into the U.S. from West Africa who may be infected with the disease,” he wrote. “STOP FLIGHTS!”

The Ebola panic in the United States reached new heights in early October, after an infected Liberian man named Thomas Eric Duncan entered the country. He was symptom-free at the time of his flight but became ill several days after arriving. He sought treatment at a Dallas hospital, which led to two nurses contracting the virus. Trump, who would spend much of the 2016 campaign portraying immigrants as rapists and murderers, used the opportunity to imply that Duncan came to the United States with sinister motives. “The Ebola patient who came into our country knew exactly what he was doing,” Trump tweeted. “Came into contact with over 100 people. Here we go—I told you so!”

The Duncan chapter was without any question the low point in the US Ebola story. Multiple mistakes occurred not only in Dallas, but in Liberia as well, as Duncan slipped through the screens designed to prevent people exposed to the virus from leaving the country. (He had accompanied the daughter of his landlord to a hospital in Monrovia, and she later died of the disease.) Nearly everything that could have gone wrong with Duncan did go wrong. Nevertheless, the only people who contracted the disease from him were the two nurses who cared for him. They, in turn, passed it along to no one. Duncan died, but both nurses made full recoveries.

An Ebola infection on US soil certainly isn’t a trivial matter, but it was by no means the calamity that Trump, along with tens of millions of his fellow Americans, assumed it was. Public health experts, including Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, repeatedly called for calm, arguing that the United States was well prepared to contain the virus and that closing down borders would simply make the outbreak harder to manage. President Barack Obama echoed these statements. Trump accused the CDC of lying about the threat posed by the disease. He portrayed Frieden’s and Obama’s leadership as feckless, even though Frieden’s assessment would prove to be considerably more accurate than Trump’s.

Trump’s tweets reached a fever pitch on October 23 and 24, when Craig Spencer, a returning doctor who had treated Ebola patients in Guinea, fell ill with the disease in New York City. According to Spencer’s account, the moment he became symptomatic he isolated himself and informed public health authorities. Before he became symptomatic, he was a threat to no one, and once he did, his isolation ensured that he was not a threat. If Duncan’s situation was a worst-case scenario, Spencer’s was exactly how the experts had hoped to deal with travelers from the affected countries.

This did not stop Trump from becoming unhinged, tweeting about the incident seven times in two days. He railed against what he regarded as the foolishness of US policy and accused Spencer of being “selfish” for having the temerity to eat at a restaurant prior to becoming ill. That a billionaire who has never made any appreciable personal sacrifices for others could have the chutzpah to make such charges is revealing. It also foreshadowed his temper tantrums against the family of Humayun Khan, a Muslim US Army captain of Pakistani descent who died trying to thwart a car bombing in Iraq. Trump publicly attacked Khan’s parents last year after they criticized his anti-Muslim rhetoric.

But if Trump’s outbursts against Spencer reveal his weird personal accounting of what constitutes altruism, his final Ebola tweet was a clear portent of future policy. On November 10, just as the news of the West African outbreak was starting to recede, he repeated his dire warnings of the threat of Ebola on US soil by noting that an infected person can spread it to two others “at a minimum.” He then added, “STOP THE FLIGHTS! NO VISAS FROM EBOLA STRICKEN COUNTRIES!”

On the campaign trail, Trump infamously called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” ostensibly in an effort to prevent terrorism. Once in office, he issued executive orders suspending immigration by refugees and citizens of several majority-Muslim countries. Perhaps given enough time, new circumstances will allow him to revisit his 2014 threat and add sub-Saharan Africa to the list.

Trump’s Ebola tweets are useful not only for their ability to illuminate how subsequent events that shocked the political establishment came to be, but also because they provide a clear road map for how he will respond to the next biological crisis. Ebola may have been the most dramatic such crisis of the past generation, but others have also generated substantial alarm. The swine flu pandemic of 2009, the avian influenza outbreaks in East Asia, and the SARS epidemic are just a few of the cases that have required international cooperation.

How will Trump deal with these unforeseen hazards? Will his instinct to resort to border-closing as a first-line policy lead to more suffering? Will his penchant for denigrating people who choose to serve others intimidate health care workers who might otherwise volunteer in such moments? Will he continue to reject any form of scientific expertise?

We’re not even 100 days into the new administration, but the evidence so far is not reassuring. Whatever the next biological agent, Trump may well take a dangerous situation and make it worse—both abroad and at home.

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How the Ebola Crisis Helped Launch Donald Trump’s Political Career

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Cacti, Foxes, Solar Panels, and Other Bids to Unmake Trump’s Wall

by FanniePulsford Posted on March 31, 2017

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published in Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Of all President Donald Trump’s promises, his signature wall along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border has drawn especially creative opposition.

Mexicans formed a human barrier in protest. Architects drafted a design for a powerful 1,000-mile energy-generating barrier outfitted with solar panels and wind turbines.

And then there’s Sarah Zapolsky and her friend April Linton, two Washington, D.C.-area social scientists. Their quaint concepts include a wall of cacti and a barrier of affordable homes.

