18 April 21
Getting Into Serious Trouble for April
We are pretty far behind where we should be for this time of the month. We have wonderful people, just like you helping. We need you to join them, yes you!
Please throw something in the hat.
In earnest.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts
CA 95611
18 April 21
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News
Andy Borowitz | Congresswoman Calls for the Development of Anglo-Saxon Space Lasers
Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a leading member of the new America First caucus, is calling for the development of what she called 'Anglo-Saxon space lasers.'"
The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report." 
epresentative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a leading member of the new America First caucus, is calling for the development of what she called “Anglo-Saxon space lasers.”
“Anglo-Saxons have for too long ceded space-laser superiority to the airborne laser beams of foreign banking élites,” she said. “This shall not stand on my watch.”
She took the opportunity to reassure her concerned QAnon supporters that she would be able to serve both QAnon and Anglo-Saxonhood at the same time. “I can multitask,” she promised.
Greene concluded her remarks by invoking the name of the mighty Anglo-Saxon deity who inspired her space-laser vow. “By Woden’s will, we shall prevail!” she shouted, brandishing an oversized hammer.
Crosses are seen in the U.S.-Mexico border town of Sasabe, Mexico, on April 2, 2021. (photo: Ash Ponders/The Intercept)
Asylum Mirage: Biden Continues Trump's War and Danger Mounts in Sonoran Desert
Ryan Devereaux, The Intercept
Devereaux writes: "While Casa Alitas has not seen the same number of new guests that came through under President Barack Obama and Trump, the present moment is not without its challenges."
iego Piña Lopez stood in the darkened entryway of the repurposed juvenile detention center, chatting with volunteers as night fell. The 31-year-old program director of Casa Alitas, Tucson’s largest migrant shelter, was approaching the end of another 12-hour day. He had hit the road early that morning to drive more than 130 miles west to the unincorporated community of Ajo, where the Border Patrol recently began dropping off vanloads of asylum-seekers. Piña took three of the new arrivals back to Tucson himself. Others rode in vehicles organized by community groups and local leaders.Casa Alitas’s new guests were settling in as Piña began our tour. We passed through a room that looked like it had once been a guard shack, now converted into a humanitarian operations center. The brick walls of the building were painted purple and pink. What had once been the jail yard was transformed into a community garden. Cells for incarcerated youth were now temporary homes for families seeking refuge in the United States.
As part of the Catholic Community Services of Southern Arizona, Casa Alitas was previously based out of a former Benedictine monastery, which could house upward of 300 people. The current space is smaller, with 68 rooms and space for roughly 120 people, though that number has been cut in half due to the Covid-19 pandemic. While the shelter has implemented an array of measures to keep the work going in the face of the coronavirus — creating separate spaces for volunteers, guests, and individuals who have tested positive for Covid-19 — U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agency that oversees the Border Patrol, has told local officials to prepare for an influx of asylum-seekers two to three times what Southern Arizona saw in 2019, when Casa Alitas provided services to approximately 18,000 people. So far, that has yet to happen.
“The numbers are not where we were back in 2019,” Piña told me. “Yes, we’re busy, but we’re not going crazy. The building’s not on fire.”
Piña has lived his share of border news cycles. Growing up on the U.S. side of the binational cities of Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, he came of age as the border entered a period of unprecedented militarization spurred by bipartisan “get tough” policies, the drug war, and the war on terror. He came to work for Casa Alitas during the Obama administration, at the tail end of the decade’s first large-scale arrival of unaccompanied Central American children and families seeking asylum in the U.S. Though most of the kids came through the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, Arizona received its share of young people seeking refuge as well. The pattern would repeat itself under President Donald Trump. It is now happening again under President Joe Biden.
While Casa Alitas has not seen the same number of new guests that came through under President Barack Obama and Trump, the present moment is not without its challenges.
Walking deeper into the shelter, Piña described a disturbing pattern he’s picked up on in recent weeks. “Thirty percent of the guests coming from certain areas of the border are missing family members,” he said; many were coming through Yuma, on the western edge of the state.
To explain the gravity of the problem, Piña opened WhatsApp, showing me a borderwide shelter group devoted to missing persons. The previous week, during a dinner with a group of new guests, Piña passed his phone around so his companions could see the text group. When it came back to him, seven new names had been added — the missing family members and loved ones of the people he was seated with.
“I lost it when I looked at it,” Piña said. A Honduran woman told him that she and her husband were taken into custody together. After some time, an official pointed at her to go and him to stay. She had no idea where he now was. For Piña, experienced as he is, it was the kind of moment where the right words are hard to find. “We’re seeing that on a consistent basis,” he said. “It’s appalling.”
With national political and media attention returning to the U.S.-Mexico border in recent weeks, most of the focus has been on the record numbers of unaccompanied children seeking asylum in Texas. Thousands of those children have been moved into facilities well beyond capacity. Republican lawmakers have seized on the moment to file midnight dispatches from the banks of the Rio Grande reporting that Biden and the Department of Homeland Security are presiding over the humanitarian crisis that stems from a break with the policies of Trump. Biden and DHS, in turn, have run with a message that the border is closed and asylum-seekers should stay away until further notice.
The processing of unaccompanied children in the United States presents clearly urgent questions of human rights, law, and policy. It is also just one facet of the larger story of Biden’s first months in office on the border.
Through interviews in migrant shelters and border communities in Arizona and Sonora, The Intercept found that the Biden administration’s continuation of Trump-era policies — particularly the choking off of asylum access at U.S. ports — is making one of the deadliest stretches of the U.S.-Mexico divide more dangerous, endangering the people the president purports to support and enriching the illicit networks he purports to oppose. In Nogales, data compiled in intake interviews on the Mexican side of the border and shared with The Intercept suggests a sharp rise in violence and extortion targeting migrants and asylum-seekers over the past year by organized crime and Mexican security forces, as well as an explosion in the previously prohibited practice of Border Patrol agents dropping people off in dangerous locations in Mexico in the middle of the night. Shelter operators on both sides of the border reported routinely seeing cases of families separated by U.S. authorities. Asylum-seekers themselves, some of whom have been waiting months or years to make their case in the U.S., described profound feelings of vulnerability and fear with no end in sight.
As a presidential candidate, Biden attacked Trump’s policy of “zero tolerance,” in which more than 5,000 children were taken from their parents at the border, as a stain on the moral fabric of the nation. The president-elect promised a humanitarian approach, one that upheld “the dignity of migrants” and “their legal right to seek asylum.”
The damage the Biden White House committed itself to undoing was immense. Though Trump ordered an end to zero tolerance, his administration replaced the policy with an equally punishing program known as “Remain in Mexico.” More than 71,000 people were forced to wait out their cases in Mexico, often in the border’s most dangerous cities, where migrant kidnappings are big business. In the span of two years, the number of documented cases involving individuals enrolled in the program who experienced some form of violence — assault, rape, kidnapping, torture, murder — was double the roughly 1.5 percent of individuals who were granted refuge.
With the onset of the coronavirus, Trump’s top immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, imposed a full-on asylum lockdown. Title 42, the obscure Centers for Disease Control and Prevention law that Miller relied on, was implemented over the objections of public health professionals at the agency. Under the rule, Border Patrol agents can summarily “expel” individuals, including asylum-seekers, back to Mexico after an “encounter” in the field without a hearing. The entire process often takes less than two hours. It’s been used more than half a million times in the past year, with more than 637,000 expulsions and counting, including the removal of at least 13,000 unaccompanied children. According to data obtained by CBS News, of the hundreds of thousands of people — including tens of thousands of families — processed through Title 42 in the past year, 0.3 percent have been given an opportunity to make their case in the U.S. As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel at the American Immigration Counsel, recently noted, “far fewer families have so far been permitted to seek asylum today than under the Trump administration in 2019.”
While Biden ordered an end to Remain in Mexico on his first day in office, he’s kept in place Title 42, the most sweeping barrier to asylum access on the border in U.S. history. The Intercept sent the White House a detailed list of questions concerning conditions observed in Mexico resulting from Title 42. The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment, leaving open the question of how extending Miller’s crowning border achievement comports with the president’s vows to break with the legacy of his predecessor.
