Trump decries immigrants from 'shithole countries' coming to US (Africa, Haiti...)

thoughtone

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BGOL Investor
source: CNN



Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump expressed frustration behind closed doors with people coming to the US from "shithole countries," sources told CNN on Thursday.

One of the sources briefed on the Thursday Oval Office meeting with lawmakers confirmed Trump asked, "Why do we want all these people from 'shithole countries' coming here?"

A person familiar with the meeting said Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin and South Carolina GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham brought a plan to Trump that involved cutting the visa lottery in half and, at the behest of the Congressional Black Caucus, the rest would go to underrepresented countries in Africa and Temporary Protective Status nations, including Haiti. The person said the language was salty on both sides.

One person briefed on the meeting said when Durbin got to Haiti, Trump began to ask why we want people from Haiti and more Africans in the US and added that the US should get more people from countries like Norway.

A person familiar with what was said at the meeting told CNN that Trump also said: "Why do we need more Haitians? Take them out."

Trump was taping a message in the State Dining Room on Thursday afternoon for Martin Luther King Jr. Day as the story was breaking, an official said. Another official said Trump expressed to aides within the hour that the media was blowing his comment out of proportion.

The Washington Post first reported on Trump's comments in the Oval Office meeting, which the Post said "shocked" lawmakers in attendance.

Reached for comment about the article, White House spokesperson Raj Shah did not deny the "shithole" remark, but instead said in a statement that Trump "is fighting for permanent solutions that make our country stronger by welcoming those who can contribute to our society, grow our economy and assimilate into our great nation."

One of the sources told CNN that White House adviser Stephen Miller was at the meeting, and White House chief of staff John Kelly attended part but probably not all of the meeting.

The Trump administration late last year announced it would end the TPS designation for Haiti, a move that could affect tens of thousands of Haitian immigrants. Likewise, the Department of Homeland Security on Monday announced it would end protections more than 200,000 Salvadorans, and on Thursday the White House rejected a bipartisan immigration proposal, including a fix for people protected under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

A White House official told CNN the President's "shithole" remark is being received much differently inside of the White House than it is outside. The official said that although this might enrage Washington, staffers predict the comment would resonate with Trump's base, similarly to how Trump's attacks on NFL players kneeling during the National Anthem did.

Neal Katyal, a lead lawyer challenging Trump's attempts to impose a travel ban on mostly Muslim nations, has argued the travel ban reveals a discriminatory intent on the President's part, and responded to news of Trump's comment in light of the ongoing legal battle.

"As I put the finishing touches on the travel ban brief to the Supreme Court tonight, the President's words remind us again of how his un-American racist ideology impacts policy," Katyal said.

The White House denied similarly derogatory remarks in December, when The New York Times reported Trump said during a meeting in June that people coming from Haiti "all have AIDS," that recent Nigerian immigrants would never "go back to their huts" in Africa and that Afghanistan is a terrorist haven.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders denied at the time that Trump had made the comments and cited denials from several of the meeting's attendees.
 

MASTERBAKER

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Super Moderator
From comparing Trump to Shakespeare (?) to blaming Democrats (?) to arguing no one even goes to the beaches in Haiti (?), Trump's sycophants are trying every excuse in the book to defend his "shithole countries" trash. Here are the lowlights.
 

MASTERBAKER

༺ S❤️PER❤️ ᗰOD ༻
Super Moderator

*shithole* *shithole* *shithole* *shithole* *shithole* *shithole* *shithole* *shithole* *shithole* *shithole* *shithole* *shithole* *shithole* *shithole* *shithole* *shithole* *shithole* *shithole* *shithole* *shithole* *shithole* *shithole* *shithole* *shithole*
 

MCP

International
International Member
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“Mr. President, Are You a Racist?” Is the Question Reporters Should Never Stop Asking Donald Trump

https://theintercept.com/2018/01/12/mr-president-racist-right-question-ask-trump-shithole-slur/

AFTER BIZARRELY OFFERING his “congratulations” to the late Martin Luther King Jr. at the White House on Friday, President Donald Trump was asked for the first time by reporters to explain why he referred to Haiti and some African nations as “shithole countries,” during talks about immigration a day earlier.



“Mr. President, will you give an apology for the statement yesterday?” Trump was asked by April Ryan, Washington bureau chief for American Urban Radio, as he turned to leave the ceremony honoring the civil rights leader. When Trump ignored the question, a second reporter asked, “Did you use the word ‘shithole’ to refer to African nations?”

Ryan then cut to the point, asking Trump the question that should be repeated every day from now until the end of his term: “Mr. President, are you a racist?”

When Trump again ignored the question, Ryan repeated it — a fact lost on anyone who followed the event on the live video stream on the White House web site, since it abruptly cut out at that point, though C-SPAN continued to broadcast the event.

Since Trump lies so easily and has previously called himself the planet’s “least-racist person,” there might seem to be little point in pressing him to answer Ryan’s question. But, as reporters in the Netherlands demonstrated this week, asking politicians who make offensive statements to account for their remarks can be a public service, by at least attaching some sort of social embarrassment to making such comments.