But they had more in mind than quirky commentary.

Their ideas are part of a quiet, slightly subversive strategy. A bureaucratic pothole for the border speed bump. Call it guerrilla bidding.

The two women are federal employees who know something about government contracting—and how to potentially gum it up. Zapolsky, who gives her age as “old enough to know better,” works at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Linton, 56, is at the State Department.

Armed with an insider’s understanding of how procurement works, Zapolsky knows that the government must review and respond to legitimate bids and related questions. That can cause drag on the process—exactly their plan.

Approaching the deadline set by the Trump administration to submit “white papers” for 30-foot-tall concrete and “other” border wall prototypes, the two women prepared their pitches. On Tuesday, the agency pushed back its deadline for submissions a third time—to April 4.

Getting past the stringent requirements for competitive bidders—who must have completed within the past five years similar projects of at least $25 million—poses a challenge to their plot. In a nod to these unusual political times, the agency also made the uncommon request for details about prospective contractors’ experience with “politically contentious design-build projects.”

But that hasn’t discouraged Zapolsky and Linton from dropping rumble-strip questions on the agency, to which it is supposed to respond:

“Our design includes stovepipe cacti. Would it be okay to use fake ones for the prototype?”
“Could we build a wall of solar panels, which meets the proposed border wall requirement, sell the energy generated back to Mexico, and have that count as that country paying for the wall?”
“Prototype demolition: Does this refer to taking down the wall after it is built should the administration change and decide the Wall is a ridiculous idea?”

On Tuesday, Customs and Border Protection posted its responses to questions. The agency reposted a truncated version of one of Zapolsky’s questions: “Does this refer to taking down the wall?” Its response: “Yes, if the line item is exercised.”

One proposal for a border barrier would include fennec foxes to aid security forces. Gil Cohen Magen/ZUMA

Trump’s champions have complained of so-called Deep State defiance from within the federal bureaucracy to undermine his efforts. Zapolsky and Linton, who met while working at the Department of Homeland Security, swear to no such membership. Their resistance stems from their concerns about the impact a wall may have and how their taxpayer money is spent. The two are acting as private citizens, not public employees, they say.

“This isn’t ‘deep’ government,” Zapolsky said. “Never confuse dissent with disloyalty. I’m all about making this country remaining great. This (wall) isn’t the way to do it.”

Solicitation saboteurs

By law, these would-be solicitation saboteurs can’t work for the government and win a federal contract. But they’re not interested in getting a dollar out of the border wall design bids, which could total $600 million.

The goal is to draw a formal complaint on the agency request that could slam the brakes on the bidding process. The daughter of a “government girl” who opposed McCarthyism, Zapolsky took umbrage that Customs and Border Protection initially planned to give the public just four days to create and submit designs for a border wall.

“I was so annoyed that it had to be a big ugly concrete wall,” she said. “I had to do something, but it had to be something creative—and legal.”

Then it came to her: clog the system. She gave it a name—#ArtThatWall—and registered as an “interested vendor” on the federal contracting website, fbo.gov. She turned next to Facebook to share her strategy.

A wave of creativity streamed back: Bead curtains. Baseball diamonds every quarter-mile with Fenway-like Green Monster walls (which match the Border Patrol’s green uniforms). A giant line of theater stages; one version includes, at random intervals, actors performing the Act V “Wall” scenes from Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Zapolsky’s 12-year-old son proposed building a wall out of Legos.

Zapolsky’s 12-year-old son proposed building a wall out of Legos. Reveal created a Lego model (not to scale). Andrew Becker/Reveal

With a nod to her current job at HUD aiming to end childhood homelessness, Zapolsky chose a wall of houses along the border. And, because, you know, barging through someone’s living room is rude.

Linton, who has studied immigration, saw the Facebook post and got busy, too. Her expansive “Beautiful Borders” vision is a wall of stovepipe cactus—which can grow to 30 feet. Landscaped with hiking trails and nearby interpretive centers jointly staffed by bilingual park rangers from Mexico and the United States, the wall would be patrolled by security forces aided by fennec foxes. The vulpine desert dwellers would have training “to identify the scent and body language of smugglers, terrorists and haters.”

“It’s big. It’s beautiful. Everybody will love it. Mexicans will build it,” a draft proposal ends.

As required, it offers a “concrete” solution.

If Zapolsky knows how many potential guerrilla bidders she’s encouraged with her Facebook call to submit designs, she isn’t saying. The two think they’ve already played a part, however minor, to stall Trump’s wall.

Caught off-guard by the level of what Customs and Border Protection deemed “industry” interest after its late February notice, the agency delayed its original March 6 target date to release its requests for proposal. About 725 construction companies, engineers, consultants and would-be vendors registered their interest in the project, Zapolsky and Linton included. The agency has outlined a two-month time frame to review and select winning bids with contracts to be awarded in early June, about two months later than first announced.