CBP confirmed to The Intercept that the nighttime drop-offs happening in Nogales and ports across the country are a direct result of Title 42 and part of a borderwide shift that began last year, which has seen the Border Patrol summarily expelling people, including families with young children, to places that previously did not receive individuals removed from the United States — including towns controlled by organized crime with no transportation services.
“There’s an agreement between Mexico and the United States as to when and where people will be returned under Title 42,” John Mennell, CBP’s supervisory public affairs specialist in Arizona, told me. This agreement is distinct from prior agreements between the two countries that have governed the repatriation of individuals onto Mexican soil for years, which typically limit removals to certain ports and prohibit releasing people between the hours of 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. Whether this agreement exists in writing or is informal is unclear — neither the Department of Homeland Security nor Mexico’s immigration office would say. What the public generally fails to understand, Mennell said, is that when people are encountered by Border Patrol agents in the desert under Title 42, the system is designed to unfold outdoors — typically at a Border Patrol “forward operating base” — as quickly as possible. “It’s only if you’re going to be detained and released into the interior or turned over to ICE or turned over to an NGO that you might go to a Border Patrol station,” he said. “Everybody that gets expelled goes right back to the border.”
“So a lot of these single males that we’re catching here in Arizona, yeah, they’re going back — at all hours,” Mennell said. “The whole idea is not to be transporting people. It’s to expel them where they entered as quickly as possible.”
Title 42’s implementation is under fire in the courts, with advocacy groups arguing that it is a thinly veiled scheme to deny asylum-seekers their rights. Despite Homeland Security’s position that Title 42 is needed to stem the cross-border spread of Covid-19, hundreds of thousands of people continue to pass through the nation’s ports every day. In November, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to stop expelling unaccompanied children under the rule. The decision was overturned, but Biden chose not to renew the policy. Beyond that, the Biden White House has been clear in its desire to implement Title 42 in as sweeping a manner as possible. In his first press conference as president, Biden himself indicated that contrary to Title 42’s public health justifications, its purpose was to stop migration.
“We’re in negotiations with the president of Mexico,” the president said. “They should all be going back.”
Mexico has complicated the administration’s efforts by declining to accept certain populations of would-be expellees. In the Arizona-Sonora area, those populations have generally included Cubans, Brazilians, and until very recently, Venezuelans. According to Mennell, the “vast majority of people apprehended in Arizona are still expelled under Title 42, to include families, unless it’s from a demographic that Mexico will not accept.”
As for family separations resulting from Title 42, Mennell said any number of reasons could explain why individuals might be split up. In the case of a husband and wife, for example, “she could be from a country that they’re not accepting but he was from a country that they were accepting. There’s a myriad of reasons why two single adults, who were traveling together, though they might be married, might be dealt with differently.” A positive Covid-19 test would not be a factor, he added: “It wouldn’t matter to us because we would either release them or send them back before they were tested for Covid.”
In addition to expulsions, Title 42 makes applying for asylum at the ports impossible for most people, raising the likelihood that desperate individuals and families will try their luck in the desert. With record-setting heat, more migrant remains were recovered in Arizona in 2020 than any year in the past decade. More than 3,200 people have lost their lives trying to cross the deserts of Southern Arizona since the mid-1990s. In November, federal law enforcement officials told the Arizona Republic that Title 42 had led to a return to the “dark days” of human smuggling in the state.
The complicated and patchwork ways in which Title 42 has manifested on the ground has spurred confusion as to exactly what is happening at the border. Because Title 42 expulsions are not formal deportations, single adults often try to enter the U.S. again, meaning that recent apprehension numbers include individuals making multiple attempts to enter the U.S. The discussion of these numbers often obscures the fact that most of those people never enter the immigration system — let alone the interior of the United States — in any meaningful way.
Humanitarian aid providers on the ground say that as long as Title 42 remains in place, so too does one of the most consequential facets of the Trump era on the border: denied access to asylum.
“You’re essentially rebuilding that same problematic system that Trump had,” Piña said. Until there is a safe and viable mechanism for people to seek asylum in the United States, he argued, violence and suffering south of the border will continue. “The cartels, the police — everyone extorts them,” he said. “Every time we do some of these policies, we just further the problem.”
Esmerelda sat with her hands folded in her lap in the common area of the comedor. It was morning at the Kino Border Initiative’s shelter in Nogales, Sonora. Two lines of people filtered into the two-story building: new arrivals, virtually all of them expelled under Title 42, and return visitors. The crowd skewed young — families with young children and young men on their own. The new arrivals, many still wearing the dusty desert clothes they were apprehended in, checked in at the intake desk, unpacking their stories before grabbing a plate of hot food and heading for the showers.
Esmerelda was not a new arrival. She and her family came to Nogales in November 2019, fleeing violence and persecution in their home state of Guerrero. As a front line in Mexico’s Dirty War, Guerrero was the site of staggering state violence from the 1960s through 1980s. More recently, the state came to symbolize the terror and violence of the drug war. In 2014, it was the site of one of the worst atrocities in the nation’s history: the enforced disappearance of 43 college students by Mexican security forces and organized crime. Today Guerrero is a known “epicentre of organised crime in Mexico, with more groups jostling for turf than in any other single region,” the International Crisis Group noted in a 2020 report, adding that collusion between police and organized crime in the state is “rampant.”
For Esmerelda and her family, it was the murder of her husband’s father and the threats that followed that sent them north. Nearly two years after she first presented herself at the port in Nogales, she’s still waiting for an opportunity to make her case. Esmerelda and her husband, along with their four children as well as two nieces and their kids — 13 people in total — have crammed themselves into a tiny apartment not far from the shelter. In the past couple months, la mafia has assaulted her husband twice, she told me, robbing him, stealing his phone, telling him that if speaks up he will be murdered. There’s an idea along the border that Nogales is a safer city for migrants, she said: “A lot of people say it’s calmer.” While that may seem true from the outside, the lived experience is something else entirely. “You have no value here — it’s dangerous,” she said. “We know that the police are colluding with organized crime.”
“They think that we’re with the guides who bring the people,” Esmerelda said. To be with the guides, as she put it, is to occupy a position in the violent power struggles that color so much of the illicit movement of people and things along the border: It’s a signal of affiliation. It’s a problem, Esmerelda explained, because it’s not true. “We aren’t guides,” she said. “We’re asylum-seekers. We want to enter. We don’t bring people. That’s what they think, that’s why we’re threatened.”
When Esmerelda and her family came to the border, the Trump administration was still using a tactic known as “metering” to strangle asylum access at the ports. An investigation by the DHS Office of the Inspector General would conclude that the practice was built on lies that ports were at capacity when they were not, including in Nogales. Esmerelda had no way of knowing that at the time; her family was doing what top U.S. officials had publicly said they should do, seeking asylum the “right way” by applying at a port of entry.
In time, metering was overtaken by Remain in Mexico, which was overtaken by Title 42. When the Biden administration began dismantling Remain in Mexico at the beginning of the year, it started with cases out of Texas and California. The same has not been true in Arizona. “I have no indication that it’s going to start here,” Mennell, the CBP official, told me. Because she’s a Mexican citizen, Esmerelda was never in Remain in Mexico. The metering list she was on has effectively disappeared, and with Title 42 still in place, the list’s potential relevance in the eyes of the Biden government is in doubt. Even if she and her family were permitted entry into the U.S., they would face an uphill battle: It is notoriously difficult for Mexicans to win asylum in the United States. For now, and for the foreseeable future, she and her family are stuck.
Esmerelda has two U.S. citizen children living with her in Nogales. They refuse to cross the border without her. For her 16-year-old daughter, who had hopes of becoming of a doctor, the stress of an uncertain life in the border city has been brutal. She’s largely stopped eating, Esmerelda said, and begun to engage in acts of self-harm. “She had a dream,” Esmerelda said. As a mother, Esmerelda is doing her best to hold it together. She puts on a strong face so her kids don’t see her sad, she said, but it’s not easy. “Psychologically, I’m not good,” Esmerelda said. “I’m sitting here in Nogales with the problems I brought from Guerrero, thinking about what happened there, what’s happening here.”
