The idea is part of a raft of immigration proposals signed by Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly that are likely to spur international and legal challenges

by Ginger Thompson and Marcelo Rochabrun

Buried deep in the Trump Administration’s plans to round up undocumented immigrants is a provision certain to enrage Mexico — new authority for federal agents to deport immigrants caught crossing the southern border to Mexico, regardless of where they are from.

If present immigration trends continue, that could mean the United States would push hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans, Hondurans, Salvadorans, Brazilians, Ecuadorans, even Haitians into Mexico. Currently, such people are detained in the U.S. and allowed to request asylum.

President Trump wants them to do so from Mexico, communicating via videoconference calls with U.S. immigration officials from facilities that Mexico would presumably be forced to build.

The new authority for immigration agents is among the dramatic, some would say untenable, tactics the Trump Administration is preparing to deploy as it upends President Obama’s policies on illegal immigration.

A pair of memos signed by John Kelly, the Homeland Security secretary, and disclosed over the weekend by McClatchy outline the plans for what present and former government officials say will be a massive roundup of undocumented immigrants.

Officials disclosed that two former Senate aides to Attorney General Jeff Sessions drafted the plan without input from career DHS policy staffers. The ideas aren’t new. Many of the approaches described in the memos come from a law that Congress passed in 1996, which policy makers and law enforcement agents disregarded as either unenforceable or absurd.

Among them was the Mexico part of the plan, for example, which calls for returning undocumented immigrants “to the foreign contiguous territory from which they arrived.” The memo goes on to point out how foisting the immigrants onto Mexico would benefit DHS’s budget, saying that it would, “save the Department’s detention and adjudication resources.”

However, former senior Mexican and American immigration officials said it could very well create new security problems along the border, as authorities in each country push unwanted migrants back and forth.

The American Immigration Lawyers Association said that the proposal would violate U.S. law and international treaty obligations. Mexico is as likely to embrace the plan as it did the notion of paying for a wall. “I would expect Mexico to respond with an emphatic ‘No,’” said Gustavo Mohar, a former senior Mexican immigration and national security policy official. Spokespeople for DHS and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Whether viable or not, the Trump administration’s deportation plans mark a dramatic departure from decades of policy and practice. Current and former immigration policy officials say that while the details of how the administration intends to carry out the plans remain unclear — if not insurmountable — the administration’s overall message to enforcement agents across the country is clear: limits have been lifted.
President Obama attempted to focus enforcement efforts on immigrants who had been convicted of serious crimes, and on those who were caught while or shortly after illegally entering the country. His administration deported record numbers of immigrants, most of whom had only been accused of minor crimes and immigration violations.

The Trump administration says it, too, is focused on deporting criminals, but it has redefined crimes to include any activity that might bring a conviction, including entering the U.S. without permission. Effectively, that makes virtually everyone in the U.S. without a proper visa subject to roundup at their workplace or home. The only clear exception, according to the enforcement plan, is for immigrants who were illegally brought to the U.S. as children, known as Dreamers.

“Anyone who complained about Obama as the deporter-in-chief,” said David Martin, formerly DHS’s principal deputy general counsel, “is unfortunately going to get a taste of what it’s like when someone is really gung-ho.”

Greg Chen, the policy director at AILA, said the Trump plan would “effectively unleash a massive deportation force with extremely broad authority to use detention as the default mechanism for anyone suspected of violating immigration law.”

The question looming over the proposals is how many of them, with all their legal and logistical obstacles, will the president actually be able to carry out.

The memos, for example, authorize the Border Patrol to hire 5,000 new agents, even though the force has never been able to fill the slots it has already been allotted. Some 60 percent of applicants to the Border Patrol fail the required polygraph, and those who pass take 18 months to get sent out into the field.

The Trump plan calls for the expansion of a George W. Bush-era program, known as 287g, which allows DHS to deputize state and local police as immigration agents. It was touted after 9/11 as a critical “force-multiplier.” But by 2010, some of the country’s largest police departments were refusing to participate because they believed it would shatter the trust between their officers and the communities they were sworn to protect. Meanwhile, participating agencies, which foot the bill for the program, were suddenly saddled with new debts and hounded by accusations of racial profiling and other abuse, forcing the Obama administration to suspend expansion of the program.

Until now, the enforcement of summary deportation laws, known as “expedited removal,” have been limited to those apprehended within 14 days of illegally entering the country and within 100 miles of Canada or Mexico. The memos signed by Kelly would allow use of those laws anywhere in the country against anyone who entered illegally within the past two years.

Lucas Guttentag, a DHS adviser and Stanford law professor, said this would “unleash chaos,” violate due process, and meet challenges in court, similar to those that scuttled the administration’s travel ban.

There would also be aggressive challenges, lawyers said, to plans that would allow immigration agents to deport unaccompanied minor children who crossed the border illegally, rather than uniting them with parents or other relatives in the U.S. They also expect legal opposition to a proposal that would strip undocumented immigrants of existing privacy protections, allowing personal information such as asylum cases or immigration violations to be publicly disclosed.

\The White House has said the memos are still under review, with final versions expected on Tuesday. And some of the provisions explicitly acknowledge that it could take years before DHS has the manpower and money to pull off what the president has ordered. Immigration enforcement agents, however, have already begun filling the policy void by launching raids and deportations, including some that advocates worry are meant to test the limits. Meanwhile panic has taken hold in many immigrant communities.