The women claimed the delays as a “joyful and respectful” but small victory, Zapolsky said, though what effect they had on the decision to push back the release of requests is unclear.

Customs and Border Protection declined to comment. Rowdy Adams, a retired Border Patrol agent involved in earlier fence projects, said Customs and Border Protection had no choice but to slow down with all the public interest.

“That’s why the brakes were pumped,” he said.

Linton waxed optimistic that, once submitted, their proposals might get some attention.

“Maybe somebody from DHS actually wants to hear from me,” Linton said before the agency posted the requests. “It feels like we’re winning and we haven’t even submitted our concept yet.”

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Cacti, Foxes, Solar Panels, and Other Bids to Unmake Trump’s Wall

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Trump’s Plan to Make America Great Again Using Cheap Foreign Labor

by CrystleAshton Posted on March 14, 2017

Mother Jones

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At Porterville Citrus, an orange harvesting and packing operation in California’s Tulare Valley, CEO Jim Phillips has been growing increasingly nervous over the past five years. He’s found it harder and harder to marshal enough local workers to pick his oranges on time—up to 20 percent of the fruit has been left to rot on the trees. This year he decided not to take any chances. He hired a contractor to supply his company with 120 Mexican guestworkers under the H-2A farmworker visa program. “It is a little bit more expensive,” he says, “but the quality and reliability is worth something to us. We know we can get the product harvested.”

Only about 4 percent of America’s 2.5 million farmworkers in 2015 came in on temporary visas—most of the rest were undocumented—but these numbers are poised to skyrocket if President Donald Trump carries out his promises to build a border wall and deport millions of undocumented immigrants. Trump has signaled that he wants to cut red tape in the H-2A program, but farmworkers’ advocates fear a loosening of the rules could make guestworkers even more vulnerable to potential labor abuses than they already are. “The H-2 programs are inherently problematic,” says Bruce Goldstein, president of a nonprofit called Farmworker Justice, because the workers “tend not to want to challenge unfair or illegal conduct—and there are a lot of violations.”

Despite campaigning on the unsettled claim that immigrants depress wages and compete with American citizens for jobs, Trump has embraced the use of temporary foreign workers. He has used low-wage guestworkers himself at Mar-a-Lago, and his son Eric petitioned the Labor Department in recent months to import 29 H-2A workers to tend his Virginia winery. Trump’s transition teams for the departments of Labor and Agriculture are stacked with members of trade groups and right-wing think tanks who support guestworker programs.

A draft executive order leaked to the press last month called for “efficient processing” of H-2A visas. The order “does suggest an interest in modernizing the H-2A program, which we would welcome,” says Jason Resnick, a vice-president of Western Growers, whose CEO serves on Trump’s agricultural advisory board. “We think the administration is well aware of the importance of the H-2A program to agriculture, so we are optimistic that there will be proposals forthcoming to make the program more efficient and streamlined and less costly and burdensome.”

The number of H-2A visas has roughly doubled since 2011 as it stands, driven by what farmers say are chronic labor shortages. The children of aging farmhands gravitate toward higher-paying work, and stricter border enforcement and an improving Mexican economy means fewer immigrant workers are available. Some farmers have turned to mechanization to hold down labor costs, but harvesting California’s fresh fruits and vegetables often requires a human touch. Western Growers says the crews of its farmer members are 20 percent understaffed.

Before hiring guestworkers, farmers have to show that they can’t find enough Americans to do the work at the “adverse effect wage,” which is basically the average wage in a given state for a given type of farm work. “US workers are not applying to take those H-2A jobs,” says Western Growers’ Resnick. “The ones that do generally don’t last a week, let alone the whole season.”

Some labor advocates say the shortages are a product of inferior wages. They point to Christopher Ranch, a 4,000-acre farm in Gilroy, California, which at the end of last year was short 50 workers it needed to peel and package garlic. In January, the company announced that it would raise its farmhand wage from $11 to $13 an hour—an 18 percent increase—and boost it to $15 in 2018. Soon it had a waitlist of 150 people. “I knew the pay raise would help,” ranch VP Ken Christopher told the Los Angeles Times, “but I had no idea it would solve our labor problem.”

But farmers insist they can’t pay wages high enough to attract non-immigrants. Labor economists tend to agree: “I don’t think we will ever get US workers in the field, period,” says P.L. Martin, a professor emeritus of agriculture and resource economics at UC-Davis. In America, he says, labor makes up about 40 percent of the cost of producing fresh fruits and vegetables, and that puts the farmers at a disadvantage to foreign rivals paying lower wages. But in less-competitive sectors—fresh-picked strawberries, fresh lettuce, etc—farmers could afford to pay more, according to a 2010 USDA report Martin co-authored.

In any case, H-2A workers are typically viewed as a last resort by American farmers, who must pay the cost of transporting and housing them. They cannot easily adjust an H-2A workforce according to a farm’s day-to-day needs—and they can’t employ any guestworker for more than three years at a time. There is one advantage, though: “We really can control the quality of the harvesting even better than we can with our local farm labor contractors,” says Phillips of Porterville Citrus. “Nobody is being overbearing, but if the workers are not productive, they can be sent back. So their incentive is to do a good job.”