While the Biden administration has hammered on a public message of “don’t come” to would-be asylum-seekers, three of the four people I interviewed in Nogales were already at the border when the president was sworn in. José, from Ecuador, arrived six months ago. Emily, from Guatemala, made it to Nogales in February. Both described direct threats of violence against themselves or their families as the principal motivation for packing up and heading north — “We had no other option,” Emily told me — and both said they felt unsafe in Nogales. “I’m very afraid,” José said.
Nedy, a 22-year-old from Guatemala, had a different story. He could tell people he was fleeing violence and persecution, he explained, but that wouldn’t be true. The truth was that he needed money. His father had a heart condition, and he required an operation. Nedy made a promise to help. He spent 22 days on buses that took him from southern Guatemala to the Sonoran Desert. He crossed the border with a group but was soon abandoned. He wandered for three days without food or water. “Three days in the desert without guides,” he said. “With nothing.” At one point, he tried flagging down a drone that passed overhead. He eventually found a road, and a passerby gave him food and water before he was taken into Border Patrol custody and expelled. It was then, he learned, that his father had died.
In an interview later that afternoon, Joanna Williams, KBI’s executive director, painted a grim picture of the landscape for asylum-seekers in Nogales.
Through intake interviews conducted at its shelter, KBI tracks abuses experienced by migrants on both sides of the border, including kidnappings, threats, extortion, abandonment in the desert, and nighttime expulsions. KBI is particularly concerned about the nighttime expulsions.
“It’s been relentless,” Williams told me. According to shelter data shared with The Intercept, there were 14 instances of nighttime expulsions reported in January, 33 in February, and 23 in March, making for 70 instances of night expulsions in 90 days, as compared to zero in the first three months of 2020.
Nighttime expulsions frequently involve more than one person, Williams noted: Shelter guests often report being returned in groups of around 30 people, though some have numbered up to 100. That would suggest that the number of people expelled at night in Nogales during Biden’s first months in office could range from several hundred to several thousand, though it’s important to recall that KBI’s data only reflects the people who were able to find the shelter and report what happened, meaning it is an undercount of the true number of individuals impacted. And this is only in the city of Nogales. As Animal Político, a Mexican news outlet, noted in an investigation published in February, nighttime removals have been happening in some the “most remote and dangerous” locations for migrants on the border for more than a year now.
Williams added that KBI is “regularly seeing” expulsions at 2 in the morning. “It’s uniquely frustrating to us as an organization because we fought for years to restrict the hours of repatriation here,” she said. “They’re supposed to be from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m., and now it’s any time.” When people are expelled in the middle of the night, there are no Mexican immigration officials to receive them, Williams explained. While on paper there are populations that the Mexican government will not accept, “when they’re sending them back at 2 in the morning, there’s not a Mexican official on the south side to object to it.”
Even during daytime hours, the Mexican government is not registering the individuals and families expelled under Title 42, Williams explained. Budget cuts have decimated Mexico’s primary immigration agency. Grupos Beta, a component of Mexico’s National Institute of Migration created to provide humanitarian aid to migrants, “barely even has money to put gas in their cars,” she said. “There’s no rhyme or reason, at least that we can tell, of who’s being released,” she added. In one recent case, a man who turned up at the shelter said he had been pressured by drug traffickers to carry a load across the border. “The drug cartel was trying to force him to carry drugs, and he refused,” Williams said. “He wanted to give the Border Patrol information.” According to Williams, the man was told that would take too much time because it involved filing a police report. He was expelled.
Like Casa Alitas in Tucson, KBI has documented “multiple cases” of families separated under Title 42. Just that morning, Williams had spoken to a Cuban man who was expelled from Texas while his wife was moved into a detention center. For years, asylum at the ports has served as a “safety valve” for people who were wrongly removed, Williams explained, “an option to turn yourself in without paying a smuggler.” Under Title 42, that safety valve is all but gone. To get an asylum-seeker through the port now requires going through CBP headquarters. “We have fought tooth and nail for certain individuals who are particularly vulnerable — I think we’ve gotten two people in through that after months and months of work,” Williams said. “That’s two people out of the hundreds who are waiting.”
As it was with Trump, Biden’s continuation of Title 42 elevates the risk for asylum-seekers waiting in Mexico with each passing day. “We’re just hearing more and more accounts of assaults and robberies,” Williams said. A review of abuses reported in Nogales in the first three months of 2020, the months immediately preceding the onset of Title 42, and the first three months of 2021 shows substantial increases in every category except for those related to detention, which is largely nonexistent due to the new rule. According to the data, reported kidnappings in the first three months of 2021 were double what they were one year prior. There were more than four times as many reports of migrants and asylum-seekers being threatened; five times as many reports of extortion; and eight times as many reports of people being abandoned in the desert.
Criminal groups in Nogales are only part of the problem. More than half of the extortion cases reported by migrants and asylum-seekers in 2021 were attributed to Mexican security forces, most hailing from the federal government.
For two consecutive presidential administrations, the U.S. relied on foreign security forces to suppress migration flows. The outsourcing led to systemic human rights abuses under both Obama and Trump. Last week, the Biden administration announced that it is continuing that model, having secured agreements with the governments of Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala to deploy thousands of troops to their own borders. Biden press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters, “The objective is to make it more difficult to make the journey.”
The news came less than two weeks after a Mexican soldier shot and killed a Guatemalan migrant at a checkpoint on the nation’s southern border and just four months after an elite U.S.-trained Mexican special operations unit massacred 19 people, including at least 14 Guatemalan migrants, on the nation’s northern border. KBI intake interviews indicate that abuses by migrant interdiction forces are already cropping up in northern Sonora, Williams said, particularly in the mountains outside the town of Sasabe, where smugglers often stage migrants before setting off north.
“National Guard will come in and rob them and beat them up and burn their belongings, never actually detain them, but harass them basically,” Williams said, referring to a quasi-military component of the Mexican federal government that has served as President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s anti-migrant shock troops. Based on the accounts of individuals who’ve reported being robbed, she added, “they’re profiting enormously out of it.”
The Mexican community of Sasabe lies about 80 miles west of Nogales, beyond the Tumacacori Mountains on the other side of the Altar Valley. With a population of around 1,500 people, it is a well-known smuggling town controlled by organized crime. In recent weeks, areas surrounding Sasabe have transformed into a “war zone,” El Universal reported in mid-March, with factions linked to the Sinaloa Cartel reportedly vying for control of the territory.
For years, Gail Kocourek, a volunteer with the Tucson Samaritans, has brought humanitarian aid to Sasabe. She has twice embarked on a weeklong walk to honor the lives of migrants lost to the desert that begins in the border town and continues nearly 80 miles north to Tucson. “I don’t know what it is about this community,” she told me. “It’s a poor little run-down community that I just love.”
Last year, Kocourek invited two experienced humanitarian aid providers to join her on a visit to Sasabe. Sister Judy Bourg, a nun with the School Sisters of Notre Dame, spent a decade working in Guatemala in the 1980s and 1990s. Dora Rodriguez crossed the border herself as a refugee fleeing the civil war in El Salvador and nearly perished in the process; today she runs Salvavision, a nonprofit that coordinates aid and support to asylum-seekers, people in immigration detention, and individuals who have been deported.
What the women found in Sasabe took all of them by surprise. After witnessing an expulsion from the southern side of the port one afternoon in early September, the trio followed a group of migrants behind the local Grupos Beta office. Rounding a corner behind the building, they came upon some 40 migrants sitting on a concrete slab surrounded by Mexican soldiers holding rifles. As the women soon discovered, the Border Patrol was making upward of 700 expulsions a week, including families, through what was historically Arizona’s quietest port. Mexican military units, meanwhile, were rounding up migrants in the mountains outside town. The three women and their organizations quickly mobilized a response, bringing biweekly loads of food and humanitarian aid supplies to Sasabe.
