What next? Death squads?

It is a feature of despotic societies for the government to use unidentified paramilitary forces in unmarked vehicles to seize opposition people and protestors off the streets and take them to secret locations for questioning. Very often these people were killed and their bodies never recovered. These kinds of things were notorious in many Latin American dictatorships and around the world (Sri Lanka was another example where such squads operated with impunity during the civil war and the insurrection) and the calls by mothers to return the ‘disappeared’ became rallying cries.

Yesterday’s revelations of what is going on in Portland, Oregon have disturbing similarities to those events.
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Scott Warren acquitted in second trial

It took the jury just a few hours to acquit the human rights activist who was charged with breaking the law because he provided food, water, clothing, and shelter, to weary immigrants crossing the desert regions on the US-Mexican border. The first trial had ended in a hung jury and the Customs and Border Protection agency decided to try him again and this time urged the judge to not allow Warren to bring up the cruel policies of Donald Trump as a defense.
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CBP wants retrial of Scott Warren to omit mention of Trump policies

Readers may remember the case of Scott Warren who was arrested and charged for providing food, water, clothing, and shelter to weary undocumented migrants who had undertaken the dangerous trek over arid and barren land on the southern US border. The trial resulted in a hung jury that refused to convict him. Of course, the Customs and Border Protection agency has decided to waste time and money by retrying him.
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Great job, US police and immigration services!

[UPDATE: The US Customs and Border Protection agency has given their version of events, saying that the border crossing was not an accident but deliberate. The whole thing seems a little weird. (Thanks to WMDKitty.)]

I have to say, if the US were trying to alienate as many people as possible, its immigration and police services are doing a magnificent job. The world is already pretty much aware of the utter cruelty and inhumanity with which undocumented immigrants and refugees are treated when they arrive at the borders. We also know the racism of Donald Trump in the way he openly disdains countries that are the home of people of color. But it seems that even people from the favored European countries who happen to stumble into the arms of US police and the immigration system are subject to abuse.
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Increasing condemnation of US behavior

The human rights group Amnesty International usually criticizes the behavior of foreign governments, and when it has criticized the US it is usually for its actions against civilians in other parts of the world in the many wars and other military entanglements that the US is involved in. But it has now issued a stinging report criticizing what the US is doing within its own borders.
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Exposing the rotten core of the immigration agencies

The scandal of how immigrant families are being treated by the Customs and Border Protection agency (and its related agency Immigration and Customs Enforcement and their parent organization the Department of Homeland Security) is finally getting the attention it deserves. Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus led by its chair Joaquin Castro are keeping the heat on by paying a visit to two of the detention sites in Texas and defying the CBP officials who tried to give them a guided Potemkin tour of just selected areas. They demanded access to other areas and the right to talk to the people being detained, and when they were denied, they did so anyway. They described what they saw as “horrifying”.
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Why the latest abuses of children by the CBP came to light

The recent revelations of the conditions under which migrant families and children are being detained brought the issue once again into the spotlight and has created a furor. One thing that puzzled me was why the Department of Homeland Security and the Customs and Border Protection agency, normally so secretive that they try to prevent reporters and even congresspeople from entering their facilities, allowed the team of lawyers and doctors into the facility, knowing that the conditions were so appalling that even given three weeks notice, what minor improvements they were able to make were never going to bring the conditions up to normal standards of decency.
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“Suffer little children” does not mean what the Trump administration thinks it means

Yet another damning report has been issued by a group of layers and doctors who had visited a large detention facility for children run by the CBP and described what they saw.

A two-year-old boy locked in detention wants to be held all the time. A few girls, ages 10 to 15, say they’ve been doing their best to feed and soothe the clingy toddler who was handed to them by a guard days ago. Lawyers warn that kids are taking care of kids, and there’s inadequate food, water and sanitation for the 250 infants, children and teens at the Border Patrol station.
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Three girls told attorneys they were trying to take care of the two-year-old boy, who had wet his pants and no diaper and was wearing a mucus-smeared shirt when the legal team encountered him.
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“Welcome back to the USA”

Seth Harp is a journalist and like many white people, was not quite aware of how militarized the US immigration system has become because on his return from his frequent trips abroad, he is usually waived through immigration after being asked a few perfunctory questions. That is, until he returned recently from an assignment in Mexico and was subject to ‘secondary screening’, that he dewcribes as “a quasi-custodial law enforcement process that takes place in the Homeland Security zone of the airport.” He was interrogated for hours by the Customs and Border Protection agency that has become a gun-toting quasi-military force, and they ransacked his phone and laptop after demanding that he give them the passwords.
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Jury refuses to convict man who gave food and water to migrants

I wrote recently about how the US Customs and Border Protection agency had been destroying water stations left by humanitarian groups in the desert to prevent migrants dying from dehydration. After one of those groups No More Deaths had publicized these horrendous actions by the CBP, the US government arrested one of its volunteers Scott Warren because he had provided migrants with water, food, clean clothes, and beds in a barn. He faced up to 20 years in prison.
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