That Trump did indeed refer, repeatedly, to those nations as “shithole countries” was confirmed on Friday by Sen. Dick Durbin, the Illinois Democrat who was in the room when the president complained that people from those nations should not be welcomed as immigrants.




“President Trump said things that were hate-filled, vile, and racist,” Durbin told television reporters. “He used those words repeatedly.”

When Durbin was asked later about a tweet from Trump, in which he seemed to deny using the word “shithole,” the senator said, “I stand by what I said. If the president disputes it, then … well, it’s not the truth.”

"I’m not going to use the word ‘lying.’ I stand by what I said. If the president disputes it, then … well, it’s not the truth,” Sen. Durbin says https://t.co/mfRIwzp86m pic.twitter.com/OPWY1eoBhi

— CBS News (@CBSNews) January 12, 2018



Durbin also revealed that one Republican in the room, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, took issue with Trump’s comments. Graham acknowledged as much in a statement released later on Friday, saying that he offered an affirmation of the multicultural roots of the United States.

My statement on #DACA. pic.twitter.com/kpJ2NHEoGL

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) January 12, 2018



Top photo: U.S. President Donald Trump greets members of the African-American community after signing proclamation to honor Martin Luther King Jr. Day, in the Roosevelt Room at the White House, on Jan. 12, 2018 in Washington, D.C.

 

QueEx

Rising Star
Super Moderator
Lawrence on President Trump 'Shithole' Comment:
'Hating Is What He Does'




In a meeting on immigration reform at the White House, the president called Haiti & African nations 'sh*thole' countries. Lawrence O'Donnell has a message for lawmakers: If you make a deal with the devil, you can't be surprised to hear him sounding like the devil. » Subscribe to MSNBC: http://on.msnbc.com/SubscribeTomsnbc
 

MASTERBAKER

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Super Moderator
The Backlash Continues on Trump's "S**thole" Comments: The Daily Show


Cory Booker Is Not Having the DHS Secretary's Testimony: The Daily Show
 

MCP

International
International Member
ElPaso_PatriotCaravan_027-1558116672-e1558116778665.jpg


https://theintercept.com/2019/05/18/border-militia-texas-mexico-guardian-patriots/

A Vigilante Militia Defends an Imaginary Border

“Is that what we think it is?” gasped a woman on the Patriot Caravan. The MAGA- and Trump-hatted group of about 25 people were on a walking tour of the U.S.-Mexico border in the desert near El Paso, Texas. It was led by a large, garrulous man named Jim Benvie, a member of the Guardian Patriots, which used to be the United Constitutional Patriots, or UCP.
“Oh sh … It might be the coyotes bringing them in!” said another woman.
“It is what you think it is,” said Benvie. As he lectured about immigrants invading America to the caravan members and the livestream audience on his phone, Benvie gazed south, past parched hills and rocky outcrops, past an invisible line dividing the U.S. from Mexico.
Just on the other side of the line, several men, women, and children were gazing north into the U.S. at Benvie and the MAGA hats.
Terrorizing Women and Children

Until last month, Benvie was the spokesperson for the now-notorious UCP. The group consisted of about nine people who set up camp on land in southern New Mexico that borders Mexico, as well as Texas near El Paso. The UCP arrived in late February. For weeks, local media uncritically reported the group’s claim that members were on the border merely to “observe” migrant crossings and notify the Border Patrol. In late April, however, the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico discovered one of the group’s online videos of their activities, which showed that they were involved in detaining migrants while carrying weapons. The ACLU issued a press release denouncing the UCP as armed, fascist vigilantes.
By then, the UCP had published some three dozen videos in addition to the one the ACLU had gotten a hold of; the videos are on Facebook and other sites. They typically show migrant men, women, and children looking terrified and humiliated as UCPers chase them, bark loud commands, order them to sit in dirt, and then stand menacingly over the migrants, wearing military camouflage clothing with their faces covered and some of them packing handguns, rifles, and AK-47s. Posted at least daily on social media, the videos were something new for border militias. They were like post-modern Breughel paintings, depicted darkness and chaos, with a demonic focus on migrants. Their images were often livestreamed, with viewers posting running tirades such as “Those children are not Vassanated [sic],” “Send them all back,” and “This makes me SICK!”

Following the media uproar about the UCP, the group was evicted from its camp — it turned out that the land members were staying on belonged to a railroad company that hadn’t known the vigilantes were there. The eviction came a few days after the arrest of a man who had claimed to be the vigilantes’ “commander,” Larry Mitchell Hopkins, who was jailed on federal weapons charges that predated the group’s border activities. Then PayPal and GoFundMe shut down the UCP’s accounts for violating policies banning promotion of hate and violence. In response to the ban and the bad publicity, the UCP rebranded itself as the Guardian Patriots.
They still hang out on the border near El Paso, and they pull out their phones and record videos. But most Guardian Patriots no longer wear camouflage or carry weapons. Nor do they habitually chase after immigrants. Instead, they generally focus on people the Border Patrol has already apprehended. Benvie, who narrates most of the videos, continues to livestream images of tired, frightened people squatting in desert sand as a backdrop for his running patter about how America is being invaded and the country needs Donald Trump’s wall.