Four months after The Intercept first reported on the practice, Mexico’s immigration office called on CBP to stop expelling people through Sasabe on account of the absence of security in the area. Today the expulsions continue at a rate of roughly 200 a week, Rodriguez said — lower than last year but still far higher than anything the town saw pre-Covid-19. Mennell, the CBP spokesperson, acknowledged that Sasabe was not used for removals prior to Title 42, though he added that “the people who are being expelled through Sasabe also entered in that general location, so it’s not like we’re taking them back to some place they’ve never been.” He described the remote crossing as having “the most restrictive hours of any of the locations where we return people” and said nighttime expulsions were not happening there.
Like Nogales, Sonora, Sasabe is home to a port where asylum-seekers are systemically rebuffed. And like Ajo, Arizona, Sasabe is receiving a population of people that it has no resources to support. Unlike those other locations, however, in Sasabe there is neither a well-run migrant shelter nor a network of committed volunteers waiting to receive people expelled by the U.S. government. There’s not even a bus station. Instead, there are smuggler stash houses and taxis managed by organized crime. The best that an asylum-seeker who climbs into one of those vehicles can hope for is that they will only be price gouged.
In an attempt to fill the humanitarian void, the Tucson Samaritans and Salvavision, through Kocourek and Rodriguez, have been working with local contacts to open a migrant welcome center within eyesight of the port, hoping that if it’s close enough to the border, people can reach the building on foot before being snagged by smugglers or kidnappers. “Casa Esperanza,” the name they have given to the new facility, is slated to open next month. The Intercept joined Kocourek and Rodriguez on a recent visit to the site.
Crossing the border into Mexico, Kocourek and Rodriguez stopped at the Grupos Beta office to unload pallets of water and food. Expulsions had been steady, the young Mexican official supervising operations told me, with the Border Patrol dropping people at the port day and night. Humanitarian deliveries to the mountains outside Sasabe, where KBI has received reports of the Mexican National Guard shaking down migrants, had been halted in recent days — the fighting there was too intense.
Rodriguez was on a mission to deliver legal documents to a young Salvadoran mother and her 13-year-old daughter. The pair fled after the mother, a street food vendor, failed to pay la renta — extortion money — to the local gang. The mother received text messages warning that if she didn’t pay up, she would never see her daughter again. The two crossed the border a year ago this month and were promptly expelled back into Sasabe in the middle of the night. The materials Rodriguez carried would consecrate a vanishingly rare and precious thing for asylum-seekers on the border: legal representation by an attorney in the U.S. The plan was to meet at the office of Martha Imelda Arce Burgos, the mayor of Sasabe, where Rodriguez would collect the signatures.
Maestra Martha, as she is known in Sasabe, took a seat at her desk as we waited for the family to arrive. With a blue medical mask covering her face, she described how Title 42 changed her community. Prior to the pandemic, Sasabe did not receive deportations. “Never,” Arce told me. Then came the spring. “We started to have 100 people a day,” Arce said. “Men. Seniors. Minors. Children. Pregnant women.” Arce, who said she considered the expulsions a form of punishment, estimated that Sasabe received around 10,000 people during a six-month period.
CBP could not say whether this estimate was accurate; the agency is not tracking how many people it is expelling through individual ports.
“A lot of the people who were deported, they didn’t go back to their city of origin,” Arce said. “They stayed here.” Arce estimated that more than 2,000 people — roughly one-and-a-half times the community’s preexisting population — have settled in Sasabe since Title 42 went into effect.
Eventually the mother and daughter entered through the mayor’s open door. Rodriguez laid the legal documents out on the desk and explained what they meant. The mother followed along, listening carefully as Rodriguez described her rights. She signed the paperwork, thanking the women for what they had done.
As we pulled through the port, back on U.S. soil, a Border Patrol vehicle backed in. Five people exited the back, crossing the line into Mexico. As we continued north, the outline of a solitary figure ambling along the highway came into view. Kocourek hit the brakes. His name was Julio. Like Nedy, the young man in Nogales, he was a 22-year-old from Guatemala. He had been separated from the group he was traveling with three days earlier. Twenty-four hours had passed since he had anything to eat or drink. He had 10 miles to go before reaching anything resembling civilization. We gave him food and water — Rodriguez explained that giving him a ride could land us in prison — and wished him luck. As we continued on, a helicopter passed low over our vehicle, headed straight in his direction.
A few days later, Rodriguez received word that the Salvadoran mother and daughter, now represented by an attorney, would be given the opportunity make their asylum case. “We are celebrating her success!!” Rodriguez wrote in a text. Four days later, the pair joined the rare population of asylum-seekers permitted to pass through the port of entry in Nogales. They rested for the night at Casa Alitas before beginning the next leg of their journey.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., speaks to the media on March 25. (photo: Jonathan Ernst/Pool/Getty Images)
Trump Looms Over Senate's Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Battle
Alexander Bolton, The Hill
Bolton writes: "Ninety-two senators voted last week to advance an Asian American hate crimes bill. But its passage likely depends on Democrats agreeing to soften language that Republicans say ties hate crimes too narrowly to the characterization of COVID-19 as the 'China virus.'"
Even Republicans who voted to advance the hate crimes legislation sponsored by Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) see it as a jab at President Trump. The bill links his characterization of COVID-19 as the “China virus” to racist and hateful acts.
Republicans also see language in the bill as opening the door to politically correct thought-police squads. Specifically, they are critical of a provision that instructs Attorney General Merrick Garland and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra to issue guidance on “best practices” for language describing the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Certainly, I condemn hate crimes against the Asian Americans or any other ethnic group,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), an influential moderate who voted to advance the bill.
Still, Collins, who has been critical of Trump and voted to convict him in his impeachment trial, indicated she thinks the bill is too focused on linking hate crimes to how people talk about COVID-19.
“The bill has some drafting problems that I hope can be corrected. For example, it seems to say that the hate crime has to be linked to COVID, which is rather odd,” she told reporters.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who voted to advance the bill, said he’s concerned generally about the criminalization of speech.
“I generally have concerns about people being offended by something somebody said and it’s clearly protected by the First Amendment,” he said. “The parameters of impermissible speech are pretty clear by Supreme Court precedent."
“This is sort of a problem with where we are these days,” he added.
Republicans warn that if Democrats don’t agree to changes, there’s no guarantee there will be enough votes to bring the legislation up for a final yes-or-no vote.
Yet there are also some risks for Republicans given the very real rise in anti-Asian hate, which captured a new level of national attention after eight people including six Asian women were killed in a string of shootings in the Atlanta area.
GOP aides acknowledge there’s a risk to blocking hate-crimes legislation, which is why so many Republicans voted for the motion to proceed.
One Senate Republican aide said even though GOP lawmakers are skeptical of the bill, they didn’t want to block a floor debate and give Democrats more ammo to call them obstructionist.
“This is not what we wanted to pick a fight on the filibuster over,” said the source.
Senate Republicans want to broaden the legislation to avoid any appearance that they’re voting to rebuke the former president, who is quick to lash out at his critics.
And they now they are vulnerable to attacks if the bill is not changed given public comments fro the six GOP senators who voted against advancing the measure.
One of the six, Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) says the measure is a thinly veiled “messaging” bill intended to punish criticism of China.
“This legislation … is not designed to do anything to prevent or punish actual crimes,” Cruz said in a statement. “It is instead a Democratic messaging vehicle designed to push the demonstrably false idea that it is somehow racist to acknowledge that Covid-19 originated in Wuhan, China and that the Chinese Communist Party actively lied and suppressed information about the outbreak, allowing it to become a global pandemic.”
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), who also voted against moving to the bill, said he sees it as taking a shot at Trump.
“We don’t need to get involved in that up here, to write a big bill that it’s racism if you say this virus that’s killed millions of people came from China,” he said. “Sure, it’s anti-Trump and he’s gone, we need to leave it out of it and do it the right way.”
Democrats are unlikely to want to soften the language since most if not all believe Trump does bear responsibility for the rise in anti-Asian American violence in the last year due to his rhetoric.
Democrats point to a study published last month in the American Journal of Public Health that found anti-Asian sentiment expressed in Trump’s tweets calling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus” perpetuated racist attitudes.
A GOP aide noted that Hirono, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) and then-Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) introduced a resolution in May calling out Trump and other Republicans for calling COVID-19 the China virus.