“The level of fear is more than anything we’ve ever seen,” said Marielena Hincapi´E, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center. She said the plan’s sweep, “sent a chill to my bones,” because it threatens to do irreparable harm to millions of families. She added, “This all seems aimed at changing who we are as a nation.”

by Claire Bernish

Award-winning actor and longtime environmental and animal rights activist, James Cromwell, held nothing back in an interview late last year, when discussing ongoing exploitation and brutalization of Indigenous peoples battling Energy Transfer Partners’ construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

To Cromwell, like innumerable observers, that the government would lash out violently against Standing Rock Sioux water protectors and their supporters to defend the construction of a pipeline for Big Oil profit evinces systemic racism and oppression practiced since the first Europeans arrived in these lands.

Months of a veritable blackout by mainstream media, he contends, shows the appalling complicity of reporters obligated to deliver a narrative acceptable to corporate backers.

In a typical protest, Cromwell told The Young Turks’ Jordan Chariton, “for the most part, the police arrest people, but they behave very rationally. When they come to the Indigenous community, they behave like thugs. And that shows the racism that sort of underpins the entire thing.

“It’s either environmental justice for people of color in the East, or for Indigenous people here, in the middle of this country, who always get the short end of the stick.”

To wit, Cromwell gave the interview from the Oceti Sakowin Camp, the largest of several encampments near the Lake Oahe reservoir on the Missouri River erected to peacefully block Dakota Access construction, and one of two which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers intends to evict.

Led by the Morton County Sheriff’s Department, unnecessarily-militarized law enforcement from at least nine states have unleashed the full fury of the Police State against the unarmed water protectors in a pattern of escalation and brute force. Tear gas, rubber bullets, Tasers, bean bag projectiles, concussion grenades, sound cannons, and weaponized water, have left hundreds injured, traumatized, and even maimed.

Vanessa Dundon, a Native American water protector better known as Sioux Z, faces permanent vision loss in one eye after police launched a tear gas canister at her head, severing her retina, during the most explicitly barbarous crackdown on water protectors on Nov. 20 on Highway 1806’s Backwater Bridge. Lacking health insurance, Sioux Z — who has acted as security and a first responder during such police offensives — has been forced to rely on crowdfunding for surgery necessary to save her sight. A non-Native supporter of the water protectors, Sophia Wilansky, had her arm blown to shreds by what might have been a Stinger grenade during the same skirmish as she delivered water to 400 people trapped on the bridge. Surgeons were still trying to save her arm and avoid the possibility of amputation — a medical effort also being partially funded with donations.

Eyewitnesses say both women appeared to have been intentionally targeted by police — an allegation reinforced by medics and first responders from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and the City of Bismarck, who observed the riot-cop army aiming for water protectors’ heads and legs.

As many as 300 people suffered various injuries during the over six-hour attack by law enforcement. One tribal elder twice went into cardiac arrest amid the fog of tear gas, hail of rubber bullets, and — most astonishingly dangerous and appalling of all — a near-constant soaking by icy water in sub-freezing temperatures, a la 1960s police use of fire hoses against black civil rights protestors.

Cromwell’s distinction between the Standing Rock Sioux’ fight to preserve clean water and typical anti-fossil fuel protests isn’t an arbitrary one — and he would know from firsthand experience.

In December 2015, Cromwell and others were arrested for disorderly conduct after attempting to block the entrance to a Competitive Power Ventures power plant. A second arrest came in June 2016 for blockading the entrance to the Crestwood Compressor Station — part of an expansion of fracked-energy infrastructure greenlighted by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and ignored by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, despite vociferous condemnation by local residents.

Similar to actions at Standing Rock, both incidents involved physically obstructing the commerce of Big Oil — but, quite unlike police defense of the Dakota Access Pipeline, Cromwell, and the other arrestees weren’t physically brutalized or treated as enemies of the State.
That striking contrast is additionally evidenced in mainstream media coverage — or astonishing lack thereof.

As TYT’s Chariton notes, corporate media arrives instantaneously at the scene when protests, rioting, or violence occurs following a police killing — such as with Ferguson and Baltimore — but in the case of Standing Rock, because the peaceful battle is against Big Oil, there has been a dearth of coverage by the mainstream press.

Asked to describe what he sees as this dereliction of duty by the corporate-backed media, Cromwell responde:
“They have a divided allegiance, because their allegiance should be to their viewership or their readership — but it’s not. It’s to the corporations. It’s all about the bottom line. And, therefore, they have to protect not only those sponsors, [but] the people who control the corporations who are usually involved in this sort of activity because it represents profits. And they have lost their connection, which has shown in this election — nobody believed the mainstream media.”

Controversy about the Dakota Access Pipeline has been a prime example of this, as corporate presstitutes continue pushing the official police accounts of violent incidents via Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier — whose laughably-thin explanations for officer use-of-force have been wholly invalidated by independent and alternative media outlets time and time again. In fact, independent journalists on the scene in Standing Rock have collected physical evidence of and filmed law enforcement engaged in the exact activities Kirchmeier denies.

Inaccurate or utter lack of reporting on the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s efforts to end pipeline construction have been the nail in the coffin for many already weary from horrendous mainstream coverage of the 2016 presidential election cycle. Online alternative media — which has been a font of thorough and accurate information for both issues — presents quite the tenable option for those seeking non-corporate, non-establishment-biased journalism.

“That’s where people go,” Cromwell continued. “People who want to know what’s happening go online and find it — and it is there. There is real journalism, but it’s certainly not the mainstream media.”