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A man who said his name was Juan Zamora and his dog Spud attend a tour of the U.S.-Mexico border with Trump supporters on May 11, 2019.
Photo: Joel Angel Juárez for The Intercept

Benvie came to border militia activity with a checkered past. In 2018, he did hurricane relief work in areas including Texas and floated down flooded streets in small boats to people trapped in homes. But his history as a heroic volunteer is sullied by civil and criminal charges of fraud and theft. In 2012, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported that Benvie was involved in coin-selling schemes that involved stealing and selling customer lists to unscrupulous telemarketers. (Benvie acknowledged to The Intercept that he was “absolutely” involved). Last year, he was charged in Oklahoma with felony possession of a stolen vehicle (he said the charge was due to a clerical mistake at a truck rental office). Disposition of that case is pending, but according to records, Benvie got a court-appointed attorney after declaring that he was a pauper.
Since then, when making and broadcasting videos about the crisis on the border, Benvie asks viewers to send money to the Guardian Patriots, ostensibly so that he and his activists can help to secure the border. The address the group provides for donations has been used by a disbarred Oklahoma attorney, Lewis B. Moon, who has a long list of charges, including disturbing the peace, impersonating a federal law enforcement agent while shooting guns, and making terroristic threats (Moon allegedly told a man he didn’t like that “I’ll put you through a shredder” and “Nobody will ever find anything of you except for your tooth.” He also allegedly said to the man, “You’ve got pretty daughters, don’t you? … I’ll have five ******* rape your daughters. … They’ll rape your daughter and they’ll murder her.”
The vigilantes’ numbers have dwindled since they were the UCP. The nine activists with that earlier group mostly were white and lived in northern New Mexico and Arizona, far from El Paso. Many of those out-of-towners have apparently returned home. The Guardian Patriots now have only three active participants on the border besides Benvie. All are Latinx and two of the three are from El Paso. Although Benvie has told reporters that he’s staying in a camp, Moon has taken a hotel room near a racetrack close to the border, which he apparently shares with Benvie. I recently called the room early in the morning, and a man answered who said he was Moon. He declined to talk, so I asked if Benvie was present. After a silence, a voice that sounded exactly like Benvie’s said that Benvie wasn’t there. When asked if he in fact was Benvie, he replied, “It’s not me,” and hung up.
With his militia chastened and shrunken, Benvie seems to have pinned hopes for expansion on people who actually live on the border. So far, the most active among them is a man who seethes with anger and has a criminal history of violence. Unlike Benvie, he is Latino and local.
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Jim Benvie, spokesperson for the newly named Guardian Patriots, left, and Anthony Aguero walk along the banks of the Rio Grande, just outside El Paso, Texas, on the outskirts of Sunland Park, N.M., on May 11, 2019.
Photo: Joel Angel Juárez for The Intercept

His last name is Aguero. He goes by the first name Anthony, but legally he is Pedro Antonio Aguero. He speaks border-accented English and rolling Spanish. He is ensconced in El Paso’s Republican Party establishment as a precinct captain and has worked on local Republican political campaigns. Even so, he said he has not voted in years because he has been too busy.
Aguero, who nicknames himself “Conservative Anthony,” wears vests and T-shirts branded as Border Network News. He calls himself a journalist. But in practice, he is a videographer for the militia who has made a practice of hunting migrants with Benvie. He livestreams by hooking up his smartphone to a small steady cam, and his videos are high quality. He also regularly excoriates El Paso’s Democratic representative to Congress, Veronica Escobar, as a traitor to her country, and he has screamed at her at public events — also via livestream.
Many of Aguero’s videos are startlingly creepy, even by militia standards, and sadistic. Some show him stalking asylum-seeking migrants and the humanitarian aid workers who assist them.
He has recorded these videos outside of hotels and shelters where migrants stay after their release from Border Patrol custody, the locations of which the aid workers try to keep confidential. He has also videoed the bus lot of El Paso’s Greyhound station, apparently intending to film migrants preparing to travel to their sponsors. It is as though Aguero is attempting to dox the immigrants rights movement in El Paso.