“Inflammatory and racist rhetoric from officials at the highest level of our government has contributed to a disturbing rise in hate-crimes targeting Asian Americans during the coronavirus pandemic,” Hirono said at the time.
Duckworth linked attacks against Asian Americans to Trump’s rhetoric.
“After Donald Trump repeatedly used his platform to try to racialize this disease, we continue to see a spike in rhetoric and actions against the Asian American community because of misguided fears surrounding the COVID-19 outbreak,” she said.
A Senate Republican aide said the bill would have federal authorities issue guidance “on how to talk about the virus in a politically correct way.”
“That part of the bill is very explicitly designed to restrict and control how people talk about the virus and the fact that it originated from China,” said the aide.
GOP senators are leery of doing anything to provoke Trump, who lashed out at Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) last weekend for not supporting his unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.
GOP senators said it was a signal that they want to put past feuds with Trump behind them and focus on unifying the party ahead of 2022.
Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) is hoping to broaden Hirono’s bill by amending it with the No Hate Act, a bipartisan proposal to improve reporting on hate crimes, encourage law enforcement training and education on hate crimes and provide grants for states to establish and run hate-crimes hotlines.
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said he would allow colleagues to consider changes to the bill put forward by Collins and Moran.
“I’ve committed to start the process with the bipartisan Moran-Blumenthal amendment. I understand my Republican colleague from Maine has some modifications to the bill, which we welcome, and those negotiations are proceeding afoot,” he said Thursday.
VA emergency room nurse Mark Sheldon, a Gulf War combat Marine, looks out the window of the mobile clinic in Libby. (photo: Tony Bynum/WP)
Many Veterans Don't Trust Coronavirus Vaccines. For a VA Crew in the Rural West, That Means Changing Minds, One by One.
Lisa Rein, The Washington Post
Rein writes: "The VA mobile medical unit's third visit since January to Libby, an old mining and lumber town 70 miles from the Canadian border in a deep-red band of America, had been unexpectedly rough."
READ MORE
Children walking home from school. (photo: Getty Images)
Child Care Advocates Seek to Lock Down $25 Billion in New Federal Funding
Alex Gangitano, The Hill
Gangitano writes: "Early childhood education advocates successfully secured billions of dollars in COVID-19 relief and now are lobbying for child care to stay in the final infrastructure package after President Biden included funding for the industry in his proposal."
READ MORE
Indian police personnel on April 9, 2021 in New Delhi, India. (photo: Sanchit Khanna/Hindustan Times/Getty Images)
India's Hindu Nationalist Project Relies on Brutal Repression
R.B. Moore, Jacobin
Moore writes: "For a casual follower of the news in India today, it is difficult to keep pace with the seemingly endless arrests of farmers, labor leaders, professors, students, lawyers, civil rights defenders, and journalists. Further, many of those targeted are stuck in legal limbo, imprisoned for years under draconian laws, trapped in bail hearing after bail hearing."
The Indian state under Prime Minister Narendra Modi is meting out vicious repression against dissenters to his right-wing Hindu nationalist vision. Yet that constant need to crack down on protests also reveals something: his far-right project is undeniably brittle.
n February 19, the Indian Ministry of Culture sent out a tweet celebrating the birth anniversary of M. S. Golwalkar, the staunch Hindu nationalist who for many decades served as the head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), or “National Volunteer Organization.” Founded in 1925, the RSS bills itself as a cultural organization, but critics often describe it as a right-wing paramilitary, a nationwide network of well-organized cadres committed to Hindutva ideology, with deep links to the current governing party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Indeed, Prime Minister Narendra Modi got his start as a full-time activist in the RSS, and in a book he wrote in 2008, Modi gave a glowing portrait of Golwalkar.
However, not everyone views Golwalkar so favorably, and a closer look at his work reveals the bigotry at its core. In his first book, Golwalkar argued that “the non-Hindu peoples of Hindustan . . . must entertain no ideas but the glorification of the Hindu race and culture . . . [and] may stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation claiming nothing . . . not even citizen’s rights.” (In this context, he wrote that Hitler’s Germany was “a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.”) In his second book, clarifying who these “non-Hindu” people might be, Golwalkar points to three “internal enemies” of the Hindu nation: Muslims, Christians, and Communists.
For Golwalkar, these enemies share one characteristic: they threaten to disrupt the supposedly “natural” unity and harmony of the Hindu race and Hindu civilization, which stretches back to time immemorial. Islam and Christianity were seen as dangerous because they were the religions of conquering “outsiders”: the Mughal Empire and then the British. This ignores not only the many divisions of pre-Mughal India along lines of caste, class, region, and religion (totally erasing, for instance, Buddhism’s stark opposition to orthodox religious practices in ancient India) but also the rich, centuries-old social lives of Islam and Christianity on the subcontinent.
If, for Golwalkar, Muslims and Christians were symbols of past defeat, the Communists were portents of a possible future rupture in the “Hindu nation.” He argues against what he calls “the theory of class conflict” explicitly because it originated outside India, but implicitly because it disrupts the assumed unity of all Hindus, showing it to be a divided set of groups with contradictory interests.
In case there’s any doubt that the current BJP government is the rightful heir of Golwalkar’s ideology, one can turn to Modi’s speech before Parliament in early February, where he coined the term “andolanjivi” to describe those who can’t live without protests and, in a chilling turn of phrase, compared all andolanjivis to parasites (“parjivis“), thus suggesting the need for extermination. Such language is a particularly disturbing expression of the paternalistic state argument — made in India, the United States, and elsewhere — that protests against the state must be the work of outside agitators. After all, how could its true citizens turn so boldly against it? Such rhetoric then justifies doing whatever it takes to remove from the body politic that which threatens to infect it.
This is not just rhetoric; the BJP government has actively targeted those it considers andolanjivis. For a casual follower of the news in India today, it is difficult to keep pace with the seemingly endless arrests of farmers, labor leaders, professors, students, lawyers, civil rights defenders, and journalists. Further, many of those targeted are stuck in legal limbo, imprisoned for years under draconian laws, trapped in bail hearing after bail hearing.
Thus, those arrested in the massive ongoing farmers’ protests share headline space with those arrested in last year’s round of state repression, which targeted those opposing discriminatory citizenship laws, and with a previous round of repression in the wake of anti-caste protests. All these rounds of repression follow a disturbingly similar pattern: an episode of violence, which is actively provoked or tacitly encouraged by Hindu nationalists, becomes a pretext for waves of arrests against those considered “anti-national” — “internal enemies” in the language of Golwalkar, or parasites in the words of his heir.
Developing the BJP model for Stifling Dissent
BJP repression has developed in tandem with rising waves of dissent. In the 2014 elections, with Modi as its prime ministerial candidate, it decimated its chief opponent, the once-grand Congress Party. Despite little parliamentary opposition, and despite the overall weakness of national-level labor unions, the BJP still had to face sporadic street-level protest against its Hindutva and pro-corporate policies. Over the course of its first term, a range of protest movements emerged in various parts of the country, from farmers’ movements to student movements to a reinvigorated anti-caste movement.
Of all these, the anti-caste movement is perhaps the most directly threatening to Hindu nationalist thinking. If communist ideology points to the class divides within Hindu society, the anti-caste movement points to divides that are more historically entrenched and more viscerally felt. As the great anti-caste leader Dr. B. R. Ambedkar presciently noted in 1936, “Hindu society as such does not exist. It is only a collection of castes. . . . A caste has no feeling that it is affiliated to other castes except when there is a Hindu-Muslim riot.”
An event called the Elgar Parishad, organized on December 31, 2017 in the city of Pune, Maharashtra, was an attempt to bring together the opposition movements that had emerged during Modi’s first term. Convened by two retired judges with a history of anti-caste and anti-Hindutva activism, the event drew participation from roughly 250 anti-caste, progressive, and left organizations and featured fiery speeches, musical performances, and cultural programs.