Which is okay so long as the boss is fair. But the imbalance of power can also enable horrific abuses. A 2015 investigation by BuzzFeed found that thousands of H-2 visa holders had been badly exploited: deprived of fair pay, imprisoned, starved, beaten, raped, and threatened with deportation if they complained. And guestworkers seldom report labor abuses. When they do, advocates say, they lack the resources to fight for restitution. Former Rep. Charles Rangel once attacked the H-2 program as “the closest thing I’ve ever seen to slavery.”

The United States last experimented with large-scale use of guestworkers during WWII, when Mexican braceros labored on American farms. Approximately 200,000 braceros entered the United States each year between 1948 and 1964, according to historian Mae M. Ngai. On paper, the program offered legal protections for workers, just as the H-2A program does today, but abuses were common—a study by the Pan American Union noted that “workers who complain are regarded as agitators and shipped back to Mexico.”

Any plan to bring in more guestworkers will likely face resistance from left-leaning labor groups and right-wing nativists alike. Breitbart News has written critically about the use of H-2As, as well as H-2B visas for non-agricultural workers. As a senator, Attorney General Jeff Sessions voted against a bill to loosen restrictions on the H-2A program.

Yet guestworkers do have a certain appeal on the right. “You are probably going to see more reliance on it, which is better than just allowing employers to hire people who come across the border illegally,” says Ira Mehlman, media director for a group called Federation for American Immigration Reform. “It eliminates some of the exploitation that comes just with the widespread hiring of illegal aliens.”

Worker advocates were less sanguine. Employers control the guestworkers’ visas, making it very difficult for the workers to switch jobs. And while undocumented immigrants tend to migrate to places where they have friends and family, guestworkers often live in remote areas without support networks. “It should be that they are significantly better protected” than undocumented immigrants “and have access to better jobs, and that’s what the migrants come in expecting,” says Cathleen Caron, the founder of a farmworker advocacy group called Justice in Motion. But “in the end, everybody gets exploited equally.”

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Trump’s Plan to Make America Great Again Using Cheap Foreign Labor

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Trump’s Other Executive Orders That May Target Immigrants

by BethanyMcCary Posted on February 23, 2017

Mother Jones

Controversy continues to boil over President Trump’s executive order imposing an immigration ban and his policies aimed at aggressively deporting undocumented immigrants. Two other executive orders signed by Trump earlier this month, focused on fighting crime, have gotten less attention—but sections of them also appear to target America’s immigrant population, a former Justice Department official says.

Trump’s executive order concerning crime reduction and public safety instructs the Department of Justice to establish a new task force to crack down on illegal immigration, drug trafficking, and violent crime. Among its duties will be to “identify deficiencies” in existing laws, make legislative recommendations, and improve data collection on crime trends. Another Trump order, focused on combating international cartels that conduct human trafficking and drug smuggling, directs the DOJ to develop a strategy against these groups that “have spread throughout the nation” and “have been known to commit brutal murders and rapes,” driving “crime, corruption, violence, and misery.”

Thomas Abt, a criminologist at the Harvard Kennedy School and the former chief of staff for the DOJ’s Office of Justice Programs, says these executive orders involve the usual activities of the DOJ, but also imply strategic priorities that are misguided and troubling. “Here in the United States, I think a connection between immigration—legal or illegal—and violent crime is not one that there’s any evidence for,” says Abt. One order suggests that increased drug trafficking by cartels is responsible for a “resurgence in deadly drug abuse and a corresponding rise in violent crime,” but there’s little evidence to support that, says Abt. He notes that the current opioid and heroine crisis took hold well before the recent spike in violent crime in some US cities.

There is also no evidence to suggest that cartels are more active in the US now than they have been historically. And while mayhem from the drug cartels ravages Mexico and central American countries, and is played up by anti-immigration pundits, violence in the US connected to the cartels is nowhere near that scale. Research published in 2015, for example, found that even at the height of cartel violence in 2010, there was “no notable increase” in crime along the US side of the border that correlated with the spike in murders in Mexico.

“The way it’s being framed as this new Bogeyman is just not accurate,” Abt says. Moreover, the executive orders “suggest that what’s coming next is not a smart, data-driven approach to these issues. They suggest the beginning of a fear-based effort.”

Abt sees a potential return to 1980s and 1990s tough-on-crime policies—championed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions—that have been eschewed as ineffective by leading crime reduction experts. With the call to “assess” the allocation of money and resources to federal agencies’ for fighting international criminal orgs, Abt also says there could be a shifting of resources by the Trump administration from proven crime-reduction efforts to ideologically based efforts.

Perhaps most troubling, Abt says, is a Trump directive to publish a quarterly report on the criminal convictions of people involved with international criminal organizations. This could be used as a pretext to discriminate against immigrants—similar to how the threat of terrorism is being used to justify banning travel by immigrants from the seven Muslim-majority countries.