Most disturbingly, he has livestreamed himself chasing migrants in the desert, screaming and bellowing at them to stop and sit down. After Border Patrol agents arrive, his videos show him castigating the migrants as “roaches” and “motherfuckers,” and continuing to yell orders — as the agents look on and do nothing.
The El Paso Republican Party has also done nothing about Aguero’s activities. Local party chair Adolpho Telles sits on prestigious nonprofit boards in the community and co-owns Rosa’s Cantina, the iconic bar made famous by the Marty Robbins song. Telles said that he has known for months that Aguero has been working with militias. But he said that Aguero’s work is independent of what he does for the Republican Party. (Telles also said it is not the party’s business that Aguero doesn’t vote, notwithstanding that he is a precinct chair). Telles said he hopes that in the future, Aguero will behave “in a professional manner instead of a thug.”
Aguero, 34, has a thuggish past to match his present actions. In 2008, according to a sworn police affidavit, a woman was at a bar in El Paso with friends when she saw Aguero and recognized him as someone she used to date. She noticed that he was drunk and offered to drive him home. On the highway, Aguero tried to kiss her and she refused. He punched her so hard that she blacked out. She managed to pull the car over near an exit, and then Aguero punched her again, kicked her, and fled the scene. The woman ended up at a hospital and Aguero was charged with assault.
He pleaded guilty and was put on probation (he said he pleaded because he got tired of fighting the case). A few months later, he was accused of assaulting another woman. (“Anybody could just make up anything about you, without there ever being any kind of evidence,” Aguero told The Intercept.) His probation was rescinded. But after contesting the charge for almost two years, he was sentenced to only three days in jail.
He served the jail term in 2012. Later that year, he was driving drunk on the highway, going in the opposite direction of traffic, when he caused a collision that seriously injured three people.
He was convicted in 2015 of vehicular assault while intoxicated, a felony, and sentenced to two years in prison.
Aguero says that he has since maintained a clean record. But his videos, with their talk about immigrants as insects and a woman politician guilty of treason against her country, smolder with a rage that sounds as though it could ignite. Even so, Aguero is out and about in El Paso — a community that is so overwhelmingly Latinx that outsiders, including national media, imagine it as impenetrably Democrat. They are mostly right, but that image hides some real numbers. It also hides the fact that the current war on immigrants is also a war on traditional border life, which has always been known for its easy boundary-hopping and affection for neighbors to the south. Now, though, life on the border under Trump free-floats with anguish and fear — including among the U.S. Latinx community.
In 2016, El Paso County was about 82 percent “Hispanic” and, according to the Latino Decisions polling organization, 14 percent of El Paso Latinx voters voted for Trump.
He got even more support in Latinx-dominant communities in other Texas border counties. In Starr, for instance, deep in South Texas, 98 percent of the residents are Hispanic and less than half a percent are white. Trump got almost a fifth of Starr’s vote. Across the country, according to a random poll of Latinx registered voters interviewed in April by the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, or NALEO, over a quarter “strongly” or “somewhat” agreed with Trump that there is a national emergency on the border, and that a border wall should be built. A roughly equal proportion said they thought migrants were a security threat. And a fifth said they would vote for Trump in 2020, or that they were leaning toward voting for him.

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Sam Esquivel, far left, gathers with other supporters of the “Patriot Caravan” near Monument One at the U.S.-Mexico border on May 11, 2019.
Photo: Joel Angel Juárez for The Intercept

Among that fifth are two El Pasoans: Nancy Esquivel, 59, and her husband, Sam, 60. I met them at a bustling El Paso restaurant where the Patriot Caravan was holding a meet-and-greet for people who planned to attend the caravan’s big event the next day. The Esquivels were going. They’d been watching Benvie’s and Aguero’s videos on rightwing social media, and they were eager to meet up with “Jim” and “Anthony,” as they affectionately called the two.
The restaurant was crowded and very loud. The Esquivels sat by themselves in a booth because a table with a big group of Patriots was too full to accommodate them. But it was hard to imagine the couple sitting with a bunch of shouting people: They seemed reserved, introverted. I had to sit close in the booth in order to hear them. Nancy said her family was Mexican and she grew up in a little farm town just north of El Paso. “When we were little, my cousins had to pick,” she said, referring to agricultural work in the fields. Sam is half Latino and spent his boyhood in rural New Mexico. He said he had family who came to the U.S. undocumented.
Nancy talked about Sam’s chronic health problems and the couple’s difficulties paying his doctor bills because of unaffordable insurance in Texas. They’d moved back to the El Paso area after spending years in southern California, where Sam had been laid off from a well-paid job he’d held for a long time. Then he got sick, and Nancy worked for a while in a warehouse to try to keep the two of them afloat.
Nancy’s main preoccupation besides Sam’s illness and difficult medical bills, she said, were the changes she’d seen on the border in the past several years, particularly with immigration. She’d worked at the warehouse with Guatemalan women who were undocumented. She had tried to talk to them about their lives, but she did not speak Spanish and couldn’t really communicate. She said she suspected that the immigrant women’s conversations with each other were about scamming the American welfare system.

Lately, she said, she’d been watching UCP videos on social media, showing large groups of migrants crossing the border and then sitting in the dirt, waiting to be processed by the Border Patrol. “There used to just be a few people coming over,” Nancy said. “But now there are so many!” She believed that we simply could not afford to support them, to allow them and their children to freeload off America. She had never in her life been involved in anything political. But now she and Sam had decided to get out of the house and get involved.
A chatty, middle-aged white woman from the packed table came over. She was also from El Paso and was meeting Patriots tonight for the first time. She offered us some of the homemade pecan pie she’d brought to the meet and greet. It was delicious. I left the restaurant at 8 p.m. As it turned out, I missed the first impromptu Patriot Caravan event.
According to videos later posted on social media, at about 10 p.m., a white male Trump supporter who rides horses with a group called the Patriotic American Cowboys started talking with two women who wore little or no makeup. The man called the women “dudes in dresses.” Furious, they loudly denounced him as a homophobe and a racist. A heated exchange ensued, and management asked the cowboy and the other Caravan Patriots to relocate to another area of the restaurant.
The Patriots were indignant. In their videos, Benvie and Aguero accused the two women of being operatives of Rep. Veronica Escobar. (At the meet and greet, some Patriots were holding up signs calling Escobar “Veronicaca” — “caca” being Spanish for “shit.”)
The Patriots livestreamed themselves relocating in the restaurant. Sam Esquivel appeared in one video, but off to the side of the fray, again looking reserved.