The event was set for the day before an anti-caste commemoration in the nearby town of Bhima Koregaon, which celebrated the military defeat of the notorious casteist Peshwa rulers on January 1, 1818 at the hands of the British. Ambedkar himself had visited Bhima Koregaon in 1927, celebrating the Dalits (those formerly known as the “untouchable” castes) who had joined the British Army to fight their caste oppressors. It later became an annual tradition for Ambedkarites to congregate in Bhima Koregaon on January 1 to keep the memory of the battle alive. This tradition never sat well with Hindu nationalists, suggesting, as it did, that caste divides can be more keenly felt than national ones, thus further eroding the myth of Hindu unity. Golwalkar himself had registered his dissatisfaction with Ambedkar’s reading of this historical event. Continuing Ambedkar’s rhetorical thrust, the Elgar Parishad cast the BJP-RSS combine as the new Peshwas, elites whose interests were directly opposed to the oppressed castes and classes.
On December 29 — before the Elgar Parishad event and the Bhima Koregaon celebrations — a group of Hindu nationalists desecrated a shrine near Bhima Koregaon that was held sacred by Dalits. Then, on January 1, groups allegedly tied to the Hindutva leaders Sambhaji Bhide and Milind Ekbote, and clearly following in Golwalkar’s footsteps, attacked Dalits on their way to the Bhima Koregaon celebrations. In response, Dalit groups organized massive protests throughout Maharashtra, culminating in a one-day strike that shut down much of the state capital Mumbai, also India’s financial capital. The backlash was immediate and brutal; police combed Dalit neighborhoods and arrested hundreds of youth with little evidence.
This turned out to be just the beginning of the state response. As Modi’s first term as prime minister reached its final year, and the country began to look toward the 2019 elections, a wild conspiracy began to circulate — that the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) was plotting to assassinate Modi, and that the Elgar Parishad was somehow a front for related Maoist organizing. In June 2018, the Pune Police arrested five activists in relation to the alleged plot. Letters supposedly substantiating this claim were leaked to the press, which created a frenzy.
Arrests related to this case have kept on piling up, even during the height of the pandemic; they now total sixteen. Several of those arrested were elderly citizens with serious medical conditions, and they were repeatedly denied bail even as COVID-19 tore through Indian prisons. (Finally, in late February, an eighty-one-year-old defendant, the poet Varavara Rao, was granted six months bail on medical grounds.) Meanwhile, the Hindutva leaders accused of instigating the initial violence got off lightly: Bhide faced no charges at all, and Ekbote was briefly imprisoned but quickly released on bail.
A close look at the profiles of those arrested makes clear that the overall case had little to do with the Elgar Parishad event or even the Bhima Koregaon violence. Only a few of those arrested were even present at Elgar Parishad. Rather, the Bhima Koregaon case was used as a pretext to arrest those who had long been a thorn in the side of the state, or in some cases, to return to prison those who had been acquitted of previous charges thanks to a lack of evidence against them.
Indeed, many of those accused have spent their careers fighting the unjust, repressive nature of the very laws that were used to bring charges against them.
Father Stan Swamy has spent decades detailing the ways the state indiscriminately arrests Adivasi (indigenous) youth. Another codefendant, Surendra Gadling, a Dalit lawyer, started his career defending those arrested under the “Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act” (UAPA) and other draconian laws; after the Bhima Koregaon violence, he spent his days defending the Dalit youth who were picked up by the police in their heavy-handed sweeps. Now he himself has been charged under the UAPA.
As they languish in jail, the case against them — always shaky — has become even flimsier. In early February, a report conducted by the Massachusetts-based digital forensics firm Arsenal Consulting exposed the evidence on which this case hinged as unreliable. Conducting a forensic examination of the hard disk of Rona Wilson, one of the defendants in the case, Arsenal Consulting found that Wilson’s laptop had been infected with malware that allowed a hacker remote access to his laptop. It even showed exactly when incriminating documents — including one referring to the assassination plot — had been planted on Wilson’s laptop. A recent article in the Washington Post notes that several outside experts have confirmed the validity of this report. Arsenal Consulting’s president, Mark Spencer, said that this was “one of the most serious cases involving evidence tampering that Arsenal has ever encountered,” especially since Wilson’s computer was compromised for roughly twenty-two months, giving the hacker ample time to deliver incriminating documents and cover their tracks. As the colleague of one of the codefendants noted in a recent press conference, it is clear now that the conspiracy is not to assassinate Modi but rather to frame the accused.
Continuing the Logic of Colonialism and of Congress
The use of draconian laws to target lawyers, poets, professors, and others as “Maoists” is not an exclusively BJP phenomenon. Rather, the BJP is making use of a set of legal instruments that were bequeathed to it by its predecessors in power: the Congress Party, whose decades-long hegemony the BJP decisively ended in 2014.
Congress was the party of Gandhi and spearheaded the movement for independence; however, once it became the governing party of independent India, it was happy to keep in place repressive policing structures initiated during British rule. Despite the mass base that Gandhi had helped to build, Congress was controlled by a coalition of urban and rural elite; in the run-up to independence, Ambedkar repeatedly characterized Congress as a party of Brahmins (the priestly caste but also dominant in national politics, media, and academia) and Banias (traditionally the trading caste from which many major industrialists emerged). After independence, there was little incentive for these groups to dismantle mechanisms of maintaining their power.
Just as the Black Lives Matter movement has turned attention to the origins of US policing in slave patrols, civil rights activists in India have brought attention to the fact that policing in India, even today, is governed by the Police Act of 1861, put in place by the British colonial government to sharpen coercive power in the aftermath of the 1857 uprising against their rule. The Constitution of India guarantees freedom of expression, assembly, and association, but in early decades of Congress rule, these freedoms began to be eroded, first through amendments and then through the original UAPA, passed in 1967, which sought to ban groups advocating secession from India. Since then, it has been amended several times by both BJP and Congress governments, its focus shifting from secession to “terrorism,” extremely broadly defined.
Congress governments did not hesitate to use these laws against activists, often in red-baiting ways. Indeed, in 2010, the Congress prime minster, Manmohan Singh, called Maoism the “biggest threat” to India’s “internal security” (strikingly echoing the words J. Edgar Hoover used to denounce the Black Panthers). Several of those arrested in the Bhima Koregaon case had previously been targeted by Congress governments. And the scholar Anand Teltumbde — one of those arrested in the Bhima Koregaon case — has, in his previous work, shown how the specter of Maoism has been invoked to tar those who have brought attention to atrocities against Dalits.
Replicating the Model
If the BJP did not pioneer the use of UAPA and other draconian laws, it has certainly perfected their application to bolster the party’s Hindu nationalist ideology. This became clear early on in the BJP’s second term, after its overwhelming victory in the 2019 elections. Buoyed by its electoral success, the party passed controversial, discriminatory new citizenship laws, which allowed fast-track citizenship for persecuted Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, and Christian — but pointedly not Muslim — refugees. Protests erupted across the country, including in the national capital of Delhi, with protesters noting that the BJP would use these laws against Muslims to make them, in Golwalkar’s own words, “wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing . . . not even citizen’s rights.” Striking back against the protests, the BJP used what sociologist Nandini Sundar called the “Bhima Koregaon model” for crushing dissent.
According to this model, when violence breaks out — as it did in Delhi, where Muslim neighborhoods bore the brunt of the attacks — blame is immediately shifted to a vague conspiracy of Maoists, students, and anti-national Muslims. Like in Bhima Koregaon, cases are filed and proliferate in what one analysis called “blank checks, to be encashed by the police” at any time. Again, the state uses this as an opportunity to target those who have long been irritants to them — in this case, Muslim and feminist student organizers, among others. And because draconian laws like UAPA are invoked, those arrested rarely get bail, no matter how flimsy the evidence against them. Merely being charged is punishment enough; the state knows this and cashes its checks accordingly.
Thus, it was no surprise that the BJP recently tried to impose the same model when faced with massive protests against the passage of three neoliberal agricultural laws. The BJP has taken over Congress’s former role as the party of Brahmans and Banias, and — in the words of the anti-caste scholar and activist Kancha Ilaiah — the newly passed farm laws are meant to enrich the latter, at the expense of Shudras (the caste traditionally responsible for agricultural work in India). The BJP, of course, denies these caste cleavages and seeks to portray the protesters as “anti-national.” Since many of the protesting farmers are Sikh, the BJP has tried to paint the entire protest as unpatriotic, instigated by “outside agitators” whose end goal is to establish Khalistan, or a separate Sikh homeland. (Maoists, always an easy target, are also blamed.)