“It’s clearly designed to marshal public opinion,” Abt says. “This is Willy-Horton-style, everybody-get-scared type of politics.”

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Trump’s Other Executive Orders That May Target Immigrants

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The Private Prison Industry Is Licking Its Chops Over Trump’s Deportation Plans

by robertalash4 Posted on February 21, 2017

Mother Jones

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Immigration agents sparked panic across the country last week, when a series of high-profile operations made it clear that a new era of crackdowns on undocumented immigrants had begun. Coming on the heels of a couple of major executive orders on immigration, the arrests and deportations were a very public reminder of President Donald Trump’s promise to deport upwards of 2 million immigrants upon taking office.

But given that America’s detention system for immigrants has been running at full capacity for some time now, where is the president going to put all of these people before deporting them?

In new jails, for starters. In the same executive order that called for the construction of a southern border wall, Trump instructed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to build out its sprawling network of immigration detention centers. Starting “immediately,” his order said, ICE should construct new facilities, lease space for immigrants alongside inmates in existing local jails, and sign new contracts—likely with private prison companies. The scale of that expansion became clearer on February 5, when the Los Angeles Times reported on a memo handed down in late January from White House immigration experts to top Homeland Security officials. The document called for raising the number of immigrants ICE incarcerates daily, nationwide, to 80,000 people.

Last year, ICE detained more than 352,000 people. The number of detainees held each day, typically between 31,000 and 34,000, reached a historic high of about 41,000 people in the fall, as Customs and Border Protection apprehended more people on the southwest border while seeing a simultaneous rise in asylum seekers. But doubling the daily capacity to 80,000 “would require ICE to sprint to add more capacity than the agency has ever added in its entire history,” says Carl Takei, staff attorney for the ACLU’s National Prison Project. It would also take an extra $2 billion in government funding per year, detention experts interviewed by Mother Jones estimated. And, Takei warned, “we don’t know if 80,000 is where he’ll stop.”

Yet even if ICE does not adopt an 80,000-person detention quota, other changes laid out in Trump’s executive orders suggest that vastly more people will be detained in the coming months and years. For example, Trump ordered ICE to prioritize deporting not only immigrants who been convicted or charged with crimes, but also those who had “committed acts that constitute a chargeable offense”—a category that could include entering the country illegally and driving without a license. Trump also ordered Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, who oversees ICE, to take “all appropriate actions” to detain undocumented immigrants while their cases are pending.

Beyond that, ICE could stop granting parole to asylum seekers, explains Margo Schlanger, a former Obama administration official who served as Homeland Security’s top authority on civil rights. With ICE taking enforcement action against more categories of immigration offenders and releasing fewer of them, Schlanger says, “we could get to a very large sum of people in detention very quickly.”

It’s not difficult to guess who profits. In an earnings call last week, the private prison giant CoreCivic (formerly known as the Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA) announced that it saw the ICE detention expansion as a business opportunity. “When coupled with the above average rate of crossings along the southwest border, these executive orders appear likely to significantly increase the need for safe, humane, and appropriate detention bed capacity that we have available,” CoreCivic President and CEO Damon Hininger said.

As of November, a whopping 65 percent of ICE detainees were held in facilities run by private prison companies, which typically earn a fee per detainee per night and whose business model depends upon minimizing costs to return profits to their shareholders. Since Trump’s election, private prison stocks have soared, and two new, for-profit detention centers are opening in Georgia and Texas.

Another private prison company, Management & Training Corp., is reportedly seeking a contract with ICE to reopen the Willacy County Correctional Institution, a troubled detention camp that held up to 2,000 ICE detainees in Kevlar tents between 2006 and 2011. “Historically, ICE has relied heavily on the private prison industry every time the detention system has expanded,” Takei says. “There’s little doubt in my mind that they will continue to rely on the private prison industry in what’s going to be the biggest expansion of the agency in history.”

The first new detention center contracts will likely take the form of arrangements between ICE and local governments to reopen empty prison facilities as detention centers or rent beds in existing local jails, Takei says. The arrangements, known intergovernmental service agreements, allow ICE to cut deals with local governments and private prison companies while avoiding a lengthy public bidding process. Occasionally, the local government agrees to hold ICE detainees alongside inmates in their publicly run jail—an arrangement a Department of Homeland Security subcommittee recently called “the most problematic” option for holding detainees. But most of the time, local governments simply act as middlemen in deals between ICE and private prison companies.

The opaque nature of the process allows all parties to avoid public outcry before the deals are signed, explains Silky Shah, co-director of the Detention Watch Network, an immigrant rights advocacy group. So far, immigration advocates haven’t gotten wind of many new contracts being negotiated or signed since Trump’s inauguration. “But that doesn’t mean contracting activity is not taking place,” Takei says. “I suspect there are closed-door meetings taking place across the country right now.”