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Trump supporters gather on land owned by the American Eagle Brick Company, along the U.S.-Mexico border between El Paso, Texas, and Sunland Park, N.M., on May 11, 2019.
Photo: Joel Angel Juárez for The Intercept
Facing Down the Tourist Threat

The Patriot Caravan kicked off with a disruption, led by Aguero, of Escobar’s monthly town hall meeting in a high school auditorium. The Patriot Caravan, dressed mostly in MAGA hats and American flag-themed clothing, sat clumped together. Sam and Nancy sat with them, but Sam’s brows were knitted. He wore a T-shirt with the letters L, G, B, T — and graphics depicting the Statue of Liberty for “L,” a gun for “G,” and Trump for “T.” The “B” was a bottle of beer.
Escobar knew in advance that the Patriot Caravan was coming. Many other people also showed up, and the congresswoman’s staff instructed all the attendees that if they wanted to be called to the mic to ask a question, they would have to be among the first five people to sign the question sheet. When time ran out for questions, Escobar explained, the meeting would end, but within a week, her staff would personally contact everyone who signed up and answer their questions.
Aguero was No. 16 on the sign-in sheet, according to Escobar’s office. Toward the end of the meeting, he walked up near the podium and raised his hand. Escobar asked him to stop. He raised his hand again. A security guard pulled him out of the meeting hall. As he was led out, Aguero yelled about how something called the “U.N. Open Migration Pact” was causing chaos and ruination. The other Patriots rose up behind him, yelling, “Trump! Trump! Trump!” and they marched out of the auditorium.
Aguero was quickly freed, and then he and his group got into cars, drove off, and minutes later were flush with the border, staring at a family on the other side, with Benvie excitedly warning that what they were seeing there “is what you think it is.”

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Left/Top: Trump supporters sign up to ask questions during a town hall with Rep. Veronica Escobar at Canutillo High School in El Paso. Right/Bottom: Anthony Aguero is escorted out of the town hall by El Paso County police.Photos: Joel Angel Juárez for The Intercept
The Patriot Caravan had gone to an area on the U.S. side of the border that included a century-old brickyard with whole and broken bricks strewn helter-skelter on the hills — hills over which the UCP used to film itself chasing people, including, in one production, a terrified woman dragging a suitcase, running, stumbling, and falling onto bricks. The Mexican side of the tour site lay just feet away and featured a museum: compact and homemade-looking, called La Casa de Adobe.
True to its name, it’s made of adobe, and during the Mexican Revolution, it housed Francisco Madero, a hero of the revolution whom Mexico holds in a place of esteem similar to that ascribed to Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln in America. The Casa is a Mexican version of the log cabin in Springfield, Illinois. Or Monticello in Virginia.
Also on the site, but spanning both sides of the border, is Monument One. It’s a dazzlingly white little obelisk — only five or six feet tall — ringed by leafy flora native to the nearby Rio Grande. Monument One is so named because it is the first marker in the area that delineates the international boundary. A plaque communicates to visitors that if they stand on one side, they are in Mexico, and on the other, the United States. There’s something magical about the little obelisk. It feels like a binational, miniature version of the Washington Monument.
As Benvie continued talking on the U.S. side about immigrant invaders, the group of men, women, and kids on the Mexican side wandered around La Casa de Adobe and over to Monument One. Children romped and parents pulled out their phones. Smiling, they began photographing Benvie and the Americans who stood a few feet away, shouting incomprehensibly in English.
Benvie told his tour attendees and livestream viewers that the Casa was a “fake museum,” a shill prop for people whose true motive for getting near it is to illegally enter America. He also claimed that Monument One was just a set piece for false narratives. Immigrants, Benvie said, “are coached very well” to lie about their motives for approaching and crossing the border. “They have American attorneys on the other side.”
Benvie appeared to know only a few words of Spanish. One is “alto,” in English “stop,” which he yelled at migrants when he was chasing them for his UCP videos. The other word is “siento,” which he also used to yell. He thought it meant “sit down,” but he was mistaken. He didn’t realize that he was actually telling the migrants, “Sorry!”
The white people on the Patriot Caravan tour, mostly non-Spanish speakers, seemed titillated by Benvie’s talk of the fake museum, the perverse boundary marker, and aspiring illegal aliens whom they could videotape, just a few feet away, preparing to dash into America. Border Patrol helicopters buzzed overhead, adding to the sense of apocalypse.
But the El Paso Latinos reacted differently — even Anthony Aguero. They might believe in Trump and his dark myths about the border, but they also knew about the border’s bright realities. How could they not? They had friends and family just on the other side, in El Paso’s sister Mexican city, Juárez, and had crossed back and forth countless times. They’d been crossing since childhood — some even at Monument One.
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Anthony Aguero, center, glances back at Jennifer Phelps, left, and Nancy Esquivel as he moves to speak to Mexican tourists at Monument One.
Photo: Joel Angel Juárez for The Intercept

