#US-Mexico border wall

[thefreethoughtprojectcom]

An internal U.S. Border Patrol memo claiming that 30 percent of camera towers that compose the agency's "Remote Video Surveillance System" (RVSS) program are broken.

Read More: https://thefreethoughtproject.com/government-surveillance/the-many-failures-of-mass-surveillance-at-the-u-s-mexico-border

#TheFreeThoughtProject

[maidofmetal]

sorry I don't think it's funny when u refer to undocumented immigrants as illegals like I get ur just making a joke but uhh fuck off with that racist nonsense 🙄

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[foldingfittedsheets]

Back in 2017 I signed up for one of the Cards Against Humanity sillies and did their Cards Against Humanity Saves America. Basically they were like fuck Tr*mp and his border wall and used the funds from the campaign to buy land and to make all 150,000 contributors part owners of said land across the US/Mexico border.

It was fun and silly and I got a little certificate.

Today I got an email that Elon Musk illegally annexed that land for SpaceX and that CAH are suing him over it. So possibly I’ll get like $100 if they manage to win a lawsuit and stick it to Musk. It’s like even more bang for my original buck.

[thoughtlessarse]

Bodycam footage of a migrant woman’s death in an encounter with US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) on March 21, 2024, was released on July 17 after being suppressed for five months. The footage, viewable here, shows the woman stranded for an excruciating 24 minutes atop the 30-foot-tall wall which runs along the California-Mexico border, calling out for help, and her subsequent death after plummeting from the top of the wall. The victim was identified afterwards as 24-year old Petronila Elizabeth Poma Perez, a Guatemalan national. In the same month, 10 people, including children, were seriously injured while attempting to cross the San Diego border wall in what was described as a “mass casualty” event. The taller 30-foot segment of the wall was installed under the Trump administration in 2019, leading to an immediate and lasting increase in the number of falling deaths along the border, with local hospitals seeing a five-fold increase in falling injuries along the wall. Many are left with spinal injuries and permanent disfiguring injuries. More women than men were admitted to local hospital UCSD Health with injuries sustained scaling the border wall in 2023. According to a doctor at the hospital, Dr. Alexander Tenorio, these injuries were not seen before the 30-foot wall was installed. The US-Mexico border is the deadliest land crossing in the world, according to the International Organization for Migration, which documented 686 deaths or disappearances in 2022. Many more deaths are certain to have gone uncounted, with those seeking to get into the US dying in extreme desert heat in inaccessible areas or drowning in waterways like the Rio Grande, which makes the border between Texas and Mexico, and the All-American Canal which runs parallel to the California-Mexico border. Despite it being over two weeks since the release of the video of Perez’s death, most of the corporate news only reported on the release in the past few days. According to a press release from the CBP on the incident, migrants were spotted at 10:27 p.m. with agents reporting via service radio that “multiple individuals were approaching the secondary International Border Fence approximately 2.7 miles west of the Otay Mesa Port of Entry and were carrying a ladder. At this location, the secondary International Border Fence is approximately 30 feet tall and is constructed of vertical metal bollards. The north side of the secondary fence has an electrical conduit running across the top of the fence, which facilitates the use of an electric gate nearby.” In the radio transmission, one CBP agent could be heard referring to migrants not as persons, but as “bodies”: “I got one body running through the truck lot. First body just went behind dirt mounds … Bodies are east of the dirt mounds, heading north.”

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[makingcontact]

Borders: What are they good for?

White text reading “Borders: What are they good for?” superimposed on top of a greyscale background showing the jagged border between two sides of a sand dune. Credit: Original photo by Siora Photography on Unsplash. Digitally altered by Lucy Kang. What are borders, and why do we have them? And how is violent border enforcement at the US-Mexico border connected to Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza?…

[wariomolly]

hello! I am in need of an interviewee for my Peoples of the Southwest class. If you/your family has been affected by the US-Mexico border wall please reach out to me. Interviews can be anonymous and must be done before april 30th. can be done however you are most comfortable (tumblr DM, text, email, phone, zoom)

[mariannewilliamson1]

LOVE AT THE BORDER | 2024 Democratic Presidential Candidate Marianne Wil...