Expanding detention quickly could have a high human cost. Schlanger is worried that conditions inside detention facilities could deteriorate without proper oversight from the Department of Homeland Security. “There are a lot of bad things that happen if the number of beds is ramped up fast, without appropriate controls, monitoring, supervision, and care,” she says, pointing to the potential overuse of solitary confinement, inadequate safety measures, poor nutrition, and insufficient medical care. “That means detainees could die.” Asylum seekers, she warns, will have a harder time fighting their immigration cases from inside detention centers, where it’s difficult to access lawyers and gather evidence. More could be coerced into voluntary deportation: “You’re vulnerable to the government saying to you, ‘Look, we’ll let you out from detention, but you have to give up your immigration case.'”

We don’t have to look far in the past to see the danger of rushing to open new detention facilities. Last year, as several thousand Haitian immigrants arrived on the southern border, fleeing natural disasters and poverty, the Department of Homeland Security began seeking contracts for new detention facilities to accommodate the surge. In their scramble to secure space for the new arrivals, ICE officials reportedly considered ignoring quality standards for the facilities—”scraping the bottom looking for beds,” as one official told the Wall Street Journal.

The bottom of the barrel, in this case, included a prison in Cibola County, New Mexico, owned by CoreCivic. Last summer, after an investigation by The Nation revealed a pattern of severe, longtime medical neglect in the 1,100-bed facility—which had gone months without a doctor—the US Bureau of Prisons decided to pull its inmates out and cancel its contract with CoreCivic. Yet less than a month after the last federal prisoner was transferred out, ICE was already negotiating an agreement with the county and CoreCivic to detain immigrants in the newly vacant facility. Four hundred immigrants are currently detained there. Takei notes that ICE contracted with the same company, for the same prison: “There weren’t any substantive changes.”

Shah expects to see familiar problems like poor medical care worsen as new deals for detention facilities are finalized. “One of the concerns we hear most often is that when people complain about ailments, officers will come back and just say, ‘Well, drink more water, or take an Advil and you’ll be fine,'” she says. “It’s a really harsh system already. If you’re going to expand at this level, it’s just going to become that much harsher.”

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The Private Prison Industry Is Licking Its Chops Over Trump’s Deportation Plans

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Here’s the Hell Trump’s Order Created for Refugees Overseas

by GarnetI19its Posted on February 2, 2017

Mother Jones

For thousands of US-bound refugees worldwide, President Donald Trump’s so-called “Muslim ban” has thrown their future into question. Now that refugees are not allowed to come to the United States for 120 days—and Syrian refugees are barred indefinitely—resettlement workers are scrambling to figure out what will happen to these people fleeing war, persecution, and disaster in their home countries.

Trump’s executive order affects both refugees in the middle of the screening process and those already approved for resettlement in the United States, according to Sarah Krause, senior director of immigration and refugee programs for Church World Service, which operates one of the nine global resettlement support centers for US-bound refugees. “For someone to get referral to the US refugee admissions program is a feat,” says Krause, whose organization helped with the resettlement of more than 14,000 people from sub-Saharan Africa to the United States last year. “For them to have made it through the process and been approved is even more incredible. That they have gone through all of that and we are now shutting the door on them is unconscionable.”

In addition to its temporary freeze on resettlement, the order caps total incoming refugees for the 2017 fiscal year at 50,000 people—less than half of what the Obama administration had planned. Nearly 26,000 have already been resettled. For the 872 refugees already set to travel to the United States this week—not including those from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, or Yemen—the government has granted a temporary grace period. Those refugees will be allowed to enter the country until Friday. For those scheduled to enter the United States after Friday, their flights have been canceled.

Here’s what Krause sees as the most pressing issues facing the refugees left behind by Trump’s order:

People have been left without housing or their possessions. “These are individuals who, in many cases, have already sold their belongings in order to have some money upon entering to the United States,” Krause says. “Many of them knew their final destination—the cities to which they would be resettled. In Kenya, refugees coming from the Dadaab and Kakuma refugee camps are brought into Nairobi prior to their departure for the United States. There they stay at the International Organization for Migration transfer center, where they receive predeparture medical screenings as well as cultural orientation, where they learn about life in the United States. Currently, there are over 120 refugees in the IOM transfer center who were expecting to board flights this week and who are now being told they will be sent back to the camp. For those refugees, they have already given up their shelters to new refugee arrivals, and sold their belongings. Their future is very uncertain.”

Refugees already approved for US entry may need to restart parts of the resettlement process—a delay of months or years. “Their cases remain in processing,” she says. “Some of their clearances will expire during this 120-day period and will need to be re-requested. There are checks that are requested by the resettlement support centers: security opinions, interagency checks, as well as fingerprints. It is a challenge to line all those clearances up, which means the window for departure is very small. Once that window closes, it’s difficult to open again.”

Refugees from the seven banned countries were left stranded. “For those that had already been booked for travel, their flights have been canceled,” Krause says. “Processing has essentially halted. They are not in their home country, they’re in countries of asylum, and the conditions in those countries are often very difficult. Some refugees make it to urban centers but live on very little and are not permitted by the countries in which they’re residing to work. Others are living in camps with hundreds of thousands of other people. Our Somali refugees—most of them have been in exile since 1990. You have generations of Somalis that have never been to Somalia.”