Aguero immediately knew that the smiling people by the Casa and the Monument were not destitute refugees from Central America, but middle-class tourists from Mexico. They were well-dressed, they had no backpacks or suitcases, one of the kids said, “How are you?” in English, and the adults said they were visiting relatives in Juárez, from the interior city of León, in Guanajuato (“The shoe manufacturing capital of Mexico,” a woman bragged). They’d driven to the Casa de Adobe and the Monument because they had the same desire that the Caravan tourists, standing a few feet north, had — to get right up to the border.
In English, Aguero told the non-Spanish-speaking Patriot Caravan that the people facing them were just tourists. Some Caravan participants smiled and tried to angle their phones at Monument One for binational photo and video ops with the Mexicans.

In Spanish, meanwhile, Aguero lectured the Mexicans about how their country’s lax immigration policies toward Central Americans were severely hurting Mexico, and didn’t these folks agree? They nodded politely and blankly. He shook their hands.
Benvie stood off to the side, continuing to insist that “those people are not tourists.”
“If we walked across, we’d be arrested?” asked a Caravan member, a young, blond woman.
“Yes,” Benvie assured her.
But Nancy and Sam Esquivel were having none of it.
“Hey, hey, hey, hey!” Benvie yelled to the couple as they walked dreamily into Mexico. “Come back!” A cacophony of desperate advice followed from the U.S. side: “Come back!” “You need to be on this side! Seriously!”
Sam returned to the United States immediately, but Nancy lingered, walking up to Monument One and hanging out with the Mexicans a bit, then drifting back to America. The Mexican police did not question or arrest her.

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Nancy Esquivel, left, and her husband, Sam, walk along the U.S.-Mexico border after both crossed into Mexico and back.
Photo: Joel Angel Juárez for The Intercept

When I asked what she had been thinking when she walked into Mexico, Nancy spoke about her childhood. “As a kid, my cousins would bring us,” she reminisced. “We went all over. Why can’t we just cross? What’s out there? What did I have to fear? I’m not used to this border.”
Minutes after the Esquivel incident, Benvie got into a protracted shouting match with a reporter from Mother Jones, who grilled him about the rash of civil suits and other complaints against him for fraud and unpaid debt. Benvie denied everything and the reporter persisted. Benvie livestreamed the exchange as his Facebook followers posted hostile comments about the reporter including, “Get his stupid liberal ass,” “Punch his lights out,” and “THAT IS WHAT THE DEMONS DO.”
The argument lasted so long that the Patriot Caravan, including the Esquivels, got bored or embarrassed, and most walked back to their cars and horse trailers. Anthony Aguero went with them. He suggested that the group go for lunch to a hamburger place — or better yet, Tacos Don Cuco. “The Patriot Caravan’s going to be a thing now,” he said to the camera. “Always, your country first.”

https://theintercept.com/2019/05/18/border-militia-texas-mexico-guardian-patriots/
 

MCP

International
International Member
What the Concentration Camps of Bosnia Can Teach Us About the Abuse of Immigrants on the U.S. Border

AP_9908020358-1561604139.jpg

Muslim prisoners in a room in the Serb-run detention camp at Trnopolje, northwest of Banja Luka, Bosnia, on Aug. 12, 1992.
Photo: David Cairns/Today London via AP


How do you investigate human rights abuses at detention centers that are off-limits to outsiders?
I am not one of the on-the-ground reporters covering the Trump administration’s abusive treatment of immigrant children on the border with Mexico, but more than 25 years ago I investigated the concentration camps where Serbs tortured and executed Muslims during the Bosnian war. I can’t quite believe that I am writing this line and this story, but much of what I saw at those Balkan camps in the 1990s is relevant to what’s happening now in America.

It appears that due to a burst of media attention, the conditions of the U.S. border camps will likely be improved — there will be soap, toothpaste, and bedding — and journalists are being allowed to visit though in sharply restricted ways. This is a script we have seen before. After the first stories about Serb-run concentration camps were written by Roy Gutman, based on testimony he collected from survivors, the camps were cleaned up a bit and some journalists were allowed inside. I was among the first visitors in the summer of 1992, and what follows is a guide to help journalists understand and thwart the U.S. government’s likely cover-up of abuses that have occurred at its concentration camps. That’s another sentence I can’t believe I am writing today.

Tours of detention camps are public relations tricks; governments do their best to make sure journalists don’t actually visit the exact places where crimes occurred. Here’s an example from Bosnia. One of the worst prison camps was at a ceramics factory known as Keraterm, and I was taken there. Except I wasn’t, really. Keraterm had a lot of buildings, and the group I was with — about a half-dozen journalists — was taken to just one building. Our guide – a brute of a man named Simo Drljaca, who was killed when NATO troops tried to arrest him after the war — walked us into the building, which was mostly empty and had a thin layer of dust on the ground and not a human smudge mark on its floors or walls.
“See, no blood,” Drljaca smiled at us.