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Caitlin Dickerson at The Atlantic:

Almost as soon as Donald Trump took office in 2017, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement were dispatched across the country to round up as many undocumented foreigners as possible, and the travel ban put into limbo the livelihoods of thousands of people from majority-Muslim countries who had won the hard-fought right to be here—refugees, tech entrepreneurs, and university professors among them. The administration drew up plans for erecting a border wall, as well as an approach to stripping away the due-process rights of noncitizens so they could be expelled faster. These changes to American immigration policy took place in the amount of time that it would take the average new hire to figure out how to use the office printer.

Within days of Trump’s election, his key immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, was already gathering a group of loyal bureaucrats to start drafting executive orders. Civil servants who were veterans of the George W. Bush administration found the proposals to be so outlandishly impractical, if not also harmful to American interests and perhaps even illegal, that they assumed the ideas could never come to fruition. They were wrong. Over the next four years, lone children were loaded onto planes and sent back to the countries they had fled without so much as a notification to their families. Others were wrenched from their parents’ arms as a way of sending a message to other families abroad about what awaited them if they, too, tried to enter the United States.

If given another chance to realize his goals, Miller has essentially boasted in recent interviews that he would move even faster and more forcefully. And Trump, who’s been campaigning on the promise to finish the job he started on immigration policy, would fairly assume if he is reelected that harsh restrictions in that arena are precisely what the American people want. “Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” he declared during a speech in Iowa in September, referring to 1954’s offensively titled Operation Wetback, under which hundreds of thousands of people with Mexican ancestry were deported, including some who were American citizens.

Trump and other key fixtures of his time in office have refused to rule out trying to reinstate family separations. They have been explicit about their plans to send ICE agents back into the streets to make arrests (with help from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the National Guard), and finish their work on the wall. They say that they will reimpose the pandemic-related expulsion policy known as Title 42, which all but shut off access to asylum, and that they will expand the use of military-style camps to house people who are caught in the enforcement dragnet. They have laid out plans and legal rationales for major policy changes that they didn’t get around to the first time, such as ending birthright citizenship, a long-held goal of Trump’s. They’ve floated ideas such as screening would-be immigrants for Marxist views before granting them entry, and using the Alien and Sedition Acts in service of deportations. Trump and his advisers have also made clear that they intend to invoke the Insurrection Act to allow them to deploy the U.S. military to the border, and to use an extensive naval blockade between the United States and Latin America to fight the drug trade. That most drug smuggling occurs at legal ports of entry doesn’t matter to Trump and his team: They seem to have reasonably concluded that immigration restrictions don’t have to be effective to be celebrated by their base.

The breakneck pace of work during Miller’s White House tour was periodically hampered by worried bureaucrats attempting end runs around him, or by his most powerful detractors, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, whispering reservations into the president’s ear. But Trump’s daughter and son-in-law have left politics altogether, and Miller used Trump’s term to perfect strategies for disempowering anyone else who dared to challenge him. As for job applicants to work in a second Trump administration, Miller told Axios that being in lockstep with him on immigration issues would be “non-negotiable.” Others need not apply. Those who choose to join Trump in this mission to slash immigration would do so knowing that they would face few consequences, if any, for how they go about it: Almost all of the administration officials who pushed aggressively for the most controversial policies of Trump’s term continue to enjoy successful careers.

[...] America’s rightward shift on immigration is part of a global story in which Western countries are, in general, turning against immigrants. But the world tends to look to the United States as a guide for what sorts of checks on immigration are socially permissible. A new Trump administration would provide a pretty clear answer: just about any. An anything-goes approach to immigration enforcement may indeed be what the country is left with if Trump succeeds in the next general election. 

Caitlin Dickerson writes in The Atlantic as part of its If Trump Wins series that if Donald Trump wins a 2nd term, then his already extreme anti-immigration agenda will be supercharged further.

This includes the following: an end to birthright citizenship, reinstation of the cruel and inhumane family separation policy, reimpose the racist Title 42 law, launching the largest deportation operation in US history, and ideological screening of immigrants.