Officials are trying to prioritize refugees in particularly dangerous circumstances. The executive order allows for some refugees to be admitted on a case-by-case basis, Krause says. “We’re working with the Department of State to compile a list of the most vulnerable cases, although at this point the process for seeking exemptions is not yet clear. This is a life-saving program, and a delay of even a day for some cases could mean death in a case of extreme medical need or protection issues. There are some who are being moved from safe house to safe house by UNHCR because they are being hunted by their persecutors. I know of a gay Somali man who is currently in a safe house and who has been attacked. He is one of those cases in our pipeline.”

But for others, there’s little hope of finding another home now that the United States has shut its doors. “For those for whom we don’t believe exemptions can be sought, or it may take too long, we will look at pulling those cases out and giving them back to UNHCR for referral to another resettlement country. While the US accepts less than 1 percent of the world’s refugee population, we take more than any other. So it is unlikely that any other countries will have the capacity to take those that we cannot. And other countries have their own processes. That will take time.”

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Here’s the Hell Trump’s Order Created for Refugees Overseas

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Crowd Packs San Francisco’s Airport: “Let the Laywers In!”

by SashaCamacho Posted on January 29, 2017

Mother Jones

Update January 29, 2:20 p.m. ET: After staying past midnight Saturday evening, protesters say they’re planning on returning to SFO again on Sunday. At least one Iranian woman who was temporarily held at the airport was released, according to NBC. SFO released a statement on Sunday saying that it shared the concerns of protesters and had requested a “full briefing” from Customs and Border Protection.

Hundreds of people rallied at San Francisco International Airport Saturday, temporarily occupying the arrivals level in protest of President Trump’s “Muslim ban.” The crowd moved into the terminal after reports circulated that six immigrants were not being allowed to leave the airport as a result of the executive order.

The crowd chanted, “No ban, no wall, sanctuary for all,” and “let the lawyers in.”

Anoop Prasad, an attorney with the Bay Area-based Asian Law Caucus, told Mother Jones that he was aware of at least two US green card holders from the targeted countries who were en route to San Francisco and worried they would be detained. He said the organization had received dozens of phone calls from concerned community members about whether immigrants with legal permanent resident status would be allowed to enter the country. Prasad said he and other Asian Law Caucus members had been trying to get in touch with Customs and Border Protection officers so lawyers could talk to the families and be present for any interviews. As of Saturday night, they had yet to receive a response.

In New York, a federal judge in New York this afternoon granted an emergency stay of the order for that will allow anyone with a valid visa who was en route or in an airport when the ruling was filed to enter the US. Cheers erupted inside the San Francisco terminal when the news was announced.

Prasad said his group, too, might “seek legal options” if immigrants were not admitted. Lawyers from advocacy groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations were also the airport on standby.

“I’m happy about what happened in New York, but I wish the California governor would do something,” said Khaledh Tahan, 32, who attended the rally with her half-sister and her Syrian mother. “When I see all the different colors of people here, we feel united, powerful, like we can overcome this.”

“I hope this protest really does something,” said Rowa Alshalian, 40, who came to the US from Syria 20 years ago and joined in chants of “we are people, we are not illegal.”

Gavin Newsom, California’s lieutenant governor, also joined the demonstration.

Near the airport’s Starbucks, a group of lawyers were gathered to offer legal advice. Junaid Sulahry, an immigration lawyer in San Francisco, stayed at the airport for five hours. “We’re here, our phones are ringing off the hooks, and the idea is to come where the action is. People want to send a very strong message that this country was founded on people escaping religious persecution.”

Angelo Alcid, an intellectual property lawyer, said he just couldn’t bear sitting at home.

As the evening wore on, a group of people began weaving through the crowd to hand out apples, pizza, cheeseburgers, and granola bars. The protesters were appreciative.

Protesters vowed not to leave until all those being held were released.

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Crowd Packs San Francisco’s Airport: “Let the Laywers In!”

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This Rookie Chicago Politician Is Ready to Resist Donald Trump’s Deportation Fervor

by GSCClarita Posted on January 26, 2017

Mother Jones

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Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel held a press conference Wednesday to assure anxious residents that Chicago would remain a “sanctuary city”—meaning local law enforcement won’t help federal agents with President Donald Trump’s plan to deport millions of immigrants, a plan that just got a lot more real. In December, Emanuel told Trump to his face that he should rethink his proposed policies—specifically, that he should retain the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has allowed undocumented immigrants who were brought here as young children (and for all practical purposes are Americans) to stay in the United States.

Yet even as Emanuel gets recognition as a mayor willing to stand up to Trump on immigration, 27-year-old rookie Alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa has been pushing for stronger legal protections in the city—especially given the White House’s reported intent to engage state and local police in its deportation efforts. “What we really need,” the alderman told local reporters “is less symbolism and more action.”