His ruse was transparently ridiculous — the building had never held prisoners. We demanded to see the building that we knew had housed prisoners; it was a brick warehouse less than 50 yards from where we stood. Prisoners had been tortured and executed there, and as we later learned, the survivors were moved out shortly before we arrived. No, Drljaca said, it’s a military facility, you can’t go inside or take pictures of it. He instructed us to get back into the minibus we were traveling in. But there were no military vehicles or soldiers in sight. The factory grounds were deserted.

The lesson is quite obvious and simple: You must go to the exact location where abuse has occurred. If you are prevented from going there and seeing what you need to see — a quasi-admission that a forbidden crime scene exists — demand to know why. The lies offered by prison officials can be nearly as revealing as the incriminating evidence kept out of view. Often that’s the only evidence of guilt you might get — the absurdity of the deception.

We were taken to two detention centers that held actual detainees. One of them was called Omarska, which has become infamous over time as the site of the greatest number of killings, and the other was called Trnopolje, which didn’t have as many killings but was nonetheless a location of immense fear and deprivation. Both camps were somewhat cleaned up for our visit, but terror can’t be erased so easily. These visits introduced us to the ethical dilemmas of interviewing detainees who feared repercussions for talking with us, though it also revealed ways to get around those repercussions.

If prisoners are afraid — as all of them were at these camps — you know it instantly. It is in their faces, their voices, their postures, the words they are afraid to speak to you. One of the most chilling moments occurred as I watched a prisoner at Omarska shiver in terror as a television reporter asked, with a camera running, whether he had been abused. The prisoner didn’t know what to do; the truth could’ve gotten him killed by the guards. His inability to say what he wanted to say was a silent form of testimony about crimes that were, at that moment, literally unspeakable.

It’s not a stretch to think that some kids at the camps run by U.S. Customs and Border Protection might be hesitant to complain about abusive conditions, assuming they are even allowed to speak to reporters (so far, apparently not). They might have the same sort of fear as the prisoners in Bosnia — could they be punished for what they say? A workaround to this quandary emerged during my visit to Omarska. One of the prisoners slipped a note to one of the other journalists, who shared it with me. “About 500 people have been killed here with sticks, hammers and knives,” the note said. “Until August 6, there were 2,500 people. We were sleeping on the concrete floor, eating only once a day, in a rush, and we were beaten while we were eating. We have been here for 75 days. Please help us. ”

The lesson from this — beyond the fact, now amply proved by war crimes trials, that Serbs committed genocide in Bosnia — was that it can be far easier for detainees to write something down and surreptitiously hand it to a journalist than to take the more intrusive route of talking to you. I wish I had been armed with pencils and pieces of paper and handed them out, as discreetly as possible, to prisoners who indicated any inclination to write notes, or just left these things in a corner for any prisoner to write a message that might later be given to other sympathetic visitors.

Another suggestion for journalists who might be visiting the CBP camps: Pay close attention to the CBP officials, and not just the polished spokespeople. What is the expression on their faces? Will they answer questions, even banal ones? The pursed lips of guards or supervisors can itself be evocative manifestations of power. They can withhold everything, whether it’s toothpaste, blankets, or words. It’s worth your time to persist with questions until the end. At Omarska, I tried to strike up a conversation with a guard who was nonresponsive until I gave up hope and provocatively blurted out what I wanted to know: “Is it true that you torture the prisoners?

He glanced down at me — he was huge and had pistols on both hips in addition to an AK-47 slung over a shoulder — and his face lurched into a smile that was intentionally and sardonically grim. “Why would we want to beat them?” he said.

Indeed, it appears that U.S. officials are beginning to follow the footsteps of Serb authorities in Bosnia. Just read this chilling story by Simon Romero, who yesterday visited a CPB camp for children in Clint, Texas. The tour for journalists, Romero wrote for the New York Times, was conducted after the number of kids at the facility was greatly reduced. The tour was brief and “highly controlled,” with CPB officials pointing out food and sanitary supplies that they said were being provided to the children — but the journalists were not allowed to enter the cells where the children lived, talk to any of them, or take pictures (their cameras and phones were not allowed inside). When a reporter saw a young girl crying, a CPB agent quickly warned, “Don’t talk to her,” adding, “If you ask her anything you’ll be thrown out.”

A final lesson from Bosnia: The full truth of what happened at the camps did not emerge as a result of journalists visiting them after the worst crimes had been committed. There is a limit to what you can learn at a crime scene that has been cleaned up, and of course there’s a huge limit to what witnesses can tell you in the presence of their tormentors. The truth emerged from later interviews that journalists and investigators conducted with survivors who were able to speak freely in safe locations, usually refugee camps. Tracking down these survivors and taking the time to hear their grim truths was hard work, but it made the difference. Find the families who were kept in abusive conditions at the CBP camps. They know what happened.
I could go on — and it is horrifying that I could go on. How could genocidal events a quarter-century ago have any relevance to America today? That is where we are. That is what we have become.

https://theintercept.com/2019/06/27/immigration-detention-bosnia/
 

Mrfreddygoodbud

Rising Star
BGOL Investor
fuck trump but some of my african an caribbean people

do need wake up calls.

they come here and jump hard to be on the "greener" side talk shit about their own while they are there.