[mexicodailypost]

‘I felt backstabbed’: Biden’s US-Mexico border wall plans elicit condemnation

Area residents thought their land was safe after Trump’s wall plans were foiled, only to discover Biden’s plans to build more Nayda Alvarez and her family love to spend time outdoors on their sprawling property along the Rio Grande in south Texas, fishing the river and barbecuing. Under the previous administration, Alvarez fought against plans for Donald Trump’s “wall” along the US-Mexico…

[fairuzfan]

Been thinking about that one Syrian researcher who found out that the US was using tech+methods from Israel for the "border wall" with Mexico under the basis of Israeli war tech being "battle tested". Not to mention ICE literally hosting torture camps for immigrants... Kamala harris literally encourages and advocates for an apartheid wall in the US+torture camps and dem voters don't really care to view that as a serious domestic issue.

[asikomecom]

Sheriff threatens outgoing Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey with arrest over 'border wall' - New York Post

Sheriff threatens outgoing Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey with arrest over 'border wall' – New York Post

Arizona’s outgoing Republican Gov. Doug Ducey is pushing ahead with building a wall made out of shipping containers along the state’s border with Mexico — even as local authorities threaten to arrest him. Ducey over the summer began directing state agencies to double stack shipping containers along the border in Yuma to fill crossing points popular… Read more

[heritageposts]

[...] More specifically, the cycle of violence in The Last of Us Part II appears to be largely modeled after the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I suspect that some players, if they consciously clock the parallels at all, will think The Last of Us Part II is taking a balanced and fair perspective on that conflict, humanizing and exposing flaws in both sides of its in-game analogues. But as someone who grew up in Israel, I recognized a familiar, firmly Israeli way of seeing and explaining the conflict which tries to appear evenhanded and even enlightened, but in practice marginalizes Palestinian experience in a manner that perpetuates a horrific status quo. The game's co-director and co-writer Neil Druckmann, an Israeli who was born and raised in the [occupied] West Bank before his family moved to the U.S., told the Washington Post that the game's themes of revenge can be traced back to the 2000 killing of two Israeli soldiers by a mob in Ramallah. Some of the gruesome details of the incident were captured on video, which Druckmann viewed. In his interview, he recounted the anger and desire for vengeance he felt when he saw the video—and how he later reconsidered and regretted those impulses, saying they made him feel “gross and guilty.” But it gave him the kernel of a story. “I landed on this emotional idea of, can we, over the course of the game, make you feel this intense hate that is universal in the same way that unconditional love is universal?” Druckmann told the Post. “This hate that people feel has the same kind of universality. You hate someone so much that you want them to suffer in the way they’ve made someone you love suffer.” Druckmann drew parallels between The Last of Us and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict again on the official The Last of Us podcast. When discussing the first time Joel kills another man to protect his daughter and the extraordinary measures people will take to protect the ones they love, Druckmann said he follows "a lot of Israeli politics," and compared the incident to Israel's release of hundreds of Palestinians prisoners in exchange for the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011. He said that his father thought that the exchange was overall bad for Israel, but that his father would release every prisoner in every prison to free his own son. "That's what this story is about, do the ends justify the means, and it's so much about perspective. If it was to save a strange kid maybe Joel would have made a very different decision, but when it was his tribe, his daughter, there was no question about what he was going to do," Druckmann said.

And continuing, on the security structures featured in the The Last of Us Part II:

Besides the familiar zombie fiction aesthetics of an overgrown and decomposing metropolis, The Last of Us Part II's main setting of Seattle is visually and functionally defined by a series of checkpoints, security walls, and barriers. There are many ways to build and depict structures that separate and keep people out. Just Google "U.S.-Mexico border wall" to see the variety of structures on the southern border of the United States alone. The Last of Us Part II's Seattle doesn't look like any of these. Instead, it looks almost exactly like the tall, precast concrete barriers and watch towers Israel started building through the West Bank in 2000.

Illustrations, from the article:

The first barrier Ellie and Dina encounter when arriving in Seattle / West Bank barrier.

. . . article continues on Vice (July 15 2020)

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