During a huge protest rally in Delhi on India’s Republic Day, January 26, there were clashes between protesters and the police, and some protesters found their way to Red Fort, a symbol of state power, where someone in the crowd hoisted a Sikh flag. Farm leaders — and many opposition politicians — are convinced that the BJP encouraged, and perhaps even orchestrated, the clashes and the hoisting of the flag, so that they could then paint the clashes as “anti-national.” The BJP, of course, denies such claims.
In any case, it is clear that the government is trying to apply the “Bhima Koregaon” model. This was seen, most egregiously, in the arrest of a young climate activist named Disha Ravi, who had made minor edits to an online tool kit used to garner national and international support for the farmers’ protests. After Greta Thunberg tweeted a link to this tool kit, BJP leaders began to paint it as some kind of nefarious international conspiracy to defame India — despite the fact that such online organizing tools are used routinely by a wide range of civil society organizations, as well as by the BJP itself.
After facing fierce attacks on social media, Ravi was whisked away from her home in Bengaluru in southern India and put in police custody in Delhi. Unlike in other cases, however, she was quickly granted bail, the judge recognizing the absurdity of the charges against her. A recent analysis by Naomi Klein points to the hypocrisy of the BJP’s accusations, as well as the disturbing complicity of Big Tech in Ravi’s arrest — the police have openly boasted about getting Google’s support in this case.
Similarly, last month a Dalit labor activist, Nodeep Kaur, was granted bail after having been targeted by police for her success in rallying worker support for the farmers’ protests. Though her bail counts as a small victory it is overshadowed by the violence, sexual assault, and casteist abuse she faced while detained. Hundreds of protesting farmers, too, have been arrested.
Resisting the Model
And yet the protests continue. Unlike those against the citizenship laws, which the government crushed, partially through arrests, partially through the guise of COVID-19 safety, the farmers’ protests have continued to grow, now stretching on for well over a hundred days. The government has found itself unable to change the narrative to its preferred framing of “outside agitators” versus loyal (Hindu) citizens.
In part, this may be due to the nature of the issue: agriculture remains the largest employer in India, and there is a widespread understanding that the farm laws will hurt both landowning farmers and agricultural laborers, cutting away their already-dwindling livelihoods for the benefit of large corporate interests. As a result, the protests have found broad cross-class and cross-caste support. Further, agricultural leaders with mass followings, like Rakesh Tikait, have taken on increasingly prominent roles in the movement, helping to swell its ranks. The sheer enormity of the protests across several states and its popularity, even with many who had previously supported the BJP, make it more difficult for the state to crush.
This is not to say that the state’s repressive tactics have lost their edge, or their ability to inflict pain. The nature of laws like the UAPA makes it easy for the state to punish protesters, who get trapped in an endless present of bail hearings, court orders, defeats, and appeals.
Even more disturbing, the cases that make national and international news are just the tip of the iceberg; they represent arrests that, for various reasons, have caught the eye of a well-connected civil society. But as those caught up in the Bhima Koregaon case have shown through their own research and advocacy, thousands upon thousands of people — disproportionately marginalized Dalits and Adivasis — are locked up on questionable grounds. As Anand Teltumbde has noted, “the enmity of the state” toward those it brands as Maoists “is merely an expression of its age-old caste hatred for the subordinated.”
And yet despite the terrifying strength of the state and its punitive apparatus, there is something surprisingly brittle — and so fragile — about the BJP’s Hindutva vision. It constantly boasts about the strength and unity of a millennia-old civilization, and yet seems shaken by the innocuous tweet of a teenage climate change activist in Sweden. Ambedkar’s polemical 1936 statement, “Hindu society as such does not exist,” still rings true.
The production supervisor of biotech company Oxitec, Sofia Bastos Pinto, looks at transgenic Aedes aegypti mosquitos at the lab in Campinas, Brazil in 2014. (photo: Nelson Almeida/AFP/Getty Images)
First GMO Mosquitoes to Be Released in the Florida Keys
Taylor White, Grist
White writes: "Native mosquitoes in Florida are increasingly resistant to the most common form of control - insecticide - and scientists say they need new and better techniques to control the insects and the diseases they carry."
The EPA approved Oxitec’s mosquitoes for release this spring. Some scientists and locals want to halt the deployment.
his spring, the biotechnology company Oxitec plans to release genetically modified, or GM, mosquitoes in the Florida Keys. Oxitec says its technology will combat dengue fever, a potentially life-threatening disease, and other mosquito-borne viruses — such as Zika — mainly transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito.
While there have been more than 7,300 dengue cases reported in the United States between 2010 and 2020, a majority are contracted in Asia and the Caribbean, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In Florida, however, there were 41 travel-related cases in 2020, compared with 71 cases that were transmitted locally.
Native mosquitoes in Florida are increasingly resistant to the most common form of control — insecticide — and scientists say they need new and better techniques to control the insects and the diseases they carry. “There aren’t any other tools that we have. Mosquito nets don’t work. Vaccines are under development but need to be fully efficacious,” says Michael Bonsall, a mathematical biologist at the University of Oxford, who is not affiliated with Oxitec but has collaborated with the company in the past, and who worked with the World Health Organization to produce a GM mosquito-testing framework.
Bonsall and other scientists think a combination of approaches is essential to reducing the burden of diseases — and that, maybe, newer ideas like GM mosquitoes should be added to the mix. Oxitec’s mosquitoes, for instance, are genetically altered to pass what the company calls “self-limiting” genes to their offspring; when released GM males breed with wild female mosquitoes, the resulting generation does not survive into adulthood, reducing the overall population.
But Oxitec has been proposing to experimentally release GM mosquitos in the Keys since 2011, and the plan has long been met with suspicion among locals and debate among scientists. Some locals say they fear being guinea pigs. Critics say they are concerned about the possible effects GM mosquitoes could have on human health and the environment. In 2012, the Key West City Commission objected to Oxitec’s plan; in a non-binding referendum four years later, residents of Key Haven — where the mosquitoes would have been released — rejected it, while residents in the surrounding county voted in support of the release. With the decision left up to the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District, officials approved the trial to be conducted elsewhere in the Keys.
According to Oxitec, the release was delayed due to a transfer of jurisdiction over the project from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to the Environmental Protection Agency.
The company reapplied for approval to release a new version of the mosquitoes, called OX5034, in the Keys. In May, the EPA granted a two-year experimental use permit, which the agency can cancel at any time. State and local sign-off soon followed — finally giving the project the greenlight.
Oxitec’s OX5034 mosquitoes are the first GM mosquitoes approved for release in the U.S. The company has already conducted a trial with the OX5034 mosquitoes in Brazil and released more than a billion of a previous version, called OX513A, there and in other locations over the years — including the Cayman Islands. The company says it is confident in the effectiveness and safety of the technology.
But some scientists want to hit pause on Oxitec’s Florida trial, to find what they say is a fairer process in deciding to release the mosquitoes. Others want to see clearer proof that this technology is even necessary, claiming that the company has only released its most positive data with the public and has kept other key data, including whether the mosquitoes curb disease transmission, private. And if the release actually launches as planned, some Keys residents say they aim to interfere.
Critics also say that Oxitec failed to engage with local communities in Florida and get their consent to release the mosquitoes. “What’s the most upsetting is that the very people that are going to be most impacted, both by the benefits or the risks of such a decision, have like the smallest voice in how these choices are made. I think that’s a really big issue,” says Natalie Kofler, a molecular biologist and bioethicist who founded Editing Nature, a platform that advocates “for inclusive decision-making processes to steer” the use of genetic technology. “If Oxitec doesn’t do this right,” she adds, “we could have huge impact on delaying the use of other beneficial technologies like that in the future.”
Oxitec’s OX5034 mosquitoes are programmed to combat the transmission of mosquito-borne illnesses by suppressing local Aedes aegypti populations. Oxitec — which is U.S.-owned and based in the United Kingdom — describes their mosquitoes as “friendly” because they will only release males, which, unlike females, do not bite humans or transmit disease.