Im just sayin this is a wake up call for many of my brehtren from the diaspora..

they come here an put their noses up.. dont marry akata...

what the fuck is that all about...

just sayin..

I bet some wish they could marry an "akata" now tho..

lets get this work together so silly karmic reactions wont slow us down
 

muckraker10021

Superstar *****
BGOL Investor
WashPost.jpg


Ilhan Omar, quintessentially American

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Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) at a gathering of the Muslim Caucus Education Collective in Washington on Tuesday. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

July 23 2019 | https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...0a701e-ad88-11e9-a0c9-6d2d7818f3da_story.html


Ilhan Omar, the congresswoman President Trump’s chanting mob would deport to Africa, sat onstage Tuesday with fellow Muslims, before an audience of Muslims, taking questions from Muslims.

And what she said was quintessentially American.

The head of a group called Muslims for Progressive Values rose to say that “it would be really powerful if the two Muslim congresswomen” — Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) — spoke out against the practice of female genital mutilation.



Omar silenced the room by calling the question “appalling.” Noting that she already “put out statements upon statements” on the topic, she said she’s “quite disgusted, to be honest, that as Muslim legislators we are constantly being asked to waste our time speaking to issues that other people are not asked to speak to.” She mockingly asked whether she needs “to be on repeat every five minutes. So, today, I forgot to condemn al-Qaeda, so here’s the al-Qaeda one. Today, I forgot to condemn FGM [female genital mutilation], so here it goes. Today, I forgot to condemn Hamas, so here it goes.” She said the questions imply that, because she’s Muslim, she might support things “so abhorrent, so offensive, so evil, so vile.”



Her all-American outrage vented, Omar concluded: “I would like , not just for you , but for everyone to know that if you want us to speak as politicians, American politicians, then you treat us as such.”

The audience broke into cheers and applause. I felt like joining in.



Omar remains ill-defined beyond the monstrous caricature the president has made of her with his racist slander. She’s one of the four nonwhite congresswomen (“the Squad”) who Trump proposes should “go back” to the countries from which they came, even though three were born in the United States. Omar, who emigrated from Somalia as a child, was the target of the “send her back” chant at Trump’s rally last week, and of Trump’s unsubstantiated suggestion that she once married her own brother. Minutes before Omar took the stage Tuesday at the Muslim Caucus Education Collective conference in Washington, Trump tweeted about “America-hating anti-Semite Rep. Omar,” who with the others in the Squad is a “Nightmare for America.”



For Trump’s racist base, Omar has it all: black, female, Muslim, immigrant. Omar previously hurt her own cause when her criticism of Israel crossed into anti-Semitism, displaying the same sort of prejudice that often directed at Muslims.

She may revert again, but the woman I saw Tuesday represented American values far better than the bigoted demagogue who has made her his bête noire. She spoke of Muslims as part of America’s expanding democracy, united not by race or religion but love of country and reverence for its Constitution. Her message — that we rise or fall together — is the only answer to a president who daily tears us apart.



The 37-year-old legislator credited her election last year to the work of Isaiah, a Jewish-Muslim interfaith organization. “It’s because of them that someone like me could get elected in a state with all the orchestrated smears against me,” she told Tuesday’s gathering. “It’s when we bond together, when we understand our ability to build community rises from the most painful places, that we are able to have the kind of celebrations that we had in Minnesota. I want to make sure people in every single state that feel the intensity of the divisions [know] that they could, too, overcome, and they, too, can do the work of building community and finding out what are the values that unite them.”



It is a dream deeply rooted in the American Dream.

Sharing the stage with Omar was Khizr Khan, the Gold Star father who incurred Trump’s wrath in 2016. Reciting a verse in Arabic, he said the Koran teaches that “everyone is included and everyone has equal dignity. That is why the time has come for Muslims, with that basic foundation, to lead the charge, support our Constitution, our basic human dignities.”



Omar applauded.



She applauded, too, when Abdul El-Sayed, a former candidate for governor in Michigan, said they ran for office not to reassure people about Muslims but because “there are people in our communities that don’t have health care.”

And Omar concurred when Sam Rasoul, a Virginia state representative, said: “I don’t want people to defend Muslims. I want people to defend our Constitution.”



Omar portrayed Trump’s recent attacks as part of “the inherent racism that has always been part of him,” going back to the Central Park Five. And her solution to Trump’s racism? Right out of Alexis de Tocqueville: “It’s to build community,” she said. “I think if you are stuck in the defending of your identities, you are going to be distracted from the work of building.”



Could there be a more American creed?



Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...0a701e-ad88-11e9-a0c9-6d2d7818f3da_story.html
 
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