Ramirez-Rosa is a Chicago native, the son of a Puerto Rican dad and a Mexican-born mom. He grew up in the Lakeview neighborhood on the city’s North Side and went to a magnet high school before attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After graduating, he become an aide to Illinois Rep. Luis Gutierrez, running his boss’ social-media efforts and working directly with families facing deportation. Just two years later he managed to unseat Rey Colon, the four-term 35th Ward incumbent, to become one of the youngest members of the City Council and its first openly gay Latino.

As an alderman, Ramirez-Rosa has made immigrants’ rights his main focus, and the overwhelming message he hears from affected families is that the city hasn’t done enough to protect them. “I’ve been fighting this mayor since before I took office,” Ramirez-Rosa told me. “I wasn’t elected to cozy up with the rich and powerful. I was elected by my constituents to represent their interests.”

Chicago’s 2012 sanctuary city law, the Welcoming City Ordinance, prevents city police from detaining undocumented immigrants on behalf of federal authorities. But the law contains several exceptions: for immigrants who have a criminal warrant out on them, who have been convicted of a serious offense, who are defendants in a criminal case, or who have been identified as part of a gang. Some of these carve-outs mean that people who haven’t been found guilty of a crime could be refused sanctuary. A Chicago Police Department spokesman told me that, to his knowledge, the police have not acted on any of the exceptions, and that they were intended for extreme circumstances. Still, Ramirez-Rosa and his constituents want those carve-outs removed to give legal backup to the city’s commitment to not cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Ramirez-Rosa wants Chicago, with its 183,000 undocumented immigrants, to be a model for immigrant protections. While Chicago’s law is already stronger than those of many sanctuary cities, it falls short of Philadelphia (which has no exceptions, barring extreme circumstances) and Los Angeles, New York City, and San Francisco (which have only a couple). He has been busy organizing and educating immigrant communities to be ready for the Trump administration. “The focus right now,” he said, “is preparing the community.”

Back in 2015, Ramirez-Rosa and more than a dozen local immigrants’ rights groups joined forces to create the Chicago Immigration Working Group, which has come up with six key policy goals. Bolstering the Welcoming City ordinance is one of them. They’ve also persuaded the city to launch an ID program that’s open to undocumented immigrants and helps them access city services. Emanuel has committed just over $1 million to a legal defense fund for would-be deportees, although Ramirez-Rosa points out that San Francisco, with a fraction of Chicago’s undocumented population, has just proposed a $5 million legal-defense fund. The alderman also co-sponsored an amendment that makes it illegal for police to threaten people with deportation during a confrontation, or to verbally abuse them. (During a 2013 raid, a Chicago cop famously yelled at a naturalized Chinese American man that he’d “put you in a UPS box and send you back where the expletive you came from!”)

This week, Trump signed orders to begin construction on a Mexican border wall and add detention centers and federal agents to the deportation effort. He also doubled down on his threat to rescind federal funding from sanctuary cities that won’t cooperate with the feds on deportations. If Trump follows through, Chicago stands to lose an estimated $1.3 billion—Congress would need to approve the cut. Trump’s attorney general pick, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, is in favor of repealing DACA and opposes a path to citizenship to undocumented immigrants. Democrats in the Senate have delayed his confirmation vote, which is now expected to take place in February.

Given all the uncertainly about what will happen, Ramirez-Rosa and his office are making it a priority to educate the immigrant community. Earlier this month, he started a door-to-door outreach effort and “know your rights” trainings to teach undocumented families what they can do to fight deportation attempts. Next up: a “cop-watch” type network in his ward so neighbors can alert one another if federal immigration agents are in their area. In an act of solidarity, Ramirez-Rosa has even declared his office a sanctuary location, a move he hopes other aldermen will copy.

Ramirez-Rosa was in talks with Emanuel’s office last year. The mayor wasn’t always such a full-throated defender of immigrant rights, the alderman notes; as chair of the House Democratic Caucus, Emanuel once called immigration the “third rail of American politics,” and he actually pushed to ramp up deportations while working under President Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s. “We know the history of this mayor,” Ramirez-Rosa says. “He just wants the sound bite on TV where he says ‘I’m your champion.'”

But the alderman is feeling more hopeful of late. The talks with the mayor have gone well, he says, and Emanuel even asked for a memo outlining the working group’s proposals. Emanuel’s office wouldn’t comment on plans to alter the carve-outs. But it pointed out in a statement that the mayor started a task force (“Chicago Is With You”) with Rep. Gutierrez and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) late last year to provide legal and mental-health services to immigrants and others in need, and he’s involved in other efforts to help immigrants.

But Chicago leaders have to do much more, Ramirez-Rosa insists. The measure of progress, he says, “is in the actual ordinances and resources that the city is bringing to bear. And we’re nowhere near the other cities that are actually national leaders on this.”

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This Rookie Chicago Politician Is Ready to Resist Donald Trump’s Deportation Fervor

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