At Oxitec’s laboratory in the U.K., the company genetically engineers the mosquitoes, giving the insects the “self-limiting” gene that makes the females dependent on the antibiotic tetracycline. Without the drug, they will die. Eggs from these genetically-altered mosquitoes — which will hatch both male and female insects — will be shipped to the Keys. Mosquitoes require water to mature from an egg to an adult; when Oxitec’s team adds water to the boxes the mosquitoes will be deployed in, both GM males and GM females will hatch. With no tetracycline present in the box, the GM females are expected to die in early larval stages.
The male mosquitoes will survive and carry the gene. When they leave the boxes, the insects will, hypothetically, fly away to mate with wild females to pass the gene to the next wild generation, according to Nathan Rose, head of regulatory affairs at Oxitec. Kevin Gorman, the company’s chief development officer, says the local female mosquito population will be increasingly reduced — which will also reduce the number of wild male mosquitoes in the treatment areas.
Gorman emphasized to Undark that the EPA and other regulators found no risk in using tetracycline in breeding their genetically-altered mosquitoes. But some scientists think the presence of this antibiotic in the environment does pose a risk. According to Jennifer Kuzma, co-founder and co-director of the Genetic Engineering and Society Center at North Carolina State University, tetracyline is commonly used in Florida to prevent bacterial diseases in agriculture — particularly in citrus groves — and to treat bacteria in sewage plants. The use of the antibiotic for these purposes may mean that it will remain in the environment, especially in water where the mosquitoes breed, which could allow Oxitec’s female mosquitoes to survive. While the company does not plan to release the mosquitos near areas where the antibiotic is used, Kuzma says the EPA’s risk assessment did not include testing of any standing water for tetracycline — something, she adds, “would have been easy enough to do for good due diligence.”
Skeptics of Oxitec’s GM mosquitoes include local residents, physicians, scientists, and environmental activists. Many of these opponents say they aren’t anti-GMO, but disagree with how the approval process has been handled. One group has even kept a running list of what it sees as Oxitec’s wrongdoings since it first began experimental releases. The list includes Oxitec’s lack of disease monitoring in the countries where it has released mosquitoes; the unknown price of its technology; and complaints that the company has overstated the success of some of it its trials.
“I cannot trust this company. I cannot trust this technology,” says Mara Daly, a resident of Key Largo who says she’s been following Oxitec’s plans for nine years.
“This is not a traditional pesticide,” she adds. “ This is not a chemical that you can trace. This is something completely different, new emerging technology, and we need better regulation.”
Phil Goodman, chairman of the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District, or FKMCD, an independently-elected commission carrying out mosquito control within Monroe County, says that many of those who discredit Oxitec’s evidence do not understand the technology. “They’re fearmongering,” he says.
“They have very little credibility here in the Florida Keys as far as I’m concerned,” he adds.
But people like Daly and Barry Wray, executive director of the Florida Keys Environmental Coalition, disagree. “We want to know it’s safe,” says Wray, who notes that his group more generally supports GM technology. “We don’t have another Florida Keys ecosystem. We don’t have another Florida Keys community. We have this one.”
Daly, Wray, and others point to what they perceive as the FKMCD’s disrespect for public opinion. They argue that the community wasn’t given a chance to consent before the EPA approval. There was a 30-day public forum in September 2019 about Oxitec’s technology application, with 31,174 comments opposing release and 56 in support. A statement emailed to Undark by Melissa Sullivan, an EPA spokesperson, noted that the agency considered these comments during the review, but critics think it happened too quickly to be of real use.
In June, Kofler and Kuzma wrote an opinion piece in The Boston Globe about the EPA approval, critiquing the agency’s regulatory system and calling for a better process for evaluating new biotechnologies. The researchers expressed concern that “the EPA did not convene an independent, external scientific advisory panel to review” Oxitec’s claims about its mosquito strategy and that the agency only publicly released its risk assessment after approving the technology. The “American public,” Kofler and Kuzma wrote, “needs to be assured that these decisions are made free of conflicts of interest.” The statement from the EPA’s Sullivan noted that the agency “conducted an extensive risk assessment based on the best available science.”
Some critics also wanted there to be more public engagement. Kofler and Kuzma say they offered to provide their expertise, along with other outside experts, to the mosquito control district to allow more discussion about the GM mosquitoes with the Keys community. But Kofler says the district wasn’t responsive. Oxitec itself launched webinars about their new product, but not until after the EPA approval. “Here we are, like in the final hour, having these conversations that needed to be happening a year ago,” says Kofler.
Without public trust and enthusiasm, it doesn’t matter whether Oxitec’s mosquito technique works, says Guy Reeves, a genetic researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Germany, who stresses that he doesn’t think the company’s approach is unsafe. “If the population in Florida Keys becomes so sensitized to this issue — that they can no longer cooperate with each other — that’s good for the mosquitoes, not good for the people,” he adds.
Based on their first generation mosquito OX513A, Oxitec says it has shown that the approach reduces a targeted mosquito population in trials in both Brazil and the Cayman Islands. But there’s no evidence that this new OX5034 mosquito release will actually be worth it for mosquito suppression, says Reeves. Oxitec also hasn’t explained how their new mosquito will directly curb human diseases, such as dengue. Reducing disease transmission and burden should be measures of efficacy for this technology, says Kofler.
According to Gorman, independent disease suppression data has only been collected by municipalities in Brazil because that’s where most of the company’s trials have been released in larger scales. These municipalities have shown that Oxitec mosquitoes have reduced dengue cases in areas of release, Gorman says. In order for Oxitec to collect additional data, he adds, the company needs to release and test large areas over sustained periods of time. Gorman maintains that the company is not required to report formal health impact studies.
Reeves adds that Oxitec also hasn’t explained what resources are needed to sustain this product, how long it could take to be effective, or the cost. When asked about the cost of the Florida Keys project, Oxitec responded to Undark by email: “Oxitec is a pre-commercial, pre-profit company. We will not profit from this pilot project in Florida. We are paying for it ourselves.”
Oxitec has released more than a billion of their OX513A mosquitoes over the past 10 years. According to independent scientists, some of those experiments did not go well.
For example, researchers at Yale University and collaborators from Brazil analyzed Oxitec’s 2015 release of OX513A in Brazil. The scientists confirmed that some offspring of the genetically modified mosquitoes — which were supposed to die and not pass new genes to the wild population — survived to adulthood and mated with their native counterparts. Between 10 and 60 percent of the native mosquitoes contained genes from Oxitec, according to the Yale study, which published in Nature in 2019. The paper’s authors concluded they do not know what impacts these mixed mosquitoes have on disease control or transmission, but added that their findings underscore the importance of monitoring the genetics of the insects.
Oxitec disagreed with the findings and responded on the journal’s website. Oxitec told Gizmodo that Yale’s study includes “numerous false, speculative, and unsubstantiated claims and statements about Oxitec’s mosquito technology.” And when Kofler and three other scientists wrote about Oxitec’s Brazil trial in The Conversation, Oxitec pushed to have the article retracted, says Kofler.
For this coming release, some Key Largo locals are willing to act on their anger. Daly, for instance, says that if the mosquitoes are deployed in her neighborhood, she’ll try to put insecticide in any box she finds or send it to an expert to test — even if it means getting in trouble with the federal authorities. “I already have my arresting officer and she said she’s gonna clean her handcuffs for me,” she says. “I don’t care.”
Ideally, Daly says, it won’t have to come to that. She and other locals hope to stop Oxitec before the latest mosquitos are delivered. Daly says she has been busy organizing protests — like one that happened recently in Key Largo — and giving out yard signs to residents who don’t want their property used in the trial. “Locals are pissed off. So I have been busy getting the press to cover the local opposition,” Daly wrote in an email to Undark.
“The first flying insect or animal that can actually use our human blood for a friggin trial for a product to come to market without my consent,” Daly says.
“That’s my blood,” she adds. “That’s my son’s blood. That’s my dog’s blood.”
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.